Always A Part

Less than a week and distance will no longer be relevant. And while I have been, overall, too clawed into the sadness of my history to write coherently I am feeling stronger right now. I have to keep my thoughts pulled back, that is the secret.

We spoke today about the changing meanings of our relationship. In my mind it seems like some sort of living thing that we create. It is so strange to me to have created something so entirely good and hopeful. When I try to describe it I get frustrated because they are the wrong words, over and over and never adequate. I guess I do not have the experience to even really try.

There are some small seeds in me still with the sadness that tell me that if I really cared for you I’d want you to be free of what I often feel is my inescapable past, capacities that I worry I can never regain. I grow afraid that the hideous and broken down thing that I am is hidden behind a shellac I meticulously built so I could chase my compulsions and gather around me soothing decorations and containers. So you just don't see it. Maybe can't recognize something so horrible. The specter of the revulsion dipped in fear in my mother’s eyes when she regards me chases me forever. The more greatness and goodness I see in you the stronger the guilt about my duplicity. I know these feelings are not real. But something being real or not has not got enough to do with me.

These are just controllable pieces. Usually controllable. I write about them because these are also the places that, when something is difficult, spread over me entirely.

dead fingers

One thing is sometimes I need to shut everything out. I don’t do a good job of keeping unimportant people at a distance and all of their demands pile up until I just close entirely down.

I don’t like not sleeping well of course. But when I am tired there is safety in it. When I am well rested and very relaxed I sometimes get vivid and uncomfortable physical sensations. The feeling of some sort of inanimate and cold object, like a dead human hand, being pushed inside of me. It doesn’t hurt so much as burn, but more importantly, leaves me feeling inexplicably devastated and alarmed. So the calm is broken. I tell myself it is not important, there is nothing really happening but when it happens it seems the realest thing of all.

It doesn't bleed into the other parts of my life but stays contained, anchoring my other secret world through shame and grief. I don't talk about it because I don't want it to define me.

Too Good To Last

The problem of living a life full of pain and disaster is that it becomes commonplace. The soothingly familiar. Anything falling outside the pattern becomes an aberration and a watch clock can be set on it, waiting, waiting, for things that bring happiness and hope to turn into expected punishments and death.

I fight hard not to do that with you. When you fail to disappoint me and continue with your unerring support and care I imagine terrible deaths to come. I won’t lie to myself and say it is all entirely healthy: Your depression and thoughts of suicide may well be what opened me to you in the first place. They offered me a flaw in a different place. Where before I accepted emotional vacuity and occasional abuse both mental and physical, now I could have my unhappy ending in a different flavour.

The problem is that you have changed me. Knowing you and allowing you to love me has made it impossible not to expect that in people. Never again will I be able to accept a self-flaggellating life. So the rhythm of tragedy by death that I imagined for myself is broken. The weakness of such logic is revealed.

Good things might not last. As it has been with you, they might get better and better.

Where am I: Chronic Pain

Since I have slept most of the weekend I thought I would go out to get fruit. So I don’t know if it was that, the pills I am on for the chronic pain in my back or just too much sleep. But I am having a fracture with reality.

I woke up a few hours ago with amnesia. I did not know who I was, where I was or what I was supposed to be doing. It lasted for about five minutes. Not long enough to matter.

But then, when I stepped outside I felt like I was glowing. Like there was light being thrown off of me that made other people uncomfortable. At the store I had to rest for a moment when the pain in my back took my breath away. That was when I burned brightest.

I have this terrible feeling that this is it. That this pain is what will be part of my life because I have had so long to know it was coming. Just for going out, even with the pills, it is hard to not just think about pain. I can’t sit, write or use my right arm with out screams of protest from the nerves in my spine.

It has a rhythm, the pain. The same as my heartbeat. If I don’t breath and just listen it has a hypnotizing effect.

Eicophobia

I am not a fearful person?
Mostly friends ask me if I thought through what I was doing because it seemed risky to them. I answer yes - I’ll go anywhere alone at night in any country, repel cliffs without a proper harness, ride a bicycle hundreds of miles with no helmet or light and dart through traffic using only my peripheral vision.

How surprising and messy it is then that I am the most fear-filled person of all.

Because I am persistently afraid of my home. Not of houses or your home.
Mine.
The home I live in.

It is not something I think about. I did not, riding the subway home this evening think, OH FUCK NOT HOME. Rather, I was looking forward to returning to some work and eating some frozen yogurt (vanilla).

I wish it was something I thought.

I push through my front door and put on my indoor flip-flop shoes. Slowly the burning ache in my back, gone for most of the evening, hums awake. I put away groceries. My eyes and temples begin to sink and grow with my heartbeat. I boil a kettle for tea and put away dishes. I have to stop for a minute and work hard to find a full breath.

What, I thought, do I do. Where, I wonder, do I go. Because anywhere I go, if I stay there long enough, becomes home.

And then I remember living in my car long ago as if it is some type of answer and not a cause.

Pretending to Get Help

I can’t write this yet.

But I can write this.

I have had a anxiety-free day…so calm and relaxed. No physical pains, slow breathing. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the 1mg of clonazepam that I took last night. It is because I am healed.

I think I’m drinking soap.

I am learning about hockey.

Pretty soon there will be no more bathing.

I’ve already been cut down to showers. Sometimes I go and sit in the tiny freezing moldy tub, lie back and imagine.

Soon, like now, I have no more anxiety medication. And I can feel it leaving me. I could go get other things that would help me more and in better ways but I cannot do that. Like how I cannot take a bath. The tub is there but it is too awful there to actually bathe. I have the prescription on my lap right now but it is too terrible for me to fill it. But I can sit back on my daybed and imagine being well.

Disordered Groceries

Grocery shopping is always something we do. I miss that. Our various disorders demanded that, while others dined out fashionably, we had already picked slowly through the grocery store so we could prepare food at home. I revel in grocery shopping. My friends haphazardously get groceries when they think of it and buy random packages that catch their eye. Then they put it all away and forget about it for weeks and months. Not me. For me it is a science. Nothing ever ever ever wasted. Of course I know how much it will be and have the money out for the cashier before she can tell me the total.

And I have just moved across town.

So it means ALL NEW GROCERY STORES. And I have, in short order, found my grocery heaven: a store UNDER CONSTRUCTION.

Inside this store is mayhem. Empty freezers stand at wrong tight angles to carts of mixed nuts. The produce is hidden in the back of the store behind tarps so you can’t find it. The ceiling tiles are missing at random intervals, revealing dark cavernous heights. It is like no grocery store I’ve ever been in. Random and challenging my organization skills. And best of all…there are no people.

Today it was empty save for two (I am assuming) Jewish men searching for kosher salt. The staff, in the midst of this chaos and freed of the annoyance of customers depleting their shelves, are giddy. The Jews ask a man in an apron about the salt and he screams NANCY HONEY DID WE EVEN PUT THE KOSHER SALT OUT?

Finally, after humming pleasantly to myself (a song I have been listening to over and over) in the empty isles for far too long, I approach the bored cashier. I stare up at the line of flickering naked fluorescent bulbs just above her and think about seizures. Then I wonder, why am I the only grocery shopper who loves it here?

Continuities

Think back to the times when your feet tingled and all your muscles tensed from cold.

That is how it is where I am living. It is probably my white trash inheritance but I adore, I worship, my electric fireplace. I find it more beautiful than any real fire I have seen. So predictable and, above all, so dustfree clean.

For some reason, and for the first time in my life, my hands are disintegrating. Disappearing inside a blistering, peeling, itchy and cracked carapace. It started on my right (unringed) ring finger but is, despite my best efforts, spreading. I always had so much pride in my hands and especially my long fingers. So delicate and able. Now they defy me.

I am supposed to go to a birthday party but I won’t.
Met some people today who thought I was there age but I am not.
My tiny dog is reacting to me quite differently - with more affection and warmth - which is yet more proof towards shorting out the repetitious belief that I can never change when perhaps I already have.

Smacked in the head

Yesterday and today I woke up feeling very calm. I felt I had turned a corner in understanding my anxiety. The things that were plagues earlier in the week seemed so manageable.

Then I went to therapy and spoke at length about my mother. Analyze, as I love to do, her casual email to me from last week. It was extremely helpful because I got a new perspective on many things.

But, and I am no longer surprised, the aftermath of this is exhaustion and that physical pain. My jaw and chest ache. I can’t get a full breath. Not at all.

