Le monde du vieux bandit

This was written in the context of NanoWrimo (National Novel Writing Month) 2004. The goal is wto write a 50,000 words novel during th emonth of November. In 2004, I managed it.

thinking about nanowrimo this year. i never finished it last year, because in mid-november i found a spot for my photo exhibit in january, and i dropped the keyboard for the exhibit preparation. i had found, thought, that writing in english somehow freed me. and freeing i need: i get so upset by just the idea of writing fiction… bad memories, i guess. two books out there and you realize that once you let them go, they are simply out there, and good people and bad people alike will have a stab at you. not even talking about the critics - doing their job - but about people who were supposed to be there for me, about bad publishing experiences, and some bad media stuff, but cause dmostly by my innocence at the time. still, i’m like a trauma victim sometimes when it comes to writing. and what i’m hoping to achieve this year is a free form novel type thing, without my own censorship. i want to let it flow and not criticize myself, i want no rereading with a red pen. it doesn’t matter if it’s good or perfect, all that matters is that i do it. there. i think i’m ready.

 

 
chapter one.

last night i masturbated next to my snoring boyfriend. it’s almost shameful to admit at twenty-nine, but it was the first time i managed to reach orgasm with only my fingers and imagination. and granted, my imagination was running wild, enthoused by a bondage short story i read online recently, and i was so wet i was happy to be sleeping on a towel - not that the self-pleasuring session was pre-planned, but that’s what i do when i have my period - there is just no way i’d leave a chlorine bleach tampon up my vagina all night, thank you. i wouldn’t even mention the orgasm, except that it surprised me. over the years i’ve masturbated and reached orgasm a million times - just not with fingers only. i remember being four years old and masturbaing by pressing my crotch against an old wagon wheel - for some unknown reason we had one of those old wagon on our land, one without the arches for the hemp covering or anything, but still it was there, immobile and useless. i played on it a lot, and eventually, i guess, discovered its crotch friendliness. i remember being barely older and using a plastic baseball bat. it’s not as gory as it sounds: i figured out that if i propped it just right under my counter, it would hold, and i could lift myself up and again, rub against it. i guess my discoveries at an early age included a lot of rubbing. anything i could when the mood struck me, which was often. there was the unfortunate gum incident. the time i cut my skin with scissors. the baby bottle, the glass. surprisingly no banana. later i discovered the shower head and the bath tap, and i stayed with that for years, until, i guess, i was old enough to have the guts to walk into a sex shop to buy myself a vibrator. did you know red ones actually go faster?

back to last night. i couldn’t believe he was sleeping. i don’t believe in false advertisement, and i had made very clear right from the start what kind of a sex drive i ran on. more like a sex engine. and it had been a two weeks dry spell and by then every time we got in bed i could feel how gorged with blood my genitals were, just expectant and hopeful. i guess that’s why it was so easy to reach orgasm - five minutes and i was done. only one problem though: masturbation doesn’t bring on as much endorphins as the (ahem) real thing. and i was left, happier perhaps, but staring at the ceiling in the night, listening to the snores of the man i love. i pushed him, moved him, pulled his pillow, told him in whispers and then in normal conversation tones that he was snoring, i massaged him, nothing would do it. i got up and took my pillows - i’m very fussy about pillows, they need to be just so (and guess what, they do not manufacture just-so pillows: i have to make them myself) and walked up to the guest bedroom. my mind was spinning with projects and ideas and thoughts of the passed day and week, and the word insomnia came to mind, but eventually, out of exhaustion perhaps or boredom, i fell asleep.

i dreamed that somehow and for some reason, my name was on a most wanted list of some sort. three names in a report, and mine was one of them. the last one, after my two male accomplices (and that’s all i remember about the poor souls…) and i knew the report came from the fbi. what they would want with me, little uninteresting (to the fbi) me, i cannot recall now that the dream has faded, but at the time i knew. and i knew i had done it. i was just shocked that they’d figured it out. and shocked to see my name, black on banal paper. and a little afraid. if they could find out my name, and write it properly in my mother tongue, with accents and all, well i was probably in big trouble. and they probably could find me.

what i am left with in the mornings are clips of dreams. like i hit print screen in my brain just before consciousness clicks on, and i get a facsimile of the situation as it was then. not only the images, smells and sounds, but the feelings and thoughts as well. but it eclipses the complexities that i guess and can almost touch, the saga that brought me in and out of that tumultuous story. and recently, i’ve been having very complex dreams (or so they feel when i get out of bed), and very dark ones. no nightmares per se. well, when i think of a nightmare i think of that time my mom had come to school and then transformed into a hideous alien and i ran. or of that headless horse in the shower, into which the body of a kidnapped boy my age was inserted. i don’t dream of anything of the kind nowadays, but it’s difficult for me not to categorize my dreams as nightmares when i know that some big corporation or government agency is somehow after me, that some man i’ve dreaded for years is right around the corner stalking me, that the house is on fire because i lit the match. it seems that my nightmares have received a generous upgrade, from low quality b-category gory horror flick to hollywood suspence and drama. perhaps.

it’s like my dreams are an episode of 24. and my life? a sitcom some days. but one of those that makes you smile more than laugh. a bad sitcom on other days. and a soap opera when some people put their nose in my business. i can’t stand that drama, though. i find it hard to believe, even though i know just how true it is, that i was once a drama queen. now i’m a reason queen or something. i can shut up and bottle up and wait and be quiet and patient. it’s the actress in me that enjoys being cast as a saint. the rest of me looks down, amused at how well i can suspend my disbelief, at how good an actress i would have been in the end. would have been, is, same thing here. it’s only the paycheck that separates an ordinary human from an actor. and the waist line, more often than not. at least that’s part of my story, the big why of the small question, why i didn’t pursue my dream of being an actress. i loved it enough. and still that is a sacred place. but i was young and naive in some ways, and too realistic in others. i was never interested in movies. tv? never. i wanted the stage to be my set and bright spots to glow in the sun’s place. first reality check: you want to be a theater actress? you want to starve. and what it means, and what was demoralizing to me, is that you’ll work for months on one play, give your guts out, shed your hair and let your emotions down, and then you’ll do it again for a few weeks, a few months if you remember not to say “good luck” and don’t walk under a black ladder while breaking a mirror, and then… nothing. it’ll go away and you’ll start over. and over. the loss that i feel just thinking about it, how vain it all is, it’s like a ball in my stomach, a tight ball of bread, you know, just like when i was a kid and would roll up my slice of white bread into a compact mass of carbs and sugar. but back then i would savour the ball, slowly and in a few bites. finishing a play is more like a whole loaf rolled into a tight ball and swallowed at once. boom, down as far as it’ll go. and now the pain.

but that’s me being a drama queen again, or as much as it is now allowed. a more pratical answer to the big why is simple math. seventy of us. sixty girls. (yes, most of the ten guys were gay, and yes, all the other ones were popular and… taken.) all pretty and skinny and good. well good. well… wait a minute. so all my life i’ll be competing against these girls, and more girls, all pretty, all skinny, all good? i was pretty at the time. pretty enough. i’d wear risky outfits, like the backless black shirt that prompted a guy to tell me that was he my boyfriend, he wouldn,t allow me to wear such a thing outside. allow me? puh-lease. no man has ever attempted to tell me what i could and could not where, in or out, and that is just as well for them. oh you don’t want me to wear that? so long, you’re history. but at the time i almost took it as a compliment, and my bra-less breasts held high at the time, and life was good. but skinny? i’ve never been skinny, and will never be. that’s fine. i am a woman, not a waif. that. is. fine. but it’s not what directors want. and so i could keep going, but i had to do it knowing, understanding, that i’d be judged on my physique all my life. that’s when i closed the door. i knew my insecurities would get the better of me in such a situation.

or so i thought. it’s years later, and i don’t know anymore. the choices i made at 17, 18, 19? they’re ridiculous choices. some were good, but almost by chance. i don’t deny what i did then, and i probably wouldn’t change anything if i was given a magic wand (that’s a blatant lie! for one thing i’d make myself skinny!) but the nature of choices i made when i was that young is ridiculous. good or bad decision, if it’ll affect your entire life and you’re 17, 18, 19? ridiculous. what did i know then? so little. i was a ball of (no, not bread) pain and scratches, rolling with the wind on stony winding paths, bleeding along the way. i was wide-eyed and yet older than i am now. i was, simply put, not the same person. it’s a cliché, no doubt, but in my case it’s almost litteral. not the same person. and who i am now and who i was then all the me’s in between would tell you: i can feed you bullshit for hours. on the plus side, i’ll probably swallow yours too. i’ll know it’s bull, but i’ll ask for more.

 

chapter two.

i have a strange love-hate realitionship with food. sometimes i can go on and on about the sheer pleasure of the palate, about sweet and sour tastes mixing in a saliva-filled orgy of taste buds. and i can cook for hours, trying new recipes, new fragrances mixed with old ones, and a picture can make me sweat of envy. i can also dissert on the proper use of cooking apparatus and utensils, being a firm believer of the right tool at the right time, and of the sheer sensual pleasure that can be brought on by using a small fork or a small spoon, to eat delicately and orgasmically. but mostly, the idea of eating repulses me. unless i’m hungry or baked. or tempted by availability. but most of the time, you can offer me chocolates, you can dangle a taco in front of my nose, and i will only feel disgust. it’s all or nothing. and it’s a little ridiculous, although i have not quite attempted to modify the behavior. it has gotten to a point where i do not know the difference between hunger and nausea. they feel the same to me, like a two headed snake looking into its own eyes, mesmerized. two sides of one acidulated coin. such opposites that they can only be one and the same.

most days, this whole crazy food thing makes no difference in my life. i manage to eat by myself mostly and at my own hours, in my own way. some nights i’ll eat like a maniac, some days i’ll have fries at 11 and be content. it’s just easier to be by myself, to not be bound by the social niceties that others bring about. the idea that one must eat three times a day, for one. circa noon is lunch time. uh - ok. but how about asking me if i’m hungry, if i feel like eating, if i need lunch? perhaps what i want - what i’ve created (the illusion of) for myself is a completely customizable world, set to my whims. it is not easy living that fantasy and yet interacting with others - in fact, the illusion is more complete when others do not meddle - but i do manage to live on a bridge between my world and that of others. it’s a disease, perhaps. i’ve always questioned everything. the why, the how, the what i want. what i want and how i want it is a big thing for me. not that i get it always or that i have the power to make others make it happen - but i focus on small things and make these mine. i’m high maintenance, but only for me - i do not hold others to my standards (although they get bonus points if they facilitate…). now the question is whether this makes me happier, in my customized skinned world, or simply more of a nervous wreck. jury’s still out.

if you were interviewing me for a job, i’d say i’m detail oriented. and you’d believe me. people just believe me on that one. i don’t know if it’s visible in my face or my clothes, but people trust my honesty instinctively. and they should, i guess. i’m honest, mostly. i’d say i’m detail oriented, not anal retentive, and that there *is* a difference, and you’d laugh gently a fake laughter, or rather, forced. and so would i. and you’d hire me. and you’d know nothing more of me. but you wouldn’t have any need or opportunity to complain about my analness, which would be demonstrated daily. i’m the brave companion that brings along trinkets that you’ve forgotten, to bring them out when you most need them and most are biting your knuckles, full of rage and having forgotten. but lo and behold, here i am, to save you and make myself feel worthwhile. i’m the potted plant - you don’t see me but i’m always there, and i see you. i don’t seem like much, until i leave. and then you’ll see. and then you’ll try to figure it all out. good luck with that.

i live in a silver mine and i call it beggar’s tomb. no, not really. but it strikes me that it would be cool to be able to say that. for some reason even saying silver mine, really what i see is the chink from even cowgirls get the blues, alone and horny is his cave, surrounded by his musical time keeping machines, chiming and sighing in the breeze all year long, now clanging, now whispering. sometimes my life is more fantasy than action. even though all i say can be false. likely is, i guess. and what i do is the only reality. i can repeat that but i don’t know that i believe it. time to break into a song.

the cock
cock a doodle do
solidly planted in the grass
he raises himself
proud and superb
the cock
cock a doodle do
cock a doodle do,
answers the echo
and on his head
his large cockscomb
reddens like a poppy
cock a doodle do

i’ve been known to prevent people from sleeping with my frightening singing. too bad.

last night i got so blasted i have no memory of it. that’s a lie. i do that (just don’t tell anybody who has that irrational faith in my honest face). i only wish i had no memory of it. it’s hard to pretend, though, with the scattered debris all over the appartment. the boyfriend might have been snoring, but he was snoring halfway across town so i wouldn’t know. and i popped a few pills. no, but that makes for a nice image. i popped a few whatever. doesn’t matter to you, does it? the point is, the result is, the art is, that i have enough broken glass and terracotta, enough squirts of liquid on the walls and enough pieces of collectibles and jewelry here to last me all week. a week of sundays, cleaning like a mad philippino lady, promised a green card faster if she can clean like wonderwoman did if she wasn’t so busy dodging bullets with her wrists. or something. well it probably ain’t happening. well, the philippino lady might, although she might also be mexican or whatever else she pleases, but i sure as hell won’t be cleaning that up. i could pretend, but i’d end up on the phone all day complaining about all the cleaning i have to do, trying to avoid conceitedly the nature of such cleanup and the reasons that made it necessary. so i’d rather be honest (see what a good girl i am?) with myself and fess up to it: no way am i cleaning this mess. ever. my mess. no way.

at least this time i stayed clear of the dog feces littering the front lawn. at least this time i only massacred my own place, and left everyone else out of it. no blinking light on the phone this monring, the landlord kindly for frighteningly telling me of the upstairs guy’s complaints. even sober, honey, i figure that if you don’t mind your dog shitting all over the lawn, and that shit baking slowly in the august sun, well there’s only one explanation, and that is: you like shit. so have it on your door and on the hallway walls. revel in your (dog’s) shit, roll in your shit, and when you open your mouth, enjoy the fistful of shit i’m very ready to deposit on your swollen rabid tongue. i’ve got nothing against dogs. dogs are good. it’s stupid humans i can’t take. well, i can. just not for long and not all the time. and it enrages me to see an animal get stuck to a shitty (pun pun) master. mind you, it also annoys me to hear the dog’s nails go clinck clinck clinck above my head all day, but i twist that around and manage to hate the non cutter of toe nails human once again. i don’t mean to kid you, though: the problem has nothing to do with the dog. and everything to do with the shitbag neighbor. he’s been rather quiet, though, since the shit on door incident. not what i expected: he’s such a testosterony guy that i expected more hardship. but perhaps mr. landlord was right when he said i - get this! - scared the shit out of my neighbor! how appropriate.

but let’s forget the neighbor for a while and come back to what it is i’m really trying to forget. last night - that’s right, everything that ever happens to me always happens last night, but really there is only one night and i keep reliving it and recalling it and retelling it, last night this and last night that. i don’t know, it just happens - those nights start with a bottle of wine and finish in uglyville. i’m just happy when i’m alone and it happens. i can hear myself right now, and i sound like a whining werewolf: i don’t know what it is about me, i’m just glad when i don’t hurt anybody, i can’t predict the onset, only see the results… it’s pretty much it. except nobody bit me to begin with, a no extra bodily hair is involved (phew!).

i think what set me off last night was a combination of sappy tv commercial and side neighbors action. i was way past drunk already. way past the moment when the bottles and vials and pots should be sealed again and put away too. then this stupid stupid show on tv finally pauses (why i watch stupid shows i’ll never understand - sometimes the brain makes requests it is better to not question and go along with), and i sit there, idle and complacent, a stupid smile on my face even perhaps, and watch this dad taking such good care of his kids, and as the story evolves he helps with homework and cooks dinner and hugs them and whatever else that could make him endearing and sweet and oh what a good dad, and they end up kneeling on a tombstone, and of course it’s the mom’s, and by then it is clear that i’ve been taken in by one of those stupid church sponsored commercials urging everyone to be good (and therefore join the church). that was bad enough, but there’s a close-up on the tombstone and guess what, the mother wasn’t burried alone, she had another child with her - cut to flashbacks of a car accident in the rain at night (right, cause her being drunk on a sunday afternoon’s drive to the park would not convey the same message). that stupid detail, the added death, really annoyed me. i mean, i was being manipulated from the start (fucking church), but that was the little extra i couldn’t take. it made me feel stupid and used and launched a rambling rant about consumerism and religion and emotional blackmail. nobody was around to hear it really, but the wine bottle seemed rather impressed. at least that’s how i interpreted her silence.

and then the neighbors. the side ones, this time. their heating vent is connected to mine, clearly and solely for my eternal torment. i bet they can’t hear anything from my side. you know, because i’m such a good honest person. but on my side? ha. i can hear the baby turning in his crib, i can hear whether what they’re having for lunch is creamy or crunchy. and i can hear, believe me, at three in the morning when the baby wakes up and the dad uses his hard earned child psychology to yell at the baby. because we all know that the way to shut a baby up in the middle of the night is to scream at it. right. well i don,t know if it worked for him as a child, but his stubbornness is not paying off with his own offspring, and regularly, three, four times a week, the baby wakes up to be yelled at in the night. which in turn wakes up their older child. who screams. and gets screamed at. i’ve considered getting them all ear plugs for christmas, but i never acted on it - instead i spent an evening imagining what i would do to them if i could. i took notes, too. could always be useful, you never know.

last night it started with the mother. she was screaming at her sweet hubby (i’ve tried to imagine why in the world those two would have decided to mate, to no avail. but sometimes even when you know they were both better looking then, and the sex was good, it’s hard to believe it years later, so without having ever seen them happy, it has proved impossible for me to discover the why and the how). screaming about their lack of money. i’ve followed you here, she said, followed you for what? i used to have tons of money, i’d never go out without a thousand bucks in my pockets, and i left it all behind, and you haven’t been able to provide. my father begged me to stay at home, not to follow you to this crazy country, and i didn’t listen and i trusted you and i i wore armani and now i shop at walmart and do you know how it makes me feel and blah blah blah. a long uninterrupted spiel about her victimhood. well bravo sister.

sure, it gave me some insight on their situation. perhaps being a frustrated immigrant couple is not all the fun it’s cracked up to be. perhaps even they don’t enjoy the shit smell from the front lawn either. perhaps it is hard to go from being rich to having normality (and a screaming husband). but i just wanted her to shut up just the same. my stupid show was back on, and the only thing worse than a bad tv show is one that you can’t hear because of your neighbor’s screeching. i was getting more and more upset (did i mention the wine and its friends?). until i heard the blows. and realised if she had been screaming before, it wasn’t the loudest she could do.

from what i could hear, and that was pretty much everything (thank the universe for thin walls and air vents…), he started to hit her. beat her. slap her. punch her. and then the screaming cries came, followed by threats and more punching. and of course the two kids soon joined in, the baby wailing madly and the other one screaming stop stop stop stop (and then a sudden silence from that little voice). what do you do when that happens? most people will wish they didn’t have to get involved, will hope the situation will stop without an intervention, will turn the volume up on the television and whistle for a few minutes, before facing the facts, and calling 911. by then the neighbor woman could be dead - which if you’re as fed up with your neighbors as i am is not such a bad prospect - with her dead and him in jail, at least i’d have quiet. but that’s not a very christian thought. not that i care. anyway, by that point i was besides myself with a drug induced… let’s see, what is the opposite of stupor? let’s call it rage. i know that i yelled at the violent bastard through the air vent. i know he yelled back. and i have some vague notion that i eventually, after quite some time and a lot of yelling back and forth across the vent, scared the fuck out of him by talking trash and trashing my place - and by the looks of it, it’s very likely the jerk thought there were more than one of me in here. i somewhat remember an ambulance coming to see her (i recall a conversation with a 911 operator, but i can’t quite piece together when it was that i called). i don’t know if the ambulance took her (or the kid for that matter) or not, or if the cops took him away or not - i must have been passed out by the time they left. or so i imagine, because logically they would have wanted to talk to me. there are just some moments when even an elephant’s drum solo wouldn’t wake me up. and that’s one of the things i appreciate most about my lifestyle - the times when nothing can interfere and i can be sensorily deprived and be only in my head and live only what i see. fuck those cops, and fuck those neighbors - i was in a happy place, a black black place where no sound reaches my eyes and no light my skin. if anything else can truly be called happy, i have not encountered it.

i should really be cleaning. or at least put some shoes on so as not to step on broken glass. masochism is not a bad life choice, the way i look at it, but with the headache i’m sporting, i’d rather not add a shard of glass to my anatomy. plus, where would the novelty be? when i was a child i stepped on glass and felt it in slow motion entering my heel. it was green and thick, the bottom part of a wine bottle that had been broken before it was properly cleaned for reuse, to store some crappy do it yourself in the comfort of your own backyard and then get stuck drinking grape piss for the rest of the year type wine. i seem to only have memories of trauma and injuries from my childhood - which is strange considering that i’m an adult now, or so my passport says, and my hands are bruised and scratched, and my lip is swollen, and i have a nasty cut on my skull (it looked worse than it was, it turned out, once i had cleaned all the caked blood off) and i must have done it all by myself last night, but i have no recollection of it. i guess the brain gets trained to remember only what it will, after a while. and it has allowed my survival so far, so that might be an indication that i can trust it. anyway, all is now calm here and over there, as far as i can hear. even the fucking baby is quiet. maybe she’s one of the very few women who have enough survival instinct to get the fuck out at the first hint of spousal abuse. i doubt it though. i doubt she’s got anything remotely resembling a network or anybody to turn to.

a few years ago i would have gotten involved, would have brought her at least a helpline number or something, would have told her to call me or drop by, or would have offered to pay for the cabride to a shelter. a few years ago i wasn’t who i am now. it’s not that i don’t give a fuck (but i don’t) or that i fear for my own safety (a thought that would have crossed my mind a few years back). i just don’t care. i’ve been called bitter, but that doesn’t really encompass it. time to break into a song.

i have two eyes, so much the better
two ears, it is similar
two shoulders, it is funny
two arms, it’s okay
two buttocks - they know each other
two legs i think that I have
two hands, very well
two elbows - sulking
two hips - they balance
two feet to dance
two knees, it is all!

i don’t always make sense or try to. i was driving one day and i was tired and i could kill myself sleeping at the wheel and i had a passenger, somebody i loved but didn’t realize how much, and he’s the why i’ve since stopped caring for many things perhaps - or perhaps that’s giving me too little fucked up-ability, and he was tired too but for some reason we wouldn’t stop and i sang and i sang and i drove him nuts and then his heads exploded and i kept singing until the next exit, and i sang nonsense and praise, and i rolled him out and lay him by the side of the road, but nothing ever got the stench of the exploded head out of the car’s upholstery and when i sold it years later - months really - the buyer asked about it but i haven’t been able to smell anything since that day so really this is only hearsay.

