Time Is Pretty Cool When It Isn't Forcing You to Exist Continuously Through Another Terrible January

This is my middle-of-the-night stream-of-consciousness post that I am not going to allow myself to delete later. It's a good exercise. It loosens up the blogging fingers and let's me freak out a little about something not related to my imminent death.


This is me in the tub with my kitty, Oskar, who is ridiculous and likes to be
extremely close to, but not actually in, hot water.

My death is not actually imminent, but it's January right now, and January is when I am pretty sure that my death is imminent anyway. I am sure that I will get cancer again and that my mid-winter weight gain is a symptom of a thyroid condition related to that imaginary cancer, and then I watch a documentary about breast cancer and pink-washing, and I end up walking around the apartment feeling myself up repeatedly and wondering if that spot I keep poking is going to be the cause of my imminent demise or if I should just cut back on my caffeine intake.

I like the way caffeine is spelled. I always say it caff-ay-inn-ay as I type it out.

That's when the visual migraine thing I sometimes get kicks in, and the whole world starts to sparkle in blinding patches like it's all turning into a disco ball, and I worry that it's actually a sign of a brain tumour or probably a stroke, because the visual migraine is usually accompanied by some facial numbness, and I realize that I haven't showered in a day-and-a-half, and, if I am going to end up in an emergency room with a stroke, I want to look and smell better while I do it, so I get into the shower and don't realize until half way through that I am possibly the dumbest person having a stroke ever, so I get out of the shower and drip all over the floor so that I can inspect my face for asymmetrical drooping, and, being that there isn't any, I decide that I'm not having a stroke and finish my shower, after which I take some Benadryl and have a long, therapeutic nap.


This is what crap I looked like before that shower.

The good news is that I'm not dying! The bad news is that I could be, but so could we all. Oh, January. I cannot quit you, at least as long as time keeps functioning the way it does.

Yesterday afternoon, during one of my therapeutic naps, I had this terribly involved dream about smoking pot, those outdoor hamburger figurines from 1970s McDonalds, baby tigers, and the nature of time. It was fantastic. In my dream, time only seemed to function in a linear fashion for those who didn't understand it, but, once you began to understand the true nature of time, it would function more in accordance with its true nature in loops and pockets and waves, and it all resulted in me getting really stoned by accident after having been mislead by a plastic, anthropomorphic garden hamburger in Alabama, and I ended up cuddling baby tigers soaked in orange juice with my aunt, who, not understanding the true nature of time, disapproved of the fact that they were being kept in giant hamster exercise balls. Poor baby tigers. They were sticky.

Time is pretty cool when it isn't forcing you to exist continuously through another terrible January filled with death anxiety.

Somehow, this is all making me think of Edenland. Hello, Edenland! I hope you are having a fine evening, or morning, or whatever time of day you are having over there in Australia.

The End.

This Is The Road My Heart Takes

I have been feeling panicked lately. I tend to feel panicked a majority of the time anyway, because that's just how this Schmutzie rolls. At two years old, I realized that things changed irrevocably in my absence when my toast became inedible while my mother and I were out shopping, and my trust in all things turned into trust in very little. I realized the truth of immortality on my fifth birthday as my cake was passed on from my grandparents to my parents to me, and I spent the day crying in my room. I was an early adopter of deap-seated, mortal anxiety.



When I went to my first psychiatrist back in about 1993 or 1994, he asked me if I suffered from anxiety. I had never understood what this anxiety I had read about entailed. Was it a sad feeling? Was it an angry feeling? I couldn't put my finger on what that word was pointing to, so I assumed I had never felt it. I told him that I must be a very calm person, because I had never experienced this anxiety he asked about. "I think you have a lot of it," he said. "I think that it is probably with you all of the time, and I think its omnipresence in your life has made you blind to it and its impact." He was a smart man.

Of course, when I make major life changes, this general anxiety skyrockets. It's how I do. So, when I quit my job at the shoe store so that I could work freelance from home full time, I felt both elated and COMPLETELY FREAKED OUT OH HOLY HELL WHAT IN GOD'S NAME HAD I DONE I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO ANYTHING.

I love the decision I've made, and I'm fairly confident that I won't be reduced to lining up with my cats to eat out of their kibble bowl, but it's a scary thing to suddenly be your own boss, accountant, manager, salesperson, secretary, and coffee jockey. No one's told me how to do any of this. It's easy to feel like I'm the only one flying this ship from my kitchen table straight into the dumpster just up the alley, because I have no boss daddy to assure me that I will have clients next June.