I made food and ate. During this process my anxiety spiraled upwards. I tried to stop myself and ask why. Was it because I always had to race to eat food because my stepfather resented how much it cost to feed me. Was it because I had to hurry up and eat and clean everything up because eating was just a wasteful mess making activity. Was it because I felt guilty for wasting food on myself because it is expensive to eat and I need to save all my money because eventually that is all anyone has.

All these things. More I couldn’t even track. The aftermath of eating in the glow of thinking about my mother is like the aftermath of a fight where someone 50% bigger than you smacks you in the head. You can get up and walk away but you hurt all over inside and out for hours following it.

The difference is this time I know I don’t deserve it and I am going to try to make the way I feel about it more important than the way I think I should feel.

Wait to Weight

Here’s a secret: my father isn’t dead. He is waiting for me. He is a presence I carry around with me and when something good or bad happens he sees. I can’t see what he looks like. I can’t hear him. But he is always around, on my periphery.

He is waiting for me. He has been waiting and waiting.

My mother is Jennifer Connely’s nose and cheeks and Barbara Hershey’s hands and chin.
She is pieces of actresses from horror movies I find comforting to watch and think about.

He still waits. He told me to wait for him. He would never let me go. No matter what. And so I wait too. We wait together in orbit of each other, close but not seeing.

I can’t make us stop waiting. I can’t disassemble my Hollywood mother. But I can do other things.

I can run every day. I can stay thin enough to see all the ribs join my sternum. I can excise all the variety and excitement out of life and eat, drink and fold in exactly the same ways for a decade.

When the wait is over, when my mother is an average woman. When.

Every Day is Happy Halloween!

I’m living in a house full with people I don’t know.
They are upstairs banging around. I am not used to this.
Battling, as I am, anxiety, it is difficult with them up there.

I am quitting my anxiety medication. I conveniently did not call the doctor to talk about what is next, how I have not fallen asleep unmedicated in months –

UPSTAIRS PEOPLE: “do you have a snake/steak/stake in your room”

This includes three varieties of prescribed benzodiazepines, every conceivable over-the-counter painkiller, sleeping pill and even gravol. Sometimes in silly dizzying combinations. It reminds me of when I was a kid and was afraid of being killed by my asthma so I drank adult-size packets of

UPSTAIRS PEOPLE: bang thump thump clang “what did he want?”


neo-citron. These are the only drug-things I’ve ever taken. I’ve never tasted alcohol, cigarettes, or anything else. So that is my evidence that I am fine.

And is panic really panic when it is familiar? Sudden overwhelming unfounded fear. Manifests in me physiologically

UPSTAIRS PEOPLE: draaaaaaaaaaaaaaagggggging chairs

as inability to breath, tightness of chest, pounding heart, numb hands and arms, stabbing pain just at the inside tip of my right shoulder blade. Mostly when I wake up or lie down in bed, whenever I am about to prepare or eat food this happens. It is unfounded. But not sudden when I know it so deeply? Not overwhelming when I embrace it and channel it into rituals?

What is overwhelming is the thought that I didn’t have to always be this way, that

UPSTAIRS PEOPLE: “I started thinking about the way…..mixtures/fixtures.” bang bang bang

I might be able to stop it. Of course, in trying to stop everything has gotten worse. ..or maybe I am getting better and just noticing it all. You see?

So, I am turning to the most soothing thing. Horror movies. Many many of them. The Entity to Grudge 2 and all the Texas Chainsaw Masacres. Especially 2. Running running in underground caverns. As Roky Erikson has explained, horror isn’t scary to everyone. The way you feel when you sit on the edge of your seat, short of breath, and jumping at shadows is how I live my everyday. Horror is

UPSTAIRS PEOPLE: “hahahahah haha”

a way of life.

Tricking

Today is my assigned rest day. The first day where my job was to do nothing stressful all day. I came close – but I had a few small tasks. (not perfect!)

Overall it was successful in that my anxiety was fairly low. I wish I could say there was none. But not yet.

Right now, having moved and living in such an utterly different and temporary way feels ….odd. So I feel that. Which is normal?

There are so many things I have to get used to.

Many of my new roles, places are things I am not sure about. And I feel urgently that I need to do them all perfectly.

There is not even the possibility for me to misstep slightly. Except of course I do and have and will and thus…anxiety. I want to be the perfect landlord, teacher, student, money-maker, organizer, size, energy level, partner……

And I can’t ever be. Never ever. Like letting go of a dream…a brutal punishing one but a dream nonetheless.

Balancing out this letting go with a feeling of acceptable, adequate and normal instead of being an utter disappointment is the trick.

I’m good at tricks.

EMAILS FROM HOME

Email #1 Today:

Hey ____

I just wanted to check in and say hi.....maybe we could meet sometime and have a chat? Anyway have a good weekend...are you helping Jane move into her apartment?? love, mom


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Email #2 Today Excerpt:

Anyway please grab what you want from the Toyota or arrange a time to p.u. Or I could drop them somewhere depending on wether or not you want the books blah blah blah.It's just a little to much to leave with __ .I will leave everything in the Toyota for a week but we should try to keep it clean.Hope all is well at your new place.

Sincerely, x



These emails combined, with what I think might be withdrawal from the anxiety medication I am stopping, have me regressing.

I think it is mostly the one from my mother, which, when I read it, I sob. For no reason. For reason. For no good reason. See, there she is, so casually loving. I haven’t seen her in almost seven years. I have spoken to her (I foolishly called) once in nearly as many. But there it is….she wants to “chat.” She wants me to “have a good weekend.” So easy going. What’s wrong with me that I am not that way back!!

The real problem is the last words: love, mom. See, no. I think the thing here is, biologically she is half the donor of my genetic material. Sure.
Sociologically I did grow up mostly in the company of her society. Where I learned to hate myself, fear hypervigilantly the violence and mental smallness of all men, feel ashamed for being abused by my father, feel guilty for having a father and overall, learn to live in a measured way where, year after year, my feelings and emotions became irrational and wrong side-effects of my cloying reminding-everyone-of-my-alcoholic-abuser-father existence.

In context then, what her email says to me is DIE DIE DIE.
Her intent was not that. Has never been. She is sick. And I should have empathy for it. Unfortunately I am not able to yet. I want to be able to but I know when I read her casual words and my throat constricts and my three hundred pounds slams into my chest - I am not there. And then when I read the casual words of my x and the feeling is echoed on a smaller scale I slide backwards.

I feel certain, in the shadow of these emails, that love is not for me. These two massive failures are my evidence. I have cast an apparent pall on both of these peoples lives. They are so casual and easy and my reaction is an eclipse of there message with a swath of clear wide pain and grief. I shudder at how little I understood about what was happening to me. And then I just don’t want to think about any of it or anything anymore.

Remembering Warm

I often think of your hands on your cock. Your hands. So carefully manicured and cleansed yet, escaping all that is a vulgar strength …an intense masculinity? Something clichéd like that seems apt. And performing their familiar pleasure ritual, allowing me into something terribly intimate softens everything in me.
Then you come on my lips, my tongue, my chin – it is not just the taste I think about but even more the warmth. The exact evidence of you.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Nipples

A room full of women gathered specifically because we all have experienced some sort of trauma in our childhoods. A trauma significant enough to us that is stands as the central organizing principal in our lives twenty, thirty, forty years later.

After being introduced to the therapy that is being offered we are asked to speak our minds. To ask questions.

Immediately one woman, who is the shape of a dollop of whipped cream pipes up.

“Yeah. I resent how these forms you have us fill out all basically ask if we have a support network. ‘Cuz see, my problem here is that I am anti-social. I don’t like people. I don’t have some fucking long list of people I can cry to all day long.”

Psychiatrist: “I can understand that totally. Is there maybe just one-“

“Look. No one wants to hear my problems. And I can’t lay it on them. Everyone has problems. I been in therapy since I was eight, nothing changes.”

(Another, horse-faced older women): “She’s right. No one cares.”

At this point I am nearly nodding off. Not so much out of boredom honestly, but in protection. The beginning of the meeting, when they outline the stages of working through a trauma and I start to think about my father and my time with him and then my mother I almost cry. That is the shitface stage I am at. Plus I am ashamed to be here. Full of shame so deep and broad it takes all my energy to look up from the table at people. But I do.