 

chapter three.

i just spent an hour curled up on the hard wood floor, hugging my knees. i was cleaning up the mess, sweeping the glass shards away, picking up the broken pieces of a lamp and the shreds of a cushion i stabbed repeatedly, putting the dirty dishes that survived in the sink, cleaning the walls on which i had thrown various substances, from sticky to splashy. i was really into it, so when i came upon a couple of boxes that had remained in a corner, hidden behind a little table, i opened the first box and started sorting through it. it turned out most of the stuff in there was destined to be thrown out, recycled and given away. i mean, who needs three coffe grinders and two kettles? and when exactly am i going to fit again into those size four jeans? i found coloring books that i brought with me for the kids when i used to babysit. something i haven’t done in fifteen years. i used to be such a pack-rat. i try to be better now. in fact, i managed, without remorse, to dispose of the contents of the entire first box. didn’t even take me long either. next!

well, the other box was of a different nature. under the candles used for my baptism (which i got overturned - oh yeah you can do that officially and everything! - as soon as i came of age), the first pair of shoes my parents bought for me, the dress i was wearing on my first birthday pictures, there was a frame. a framed picture. i knew what it was even before i took it, but i couldn’t stop myself. it was my picture of bigby.

rewind. when i was little, i had an imaginary friend named bigby. he was my bestest buddy and my greatest ally. he and i would host talk shows on my little tape deck, would cut the hair on my dolls and apply permanent makeup (crayola didn’t make washable markers in those days, believe me), would hunt for clues of lost civilization under every rock in the forest. i would blab on and on about him to any adult who’d listen (there were few). i said i only remembered bad shit about my childhood, but it’s not quite true. i remember bigby too. it’s so easy for a child to create a believable other being: when you’re three, you are not that complex a person yourself, or at least you are not aware of your complexity, so creating a being that is just as complex as you perceive yourself to be is, precisely, child’s play. everybody happy.

bigby appeared in my stories when i was about three. i vaguely remember that, but i was also told and i’ve read my mother’s journal of my childhood, and i’ve read the psychologist’s report. about a year later - and this i remember - we took a picture in front of the house. my aunt took the picture, actuelly, while i was standing, in my pretty red dress with ruffles and ribbons (i’m gagging), in front of my parents, smiling for the occasion. fast forward to a few days later, when we got the pictures back. there we were, looking like a happy family in front of their pretty house, with the pretty ribbonned and ruffled daughter. but next to the little girl, there was a kind of halo. it was only a freaky lens flare, as i learned later. that’s not what i saw. i saw bigby, and i said so. it is hard for me to explain now, but at the time it made perfect sense, and i was convincing enough to freak out my parents. you see, that’s precisely how i had always pictured my bigby, my imaginary friend. so to see him “standing” there next to me was a dream come true.

my dad made fun of me, while my mother crossed herself and backed away. i was blabbing about bigby, showing him the picture (while my mother backed even further), and begging my parents to be able to keep it. i was told that i could, since it was a bad picture anyway, and we’d have to take another family portrait for whatever use this one was supposed to be for. (what they didn’t know was that the red dress had already suffered a… well, an accident. bigby and i and scisors ahad been kind of busy on it… and ribbons are so pretty, flowing in the wind from the top branches of a slender birch tree…) so i hugged the picture close to my chest and went to my room - i took out of a frame a picture of my grandmother (for some reason grandmothers think that what a child really wants in his or her room is a picture of a wrinkled adult) and replaced it by the family portrait, the only one that included my best buddy bigby.

time to clear the air. i find that sometimes tv is its own antidote. often i’ll get stuck with something stupid in my head, like that guy whose feet are too big for his bed, with raindrops falling on his head, and i can’t stop humming or singing on the inside and it drives me nuts. when that happens i often turn back to the good days of the friends sitcom, when phoebe used to sing such perls as “the cow in the meadow goes moo, then the farmer hits it on the head and grinds it up and that’s how we get hamburger” and “sometimes men love women, sometimes men love men, and then there are bisexuals, though some just say they’re kidding themselves”. it perks me up. and dries the insanely clingy raindrops that would otherwise keep falling on my head but that doesn’t mean my eyes will soon be turning red. okay, so sometimes my trick doesn’t work. so i think of a blue sky with just one cloud, and at every breath i blow the cloud a little further away until it vanishes at the edge of my vision. but then i think of pacman, and how the ghosts could just go out on one side to reappear on the other - the game screen was looped. and then my cloud reappears on the other side. do you have any idea how frustrating that can be? i’m so far from being zen. thinking about my childhood but avoiding hardships, i remember consumerist frustration. i was twelve before i got a barbie. that didn’t last long. i never had a little pony or a strawberry shortthing. there were some toys that were ubiquitous: everybody had them, but me. and it probably explains my empty pockets now and the rage of consumption that overwhelms me a few times a year. somehow you can rationalize it all you want but i still remember acutely how essential possessing those things was to me. without them i was half a child. in my own mind. looking back i can tell how ridiculous it was and is, and how easily kids get manipulated by shiny plastic and happy jingles, but because as an adult i’m necessarily not a child, seeing the mechanic and the strategy doesn’t quite make the manipulation any less powerful. my adult brain sees the industry’s game, and smiles a little at their evil brilliance. but there is a complete disconnection between that understanding of the strings, and the child i was, mesmerized by the jingling jangling fake jewels and easy bake ovens. the child still doesn’t see the strings. i kept bigby’s picture next to my bed for a year or two. it was my most prized possession. and even as i entered school bigby kept his place in my life - obviously, since he came to school with me. i was glad to have a friend to hang out with and play with, because all the strange children just made me mad. well, they did keep a certain distance after a while. after i broke a finger. i mean another kid’s finger. but i didn’t mean to, i swear. i just wanted the damn idiot off me. playing tag is one thing but if you physically restrict me, chances are you’ll pay the price. and it was true then, when boys were no bigger than me, and it’s true now but i had to work at it. anyway, the jerk grabbed me from behind, and he surprised me so i yanked his pinkie. hard. and then he yelled. loud. and i kicked him while he was down and i walked away. and after that the other children had a new respect for me, and bigby and i agreed that was just fine. then at some point - in fact it was at a point so precise i’d rather say at some point - i put bigby’s picture away in my childhood box, with the little pajamas and the old candles, under all the cards people i don’t know sent my parents at my birth, and there it has stayed since, through moves uncounted, storage and floods.
i don’t think about bigby anymore. he is now the kind of thing that i never think about, but then when i do it sort of rings a bell, and it feels half true, and then i go “oh yeah…” and mull over it for a few minutes, before taking the lasagna out of the oven or the clothes out of the drier. finding the picture again brought it all back in a more elaborate, clearer way. i’ve been hiding from what happened all my life, and now i’m paralyzed when it surfaces. well things have not yet changed. i’ll wipe my bloody tears (no really - the gash in my skull has reopened during the night, just a little, and now i have blood on my face, which the tears rehydrated) and put everything back in the box, bigby and all. i miss him. but what i really miss is those few years of happy innocent childhood. that’s another lie. i was probably never innocent. yet who knows. i feel so stupid to be so affected by childhood crap. as if that could explain everything, as if at some point one didn’t have to take charge and say, fine, i had fucked up parents (who didn’t?), and this is what they made me, but now i make myself and what i do will be my responsibility, my choice, my actions, my catastrophes.

time to change the topic. one of the things i hate most is being cold when i’m very tired and actually falling asleep in a place where i shouldn’t. like at work, when i worked. it would be after lunch, and my head would start nodding, but then shivers would wake me up. nod, shiver, nod, shiver, in a parade until recess, until the bell tolled for thee and me. and the yawns, so big i could put my foot in. and all i want when that happens is to curl up under the desk and sleep, and perhaps i’ll give a good scare to the portuguese cleaning lady when she comes in at night and wakes me with her vacuum cleaner, but perhaps in a few weeks we’ll both laugh about it. right. well i hate needing to sleep and being cold. i hate being kept awake because i’m cold. i also hate when my appendix bursts and nobody cares. and i hate not having a real solution for sinus congestion.

there are words i like and words i don’t. i like pun, bun, wiggle, jiggle, squirt, jelly, bong, gong and key. i hate plymouth (because i want to pronounce it ply-mouth). juggernaut, cosmetician and lavatory. and sometimes i can lay in bed and make lists until the wee hours or until i fall asleep, whichever happens last.

 

chapter four.

sometimes i have the feeling i’m letting life pass me by, looking at it and commenting on it rather than living it. i mean, i can imagine there are more fulfilling ways of spending one’s time than what i do. what i do… not much. i sleep, eat, fart, watch tv and movies, drink too much, take in too many drugs, and i write and i sing nonsense and i dance alone and i break things and i fight and i yell and i do things for no reason, or rather for a reason: the reason is there is no reason, if you get my meaning. sometimes i wonder what more there is or could be, and the answers i find around me make me want to vomit. work? giving my life meaning through work? give me a break. if i can work (see, pun pun) around having to work, i will. giving most of my life to some jerk boss who thinks he can replace me at any given point of the day? why? no really, why would i do that to myself? having to behave, to be polite to assholes, to be productive, to punch in… that is so not me. and finding another way of life, another way to define oneself? that was the ideal, and i must admit it sort of floundered. went crash in a big heap of car parts. i’m having difficulty thinking outside the box that made me. and being my own boss never really worked. if i’m at home, why would i work forsome jackass customer when i can scratch my ass and drink another beer. i’m wasting away, i guess. that’s what adults of my parents’ generation would say about me. but there’s a basic hope that they never instilled in us, in me anyway, or that died on its own. either way, the problem is i don’t believe. i don’t believe anything will get better, i don’t believe i’ll manage to have a pension when i’m old, i don’t believe what politicians, preachers, bosses or hoboes tell me. hell, i don’t believe anything i read or hear, and i don’t often believe what i say. that leaves me a little paranoid, sure. don’t mean they’re not after me, right? that leaves me alone too. well, there is the boyfriend, who drops by whenever convenient for both of us, which isn’t very often and that’s okay - we’re not the clingy type, and we have so very little in common except an undying attraction for the other’s skin. other than him, i don’t see that many people. well, i see just as well as you - i see people in stores and on the street and shit, but i don’t invite none of those fuckers home, and i certainly don’t want to know more about them than i can tell from one look. if you haven’t noticed, i’m not a people person. never was.

i wasn’t always that “bad”. i’m probably not, even now. i just like to sound tougher and meaner than i really am. why not. words are there to play with and to make fun of. words there are to terrify and to break. words for sorrow, words for pain, and words for blue skies through the tears. yeah my intentions are few and vague and my sources many and cheesy. tough luck.

i spent my teenage years trapped in a private prison. school they called it, but i felt trapped. oh it wasn’t the learning part that was hard, no - i can be a spunge when i decide to be, and when the teacher appeals to me somehow. again my problem was with people. surrounded by these rich kids who had seen it all and thought they knew it all and who knew, for the most part, where they would be ten, twenty years down the line, because daddy’s footsteps are so easy to follow, because the business needed new blood, because the doors just opened before their feet. contacts. plugs. well good for them. but i felt like i was human and they were something other, or else they were human and i was not. i still haven’t figured that one out.

i shouldn’t complain about my teen years. thought they were bleak and seemed to last forever. that school is where i toughened up, became able to self-sustain and self-assess. i spent years in my head - more years in my head. where else was i supposed to be? out there, in the physical world, my clothes didn’t fit the aura of money emanating from the walls and the designer school bags, my look was outdated or too wild, my opinions undervalued because coming from a nerd, my efforts invisible. i suffered from not fitting in, as do most kids in most school, i guess, or so we are told. i developed weird hang ups, weird theories that, it turned out, didn’t pan out in the “real” or after school life. like putting all those popular people on a pedestal, thinking of them as somehow genuinely superior. it took me years to understand that i wasn’t worth any less, isn’t that ridiculous? i guess it only goes to show how damaged i ended up being after years of banging my head on grey peeling walls. i thought i could never connect with the überbeings - why would they care about little old uninteresting me when they already have all these wonderful superpowered friends? years to figure out that deep down, everybody is lonely and in need, and that simply being there and offering friendship was usually enough to enter the circle of the chosen ones. not that this is always a good thing to do, as i learned later, again and again.

there were good times, though, and i probably don’t think of these quite often enough. at some point i did integrate a group of friends who, it turns out, were all misfits of sorts, and so we got along well together, as well as teenagers with the proverbial raging hormones could in such a situation. and i had fun. i had fun going to school while high on acid - best economics classes ever, if you catch my drift. and i had fun bringing booze to school for my lunch drink. and i had fun squeeking at the top of my voice, something that could have sounded very much like twinkle twinkle little star, only sung by fingernails on a blackboard. a blackboard. in schools nowadays they have white dry erase boards, not the blackboard and chalk of my youth. no more cleaning the board after class, no more coughing in the chalk dust in the corner. it doesn’t matter. change is good, and all that. but it’s another little sign that i’m entering an older generational thing, that soon i’ll be closer to people my parents’ age than to kids. i don’t know why that bums me out. i’ve never felt close to kids, even when i was one. and teenagers have scared me for as long as i can remember, and they did when i was one of them and they still do now. well not one teen sitting on the curb, but six or seven of them just hanging out on the sidewalk where i need to pass, sure, i get scared, i feel a twinge in the base of my spine, and my fight or flight response comes right under the surface, ready to issue a red alert battle cry that would shatter their ear drums and bring letters in my mailbox from all those little brats’ parents’ lawyers. can you sue somebody for an innate reaction of scaring the monster?

it’s hard to say who the monster is and why, though. hard to make somebody understand and see your own, just like it’s hard to accept somebody else’s monster. to you it may be a cute pet, but to them it is evil and powerful. or both perhaps. monsters fascinate me, but i keep that passion on a tight leash. it’s too easy for me to get hurt, orbitting around maniacs of various sorts. i do try to protect myself against pain - i can’t imagine how much of it i would feel if i didn’t protect myself. but i’m no rock, i’m no island, as the song doesn’t go. i just choose who has the right and the opportunity to hurt me, and then i reward them when they don’t. three strikes, you’re out.

i over analyze everything. every fucking little thing. i calculate how much pain you have made me feel, why, and what excuses or exonerating circumstances you could in all fairness use. then i give you another chance, or not. if you could open my skull you’d find huge databases full of eccentric formulas, calculating everything from what’s left in the food cupboard to where i left what at any given time, from the smallest gift i’ve ever been given by anyone to the ever morphing pros and cons to life, the universe and everything. and maybe it’s all that data gathering, organising, linking, that leaves me feeling inadequate at most times. because try as i might, i’m not a computer, i’m not a thinking filing machine, not even a tape recorder. and i don’t know exactly what the motivation is behind all the data gathering collecting organizing improving sorting. i guess that’s how religious people feel: they can’t explain why they do what they do and believe what they believe, other than there is something at their core that tells them this is the way for them, and they have little choice in following or not - it is their nature to.

i miss religion sometimes, as one can only miss what he or she has never had. i envy people who have faith. well, sometimes. i envy their ready-made answers where i find none, i envy the rituals they have that make thinking superfluous and yet somehow manage to lessen the hurt. i find religion empty, sure - just a bunch of lyrics and texts pasted together for the sunday gathering, with nobody listening or caring about anything but being there, usually to be seen more than to see. that’s unfair - there really are people who believe, and act accordingly. just very few. and they are the ones i envy. while at the same time i have no idea how they manage to suspend their disbelief that much. i just wish for the comforting words, the smell of incense and the sense of community. it’s all fake (well, not the incense…), but somehow if you decide to believe, it all makes sense, and you can be comforted and healed and feel the heat from your peers. it’s taking that first step though, saying “i know this can only be bullshit but it’ll do me good and i will obey and follow and believe”, that i’m just unable to do. i wouldn’t have made a good soldier, not even in god’s army.

i usually get pissed when i open the newspaper. and today again. it drives me nuts when the results of a big freaking scientific study come out, only to tell us what we already know, what common sense has told us for generations after generations. today, for example, in one news source, i learned that cats can suffer from stress. some big european university figured that out. not just that, but sources of feline stress include the arrival of a new family member or tension with another feline or a move. well, i’ll be. obviously the researcher who had proposed to study this has never had a cat. i could have told you what he’d find before the first drop of ink was wasted on that proposal! i could even have told you what signs to look for in a stressed cat, and how to help the cat feel better. doesn’t take a research assistant to figure it all out. or a research grant. just takes a bit of common sense, something most people seem required to check out before entering academia - or is it before entering any academic institution? sometimes i wonder. get a cat, love the cat, live with the cat, and you’ll figure out all that there is to know about their psychology. well, if you listen and pay attention. which obviously most people, pet owners or not, do not devote much time or attention to. devotion is underrated in the world i live in.

second story of the day: scientists, experts in their fields, have realized that if you have a healthy relationship at home, it’ll help you deal with stress at work! and that if you are stressed at work, you should get more support at home! well! if only anybody had thought of that before, imagine the cost savings on our health care system! imagine all the heart attacks and ulcers that could have been avoided! and all that time it seemed to us all more logical to opt for stress at home *and* stress at work! see - it’s things like these that make me vow never to buy a newspaper again. yet i will, of course. once in a while. once every time i forget why i vowed not to buy another one. once every time i forget how frustrated and upset all those printed words can make me. i over analyze that too, of course. news and my reaction to them. and over analyzing emotions can get tricky. or plain stupid.
in other news, i’ve always been fascinated by this. one witch had an itch and one witch had a twitch. which witch had the itch and which witch had the twitch? i think it’s a valid question. and it makes children’s eyes grow big and confused, and i like confusing children. some days are like a marathon and other are like the 100 meters. yet they last supposedly the same time, and i’m always exhausted at the end. well, when i give days an end. sometimes i can stay up and awake and just stare out the window. other nights i’ll spend cleaning the entire appartment. others still i spend playing a computer game while reading a book and watching infomercials on television. but for that i need to be in the mood. my sleep pattern is a little on the fucked up side, but i won’t apologize for that. i’m at war with my body, who would rather have a regular schedule and a healthy life style. screw that. i eat what i want whenever and sleep when there’s nothing else to do. sleep is a release, a relief, but it’s getting there that is difficult. i create my own insomnia by going over the day, and if that’s not enough, the week or the month, to find all the things i did wrong, or imperfectly, to mull them over, twist them, turn them, look at them upside down and inside out. it’s my personal torture, and i’ve become addicted to it. but it prevents me from sleeping, creating a dread and a sweaty unbearable feeling of uselessness. what goal this can fulfill, which need of mine this takes care of, i do not know. it is a tradition that has lasted as long as i have on this earth (and can consciously - how i hate that word - recall). it’s a nasty relationship, because i loathe the habit but i refuse to stop. an addiction, i said, and that’s what it is. i once seriously wished to train my body to sleep as little as possible - not three or four hours a day, but rather seven or eight a week, in one shot, so that i could restrict the insomnia and the torture causing it to once a week. like a sleep diet. i had no success there - my body refused to obey and revolted against this crime against nature, but not before giving me quite a few pleasantly surreal hallucinations and inspirations.

 

chapter five.

the boyfriend dropped by last night (i told you already: with me, everything happens last night, even if it’s a future event, even if it’s a sun rise). that was fun. i mean, that was distracting. somehow he knows how to make my brain stop on its spiral death trap of over heating. not all the time, but most of the time. it’s nice to have somebody with whom i can be in neutral gear, who won’t judge me too much if i’m acting crazy or boring, who can bring me down in the first instance and perk me up in the second. he brought echinacea tea because i’m getting a cold. isn’t that sweet? he’s trying to cure me with his fake hippie medicine! bah, i got to make fun of him for that, but i still took the tea. i like that he’s all lovey-dovey hippie-like, all herbal and bio and healthy. i like that he can cook yummy stuff, but he won’t complain if i feed him what i cook… er- order. i’m not too sure why such a new age health freak is doing with me, but it’s been a few years so i’ve stopped pondering the subject too often. and he got rather annoyed at me for bringing that up every week, so i said good enough and i decided i meant it. i think he’d just get bored with a hippie girl. they’d go to live shows and lie on the grass and smoke… grass, they’d make beed necklaces and spawn long haired easy going children with vague eyes, they’d eat bread that tastes like dry all bran cereal, they’d home school and go camping all summer, they’d have a llama and a sheep. well bravo. i guess if that’s what he wanted, he would have gone for it. instead, i’m guessing he likes how different i am from him. he’s all about caring, and i’m all about not. he’s organized and sweet and i’m sure you could eat off his colon. i’m the kind that shrugs a lot. where did i put my keys? i know where. but i don’t care enough to go get them so i’ll just stay here instead. in a way, that makes me a great girlfriend: he gets here, tired from long hours at work, and he apologizes that he doesn’t have the energy to take me out to dinner like he said he would. i shrug. i didn’t feel like getting dressed anyway. he smiles. see how easy things can be?

i think i could be in a relationship with most men. most women too i guess. as long as they get me, don’t force me to do crap, don’t want to change anything about me. i could be with anybody who likes me the way i like me, the way i am. looking for amibitious cheerleader? third door to your left. famous intellectuals with long list of prizes? fourth door to your right. drama queens? sorry, we’re just out, the last one took a wrong turn and plunged from the roof. last i heard she was a speck of dust on a windshield down below.

i’m not that hard to handle. i demand a huge amount of respect, and privacy and independance. but i offer the same. so it doesn’t really matter what kind of person i’m with - they could be into bungee jumping (do people still do that? it was such a ubiquitous term a few years ago, and now it’s become a metaphor more than a reality, seems to me… but then again, i don’t go out looking for places that offer it or reports from suicidal near misses. i get my own kicks my own way, and that usually doesn’t involve oversized elastic bands… then again…) and bank robberies (if they were good at it… i’m not the patient kind - you go to jail, you say bye bye honey), it wouldn’t really make a difference to me. hell, i think i could even date a businessman. although the suit and tie would probably make me laugh every time i saw them. i don’t understand the idea of ties. i’m not sure who does. they look stupid, they - from what every man i’ve ever met has told me - feel terrible, they have no use, and they’re too often ugly. it really puzzles me to see that ties have survived evolution. or tie wearers for that matter.

i can go on and on about things i don’t like. hell, i’ll give you a sample in a little while. but one thing i really really enjoy is thinking about hooloovoos. what is a hooloovoo, you ask? ah, now that’s a good question. and there is a simple answer: a hooloovoo is a super intelligent shade of the colour blue. simple. and so smart. because obviously blue is super intelligent. isn’t it? i usually don’t have to confess this, because to people who know or even meet me it is as obvious as the sun in the sky, but i love blue. oh, actually it has gone beyond love. beyond adoration and beyond devotion. i usually don’t spend any money on anything that is not blue. why bother? (unfortunately most money is not blue…) my entire wardrobe (granted i am no fashion crazy girly girl) is made up only of blue items. it’s something i started working on at least ten years ago, fed up with having to figure out what to wear in the morning, tired of getting dressed in the dark because my eyes want to pretend they’re still sleeping for a few more minutes, only to realize later that i was wearing mismatched items and looked like an actual scarecrow. i mean something that would actually scare crows, not clothes stuck on a stick and filled with hay. i like to simplify what i can, and simplifying my clothes has been good. now i can grope and grab anything in the not quite dirty enough for laundry pile, or pull on what’s hanging in the closet, and know that i’ll be wearing shades of blue, and shades of blue all work together, and i need not give this any other thought until i get undressed and have to decide what goes in the aforementioned pile and what goes in the slightly closer to the washing machine pile. and it goes beyond clothes. i had to paint my walls here white, because if i painted them blue as i wished, i’d probably bump into everything and anything. because both the everything and the anything are, well, blue. desks, chairs, sofas, fridge, dishes, tv. i love blue. i want my life to be as blue as the universe should be. and i’ve got the feeling that every time i get rid of something that is not blue and replace it by something blue, i get a little closer to the hooloovoo. blue is a way of life, man. blue is everything. blue is one of the only truths i know. blue is one of the only obsessions i have now, that i’ve had all my life. like i was born in a vacuum where blue was missing, and i have to spend my life filling the blue void. explain it as you will – i know i don’t – but i have blue in my gut.

now, as for things that i don’t like. oh boy. no. you know what? i’ll save that for another day. right now i don’t know if it’s the red wine or the sex i had during the night, but i feel mellow in my happily smooth mood. not a mood i encounter very often, so i’ll coast on it for a while. i’m all for exploring my dark side and whatever, but coasting on yummy is not something i spit on. and i must say the boyfriend is yummy. who knew that someone could know how to cook tofu properly *and* know how to make me reach new orgasmic heights?

right now (last night if you prefer) i’m sitting on a red towel. the only non blue towel in the house. it’s the perfect towel to drip on, any day of the month. and towels are the best items to drip on. i enjoy that part, the day after sex, when i’m still dripping with sperm, slowly and inconstantly for a few hours. i don’t take showers on those mornings: i revel in the smell of sex. i’m not much of a traveler, but if i was to give advice to anyone on their way anywhere, i’d say to bring a towel. a red one if you’re a woman. a red towel means never having to say no to any sex act humanly possible. and that’s what i called being prepared.

this has nothing to do with anything, but i thought of it. at one point i got my shoes stolen. i went to a friend’s house, and she had a cousin for a roommate (i’ve met quite a few people who have done that and it has always ended in disaster – having a friend for a roommate is risky enough, and you often end up without a friend or a place to stay, but usually, you can’t manage to get rid of family – there should be a guide out there for stupid (i.e. every) teenagers, to at least give them a chance to avoid that kind of stupid pitfalls). i was chatting with my friend (back then chatting meant actual talking back and forth, nothing to do with avatars and perverts – well, unless you included a pervert, voluntarily or not, in your chat) in her living room. i remember it had an old fireplace, an unusable fireplace that for some reason had never been taken out. instead, the landlords had had the brilliant idea of covering the hearth with a light grill. on the side, there was a light switch. i flicked it (i don’t know if you can resist a light switch on the middle of a wall, where it appears unlikely and lost, but i certainly can’t). it activated a sickly red light bulb, stuck by itself in the hearth! i never understood fake or gas fireplaces, but that beat them all!

