Like Never Before

The Fleetwood Mac version of this song is from my childhood. I discovered Eva Cassidy in grad school. This rendition haunts me. Even more now, RG.

An Argument for the Differently-Thinking

I prefer to spend my time imagining possibilities (daydreaming), watching and sharing in my nephew’s growth and development (playing with children), indulging my need for culture (goofing off), discussing possibilities and growth and culture with others (goofing off), and then writing about all of it at the end of the day (goofing off), when other minds are sleeping off the number-crunching and customer-pleasing and profit-mongering of theirs (using various substances to keep them hard asleep so they don’t have those freaky dreams that keep them awake and make them think about the decisions they’ve made all day and whether or not they make any real difference).

Apparently, this makes me one of two things: Batshit crazy or “High as a kite.”

Those are the choices offered. I have finally been feeling like myself again. More like myself than I have felt in a long time. And the best part is, I’m feeling like an even better self each damn day. I kinda like it. It makes me want to do stuff. Gives me confidence that I can do stuff and do it without screwing it up. And it makes me want to write. And I write. And I keep writing. And I don’t think I would ever stop writing if I could ever figure out how to stop letting them get to me, but I do and I start to give in just a little bit and feel guilty (GUILTY! Ha!) about spending time “writing my little stories” when I should be out there earning money and making the lives of everyone around me more comfortable.

Then I start to resent having to pretend being one of you and I slowly give up on the writing and turn my attentions toward giving you everything you think you want even though I can see how it’s going to end for you, for both of us, for all of us, because I know in the end that you wouldn’t listen to me if I told you the truth anyway and it’s just easier to get along by not disturbing the pack.

It never works.

I end up back here each time.

Maybe, just fucking maybe, the reason we are lagging in development and design is because we’ve medicated away all the creativity. Differently thinking. I am not mentally ill. Fuck you. Fuck you all. I just think differently. And guess what, you assholes, you bloody motherfucking assholes, I know and trust what I think is right and I have sifted the monuments and remains of thousands of years of thinking before mine to back me up. But even more importantly, I have sifted the remains of thirty some years of my own thinking and am working hard to shed the ways that keep me back. 

I am not part of your pack. Stop trying to make me run along and hunt with you. I'm not even a damned predator.

The Rambler

Let’s face it. I have nothing important to say. That’s why I insist on the freewrite each morning. That’s why I start here because I know and even worse I know that you know that I am nothing more than a rambler when I think I’m a storyteller.

Heat index was somewhere in the oh-my-fuck-my-lungs-have-melted range yesterday and a few days before and still a few more to come. This is the part of summer like the coldest part of winter in Iowa. Only the brave and the poor go outside.

This is what I wanted to say to you. I think it’s what I’ve been trying to figure out how to say all along. No, I know it is. I’ve just been putting all the words together and it’s taken a long time. Such a very, very long time.

You trusted me. Way more than anyone ever trusted me. And I loved that. I trusted you that way too. I still do. I just saw that, well, you were putting faith into me and what I had to say like I was some sort of guru (which let’s face it, I am), and not just parsing through my rants for stuff you needed and trusting yourself instead. You started immersing yourself completely in my life and I needed you to fly on your own. You needed you to fly. And I did not know how to help you do that anymore. So I guess some part of me knew we both needed you to stop trusting me so much so you could stand completely back up on your own, but I also didn’t want you to stop believing in the good things, the positive things, the lessons we were sharing about life and what is really important. Somewhere in between, I lost my footing and ended up in a chasm. 

And you lost faith in both of us.

Thank You, CPC Plumber

I went outside to have a smoke (still in the quitting process) and some guy just holla'd at me while hanging from the passenger side of his boss's ride.

Scrubs.

Once Upon a Time

This morning you were getting ready for work and I was standing on the deck having a cigarette which seemed ridiculous when you were only yards away and about to leave and I could be spending that time talking to you. I assumed you would be dressed. I don’t know why I assumed it, but was happy to be wrong. I just sat down at the edge of the bed. I could think of no place nor time I’d rather be. Nowhere more beautiful than this moment. I wasn’t there long before you noticed me and sighed.

