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/

A Re-Post: For All the Wonderful Moms in My Life

 FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2007

Taking off my black hat

So this is how it usually works:

The kid’s grandmother (my ex’s mom) asks my son what he’d like for Christmas and his birthday (which is just a few days later). He tells her. She goes out and buys it right away, tells him that she’s bought it, wraps it up and makes him wait until Christmas morning to unwrap it.

As a kid, the fun of Christmas for me was wondering what was in those boxes under the tree. I always hated when the surprise of a gift was spoiled for me, and even though I don’t argue with the kid’s arrangement with his grandmother, I just don’t understand it. But, as I said, I don’t say anything about it.

This year, though, it has gone too far. Last night when I got home from work – my first night off in many nights – I was informed by the kid that his grandmother told him she would get him the new Guitar Hero game for his Xbox. No big deal. I was kind of happy actually because it’s somewhere around a hundred bucks and he really wanted it, but I knew I would have to pick up a few extra shifts if I wanted to get it for him. So good for him.

But there was a catch. It seemed she had also told him he could have it early if he wanted. I was slightly irritated by this – the kid has no patience and a lot of this is due to the spoiling he received while living with his dad and grandparents – but I didn’t make a big deal out of it. I just said something about not being disappointed when Christmas came and he didn’t have anything new to open from his grandparents.

I went to my bedroom and started changing out of my work clothes when the kid’s voice came through the door.

“Grandma said she would send you the money if we went out and got it. So can we? Go pick it up?”

I moved beyond irritated. I was pissed.

“No, we can’t,” I said, opening the door to see his pathetic face. “I don’t have the cash.”

“She said she would send you the money for it,” he argued as I walked past him and into the kitchen for a drink.

“I don’t have the money,” I repeated. “If she wants to send you the money to buy it, then I can take you out to pick it up when I have time, but I do not have the cash right now.”

He argued with me for several more minutes about how he knew I had that much (I have him count my tips each night and I try to keep him aware of, if not directly involved in our budget), and that his grandma would reimburse me so I wouldn’t be out anything.

I didn’t give in. For one thing, my ex and his family haven’t always been great about paying me back. They’re very generous with the kidwhen he’s living with them, but as soon as he’s with me, they seem to forget that he might need or even want anything (yes, there’s a child support arrangement, but that’s a rant – I mean topic – for another time). And I’ve paid up front for many things – airline tickets, shoes, school clothes – for which I was promised cash in return, only to be stiffed and put into a financial bind when the money didn’t come. I’ve learned my lesson and I’m certainly in no position for that to happen again. For another, if his grandmother wants to get him a present, then she should get it for him. She should get it. I’m already annoyed that I have to do the actual shopping, but I find no reason why I should have to do the paying too.

The part of it that really pisses me off is that she knows we’re on a pretty strict budget. She knows I’m working two jobs and that the holidays are coming and that I’m trying to put some money toward going to Iowa over the break, so she should be aware that I’m in no position to go out and purchase the kid’s Christmas present for her. Apparently, she isn’t aware.

So she told the kid he could have something and because I am unwilling/unable to go along, I am the perceived villain, and the kid moped around the apartment all night.

My ex and his family do this stuff to me all the time. One year, the kid wanted an electric scooter for Christmas. I shopped around all fall until I finally found one I could afford. When I discussed it with my ex, he said he didn’t think it was such a good idea. The kid was still fairly young and living with his father at the time, and he didn’t think they were very safe. I disagreed, but we’re in this parenting thing together (like it or not), so I didn’t buy the scooter.

On Christmas morning, the kid was a little disappointed that he didn’t get it, but he liked the other gifts I bought instead and everything was fine. Then for his birthday, his dad and grandma gave him cash and a gift card and took him to the store where they let him buy himself - you guessed it - a scooter. He was so excited about it. He immediately brought it over to my sister’s house, where I was staying, and drove it around the neighborhood. His little face beamed as he showed me the turn signals and the working headlight, and my heart broke a little that I couldn’t be the one to make his holidays so wonderful.

My mom used to complain about my dad doing the same types of things to her, always trying to make her look bad in our eyes, always trying to make her into the bad guy. One day a few years ago, when we finally started opening up to each other about our experiences with depression and the bipolar and therapy, she told me things really changed for her when one therapist told her this: “[dhf’s father] has his white cowboy hat held on with superglue. It’s never coming off his head, so stop trying to knock it off. All you can do is take off your own black hat and refuse to wear it anymore.”