anyway i was chatting with my friend about this and that (no, actually we were discussing my then soon to be ex-boyfriend, i was bawling and she was telling me what an asshole he was and why i was so much better than him and worth so much more and how i had to get back on top and kick him out and forget him, and of course i was defending him and clinging to the idea of a great couple that we really never impersonated but oh i so wished it would have happened. we were just being girlfriends. typical girlfriends. her cousin of a roommate came in, said hello i’m leaving for the weekend just picking up my stuff and crap and then i’m on my way. i went back to my whining, and we turned back to our hot tea (or was it booze? i don’t know – both are likely… let’s settle for an irish coffee (i’ll settle for an irish coffee but you know what i really need). the cousin took what she wanted, needed, said goodbye and left and we completely forgot about her. well, as much as we could. things were not all sane in the kingdom of denmark, and my friend was going nuts over her cousin’s weirdness, from vacuuming for twenty-four hours straight (including outside the windows, below zero temperature or no), to displaying books about strange, rare and gross diseases and afflictions that she believed she had or could have or should have - nobody was certain, all over the apartment. she also put everything that belonged to my friend back in her room because i wasn’t nice enough, expensive enough, designer-like enough. but whatever, like i said, you decide to live with family, you deal with your genetic shit.

it’s only a few hours later, when i was on my way home, that i realised my shoes were missing. i must admit that i often say my stuff has vanished, and that usually i find it again, but this time i wasn’t home, so i knew i hadn’t put the shoes in some remote closet where only i could find them. no, i’d left them there, on the little carpet in front (but inside) of the door. i can be weird sometimes, but i can also behave, and i do understand the non verbalized rules of common curtesy and use. shoes go on carpet next to door. even i can understand that. well, my shoes were gone. and it took a while, but we retraced our evening and recalled the wild card of a cousin. and true enough, she had taken my shoes. shoenapping! i was shoeless and away from home. which wasn’t such a drama. i just took a pair of my friend’s shoes and walked on the heels, tucked under my heels. but it was a surreal moments, and as such, i guess i’ll always somewhat cherish it.
another “thing” i like is fish. i have blue fish, that swim above blue rocks. they keep me busy. ha! not, actually quite the contrary. they keep my mind from busying itself with crappy thoughts and guilt and revenge plans. i stare at them and i stare and stare and become a fish zombie, and i bet my blood pressure in those moments goes back to what it shoud be. a song? why not.

fish wiggle
fish splash
fish live in water
at the bottom of the lake
they go flic flac
on their belly and on their back
in the river bed
there is no light
the fish see clearly in water
in the immense river
all the fish dance
and pass under the boats
in the green sea
they take a quick dip
oh yeah that’s good weather
fish wiggle
fish splash
fish live in water

i thought of something (when? last night, of course!). i’m thinking i should start my own religion. i have what it takes: a name for me (i.e. the divinity and prophet), which is the great hooloovoo, a message i would like to propagate to the uneducated unenlightened masses (blue is the best – not just color but concept, warmth, and overall goal to achieve – oh, and also, the great hooloovoo should be revered above all else), greed, time and i like to make up nonsensical songs and jingles. oh, and also, i don’t like people all that much. i think i can make a good case for myself as a new found, reborn religious figure, deity and leader. i’ll be nice, and ask only for five percent of my members’ income. although the more i think of it, the clearer it becomes: cults need to ask for a lot of money, because as a rule the people they draw in are not earning millions… and what am i going to do with a tiny fraction of my disciples’ minimum wages? i’ll either raise the price or send them to bring back more sheep to heal and enlighten. perhaps they’d start at twenty percent of their salary, dropping five percent for each new recruit they bring who joins and starts at twenty… this is all too easy! i knew i had a mastermind, but i just hadn’t found my (religious) calling… until now!

now i’ll need to focus on a costume (blue, of course). i’m thinking the old long robe and long cape can never be overdone. with a hood to cover my face. or should i have a crown, set with sapphires, instead? and we will serve blueberries and drink blueberry sacrificial wine. my devotees will wear jeans and have blue jays as pets and will dye their hair blue in my honor. the membership kit will come with blue contact lenses and a vial of methylene blue to dye their skin for special ceremonies. somehow a football fan painted face does not appeal as much to me. or maybe it’s the fat belly, frostbit skin and hollering that i associate with that image that turn me off? nevertheless, i’ll go for the dying. that way i can take my followers for a swim in some blue big water.

you know what though? that sounds like a lot of work. planning and reaching out and stuff… it’s just not for me. i refuse to even think of what the boyfriend would say. not that i listen to him whenever he dares disagree with me, but still, that likely would be more than he could handle. no, what i need before i get any further on this road, is a good, faithful, subservient and efficient lieutenant. we’ll call him or her a minister.

i’d need a good mystery. i’ll base it on the number five. ooh, i should have five hooloovoo associates. or four, plus me. i’ll be the center and they can be the corners of my blue square. perhaps i can steal – er – modify a few hymns i was forced to learn in my youth? i’ll start with catholic crap, and find my way to remoter (possibly more interesting lyrics).

take this bread, great hooloovoo, take this bread
may this bread become your body
may this bread become your body.

take this wine, great hooloovoo, take this wine
may this wine become your blood
may this wine become your blood.

hmmm. that’s not perfect. first, the idea of blue bread is not very appealing. and perhaps transubstantiation is something to leave to more experienced self-proclaimed gurus? i like the bit about the wine, though. it’s easy to turn my blood into wine, i just need a lot of wine…perhaps i could have a scientific division, that investigates how best to transform wine into blood and vice versa. it sounds cryptic and useless enough for cult devotees to open wide their empty eyes and raise their heads high and gasp into the blue light with the certainty that something, they don’t know what, but something, something wonderful is about to happen, and it is all because of the great hooloovoo’s endeavor. yeah, i like that.

hi, i’m tim choate, who played zathras on babylon 5. i’m dead, and i approved this chapter.

 

chapter six.

well the echinacea tea did nothing. not that i was hoping it to. but today i’m actually sick and all i feel like doing is moaning and complaining. the boyfriend left me with a full fridge – he brought tons of pre-cooked meals, that he cooked, just because he knew my refrigerator was empty and i’d rather not eat that go out and drag my sorry carcass to the grocery store. so i have tofu pasta and fake meat stuff and carrot juice and whatever else. i’m not complaining. i’m wondering what i did to deserve such a nice guy taking care of me like that. not many men could pull off being this caring with me: i’d be afraid they’re getting clingy and i’d push them away. i guess he knows how to dose it well: only smothering me with attention when i’m too out of it to realize what he’s doing, or too weak to stop him. and really, who doesn’t want a mommy substitute when stricken with a stupid flu cold crap virus?

so i’m eating healthy and inhaling the eucalyptus he put in the humidifier, although i can’t smell anything. i’d probably feel better if i was pumped up full of meds. or at least full of sweet sweet codeine. had a doctor prescribe a syrup filled with codeine at one point and i spent the entire weekend in bed, drooling perhaps but happy as a clam, if clams really are as happy as we assume them to be, that is. it was a revelation. with angels singing and harp music coming out of nowhere, if you’ll believe it. an “ahhhh” moment of bliss. my brain is always running on overdrive, not that i’m so smart, i’m not saying my brain is spewing improvements on the theory of relativity, no, my brain is more about shitting on my personality and destroying whatever i’ve managed to build since our last conversation, but it’s always there, always active, always chattering and buzzing and clicking. and codeine, along with many other substances it turns out, can turn my brain into mush, can stop the inner dialogue and leave me a helpless child, but even better, because a child knows only his universe, whereas i’m making a conscious decision to go back to the feeling of non thinking, and i know how much better off i am. i’m a drooling giggling buddha in a bed.

i’m out of codeine now, and the boyfriend cannot get me more. i’ll have someone else drop by and bring along a few things to help me get through this stupid stupid virus. i can hear the boyfriend still, saying how i have to rest and be normal for a while if i don’t want this to stick around, and i have to eat well and take care of my body and not smoke and not take drugs or at least not abuse anything, and then my general health will improve and i won’t be as susceptible to all the viruses flying about and how about a glass of milk honey i never see you drink milk and you need calcium for your bones and this and that and blah blah blah. that was last night, a long time ago. he doesn’t repeat those things anymore. he doesn’t even sigh. i don’t tell him about every little symptom either. no point: he gets more upset than i. i don’t get upset, i get down right whiny. i hate being sick, just like anybody else. but i probably complain more than most. i can stand sharp pain, any sharp pain, any time. i can take a fist in the stomach and only wince. i can get an uppercut and only shed a few silent tears. i can take a beating and get up to beat the beater. but being congested? it drives me nuts. headaches too. the throbbing, the hours of throbbing, the dull but constant oh so constant pain. i’ve been stabbed before. i broke an ankle. i had my forearm broken in two places. i’ve had appendicitis. i’ve had kidney stones and i’ve had a fractured jaw. well i took all that better than i take any stupid cold virus, any idiotic flu bug. give me an emergency and i can react. give me fear and i will become cold and driven and i will take the best action possible, because i’m at my best when i feel that my life is in my hands and in mine only, and my actions will determine whether i live or die. but this? having to sleep propped up because otherwise i’ll choke on my own mucus and cough without end? having to keep a kleenex under my nose if i put my head to the side, because i really want to sleep and yet i’m dripping watery crap? argh. kill me, kill me now.

and i’m cold too. it’s not cold here, but i’m cold in my bones. and i hate being cold. i’m wrapped in blankets and they don’t really help and i ran the shower with hot water to bring some humidity into this place so at least maybe my throat would get better, and i’m wearing layers of comfy clothes, or at least clothes i usually find comfortable but right now they feel itchy and i’m annoyed at everything, including myself for existing and you for being you. there’s no use: i’m just not a good sick person. i hope that i’m never really sick, hospital sick. because i would never be a patient patient, and i sure as hell wouldn’t have the right attitude. i’d end up being deserted by all the doctors, and with only the evil nurse to wipe me clean. hospitals are nothing to laugh at, really. they are a frightening disease-ridden place and i’d rather die at home that have to spend weeks eating the poisoned food and listening to the poisoned tongues. perhaps i should enquire about a morphine home delivery stratagem, so i can die here (not now, i’m not that much of a drama queen, i know what i have is only a cold) and still die in peace. because when i think about it, the only reason i can see for people going to hospitals voluntarily is the pain relieving drugs. you sure as hell don’t go there for the company.

i hate doctors. i hate clowns too, but that is probably besides the particular topic… although sometimes if you’re not careful you can walk through the children’s ward and come face to face with a colorfully painted antichrist demon who’ll squirt water at you and go flap flapping away (one hopes) in his big ugly shoes – and if that happens, just run the other way, don’t do what i do and start screaming demon! demon! kill the demon! while jumping at the clown’s throat. even though they look and feel and smell like only a demon would, it turns out that sometimes clowns take over a human and imprison him (or her! it even happens to women!), choke him and take his place in life. of course, then it is merciful to jump at them and release the human from the clown’s fury, but then you want to hold off on the jugular bite, to avoid killing the human along with the beast. although if you ask me the human inside the clown is just as guilty for having allowed such a beast to take possession of him, it was later revealed that the courts do not agree with me. and killing the clown beast will only land you a longer stay in the hospital. you’ll get to discover a whole new wing, where you’ll realize that the rest of the hospital walls seem freshly painted by comparison, and the other nurses, angels. you’ll discover that some drugs are very very… very good, and that some just turn you into a useless zombie, without even the fun of being aware that you’re a zombie. frightening substances, those. you’ll meet people who are quite a lot more fucked up that you, and yet you understand where they’re coming from. the terrifying part is that you know exactly where they’re headed too, and nobody will believe listen hear. you’re in the crazy house you must be crazy and then the accidents will start happening and they’ll all turn to you, all the white shirts will turn to you and assume you had something to do with it because you predicted it, but no, you only paid attention to a few other patients and you shouldn’t have because white shirts don’t want their authority challenged and now you’re in for the zombie suit if you’re lucky, the zombie room if you’re not. and in the zombie room you can see clowns approaching from all sides. you know there are walls but somehow the clowns don’t heed them, they go through, like you go through air, and they advance, coming closer, getting closer, until just before they touch you, you scream a horrible scream and an orderly opens the door and he screams too, as you scoop out your eye ball out of your skull and throw it at his head, here, you take this, you take it and you see the clowns too because i can’t be alone seeing them anymore i can’t take it and let me out you fucking clown sucker. and he screams and the clowns vanish and you finally sit down on the floor and there is wet hot blood bubbling from your eye socket to the ground and then more people come but at least they’re not clowns and you feel a needle or perhaps not even but you hear them vaguely, as if through a thick layer of cotton, and you figure out that they’ll sedate you first, before taking care of your eye or of your bleeding fingernails, where you clawed at the walls in terror, trying to escape the clown visions. you close your eye and enter a dream world of vague shapes and sounds, all muted, all soft and imprecise. when you wake up you vaguely understand that it can all be blamed on a bad cocktail of pills. turns out the little pink ones and the big gray ones should not be given with the green injections, at least not to people who have a history of psychotic trouble, and they make you sign papers and you sign because you know you could sue their asses off but really at the end of that line of signatures there is freedom and bandages and a prescription for morphine, but you can get that from your local pharmacist because you’re going home. you’ve become a medical error and they want to sweep you under the rug and forget that you ever existed. your eye is gone but you feel empowered and it was the left one and you never liked it as much as the right one anyway, and who needs perspective and hey now that you think of it perhaps you can hold off on that one signature and there you go, they’re throwing money your way, and perhaps you won’t even have to work again wouldn’t that be sweet? and as you walk out of the office you hide a drug compendium under your jacket. and as the cab they paid for takes you home, you hum gently, as you let your head rest on the wet window, and you inhale this smell of wet pavement, mixed with the driver’s tobacco smell and the foreign cooking smell that seems to emanate of the old, worn, fabric cushy seats.

i believe my point was to say i hate doctors. well i do, and perhaps this explains that. in any case i need to be so sick i’m unconscious before i can go see a doctor. or rather, before anybody manages to make a doctor see me, cause i certainly don’t go of my own, and i certainly have to desire to look at a doctor. fucking prick bastards. i don’t trust them. i’d sooner trust a veterinarian, and even they are mostly pill pushers. not that i mind pill pushing. but i want a choice in the matter. i want to pick the pills, i want to know what they can do before i pop them, and i don’t want to be in any kind of situation where i can be medicate against my will. i don’t care if it’s for my own good. the last time a doctor injected stuff in me for my own good i ended up scared literally shitless, and all they do is open the little blind on the little window of the little door leading to the little padded room and take notes. oh boy do they take notes. what i drink, what i eat, who i speak to and what i say and on what tone. what i refuse to wear, how often i take a shit, how often i pee and where, how many showers i’m allowed to take, what the doctor said is the maximum restraint they can use on me and for how long and who gets to decide when that’s going to be. so yeah, i don’t trust doctors.

i dated one, once, way before i had reasons to justify my hatred. i had to stop seeing him after a few dates because he was creeping me out. he kept looking at my arms, trying to make my veins pop out, because it despaired him that he couldn’t see my veins, and therefore couldn’t inject me with anything easily. apparently he got off on seeing nice juicy veins into which it would be easy to plunge anything. well that was weird enough. i was afraid to fall asleep next to him and wake up hooked up to some huge machine, my blood being pumped out and replaced by some motor oil (the motor oil is because it seemed rather obvious to me that he treated his new car with a lot more respect than he did me – seems only logical that if his infatuation for me had gone up a notch he would have wanted me, too, to have superior motor oil going through my pipes). hell, i was afraid he’d slip something into my drink to make me sleep and have his way with me. which, honestly, would have been the only way for him to get laid. by me anyway. i’m sure there’s tons of little bimbos out there who are ready to get on their knees for the six figure income and the social status of being a doctor’s wife. well good for them, but i’d rather lock their hubby in a box and shove swords through it.

when i think about it, all the years between now and before have melted together in some shapeless year goo, and i don’t know for sure what happened when and why and how. my childhood, yeah, i know the outline, i can tell about what age i was when this or that happened. teen years, still not so bad - the grades help, i guess. oh yeah, when that happened i was in ninth grade, so that would mean i was… yeah, okay. but after school? it’s all one long year of years. i don’t know how long it’s been since i moved here, i don’t know how long i stayed in the apartment before this one. i don’t know how old i was when i dumped the doctor, or when i had the affair with the cute but older, sexy but broke writer. with him it was purely sexual, although it made me laugh my head off when he said “you like my penis, don’t you? say you like it!”. oh please. i can suck your penis, i can lick your penis, i can stroke and kiss and squeeze and take it in, this way and that. i can rub various substances on your penis, i can squish it with my mystery orgasm muscles. but like it? tell you, “oh honey, i so adore your penis!, it’s the most beautiful penis in the world”? ha. hahahahahaha. no way. too funny. like women care about penises. i mean, i do, in the sense that i may or may not derive pleasure from the said appendage, but to find it pretty? better looking than another one? wow. whatever you need to believe to get it up, honey. i for one do not need compliments on the freshness of the color of my labia. although to get one would make me laugh for a while, and that would not be a bad thing per se. in any case, the writer was a funny guy. i ended it one night, because i’d gone to his place for sex - that’s all we did - and we ended up watching a horribly long movie before having sex. and then, get this, he wanted to cuddle. oh boy. that was not the agreement i had entered into. still, i didn’t want to hurt his feelings, or lose a good source of lay. but even as he slept, he clutched on to me, he curled up and snatched at me. well, sorry boy, i ain’t your mamma. i got dressed and left. he woke up, saw me to the door, didn’t say much. i think we both knew we’d passed a line, and there was no going back. never saw him again. but worse, i barely ever thought of him again, except for his need to be told he had a gorgeous penis, and that i oh so adored it.

thinking back, i’ve had all kinds of men in my life. none quite like the current boyfriend, and that’s probably his ace in the hole as they say in america. there was one, for a few months, who was supposedly a rebel. not that being a rebel required the extra two hundred pounds of flesh he carried around. or that a rebel can’t have hair or nice teeth or at least a winning personality. and i don’t think a gait is a prerequisite either. i file that guy under “what were you thinking, girl”, as did most people who ever met him, i guess. he wasn’t the kind who wanted to be told about the beauty of his organ, no - what he wanted was to slap me on the ass and call me a bitch while going at it. the first time he did it, i exploded. i disengaged, and rolled around, and could barely look at him. i shook with laughter. i couldn’t believe that his big turn on was to belittle me insult me slap me. well it was. and i learned that well before i finally showed him the door and he finally took it for good. i guess i only started being violent myself after he had been history for a while, or we two would have been in fights worthy of a concept album. he threw stuff at me, including his fists. he never hurt me though - even then i had my limits. but he tried and succeeded at making me miserable. not that i hold a grudge - i can see easily and coldly now that he was just a poor sap, weak and witless, and he was trying to bring me down to his level and shed tears of rage when he found that he couldn’t. i’m not very willing to participate in my own downfall. not unless i get to decide the time and the place.

what would you do for a klondike bar, i sing to the boyfriend sometimes. he always say “not much, i don’t really like klondike bars”, and that has always seemed to me a lot more sane than any other answer, televised or not. that’s why i like my man: he’s full of sanity. and full of bullshit at other times. i guess he’s a pleasant mix of the two, and that’s what i need. that, and another pair of lungs, and new sinuses. clean sinuses. the kind that never get congested, full of phlegm and unknown brown substances. a new nose to go with that please, because mine if chafed and unhappy. i wish i could remove my sinuses and steep them in hot water for the night (maybe on a coffee mug heater thing), and put them back, all clean and relaxed and comfortable. hell, while we’re at it, i’d like removable arms, because when i lie in bed with the boyfriend, one of us always ends up with one arm too many, one that needs to get tucked under (and ends up bloodless and painful) or folded around or just sawed off. a removable limb would prevent the potentially hazardous loss of blood - especially in bed: i don’t want blood squirting everywhere if we can avoid it with just one armectomy surgery or two. seriously, i don’t know who decides what gets researched and what doesn’t, but clearly those scientists don’t know what they’re doing, and they don’t know what the people truly want. the people want removable parts and self cleansing sinuses. oh, and you know that bepto-pismol add, where the pink goo goes down the esophagus and coats everything in a nice thick pink layer of ease? well i want them to invent a liquid that actually coats like that and makes you feel like the tv commercial makes you think you’ll feel. they’ve got quite a way to go (short of telling us to drink melted candle wax). and i want that same type of liquid to coat my harsh dry scratchy throat.

i am the one white cat of queen beruthiel, and i approve the first third of this novel.

 

 

chapter seven.

i don’t read instructions. never have. and yet i’ve assembled more furniture that you’d believe. i’m just good at it i guess. but i’ve never read the instructions, they only slow me down. how very masculine of me. except that men tend to get pissed rather quickly, and they get so upset when they think they’re done and they still have two or three parts in hand, and they have no clue where this or that fits in or on or what these things are supposed to be and do. they curse a lot too. not me. i’m patient with inanimate objects. and i come in and i take the extra parts and i re-assemble and the men just stand there with their jaws dropped, or they just walk away frustrated, thinking i’ll never get it done if they weren’t able to. well i have a special smile for those times. and they tend not to like it, either.

the boyfriend was out of town this weekend. gone to see his insane family. i’m lucky – i don’t have to go. and i haven’t had to go in a long while. it’s just easier: they say i’m insane, and i say they’re insane. i don’t live in the same era, universe or dimension as his family. and who needs in-laws anyway? it’s the same as your own family, the aura of guilt, the sense of unsaid expectations, the lies, the hypocrisy, the silences, the fakeness of it all. just like your own family, except that the decades of history are beyond your grasp. you’ll never know all there is to know, the why and the because, and they don’t want you to know, but they’ll take you as a silent witness, they’ll ask and expect you to take their side, even when they don’t tell you what it’s all about. they want you there, smiling and bowing and polite, and that’s it. who you are, what makes you tick, they don’t want to know – in fact, you shouldn’t tell them, as they’ll only use it against you. if you can, send a cardboard cutout of yourself to any in-laws gathering: the cutout can’t do worse that you would.

you can go there for years, be told you’re a member of the family (don’t believe it for a second – if the boyfriend bolts, they’ll change their phone numbers if they have to, just so they can cut you off as quickly and painlessly for them as possible), and you’ll never really know what’s going on, the hatred, the sarcasm, the superiority complex, the infidelities, the lies, the family secrets, the history. they want to be perfect and they want you to think they are and they want you to be perfect and they expect their son is perfect. well good for them.

you can sit there for hours and hours and what do you know, every few minutes they’ll mention his ex-girlfriend, the one who was so pretty, so nice, so sweet, the one that everybody thought was the one, and i wonder why it didn’t work out, perhaps they didn’t give it all they had, perhaps they should have worked at it some more. and what do you know, the ex in question called last week, and what a chat we had, what a fun person she is, respectful and yet full of energy, and what do you know, she’s single again. and she’s done so much for herself. and she trains four times a week now, did you know? and she gave me her famous triple chocolate cake recipe and i made it and that’s what we’re having for dessert.

and you excuse yourself to go to the washroom while they keep going on and on about her, and walking by, you see her picture, right there on the mantel piece. it’s been two years and they never took it down. and there’s a picture of the boyfriend in the bath when he was a baby and here he is graduating and here he is with his new car and oh, if you more the picture with the car a little to the side, from behind the bath picture, well there you are.

nothing ever really happened. i just feel claustrophobic there. judged. well, that’s not even a feeling, it’s a fact. they judge. they judge him too, but he’s one of theirs, so they expect him to come around eventually. the mother told me, as if in confidence, in a whisper, i think he still has feelings for the ex. right. what he was expressing wasn’t desperation or shame that his family would treat me like shit, it was “feelings”. right.