I was thinking about last night when we were talking about learning from each other. I was so excited about how my nerdy obsessions and love of art had finally fulfilled the promise of such pursuits - that the world could be unlocked someday, if only I learned enough. I just always thought I would be alone for the turning of the key. I never hoped to have someone beside me when it happened I sometimes dreamed I would leave the gates open behind me maybe, lead others to the doors with my words and my voice. But I never thought there would be someone there to share it with me, someone who needed through that gate even more than I did, but still kinda dug that I was along for the trip.

I have so much to learn from you. I could listen to you forever. Until we had no words left to share. Until all we could do is sit in each other’s company and you would still be teaching me, showing me what I have spent decades trying to learn – how to be so comfortable in your own body. Even as your own muscles fight against you.

A Bunch of Words Together Saying Nothing

Free again free free free sometimes I tire of the freedom. Sometimes I long for the comfort of the familiar. But when I am comfortable, I convince myself I am trapped. I leave behind limbs when trapped. 


I just wasn’t this time.

Only in my mind.

Which is now free to wander as it will.

Alone and such. And not a leg to stand on.

It'll Come Back

You asked me not to take blame. I've already been working on that. I'm always working on that. And it's okay, because at least I know my weakness. I have to face it head on. Always. Every single time without fail or I end up in a tailspin. But that's about me. And I already know about me, that I have a lot to learn about me, but I'm okay with that too. Again, about me.

I just want you to know that I also can't take credit. I won't take credit. I recognized you and saw who you were to become and I only wanted to be in your presence for the journey. I had no clue you would fall so hard for me.

ME? Come on?!

You were already headed toward your own enlightenment when I met you. I take that back, you were an enlightened soul working toward whatever the heaven or hell or karmic retribution it is we work toward once we recognize our own consciousness. I may have offered you companionship and support on your journey, but I never meant to keep either of us back nor do I take credit for you already being a determined, fierce, and talented woman.You have so much love to give. Just give it. It will come back to you. 

We both kicked ourselves for not encouraging each other enough, when what we both really needed was to just do it for ourselves. Encourage ourselves. I know who I am. I am working hard to preserve that person. I miss having that someone who knows it too.

Vitamin P and Other Such Crutches

This is when I start to listen to them, boys mostly who always seem to think they know what’s best because they’re all so in touch with their own motives and triggers and emotions, and I start to think that maybe I don’t need these pills after all. Maybe they are a crutch. Maybe it is all a crutch. Somehow I seem unable to stand without a crutch. I can either accept that and use the crutch to still outrun my naysayers, or I can pretend I don’t need the help, like they pretend, and keep hopping along on one leg, without balance.

Or I can crumple up in a ball and roll around on the floor with the rest of them.

My Space

I have a desk. My sister and I picked it up for free at a yardsale and tossed it in the back of the minivan. It sat there for a week while it rained whenever my sister was home with the van before I got to bring the thing in the apartment.  It was painted over in white by the people who gave it up so I consider that a sign to use it as a canvas and have been randomly doodling on it. since no one uses the kitchen table to actually dine at, my sister let me take one of the chairs, one that sat in my grandparents’ breakfast nook.  

The setup is squeezed into a corner of the apartment, but I have enough space to have slowly migrated my books and journals and scrap writings out here and now it is a proper writer’s desk. Well, it’s my desk, but you get the drift.  I have needed to do this for myself for some time now and have refused to help a sister out. I mean, I’ve helped others, but for some reason I have not carved out the space for myself that I need.

I am always to blame for my own downfall.

I wanted my life to be a fucking comedy, bitches!

I don’t know if there could be any possible relationship but since putting the desk and my computer here, I have been writing, getting myself back into a routine. I sit down here in the morning.  I freewrite. I read. I work. As a writer. Albeit one without pay for now.

The thing is, there’s a chair right next to my desk. A big comfy blue chair and if you are sitting in it, it’s really awkward and crowded to have someone at the desk.  It’s also usually where I end up when my shoulders start to tighten from leaning forward over the laptop. The thing about this particular chair I guess is that I’ve realized it’s sort of my spot. And I feel totally like Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory about it.

