Don’t like to go too long w/out putting something down here, but the topics aren’t exactly raining down like manna. Worse, I started twice and bullshitted for three paragraphs on topics I was totally apathetic about. Not necessarily attractive to recognize you can yammer on endlessly without point or inspiration. Who was that dude in Hamlet? The boorish uncle…
Nyi. Deleted musings: Shall I cut my hair? It’s long. I like it. Sorta. Sometimes.
Deleted musings 2: Umbuto. Kevin Garnett. The four horsemen of Notre Dame (as coined by Grantland Rice) I half-heartedly started to explore how dating an enthusiast of any ilk indoctrinates you with their lingo and fun-facts, whether you welcome that or not.
Mostly what’s in my head right now is nightmares. Bad ones; I keep having these horror-drawn creepy scenarios in my sleep. I wake from them almost hungover. Feels guilty talking about them, too, because you can almost give people nightmares simply by talking about them. I gave my boyfriend and my daughter a nightmare that way. The passing reference is almost more potent to the subconscious mind then a heart-felt discussion.
I’ve looked for outside answers, but it’s dicey when you’re playing doctor with your brain-stem. Where do these images come from? Why? Is there a why? There’s no definitive reason to believe that our dreams ‘mean’ anything, except the mind’s unfathomable process of organizing and storing.
Do you ever think about how much of life centers around things that have no weight or substance in ‘the real world’? We live in realms seen and unseen, sure, but the unseens- the conceptual stuff is really dominant: Love, death, our idea of what others think of us, ambitions, dreams, memories.
The mind is almost a speck in a web of perception; we are creatures of flesh pinned between concepts, grasping for meaning in a world comprised of baffling idiosyncrasies: A pebble in your hand is also an idea. It’s a marker of a moment that’s fleeting and finite, a beginning and an end wrapped around something concrete. Let it drop to the ground: Did it happen? Did you see it, or the retina’s reproduction of a shape and color- not even the color of the stone, but the color reflected by the stone, which means the stone is every other color except the bend of light you saw refracted.
The world’s not that different from a dream. We are composed primarily of spaces,- spaces to be filled with light, or nightmares.
Been struggling a little bit this last week with something other than nanowrimo. The anxiety seems to be welling from a source that ought to cause joy: The one year anniversary of my current relationship.
I really suck at special occasions. That might be a personal anomaly, but I suspect most people with trauma related disorders have a similar hang-up. I love everyday, normal routines, while important holidays makes me want to hide under the bed. I don’t know if it’s just fear that makes everything wonky, but-
In the last week I’ve tried to sabotage stuff six ways to Tuesday. Almost like- in my head I don’t think we’ll make it to a year or something, or I’m too anxious to face disappointment on that day so I keep looking for ways to minimize risk. It’s messed, and not conscious, either, but I wish my brain would stop that. We’ve been doin’ really good- maybe that’s the other part: Feelings get intense, and then I feel pretty vulnerable.
My S.O. in these situations has been about as kind and steady as anyone could possibly be. He’s the one who recognized that these troubles seem to be arising in direct correlation to the upcoming anniversary. He works with troubled families, so there’s some context and background he can call on to understand what rationally makes no sense.
We talk now and then about ‘a middle part’. I don’t have middle parts, historically, when it comes to romance. I have falling deep in love, and then the destruction part where things go terrible. I’m not sure what a middle part feels like, or if I’m capable of it, and I’m sort of afraid that I’m not.
So- it’s a little scary, yeah. A year. In the ptsd mind, there’s so much fear associated with intimacy, that it can feel like a ledge, a little bit. There’s a million ways to go plunging into that angry, victimized state of mind.
There is a single image, a visualization that seems to help me feel optimistic: The sensation of surfing. I’ve never actually stood on a surf board, but I can feel that balance, my feet on the board, the ocean, the roar that surrounds you so you feel like a part of the sound. Surfing is the improbable balance of so many elements coming together in harmony. If you try too hard, if you get tense, you get thrown.
But you still have to be present enough to stand up, to try. You’re there, but not. It’s the act of letting the elements guide your benevolent will. You step onto the board and let it happen. It looks impossible, but it’s a miracle that’s been repeated a thousand times. People find their improbable balance.
That physical representation of a miracle is what I go to in my head, each time I’m drowning in the state of my own mind. We’re staying afloat, so here’s my daily dose of optimism: Happy Anniversary to Us.
I don’t know. I don’t quite get it. When I woke this morning, what greeted my eyes were the colors of a sky painted from sunrise. There were stripes of pink. blue, pink, blue- and the whole picture was infused with the rosy glow that I identify with dawn.
The sky was beautiful. But last night, last night from that same window I also saw the moon hang like a heavy, golden globe, and the silhouette of tree leaves frame its slow descent into the high regions of the night.
Outside, if I walk a little ways, there is the ocean, vast and silvery, reflecting the morning rainbows, and the waves pounding out an eternal song.