strangely enough, i was raised to be treated like a piece of shit, so i should like this. but i don’t. they remind me so much of all that has gone wrong in my little life that i want them all to face the music and pay for what others have done. no, that’s not even true. if they just paid for what they have done and do, i’d be satisfied. really. i’m not good at pretending. i have no respect for hypocrites, and i refuse to play their game. well that doesn’t make it easy to have happy friendly relations with in-laws. i called them on their bullshit. the mother would try to guilt-trip us for having gone shopping instead of being at home with her chopping peppers and shredding cheese for the dinner she decided to have, and she invited seventeen people to. but when we left, did she mention she needed help? no. everything was well, and we could do what we wanted. yet we come back, and who knows who pissed on her parade, but now she’s a martyr, doing everything by herself while we selfishly went away for a couple of hours. at first i only smiled and chopped her fucking vegetables, all the while being told my pieces were too thin or too coarse or not triangular enough. and then i stopped caring. that was a good period. because soon thereafter, sensing that she was losing her grip, she came back with a lot heavier guilt-tripping, and i have my limits, even when i promise the boyfriend i’ll behave, and on at least two occasions i ended up storming out of there, and i spent the evening in random bars and the night in sleazy motels. i’d come back the next day to pick up the boyfriend, and they were all going on and on about how we should stay for brunch, come one, we’ve barely seen you, why don’t you leave just a little bit later. nothing about me storming out. and certainly nothing about the fact that we have hours of travel to get back to our town. they don’t care about that. they just want to stretch their time with their son. enough to lie to get him to go, to stay, or not to go home just yet. that we have shit to do at home is not their problem, and even if i’m having gastric problems and need my own doctor right fucking now and hours of road lie between me and him (yeah okay i have a specialist i don’t want to kill – well i had to, until he, well, died).

now that i’m talking about his family, the words escape me. it’s like if i don’t say anything about the worse shit, it never happened, and i don’t have to reopen wounds to pick at them and discuss them endlessly. but really it makes them sound just normal and me crazy. great. well you’ll have to trust me, they’re untrustworthy, and they’ll backstab anybody if they find an advantage to it. even their son and brother. me… i’m nothing to them. a problem their son has encountered on the road. kind of like he stepped on a big wad of gum on a sunny sidewalk, and now he’s stuck with it for a while, but eventually it’ll just go away and everybody will just forget the episode and go on with their lives. they are energy suckers and love bandits. they manipulate until you give up. except that i’m one tough cookie when it comes to manipulation. i’ve been trained by the best, and now i can smell emotional blackmail a mile off.

so the boyfriend was gone all weekend, dealing with them as he can. he avoids seeing them now too. says i revealed them for what they are. impressive how blind human beings can be sometimes. but i didn’t say anything bad about them, i just exposed them by letting them talk and go behind my back and attempt to manipulate him and i. anyway, he still goes a couple of times a year, and this weekend was one like that.

and now, you ask, why was i talking about not reading instructions? well, my dear, because i also do not care much for the directions on a medication label either. and i spent the entire weekend in bed, buzzed out of my skull. i wanted to get rid of my stupid cold so i can stop talking and thinking about it, and what do you know, they make those snazzy cough syrup potions for night-time, and they’re supposed to be strong enough to knock down a thai elephant if you take a big enough quantity (and really it’s a skill test because those liquids are putrid). so i thought i’d give that a try. i poured myself a glass. i assume that’s more than recommended (the little plastic medicine cup that came on the bottle was a hint), but drinking cola has gotten me used to the idea that one bottle is one portion (it’s true – when they changed the format of cola cans nobody started keeping the extra third in the fridge for later, we just decided that as of that moment, one serving was that newly blown up size!), and i drank it all. quickly, because it tastes horrible. and i’ve spent forty hours sleeping in the last forty-eight. well, if you call that sleeping. i laid in bed sweating like crazy, having weird dreams i couldn’t get out of – felt like i was really a wad of chewing gum, because i seemed to stick to everything and reality was distorted. again, dreams of people chasing me. a long saga about running away, but the man right there is looking for me, so perhaps if i look away and hide my face with my hood he won’t see me, and oh, there he is boarding the train and perhaps i’ve lost him, but he looks back, and in any case he’s going in the same direction i need to go, so perhaps i’m thinking i can stop in that ghost town that was shut down in the middle of the eighties, except really it was a real town and it’s been burned to the ground and where would i hide there and what would i eat and winter is coming and i’m already so cold and there is no hope for me in these woods but civilization will be the end of me, and they’ll find me and i’m doomed.

once in a while i’d wake up. my mouth felt as if an army of rubber spiders had been covering every surface with a thick web, preventing my tongue from ever touching my palate, teeth or cheeks ever again. instead of flesh, i could feel this cottony layer of goo, viscous and thick. my eyes couldn’t focus – at one point i picked up a magazine and tried to read, but i was seeing green spots at random intervals. television was straining my brain power. so i’d go back to bed for a few more hours.

and that takes me to tonight. i’m slowly coming out of the haze. i’ve had food again. man, i was so hungry when i was first able to wonder whether i was or no. but i had a bagel with some fake meat thing the boyfriend left me, and that was more than enough and i reached nausea quickly. the boyfriend called on his way home. wanted to come over. i said no. he’d freak if he saw the apartment now. there’s kleenex everywhere, and trash on the floor, and blankets all over, because i’d just carry some around with me so i could lie down and sleep whenever the need became more than i could tame. and i don’t have what it takes to clean it all up for now. i think i’ll go sleep a little bit more. but you know, i haven’t coughed or sneezed in six hours. well, that i know of (i haven’t yet set up a camera above my bed to see if i’m sick during my sleep…). so i think i beat this thing. radioactive cough syrup beats echinacea’s ass any day.

chapter eight.

i wish i had breakfast-like food. not a craving i get often - usually i can’t eat within three or four hours of getting up, so that can often take me to the middle of the afternoon. but right now, i could eat over sweetened froot loops, or a big plate of bacon and eggs with those little breakfast sausages that are full of msg but the taste is worth it, and perhaps some home made hash browns. or a gross clown breakfast (at the drive through you take fewer chances of coming face to face with the clown, did you know?). seriously, with a bacon mcmuffin or something. that stuff is so gross and toxic that it wakes me up and does the breakfast job. all i have to do is get dressed, and walk to the corner. well, the second corner. i won’t. i’ll have whatever leftovers i have in the fridge and the cupboard. i’m not too sure why - it feels like i’m denying myself pleasure or the fulfillment of a wish that would satisfy me. but on the other hand, i really am lazy. and i can justify not spending money. *sigh*

my sister called. she’s nice and all, but sometimes i wish she’d just croak. see, i have patience with things, but no patience with humans. i’m never sure of why she’s calling. this time she went on and on about my nephew, her son. he’s nine years old and a darling little devil. i mean that. i adore him, but he’s a hell raiser if there ever was one. and i’d be like him too, or worse most likely, if i was being raised by my sister. uh - well said like that it sounds a whole lot more red-necky than i intended. the nephew is cool. he likes me and i like him, easy enough. that, and he’s usually not left alone with me, so he’s no responsibility - i can just have fun with him and not care about his schedule or the color his pants have turned to. i’m not the responsible adult my sister would like me to be, but at least i’m a cool companion for her son once in a while. and when she does leave him with me, it’s usually one of those times she uses the expression “i have no other choice”, which i really hate because it’s always bullshit. mark my words: i have no choice is always bullshit, no matter who says it or when. if you throw yourself in a fire rather than plunge 2 kilometers to your death, you had a choice: you chose the fire. if you leave your kid with me when your babysitter has cancelled on you at the last minute, you have the choice of staying home and missing out on your evening of friendly bar hopping. if you make him miss his karate lesson, don’t tell him you didn’t have a choice: you had a choice, you just happened to choose hosting a five service dinner on the same weeknight your kid had a class (you signed him up for), and you’d rather have everything ready for your party than take the kid to his class. you had a choice.

anyway, on those nights when she doesn’t have a choice, the nephew and i pig out on all sorts of food that is forbidden for either or both of us. i slacken all the health rules accidents and procedures have laid on me in the last several years, and he asks me to buy all the junk his mom won’t allow in the house. we put cushions on the floor and we rent crazy movies, the kind with a lot of stupid car chases, and horror movies with zombies and pestilent monsters. we sleep late and eat more junk for breakfast. then we hide all evidence in a special drawer, and try to act normally enough so that when his mom opens the door we can be believable in our “us? nothing!” look. it’s fun. but it doesn’t happen too often to become unfun.

anyway, she didn’t want me to babysit (he rolls his eyes every time she uses that term: he says he’s not a baby anymore - which is what i would have said when i was nine, and until i turned 25 and then realized i had been a baby all my life until then, and even then…). she just wanted to complain. i guess all her friends were unavailable. she wanted to blow some steam, tell me - well, no, not me, but somebody, anybody! - that her son had ruined his brand new super expensive sneakers on a skateboard ramp, doing she doesn’t know what, but it doesn’t matter what because he was supposed to be in his room doing his homework, not on a stupid skateboard ramp, which she had forbidden for him that week and the next because of some math test that he had failed, and he could have gotten hurt, going there without her permission, and what was she going to do with him, he was proving more unruly by the minute and turning into his dad, and speaking of his dad, the bastard again didn’t pay his child support, and he didn’t show up to pick up the nephew, and that’s the third time in a row and do i think maybe that’s why the nephew is acting up? she doesn’t really want an answer. or if she does, she simply forgets to give you time to answer. she goes on about the school, which isn’t providing enough flexibility for her busy business woman schedule, about crap on tv that her son is taking in but what else is there for him really, he doesn’t want to read he doesn’t want to do anything, and especially not with her and what’s a single gorgeous ambitious mother to do?

the lament is long and tumultuous. i know - i’ve heard it all before. oh she modifies it, adds a few elements, removes some others, changes the order. it’s her rich good looking single mother chant, and she’s been perfecting it for seven years and if you knew my sister you’d know just how perfect anything she devotes her attention to can get. any thing, mind you, because she is rather frustrated with all of us subhumans, who somehow can live our lives around her (orbiting her, she’d say and think) without being touched by her blessedness. so she goes on with her chant, the theme to her life nowadays. she’ll tune it for the audience, too. i’m the sister, so i get every possible version - she tests them on me. but i’ve heard her modify it for the divorce judge (her son’s father never stood a chance… what she doesn’t say in the chant is that she got such a high child support payment from him that he has to keep two jobs to be able to live - yet clearly she lives well enough without his payments - and that he is only allowed to see his son approximately whenever she decides he should - and if she calls and he happens not to pick up before the fourth ring, well he’s lost his chance and he can hope to see his son in another couple of weeks, whenever she’ll think of it next). i’ve heard her modify it for an award acceptance speech. i’ve heard another version at a friend’s wedding - somehow all of a sudden it became all about the maid of honor…

i lit up a joint. i wasn’t really a part of the conversation anyway. i could keep her happy (and i prefer to keep my sister happy, even though it has very little to do with sisterly love and everything to do with my personal peace and quiet - she can be something when she gets angry or offended, or even worse, when she’s worried and absolutely wants to make sure you’re doing okay; and by that, she means living your life the way she thinks you should, and that’s the way she would live it if she could…) without doing more than grunting an uh-uh once in a while, or sending a “no, really?” via the air waves. she went on and on for close to an hour. she knows i hate the telephone, she just doesn’t care. no, that’s probably not true. she just has a little difficulty practicing empathy. she simply cannot grasp certain things, like the fact that someone - anyone - could hate talking on the phone. she thinks the telephone is great: it allows her to spread her message to the masses, all over the world, while listening to the sound of her own voice. how delightful! hell, she pays for my phone service. i begged her not to, but she went on and on about emergencies, what would happen if there was an emergency, what if you were babysitting your nephew and the drapes caught fire (drapes? she lives in the last century. fire? that’s why i have fire extinguishers, maybe?), what if you have a stroke and all you can do is reach for the phone and press 911? fine, i eventually said. because what she really wanted was to have a way to reach me whenever she wants to, and having a phone is not quite as frightening a thought as having her drop by unexpectedly every week. and i think she’d agree. she’s as scared of barging in on me (and finding out “what i do” - even though i don’t know what she’s so afraid to find out) as i’m scared to have her invade my life.

it’s funny and weird to look at us both now and to think that we had the same parents, the same upbringing, that we lived the same shit more or less. because we became very different adults. she’s very driven. she went to school for quite a while, got good grades, graduated with whatever honor is the highest possible, got a good job right away. she got married (gasp!) young, to her second boyfriend, a guy who seemed decent enough (he was and is), and got pregnant six months into the marriage. i think her hubbie hoped that a kid would somewhat slow her down, and he would finally be able to catch up. he was oh so wrong. her expectations became requirements, and the poor guy faded slowly. he attempted to stay in her shadow and hide there, but she’s not the type (and neither am i, i guess) to let you get away with anything. so she quickly decided that her life and that of her child would be better organized and more efficient if she erased the dad factor.

i don’t mind that my sister plays king of the world. she does wield a certain power, and usually she uses it for good. i mean if it was up to her, there would be no environmental problem left unsolved, no animal left without a good caring family, no child going hungry. there would also be no drugs or alcohol, and men would be an endangered species. that’s where i draw my own lines. and those are topics we mutually have agreed to avoid, except when i’m too drunk or she’s too hyper. then we have fights the like of which most people would rather never see. the boyfriend is always tiptoeing around her, ever since bitch fest 1998, a grand public demonstration of our hostile feelings for one another. for new year’s eve, no less. how pathetically unoriginal, to have our family feuds during the holidays. it scared the boyfriend. even after we reconciled (at the emergency room he brought us to), he has always gotten that terrified bunny look when i mention that my sister and i will be in the same room he is in. and if he thinks i can’t handle her at that moment, he points it out, and then points out that he’s got pressing things to do.

my sister and i, really, are always having the same fight. it started when i was six and she was ten, and it never really ended, only paused for shorter or longer treuces. she thinks she knows all, and she thinks i should rely on her and act according to her advice. that’s one way to sum it up. my sister is the kind of person that you’re better not to go see if you have a problem. it’s not that she’s mean, it’s just that she’s developed very analytical ways of coping, and she applies her grid of acceptable reactions and emotions to other people - that’s where my problem starts.

an example would be when i was younger and some bastard i thought i loved cheated on me. we’d been dating for a few months, and although it was serious, i was young, and to be honest i had cheated on him too, and more than once. the difference, though, the major difference, is that he never found out. so i was still the saint, you see? very important. now my sister knew i had cheated, but she’s my sister - she takes my side no matter what. now for a chick who had strayed, i was rather taken aback by how painful his betrayal was. to this day, i can’t believe what an idiot he was to come right out and tell me - and then to expect me to accept his apology! if i didn’t know until then, what was the point of telling me now? but the point is, i was terribly upset, falling to pieces, whatever, all the clichés there are out there to describe infidelity and betrayal are all accurate to some degree.

i went to my sister. she sat with me and listened for a bit. not too long - but i know her and i usually make my stories short and to the point, that way i can get to their end. so she listened, and then she screwed up her face (when she does that she looks like one of those mechanical toys that you wind, and the second you let them go they bark or move forward or whatever they’re designed to do), and she let me have it. now what you’re going to do - what? excuse me? and that’s my problem with her. she doesn’t care to listen, she wants to fix. she doesn’t want me to pour my heart out - she wants to glue the pieces back together so we don’t have to talk about all those emotions anymore. it’s not just about appearances, it’s about the way she sees life, and therefore the way life must be lived. she doesn’t give advice, she gives instructions.

and, as i said before, i don’t follow directions. never have. so perhaps you can see why every few years we end up pulling the hair off each other’s head. hair pulling isn’t even that bad - we started that when i was five. then at ten came the nails - in her face, in mine, anywhere. then when we were both teens we had fist fights. she didn’t like those: they’d leave her face bruised and bloody, and that did not fit at all with her little miss perfect school aura. i, on the other hand, did not care, and simply looked my part. we haven’t gotten into a real fight since becoming adults - other than that time at new year’s eve.

as i’m thinking about all this, she’s still going on, yakking away. what was it about now? oh, she’s going through the one about how it’s so much easier for a single dad to find another woman than it is for a single mom. i uh-uh empathetically. if it makes her feel better to think she’s still single because men are afraid of her son… most likely, it’s her they’re afraid of. but it eats her up to know i’ve got a relationship that suits me - even though it would not suit her at all. so she brings up the topic oh just a little bit too often for me to think it’s completely casual. i’d tell her to get a dog, since dogs are so much cuter than children, and are likely to attract more single men, but eh - why walk into a trap when i don’t have to, put my foot in when she’s perfectly happy chatting with herself.

and then, just between the cost of hiring a new gardener to take care of her lawn (golf course is more like it, and i’ve never understood why she clung and clings to that house, given that she doesn’t especially like going outside, and that it is bigger out than in) and the new karate belt the nephew is trying out for next week (and could you be there? it’s wednesday night and he’d love for you to be there, could you? uh-uh. well then can i ask you to drive him home afterwards? i’ve got a lot of things to do. uh-uh.), she let it fall, gently as is only her way when she knows she’s dropping a bomb. i saw dad, she said. uh-uh.

i don’t quite know what she said after that. i put the phone down on the table and walked away. and walked and walked and walked. hours later i called the boyfriend to come and pick me up. said he was worried sick. i thought, how nice, i have somebody who worries about me. how nice. he came. no questions asked. he held me, and helped me into his tiny electrical car that has a weird smell, not quite a new car smell but something else and when he first got it i made fun and said it smelled like new vegeleather. he had brought me a jacket and a hat and a thermos filled with hot chocolate. sometimes i worry that he’s wearing me down, and that from independent that i was from him i’m turning into the princess by allowing him to be so prince charming-like. but most times i try not to ask those kinds of questions, i close my eyes and recline in the seat and enjoy the warmth all around, and i squeeze his knee as he drives and he looks at me and smiles gently.

chapter nine.

he took me to his place. i rarely go there. i tell him, it’s your place, your den, your privacy, and you should keep that from me. i tell him a toothbrush and a sweater is all he can leave behind, and all i will leave behind. he says i’m commitment phobic. i say yeah well you haven’t met my parents. or i say i’ve got a whole lot of phobias you don’t even know about (and it’s true). and he hugs me. often i nag and say hugging is his reaction to everything, but then i just hug him back every time. it took me a while to get used to it. i’ve never had issues with sexuality, but friendly comforting touching feels very odd to me. it’s more personal somehow that an anonymous banging in the bar owner’s office, no matter how many items of clothing you leave behind.

he went to work and left me here. well he offered to drop me off at my place first, but i asked to stay here. he didn’t answer, he just hugged me again. all i know is, if i go back home my sister will have left ten dozen messages, going from amused to worried to angry, and when i show up safe and sound she’ll be furious. and since she might suspect i won’t take her messages, she’s likely to show up. well i can’t deal with that today. i can’t deal with people freaking out for me. allow me my own freak outs, and allow me to choose what makes me panic and what just passes me by. i can’t deal with over-protectiveness, especially when it’s selfish.

i don’t think we can trace back everything to our parents. any one of us. i think it’s just too easy. i think at some point, and perhaps that point differs for every individual, you have to take charge and decide that you are responsible for what will happen to you. it can’t always be the parents, the childhood. i know all about damaging, and still i’d argue that at some point when shit started to happen to me, it wasn’t because my dad is what he is or because my mother was what she was, and i knew that i was responsible. why didn’t i stop then? because i didn’t care. sure - my childhood and everthing leading up to where i am now has shaped me, sure. but so what? how does blaming it or explaining it make it better? it doesn’t.

you can imagine the problems i’ve had every time somebody in a white blouse conjured up the thought that i should see some kind of mental health professional. from elementary school on. the first shrink the school made me see didn’t come back for my second session. it was going well enough, and i was answering her questions. but in between hers, i asked her some of my own. if she had children (no). if she’d had abortions (she didn’t answer but she looked concerned so i guessed yes). if she would take a bath with leeches (no, why would she). if she would take off her clothes and dance for me (that one puzzled her most, but she declined). if i could please jump out the window now, rather than go back to class (that was a no).

i’ve never really cared what people thought of me. if i was into shrinkology i’d probably say that’s because my parents did not make a secret of what they thought of me, and i “suffered” from an early separation of the ego and superego or some crap like that, or that i was estranged from a healthy image of self. or that i build a shell around me as protection, and that shell is thick enough to make people believe that i don’t care what they think, but really i do. whatever. but not caring - genuinely not caring about what people think, does not make you a good psychology patient. or perhaps you need a better psychologist than those i have met. in any case, in any school setting, it was rather clear to me that the “mental health professionals” expected me to behave just because i was at school and regular people would care what is being said among the staff, let alone the students. i was sent to a shrink twice in high school. once at each school. somehow they never tried a second time.

i almost feel bad for the first one. i must have been elevenish, but she was just out of university, a fresh young thing with naive hopes and great wide open green eyes. i’d been sent to her because i didn’t always show up, and didn’t quite do what was expected of me when i did. have i mentioned that i don’t follow instructions? well asking me to sit down and be quiet, pick up this book, do those exercises, give an answer, go home and resolve these problems… right. all i knew was that the law forced me to attend school until i turned sixteen. so i did. but the law could simply not force me to care. so i didn’t. little shrinky chick wanted to know why, but instead of replying i started talking about erotic fantasies including gang bangs and blood and knives and preschool aged children. anything i could think of (and i could think of a lot just from what i’d seen and heard before that point - and i could make the rest up) that would sound fucked up and might make her leave me alone. it worked. she was freaked out, and the director, later, gave me a look and said something about attempting to traumatize the shrink with my made up stories. so much for the doctor patient privilege. they’d say i’ve had a trust issue with the profession ever since. they’d be right.

it’s always weird to me when people try to understand me. what the fuck? are you so simple that you’ve gone around yourself enough times to want to do it to someone else? and how about asking for my permission first? i can see why the boyfriend tries - his life is complicated enough with me in it, he wants to know where things stand, and that’s fine - especially since he knows not to push, and he has intuitively understood that with me, it is always easier to read between the lines. but why would shrinks want to understand me? worse, why would they insist on knowing that i know myself? leave me the fuck alone. court order my ass, freak. the harder you try to make me talk, the louder i will scream, the more things i will throw on the far wall to see how well they break, and whether i can make some shrapnel rebound on to your face, bastard. and you can lock me away and you can turn me into a vegetable, but that doesn’t mean you can know me. you can cut my skull open and look inside and put electrodes and whatever else, and make me smell burnt toast (thank you doctor penfield), but that doesn’t mean i will be revealed to you. fuck you. open me up, make sliced salami out of my grey matter, do what you must or want, but my mouth will stay shut - or screaming, whichever seems to upset you more, you taker in charge of wards of the state. well the wards want to bleed out to the sewer trap and drip drip drip away - not just to escape, but to negate, to not be here or there, to not have to answer or to sit or stand - to not have to be. and you drove them there, or you gave them a ride there, and you deserve in turn to be taken for a ride. a long windowless drive. meet mister screwdriver.

chapter ten.

how do you do. indeed, *how* do you do? huh. strange.

the boyfriend brought indian food home after work last night. forget anything i’ve said about nausea instead of hunger, when my nose smells indian food, i go into greed mode. i could eat buckets full of butter chicken sauce. it is rather of a mystery to me why they would indeed put chicken in the butter chicken - doesn’t that take space away from the yummy, yummy sauce? i was in such a mood that i invented a wonderful song: nan is nan, na na na na na. in which of course i replaced all the na’s by “nan”. it wasn’t very rich perhaps (the sauce was), but i don’t give a shit. yummy onion badjees. and that little sauce that isn’t quite tzatziki but almost. and the radioactive carrots from hell. it was a feast on the floor, a grandiose orgy of yumminess.

after that i had weird dreams, obviously. but for some reason, i had a few classroom dreams. me telling a teacher off and slamming the door on my way out and i was going straight to the principal’s office to tell my version (because i’d been offended in some way…) and as i was getting ready to do so, other students came out in the hallway and gave me their support, and then we were all going to the principal’s office but we had wasted a few seconds and the jackass teacher had passed behind us and was already at the principal’s office, probably feeding him lies about the “true” story. perhaps you can tell that i have trouble trusting schools and teachers too. the weirdest thing in that dream is that i actually thought the principal would help, or at least take my side. that’s not quite how i remember my life going way back when principals were something to worry about, or at least were some element in my life and reality.

i’m back home now. the boyfriend and i walked here last night after the feast. it was a nice evening, not quite cold but not warm either, and there was that clean pure smell that announces winter to me, and a nice roundish moon that made me sing that i was followed by a moon shadow, even though that is quite impossible in the city - unless the street lights all go bye bye. a nice thought.

i don’t like sleeping elsewhere than my own apartment. well, for one night, sure, but not much longer. i am not sure why this is of any significance to me: i don’t have pets, and the few plants i manage to keep are used to being ignored, and if they weren’t able to survive for a few days (weeks…) by themselves, they would already have met their doom.