And every motherfucker who comes in my sister’s apartment seems to sit in that chair.

Despite the fact that I have my computer open and sitting on the desk, which itself is always just disorganized enough to indicate that someone is WORKING there, and despite the fact that my drink is usually there and  there’s a book of poetry or my journal in it which they have to move in order to sit down after I’ve gotten up to let them in and let my sister know she has guest, they snake my spot. They always take my spot. Even though there are three other seats in the room, all of which offer a much better view of the tv.

I Still Haven't Figured Out Why Any of You Are Still Reading This

Instead of sitting here meditating and so lost in my own fucking bullshit thoughts I should be writing. You know, writing them down for posterity’s sake. My own fucking bullshit thoughts. The ones I come up with while meditating. While sitting here with my eyes closed and enjoying the effects of the medication and the way it feels to type blind the keys rising to meet my fingertips and I am freewriting again lost in it eyes closed muse writing and I have lost my ability to type or to think or to anything because I cannot go another stop on my travels thinking I know my destination. I will never know my destination. And that is the best thing of it. That is the part I once taught myself to no longer fear. I am learning again. And I am learning it better this time. But I’ve been a long time in the villages  that makes no sense absolutely no sense I don’t know where I was going with that I am tired but I think I will type myself into unconsciousness of course it will be hard to decipher just to say that it is time. Time to leave this particular village because I’ve learned all I can and that’s a metaphorical village and not a metaphor for a village, if you know what I mean.

Beer and Tomato Juice

Having a red beer at the moment. Friday night with my sister and her kids, and it's hotter than balls as my son would say, so i am sipping on a little tradition. The past two days have been, to also quote my son, insane. By contrast, my sanity seems to be returning at an alarming rate. Alarming because it is overwhelming to be sane in an insane world. Just as overwhelming as it is to be insane in a sane world. The key is to find the balance either way. Then to keep it. Or maybe not freak out so much when it goes.

I once had it. The Ying-Yang. And then I had it with someone else.

With red horns tattoed on her hand. Devil's horns the color of my beer.

Woo-Hoo

I have been writing for a few days now. Actual writing. Complete thoughts followed by more (related and compelling) thoughts. Best of all, I have been able to write them down.

I have been able to sit down amid all the chaos and tune it all out. Only me and the words. My words.

Enough to Drive You Crazy If You Let It

I stand across the room from my sister, rocking from foot to foot as she vents about her day. It was extra humid today and her store was extra busy and extra understaffed. Besides, her uniform is all black and she has to wear a smock over it, so she is demonstrably upset as she vulgarizes the English language in an attempt to express to me the frustration of her nine hour shift. My mind begins to wander.

I am currently on what might be considered a sabbatical if I were working in my field of study or a leave of absence if I had some big swank office somewhere, but since I am a waitress at some corporate joint is called ‘medical leave’ and entails nothing more than getting to keep my service years uninterrupted. In short, I am taking on each day as it comes. Mostly I keep my nephew while my sister’s at work and in exchange get to eat and sleep and do whatever else I want in her apartment.

Sometimes while she’s at work, I rearrange the furniture.  Whole rooms.

So I’m not working. I’ve been home all day writing. Talking on the phone. Definitely not putting up with cranky and possibly dehydrated customers.  My sister is herself cranky as she retells the most poignant moments of her shift: having to call in the assistant manager for backup help, running out of bags, customers bitching about no bags, my sister bitching about all of it.

I could care less about any of it. But I smile and nod and try to remember some of the swear words for later use. I want to tell her to chill, then I think about what an ass I was coming home from work this last year, venting, worse than venting, forcing the anger out like fire from a pot-bellied stove when all I needed was to let the heat and smoke roll away in their own time. I want to tell her to stop caring, these minor stupid details don't really matter, not at all, in any scheme of anything. But they have this way of getting you to care.  

My sister waves her hands a lot when she swears, I think to myself. 