But these hopeless women make me think. I look across the table at a woman who looks more like me. She is young, tall – taller than me. Pretty with long red hair and pale skin and eyes. She has a terrible wounded look about her. I wonder is this how I look? Is it so terribly obvious? If I don’t fix myself will I end up like these other women whom nobody can tolerate. Because now people will listen to me. But is it because I am presentable and know how to dish it out in appetizing ways?

Then I imagine kissing the red head in the elevator. Rubbing her large breasts with my small ones.

I look at the psychiatrists – two older women themselves – and feel caught between them and the women they are trying to convince they are wrong whilst also being supportive. What a terrible task.

Government cuts is why we are here. The waiting lists are so long for people needing this kind of help. I still don’t think this is good. Asking people who look at other humans as predators because of experience to gather in a group and be comfortable and honest is odd.

I am first to leave. I hand in my paperwork and I am asked if I have any questions. I say no, it is exactly what I expected and then I run, run to the elevators and hold my finger over the down button for longer than necessary.

oops!

ICU Resort and Spa

Yesterday I had an exchange with someone that I did not want to have. That should not exist and I left my body again and I thought about a trip I might like to take.

I enjoy travel but I have never stayed at an all inclusive resort and have no desire to do so.

Or didn’t think I did.

Then I found ICU Resort and Spa in Burritacca Colombia. What they offer is necessarily inclusive. You can’t opt out of anything. And even so, I have made a reservation and can’t wait to go.

Upon arrival you are escorted immediately to a room that looks like what you would find in a typical Western intensive care unit. Before you can drop your hat or your purse they inject you with enough sedative to loosen your knees and they catch you and guide you to your gurney.

They ask you how long you are staying and to count down the days backwards. Hopefully I won’t get past 10. Then, according to your pre-arranged wishes, they hook you up to a certain number of calories a day IV drip and intubate you so you do not even have to breathe on your own. And there, unconscious you remain for the duration of your vacation.

Three times each day a very attractive and scantily clad hotel “orderly” arrives and moves all the joints in your body and gives you a deep tissue massage.

I might never leave.

Homefree

I think maybe it would be best if I never lived anywhere.
If I never had a home it would resolve most of my compulsions and concerns.
It is a strange idea, since I just bought a house. Luckily I don’t live there and maybe I never should. Because thinking about living there is to let loose all-consuming thoughts that I am on the run from.

So, what I can do is move into a car or some fucking thing. And then, not having any of the things that give me anxiety, I will be free.

The other problem I have is being torn. Right now I am stuck in the between of how I was for so long thinking about my house/family and filled with fury and unleashed anxiety and how I am going to be without constant anger and dismantled compulsions. The funny thing was, at no time was I ever depressed. I was happy with my fury and busy with my perfectionism. Only fleetingly sad….so brief as to not exist at all. And my anxiety was the fuel that moved me. I acknowledge that if I did not work and live in such a pain-filled and anxious reality I could probably accomplished much much more emotionally and who knows what else.

Now that I have to feel things I can hardly imagine what I was thinking.
I still do things old ways though and when I do it really hurts.
Secrets and protective versions of reality that I try not to hold to. Doing what is best for me. That is what my psychiatrist calmly told me: I need to just do what is best for me. She made it sound so very clean and airy. But I am repeatedly failing at doing it anyways.

House full of Goodbye

Moving Day

Today I am moving most of my belongings out of here.
Here. This place was my home. Home. It was my dead father, vacant mother, secret confidant. It was my whole world, the only place I felt safe. The only thing on earth that loved me.

My house loved me because I kept it uncontaminated in the areas it needed. And because I promised it forever. I promised, forever I would be here taking care of it.

Now I’m leaving.

First, I got a dog. A teeny tiny dog that I loved enough to see that the person I was living with in my loving house was not someone I cared for at all.

So I got rid of him. Then it was me and my house and my dog. Then, because of chance encounter, I started going to therapy. And slowly, that coupled with this chance relationship that has made me feel safe, supported and loved by a person for the first time in my life and opening up to my two best friends….I can leave.

The house is absolutely alive to me. All houses are. I feel them hurt. It whispers quietly to me not to go, not to leave it. It is getting angry at me and has been keeping me awake. It hates to love me.

When I leave I will be severing some vestigial limb so there will be bleeding. It will take some time for that wound to heal. And I will always carry the scar, the scar of my love lost.

I am sitting, writing this in my house, pulled around me. It is now a shroud of shrieking needles. Each of the thousands of sharp points singing out a threat in shape and sound: DON’T DARE LEAVE ME YOU CUNT. I can feel all the energetic anger concentrate just above my right shoulder blade and dart into me, pinning me down.

But I will got through the motions because now I have an clearer understanding and now way back. I have felt feeling good and compared it to what I thought was good and learned that what I was feeling was only relief. Relief from running, hiding, shame and threats of destitution. Taking a step up from mere relief and instead reaching towards trying to be happy is big. Seems very big right now. So maybe I will falter. Still, I can’t go back. And don't want to at all. I'm greedy for this new thing.

And still I listen to the house shriek and chatter and try to formulate the feeling of goodbye.

Flying Over It.

Wake up at 22:30. I had fallen asleep sitting up (to lesson the pounding heart) after taking my medication plus a couple extra things. Now my heart is pounding so much, I’m hot and I can’t breathe. I have never, ever had anything as bad as this. I feel like, since I tried to figure out why I got these heart pounding problems in the morning it has spread and worsened and, even though I am making progress, I don’t care because I just want it to STOP.

Why. Why is my body doing this to me. Moving is hard. All this change is harder. So my body is rebelling. Everything is going to work out. Help is at hand, you are coming. But still my heart and chest shake and now it hurts.

Watching One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest. There is nothing wrong. There is nothing wrong. Lobotomy.

Reading about other people with anxiety who have heart pounding and take sleeping pills to fall asleep with it and then they wake up because the sleeping pill effect has worn off.
They live like this for years.

I can’t. I absolutely can’t live like this for very much longer.

Remington Steel Home

I love television, right.

So, I loved this detective show Remington Steele. It was impossible to hide. All day Tuesday I would be anxious about it…like I had a meeting or a date with someone. I was ten so I did not know what a date was.

It was like this: every night of the week that was not Tuesday I would sit alone in my room and shut my eyes and imagine myself into that world. I would be one or the other of the main characters. Slowly, over time, this world became my life, more real to me than the small town, the trailer, the family I lived in. I knitted it all together so that, when I was alone in my room I brought Remington Steele alive in there with me. But also, when I watched the show, I brought myself into the show.



Here is how.

First everyone had to be asleep. That was fine. My stepfather and mother would be in bed by 7:30 pm. They would turn off the heat. I would listen to them in the kitchen and then moving off down the hall. Always on Tuesdays my stepfather would make jokes about Remington Steele. If he was in a good mood he would say maybe there will be a news pre-emption. If he was in a bad mood he would threaten to rip the aerial off the house or kick the tv in. These threats, small and large, would feed the embers of my panic. I could not ever show anything though, of course. I knew that I had to see the show because I was the show, it was part of me and as crucial to my survival as my organs and daily fruit loops. Not seeing it was not possible anyways.

To ensure that my stepfather would never stop me (Remington Steele) I had more than just a first step. Also, I had to be sitting with straight legs on the couch with one square couch pillow behind my back. I had to have the ugly orange and purple itchy crocheted blanket over my legs and hips. I had to breathe very shallowly throughout the show so I could hear it as it had to be turned down very low so as not to disturb my stepfather. And finally, most importantly, I had to have absolutely no hair on my face at all. This meant very carefully and repeatedly wetting my hands and pushing all the hair around my face behind my ears.



This protected me (Remington Steele). After the show I would go to bed and re-enact in my head the entire episode changing things (but not really) to fit with my life and integrate that episode with my week.

Summer reruns nothing changed, it was just an opportunity to fix anything I might have done wrong.

ONE WEEK COUNTDOWN TO THE END

I tell everyone how stressful things have been, how tired I am. TRUE.

But, of course, no one has time to hear about the silly details.

First there are four things.

You are not allowed to drink coffee so you eat chocolate covered coffee beans instead.

You are not allowed to grocery shop so you eat what is left and create meals that make your stomach heave.

You are not allowed to pack or to stay so you throw everything out.

You are not allowed to have help because you don’t deserve it – the entire mess is your fault and if you get help you will still be making mess instead of FIXING THINGS PERFECTLY.

Next, you split yourself into two. One of you deals with the routine work things, organizing things, outside things and politeness. The other one listens to the commands and then tallies up the anxiety from patently ignoring the commands.