i live by myself. well, i don’t count the occasional mouse in the walls or curious squirrel walking in from the side window. and i don’t count bugs and spiders. or objects. so i live alone, what people mean when they say they live alone. and i’ve been enjoying it. up to a few years ago i had roommates. a few men, friends or boyfriend, and one girl, who led me to say “never again”. the bitch - alledgedly my friend at the time - left the place just before christmas, leaving me to find a roommate right in the middle of the holidays - yeah, that’s going to happen. she was a screwed up sad little puppy, surviving on cigarettes, coffee and popcorn, lest she lose her trim figure. poor thing doesn’t know that her skin is wrinkling and aging like crazy. mind you that should be the least of her concerns, with her lying stab-ya-in-the-back for a good lay attitude. even though she fakes liking sex, and even though she’s had way (way) more than her share of std’s. okay, so i’m visibly still upset about this whole ordeal. visibly. even years after, i can hardly think of that bitch without launching into a mega-rant that nobody really cares about since, obviously, she’s only part of my past. she is the reason, though, that i don’t keep or want girlfriends. fuck them. i don’t even think i could be a lesbian anymore, and that was a fun time i had for a while. that’s how badly the bitch screwed me, and how much it notched my trust in women. pretty much, if you’re a woman and i met you before that episode, we’re still okay, but if i met you during or after, we have no chance of ever becoming more than nod-in-the-hallway acquaintances. if you want to send her a bag full of dog shit to thank her, i’ll gladly give her address. or even that of her idiotically blind parents, who keep throwing money her way, as if money could fix a lifetime of screwing up and hypocrisy. as you can tell, she’s on my shit list. quite. i won’t do anything active to get her in deeper shit than her birdbrain will land her in, but if i can extend a foot to trip her at any point along the way, i will. so it’s perhaps the first smart thing she’s ever done, not to be in my path at any point since that debacle. bitch.

anyway, the bitch’s departure meant to me that i would never again live with a woman. and looking back, i could tell i had been foolish: living with my mother, living with my sister or with both, none of these situations were good ideas or led to great results. men at least i could handle - i get their “logic” - yeah i use quotation marks, because a man’s logic is usually rather far from what i call logic, but still, i can function with men. and usually if they have a problem, they tell you, or they make you know it: they don’t run off and leave a stupid coward note telling you not to contact them ever again, and then when you want the rent paid to you, start screaming that you’re harassing them, stalking them, because you called three times over the course of a week. men have more sense than birdbrain bitches. most men anyway. so i put an ad in the paper and i made a mental note that all responding women were automatically rejected (sorry ladies, but you probably wouldn’t want to live with me either).

i really didn’t enjoy the “selection” process. actually i enjoyed nothing about this. i hated the idea to have to share my space with anyone. but at the time it was a choice between a roommate and another apartment and moving is something i have raised to a phobia, and it was out of the question. a few people came to visit the place - basically i was renting one room, the room that is now my nondescript lounge/second living room/meditation space/guest bedroom, and the rest was all furnished. they called, they made an appointment and they came, and i hated them right away, each and every one of them. except, of course, the last one, because there had to be a last one if i wasn’t going to move. he turned out to be my roommate, but he also turned out to be a sociology experiment, of you’ll believe it.

perhaps i should have known better, given the huge mind gap between my sister and i, but i thought, at the time, that generations were defined as thirty years. yeah. maybe so at the time the book i looked that up into was printed, but no more. now, as i found out, generations can last as little as three or four years, and people on either side of the divide will not be able to communicate properly. perhaps that’s why he raised none of my warning bells, because i had no filter to decipher his signals and they didn’t register on any scale of mine. he was something entirely new.

my roommate was in his very very early twenties. i thought i could relate, y’know? well i can’t. he was nice and all - nothing to say about his personality, to the contrary, he was smart and he did what he had to do. and to live with me, man, you have to know what you’re getting into. well, i was probably a lot smoother and easier to live with back then. it was before my shit hit many many fans. and after some other shit his some other fans. i was in my mid shit period, you might say. my brown period (and as we all know, brown is the color of poo). no, it was other stuff, way to live life, that i found flabbergasting in his way to behave. i thought i’d been raised with computers and that was that. well i didn’t have the teenage years with internet that he did, so i didn’t meet all my friends in chat rooms, and i didn’t make dates online either. now i realize how out of date i am, with my memories of a texas instrument 64k, of atari 2600 games, with my very clear idea of how life was, before microwave ovens were in every kitchen, before vhs and cds were the norm (so imagine dvds). no, i discovered with him that i’m totally cut off from “youth”, and that calling somebody young who is thirty-five is beyond ridiculous, because no one who is thirty-five and in their right mind could relate to those people now becoming adults (whatever that means - i often ponder upon that word, because i very rarely feel adult myself… but given that i have no mother or father figure to take care of all the shit i wish i didn’t have to, i guess i am in every relevant sense, an adult. every sense relevant to those outside me - because in me i’m a young bird with a strong will to put her head in the sand every so often.

but it wasn’t even the technological stuff that set him - and all his friends i met (boy did he have lots of friends… like a normal person i guess… it’s just that my network hasn’t been that populous or tight in years uncounted… no actually, it never was, but i imagine that it is for a lot of teens and post-teens. and good for them. there was a time when i would have given everything to appear to be that popular. or even a little.) apart from me and my life. it was little things. like a warped (from my point of view) perception of sex. see, i didn’t understand (and still don’t) how someone can be into couples exchanges and orgies of various kind (eh, to each their own - i’d never judge that!), yet consider that a woman menstruating should not have sex. well, mind you maybe it was only the guys who wouldn’t have sex with a menstruating girl (i wrote woman just now, but that was inaccurate: becoming a man or a woman is something more than being an adult - and for a woman, that can take years. for a man too, i guess, but they tend not to ask the question from within, and take the name automatically when it comes from without). that baffled me and still does. see, to me the very definition of a man, a real man, is one who will perform oral sex on a menstruating woman. but at the very least the sex part - by which he probably meant penetration mostly - shouldn’t be a problem! i mean a whole week a month without sex? that is ridiculous beyond words. for me. for me, of course.

there was other stuff, related. the focus on appearance. even young, i never had that ego thing, that pride and illusion that appearances matter. which of course they do, more than i’m willing to submit to, and that has caused some of my share of problems. but we’re talking about guys who shave their chests here. and their armpits. and their genitals. bravo. that is so far beyond anything i can understand (i don’t even shave! nowhere!) that i’m having trouble finding words to discuss it. gross would be one. but i assume and understand that those boys are not quite doing it to attract me, but rather nymphettes who trim and shave and wax and pluck a whole lot more than they do. still, i can’t imagine chest regrowth feeling good against my breasts. disgusting. other stuff, like never leaving the house without looking like a japanese animation character, with every hair and fabric just so. i’m from microserfs, and they were straight out of shampoo planet. and if that reference escapes you, pick up a few of douglas coupland’s books and find out, because i can’t explain it better. it was just a cultural shock, with someone of my geographical background, but a few years and a universe of distance.

it felt like my so-called wisdom - not mine per se, but that which is assumed globally to be attained with years of life - was useless there. those kids didn’t play by any of my rules. they had unwritten ones, a whole slew of them, about which stores sell cool clothes and which should be avoided, about how to spend all your money quickly and in clothes, accessories and games, if not suped-up cars, about how everyone should admire them for their style. but really, a twenty year old always thinks he has style. and they oh so think they have all the answers. that’s what will never change i guess. and it’s a form of comfort, to know that even though i have no idea what they are about, they are in a way like i was: clueless, but ready to defend their so-called and self-proclaimed depth to the extreme. and if there is one time that allows for that particular kind of stupidity, when most people will simply excuse it with a shrug and a smile, it is youth. so good for them.

i just said i have no idea what they were about. that is a lie, but it is also where i meet my empathy limits. because the truth is, i was unable not to judge them. perhaps every generation has that problem with the next? it sure would explain a lot. it’s not that i think my way is better - i don’t! for one thing my way is my way and i actually know of nobody else who lives my life (if there are, i wouldn’t know: they wouldn’t want to know me any more than i know them), but it just seemed to me like a whole lot of empty. worse than generations before me and worse than mine. everything on the surface, everything to look hot, to get laid. working on a relationship is ridiculous, talking about politics uninteresting, reading almost a sin, and being simply honest and available and vulnerable is simply a weakness that should be picked on. hard. but then again what do i know, an outside observer spying down on ants, not knowing that the ants are also conducting their own experiences on the onlooker. i don’t know. they all seemed peculiar to me, and me to them, and that doesn’t change how the world goes.

anyway, eventually he moved on, as they say, and he moved out. that was after and during some of my shit. if i must dot my i’s, he left during my hospitalization in which the clowns appeared. and as it turned out, i was happy to reclaim my space as my own and to be here by myself, and to cleanse his room from all signs of a youth that frightens me just as teens have always frightened me. turns out young adults do to, is all.

when i got in last night i put the phone back on the hook but i unplugged it. after i had deleted all the messages on my voice mail. there were five. i assume they were all from my sister, but i still refuse to deal with that and with her, and fuck the shrinks who’d say i should, simply, deal with it. because says who? who gets to decide what i do and when? me. and only me. my sister would say i’m acting like a child. i’d say she should too, because she’d see that children have it all figured out sometimes, and that if we didn’t interfere to make them fit into a mold, they’d end up a lot happier. sure it’d be chaos, but chaos is natural and if lived peacefully it can work. well for now, it works for me. everything in its own time. i also unplugged the doorbell. and i’m now locking the second lock, because i never believed that she lost the key i lent her. it’s too like her to just keep it “in case”. in case what? in case i kill myself in here and the neighbors start smelling my rotting carcass? perhaps. but given my neighbors, i’d rather they had to smell me as long as possible. it’s not like my body needs preservation for embalming - no thank you! but in any case i’m far from suicidal, and she is insane. or we both are. doesn’t matter. same difference.

Link: cancelled my cell phone and i feel good

chapter eleven.

i think it’d be a valid question if somebody asked me what i do with my days. i don’t work, i don’t volunteer, i don’t see many people. where does the time go? well i’ve found that time doesn’t go anywhere, yet i get older and more bitter. or younger and more easily impressed. it all depends on the day. some days i wake up and the sun is shining and there are little birds chirping and i just want to stay in and cower down on a couch and nurse my wounds. or make new ones. i have quite a few scars and always one of two semi-bleeding wounds. i do that to myself, and i don’t expect to be judged for it. so-called experts say it’s a form of masochism - and they’ve even conceptually linked it to anorexia, given that they’re allegedly both about control over your body and about not being good enough and punishing oneself. whatever. i started with the sharp corner of a plastic ruler when in eight grade. i got into it enough to start bleeding, and then a girl saw a few drops of blood and she screamed like those dumb actresses do in bad crime drama tv shows, and i was escorted to the nurse’s office and at least it allowed me to determine that i didn’t like the attention, even though i like the feeling of the cut and the moisture squirting from within.

it’s the kind of hobby one has to keep in check. i quickly found out long sleeves and long pants would be much easier to live in for me. simpler than answering questions from the cafeteria lady and the bus driver. once again, would you fucking mind your own fucking business? weirdos. a few too many people see the marks, and tell the right person, and you’ve landed yourself a nice hospital visit. and then you’ll have to justify your private life to strangers in white blouses. with a bit of luck, they’ll give you a blue blouse that you can keep because they took all your clothes away. at least the blouse is blue. and at least they can’t keep you forever, especially if you suddenly become gentle as a lamb (i’ve never personally met a lamb, but expect they are rather sweet; i’d never eat lamb, in any case). and guess what? i hate doctors and i hate hospitals. so as long as they don’t pump too much shit up my veins, i can play the game and look at them all with bright pitiful eyes that scream “what have i done to deserve this?”. the look didn’t work for my mother or father way back when, but it has worked with many men i’ve met since leaving them, and even on quite a few women. it’s all in the timing and the expected sincerity. eventually when you’re nice and non violent and you give them the answers they prechew for you, they let you go.

i had a boyfriend - no, rather a lover - once who was mostly attracted to me mostly because of my scars and wounds. he would lick the lines, from paler to most recent. he would get turned on just by seeing my forearms (not something i can say of just any man). he was into sharp things too, but he didn’t enjoy pain as much. and so naturally (well it seemed very natural at the time) we integrated knives and razor blades into our sex routine (which then became a non-routine…). he’d just knick the skin. or he’d run a razor blade from my little toe to my pinky, all along the side of my leg, torso and arm, so gently that even though he broke the skin, only a few tiny drops of blood would appear every few inches along the way. or he’d make patterns. i have a few nice stars on my lower back that date from that era. he’d go deeper then, for the sake of art - no point having a nicely shaped scar star if it’s just going to vanish after healing. we ended it one night, when he admitted that he was married. sorry bucko, you might have been the most fucked up delicious lover ever, but i don’t do married men. he was rather shocked. something about how strange it was to find principles in a girl like me. a girl like me? that’s a good one. especially coming from some depraved cheater. things got a bit tense. no, not a bit. we got into an argument, and the argument led to a full-fledged fight. we’d just had sex, and there were a few knives and a few pokers of various shapes lying around, and things got ugly. he’d forgotten one thing, though: i can take pain, in a way that he couldn’t. he stabbed through my arm, and i flinched, but i didn’t waiver or faint. i retaliated. with a skewer in the genitals. oh the look on his face. and then i left rather quickly, while he was cursing and throwing things in my general direction. glasses, clothes, pillows - there isn’t much stuff lying around in a cheap motel room to throw at the former lover you used to cut open, once she returned the favor. i never heard from him again. but that might have something to do with the fact that i changed my phone number, and i’d never given him my address. or my real name for that matter. i’m like that - if i haven’t been officially dating someone for at least five or six months, they get a fantasy name. that way if things end badly, they can’t track me down. and since i don’t introduce anybody to family (i.e. the sister) or friends, well i usually never get caught.

for some reason i now feel like discussing staplers. they remind me of when i worked in office jobs, little crappy thankless jobs with bosses who earn five times your salary and treat you like shit because guess what making money makes them right, every time, and your lowly position and your feminine gender and your young age make you, quite simply, wrong. what do you know anyway. it has seemed to me over the years like a lot of people - men, let’s face it - could not really handle staplers. and those are men who handle the livelihood of dozens of people, often enough, and who design circuits and who invest millions. i’ve met more than one who had absolutely no clue how to replenish the staples and who showed some sense in coming to me with a desperate puppy look before throwing the damn thing away - clearly it has been filled in the stapler factory and no more magical staples may come out of it? i’ve even had one boss who would simply take the common, next-to-the-printer stapler if his was empty. and then, when both ended up empty, he’d put them in his outbound tray, for me to magically fill them, like only i know how. i filled them and put them in his inbox. and i thought less of him ever after. which had no impact on our respective salaries, mind you.

huh, what do you know, my stapler urge has passed, and i’ve expressed all that i could or would on that topic for the moment. i wish i had a song about staplers. i don’t. but it’s been a while since i broke into a song. oh, what the hell, here’s something stupid in frenglish i learned from a friend a long time ago, who claimed it was a song he had learned at camp. it always makes me laugh, and that’s not bad.

i went yesterday on the bord des états
with my porte-manteau and my unbrella
jumping dans le gros char
j’arrivai en retard
j’m'assis sur le back-seat pis je m’allume un cigare
à travers la window j’ai voulu embrasser
ma jeune fiancée, but the train goes away
but the train goes away, je la reverrai plus loin
j’embrassai une grosse vache qui watchai passer le train.
meuh.

i’m sorry to say this would translate to something like: i went yesterday to the states, with my suitcase and umbrella. i jumped in the big car, i was late, i sat ont he back seat and lit a cigare. through the window i wanted to kiss my young fiancée but the train left. i’ll see her later. i kissed a big cow that was watching the train pass. mooo.

it’s stupid, i know. probably why i like it.

chapter twelve.

last night (of course…) i did something really weird. or at least i experienced something really weird. i was home, i was idle, i was restless. there was nothing good on tv. nothing? hold on. what’s that? i know those guys! that’s the canadians from the late eighties!

see, the thing is, there’s a lockout in the national hockey league this year. not that i care. but i’m not deaf and blind either, so i know it’s going on. something about players wanting more money, if you’ll believe that. when i hear of daycare workers and mcdonald’s employees wanting to go on strike or to unionize to be able to, so they can get better working conditions, i understand, but hockey players? man, if i was paid what they’re paid i wouldn’t be living in this dump! i’d have a mansion in the slums, at the very least (with a trampoline but no isolation tank, in case you were wondering).

but whatever - i’m not going to launch into a debate i absolutely do not care about. tickets are too expensive, and most games aren’t shown on television anymore anyway. that, and i stopped caring about hockey when i found out about real, live, in the flesh boys. or when they became interesting for my needs and wishes, anyway. but there was a time when i was a hockey fanatic. a maniac. i knew everything, i read everything, saw everything, went everywhere, cared for nothing else. i had scrap books, i had tapes, i wrote down summaries of each game based on what i saw (i never cared too much for the announcers on tv or on the radio - the game i saw was better than the game they did. or at least my comments were always relevant to me.) i knew all the stats, all the records, who won what trophy and when. and my particular obsession circled around the canadians. and it was the late eighties.

so last night on tv, it was the stanley cup final game of 1989, calgary flames against the montreal canadians, and calgary is leading 3 to 2 in the game. the series is tied 3-3 and this is the final game. oh yeah, and it is fifteen years later, and all of this is old history that nobody cares about really, but i guess the viewers and fans are so hockey deprived that they’re willing to watch fifteen year old reruns. hockey game reruns. the concept baffles me. i was never one to tape a game i missed and watch it later. if i knew or could find out the final score and some of the highlights, why would i do that? the point, after all, the greater purpose, is to win, and get to the playoffs. period. oh, and sometimes, to squish some other team with whose city “we” have a bitter rivalry. why not.

all of this was weird enough. but you know what was even weirder? my memory. my frikkin photographic memory. i knew it was svoboda back there, petr svoboda with the hunched shoulders. i knew brian skrudland was jersey number 39. heck, i remember all their numbers. all of them. craig ludwig, 17. shayne corson, 27. claude lemieux, 32. oh how i liked him. mats naslund, a.k.a. the little viking, at five feet six and number 26. of course it was an important game and some more obscure players weren’t around, so i cannot be as impressive as i should be here. but i remember them all. sergio momesso at 36, mike lalor at 38. i even remembered the old trios.

i can’t remember why i go to the kitchen half the time. i get there, and i look around. i knew i had something to do there, but what? was i getting something? perhaps if i thought about what i was doind just before coming here i’d know why i came. but i don’t even remember what i was doing just now.

so why do i remember a hockey team from twenty years ago, including such fantastic and exciting details as petr svoboda’s wife’s name was valerie and brian hayward has a business degree from cornell university? his birthday is june 25, 1960. i just remember this, without effort. and actually i often think of him on his birthday. i do, on most years. craig ludwig had twin boys (they were blond). larry robinson played polo (he had an accident which introduced me to the concept of an open fracture - i didn’t enjoy it). john kordic drove a red corvette that he bought from the christin dealership (i must admit i’ve forgotten the plate number… but i knew it at some point). ryan walters was religious enough to add john 3:14 after an autograph, and i looked it up and it became the only bible verse i’ve ever learned by heart: for god so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. a bunch of rubbish, no doubt, but rubbish that was given to me as a message by a hockey player!

i could write the book “confessions of a pre-teen hockey nut”. hell, if there was a competition for most ridiculous young hockey obsessed freak, i’d win without contest. don’t believe me? have you ever seen the young (very young) girls who wait outside the arena in the cold for hours, in the hope of catching the players when they come out after practice? those girls are dressed in mini skirts in the middle of winter, and they think - or at least hope - they look pretty enough and old enough not to be taken for an obvious case of statutory rape. that was me. i froze my ass off on countless days. the main result was a decent collection of autographs.

there was more. as a young fan, it turns out that you can write to teams and get approximately whatever you want, from autographed pictures to letterhead paper to interviews, to invitations. i’d be a rather disquieting stalker.

there was way more. all i’ve said so far was about my public life. but i’ve always been like an iceberg, with most of my essence hidden. well hidden. in fact, i’ve never talked about this to anyone. well, here goes. i had very vivid and complex fantasies. it all probably started because of my insane insomnia (i like that: it would make for a cool title: insane insomnia… b-movies fame, here i come!). i had nothing to do in bed for hours, so i made stuff up. a lot of stuff. stuff about sex, which was very warped in my pre-teen brain. i thought men wanted it and women didn’t, so i’d have, as the “woman”, to negotiate this with - well i just jumped ahead. see, my fantasies, at that point (their strongest period), revolved solely, exclusively and obsessively on hockey players. i had a few favorites, and i figured that in my fantasy life, i could have a very complex ménage à quatre with my three favorites. actually i’d date one and cheat on him with another, then dump him for the third. the major advantage of fantasies over real life is that you can do that as often as you want, and there’s always ways of patching everything up to keep a nice knot-in-your-stomach feeling of drama, while at the same time keeping yourself entertained and aroused. real life humans are way too sensitive to be played with in such a fashion, but i made my guys perfect. perfect for me, at the time, with my mind and veins being pumped with more and more hormones, yet with my actual knowledge of life stalled in neutral.

i’d write letters to and from them. invent phone calls. put a pillow in bed with me and pretend i was sleeping next to a man. it didn’t even occur to me that a twelve year old dreaming of sleeping next to a twenty-five year old might be more than a little gross (when i hit my twenties and realized i was the same age as hockey players, it hit me how old i was. it also hit me how very little those guys interested me anymore!), that perhaps i was retreating a little too far in my own crazy dream. the second i was alone i wasn’t. it was like having upgraded my imaginary friends for ones that had a dick (which they couldn’t and didn’t use… it was, after all, also an imaginary dick…). it was like living in an imaginary hockey-themed soap opera. it was every little hockey freak’s dream. and i managed to get a few good things out of it. for one thing, i managed to beat insomnia during the playoffs. see, as a hockey freak who buys all the newspapers and read everything there is and ever was, you know stupid details. such as, sometimes during the playoffs, the players will go off and live in a hotel, without their wives and girlfriends, and then there’s a curfew. well i imagined that i snuck in (or sometimes the coach was also in love with me - they were all in love with me - how else would a fantasy world be perfect? - and he let me in even though it was against his own orders - it made a lot of sense…) and i was sleeping next to my pillow of a hockey playign boyfriend. and then the coach would open the door to check that his guys were actually sleeping (it’s all oh so logical, right, the man would just open every door and check!), and i’d lie with my head on the man-pillow and i’d pretend to be asleep until he left. well often enough that calmed me down enough to make me actually fall asleep.

looking back, i wonder why i didn’t spend my time masturbating instead. i guess i needed the relationship, the human contact pretending more than the sexual pleasure. i don’t even think a real masturbation session ever occurred to me when it came to those “guys”.

anyway now when i see the little girls waiting for their super hockey star to come off the ice, screaming wildly their pure joy that he brushed their hand as he handed them back their signed paper (probably not just a paper - more likely a heart-shaped, perfumed, multi-colored autograph album…), i worry a little. for them. but also i think about the poor hunk of a young man, who has no clue what craziness can be going on behind the plastic glasses and the metal braces. if he got a glimpse of it he would be disturbed. of we’re lucky. a few of them would take the plunge - they already do, knowingly or not. but most would just be grossed out. those poor saps. sure, they’re rich and young and popular. they’re also often not that bright, not that educated, and they have a rather short career ahead. and young girls throw themselves at them, in an attempt to grow up too fast and crooked. i can see both sides, and they both disturb me, but they also both launch a nostalgic bitter-sweetness. young girls have a passion that can never be matched in later years. and an imagination that is unrivalled.

one day i discovered another’s skin, the real thing, flesh that i could touch and bring closer, and lips that would part mine and a tongue that would stroll around in my mouth, and the weight of his body on mine, and the strength of his arms as he hugged me, and the smell of his after-shave that lingered on his clothes and on his pillow the night he stayed over, and i never really had the same interest in hockey again, and nobody made the connection. i never landed a hockey player - or any professional athlete. but i did land that sweet sixteen year old, with his perfect skin and strong tight lean muscles and not yet a hint of chest hair, and he made me jump into what others would call real life.

chapter thirteen.

