Beauty School Dropout

I was supposed to dye my mother's hair today. She called early this

morning, then never answered the phone when I called back. I guess

it's gotten pretty sad when even my own mother stands me up.

More Randomness from Deadbeatville

I am not really going to be a deadbeat.

For those of you concerned. Or even still reading this mess.  I’m not a deadbeat, but I play one in real life. That’s just how others would refer to me, I think. I am not actively exchanging my time for money; therefore, I am stealing the time of others in order to get by. This reductionist argument rests on a premise of a limited quantity of time . . .

Ahem.

I’ve been writing.

Not writing, but writing. Thinking critically without the recording-of-it part.  I haven’t been able to get the recording-of-it part down lately. I guess it is what they would call writer’s block. Staring at the blank page. But the page is no longer blank. And it blinks at me. Buzzes with this weird blue light in the darkness of my room. Tabs and windows and portals to other worlds. Other lives. Other personas. Temptation for checking.

Petroleum for an obsessive-compulsive.

I Took Alot of Kiddin' Cause I Never Did Fit In

I'm feeling slightly melancholy today. Thinking about taking up writing country music lyrics. Like early Glenn Campbell stuff. Or Loretta Lynn. Barbara Mandrell. I think I could totally rock out some awesome lyrics right now. Some personal heartbreak and some screw-the-establishment Johnny Cash or Waylon Jennings shit as well.

If only I could write music. Or carry any discernable tune. Or sing without my nephew asking me to stop singing. Or remember how to play that damned cello I had to lug back and forth to school for five years.

Can anyone write catchy music like this? I'll write the words.

Tuesday

I’ve recently decided to drop out of the capitalist market. Well, insomuch as I can. I awakened several years ago to the notion that the only way to resist government or markets or any other similarly constructed power scheme in which some humans are deemed worthier than others based on arbitrary status within the construct, the only way to really be free of them and not simply opposing them (thereby lending to their credibility as a power system) is non-participation.

Having said all of that, and also having become completely fed up with American Capitalism, I have decided to become a deadbeat.  I woke recently to the notion that I have spent thirty some years of my life waking on someone else’s schedule in pursuit of someone else’s dream.  Sometimes I pursued two or three at once in exchange for which my son and I (barely) had a place to stay and food to eat.  Who is to say I have another thirty some years to pursue my own dream? My own thoughts? My own life?

From my Twenties

Freewrite

Had to step back and separate myself again. What I want. Who I am. What parts of myself am I willing to give a little on and what parts I can give nothing of.

 I could use an office chair. I so want to lean back right now but that would be bad for the chair I’m currently sitting in which used to be in my grandmother’s breakfast nook, now the height of fashion in those mini McMansions they sold everyone a few years back. We have given over so much of ourselves. So so very much. We are the science fiction novels and movies we grew up on. Want to talk to a friend? Video message them from your Android. Want a car that parks for you? Corrects your accidents-in-waiting? Guides you to your destination? How about a drink that substitutes as a meal? Or a pill? Or a pill that makes you happier, more sociable, or hornier?

A little off track as usual but I don't think I ever had one. Just free writing. Went walking in the woods again today. Not in the woods so much as on a guided, well-maintained nature trail through the woods around a small lake. I am free to do such things now. Free to do as I please. I have missed this. Have definitely missed me. Quit my job. It was way overdue. Don’t have anything lined up which is of course freaking others out, mostly because they don’t know how to live a different life than the one they are living now, where they’ve traded their souls for the modern-day comforts of  faster downloads and pleasantly sedated coworkers.

Digression. 

I keep forgetting to title these things

Just had the most insightful, rational, educated discussion I have had in weeks. It was with my eighteen year old son who convinced me with my own words to let him skip the remaining years of high-school (or "box-filling" as he says) in order to start his own already successful software company. That's right, bitches. Your boy was prom king. Mine is his own CEO.

Okay, totally uncalled for. But still, suck it!

I'm sure that, when he and his father and I made the decision a couple years ago, there were certain people who were highly critical of that decision. This is the only way it's done. Your fifteen year old honor student doesn't drop out of high school with no plans to return and no (real) plans for a GED. Responsible parents don't let that happen!