I choked up a little when she told me that. Okay, so we had been drinking and I might have become a blubbering mess (two bipolar women drinking – I gotta tell you, it doesn’t get much more fun than that). I was angry with her over the years for various things – I was a teenager – but I never saw her as the villain, and it hurt to think that that’s how she saw herself for so many years, that that’s how my father made her feel. I told her that. I told her that her hat was always white in my book. And even though I know it didn’t take away the pain she felt for so long, I think it healed her in some ways. And we cried and had a few more beers. Well, I had a few more beers. She went to bed.

I know that it will be a long time before my son can step away and really assess our performances as parents. I know that he may never realize the ways in which his father failed us both, so many times, without remorse. And if he never sees his father without the glow from his gleaming white hat, I don’t really care. But I’m not wearing the black one. I’m not going to be the mustache-twisting villain, and I’m not handing over my gold just so he’ll like me. And maybe someday over a few beers, he'll put the white hat on my head.

Mood Entry

Melancholy today. I don’t like it one bit. I want to be happy. Happier. But unlike before, happiness seems to have a cap. An endpoint at which I can no longer feel anything but the numbness of separation. Because after all of the heartache and the sadness and the hurt we experienced together, it feels selfish to be happy now. Without her.

 Especially when the only time I ever believed I deserved the happiness was when she loved me and I loved her. 

*Because It's Our Only Chance of Progress

Nearly ten years ago I was in my first semester of graduate school in Richmond. It was September, hot as anything, and I sat on a collapsible lawn chair I’d bought the day before. I was still waiting for my furniture to arrive and the voices of some morning news anchors on my portable TV echoed off the bare walls and hardwood floors. I was putting my shoes on. I had the phone cradled between my chin and shoulder and I was putting on my shoes, talking to one of my former military bosses now turned friend. The news was almost over and I was getting ready to turn it off and go mow the lawn.

I’d just read Saints and Villains by Denise Giardinia. It tells the story of theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer and his role in the plot to kill Hitler.  I’d read the book for an undergraduate course, my capstone, called “The Nature of Knowledge” in which we discussed that very thing and whether or not it was important to gain knowledge (it is) and if so, why?* Saints and Villains wasn’t the most well-written of the books we read that semester (and there were many), but it was one that stuck with me mostly because of Bonheoffer’s mental anguish knowing that what was going on in his country was immoral and watching his fellow countrymen fall prey to Hitler’s charms, but feeling powerless to stop it.

 We spent a lot of time discussing the Holocaust that semester in my other courses as well and I remember asking my professor, after we watched a film in which cheering crowds thronged to hear an energetic mustachioed man, how the people of Germany let it happen. How did we? I already knew the answer. We’d been reading about it all semester. We don’t know what we don’t want to know. The fact that we think those in power will not run amok is precisely what allows them to run amok. If it is too difficult for us to process, we as human beings are apt to excuse ourselves for our ignorance. Until it becomes absolutely necessary for us to face the truth.

The brutal extermination of six million people from this earth did not go by unnoticed while it was happening; we simply believed the human race had progressed beyond such barbarity. And we had no skills to cope with the notion that it might not be true.

I thought a lot about the book that morning as I rode the bus across the James River. The buildings downtown popped against a perfectly blue sky and the entire scene was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. I remember thinking this as I sat there, numb, staring out the window and thinking how sad it was that the day was so beautiful yet so tragic.

 It wasn’t until I got to school, which had already been cancelled, that I actually felt anything. Watching footage online of Middle Eastern children cheering at the news of the deaths of thousands of people, I wanted to cry. We will end up here again, I thought. Over and again. We will only end up here.

 Two years later I sat with a group of fellow grad students and professors at a local restaurant. It was a somber occasion, one that had only become somber because of our general mood. George Bush had been re-elected the day before, and we couldn’t shake the sense that we as a country were going to a very dark place. I thought again of the book, of Bonheoffer and his search for meaning in a world he could no longer figure out.  All of us in the restaurant being academics, it felt to me like a scene from the book, the lot of us bemoaning the wool being so easily being pulled over Americans eyes and knowing full well the consequences to come.