knock knock knock
who is there?
talk talk talk to me
eyes open, eyes closed
my ears can guess
plum, mom or dad,
or the squeaking duck
i recognize them when i hear them
when they speak to my ears
knock knock knock
who is there?
talk talk talk to me
eyes open, eyes closed
my ears can guess

i thought a silly song would start the week well. i spent the weekend in my head. well, in dreams partly. i recuperated from the stupid cold, and i let the boyfriend take care of me. he’s a real mom sometimes, the kind of mom i didn’t have but dreamed of, so i let him indulge in his strange smothering passions. i even let him clean up around here (i usually don’t - let him, i mean). and i must admit it looks good and it makes me feel a whole lot better. i can maintain clean for extended periods, but it’s getting back to it when i slip that is too much for me.

i dreamed about somebody calling my name (not john - ah! bowakawa poussé, poussé). i was outside somewhere, walking one way, it had a feeling of summer and of free music festival or street fair of some sort, with a crowd, but not so many people around me that i’d bolt. the crowd was more of an impression, an unseen given. i looked around, trying to see who had called me. a woman from my past. a blond tall skinny skinny woman with pink blotchy skin and a small spherical head. oh no. i walked away, or i tried to, or i switched dreams.

i do that. the night before, i had been dreaming i was on a stupidly long and narrow inflatable raft (think looooong), floating on the ocean, when a shark fin appeared and started to circle around me. at first i thought it was kind of fun, and then eventually i realized i could die there. and then dying became a reality, and it became very - very - clear to me that i did not want to die. it was a feeling much more urgent and much more black or white than what i feel when i think about death in my normal waking life. hell, sometimes i consider the possibilities, you know. but this stupid shark dream brought home the sense of panic and dread. so i panicked in the dream, but knowing it was a dream i decided to opt out of that death wish and i moved on, to another less intense dream. i guess it’s the nightmares i had each night as a kid that helped me develop ways to cope with crazy dreams.

i hate thinking about that woman from my past, featured in last night’s dream. i haven’t seen her in years and yet for some reason i dream about her maybe twice a year. something unfinished? i don’t know. i did never bash her skull in. i did end our “friendship” in writing. so what. she wrote back, said she understood. said that now that she was a mother, she knew infinite love, and so she could love me without need. well good for you, bitch. i had simply lost all respect for her. i mean i can be pretty easy going with people i love, i tend not to judge them, or at least not too harshly. but she had quit school to marry an illegal immigrant who barely spoke a language she understood, the first boy with whom she’d had sex, and she got pregnant. hence the marriage. well i thought that was a very stupid thing to do before even becoming an adult. no, actually, i thought those were several stupid things to do:

a, getting married so young; b, to an illegal immigrant; c, who doesn’t speak your language; d, because you’re pregnant; e, without ever having had an orgasm; f, without having had sex with anybody else; g, having that child; h, quitting school; i, moving in - with the illegal immigrant husband - with your father. well, whatever. she was my friend and i’d support her (stupid, stupid, stupid) decisions.

that was until i saw how things were going. when she had the baby i went to see her. not when she had the baby. a few months after. well she was already driving me nuts during pregnancy - she was one of those who needs to feel extremely special, so it’s no music in the car that is too rock’n rolly, nothing with negative lyrics. you know, because it would affect the fetus. right. she’d freak if a cat got near her, because her nice new husband had brought with him thousands of years of superstition, and he would not allow his pregnant wife to be near a feline. because we all know how vicious cats are to unborn children and ballooning women. right. she was also the kind to express everything as if she was the first woman to ever be pregnant, and she needed to enlighten us mere mortals who knew not the joys of swelling feet and popping navel. it never stopped. it drove me nuts.

i have nothing against kids. i have something about psychotic parents and people who think they know better than everyone else and they have a mission to educate the masses. i especially had an issue with her after she had the baby. she lived in her room. barely ever went out. yeah, that’s has to be healthy for the child. all those poeple who freak out, thinking of all the bad germs that will undoubtedly attack their fragile progeny if a face gets licked by a dog or a pink nose breathes in a tiny amount of exhaust fumes, are just raising weak pathetic larvae. she panicked when i took the baby in my arms because i had cat hair on me. oh my. yes. cat hair on baby, bad. very bad. could kill him. but then what else can i do, when i move the damn baby further from me, he starts wailing like crazy - you see, the little thing has never been alone, untouched, had never not heard the sound of another human heart! all day, he is held by his mommy, who is creating a dependant maladjusted child, the kind of adult who can never be alone but always needs company, a weak despicable leech. i’m not a monster. i don’t mean that she should put the baby in a closet for a few hours a day to toughen him up. i’m just saying that he can’t - can’t! - spend his entire life stuck to another being, and that being born is all about being suddenly and forever separated from your mother, and that if you maintain constant contact after birth, you are depriving the child of the first drama he’ll have to adjust to. we all fucking did it at some point, and it’s unfair to the child to delay this and make things harder than they need to be.

it was too stuffy in there, i had to get out. hearing her talk about her life, lived in that one room, the things she did - because she lived with her hubbie, her daddy (gee, i wonder where the unresolved parental attachment issues came from?), her two much younger brothers and her baby, she was the cook, the maid, the mother. and she lived cooped up with her men, and she tried to bring others in, to come see her so she could spread her motherhood gospel - which is not that easy when you suddenly lead a reclusive life. it made me sick. i could just imagine the husband’s family arriving next year, the second and third children she would spawn, the life ruined, and for what. to breed?

to breed or not to breed, that is indeed the question. i was never dumb enough (now i’m judging - deal with it) to want a child at an early age. well i toyed with the idea for a few days, yes, but an abortion took care of that, and i never looked back. i really question what anyone can give a child when they have them too young. i question what you can teach when you’re still in your teens. oh i know some teen moms make it, and are wonderful moms and manage to do it all. kudos. but if they’re such great moms, i think they would have been even more extraordinary given a few more years of pre-spawning life.

i’ve never been sure whether to have children or not. i’ve never been certain which was better for me. i’m terrified of my genes. cyclical violence, cyclical craziness. i’m afraid of me with a child. at the same time, it might just work, i might just calm down and quiet out and be a tender affectionate mom. or perhaps i could just be an ordinary mom, since the boyfriend would make such a good dad. he doesn’t know what he wants either. sometimes we talk about it and we imagine how our lives would change, and it’s like two teenagers imagining their future together on their first date and finding names for babies they’ll never have together. i’d have to give up a lot. too much probably. and really, when we get down to it, we enjoy being alone together. we enjoy having sex at all hours, and we enjoy not having to plan for another being, and we enjoy simply being together. and a baby, a child… well, they’re nice and all, but they drain you, and it’ll be years until their conversation is worth anything, and it always has to be about them, them, them, and i’m quite happy having things be about me, me, me. i’m just not ready to give up my own centerness, my right to get up and go, and my privacy, and my body as a personal pleasure center. so, kids, well, maybe. some day.

it’s quite an issue. pressures coming from all sides. reaching thirty without a child, must be something wrong with me (there is). everyone asks. like it’s any of their business. like it doesn’t make more sense to err on the side of caution in that very personal debate, instead of popping out the child only to look at his face and think “uh-oh, i just made a big mistake”. so many people out there who should never have been parents (mine strike me as the perfect example), so many people who fucked up and are at a loss, or think they’re so right when they’re so wrong. i don’t understand why it’s the un-childrened that get the grief and not the neglectful bastards.

speaking of births. i did a rebirth once. can’t say it turned me into a babbling babe. it was part of a whole new age type weekend, bringing together twenty strangers and making them do exercises and listen to speeches for hours on end, without enough time to eat or sleep properly, without enough time or hot water for us all to take a hot shower - no wonder we were all very receptive. what a bunch of horse shit. oh, did i mention the chanting? there was lots of chanting. why not. might as well sing, when you’re about to join a cult. well, i’m making that up. somewhat. it was not a cult, there was no talk of gurus or a savior. if there had been, i would have been out the door, fast or not, money back or not. it was a “seminar” hosted by a couple. oh they looked so healthy oh they seemed so sane. in private (i wasn’t supposed to know them or see them in private…) though, they were harsh and hypocritical with one another, whispering their anger rather than shouting it: my love, you’re really getting on my nerves. sweetie, shove it. very healthy indeed. but in front of their paying customers, they were all smiles and a halo of love radiated from them, and they looked like middle-aged people who fucked their brains out day in day out, and who had gorgeous smiling children, and had found the one true path to happiness. so why not, for a few hundred dollars and a weekend of your time, find out their love and life secret, and improve your life with their teachings? why not indeed.

at some point during the weekend, i got a bad headache. a migraine actually, although at the time i didn’t know that i actually had migraines, and i called them “my really bad headaches”. the man-guru who was not a guru said he could help. he put one hand on the nape of my neck, and the other on my forehead. he was standing up, facing me. and he pressed with his hands. the idea was that he would extract all the bad energy - which was obviously causing the headache (i love sharing that theory with fellow migraine sufferers, even though sometimes the laughter it provokes is counter-productive), and then release it back to the ground. or under the ground actually, by shaking his hands (which by then would contain the bad energy, if you’re following) and thinking “i am sending all this bad energy underground”. well he was squeezing and squishing my head and that hurt more than the headache had up until then. and he squeezed and squished for a few minutes, until i thought i would collapse. then he let go, shook his hands to send the evil energy away (it always scared me when people did that “sending the energy underground” thing, because if we’re to believe that, then isn’t hole-digging a very, very bad idea? you’d just be there digging a hole for some good reason, and all of a sudden you’d feel sick and depressed - shit, you’ve hit a pocket of bad energy that someone sent down here with a shake of the hands and not another thought for you, poor fool!). well when he let go, the pain was gone. in fact, i could barely feel my head. great, i thought, and i thanked the guru who is not a guru and i sat back down. it was a miracle! yup. a two-minute miracle. because two minutes later, the pressure he had created was gone, and the underlying pain that had never gone away was back. and that’s how the whole weekend worked, really, by putting more pressure on pressure points, and then releasing the added pressure, to make you think everything was all better. fucking new agers.

i don’t remember much of the rebirth thing. it was something like a bad sexual encounter, when the guy does absolutely nothing for you and he goes on and on and you wonder why you’re even there but it’s a bit late to get out of it now so you try to give him a few hints by throwing your hips this way or that, by lifting yourself, by presenting your neck of lips or breasts, but either he’s dense or he tries and fails miserably, but nothing is happening, nothing is ever going to happen, and eventually you’ll have to face the facts and tell him to fuck off or be a nice girl and simply fake an orgasm. well i faked a rebirth. not that i pretended i had seen the instant of my birth or anything - that would have been giving them way too much, and i didn’t want my picture to end up on some stupid brochure. some people did, i assume. unless they really saw the face of the doctor who was in charge of their delivery decades earlier. hey - good for them, i guess. but i’m skeptical. it all involved a lot of screaming, a lot of crying, people around you while you’re lying on the floor, people caressing you, people pushing you. i kicked a few of them. you know… in the spur of the moment. a-hem. whatever. i wanted out of there quite badly, except of course that’s not how it works. now everybody gather in a circle for the mid-afternoon chant, followed by a sharing ceremony, during which we will each in turn list three things we are grateful for from the rebirth ceremony, and one thing to do different next time. next time? i almost choked. fuck off, once of that shit was enough. but most around me had humid eyes and a pathetic smile, and boy did they look enlightened. if baby sheep can look enlightened. they sure are cute though. dangerously cute, when they encounter someone who can read the “easily manipulable” and “quite gullible thank you” labels. there were two follow up evenings. and guess what, they encouraged seminar members to invite family and friends, to bring them in the circle of sharing and show them all that they have been missing and could welcome into their life, if only they signed a teeny tiny cheque. or two.
sometimes i wish i had more cynicism, or less conscience, and i too could part the proverbial fool and his money. people will believe anything if they’ve paid to hear it (if they’d paid to listen to bullshit, it would be too sad…). then i realize that i don’t have that kind of energy. and i think karma would run up to me and bite me in the ass. hard. and i don’t need that. better to keep living my meaningless life that to provide false meaning to others. better not to get involved with that many strangers. i don’t have a guru fiber in me anyway. i’ve been told i’m a bridge burner. that i’m mean. that i don’t know when to shut up. other things not as nice. people like the blond skinny bad mom up there, who come back in my life and think they’ve recognized themselves and accuse me of being a bitch. why? because i say what i think? well you poor things. it’s true i burn bridges. i’ve not quite ever regretted it though. i’m nice, contrary to what those people think. i’m nice until i’m not anymore. is that so strange? once my limit has been passed, true, i have no turning back. i’m not smooth like i’m told people need to be to live in society. i’m too honest for that. at least that’s what i call it. too abrupt. rough around the edges, they say. and we’re all right. living well in sociaety was never my goal anyway. perhaps that is at the core of the issue? well why don’t i just sign a big fat cheque to a shrink to find out? right. i only have issues because others say i do. when i’m me, i’m ok.

i’ve been told i’m too sensitive. i don’t understand that. i don’t understand how my built-in sensitivity can be considered too much. i’ve always had the attitude that if i’m different, maybe (not maybe, i just know it!) i’m not wrong: maybe (again…) the whole world is wrong and i’m right. and i have no qualms totally believing that. i don’t see why everyone else would hold the truth and i would not. i know my truths much better than anybody else, for one thing. good luck convincing me i’m wrong on that one. good freaking luck. but here’s a hint: never discuss that kind of theory with someone in a white blouse. oh no. they’ll smile their little knowing smile and try to make you talk some more, so you can get stuck in your own theories and they take notes and they look at you from the side and they smile again and say “really?”. then they attempt to make you see their point of view, to explain, as if you were an idiot, the meaning of the word consensus, and what it means to live in society and why there are rules and why we all collectively must trust the rules and agree to obey them, that in fact there is an unwritten contract between sociaety and all its members, and that when a child is born, he enters into that contract and with proper socialization he or she will come to intuitively believe in this pact and to respect it unquestionningly, and that is good because it helps man find happiness. well i say fuck all that, i say question everything, i say let’s ask the basic questions again and see if we can’t find different answers, because clearly whatever you guys have all agreed on doesn’t work for me, so what can we do about that, fuckers?

then the white blouse will ask about your childhood, to find out what went wrong there, and they say “tell me about your mother” and every time they do, i think of leon, the replicant, and i too want to blow them up, except of course i don’t usually carry a machine gun with me. but every time the question comes, i wish i did. i refuse to answer questions about my childhood unless i’m heavily drugged - either that’ll make me say the truth, and that’s all right because i’ll deny everything later, or it’ll make me go on and on about various ficticious facts. i have a few imaginary childhoods. it’s a survival skill i developped. i’ve built elaborate fantasies. in one, i’m the daughter of a widower gardener, who works for a rich family, and we live in a little pavilion in the park. that one comes from nineteenth century novels i couldn’t get enough of at some point. in another, i’m a skateboard champion and my parents take me all over the country to competitions. i even forged a few newspaper articles for that one. nothing too overt like a front page, but a few pictures and a few “local girl triumphs over older boys” and the like. i have another fake childhood in which i am mute until puberty and at first everybody thinks i’m deaf too, and doctors think it might be autism. at puberty i began to speak as if nothing had ever been strange. the shrinks don’t usually believe those sotries and the other i make up. but that’s fine - they were not imagined to be believed but to take me away from my own shit. and as such they have been very efficient.

“tell me about your childhood”. what a fucking intimate question! do i go around asking people to tell me about their vagina, to tell me about their penis, their rectum? i don’t see much of a difference. except they get framed diplomas to hang on their walls and i would get slapped. at least i won’t pay to be slapped.

some days i could eat olives all day, without stopping. well, no, i tend to stop to drink beer on those days. olives and beer. the perfect mix. i live green queen olives, with the pith. hmmmm, olives. can you tell i’m craving them right now? perhaps i’ll call the boyfriend and invite him for an olives and beer evening. sometimes he says i’m crazy (that’s a lie - he would never say that to me. but he says quirky and funny, and that’s ok), and sometimes he laughs and says yes. i hope it’s one of those times. i could actually use the company tonight.

you know what happened to the skinny skinny girl who married too young? other than appearing in recurrent dreams of mine, i mean? a couple of months ago she died. the boyfriend saw it in the paper and he read the article to me and then when they gave her husband’s name i gasped, and i asked him to find her name, not his, hers, and yup, there you go, she was dead. barely older than me, too. it seems she was taken by a health craze, and she went on the atkins diet. except she was already a vegetarian, and that left her with very few choices. she ate the cheese and the cream and the salad and the allowed vegetables. she took a bunch of supplements, though not all the right ones apparently because some only were available in gel caps, and if you don’t know this you should, the gelatin of gel caps and a lot of candy is made from animal connective tissue, and she wouldn’t take them. she also started a drastic cardio workout plan, and she already had respiratory problem and not one ounce of fat, and it took only a few weeks for he heart to give out. i think it was suicide by atkins. but what do i know.

i thought about going to the funeral. i’m not sure why, seeing as i usually avoid those things like the plague (actually, i avoid the plague by living in this century, not by anything specific that i am aware of, but anyway), even when i get told that i should go (it’s not quite something that occurs to me - i mean if the person is dead, they’re dead, and what do they care whether i attend a stupid boring service or not?). i think i just wanted to amke sure she was dead. and i was vaguely curious to see if the boys had turned out as warped as i expected them to. then i remembered something about her illegal immigrant of a husband (who had probably learned the language in the last few years, but had also probably imported a large extended family). he’s a compulsive noise person. he plays with pens, clicking them on and off for minutes and minutes. i once saw him play with a zippo lighter for half an hour (after which i took the lighter away - well, i grabbed it. more precisely, i screamed, grabbed the lighter from his hand and threw it out the window - we were on the sixth floor). click, click. click, click. click, click. click, click. i can’t take it. just thinking about it i work myself up. he hums, he whistles, he is never quiet. and i cannot stand never quiet. i want never quiet to die. painfully but silently. so then i decided not to go. but then i changed my mind again. then the day came, and i completely forgot about it, so that was that.

the guru guy i never heard of again. well, once i moved a couple of times and his mailings still went to an old address where nobody knew me. well, where nobody knew me under the name i had given him and his group. i thought i saw his wife once in a stripclub - don’t ask. but years later i met some lady who wanted to cure my migraine with pressure again. except she wanted to apply pressure to my hand, to the spot between my index finger and my thumb. i forget on which hand and if it was supposed to be relevant in any way. she sat next to me and took my hand and rubbed hard and in a circle, and harder, and she kept rubbing, until at some point the pain on my hand overwhelmed the pain in my head and i thought i was cured and i quickly escaped the pressure lady. and of course, as soon as she was out of sight, the pain came back. won’t people without migraines ever understand that migraine gets cured by powerful chemical compounds (my favorite being of an opiate variety…), not by applying fucking pressure? makes me think of my aunt who’d make me laugh as a child, because if you complained of a pain soemwhere, she’d step on your toe or slap your shoulder, and then ask whether you still felt the first pain, which of course you didn’t right at that moment.

last night i bought myself some blue ear plugs. very cute: they come in a tiny blue round case. i put them on last night and i slept well, and when the boyfriend left for work this morning i put them back on and i’ve had them on all day and i’m enjoying the remoteness of everything. i know when there are car honks and i know when the neighbors walk in and out, but that’s about it, and it’s vague. i like vague. and i like quiet. well, depending. but right now i like remote quiet, and i’m getting it. if only i had olives too.

this is rather random, but i hate nicholas cage. i can’t stand him. i want him to die. or at the very least, to get off the screen, any screen, and become a camera-phobic hermit. i can’t even explain why. i know many people onsider him a great actor, and some women (gasp!) find him attractive, but i can’t stand him. i can’t see any movie he plays in because i won’t be wtaching, i’ll be gagging, and i’ll be complaining about how much i hate him the whole time. i’ve given this quite a lot of thought, and i’ve decided that if i ever was driving a car somewhere, and he happened to cross the street in front of me, green light, red light, i don’t care - i’d run him over. only way to get rid of that problem. nicholas cage is the very opposite of blue. i’m not saying he’s evil - that’s paul mccartney - but i’m saying he’s wrong. perhaps not quite human. i wouldn’t go near him if you paid me, i wouldn’t go see one of his movies to save my own life. i cannot take him. i cannot take that he exists. it’s unbelievable to me that the universe can hold both him and i and not collapse in a giant wet *ploick*. i hate him. i don’t even know why (i don’t think i’ve ever seen him in anything, so great is my dislike) - it’s a gut reaction, like i have never had for anyone else. sure, i instantly hate a lot of people. usually, i find out later that they were allergic to animals, or that they didn’t like animals, or that they had some other weird trait that i consider should never have passed the test of evolution and makes them retarded idiots with barely any right to breathe. but it is never as strong as my profound, unexplainable, gut-wrenching furious and total hatred for nicholas cage. somebody put him out of my misery.

i’ve been told that it’s borderline wrong, to be so categorical, to love and hate and have nothing in between. but it’s not true. i also have an awful lot of indifference. otherwise i don’t know how i’d make it through most days. i don’t know how anybody could survive without a big share of indifference. but then again, watch me care.

chapter fourteen.

last night, when i was six, i went into one of those revolving cylinder attractions like they have on fair grounds and at amusement parks and i developped instant vertigo. one of those things where you’re supposed to stick to the wall, and the whole thing spins and that’s what makes you stick, and then the floor moves down. i was too light to be in there, and i was falling down, and one of the teens there got unstuck from the wall and came to my help. i didn’t find it funny, and i wanted to throw up. i had nightmares for years, with the floor vanishing from under me, stuck to a convex wall, sliding down slowly but without rest. nightmares of vertigo and of falls.

the boyfriend installed a ladder in my living room. he bolted it to the floor. he put a swing-like seat up there, near the ceiling, for me to use as a goal. i am attempting to combat vertigo enough to be able to attempt skiing. it’s not the height of the mountain that robs me of blood circulation, it’s the awful lift device. depending of something that flimsy, being stuck high up with nothing under me - just thinking about it makes me sick. watching people doing it on television makes me nauseous (what are they, insane? no way man, no way). so this won’t be an easy battle. i am hoping that within the next twenty years i might be able to reach the top of a ski station’s mountain. for now, i’m going up as high as i can on the ladder every day, and staying there for a little while to get used to it. i’ve only started last month. now i can step on the fourth step for a while. it used to be that the third step was my absolute limit, so i’m moving ahead. even though it sounds pathetic. three, four steps, that’s nothing, right? i know. but it’s high enough for me to want down, for my flight or fight response to trigger the “flee, flee you fool!” response in big bold shiny glittering blinking red neon letters, for my sweat to start dripping in tiny droplets, my heart to pound. i get down before i faint. so far so good.

i figure this is my way to self-improvement. ha! well, i figure that attacking such a consequenceless problem is not that big a deal, and doesn’t turn me into a new age know thyself type. i’m not against self-improvement, i just find it is a rather empty goal. so let’s say i am doing it for the boyfriend. because he’d so love to see me ski. or attempt to, anyway. he was probably the kind of guy i had crushes on but also wanted to stab in high school. a jock. a popular pretty boy with money in the family (he has since broken his nose twice, his ankle once (and i’m told that cramps your jock style) and has been cut off from any of the family money - otherwise i probably would have never met him - because i never would have looked at him.) anyway he was a skiier, on the slopes every minute he could get, teaching and patrolling and doing all kinds of things that are completely abstract and vague to me. he took me to a ski resort a few times, because he used to have a rented condo up north, and he’d manage to drag me there a few times a year. i had never seen a ski resort up close before. it’s all very unclear to me what the thrill is, and how those things work, how you know where to go and which slope to try and how much space to leave between people and how you don’t lose your friends and such - in fact, everything that can happen after the lift is a blur to me, because that’s very much where my limit is. so i stay at ground level, and i enjoy the no ski after ski, and i drink with the best of them (i mean best drinkers - i have no idea who the best ski people are, although i do comment to myself about their ridiculous trendy outfits). so skiing is fun for me too. and every time i was happy to leave for home from the bottom of the hill, because drunk as i was i never would have been able to make it down.

anyway. winter is coming and i’ll probably complain about having no ice skates as i always do, and do nothing about it as i always do. so much for self-improvement. every fall it’s the same thing, the boyfriend turns into a cromagnon man: winter bad, huh, me fix things, huh. so he plastifies my windows, removes the screens, patches holes, buys salt front the front entrance, makes sure i have hats and mittens in plenty. like i said, he’s my mother. and my father. that’s cool. i so don’t care about the passing of the seasons that i fhe didn’t have all those alien rituals, i probably would never find out about leaves falling and black flies coming to life.

