White Shirts

On the one hand, the girls were running in the fields behind my house.
I saw them and didn't see them, we were alone. Except we were divided by distance, at least an acre away and also behind the chicken coops and green houses but I could still see them clearly because I made up the details I couldn't see in my mind.
They were hiding but in that way teenagers hide when they know they are being seen.
Each of the girls, or maybe there was only one, was wearing t-shirts that reached just above their knees. They(She) was crouching behind the barbed-wire fence that kept in the neighbourhood sheep. All of a sudden, in a flurry of fleshy activity they got up and ran away.
I was left with the impression that I had seen something I shouldn't and later, at the community center track in town, I heard more about dirty things that happened.
I can remember a lot of thing just like that, I can see parts of what I originally saw. Unfortunately the periphery sometimes only.

trickle

I can’t trust anyone, I know that. And as he moves closer I have to move farther away because the plan must certainly be to destroy me. The only thing I know for sure is I have to protect myself and take care of myself. If I give any of that up, even a corner, I will regret it. Then punish myself for it.

The more depressed and silent he becomes the more certain I am that he is plotting against me, mapping out a way to take away what I have put in place for myself. All I can ever know is my own danger. That is the trap.

Everything feels entirely different. You came here and I left. I guess I wasn’t ready. I thought I was but I am not. I am not yet able to trust my judgement enough to be sure that in choosing you I chose wisely. I look at you and I see threat where before was safety. What hurts worse than anything is that you can’t stop it, you are too sick to step outside of my trap and remind me that you are not my enemy and so, in maintaining a nobigdeal veneer you become proof. I send, you send and we respond not at all correctly. We are crossed, things are shutting and closing at rates impossible to follow.

Paris Hilton has herpes, I gave them to her.

He killed the help
give me the gun

It broke and blue powder,
the colour of eyes stained my finger
and burned going down.

Now, both real and imaginary,
bricks bounce off my sternum and the veins in my neck become arteries,
arteries into twigs of ironwood trees.

Even in my towards direction I’m backwards. When I feel
things they don’t come. I tell you about pain, I talk about things that don’t matter which builds to unleashments and an hour later
I am in my well-equipped vehicle with Hot Chic dying.

If I could be anything, I’d be summer 07 balenciaga eyewear resting on
reformed bridges everywhere. Instead I am here, uniformed and smeared with ride symptoms.

The End.

HOORAY!

This blog, if it is to continue, must be repurposed: for the distance in my long distance relationship has now been removed.

CELEBRATE!

Really, what to see.

My dog likes to sleep with her head on my hip. I like to sleep when someone is asking me pointed questions. Somehow I feel most like sleeping when I am completely sure I won’t be able to (like in therapy or driving).

I am trying purposefully to eat enough and I can manage that if it is mostly composed of frozen yogurt and chocolate. By the end of every day though I feel like I wish I had eaten nothing at all, as though food sullies me and I think wistfully back to times when I was not shackled to such a chore and felt purified.

Someone in kindness told me I was stunning today. I scoffed inwardly. Maybe because I am 1000 years old right now and old is ugly.

I am not the man I used to be.

Neonized signs

I have, among other things, tremendous willpower. That is something I have always been sure of. A way I would have of describing myself to others if they asked. I was aware of it at various times in my life when I would make a decision about how to live my life and then, despite how unpleasant it was, stick to it. Examples: living off $5.00 a month for my first year of university. Or my decision, over ten years ago, to run every day no matter the health or weather calamity. Even my decisions about how and when and what to eat severely limiting my social and physical health.

More recently I have become aware of other ways I have used my willpower. As a child, I willed myself to feel no emotions for any living thing only material things and fictional characters like houses and the certain cast members of All My Children. Later, I willed myself to be in a painful relationship with someone I did not like nor respect to normalize the results of my earlier decision.

I am now willing myself to stop all this. And in the process coming to doubt my willpower. Because, while those things I decided to do seemed difficult to others they were really easy to me. And now – willing myself to be physically and emotionally healthy – is hard. Sometimes so painful that I can’t actually stand it.

But.

But, despite the absolute pain and impossibilities and in some ways because of it, there remains a formulation of hope. Hope in the shape of you. After spending the past few weeks with you I can begin to understand more of what relationships that work are for. Not to tether myself artificially to reality. Nor to punish myself in soothingly familiar ways for being shameful and a burden.
I think maybe relationships like ours are to remind me of what my life should have in it, of how to feel passionate for something and not compulsively driven. It is helping me move away from a structure of battling absolutes and wills and towards something far more messy, frighteningly unpredictable and yet still starkly beautiful: a kind of trust in myself that goes beyond knowing I can decide to do something and make it so.

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.