These sights amaze me. That they exist, yes, and that I have the capacity to see them- that the world should be painted in colors that are beautiful to my eyes. What is that an adaptation for? What was the point of that subtlety of perception?
There’s no answer in the physical realm, I can only go to the spiritual. The sights of this morning aren’t just ’sufficient’, there is a wild beauty up above. It is a gift. Our world is a beautiful world.
Outside is where I feel it. When I sit in a room and have the wonders of existence interpreted to me by men who err and sin willfully, my cynicism also kicks in. But out in all of this, my doubt dissipates with morning dew.
I don’t get how a heart could take so much for granted. I don’t understand how cynicism gains such a powerful foothold. Other people’s beliefs are their own business, but to scoff at the idea of a God, to loudly and proudly denounce any meaning in creation seems sort of, I don’t know… sad. It seems sad, when I see the sky like that.
Maybe it’s just too easy not to believe in anything. Maybe that’s the flaw in the heart of human-kind: We will not be made fools of. And so miss the glory of the forest as we hide in the shadow of the trees.
I just force-flushed my perfectionism down the toilet, and writing is under way. I have 644 words.
It’s not like, spelling and grammar perfectionism, it’s like expecting every word to be the blessed and holy product of a genius that could lay a book down, edited and fully formed into NeoOffice writer. Which is a freeware product, btw, and available to anyone who doesn’t mind the inability to capitalize the letter B.
Srry, I should save the extraneous babble for my word count.
How’s it goin’ for you?
If you aren’t a nano-participant, please forgive the obsession, the self-absorption and tirades, cussing and self-abuse sure to follow. This is how books get written. This is also how books don’t get written, oddly enough.
That’s sort of a paradox, isn’t it.
It’s been awhile, huh. Lately, I tweet instead of blog, and today I didn’t do that. Today I didn’t do a lot of things I meant to do, like spend time checking out fellow nanowrimo buddies’ progress, or, I d’no, start writing my own book.
Halloween was eventful. Eventful good for much of the night, eventful bad in the pre-dawn hours, when those strange, strangled vocalizations I kept hearing from my bedroom turned out to be our mangled kitty who had dragged herself God knows how far to lie under my window. I’d tell the whole story, but I’m tired in such a way that I’m typing this with my eyes closed. The part that left me exhausted wasn’t my upset- I had a wary relationship with this pet at best, though her final hours were very distressing. It was my daughter’s overwhelming and relentless grief throughout the day that really did me in.
If a badass biker gang had hung out in our world today, there wouldn’t be a dry eye on any of them. Sierra, who is not maybe the most willing communicator, typically, revealed a startling talent for clarity and expression that really bowled me over. I thought she would cry and be sad, but I also sort of expected the reticence to discuss in too much depth the death- that’s the ‘m.o.’ she usually displays.
But Gracie meant a lot more to her than to me. Gracie was her friend, and her helplessness, the way she fought to try and come to terms with not having her kitty when she just wanted her there one more time,
Jesus.
Kill me now, I can’t send this little girl into the big bad world of cruelty and crushing losses. Then again, strike that, cus I also couldn’t impose on her another loss, and it’s just all very confusing and life-like and horrible and strange.
The world is too ugly for children. And I’m the big wimp who will say so.
I’m all…. jabberwocked.
Woke up mummy brained. The sleep came in two-point-five hour increments, which to a brighter person would indicate a need to hydrate. I woke each time an organ atrophied, confused and terrified about an evil ostrich lurking in the dresser.
My subconscious has some explaining to do.
Me: What’s the deal?
Subconscious: Where shall I direct your call, please?
Me: I’d like to speak to the manager.
Subconscious: Please stand by for a list of departmental extensions. Dial zero at any time to speak with an operator.
Me: *initiates gag reflex*
Subconscious: Hello, Dave.
I’m going back to bed.
Tonight, if you’re ambitious enough to wake in the center of the dark, you can play spectator to the pyrotechnics of the heavens.
Yes, the Orionid Meteor Shower may just outdo last night’s episode of House. This article explains in some detail that the shooting stars will be a product of comet dust. Remember Neil Gaiman’s story Stardust? It’s possible these ice and particle fragments are what we’re actually made of, if you go farther back than biological history and fossil records. In the beginning, there was matter clinging to matter in the vast expanse of the endless void.
I’m dreamatical. Sleep has been an elusive beastie once again. A recurring jaw infection has come back to visit, and my night-time worries, daytime loves, and a hint of fever swirl me through an ocean of dream in which I feel most like a passive participant. Float, sink, live, die- I think the mind dream’s harder when it cannot count on sleep- there is a compensative surge.
It is a little intriguing when the conscious is subsumed by the subconscious. When the dark gets bigger than your efforts to push it back. When our little settlements seem ludicrous in the sweep of the land. It is easier sometimes to watch rather than control. The night spreads its feathers out, and we scatter like comet dust.