I woke up feeling quite contented this morning, though, because my dreams have stepped up to take care of me again. Just before I woke up, I was caught in this long dream about my life replayed as if it had been bathed throughout in mediocrity. The pain in it was terrible. Everything was a stab to the heart: my passionless marriage, my high school reunion, my dream husband's desire for children, the suburban bungalow. The concession to convention and necessity over pursuing a more passionate life wove a deep thread of grief and exhaustion through every experience. It's not that that kind of life can't have passion in it, but it's not a life I could have led, and, in my dream mind, I cried for every piece of me that it could not hold.

I woke up relieved to be who I am doing what I do. Having kids would make this more difficult. Having a mortgage would make this more difficult. The burden of a car would make this more difficult. My life, the one it turns out I actually like, is only possible right now because of how it differs from the one I thought my family and culture dreamed for me back in December of 1972.

There are few standards against which I feel I can measure my life, and this used to shake me. How would I know when I was successful? How would I know when I was good at what I did? How would other people be able understand me within the context of the shape my life has taken? This person that I am with my outlaw blend of gender, sexuality, religion, and cultural aesthetics: how do I know when I am following my creative pull and when I am tipping over into becoming the desperado, however gentle?

The longer I live with myself, the more comfortable I become with trusting that I am neither completely lost nor on the verge of shooting up the joint. We're good with ourselves, me and I.

I might find myself panicking at my makeshift desk, because my future has no tidy map, but no one's does, really, in the end. Had I been on the road I thought my family would have mapped for me with a house and children and a car, that would have been interrupted by cervical cancer, anyway. This is how life works. You don't get what you want, and then you get something you never imagined for yourself, and then you get something you want, and then the whole thing gets tossed over for something else, and then you keep going. It's hard, sometimes rewarding, and often unexpected. It's all very messy, and these maps we see charted out for us, the ones we think we see other people navigate better and more accurately than we do? They don't exist. They are a myth our scared hearts would like to be real, but our brave hearts know better.

And so, I'll probably keep panicking, because that's how I do, but I'll do it knowing that this is the road my heart takes. We're good with ourselves, me and I.

----------------------------

PS. Listen to Iggy Pop's "The Passenger". I listen to it when I want to remember how things are.

So, An Id And A Super-ego Walk Into Dream...

I have been suffering acute feelings of too-ugly-to-leave-the-house-ness recently. I think this is due, in part, to feeling a bit insecure after having finished up my job at the shoe store before taking up full time work at home. Who am I again? What does my life look like? Do I really ever need to leave the house again?

This is also due, in part, to my being rather ugly lately. Don't try to console me. It's true. I've been sick for nearly a week, I haven't been able to take the clippers to my hair because of a jacked back, and I've been breaking out something fierce for months. I'm pale, shaggy, blotchy, and prone to a particularly unsexy kind of groaning.

Some part of my subconscious is trying to give me little pep talks through a recurring series of dreams, though, which is kind of heart-warming. I must like me. Like really like me!

In one of these dreams, this cute little woman keeps trying to come on to me. She sits down next to me, chats me up, touches my arm. At one point, she reaches down, pulls up my skirt, and tells me how much she likes my hairy thighs. I look down, and my thighs are exceedingly hairy, hairier than in real life even, but with her verbal suggestion, I buy just how hot they are. My hairy thighs are double-T hott with some sexy on the side. I decide that I love my hairy thighs, too! In fact, why not show off how confident I am in my hirsute beauty and hike my short skirt even shorter!

Of course, because even in my dreams I am prone to knee-jerk monogamy, the Palinode came into the room, and I pretended that I was showing off my hairy thighs for him and not the hot little number who was trying to pick me up. She looked depressed about my hetero marriage, but I didn't mind for long, because I suddenly said the best thing I've ever said in a dream.

I said, and I quote, "Check out these getaway sticks, baby."

Check out these getaway sticks, indeed.

In another of these pep talk dreams, which I just woke out of, I have a svelte figure despite all the food I keep eating. I eat cakes and chicken legs and milkshakes, and yet my waist stays slim. At some point in the middle this weird food porn, someone walks past me, slaps my butt, and says something like "how do you do it?" or "keep doing what you're doing, because it's working", and I beam over fistfuls of food with my mouth stuffed to the teeth, because, at that moment, I know exactly how awesome I am, and I am awesome.