i was away the last two days. community service. at least that’s what they call it. i’d call it boring. and long. and why did i have to get dressed for this? and it started with a little training session in a little training room with lots of crappy chairs and no window and stale doughnuts and piss coffee. and i ended with much of the same, but everything - the room, the pastries, the coffee - was just much staler. i shouldn’t complain, it’s better than paying a fine or doing time. or so i’m told. it’s true i wouldn’t like it very much in prison. sharing my space, not having privacy, being told what to do… not quite my style. and all those women! i’d go nuts. i’d much rather be in a male prison. not that they’d allow me in. but all things considered, i’d prefer it. what did i do to deserve the community service crap assignment? wouldn’t you like to know.

my neighbors had sex last night. the ones with the kids and the fighting and the constant noise. i mention that they had sex because it’s only happened three times since they moved in. well, i’ve heard them three times, and i can hear everything that goes on in there. perhaps i missed a few times, being elsewhere. perhaps. anyway it was weird. a few minutes of bang bang ooh aah, and then they broke into a major fight. for once i couldn’t decypher their words. mind you, a fight that breaks right into the middle of intercourse is usually about only a few possible issues. impotence, pain, speed at which he’s done. perhaps we can add apparent symptoms of venereal disease and obvious faking. well, unless the woman did what i did a few times to upset then lovers, and made a remark about something completely unrelated, but showing pretty well that she was miles away, thinking about something that has nothing to do with the poor guy and his eager penis. they don’t like that. somathing about the groceries is always nice. like, oh shit i forgot to buy limes at the grocery store! or i hear it’s nice this time of year in sweden. or did you think to buy yourself vitamin c yesterday? oh yeah they love that. especially when it’s delievered with good timing, when they’re so sure they’re on their way to heaven, taking you with them like some genital charming prince, as if ramming in and out ever sufficed to anything.

anyway, they had sex, then they had a fight, then the sex resumed (that is more puzzling). and then before i got mad (i’m getting better at this self-control crap too!) i remembered my cute ear plugs, and i put them in. then i ate a cheese sandwich and pretended i was in mexico. by that, i mean that i sat in a hot bath tub with epson salts and a tanning light. well, it’s not a tanning light, it’s one of those ultra violet thingies for light therapy. the boyfriend thought it could cure me of what he calls my seasonal depression. poor sweetie: my depression isn’t seasonal, unless a life is a season. but in any case i actually like the lamp, so even though officially i put it in the back of a closet and never use it, i do unpack it every week or so, and bask in its shine.

chapter fifteen.

sometimes i feel like buying stuff all day. it doesn’t matter what, as long as it answers to a need or a wish or a whim of mine and makes me happy for a few seconds. i just wish i could hire someone to return all the crap the next day though, when i feel like an idiot for overspending for crap i never needed. i assume some people can just consume, day in, day out, and not get the guilt and disgust i get. i assume that’s how our world turns round right now. i guess i should be happy to have that capacity for guilt - it keeps me from being a rotten consumer who is part of the problem not the solution (or whatever else your leftist cousin would say). but it prevents me from getting the irrational bliss of the shopper. that tiny moment when everything is better, more beautiful, shinier, just because you spent fifty buck on the cutest t-shirt or the classiest bra. and if you can shop all day, you can extend the moment and carrying all your big and tiny and paper and plastic bags over your arms, you can feel like a magical princess whose every wish comes true instantly. when that happens, i avoid shopping for shoes, because i usually end up depressed and upset and tired and i rant to myself about all the stupid manufacturers and the so-called trend-setters and i can ruin a good day of spending in three shoe store visits.

i haven’t been on a binge of that sort in years now. but i get my fix nonetheless. sometimes i raid a dollar store and i end up happy for a few hours with only a few items and a few bucks spent. it’s stupid, and i don’t know why spending brings happiness, but i know it can often give me a boost when i have enough energy to decide i’m getting dressed and going out for it. the boyfriend just rolls his eyes at me when that happens. i don’t care. i’m not spending his money, and even if i was, it wouldn’t be much of it, so why not.

i guess i’m in limbo right now and that’s why i feel like i’m going in circles. i’m not quite in hell and not quite anywhere else. i’m floating and floatingly talking about my floating (all this talk of floating has made me think of root beer, which is gross and now i’m grossed out - none of that stinkin’ root beer!). there’s good stuff going on - things are going well with the boyfriend, meaning we hit few bumps and we collide mainly voluntarily, and i’m realitively healthy. and i have been able to distance myself from most of the worst shit i’ve gone through, and i hope not to go back. but all i’ve known was extreme, and now i’m in limbo, nowhere near any extreme, and i only have old wounds to lick and pick at. and the thing about extremes is that you feel alive. trying to sleep in the rain behind a stinking dumpster because they release you from the hospital but you have nowhere to go that you want to be at, sure you feel like shit, but you know you’re alive. and you do too when you quit your job and leave for mexico for a few weeks, knowing that when you get back your appartment will have been renovated, and you can live there all you want and never go out again if you don’t want to, because money is no real problem anymore and you know you’ll always get by. good or bad, but mostly bad, extremes have always defined my aliveness. floating like i am now, i don’t know for a fact that i live. if i bit my forearm (and i do), eventually i’ll feel enough pain to convince myself i’m feeling something, and feeling something is a good indicator of life. and i have to be content with that kind of evidence.

a month can feel like a million years when your days are empty and that you don’t feel like filling them, but rather like watching them drip one by one until the dripping noise drives you mad. you know, to see how long it’ll take. sometimes i have a very scientific patience. the boyfriend suggested i should get a dog, to keep me company and give my life meaning. no way. i can’t have a being that depends on me like a dog would. i’m not trustworthy. the poor thing would be quite miserable on all the days where nothing could make me get out of bed or get dressed. i’m not dog owner material right now, unfortunately. i love animals. but i love them too much to treat them less than perfectly, and i’m just not in a place where a dog would be good for me, or me for it. i can barely take care of myself, i’m not stupid enough to add to my burdens, like those people who get married to save a dying relationship or those teenage girls who have a baby to have someone whol loves them back. what a load of crap. i’d love a dog. i’d adore my dog. but then i’d let her down and i’d want to kill myself and frankly, i’m honest enough to know that and smart enough not to take one step in that direction. call me columbo.

i used to watch a lot of movies. then i got tired of seeing only stupid ones, since i’d seen most of what i knew i wanted to see already. i was just watching brain fodder. then i took to getting as high as i could, and watching soap operas on foreign channels. spanish is a bit too close, a bit too easy to figure out, so i preferred turkish and arabic soaps. i didn’t always know what they were, or in what language, and i usually could not figure out exactly what things were about. mostly the same crap as our soap operas, i’m guessing - love and treason and fake evil twins coming back from the dead after years of silence, when their twin is already married to their mistress and has adopted all the illegetimate sheep on the first. glitzy glamour and rich people in comas, crying over which daughter will inherit the family fortune and bitch slapping each other about the go-getter handsome brown haired dude from south america who only happens to somewhat look like their dead mother’s lover that they know nothing about but all of a sudden somebody sends a picture in the mail, and lo, it is the mother, back herself from the dead, or perhaps some lost island in the pacific where they inject botox at will and shape up those boobs at need. some days i’d turn my tv set upside down because that way the radioactively colorful makeup on the female stars did not scrae me as much, and it all looked like some abstract art with an incomprehensible soundtrack. but even that got old eventually. and i get headaches when i watch tv for too long. something about having lost the ability to see perspective. other days i’d stare at the turned of tv set and blink until i saw something. other times i sat in front of the window and made up stories about the passers-by, which is i guess what gave soemone the idea to invent tv, so that at least someone out there would have control over who passes by and who doesn’t, cause honestly some pedestrians are simply uninspiring, and what am i going to do with a blank piece of flesh if there’s a storm out and i won’t get another pain in the ass innocent bystander for another half hour?

one by one, i’m exhausting my ways to exhaust time. masturbation doesn’t take that long when you do it enough to be good at it. sure, you can do it over and over. but even that is a charm that quickly fades. so i spend most days in a daze, mixing pills and liquids and powders and herbs, and i keep adding to my internal mix until i feel comfortable enough that i won’t need to move again for a few hours. sometimes i don’t reach that. but trying is most interesting anyway.

i read the personals. that got the boyfriend nervous. it made me laugh. and sometimes i called. my favorite ever was from a woman seeking another woman, who said her boyfriend would come along, but that it was ok, because he liked to be tied up and pretend to be a dog, so “we” could just tie his leash to a corner while going at it. not that it was the weirdest ad i saw, but it made me laugh. i kept it. i was never very interested in any nomal personal ad, you know, man seeks single white female, proportional weight, clean, no children, for walks on the beach and wine by the fireplace. yawn. fucked up people interest me a whole lot more. or perhaps in understand them better? i don’t know, but a lady who posts a picture of her eight-inches heel squishing a realistic if oversized penis and balls dildo is simply more attractive to me that one who pouts and squishes her boobs together to play ingenue. the men tend to be a little more pathertic. like they don’t know what they really want, or they know it but for decades we’ve bashed their skull sin when they did, so now they’re confused and they don’t dare. but what’s masculine about a guy stroking his limp tiny cock while sucking a finger he inserted in the gaping whole underneath his mustache? mind you, men who show off their dick to attract women always puzzle me. i think they don’t get it. they’re like that ex-lover who wanted me to say how much i liked his. poor guys.

on the other hand, all those people who feel the need to put a personal ad not for a relationship (i can believe that is hard to find, although i’m not sure personal ads help much) but only for sex kind of leave me puzzled. is it so hard to find free sex? perhaps if you’re in a remote area and looking for something kinky and specific. in that case, perhaps you should get out of your remote area to get some. just a thought. but otherwise, i don’t get it. getting sex is easy. for a woman at least. and she doesn’t have to be super pretty or well shaped - just wanting sex will usually get you some. at least that’s what i’ve always found. that’s the kind of discussion i have with myself, because the boyfriend becomes very uncomfortable. he thinks i’m about to spill the beans on my past sexual history, as they say in cosmo, as they say on tv. no way. there isn’t that much to tell and i’d rather slip things out one by one and keep some anecdotes to make him blush for a few more years.

i stopped reading the personals a few months ago. it was a cold wet gray day and i was alone and i had nothing to do so i set up a bunch of newspapers on the table and i was getting ready to start, with three colors of pens and two markers, one yellow (gasp!) and one blue (d’uh). i decided to make some popcorn, so i found a bag, and i put it in the microwave. it clearly said “this side up”, but as i perhaps have already mentioned, i’m not too good at following instructions. i put it wrong side up, set the time to however minutes it takes (i actually don’t know because i have a popcorn button and i usually push it and walk away so i have no clue how long popcorn takes…), and went back to the table, to start reading my post-modern harlequin novel type filling. well believe it or not the microwave went something like “kaplow, bang schlinling”. i went back to the kitchen and the popcorn seemed to have exploded. the microwave door had held on, but barely, and its hinges were stretched, and the inside was black, with here and there in a popping sound a grain of corn that would pop. i made a mental note that some instructions are better left unquestioned. i abandoned the idea of having popcorn. i took a giant garbage bag and filled it with the microwave, popcorn and all, and brought it down to the garbage bin. and there i found a half burned out diary, half covered in potato peals. so i left my microwave, took the diary, went back home and forgot all about reading personal ads for a while.

after i tired from watching all the soap operas, i spent a few days blowing soap… bubbles (guess where i got that idea…) through the window. i’d stand in the shade, though, so all the people looking up to see the bubbles’ origin could not see me. the first day i had a lot of fun. the second day, i bought a few more accessories, to be able to blow more bubbles at once, or to blow in more comfort. the third day i had less fun, and fewer people were looking up. it seems people adapt very quickly to something that doesn’t bash their skull in or destroy their life savings. the fourth day i did something else. but the sidewalk in front of my window was really, really clean.

for a while i was into orange. well, in my apartment, orange and blue. so i’d go out at night and i’d find orange traffic cones and i’d rescue them and set them up all over the place. yes, rescue them: traffic cones are not awarded the proper amount of respect from city workers, and they often get crushed or stabbed or soiled by people who simply do not care. whereas a mint condition orange traffic cone is a thing of beauty. well, i, at least, can find the beauty in mass made urban design objects. and the cool thing about the cones too is that the boyfriend could walk in and get upset that he wasn’t able to walk around because i had stolen (liberated, stolen, same thing) so many cones, but then in a few minutes i could have all the cones one on top of the other, making a few towering orange pillars, but leaving him with all the room he requires to deambulate, and i could then go “see?”. in the same way and others, the cones also kept my nephew very entertained, and for a long time. the end of the cones came when i was away for a few days, although it was one of those extendable stays, and nobody knew how long i’d be gone before i was released, and my sister came in and got rid of them all. somehow. that was before i asked for the key back and she pretended to have lost it or whatever. she never really admitted getting rid of the cones either. i got upset and she didn’t deny anything but she never quite admitted it either. bitch. i’m still avoiding her. last night someone tried the old lock on the door and tried turning the handle and barging in. then when the second lock resisted, the person simply retreated. i’m having a new bolt put in. and i’m still not picking up the phone or plugging the doorbell back in. as for mail, i only get my mail to recycle it once in a while. all my bills are on prepayment plans, and what else could i get by mail, adverts? gee, thanks. the few that the dense mailman still puts in, i recycle as well. so what i get by mail is mostly crap that was put in the wrong box (which i recycle automatically as well) and unrequested credit cards and the like. straight to recycling, thank you very much.

as my godmother used to say, never fall in love with a korean boy. and she knew what she was talking about then, even though now she’s assembling three rags to a plastic bags, close the top with a clip and toss aside. people buy those for a small price and clean their cars with those rags, i’m told. she doesn’t care. she’s not all quite there anyway and she doesn’t know what the rags are for and why she fills the bags, but she knows it’s better to fill bags in that room than to be back in the unit, locked in with psychos and compulsive urinators. the last time i saw her, she took me in her arms and sobbed and wouldn’t let go, and she seemed scared and she said, “i couldn’t find you to tell you where i was!” and i hugged her and i said it was okay, everything was okay (while at the same time wondering why those stupid empty words seem to comfort approximately everyone, and most importantly, why those stupid empty words come to absolutely everybody when the time comes to comfort another - what a wasted language, if the most comforting and reassuring words we can find are “it’s okay”, whether it be true or not. and when we say it, we know that really, very few things that make the person panick like that will, in fact, ever be close to okay), and it calmed her down and she started staring into space and her amrs went numb. it’s a side effect of one of the pills they give her. she just stares, sometimes, for hours at a time, and people around her ignore her then, and they only acknowledge her existence again when she starts showing off a certain level of mobility. they don’t allow me to visit her anymore. they said i disturb the other patiens too much. i say if some asshole wants to grab my eye patch without warning, that’s his right, but my right in return is to kick his shin, and then his groin. and then his face. whatever he leaves near enough. jerk. the head nurse stopped me from further kicking, and then he took me aside and said, rather quiet-like, “you have to stop being an ass magnet”. it’s only later, when doctors got involved, that iwas told not to come back. but really, as soon as the jerk dies or gets transfered to another unit, i’ll be allowed back in.

i’ll tell you a secret. when i close my eye, everything is blue.

time for a song now, because i’m not good at the mushy stuff, at telling secrets and then not running off or not starting to talk loudly in a screechy voice because i touched upon somethng too emotional for me to deal with very well and it’s confusing for others because i just trail off after i say something intimate, just ask the boyfriend, but i simply can’t deal with self-revelation and intimacy. so i’ll sing a stupid song instead. and if it makes no sense, even better.

there were four
who wanted to fight
against three, who didn’t want to.
and the four
who wanted to fight
told the three, who didn’t want to,
there are four of us,
who want to fight
against three, who do not want to.

chapter sixteen.

i dreamt that i walked into two convenience stores, one after the other (why? what was i looking to buy that required me to enter two convenience stores within the same block? who knows! who cares!). both were owned and operated by an asian couple. when i walked into the first convenience store, the couple came to me in tears to explain that their rake had been stolen. had i seen it? when i walked into the second convenience store, the couple were crying and screaming and they showed me a drawing of their rake, which had also been stolen. the man had a mechanical hand in his flesh one, a hand that extended metal fingers to, effectively, rake, but only the width of a hand, nothing like their precious rake had done. i’m not sure what that rake symbolized, but i’m thinking that if people want to flock to me for help and guidance, i would rather be recognized as something other than the mother queen goddess of raking apparatus.

i also dreamt that i was covered in white mice. i was lying down and i could see them walking all over my body, but i couldn’t move or do anything about it - all i could do was watch and feel their little feet on me. it wasn’t unpleasant, not like i think it would really be (and my dream fortunately left out all the mice shit, so i wasn’t covered in it as i would be in reality), just little fluffy mice walking to and fro, not nibbling or anything, just a slightly tickling massage of white furry mammals.

two last nights ago i asked the boyfriend to drive me to the cabin. his cabin. his family’s cabin. whatever. all i know is that when we want to get out of here there is a place to go where we can be alone, or even where i can be alone. it’s small and doesn’t have electricity, so he’s the only one of his family who ever goes, except for picnics and crap like that in the summer, which are well announced and publicized via the family radar screen and so we can avoid those days. most of the time when they organize a family affair of that kind it ends up raining on their ants anyway, and it makes me laugh and i don’t really care that i’m being mean and not treating others in any way that remotely resembles how i want to be treated. do unto others my ass.

the lake was cold as hell but not quite frozen, which was a good thing considering that i spent a few hours sitting on the dock throwing up into the water. weird thing though is that even though the water is clearly not frozen, it seems to be thicker, its surface harder to break. as if there is some state between liquid and solid that no high school teacher has wanted to tell us about.

it was cold but i wanted to be there and see the stars and feel the wind on my face. and he built a fire in the fire place and i wrapped myself in blankets and we drank and i forgot that i hadn’t had anything to eat since the day before and eventually everything became blurry and i stumbled out and he followed and i sat on the dock in the middle of the dark not quite frozen water and i cried as i puked in the thick water and it was like something snapped and i was able to let go momentarily and vomitting was good and lifted my spirits and freed me from some of the weight i’d been carrying for a long while. well that’s how it felt at the time anyway. and the moon rose and i forgot i was cold for a while and i couldn’t get up anyway because the dock is shaky, logically, resting on water as it is, and every time i tried to get up i’d swoon with nausea and have to sit back down and so i just laid back in his amrs and looked at the moon for a while and when i was finally cold, i was finally able to get up and go back inside and we ate soup and bread and butter and honey and i felt fantastic, just emptied out of all the gunk, and ready to start anew. except of course i wasn’t quite all there and i was rather mistaken, but for those few hours i felt like a new me. no, even better, a new someone else. and his smile in the fire light was magical and i felt like i had stepped into one of those bad romance novels that i have never read but don’t we all know enough about those without actually ever reading them? and we actually slept in front of the fire because it was the only warm place for us to sleep well and i actually did sleep well and one night like that can really make a difference for me, a difference i will feel for at least a week.

the next morning was just not that fun. the fire had died hours earlier, everything was cold, i was cold, he was cold, and although he had brought coffee, he soon found that one of his sisters (well, he assumed, since she was the only one and the last one to go to the cabin) had taken home with her all the possible ways of making coffee. gone were all the pots and pans, and gone the french press. no filters, nothing. i shrugged it off. i was cold and i was ready to leave - at least in the car i’d be warm. he got crabby very fast. started mumbling and grumbling about people like that, who don’t think of others and who put their noses where they don,t belong, and he was going to tell her off, and how dare she take his stuff from there and who did she think she was and we’ll see about that, i’ll change the lock, i’ll tell her there’s rats, i’ll flood the place with her in it. he was mumbling without interruption, pacing to and fro as he put stuff away and packed his shit. i was hung over and i just sat huddled in a blanket or four, my head resting on the wall’s wood panelling. his coffee was a half hour away, at the nearest little hamlet, and his mood wouldn’t change until we got there. so i closed my eyes and drifted off somewhat.

i woke up at home. freakiest thing. the boyfriend was sitting next to me on the bed, wiping the sweat from my forehead. he looked worried. i was confused and couldn’t figure out what time - or even what day it was. i knew i shouldn’t be at home, but i didn’t quite know just yet where i expected to be. my head hurt. my skull hurt. he said i banged it. i got up apparently at some point and then collapsed again and my head collided with the balcony post at the cabin. it had worried him but i had laughed it off. i have no recollection of that ever happening, although i do not doubt that it will become a memory in time, like all those stories you were told over and over as a child, that now you see the images in your head of all those events really happening, but if you think about it, you can’t be sure whether you were there or whether you just built it up from everybody else’s accounts, and either way it is now a part of you, a first or perhaps second-hand memory, engraved and ever changing.

i’ve been passed out for over twenty-four hours, apparently. i guess it’s my longest black out ever. i woke up just in time, too, because the boyfriend said he would have taken me to the hospital in an hour or so if i hadn’t come to. he didn’t right away because he knew i’d flip. and i’d be angry at him for a long time. and he knew going to a hospital has never solved anything for me. quite the opposite. and he also knew i’ve blacked out for hours before, and it’s not much to worry about.