Writing free

Freewriting this morning as every morning as in every morning that I actually write which isn’t really that many mornings which is to say not as many mornings as I’d like. To freewrite. As well as write. Now I am stopping to correct punctuation and also spelling although you won't see the corrections being made so it is no longer freewriting just me rambling onto the page as if I were drunk dialing into your voicemail or something and you were listening to it the next afternoon as I sat coolly across the table from you in some swanky beeratorium. I don’t know what a beeratorium is or why it would be swanky, but trust me, this is the kind of place I would hang out and sit coolly across a table from you while you listened to me make an ass of myself into your voicemail and tried to stifle a giggle while I sit (coolly) and take your smiles and laughter as a sign that you are really into me when let’s face it I am nothing but a rambling goof. 

Going Where the Weather Suits my Clothes

Trying to figure out where that is at the moment. Trying to hear my own voice amid all the others who just seem to be talking at me.

I'm still hearing the words they're saying and not trusting my own.

I used to listen to this while riding the bus home late at night in Richmond. It seemed to fit into the soundtrack of my life too as I stared past my own reflection on the glass and into the dark beauty of the old city. You know, right behind the homeless dudes fighting on the corner.

Looking for Roots

  My little hippie friend and I went down to the East Village which is really just about six square blocks of revitalized buildings renamed as the East Village though we’re preteding that’s what the area surrounding the capitol has been called all along. When I was a young child those streets held small merchants and businesses such as my grandfather’s paper company and the post office on the corner. In my teens, they replaced the quaint brick buildings with newer brighter better brick buildings. By the time I hit my twenties, it wasn’t really a good place to be after dark.

Now it’s filled with trendy little shops and art galleries and thrift stores benefiting the women’s league and other white collar causes. It is clean and well-lit. My little hippie friend and I make our way through a flea mart type building. It was a used furniture shop when I was young; now it contains relics of my own youth, a youth my young hippie friend was not even around for. Much of what I see in the booths as a matter of fact, I once saw in operation. At an old country store where they hadn’t upgraded yet or my great Aunt Mathilda who had no need at her farm for the modern conveniences.

Going through the shops today I wished I had a little cash for a thing here or there, but I have no use for it really. I have nothing left. No possessions really. Not to speak of. It makes me feel amazingly free and incredibly pressed for time at once. Like I have no legacy to pass on, and I need to create one.

I wasn’t worried about it. I had writing. The stories would be my legacy. So I didn’t mind giving the other stuff up a little at a time. Here and there. I come from a line of hoarders after all. 

By age twenty-one I already had a full storage unit of randomness. I watched my grandmother fill her home with margarine dishes and extra boxes of Kleenex. By the time I was ready to move cross country for grad school, I had to pare down quite a bit. By the third apartment in Richmond, I had shed even more superfluous stuff. What I had left would be stolen, apprehended or otherwise unattainable to me for the next several years. My son and I moved back from Virginia in one ten foot truck. And I am now in possession of almost none of even that.

But like I said, the writing, the stories, are supposed to be my collection. My legacy. Proof of me and mine.

All You Need

Hyperbolic aerodynamics

“What the hell are you doing here?” my cousin says to me. She is twice my age. Looks like Janis Joplin, if she’d survived. And kept on partying the same way. And had three kids and a biker husband they had to special order a casket for.  And they kept on putting pieces of her back together and sedated with enough morphine to not do her any more damage. This woman has always been a secret idol of mine, though the corners of my father’s mouth always took an extra sharp plunge upon finding out that this particular cousin and her brood were present at this or that family member’s home.

I smile. Broad smile. In retrospect I should have hugged her, but we were in the bathroom at the park and I was waiting to leave.

“I heard something about some Sleeths getting together. Maybe a few Hayes.”

“Oh, this is where the family reunion is?” she manages to look confused. 

Beside her is my aunt. My uncle’s wife. Maybe ex-wife reconciled now. No blood relation. Tiny, feisty woman. Married to my brute of an uncle. Well, the brutiest of them. Brutest? I was terrified of her growing up, but I loved her. I just knew she would tear me in two if necessary because life had once torn her in two. Her daughters were the same ages as my younger sisters and the group of them was always finding something to do, leaving me to entertain myself quietly. Mostly, I sat and did what I always did when I found myself alone – I listened.