Tonight (this morning) I am watching footage of cheering crowds. Celebration. History. But I can’t help but think of those children cheering ten years ago. They are men now. Men whose greatest sense of communion came when they were children and watched the destruction of what they were taught to be the symbol of all that is evil and wrong in the world.  I don’t know what to do with the thought. It is a cycle. All of it. The cheering crowds, the assassinated dictators, the bombing and invading and training to overthrow. The perpetuation of hatred in the name of nationalism. 

Lesson #1

It's difficult to admit to yourself how much of an asshole you've been sometimes.

Forward

I don’t want to write about her. It is too painful and I might say things I will regret and they will forever be in print. Well at least they will be recorded somewhere and I am not sure I’m ready for that since the pain is still too new and I might say anything to reduce that pain. It really blows. I need to write about her. But I love her too much to tell you our story through my currently-situated mind.

I will only tell you that she is beautiful and fierce and I never meant to hold us back.

For You, My Friend

I have nothing to give you for your birthday this year. No money with which to buy you anything. No resources with which to make you anything. But then what is new? I am poor. I am always poor. Will always be poor.

As far as money goes.

But never mind all that. You’ve heard me drone on enough about it into the wee hours, stoned beyond need, your husband and I getting into excited discussions about the impending corporate takeover and collapse of the current world order. And you just sit there between us and smile at both of us. Content to just enjoy the company of the people you love.

You were even there for me in the darker hours. Sitting in a sterile white room, flooded with light, waiting to enter the zombie tank. While they poked and prodded for blood samples and mental illness history, you smiled at me and it was just like a squeeze on the hand.

Thank you for reminding me every day to be more like you. Thank you for reminding me how to be wealthy in love. And that wealth, my friend, I will always share with you.

Signs that I am clearly too invested in television and may quite possibly be delusional

This morning I read that Stanley Kamel, the actor who plays Dr. Charles Kroger on the tv series Monk, had died. If you haven’t ever seen the show, Dr. Kroger is the therapist to Adrian Monk (Tony Shalhoub), a private investigator suffering from a nearly debilitating case of obsessive compulsive disorder. My first reaction upon reading this news should have been a bit of sadness for Mr. Kamel and his family, or if I spent more time doing important things and less watching television, my first reaction should have been “Who?”

However, I am ashamed to report that the first thing that popped into my mind was how horrible it was going to be for Monk.

No, not for Tony Shalhoub. For Adrian Monk. The fictional television character.

Indie Bloggers

If you don't already know about the following site, well, you've been missing out on a lot. On the other hand, you'll have a great deal of wonderful writing to fill your day once you follow this link and check out the archives.

And somehow, amazingly, one of my previous posts was chosen for today. And no, it's not the one about bird poop.

What I did on my spring vacation

So I’ve just spent the better part of a week in bed with the death (or as others might speak of it, ‘the flu’). It was made especially delightful by the fact that the kid was also sick. And even more so by the fact that grocery shopping was on my to-do list, so when we finally emerged from bed and felt like maybe we could eat something, our options were expired cottage cheese, the moldy ends of a loaf of bread, or five strawberry Jolly Ranchers. I let my son have the Jolly Ranchers (I can’t believe they haven’t given me “Mother of the Year” yet).

I arrived back at work just in time for spring break, which students and faculty have off, but for which staff must be present. This would be annoying except for the fact that I can get a lot of work done when it’s so quiet around here.

For example:

9:22 am – I arrive over an hour late, for no reason in particular. Five minutes later, my coworker buzzes to ask if she missed anything. Apparently she arrived shortly after I did.

9:45 am – The fire alarms go off. I grab my cigarettes and lock my door and spend the next twenty minutes smoking in the courtyard.

10:30 am – My coworker calls from the copy room and asks me to bring her a file.

10:32 am – I bring my coworker the file. She photocopies it.

10:40 am – I re-file the file.

10:40:32 am – 11:15 am – I catch up on some blogs.

11:16 am – Two faculty members roll past my door in office chairs.

11:17 am – noon – I mediate office chair races for a handful of bored faculty members who have nothing better to do during their spring break than come into the office and participate in office chair races.

12:01 pm – Co-worker steps out of her office and tells me she’s heading out for the weekend and that I can go home.

12:02 pm – ten minutes ago – I sit in my office and contemplate going home, but decide that I will just have to come back for the kid and there’s nothing better to do since all of my other friends are either faculty members on spring break or servers on shift at the restaurant.

Ten minutes ago – Now – Start writing a crappy blog chronicle of my day.