Cancer.
Maybe it’s cancer awareness month right now, maybe it isn’t. I have some reading to do- but I’ve become awfully aware.
It’s become inavoidable- this plague on the world. I honestly don’t know anyone who hasn’t been affected by cancer, be it through direct bereavement, or the friend of a friend. Right here in this little community, a dear friend, Bob Church, said goodbye to his family this spring after a terrible battle. I won’t identify them out loud, but at least two other people in this community have lost parents to the disease.
In the world offline, cancer has hurt and ravaged someone close to my heart, tallying up the losses. And you can’t go anywhere without seeing the growing threat. Baseball-
The inspiring John Lester, Red Sox pitcher and a lad if I ever saw one (age 25), has already fought and survived lymphoma. For now.
I joke, all the time I joke- about cheetos for breakfast and brownies for midnight snack. I come from an old skool brand of kitchen that sees butter as something godly, but it’s no longer a matter to take lightly.
The very air we breathe now packs a carcinogenic punch, and a body that hopes to live in this era has to be safe-guarded. As is so often the case, the cultural attitude hasn’t quite caught up to the physical reality yet: Cancer is coming to a body near you. Now fight this bastard with all that you’ve got.
It was while reading Norm, over at Unmerited Gifts that it dawned on me. He was visiting a friend in a hospital bed- someone whose cancer has gone to the bones, and who sounded as if he had laryngitis because a tumor had grown in the discs of his neck.
He’s in the wheelchair, and fighting, and getting radiation treatment.
some people survive past this point, but not many.
Basically, by the time you’re in the hospital, it’s already really late in the game to be fighting cancer.
I’ve enjoyed sort of an extended youth, health-wise, but if I’ve drawn anything from the heaps of tragic stories I’ve heard all too often lately about cancer, it’s that I don’t want that fight. And I sure don’t want my daughter to have that fight.
All things in moderation isn’t really the rule anymore- I mean, when the poultry we eat can only be kept alive by pumping antibiotics through the little chicken system by force, when the very soil that houses crops reads higher levels of dioxins and PCB’s then you’d find near an active volcano, and when the ocean has become host to billions of tons of plastic, slowly leaking their toxic signature into the food chain, it’s no longer enough to say- “A few chips won’t hurt.” “An occasional run to McDonald’s won’t kill anyone.”
Statistics say otherwise. You reap what you sow- and our food sources (not to mention decades of pollution in every form) – are killing us. En masse.
I’m not exactly an expert on what a cancer preventative lifestyle looks like, and I’m not at all certain that 32 isn’t too late to give it a shot- but having never been a sun worshipper, maybe it’s not such a lost cause.
Anyway, I’ll share. Share as I learn. I know this much-
If it’s fried, don’t eat it. Not just cus fat is bad- but that way of preparing food is kind of like a carcinogen party.
Oatmeal is probably good.
Ocean-raised salmon from the Pacific is probably good. The Atlantic fishies have pretty high levels of mercury.
Eat your veggies. But wash the pesticides off first.
Some fats are good, some bad.
Nuts, berries and seeds is what the native american diet primarily consisted of for hundreds of years, and as far as we know, they didn’t get cancer.
Exercise is good. A lot of products people use on their skin and hair have ingredients that seem to cause tumors in rats.
Wear sunscreen. Don’t get over-stressed. And if people in your work place keep getting cancer, quit your job.
No matter what the liability bitches say, where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire- so run.
This is our cause now: I’m going to try and keep my kid off of reality t.v. shows and also keep us from getting cancer. I hope all of you guys will fight back the monster, too.
A blogcast
There’s such a lot of sad in me
these few days, but
I keep going, ”Snap out of it.”
Maybe because that’s what I’m supposed to be saying..
But then in no time
I am reading my book, or
listening to a friend.
Even with the sky so blue
what I hear is the parts
that are all smashed and blistered.
The ache, the other blueness-
my skin is the semi-permeable membrane,
and sadness keeps coming in.
There are reasons though, when you think about it,
if you think about it, a certain way-
(and how can you stop?)
To look around this world of endless yearning
someone’s always wanting for somebody,
somebody who may not be back again,
ever.
We really are children on the sandbanks of the world
looking out across the waters of eternity
wondering what happens
when the body goes in.
It makes me back up, sudden,
but some people dip their toes in,
or even, in an anguish of love and brokenness,
make the diver’s arc
and try to crack the density of a wave.
It’s violent, but I believe that this-
much slower process, can be more cruel as well.
To love, and just keep loving and losing this way;
to know all the time that your love has made seams in your body
that will split, and turn you inside out
when the big wave comes.
Just keep touching fingertips to the tenderness of face.
Will you go from me?
Inevitably.
I cannot hold you, anymore than I can hold my own molecules.
They swell and degenerate
and sink, eventually
into that self-same ocean of despair.
I am a dying thing, and I love you.
Yes,
I feel sad.