I was compulsively shy as a child. Obsessed with what others thought of me. Horrified at the thought of partner-projects in school because I would be stuck in my chair, waiting for all the other kids to pair up and I was left with the kid who wet himself or has special snacks, or worse yet, I would have to be the teacher’s partner. This left the rest of the class with the impression that I was teacher’s pet or k-i-s-s-i-n-g the special-snacker, when in reality I was just afraid that if I opened my mouth and spoke the first word to another person or stood out in any way, the world would somehow stop spinning on its axis.

That is not hyperbole.

So I learned to blend in. To not be me, to not be seen or stand out in any way so others wouldn’t be upset with or critical of me. I already knew I couldn’t play their rules and didn’t like their games anyway, so I tried hiding. How can you find fault with someone who isn’t there?

I tried to control it after that. The next stage in my growth. To represent myself and market myself like a tennis shoe or a lip gloss. Confident. Hard-working. Better aerodynamics.

This morning as we were leaving for the reunion I looked down last minute at my brightly painted toenails and slightly too snug tank top. A cigarette dangled from my mouth and as we pulled out from the lot, I flipped up the visor mirror.

“Dude,” (I call her 'Dude') I smiled into the mirror and told her, “I am pretty white trash today.”

She shook her head at me.

"Today we are Sleeths.”

 Then she cranked up the radio and some hip-hop song bounced the minivan as we rolled through an industrial area. The kind of place our grandfather and our uncles would have worked. On my mother’s side. The Sleeth side. The kind of place my dad’s family might have slummed as plant supervisor but never would have set place otherwise. At least not long enough for any dust to settle on.

My parents’ families lived across the street from one another at one point. It was the first home in which my mother remembers having running water. To some people in my father’s family, especially after the divorce, my mom and the Sleeths became a joke, the name synonymous with poor white trash.  And they often made those jokes in front of me. I don’t know if that’s where things started to turn south for me: I really no longer care.

   

On the way to the reunion, bouncing over the train tracks, I thought about the weekends spent at our grandparents as kids. I loved going down to play with all the cousins, but hated nighttime.  I used to lie awake, terrified of the dark, and listen to the lonesome sound of the train whistles. Proof of life, awake, out there somewhere in the night, while in the house all I could hear was grandpa snoring and maybe a cricket we let in during the day or a bull frog outside the window. Mostly though it was the train whistle that let me sleep. That reassured me. To me, this little girl lost in the dark, that whistle was reassurance that even if I fell asleep, the world would still go on and another whistle would wake me in the morning.

A few weeks ago one of my cousins lost his six year old son in an accident at their home.  In another lifetime when we were blonde and summer-tanned and Kool-aid lipped, we used to cross the highway to the cemetery and go into the old abandoned buildings we were supposed to stay away from in the ghost town my grandparents settled in.  None of us, I’m sure imagined such a thing. I was amazed at the church watching my now grown cousin and his wife go through the process of burying their son. I was amazed at their strength. Amazed at the way they did not curl up into a ball and stop going.

There’s a short story I love and I can remember neither the title nor the author, but it was about the narrator’s dirt-poor family and the rabble of cousins and how when one died in some tragic accident around the family farm, barely anyone seemed to notice. Life went on. As it always had. As it always will. I don’t think facing down our fate that many of us could move forward.  

My aunt and rock star cousin and giggle a bit at whatever one of them said last. The sound of a toilet flushes out their words, but I laugh a little anyway as I wait to use the sink in this tiny cinder block latrine. I think to myself how they look as they did twenty years ago, the two of them huddling together in secret laughter.  It is good to see some institutions, some relationships, some friendships withstand. It’s good to see that the earth stays on its axis, no matter what I predict.

“What the hell?” my aunt shouts, even though we are a foot apart. She is referring to the open stall behind her for which there is no door.

Considering our white trash credentials, I find it apropos.

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.