Clean the floor.
NO.

Put the peanut butter on the second shelf.
NO.

Take off your boots.
NO.

Wash the sheets.
NO.

Wash the curtains.
NO.

Clean the computer.
NO.

Put the vegetables in special vegetable bags.
NO.

Turn off the lights.
NO.

Turn on the TV.
NO.

Turn off the TV.
No.

Dust the entire house, there are cobwebs.
NO.

Take of your indoor shoes before entering bedroom.
NO.

Take a decontaminating bath before retiring to sleeplessness in bed.
NO.
YES.
NO.
Okay.

Don’t eat.
No.
Yes. NO. A little.

Run every day.
YES.

Throw everything away or use it.
YES.

Answer the phone (it is X AGAIN).
NO.
Yes.

Move.
No.

Stay.
No.

Fix yourself because you talk in ways that make people confused.
Yes,
HOW.

Constant losing/winning battle.

And I of course I can handle it. Because I am split in two.

Summer 1992 (three years prior to any running) Age 20

So I am reading the Edible Woman and thinking about exercise. Me...not just normal weight lifting or aerobics but RUNNING. Not just jogging...but running. Fast.

Why is this happening to me. I hate exercise but I feel like becoming totally fit...fat free. Tonight after I try Paul out I'm going to the track by the school behind Honest Eds and I'm going to run in Armadillo circles until I puke. Taraleigh might come.

Happy? Suicidal? When I run my ears clog up and I can't hear and my body throbs and I need that.
DISTRACTION. I think if I can just keep up this distraction then I will be okay. But when you lose distraction it forces you to look at your existence track and obviously I want to run to the end of this one and see if the next one is any longer.

Sometimes being and ex-junkie is better than having a masters in education.

I used to have guts.

I was chosen by various Canadian writers along with a few other high school students to read something specially prepared and previewed by our teachers. Since, over the summer, my teacher tried to fuck me, I decided against any preparation and in the fifteen minutes before I was to stand in front of the cameras on the top floor of the hotel at Bloor and Avenue Road I wrote this:

(Small excerpt from four page piece)

The grassy earth lifts to finger me and these long fingers whsper my name and signal the finale. In time to the rhythm Bristleback and I spread ourselves over the whole scene, enveloping it in a raw orange-red bristeled sphere....we are not sticky. We are as slippery as a lightbulb and then we do light up....

Owls and Betrayal

Spent a weekend on the water; being grilled to borrow money from my grandparents and signing useless promise notes to them. I also heard a new cluster of information about my first four years of life and I am still sorting through it. Some of it was too much to listen to so I shut my ears.

I also pushed you away, which I regret. I am not stable right now but, of all things, I wish so much to be able to not forget that you are not an enemy. No excuses.

I also rested this weekend. Felt good. The drive back here was very calm and restful, right until I parked.

The minute I walked into the house I felt panic seize me. I pushed it down as hard as I could. That was two hours ago. I am losing the battle. My heart is beating so hard I am trembling. The nausea which lifted all weekend is back twofold and I can hardly catch my breath. It is purely physical. I am not thinking anything except that everything is okay, is good. But my body betrays me. The betrayal enrages me and, I have begun reverting to old ways of punishing myself. I try to knock myself out, to puncture my mutinous brain with screws in the wall that used to hold cardboard prints of owls I have just given away to your sister. The screws dare me.

Can't wait to move I think.

Saw two men who were in X's band right beside me in groucery store line.

One of them I spent hours and hours with and was friends with.

They kept talking loudly trying to get my attention. I am pretty sure they saw me because of this.
They are pretty nerdy/nervous around women and given the context I guess akward. Maybe they
did not even notice me in my giant glasses.

I ignored them and bagged my groceries in such a way to avoid eye contact.

Letter from Grandmother, July 19 1998

Hi Chantelle:

It was great hearing from you!! We were wondering how you were getting along in "Algonquin" and a lot of the time on your own.

Sounds like you are pioneering...clearing land, 2 goats and a dog (I'm glad you have a big dog) and a garden, but the pioneers didn't have a van to drive down the country roads to the beach to lie all day in the sun. What roads? They didn't have a big house with lots of bedrooms either. It sounds like its been a great place with a lot of good memories for many peopole and still good enough for you to spend a good summer there doing what you do. Writing, painting, gardening and losts of exercise. Enjoy Chantelle.

Its dull and overcast to-day and raining a little. The reain is good we need it. I am taking it easy to-day. Spent most of the morning watching the British Open Golf Tournament. It was exciting.

I was talking to your Mom to-day. I told her I had been talking to you and she was wondering how you are getting along.

We go five quarats of black currants from our bushes so will be making mor jam soon. We have had 12 quarts from the bushes but the quantity seems to be getting smaller each year.

Take care of yourself Chantelle and give my love to Max.

Lots of Love
G & G

Montego Bay, Jamaica Wednesday December 27 1995

No it is 8:30 am because I just talked to Otis the bartender. He's gonna take me to see Cutty Ranks, Shaggy, Beenie Man and Lady Saw who are playing at New Year Parties.

Where am I? Can I go on as a student when I know there is a part of me forlorn in the boredom of everyday life. For me, all what is going on here, this is normal. I feel like me here, alone, wandering around at night in the darkened streets startling pigs and chickens. And "working." Being in Toronto is a holiday of the everyday for me. A way of breaking the monotony of chaos.

Hey Girlie! Watch out for muggers with the icepick and the slashyslashy cheek!

There are two guys who meet us at the airport. They take us to this quaint place. They are our everything while we are here. Food. Tour guides. Everything, no questions asked or answered.

Sitting by the pool, reading From the Social Construction of Race to the Abolition of Whiteness by David Roediger 1994, I feel soothed. Long slices of my face fall, papery, into my hands.

The radio stations are ALL good.

The discos are ALL dancehall! Everyone dresses in gold and crystal and mesh with fronts and are suprised when I understand them. Some guy from Montreal just asked me to translate for him.

I brough some pictures of my dad here. They are on my dresser in my room. I feel so at home here already. "I've thought of hotels as the most ideal places indeed to be." Shampoo Planet D. Coupland page 31

***

Last night I let Otis kiss me and I felt a bit guilty about Eddie. I feel like I'll never leave here and never see him again anyways.
Before I left Eddie asked me if he thought we'd be stuck together forever.

Everyone here is always chopping at the undergrowth with machetes. Too much life here. Went to a strip club here last night too and the girls were upside down grinding their hips!

Then we went to The Keg. It is an outdoor dancehall on a rooftop. It cost $J60 to get in.
Everyone was dancing so well! Keith started dancing with me and did a good job. "No Problem" he said, which I think
he meant it was okay dancing with me. He was drinking rum out of a baby bottle.

I was the only white person there, but no one seemed to care. Maybe because I was having fun.

January 25 1996 Los Angeles

It is the beginning of my second week of living here. Hsin-Dan has spent most of this afternoon askme me
what is "Mall-i-boo" like and what does double digited mean as she reads through personal ads.

Be interesting to date some guy in a wheelchair. Just to talk to him and what he has been through. Hsin-Dan is bored because we can't find any strip clubs to make money at. In New York at Harmony we could clear $500 in a couple hours no problem. But the no-touching rules here move the prostitution links so far away we are afraid to touch because of them.

Her boredom is catching. I'm drinking skim-milk weakend hot chocolate adn coffee to amuse myself and reflecting upon re-manufacturing my identity.

When I am with Max's friends, who use strippers as entertainment, I say nothing about it. When Hsin and I are together we can't wait to work again somewhere fun.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH CAPITALISM. There is a seminar tonight at 7:30 pm on West Pico Blvd. I don't have a car so I will dissect an article instead and then stick it to the wall with band-aids.


****

Last night Hsin and I went out to The Dresdan and a tall guy who was pretty creepy looking dropped a note on my booth table and then moved to the other side of room and stared at me.

The note said: You are so beautiful.
That's it. As soon as he had seen I read it he left. I put it in my pocket and Hsin-Dan and I continued to giggle at Mary and Elaine, the crappy jazz performers. Plus she flirted with the bar tender.

Los Angeles 1996 continued

March

I walk to the grocery store. I buy grapefruit and an LA Times.

At home I become she and she starts her eating ritual.

Finally, she can't breathe.

April

The pain in my genitals has finally become too great and convincing. How could this happen to me I am healthy, fit, drug and fat free? Has a penis caused this, or worse, a clitoris?