That was a thought communicated to me throughout the kid's childhood. Sometimes people told me. My mother still lectures me about him not having a GED, even though he already has a successful LLC, and pending contract with a very large company. Sometimes people said nothing, but I could see it in their expression. The years I lived in Richmond on my own - the first year when I let him stay behind with his dad for a year, or when I had to bring him back because I had to bring myself back first, even the extra year that I was too poor, oppressed under the weight of debt, to pay for his move back with me.

 I still remember one particularly skeevy grad student who put his hand on mine (which was on my knee), squeezed, and tried to comfort me through my obviously difficult time with a Mormon prayer.

I don't know if that's a real thing. But he was Mormon. And he did offer to pray for me.

We go through so much of our lives assuming there's only one way or there's a natural way that we just don't know how to  respond sometimes when people behave otherwise. You are a mother, the skeevy Mormon seemed to be saying, You should be with your child. 


I won't pick on that guy. Or Mormons. I like them. As much as I like any religious group.

Seriously side tracked. It's late.

I got it a lot with the kid. The questioning. The assumption that what someone else knew was best. So I decided to be the one who knew best. Or at least as well as any of us knows anything. I dedicated myself to learning as much about the universe from the inside out as I could, in hopes that I could one day share my knowledge with him. I tried a little writing on the side too, but . . .

The rat bastard was already reading at a college level in sixth grade.

This is too rambling. Too long. Too disjointed. But I wanted to write a little about my son, who I think is just  one of the coolest dudes I know. After all, how many eighteen-year-olds' Friday night discussion topics included Qaddafi, the Hegelian Dialectic, his own corporation's success, and Sisyphus?

Keep Your Head

      I have re-awakened from a nightmare and it feels like it might take this time, like I am finally seeing things from the other side of the looking glass and can no longer figure out how to get back to the other side. One of the most difficult parts of coming out of this shit is that by the time I actually start to feel normal again and like I can handle anything, i have usually driven away all my friends.


      Too many late night panicked calls. Too many blubbering calls. Too many calls. Period. I can't even be hurt or offended by it because I know someone with a mental illness and have been on the other side. I know where my friends and loved ones are coming from. I am the friend and loved one of a mentally ill person.


       I've decided to just go with it. Fuck this shit. Fuck it, just write. Whatever. That's the key. The honest truth is, when I look back over my life, most of the really bad decisions, the ones that changed things for the worse, I made because I caved to what other people thought and convinced myself it was the right choice, even though I could feel in my heart and soul that it wasn't.   

     I have no next step. Submitted a few things this week. Took a few walks. Played with my nephew. I miss my friends. I miss them. Not the crazy woman, but me - I miss them.


     But I know the pattern. I have been here before. Some people I will have scared away for good, but eventually, the ones who are strong enough and love me enough and who I once shared enough laughter and the good parts of the crazy woman with will remember that version of me - this version of me - the one on the right side of the looking glass. 

                 

Wasted time, wasted chances

I have spent far too much of my limited time in this existence trying not to become him. I should have just focused on becoming myself. Being myself. Because I am better than him. I know how to control it. And when I stop obsessing about it, I don't even need the control.

Power is nothing but a construct.

I will no longer let my life be controlled by other people's made up rules. I know what is right. I will do it. As I have always tried.

Trust yourself, and you shall know how to live.

Phil Collins - I Dont Care Anymore (Official Music Video)

Mood Entry #2

I feel like a lion in a cage. Not even in a big zoo enclosure, but one of those circus cages they use wheel them out to center ring. And I'm sitting here, under the tent and the spotlight, all these screaming children and suburbanites staring down at me. All I can do is growl and roar, but when I do, I'm immediately cracked by a whip.  So I sit as quietly and still as possible in my tiny cage, making no sound for them to hear, suppressing the roar, repressing my natural instinct to bolt and rage and fight against my bars and the whip and the crowd. I cannot repress the energy. I cannot stop it from coming. I can only contain it as it consumes me from the insides out.  My body wants to pounce, but I maintain control. Some days it is too much - holding back the energy of a lion's attack from the inside out - I falter, and the lion wins.

I am not

a teenager.
your doormat.
happy right now.
letting my unhappiness get the better of me.
putting up with this bullshit for one more day.
spending my life waiting for you to fly over that wall and join me.
hovering over this tiny bit of land when there is an entire world waiting to be seen.
going to be consumed by the hatred and fear that seems to have eaten away at your zombie souls.

Anne Sexton

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-addict-6/