These dreams are obviously about things which make me feel insecure, but part of me must actually really dig what I've got going on, despite the sick, shaggy, blotchy thing I'm presently trying to carry off. Of course, it looks like my Id wants to off my Super-go so we can just eat all the things and be hairy and merry, but that doesn't support my I-love-myself-I-really-must theory, plus, everything I know about Freud I just read in a Wikipedia article, so nothing I've written down today is based in any actual, established knowledge, except for the term "getaway sticks", which is a real thing people used to say.

And now I have to run. I may be suffering acute feelings of too-ugly-to-leave-the-house-ness, but I'm going to leave the house and go soak up some of my sweet Shanan_S anyway. No point in keeping these hairy thighs and my voracious appetite to myself!

Too Much Laziness, Dreams, Computers Can Read Your Mind, Technological Trouble, And Walt Whitman

While I am writing this, it is 7:30 am on Sunday morning. I simply cannot lie around for one more second. There are a couple of reasons for this, the first of which is that my neck and back are still all messed up (and, no, I haven’t gone to the doctor yet. I hate those freaks). The second reason is that the Fiery One and I spent all day yesterday lying around. Granted, it wasn’t that hard, because neither of us roused ourselves out of bed until after 2:00 pm, but we did not move our butts from either sitting or lying positions once. That we eventually went to bed was a decision based solely on a collective desire to change location, if only for the sake of variety. Now that I am up so early with a drive to blog, the internet connection is not working again. It seems to like to conk out occasionally and need to be prodded along with all the usual plugging and unplugging of cords that seems to coerce almost any machine into an operational state. Right now, I have resorted to disconnecting the modem from the power bar. It so hates to be without the juice that five or ten minutes without it should impress it with who has the real power around here.

My dreams over the last couple of nights have been vivid but most disappointing. I am always disappointed when my dreams rely almost entirely on lifting events from my day and simply mixing them up for nonsensical effect. I feel that it is my brain’s lazy way out. The night before last was filled with the same snippets of my real-life Friday played in different sequences over and over and over. It got so that I would be in a dream and thinking, oh yeah, I’ve seen that rabbit not only here but there and there, and this person I’m talking to has messy hair now but so-and-so and so-and-so had messy hair before. It got pretty tiresome, and I actually got bored of the whole dreaming scene. Last night’s dreams were much better. There was some of the predictable stuff from the night before, but there was also some choice stuff that felt worth the experiencing. In one dream, I was both me and not me, which is a common state for my dreaming self. I am both the person experiencing and the person observing the experience. I was looking down at the back of my left hand with curious amazement. There was a large eye there. It was blue in colour, and the flesh around the eye was connected to it, because it changed to alter the expression of the eye. The sadness, the abject loneliness, that this eye was experiencing pierced into me, and I could not help but feel for it. It was an intruder into my body, and so there was this sense of a great personal violation, but at the same time, this eye was able to communicate to me by its expression that this was not a choice it had made; our conditions were the same – we were now forced to exist in the same body without the ability to truly connect with one another. We were comfortless in our condition. See what I mean? The emotional depth in that dream was choice.

Here is a time-waster for you. It totally knew that I had picked the Jack of Clubs.

Yay! I got the internet all operational again, so I will be able to share this post with you. In the past, I have lost a few, and it is never pretty on this end when that happens. There is one problem, though. My connection is so beastly slow this morning that I will be unable to complete the “Facts and Links” section of this entry. This makes me a little sad. Boo hoo.

Due to this lack of content, I will leave you with a bit of Walt Whitman.

Song of Myself (excerpt)

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.

Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? Have you reckon’d the earth much?
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

Gay And Crumbly Dreams, He Ain't Heavy, What's Meaning "New", And Chalk

I have been having the weirdest dreams lately. I think that they are coming out of a combination of the fact that I have not been remembering my dreams well since August and that I have finally been getting more than four hours of sleep, which has been a problem for me since the Fiery One left on his trip. The first dream was about being out partying with a Man I know, who is completely out as a homosexual. No really, that is relevant. In my dream, the Fiery One was at home while I was out on the town with Man. We were getting a little drunk with a large group of younger gay men, when all of a sudden, he turns and starts pressing his lips against mine. I pushed him off, both because I am happily married and he is gay, but he kept it up the whole evening at every bar we went to. Finally, I got perturbed and demanded to know what he thought he was doing. He told me that even though he was gay, he was finding his urges to touch me uncontrollable. My dream ended there, and I have chosen not to explore it too deeply. I don’t have fantasies about turning gay men straight, so I am going to assume that this dream came out of the sexual frustration born of the Fiery One’s extended absence. In my second dream, which happened a couple of days after the first, I was hanging out with friends alone. When I woke up, I didn’t know any of the people I had dreamt about, but in the dream they were old and dear friends. My friends all lived in older buildings, and while visiting the first of the two buildings, which was made of dark brown brick, I wandered upstairs to take a look around, because I was curious about the construction I had heard was going on up there. When I got up there, everything was chalky, white, and easily crumbled. There were plastic sheets hanging here and there, and I was filled with a nervousness that only precedes true and merciless gore, so I went back downstairs and followed my friends to another building. This second building was white outside and sat on a broad expanse of land, like some kind of estate. I was told right off that I should, under no circumstances, go upstairs, because they were rebuilding the upper floors and it was quite dangerous. Of course, this piqued my curiosity, so I crawled out a window and hoisted myself up to a second-floor balcony. Again, everything was white and chalky, only more so, as though the entire remains of the upper floor had merely been coated thickly in plaster of paris. As a result, the doorways and windows were deeper and smaller than expected. I walked gingerly through the first room and had barely entered the hallway when I felt the whole story shift, and I nearly didn’t make it to the balcony from which I leapt to avoid the complete collapse of the area I had been in. And that was it – dream end. I am going to ignore the gay boss sexual harassment thing, and focus on the crumbly, white building parts. My terrible dream dictionary tells me only about old buildings that are falling apart and not good character buildings that are being remodelled upstairs. Hmmm. Supposedly, according to my dream dictionary, the mix of these two might mean a happy home with profitable undertakings combined with ill health and a decay of love and business. A happy home with ill health, or rich without love? I will just keep dreaming, I guess. And wait ever so patiently for the Fiery One to arrive home from his travels and sate whatever hungers I have for intellectual and intimate contact.

The song “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” (written by Russell and Scott and released by Neil Diamond in 1970) has been stuck in my head for a full two days now, and I have no idea where I picked it up. It’s not a song that gets played everywhere. At any rate, in an effort to remove it from my head, I looked up the words to it, because I find that I usually don’t remember all the words to the songs that get stuck in my head, and if I can sing the song all the way through correctly, then I am freed. Well, it hasn’t worked. How long must this go on? “The road is long, with many a winding turn...”

A lady asked this of me at work about something we sell:
“Is this new?” Keep in mind that we are not a consignment or used things store. Everything we have is new.
“Do you mean ‘new to you’? Or do you mean new, as in never used before? Or, do you mean new, as in we just got this in recently?”
“Yeah,” she nodded at me, as though I had understood her perfectly.
“Yes, it’s new... here... at this store.”
And after that, she seemed quite content in her knowledge that all the things for sale were new in some respect, and she left me alone to go and shop on her own.

Chalk Facts and Links:
* Chalk is a soft, white rock, an almost pure carbonate of lime. When examined under a microscope, it is mostly made up of tiny skeletons and shells of creatures which once lived in the sea, and when they died and sank to the bottom, they formed a thick deposit. Chalk hills were at one time below the sea, and have since been raised by movements of the Earth's crust.
* If you draw a line of chalk around the windows and doors outside your home and around water pipes inside your home, ants will not enter. Ants will not cross a chalk line.
* Slugs, also, will not cross a chalk line.
* Placing a piece of chalk in your jewellery box will stop silver jewellery from tarnishing.
* Most chalk used today is comprised of fine abrasives and does not contain a speck of chalk.
* Why does a piece of chalk produce a squeal if you hold it incorrectly, and what determines the pitch you hear? Find your answers here.
* Please read this very dry essay from 1896 entitled “The Destruction and Shattering of the Chalk of Eastern England.” On second thought, don’t, unless you truly love chalk.
* The botanical name for Baby’s Breath, gypsophila, means “love chalk,” which refers to its preference for chalky soil.