I wait in the main waiting room of East LA Women's Clinic for the doctors to get out of their meeting. My appointment is for 10:30. I stumble to the desk and tell the thick woman there that I can't stand the TV (hispanic preachers) so I am going to wait in the tiny room by her desk. Really I just need solitude. I begin to pace because I am sure I deserve all this pain. The room is square so I cross it diagonally. In the room is a table with a phone on it that staff periodically use. And a sign about AIDS, and one about maximum occupancy. I reread the signs over and over in English and Spanish.

I decide to tell Max. I call him and he arrives. He is not supposed to be in here, the signs say so in both English and Spanish. Only patients are allowed in this part. He has a coffee of course. I am so thirsty I try to drink it.
We sit down.
He spills the coffee and tries to fix it by moving his chair.

I wonder if he is my enemy.

Faulty Lines

I have been looking to the past to avoid the present.

It shouldn't be so hard. If I could just think clearly about it, what is going on is not so hard. But the battle of the last few weeks
to continue exectuting tasks, ordering other people around and making decisions which will effect the next five years of my life is made harder because I believe firmly that there is one, right and perfect way for it to go. It is not going that way and I feel right now that I can, using some sort of unnamed mental energy, to force it to be.

That is what I do sometimes. I think that the bad things that have happened in my life are my fault. Not because I did something but because I didn't do something. My stepfucker killed my dog because of me. My dad died hating me because of me. My mother stays with an abusive man because of me. My last relationship plauges me to the brink because of me.

This because of me is I really, genuinely believe (even though I know it isn't true!) that if I sit on the ground, crush my eyes close and really concentrate hard on something it will come true. I just have to really visualize it strongly and for long enough that it causes my eyes, head and body to really ache and shudder. It has worked in the past and so when it doesn't work now it is because I am not trying hard enough.

Today I have to try harder. I have to end this the way I want through sheer force of will or I feel like I don't really see the point of living if I have to live without things turning out as I need them to. It'd be healthier, by far, I know to realize that all this is a sickness. I can see it as so. But I don't care right now.
I want to sit on the ground and concentrate for half an hour, strain all my energy towards what I want, because if I don't at least try I hate it.

Los Angeles Thursday March 7 1996

Back then I write:

So here I live in Hollywood.

Dis-satisfaction. Max just came home from work and kissed me and then left to play basketball. And he's working tonight at the restaurant.

I think of the trouble I am in, the bite mark on the back of my neck and feel boredoms flee under the struggle. That is why. I enjoy
the feeling of throwing myself into it.

I spend all day unable to get a full breath, feeling extremely relaxingly fitful and benign. I want to explode in tears. I want to be able to breathe.

**

Pressed up against the Dodge Dart car door. Victor undoes his pants and presses me more into the door.

What do you want? he asks

I want you to stop.

Do you ever have rape fantasies? Is that what your no means?

No. My no means no.

Aww. But I want you so bad. Not just your body, but I want that closeness with you. I want to come home from work and see you and kiss for a minute before we even talk. Please. Give me your tongue.

No!

Please. Don't do this to me. Just send it into my mouth.

Victor presses my hands, clad in weight-lifting gloves around his penis. She notices the size. Irrelevant.

Victor turns her to face him and kisses and she gives in once, wetting her tongue. He groans and leaps on her, biting the nape of her neck right to the bone.

Did that hurt? I'm a vampire. You didn't know that.

I roll my eyes. I am your victim. We are in a cheesy Anne Rice novel.

Yes. And you are mine.

Victor bumps her up against the door again.

Please no! I have to go. Please stop.

I hate how much I love how you say that. "Please stop!" You drive me crazy. I think about you, how much I want you. Come lie down with me. Aren't I a pervert?

No. Please. I feel so bad.

I begin to tear up and cross my arms.

Don't put your arms like that. Don't.

But I -

Don't you want me? Are you wet? If you go home you'll be miserable. He won't even be there. He'll be at work. You don't really feel like I do. That's all.

Shame wells up in my chest.

No. I am confused. You can't expect me to go from one thing to another.
I try to leave.

Victor locks the door.

I know. Maybe in 10 years we'll be together. You'll be beautiful still. I'll be old. Don't you want to feel me?
Victor pulls up his shirt.

I wanted you from when I first saw you on Los Feliz. ANd then I found out how you are and I can't take it.

Just let me go.

He drops his hands to my waistband. Slips his fingers under.

Just let me once.

No!

I want the taste and smell of you on my lips, tongue. You do it then.

I thought, I have to pee.

Max writes in Los Angeles 1996

(written in handwriting in my journal)

I feel like telling the guy who plays Elton John to give up the pianer for a moment. I should just buy a guitar so I don't have to wait to play music. Chantelle's suggested that I sing which makes me feel nervous. It makes us whites "better to sympathize with the plight of WWII jews." We're sitting in the ONyx which is infinitely more coller than anything in Toronto which is fairly pathetic. Chantelle's is seeing me as a little kid as I write in the style which has slipped through the system. I feel closer to you through the conversastion of the night. I want you to be completely honest about Victor. My confidence in your love of me is increasing and likewise in my trust of myself. This feels awkward for me. I feel a certain pressure to be eloquent and witty. Oh well guess we won't be waiting any longer.

The frustration continues and my only solice is the thought of Beavis and Butthead Winebego guys expression when he calls every McDonald's in Los Angeles.

April 1996

With Max at New Mexico/Arizona border, leaving Los Angeles:

How many more miles of disappointment need to register on my face before you try to talk to me about how I destroy everything you need and replace it with huffing.

We stopped in a stinky bar on the border. After we had a small talk about when he date raped me. The tension wells up and petrifies my feminist tongue. So many unspoken thoughts, ideas. And any spoken, done so quietly because I know that even though I feel right I am solidly irrationally wrong. Every fear I feel of angry men is my own insecurity. Every insult to my my self-respect and ability to live is really my own tense waiting for a man to violate my powers.

Except all of this is wrong. Am I so thoroughly mad that I have imagined the whole thing? Or am I tense and weary because of constant encouragement. Who are you but the voice who sings unimportant words in the choir to back up my screams and hollow-out their loved meaning?

1996 October

I have all these pictures of yung relative girls that I do not know. And yet I have them, stopped at school in varying poses of confidence preparing to be observed and summed up. All of them purposeful now, waiting to be posessed. I don't know them but they are my cousins, five of them and my sister. A sister with a head I don't know and moreover arms that ar full like a womans ans she is invited on to secondary school with her roses in her arm and I look at the roses and then her blue smile and I wait til she suffocates. I need her organs, too much.

Throwing things away

In the process of packing and getting rid of things I have come upon some things written in the past by me that I would like
to remember and so they follow.

The capitalized poem Andrew wrote in my journal (after he had read it) and shortly after he raped me, leaving me covered in soapstone dust which is a carcinogen, was his way of communicating to me in my language because back then I spent hours a day buried in my notebooks.

December 1994, Andrew's Letter to me

SOMETHING STUPID LIKE I LOVE YOU
WELL YOU MUST KNOW HOW FIRST
COLD LIKE BLUE
BLUE AS I AM
FOR A LIER HAS BEEN LIED TO
OF CORSE I AM ALWAYS RONG

RONG ME.

FOR THATS WHAT MAKES EVERY
THING OK.
FOR ONE WHO DOESN'T BELIEVE
IT MAKES IT HARD FOR
ANOTHER TO HAVE MORE FATH.
AT LEAST ENOUGH
THROWBACKS TO JUSTIFY AND HURT
LIES TO PROTECT AND HURT
A LIE IS WHEN THERE IS ENOUGH FOR
ONE AND ONE DOESN'T REALLY CARE ENOUGH
FOR ONE LET ALONE 2 OR MORE.

November 1994, Nelson B.C.

Dear Kevan,

I just felt this feeling about me and you that was like nothing. Closeness is funny. I am with someone at this instant who I feel closer to than anyone before, but in most other ways quite distant.

I am slowly learning that instances are all that matter and that building tomorrow is for the insane.
You were in my life for a long time but of matter of only small amounts. I must not want to be treated well. Heart racing.
All this talk takes me to a creek I played in as a child. I caught frogs and stuck pins into the space between their legs and they never even cried.

It is so damned cold outside. It is not the living I despise it is everybody's noticing of my life. I want to live in the floorboards and survive off spilt foods.

I haven't known what time it is for a week.

Saturday October 30, 1994 Nelson B.C.

Devil's Night: "The woman is perfected
Her dead body flows
In the scrolls of her robes"

I am in a place called the Sanfrancisco of Canada and I am staying with this person I never even talked to in high school after four years of sharing classes. TL is away for a bit in Vancouver. It is weird here, people living in self-built cabins in the woods. No phones, no heat, no water but lots of welfare. The person I'm staying with is moving tomorrow across town but I can't move in and TL has the tent and I'm homeless. But happy. Very white here and so hippy it turns my hate of their dumpy-ghostly trippyness livid. I am fufilled in my unliked lost loved surroundings and the mountains are purple at night.


****

I spent Devil's night with a boy who doesn't read very well but whom I may love I guess and he only reads comic books and doesn't even read them just looks at the pictures.

"Why are you staring at me? For the same reason you are staring at me."

Naked except for panties with 100% cotton label still affixed. It itches but gives good diversion. For here in this wood heated box there are no distractions except for the ones (she) and I invent.

Thursday September 12, 1994 Wolfhead Montana

Got tailpipe fixed and TL and I waited for two hours in a Town Pump where a nice MIssouri man who worked there kept us amused.
Called Ruth. (grandmother)
She said: "Oh heavans. Don't do what you know you're not supposed to."

I am just a set of positive dichotomies to her which may be upset by the bad vibes of the continent.

September 1994

Journal Entry from Duluth Minnesota:

MOTEL $18 a night. Smells like urine and mould.
But TV! and an unpurposeful surrealist painting of a blacksmithy.
Huge water mark on the ceiling.
Blue mottled carpet so stained it looks green and no Gideon Bible!
No closet rod and a whole solar system of fuzzy fungus in said useless, doorless closet. Blue wood panelling?
and nobby bedspreads.
Public school heater and tea towels for drapes.

The neon flashes the simple, obvious name: MOTEL in the theme hue of blue.

Aaron (the guy giving us the cross-country ride who has herpes) would take Mudhoney's song "Fuck me, I'm sick" and use it as his anthem.

September 15, 1993

Dear Ms. Karen Oliver

Re: Estate of GLEN EDWARD OLIVER, Deceased.

After a careful review of the above-named file, it has come to my attention that we do not have an up-to-date address for your daughter, Chantelle. Since she has reached the age of majority, we will be distributing the assets of her late father's estate to her in teh very near future. As such, we would appreciate it if you would provide us with a n address or pass this letter on to Chantelle, so she may contact us directly.

Thank you for your assistance.

Yours truly,
Suzanne Noble
Estate Officer
Lower Mainland Region
Tel. No.: (604) 775-1811

Home Remedy

Resistance to maintaining body weight at or above a minimally normal weight for age and height
Intense fear of gaining weight or becoming fat, even though underweight
Disturbance in the way in which one's body weight or shape is experienced, undue influence of body weight or shape on self-evaluation, or denial of the seriousness of the current low body weight
Infrequent or absent menstrual periods (in females who have reached puberty)

Piaget

Lying down right now and not feeling my heart pounding in my throat, ears, back is the best thing in the world.







I still feel an echo, like the pounding heart is not gone only waiting a little further away. Accompanied by a slight tightness in the front of my throat.










Like Piaget's Disease.
But like I have extra ribs and that they are growing nonstop in deformed arcs that encircle my chest and spiral smaller and smaller forever.

Not where but when

Yesterday my therapist, in an attempt to help me cope with my chronic loud heart symptom, tried to suggest places for me to go that felt calm and safe. I was pretty unhelpful as she listed off various city parks and asked me if nature made me feel calm. I said yes, but that nowhere in a city felt like nature to me because I grew up in the country. I said city parks actually irritate me, which is true, and that the farm I used to go to for that escape is now all fucked up because of my x and having to sell it and what transpired there.

Just now I realized how I should have answered more positively. There is no "where" I go exactly, but there are two television shows that calm me so much I can't help but fall asleep watching them, even if I fight it. One is the aforementioned All My Children, which is helpfully on every day. However, today it didn't work as well as usual.

The other show worked really well on Sunday night: Deadwood. I cannot at all stay awake for that entire show. Not because I don't find it interesting - I actually find it very compelling . It is because, as I sort of live in the show, I can live in the 1850s which is not only another place but another time entirely. So far and entirely free from all the personal, emotional, physical and social structures that are a constant covert live feed for my anxiety. That process alleviated my pounding heart even this week or at least help me fall asleep immediately.

So the answer to her where is really a correction: It should be "When" should I go to. And the answer is 150 years ago to one of the last bleeding edges of the American western Frontier. Helped along of course via HBO productions.

Happy Chinese Valentines Day: July 31

To you.

July with Paris eating out Nicole

Worst day ever for loud heart. Worse every day.
No reason. The reason is everywhere that was comforting
is gone, everything is absolutely altered. I don't feel safe
in my home. To get out is ending.

Loud loud loud. Short of breath except when I exercise. Made a video
because I need to see how I look from the outside. You'd think you
could see my heart beating in my chest, is what I think. But I can't.
And that is some comfort.

With everything stripped down, away, like everyone said for the best:
moving; new home; facing deep problems (some of them) - I feel like
a fool or not like one for missing how I couldn't just pretend away everything.
And even more recently; thinking I could stop how bad it makes me feel the
years of punishing myself staying with someone I feared and loathed. I'm used
to it and love it. I needed it. When I am not punishing myself that way maybe I
look for other ways. Thoughts piling up; it is exponential I guess. The more of them
the more of them behind. I can think STOP and that seeds off a whole new set. I know
I didn't deserve what I got but I made it. I remember that maybe this isn't real
is some aftereffect. But these are just more piles of thoughts overlapping some
other things. All of it I can live with. Like the knife above my right shoulder blade,
the way my flesh sears when I open the fridge, the wholeness with which my
bed, which once held escape, now swallows me up like a hungry angry mothermouth
full of bright teeth.

And thump thump thump, like I was being chased. How I crave that. I remember clearly telling someone about the happiest day of my life: The day TP's enemy got out of jail and every friend on the road told me he was about to stab me. I carried a silly paring knife in my pocket to work every night that week and carefully waited to walk home at small hours of the night, alone and slowly, heart racing with good fucking real purpose.

The comfort of purpose.
Looking for itthump.

Paris and Nicole Reunite

Elvi

In the past, what I was best at and enjoyed most, was focusing on one very specific project intensely like a film or a story or a demolition. The problem was I escaped into it so I would not have to feel anything. Marrying attention to feeling with intesnse focus on a project seems perverse in some way. Another expample of black and white thinking, I suppose. No wonder I was so fascinated by Gloria Anzaldua's Borderland book a decade ago...all about being in two places at once and so on. Of course her argument was about mestiza consciousness and not my fucking particular coping mechanisms, but it is interesting nonetheless that even though I had no idea how fucked up I was, I was at some level aware of a glaring problem.

This weekend: Elvis, bridal improv, soccer and running down the pain that makes my heart loud and shoulder throb slowly. In other words, trying not to pay attention to all the misteps and mistakes I must certainly be making.

SAMENESS OF INTAKE

I have been worried over the last 48 hours about the displacement of compulsioins on to new areas.

Couldn't think of any thing that was a big deal.

Only that I can only eat Exactly The Same Thing every day. It's healthy, so, that's okay. I guess.
But if I can't get what I eat every day I don't eat.

"I'm No Threat To Others"

Date: July 12, 2005
------

...That's the best kind of hostility. And intensity.

I did _linear_ editing in highschool. That was not fun.

I'll look for the awesome convertible at 10:15 tomorrow just east of
-----, on ----, at ---- 's Music.

later!

Changing Rooms of the Rich.

Trying on dresses is entirely more enjoyable when you have a little stage surrounded by mirrors from which to privately view yourself in. All the dresses fit me but I couldn't stand them because I looked like someone else. Someone who wore these kind of formal dresses. But it was excellent to twirl in the mirror while Jesuspenis sat and stared. She really pays attention when I try things on.

Kendal, on All My Children is now certain that her baby father is not who she thought it was but the insemination doctor who used his access to infertile couples to spread his own seed. He fathered hundreds of babies. Kendal should just forget about it and move on - what's done is done. But instead she is running around her apartment building in her housecoat in a panic.

I left my house today to buy a maid of honour dress for a woman who is pretty much my sister. I left early though because X called and I didn't want to answer and was afraid he'd come over. So I left, feeling free. Just down the road from my house, as I idled in my car to turn left I noticed a man frantically waving at me from inside his vehicle. I always ignore this type of behaviour so I turned away...until the person yelled my name and, to my horror, I saw it was X and he yelled: "Give me a call!" I stared blankly at him through my oversized sunglasses and made my turn.

Distances Recovered; the reward of intimacy

It is good to see you are taking care of yourself and your cold.

Talking to you this morning was very good. It always is. I am working very hard to break
through this awful feeling that I cannot seem to escape. It is about my past, my present difficult
situation, but also my future. I don't trust my feelings right now, but I certainly feel something is
very wrong. I don't know how to put it exactly. Maybe, as part of therapy, I have recognized some
new things I need to do and say that I am not doing and saying. But I am still working on
what actions to take. What things I have left out that will make this feeling go away. I want everything
to be okay, to not feel bad, but that is part of the problem. The more I do that the more distant everything
and everyone feels. I don't know if it is because my therapy last week was about permitting myself
to feel all the things I pushed away for so long and I am finally registering that emotionally. I don't know if I should
just wait and have this feeling pass, which it surely should. I know that if you felt like this I would
want to know. But at the same time, I feel like you cope with these things all the time and it is
no big deal to you. It is back and forth.

I need everything that can be to be a little less hard for a couple weeks. I need that or I cannot
possibly go on.

Intimacy is so fucking fragile. It counts on so much strength. All of my strength has been wrongly diverted - stolen really - by wrongheaded directives.

I just got a very kind and fun email from a friend who, at my encouragement, has started online dating. These are the connections that matter, that mean something and that give strength. Intimacy's reward.

Spectacular Results

Living in an emotionally more complex world, one with variety beyond the distance between rage and hatred, is so new to me I feel at times completely out of touch with reality.

Where once I vacillated between being either perfect or horrible, now I contain such an array of oppositional identies and certainties that used to be mutually exclusive, it makes me sea-sick. I feel simultaneously hopeful about the future while I also feel like it would be nice to quietly die. I feel excited about summer plans with close friends; I want to avoid friends and the new responsibility of expressing my weaknesses and desires. I enjoy being angry about things; it terrifies me to be angry.

It is a fine fucking way to meet a life-altering awakening.

I am not sure if I really feel like this; or is it a result of my attempts to meddle with my anxiety. I know change makes sense; but how much? Is the only thing making me sure my decision to be sure? Then I get bored with it all and just want to take pornographic pictures. Look! Sex! Genitals!

House Cunting

After an afternoon inside strangers homes, smelling their closets and judging how their shaped their kitchen triangles, I finally got it. I did not survive my father's unnamed exploits, 14 years sleeping 20 feet away from Dana, assorted imaginative forms of starvation and a nine year strangulation of emotions just to be here, looking for purification in some freshly dressed $450 000 fully detached "gem." No home, no building, no lifestyle, no investment will ever soothe me.

What soothes me is action. Decisiveness. Spending time with something, knowing when it is enough, and being done with it.

Piecemeal I am completing an ugly break. Not beginnning, but now, finishing it.

Real Estate and Bird Corpse

I am surrounded by starling feathers. Evidence of a bird that has flown down my chimney and, after flying full force into most of the 34 windows in my house, it stopped. It finally fluttered under the cedar chest under my Panasonic 26 “ and died. Bird shit and fluffy breast feathers are evidence of its efforts to escape my house. The spot where it died is stained a darker yellow. When I removed the birdbody it was impossibly light. The darkspot where it lay was matted with the dried juices that used to make the bird heavy. I wiped it up with orange-scented Windex but the darkspot remained.

I have picked up as many of the feathers as possible, but more keep showing up.

I am in this house, in this life too. Last night I had a very vivid dream. Away from the city I remember dreams better. I dreamt that the world was about to end in fire. We decided to go to the epicenter and watch. In the dream I was flooded with relief because I would be free of the complexities that this house, that house, my past decisions, had left me with.

And this morning, I am enjoying the bright day and the warm wind, but I am surrounded by light grey breast feathers. I feel empty and light.

In The Hall

45 minutes early for therapy, just the way I like it, I sat reading in the halls populated by hurried therapists, busted addicts and candy secretaries (who keep asking me why I am there, nervously).

My soundtrack to the relationship between competing versions of social theory was the loud and clear voice of a young woman explaing to someone (who spoke much more softly) how her new medication prevents her from sleeping from more than two hours at a time because of terrifying nightmares but she feels better overall. As my thoughts wandered to the practicality of the debates, I could hear the woman explain how, she could follow the 12 steps no problem when she was living at the rehab, but once she left, she lacked the support to remember all the steps.

Therapy today was surprisingly useful. I still do not have a referal but I did a lot of talking about the X and unbound myself to a great degree from the guilt and responsibility I feel to him and that relationship. I realized that I liken cutting him off to the way my mother cut my father off, and, in general, some sort of denial of mistakes and complete and utter failure as a person. The whole thing sentenced me to living with damaging people in attempt to be healthy and face my mistakes. My therapist recommended that, while I certainly don't have to decide immediately, I really consider just cutting X out of my life forever.

And the thought gave me great peace.

My other show that I live through is, I am ashamed to say, The Gilmore Girls. I am hesitant to admit it, not because I don't think the show is valuable and worthy of my conjoinment, but because of the potentially self-destrutiveness of the show:
It is a show about a really healthy and meaningful mother-daughter relationship.
So each show is a little bit escape and a little bit torture as I fall out of character and come back to the hall, the Habermas, the insomniac addict and my weaponized X.

The Cure That Kills

For my feeling like my heart is going to shatter my rib cage and
the vice around my sternum that stops my breath, I have sought remedy.
Finally, after a lifetime of enjoying these neat features of my day
that I believed were what helped everyone wake up and face their day.

The times over the past ten years when I knew it wasn't right and said
so were met with threatened silence so I changed my mind.

The thereapy has put me towards being free of all this....eventually.
In the MEAN time I have been put on a medication. Which worked really
well for one night.

But tonight about 39 minutes after I took it, instead of sleeping, I sit here,
on the edge of my bed, because my I can see my heart beat in my chest,
there are pains shooting up and down my neck which has stiffened well.

I am trying to slow my breathing.

I can live with it; I'm used to it; I can't say I am not disappointed.

The Come Back

I am now far away again. Not really back, though.

Kendall is completely fine.

I've done some baking.

I have a long list, of obligations.

My yard is a jungle, neighbourhood fodder.

But me and Jesus are plotting.

Coming home to somewhere I've never been.

On the other side of the world, with 12 hours lost and space now at a premium, I write with you asleep on your "bed."

It has just started to rain. So hard it is blotting out the view of this Frankenstein city.

I have not travelled this kind of culturally far since I was young. Since I was hungry for danger to augment my identity.

Now, I am not looking for adventure at all but a way to find peace. I can have it here because it is so far from most of my responsibilities and difficult decisions. Truly I have become a vacationer because my everyday, at home, presents enough danger.

Travelling here was easy; much easier than I ever hoped for. I slept and was comfortable and entertained by a porn memoir with pieces of me in it. Seeing you was the easiest of all.

The world works us so hard it is of course a comfort and delight to reach eachother because it is like coming home. Only not what I have made my homes into (strict cylces of cleaning regimens, unbreakable routines and continuation of old cycles) but something safer and much more soothing.

Back To Basics: uh-oh

After yoga (one of the few things besides running, fucking and pilates that can hush the incessant noise in my head) I am able to take a more focused look at relationships.

What, to me, is a relationship?

Well, what has it been?

I have represented the bad parts of the “x.” Those are, of course, more comfortable to drum up. But what about a guilt-free look at some facts? An honest retrospective towards complete abandonment of old cycles.

He would often ask me how I felt about him. I would often respond by saying I need “more.” I had no idea what I meant. I just felt so strongly I wanted it and, through circumscription, knew he would never produce it.



One time he responded by taking me, as a total surprise, to see my favourite band. (The Cowboy Junkies). Since I was 14 I listened to their albums over and over. I memorized their depressing tones and lyrics and, when I had no clock to check time, I would sing their songs to mark the passage of time.
My response to his gift:
“You know I hate live music.”

Another time he bought us tango lessons. We both loved dancing, so he felt this was a sure way to hone in on “more.” He was always trying to get me to dance with him but I hate dancing with anyone. And I like to improvise which makes it hard for my partner.
My response to the lessons? I responded to the very flirtatious instructor in kind and complained afterward about how much I hated having definite steps.

I could continue; I could make the list worse and more embarrassing; the point has been made. I have done equal worse things in the past to other men and women. I had no business being in a relationship with him, or anyone. I was not interested in it per se. I was fascinated by how far I could push, how little I could care, how annoyed I could be.

A selfish experiment.

While my own, more important world, unfolded like a maze.

So, only a partial answer so far:
Relationships will not ever be this for me again. I choose the grace and effortlessness of absolute aloneness over that. But I feel and have had clear signs that I have successfully abandoned my old routines. Unfortunately I don’t feel any knew ones falling in to soothe me yet. But it is reassuring to have my best friends express to me that I have “grown.’ And you, you have said so too.

It will never, ever, be easy with us. It has not been. We are not people of ease or predictability. There is, however, a kind of dance we do with each other that, through difficult times and good ones, works. Maybe that is the more I meant.

Flight Plan: The Asian Authority Gradient

The tenor of this blog is about to change. I am about to be in the visiting portion of
this long distance relationship.

Hooray! Hooray!

Being me though, I had to do a little investigating about any of the things that might stand in our way of being together:

My flight is on Korean Air. What is their safety history. Funny you should ask!

Korean Air - Safety Record Throughout the late 1990s safety concerns kept Korean Air under the watchful gaze of authorities at home and abroad. After the fatal crash at London’s Stansted Airport, Korean Air was cited as having, “one of the worst safety records in the aviation world.” The safety record was so botched at one point that the founder of the company, Cho Yang Ho stepped down in a gesture intended to demonstrate he was accepting responsibility for the abysmal safety record. Due to frequent safety issues, Air Canada, Air France, and Delta Air Lines suspended a code share agreement with Korean Air for a time in the late 90s. The US Department of Defense has, at times, blacklisted Korean Air and prohibited staff members from using that airline for any purpose. Critics claim that management can be amateurish and unprofessional, with people in senior positions frequently selected not for their qualifications and experience, but because of connections. Another often cited problem issue is that of the cockpit culture within Korean Air. Traditionally, the bulk of pilots were drawn from the ranks of ex-Korean military pilots who brought to the cockpit a very rigid, hierarchical authority structure that did not allow junior officers to contradict or question the decisions of the commander of the aircraft. The 13 June, 1991 belly landing is a prime example of Korean cockpit culture resulting in safety issues. Investigation after the incident indicate the junior officer balked at the command to remove a fuse from the alarm system, but the senior officer overrode him. Mick Toller, head of Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority, referred to the situation within the cockpit of Korean Air planes as, “the Asian authority gradient” in which the plane’s captain is God and others dare not even discuss things with him.

It is okay though, they have been on an upswing since the 90s and have a solid safety B grade.
I'd take 10 near crashes if I can only have enough leg room.

What to do.

There is a generalized what to do feeling here. My mouth tastes of sunscreen because that is something I do. I have a terrible cold because that is what I do. I run everyday because that is what I do. My aunts birthday is tomorrow and so I should call her what to do.

It is the best thing to move but I'd rather dig for dark blood in my neck because that is something I do. Think five steps ahead and gather each days details like alarms is something I do. Get lost inside a plastic replica what to do.

Change is my monster chasing me but I don't run what to do what to do.

Breaking up is hard to do.

Come home to x’s calls. New demands, details. New information about subtle attacks on TL and escalating insults directed at her are distressing. I am beginning to see that his mistreatment of her is a diversion of hostility he subconsciously feels but cannot deliver to me. Partly out of material consideration but also out of fear of me. My immediate reaction is to feel entirely responsible for making two people’s lives harder. Oh, and my own too, merely because I held on to something for so long out of self-hatred and dislike of change.

It’s my problem, so it must be my solution.

I think I know how to make things better until it will be over. A few well-placed suggestions and hints and I can hopefully manipulate his own worst fears about himself. Those I know well. I just want him to leave us alone. It makes me feel gross to have to sink to this, to not be able to salvage some sort of dignified friendship out of all the years spent. I am certainly willing. But using my friend as a whipping post is unacceptable. Disgusting.

I just want, as I did a year ago, this whole fucking deal over.

Old Anxiety Tactics

I forgot how much painting and drawing helps.
All I have to do is pick a picture and decide to draw it and I can lose hours
to calm concentration. I used to do that all the time.
I set up a small project tonight and it has worked quite well.

Countdown

Seven days, 11 hours, 17 minutes and 15 seconds and counting.

Family:Friends Ratio

My Family is shit.
My friends surpass my highest hopes.

Happiness is Blandness

If governments were to prescribe anything more specific, then the likely result is highly prescriptive policies which seek to micro-manage people's lives and attitudes. After all, what makes people happy - eating greasy food, for example - doesn't always fit neatly into government policy.

An alternative outcome of such micro-management is wall-to-wall blandness. A glimpse into the kind of world which would be the likely outcome if the happiness patrol had its way was given in a recent article in Men's Health. Based, once again, on supposedly scientific findings, the authors claimed that if you want to be happy you should ditch "moody music" which increases self-focus and fill your iPod with "eclectic rock that takes the mickey". The examples given were Tenacious D and Machine Gun Fellatio.

Birthday Present: Half-Assed Machinist/Invisible Pictures

Birthday Present: Evidence of Me And Dad

"How can you wake up from a nightmare if you are not asleep?"

This is the tagline for the movie The Machinist.
I also think it seems like something you might say out of experience.

I have become a half-assed machinist and I quit. It is notable, I think, to not
eat at all and not sleep at all for a year. It is nothing but irritating to sleep
3 or 4 hours a night and just graze lightly every day for the period of about a month. So tonight,
with holiday fireworks thundering around the neighbourhood I am giving one
last kick at health and if it doesn't work I am going to stop fucking around and end the mediocrity.

I really empathize with you about your sleep disorder/night terrors/abnormal sleeping brain activity. I certainly do not and never will know what it is like to not ever sleep enough (because your eight hours are I fear more like other people’s four). But the results of this past month have given me a few new insights – perhaps even about the overlaps and connections between your illnesses.

My sleep diet manifests for me like this: I remember things, but out of order. I can remember exactly the way the skin around my grandmother’s eyes looked as she spoke to me this afternoon but I have no idea what she said. How mauve and poreless, decorated with soft raised ovals the size of a modest pearl. Like the one in the promise ring she gave me. The effect was miscommunication. She offered me a chocolate and I thought she was giving me the whole box causing considerable discomfort around issues of generosity (which, please don’t doubt, she lacks tremendously). My busy thoughts, which I usually can corral to good effect, now wander off into wet material and drip unrelated memories and ideas onto one another. I track the mess and become more and more alarmed and delighted in this process. More dedicated to that than what is going on around me. Especially if it is something to do with my family or surface activity.

I can’t watch tv. I actually turned off the tv in order to fall asleep last night. It irritated me. Which, in turn, horrified me.


If any of this is what you have to deal with.

Over this past year everything in my life has gotten harder, more painful. With one exception.

My relationships with people are new. TL said to me today that I have been a great friend to her this year. Being a great friend herself, she did not mention the corollary: I used to suck. My relationship with you, her and three or four others are fundamentally different. I have a capacity now to actually care deeply for others.

It is no coincidence that while my relationships with people are becoming more meaningful, everything else is disintegrating. It is because I had built my life entirely around the presupposition that the only way I could be happy is to be perfected/alone








Up until today I had seen few pictures of myself as a child. I have one picture of my mother holding me right after she got home from the hospital that I got from my father’s family ten years ago. I have no memory of her ever holding me and the assumption I held was that as an infant, holding me would have been unavoidable, so it probably happened.




I have no memory of anyone ever holding me or touching me as a child. These pictures, presented to me today as a gift from my uncle, represent both proof that there was a time, before events conspired to make me untouchable, when I was loved and also are evidence proving that I did exist before the age of 4. TL pointed this out to me. My father took all of them. There are dozens dozens of me looking with love in my eyes into his lens.





I post them here as an exercise: make them normal, part of the narrative of my life. Once my mother loved me. Loved.
And because when I look into this moribund photo album found last week in a barn - an album that seems to hold everything - the pictures disappear.

Okay. No more family interaction required for weeks and weeks. Here goes my (sleeping pills) healthy sleep.