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i’m probably the opposite of a hypocondriac. i never care why i hurt or how i’ll get better or what this may be a symptom of, that a cause of this. first of all, asking those questions is the type of mistake that will land your ass of a crappy flea infested couch in some stupid musak playing gray carpeted and green painted waiting room for six to eight hours, where you will have enough free time to ascertain your chances of catching something from some other impatient patient sitting next to you with their unwashed hands and sneezing infants, and enough free time to go home, get all the rest you’d need to heal, and go back to sit your ass on the gross couch. call it an allergy to doctors, to their smugness, to their high opinion of themselves, whereas, really, they’re just lawyers who happened to be good at math. i hate their cold clammy hands, their refusal to discuss anything that is not contained in one of their leather bound tomes and that hasn’t bee taught by doctor so and so the famous expert in expertology. fucke them. life is so much bigger than doctors think. and so is health and so is my body. i enjoy saying keep your laws off my body, as any woman should, but it’s also keep your fucking western mysogynistic bastardized medicine off my body. and keep your doctors off my body. and keep your super germs and super infections and super bacterias in your hospitals if you must and off my body, period.

the boyfriend took the day off, stayed with me. he’s pale and shaken and his eyes are red. poor guy. he’d never admit to me that the whole thing is hard for him, but i know. and he’d never tell me because i could make fun of him. i probably would. i’d say he’s weak, or if you can’t take it you know where the door is, or something equally friendly. i’m like that. if he makes me notice that perhaps i need him i’ll push him away. and i’ll hurt him. and the fact that i’ll regret the words even before i utter them won’t make much of a difference. neither would my apology and his forgiveness. we’ve been over this before. so he hides his tears and he hides his fears and i allow myself to be comforted and treated like a sick princess. in truth, i know this is harder for him than for me. especially the black outs, but that’s rather obvious: why would being unconscious be hard for me? it’s only harsh for the one staying behind, who doesn’t know what to do or what will happen, and needs to get this heavy body in the car and up the stairs and in bed, and has to take all the decisions and make sure he makes the right choices, or else he’ll have to face the consequences whenever i wake up. i know i’m harsh. i am not sure there is anything i can do to change that completely. i’ve come some way. a long way perhaps. but still. i’m dangerous to love. i can hurt without wanting to, and that’s already bad, but sometimes i hurt and i know i do and i want to, and that’s when i’m the most vicious. and i wouldn’t want to face me when that happens.

chapter seventeen.

i lied. or he lied. he admitted last night that he had in fact taken me to his doctor friend. ran some tests and fondled me as doctors enjoy doing (perhaps a little less since i was his friend’s unconscious girlfriend) and said that as far as he could tell i was only sleeping, and to let me sleep for a while. the boyfriend agreed that made some sense, given how bad my sleeping habits and ability have been recently. so i slept. i’m not sure what good it did me, other than being famished when i woke up.

i dreamt of doors. lots of doors. scooby-doo-like, if you know what i mean, but only the doors. they were creaking and closing and opening of their own and that was creepy. and i was walking through the doors and i didn’t know what i was looking for but i knew i’d know it if i saw it, feel it if i came close. later i crossed a bridge and fell through it. how’s that for fucking symbolism? but i always wake up before i break something or kill myself or get killed. dreams are cool, in that sense, in a way life is not.

i’ve got this thing against time. for most of my life now i’ve refused to wear a watch. a few months ago i got rid of all the clocks in the house. drove the boyfriend up the wall when the alarm didn’t ring the next morning and he was late for something or other, but he has since gotten used to setting some little beep beeping thing he carries around to serve that purpose. i used to say time was a limit we submit to and i refuse to do so, blah blah blah. well it’s kind of true. just like i find it rather ridiculous that someone can claim they own land (owning the earth itself? how dare you! how proposterous!), i find it hard to swallow that we would all have to agree that it is eight o’clock. and what’s that supposed to mean anyway? it’s just a way of saying at our longitude and latitude, when the sun is about way high, we decided to say it was eight o’clock. well i can live with the sun and the weather without needing to apply numbers to them, thank you very much.

i’m glad, mind you, that i can allow myself to live my own way. if i had to hold a job or if i had kids or whatever - or anything, in fact! - i’d have to conform a whole lot more. now i don’t. the worse that happens to me is having to wait a long time at a movie theatre because i got there in between showings, or having to order take out when i get to the grocery store only to realized it has been closed for a while (which is less heart wrenching than getting there and seeing all the cashiers count the money and the managers running around and the shelving boys shelving stuff, and you know you just missed your chance and five minutes ago they would have let you in). so since i have that chance, i don’t see why i wouldn’t exploit it fully. and night and day long ago became words for light or dark, not words for when i sleep versus when i’m awake. sometimes my time difficulty/rejection adds to my already difficult way to relate to others. i don’t know when the weekend is unless the boyfriend tells me. i never know the date. the month, sometimes. i mean i’m not dense, if i see pumpkins i know it’s october, and if i hear crappy music i know christmas must be in less than three months.

speaking of october. i spent a few years of my childhood completely convinced that the great pumpkin was real. just like linus, you think. no. because of linus. i watched peanuts and i saw linus and he convinced me, the great pumpkin had to be real, because linus was so sweet and so smart and so convinced and really, doesn’t that make more sense than santa claus or the fucking tooth fairy, neither of which much visited our home? i thought so. and i never liked candy all that much and people in costumes sort of freak me out and so waiting in a neighbor’s garden for the great pumpkin seemed a much more valid occupation than the trick or treating my sister greedily engaged in. the nieghbor didn’t quite agree, but after he called my parents he let me stay. not that they encouraged me to believe in the great one, but they encouraged us to be out of the house for long periods at a time. and they didn’t express that very politely, so maybe the neighbor felt badly for me. or maybe he figured i wasn’t doing anything wrong. the second year he brought me a little stool and a blanket. he was a nice man, i guess. i never really stopped believing in the great pumpkin. well, that is to say there never was a moment when i decided i didn’t believe anymore, and nothing happened to shed any light on the mystery. but one year for halloween i was sick and had to stay in bed at my grandma’s, and the next year i didn’t even think of the pumpkin patch, and that was the end of my active belief.

back to time. when i get asked if i have the time, i say yes, all the time in the world. when people ask what time it is, i make it up. it’s usually four twenty or eleven eleven. why not. if time is so important for you, bitch, get yourself a watch and don’t bother me any more. if you’re late for an appointment, asshole, i don’t see how that’s my responsibility, and i don’t see why i should help you feel worse or better about how late or not you are. gee, what is it with all those strangers putting their crap on random others? if i wanted your life i’d have it. if i wanted to know all about it i would. nobody is that hard to crack these days. but i don’t care. get this through your skull and get it right: i do not care about you, your miserable life, your needs and frustrations. i don’t care who you are, where you came from, what makes you tick tock tick tock tick tock. and when there are no more tick tocks are you going to blame the faulty battery or are you going to slide to the ground and croak, having taken its battery for yours, its reality for the real thing?

now that we’re on the topic of delusional societal issues, it brings back a stupid memory. i was hit on the head with a crucifix once. well, maybe more than once, but i only saw it come down on my skull once, and then everything became foggy and then everything became silvery, like i was surrounded by completely silent paparazzi with huge camera flashes, and then everything went rather dark. my brother hit me. yes, i have a brother. had. i had a brother. he was older than my sister and i. and he was a jerk. big surprise there. well he’s in jail now, for something unrelated and a lot more gruesome, and chances are i’ll never see him again because in thirty years when they may let him out i’ll be dead or he’ll be dead or i won’t care and he’ll be broken. which ever - they’re all good options. anyway he hit me with a crucifix. doctors thought i might have brain damage. but then again what do doctors ever know. and they bandaged my head over the stitches and they eventually sent me home, where my agressor lived. bravo. very smart. well in the end it worked out because the social worker they assigned to me fell in love with my brother and well, let’s just say he’ll be thinking about her, among others, for a long long lonely time. but the whole crucifix in the head issue didn’t really improve my vision of religion. ha. i love making understatements.

there was a song that really interested me when i was little. it was about a tiny husband. sung by a woman who said her father had given her a tiny man for a husband. and i meant tiny. i mean that they took a leaf to make him a suit. and that she lost him in her bed (lucky her: usually you try to lose men in your bed and you can’t), and she looked for him and then somehow he got roasted and the cat thought it was a dead mouse so he took the tiny hubbie. isn’t that gross and surreal? well i used to dream about men being that small, so i could crush them. not all of them, but my brother for sure. my father too. but the whole song was just fascinating to me: what does she mean, her father gave her a husband? and how can he be this tiny? i know: very intellectual questions. but puzzling enough to come back to mind once in a while for all the years since. there was another song too, also sung by a woman, and she said she wanted a husband who was docile and could fit in her pocket. again with the miniature men! mind you that second song was mostly about a tyranic wife who wanted a (tiny) nice husband who would obey her and look pretty. nothing short of the proverbial tables turning, and i’ve got nothing bad to say about that. i reman, though, a little weirded out by the obviously common wish for a pocket-sized husband. i mean… buy a vibrator, ladies. there’s a good pocket sized partner!

some things are just too weird to be true. for everything else, there’s mastercard. ha.

my sister slipped an envelope under my door last night. which tells me i need to ask the landlord to come and add a rubber thingie to the bottom of the door, because if a thin envelope can pass, a lot of cold air must be coming in throughout the winter. i’ve been good about using all my locks, and the boyfriend seemed relieved when i told him about it. he would not have been shocked if i’d said i had decided to leave all doors and windows unlocked at all times, but me adding locks was a shock. in a good way. he hoped i was on a roll and offered to get me more smoke detectors - he installed one, following a fight he somwhat won because i passed out and he figured i would somehwat forget about it and once the detector was up i wouldn’t go through the trouble of taking it down - which is a good point considering the height of the ceilings here, and my vertigo - i could have and i considered throwing stuff at it to knock it off, but realistically, chances are i would only manage to strat the beyond loud alarm, and then be stuck with it until the batteries died, unable as i am to get up high enough on a ladder to make the horrible noise stop. so he somewhat won with the one smoke detector, but i said no to more. he worries because i smoke in bed - everywhere, really - pot, hash, whatever i have, feel like or can find (not in that order). and i’ve got this passing out thing. but really, if i was unconscious, the alarm wouldn’t do much for it, and the sound of that crappy ufo-shaped plastic gizmo is enough to send me into a week-long migraine. i’d rather not take the chance of getting migraine for toast. any migraine sufferer out there will understand that i’d rather take the small chance of dying in a fire than risk a life-long migraine. plus, i’m not that much at risk of dying since he did put one detector up. i say good enough. i say everybody happy, now let’s never speak of it again.

the envelope was thin. i put it aside. i almost threw it away. but eh, she is my sister. and i can’t avoid her forever: i’ve thought about it, and it would be way too complicated. plus, if she decides to get back into my life, she’ll do it in unpleasant and overbearing ways. so i drank half a bottle of wine and then i opened it. the letter, i mean. obviously i had already opened the wine.

i’m lucky that my migraines aren’t triggered by red wine. i’d go crazy if they did. well, i’d at least have to find some other favorite liquid, and that would mean a life-long search, no doubt. i never say no to wine (although wine sometimes says no to me… bastard). never. that got me in weird situations, meeting a stranger at a party and drinking an entire bottle of port in the dark in the kitchen, and by myself too, well the sitting in the dark was in common, but the bottle was mine, and what a mistake that was. the hosts found dried port in their washing machine the next day, and although they somehow knew it was due to me, it was rather hard to explain exactly how that had happened. anyway. that’s not getting in trouble. that’s being silly. i solved the problem of both, though - i don’t attend parties anymore. i’ve lost the will and the energy, and at the same time i lost all the invitations. funny how when you say no enough times, even nicely, people just stop asking and take your no for granted instead. which is fine by me at this point. but there were times when i lost friends or relations or acquaintances because of hospital stays and other accident or injury or sickness-related delays and silences, and at first that really hurt me. i felt it was rather unfair, rather mean of those people, or thoughtless, or selfish, or what. but then i understood nobody wants to be only begging anf begging - they’ll only do it when you say yes once in a while, and when you don’t, it doesn’t matter what the reason is, it just is, and they flock away. there’s nothing mean there, just a lack of interest to be always nudging the person. i guess it’s similar to friends being estranged when one of them starts a family and the other feels the baby is in the way or whatever. so i tried to stay away from clichés, to not be a rock, not be an island, and yet to not be hurt so much. and it worked. it worked when i realized the parties and cocktails and events and dinners didn’t fulfill me anyway, and i preferred my life without. actually, the big revelation was how much more relaxed i was with fewer people in my life. and how much energy i felt was being wasted on people who were simply not worth it for me. people i didn’t really love or know, who didn’t really love me or care about me, but we were in the same circle, and i invited them and they invited me, and in the end, bleah, enough, throw them out, keep your key, keep your life. those people were life suckers. and i suck enough of my own life, i don’t need any help on that.

chapter eighteen.

***

it’s the author here. i don’t know what is going on, but our narrator has hit a snag. she isn’t talking to me anymore, and that’s a problem. i started her as just some woman who was my age. we share many things, but we are also completely different. i gave her some form of life, the only one that is in my power to give, and she has taken that life and turned it into her own. i had no expectations for her, and i had no idea where she was going or what she would do. that has all been up to her, and i have only been the translator, the link between you and her.

she’s been shutting out more and more people, and it seems she is now shutting me out, and i am not yet sure how to resolve that. she has walled herself in, and only the boyfriend speaks to me now. this puts me in a weird place. being revealed by her silence is already a surprise, and not a very good one, but not knowing when or if she’ll come back, not knowing how i will extricate myself from this mess and finish the story… ouch. i’m not used to being this alone. and maybe that’s her point. maybe she felt i needed to be left to myself for a while to understand where she comes from properly, to relay her thoughts better.

authors, of course, are always utterly vulnerable. but here’s the secret: we don’t want anybody to know! and therefore, finding myself before you, replacing the mirror i had set up to block you from seeing me… well it comes close to the dream in which you go about your daily life and later realize you forgot to get dressed that morning. very close indeed. and she may be somewhat exhibitionist, but i am not. and indeed, what is she? insane is too braod and unclear a word. depression does not cover it all. psychotic? perhaps. but she’s also sane and logical most of the time. so. right. i’m the author, and i don’t even know what label to put on my main character, on my narrator, on my sole speaking role. i can’t apologize for that: she simply is too human to be put neatly in a box. aren’t you?

***

i’m back. i don’t what that bitch is talking about. i hate interference, and i come and go as i please. if i allow her in, it’s only because i feel like it, and that is a highly revolving door, missie. sometimes i say yes, sometimes i say no, and everybody had better step in line. christ. i was here, i was quiet. well i was. the bottles i’ve been throwing on the living room brick wall sure haven’t been quiet. neither have the neighbors as of the fifth bottle. it’s like i can see through the floor: i see a lady in a house dress, standing on a bar stool with a broom, and she bangs the broom stick on her ceiling, and the plaster chips a little and the dust falls in her eyes and nose and she sneezes, and then she taps again. tap tap tap tap tap. and again. and i keep my empty bottle quiet until she stops and when she stops i throw another one, as hard as i can, and always harder than the last. and then she taps again. we’re free styling. it’s neighbors jazz. soon in all good record stores. oh, sorry, it’s time for my red wine solo.

yeah well fuck you too, lady. nah, i’m not going to keep screaming through the floor. mostly because i’m getting bored of throwing bottles. and also because to throw another empty bottle i’d need to drink a full one. now i love wine and all, but it’ll take me at least half an hour to say goodbye to a bottle full of it. i could empty the contents into a pitcher and drink it from there later, and throw the bottle now, but that would require me to get up and walk to the kitchen and get a picther. oh i’d even have to put shoes on because the way to the kitchen is now littered with glass shards. it’s quite pretty actually, with the slanting sun, all those green shards, some lighter, some darker, some almost yellow and some almost black, on the blue floor. i’m too lazy. i’ll drink from here, and decide to pick up the broken glass later, when i feel like putting shoes on and stuff. my deadline will be the boyfriend’s arrival tonight. because if he sees that he won’t even ask, he’ll just get a broom and go tap tap tap the downstairs’ bitch’s face in, until her nose was concave and her forehead was a bloody mess and her teeth joined my glass shards on the floor and tap tap tap until her ears bleed and her lips are torn off. no, that’s me, if i had more energy. he’d take a broom and swipe it all away, until the living room was perfectly clean again, until my pretty little toes risked nothing anymore, not the tiniest little scratch from a forgotten green sliver. he wouldn’t ask why, he wouldn’t give me a sermon. he’s good. he’s too good. and sometimes seeing him be that good drives me nuts, so i prefer not to give him too many opportunities. so i’ll do my own cleanup. and yeah my pretty toes will be at a higher risk than if he’d done it, but at least i won’t have to feel like he saved me once again. fuck i hate that. and i love it too. or not. i need it, but hate it. there, that’s a lot closer to accuracy.

from my window here i can see children walking to the school on the next block. it’s a high school but sometimes that’s hard to believe. not only does my window allow me enough distance to not fear the kids as the teenagers they necessarily are, but also i get somewhat interested. it’s like an uncontrolled soap opera. what reality tv really would be if it was actually real. and some of them are so small, so tiny. they look so fragile. well, not all of them, but some. there’s a little guy i see almost every day, and he’s short and pudgy and not all that pretty (which is what makes him pretty) with his short but too long curly dirty brown hair, and he looks so lost and he’s always walking with a spooked look on his face. one day he’ll have his pant cuff caught inside his sock. the next he’ll be walking to school with one mitten and one glove. there’s always something. poor little guy. i have grown fond of him in a way that would no doubt be impoosible to attain if i ever spoke to him. and what would i say? hello, i watch you from my window every day? right. that’s a 9-1-1 situation if i’ve ever heard of one. poor little pudgy guy.

i watch them. the girls who’ll be in a strip club or on the street in a few years, or at least they look like that’s their career choice and i always wonder about their parents who allow them to go outside like that but then i think back to my own past and i know there’s very little their parents can do (and probably very little they would do if they could), and very little their parents actually know. there are boys with their pants’ ass practically dragging on the sidewalk, and those are great: they actually motivate me, make me want to spring into action. as long as the action in question is to run outside and grab their pants and pull them fully down. but i guess that’s another case for 9-1-1. still, it’s tempting.

it’s a strange thing. i’ve never been a people person, so i’ve never been a people watcher. i’ve seen some, though. i used to live in a crappy neighborhood where even the grocery store went under, and at the corner where the dead grocery store was, where the bus stops were, there was a man who live in one of those houses built specifically to be on the corner, that has a flat section facing the intersection, with balconies, instead of a regular house corner. that man lived on the second floor and spent his life on his balcony, staring at everything that went on around his corner, at everybody to walked to or from anywhere within his field of vision. he would stand there, never sit, with his hands firmly clasping the front balcony railing. he’d wear a house coat, badly tightened by a fabric belt, and gray wool socks. in winter, he added sandals and sometimes a hat. never pants. and he was never inside. well when he was, he left the door open. in the worse colds of winter, he closed the door but he left the window ajar. i saw him staring at me every day that i lived there. a few times i yelled at him. get back in you old fucker you creep us out. stop staring you pervert, get your own life. he’d never react. i guess staring at stranger was all he had left. but that’s just a guess. for all i know he hated his wife and did that to drive her crazy. or he was a sex fiend. i don,t know, but i did find him creepy. that’s one of the reasons i had my windows tainted. at least the kids walking to and from school don’t know that i stare at them and i creep nobody out.

at one point i started to make a list. little pudgy idiot cutie. blond tiny waif slut with birth mark. white fat ass with afro. nerd with actual duct tape on glasses. blond goddess with uneven legs. but i didn’t have the dedication. i can only care so much about all those characters i’ll never know, who are about to change in vague and mysterious ways anyway, and usually not for the best. but also there were too many just like me, girls and boys without anything to set them apart, who are just students. and you know that once in school they are invisible. they are not jocks, not popular, not druggies, not yo’s, not goths, not the theater crew. they’re not even the role playing game gang, not even the audio visual group. they are, quite simply, nothing. because in high school you’re either special or you’re nothing. which is a lot of bullshit, of course, but for some of us it takes years to realize that. life, high school - at opposite ends of the vague spectrum of the human experience.

chapter nineteen.

my little pudgy guy was walking with a friend today. i ended up not sleeping at night, and so i was up to see him walk to school, and i saw him, walking with a taller skinnier kid who didn’t seem very interested in the story pudgy seemed so pleased to tell. no matter, i’m happy he seemed happy, and i’m happy he wasn’t alone for once. and his pants weren’t tucked in his socks, and his fly was up, his hat on his head - he was just having a good day. go pudgy! (i’m perfectly aware that seeing someone for fifteen seconds sometimes twice a day does not grant me access to their inner turnmoil, and that it’s more than likely pudgy did not have a perfect day, or even a good one. but it improves my day to think of him as happy. poor little pudgy!)

yeah so i didn’t sleep. i figure i’m starting to balance off the twenty-four hour sleep thing. the boyfriend was snoring again. my brain was running twelve hundred miles an hour. or something. i don’t quite know how long a mile goes, given that i was raised with the metric system. still, let’s say my brain was racing, and i couldn,t stop thinking about a million things that did not belong in my head as i was lying down in warm comfortable sheets, next to my man, at four twenty in the morning. actually i don’t know what time it was, since i don’t have a clock, but i like the number four twenty. what i do know is that i saw the light slowly grow and engulf the room, and i was awake during the entire sun dance, as it went up and my spirits sank.

it’s not quite pleasant to have insomnia. not that bad anyway. because all night as i lie there worrying or getting excited or making up stories and reliving parts of my day, my week, my life, i also worry about the fact that i’m not sleeping. and that doesn’t help me to fall asleep. and i worry about the next day, when i know i’ll feel like a zombie but i won’t quite be able to nap either, and i’ll just walk around the house feeling sorry for myself, all day. if i’m lucky something will happen to piss me off and then my energy level will go up for a little short while. so as i lie there i worry not only about lying there but also about the upcoming days, and how not being asleep right now is screwing the entire week to come, and then i feel anger and frustration and shame and dread and guilt. and none of these feelings are conducive to sleep. so i guess i’m my own worse enemy. that, or i’ve started to raise insomnia to the state of an art form. yippee.

sometimes when that happens i get up and i try to watch movies, or to read, or to work out so i tire my body out. but my body already is tired - it’s my mind that just won’t quit. i tried reading the income tax act. it ended up making me laugh, but that was probably because it was so boring it made me think it would read much better with acid. and it did. but i didn’t read much of it anyway. or rather, all that i saw and read in there had relatively little to do with taxation law. i tried watching the purchasing channel, with its informercials for vertical roasting and miracle grills and the biggest fake stones you’ll ever see. that too made me laugh. but then i realized it was a lot more sad and pathetic than finny, and i switched to the channel that shows pictures and descriptions of children who have disappeared. some have been gone for twenty years, and they show a picture from way back, when the child was two years old, and then they show an artist’s rendition of what the kid would look like now. those images always puzzle me. i’ve changed so much since i was a child, i really doubt anyone could have known how i would age. well, okay, i lost an eye, and that nobody could guess. but more than that - i could have become a gym bug, or a fat freak, and that would have changed the way my face is shaped, over decades. anyway, i always wonder how close the drawing is to reality. i guess few people ever find out, because i imagine few people find their lost or kidnapped children twenty years down the line (and when they do, why oh why do they sign to give rights to their stories to some crappy made for tv movie?). so i was wondering if i could send a picture of me as a child and see what they would come up with. or something. except that i have very few pictures of myself as a child. actually, i have none. my sister has a few. our parents weren’t exactly typical parents who take snpashots of their offspring at every turn. and even though they did once in a while, they were not the kind to think that their offspring’s portrait was oh so precious. basically, most of the pictures of me have been destroyed in various accidents, voluntary or not.

when i was a kid, my father told me to blow saliva bubbles with my lips when i was on the toilet taking a shit and had nothing to do (apparently magazines were not in vogue as bathroom reading materials at the time). he also told me i used too much toilet paper. he said two sheets was enough for a pee. he was very involved in my bathroom life. fucker. when i was sixteen, i took enough laxatives to incapacitate a water buffalo. then i shit all over his sheets and pillow, and i made the bed again. i left a load in some of his shoes too. then i gathered my meager belongings and i left the place never to return. i hitch hiked to the city, and took a bus from there. my sister had already left home, but she was still in touch with our father, so she told me all about the screaming and the cursing of my name. as if he hadn’t deserved it, and worse. apparently the smell was overpowering and stayed in the house for weeks too. well, what i didn’t know was that he wasn’t coming home the next day as i thought, but a week later. so i gather my little prank got seven days to simmer. good for him.

i don’t even know what my father looks like. i know that stuff happened. i can remember it, but his face stays a blur, even in happy memories. i burnt all the pictures of him i later found in my stuff. not that there were many. i also burnt all the pictures where you could see something of his. his shoes behind me as a toddler. his hand on my sister’s shoulder. all gone. well there’s something artificially comforting about destroying photographs, given that someone somwhere may still have the negatives. but still - what matters is not that he has stopped existing, but that he does not exist for me in my life in any way whatsoever. well, genes excepted.

i used to dream i was adopted and my parents didn’t want to tell me. it’s a common thing for children, i guess. except that most children, if it really happened, would feel a huge loss, a huge insecurity. well if i had prayed, i would have prayed for that. and if new parents, real parents had come, i would have left with them in a hurry and without a look back. i didn’t pray. my sister did. our grand-mother would drag us to church most sunday mornings and although it was a nice break from our sordid lives, it was also excrutiatingly long and boring. and i never liked my grand-mother to begin with. she spawned my father, and apples and trees, it seems, are somehow related…? yeah. so we’d be stuck in church with her, and she was an old lady who smelled like an old lady, dressed like an old lady, acted like an old lady and cared, like only old ladies do, a lot more about appearances of morals than about anything else. and every week the basket for donations would pass and my sister and i would watch it come with big round envious eyes - we had never had that much money at home - and my grand-mother would give us each a dollar, but she would make sure we put it in, for god, she said, for his works, and we put it in because we had to. and i thought god was fucking lucky to get all that money, when the most i had ever had to myself was a quarter, and i had to wear my sister’s old clothes, which were really our cousin’s old clothes, and we never saw anything worth anything, other than that fucking collection basket. i thought god didn’t need money - since he was everywhere, he could just pick pockets like my brother or scare the hell out of any rich pilgrim and shake him out. my grand-mother replied to that with a slap on the back of my head.

at school too they rammed it in, about jesus and mary and the evil judas and the holy ghost (cool, i thought: a ghost! but no…). and i yawned and i drew other stuff, not jesus curing lazarus but a round of goblins dancing around a bonfire, not his thorny crown but a meadow filled with evil looking flowers. and the religion teachers, ne after the other, discovered my head filled with filth and hated me. and i hated them back. and i was told that i was ofeending god and i would say yeah well god is a jackass and god offended me first. that usually got me sent to the principal’s office, but i didn’t mind because he knew my parents and he never called them to rat me out - not since the one time he did and i ended up missing school to attend my own surgery - and he gave me chocolate and we talked and he understood my point of view about god and all that crap. he just said i should listen and be polite, that i didn’t have to believe or fake it. i think he was the first cool adult i met.

he committed suicide the year i went to high school. not that it’s related to me at all. i just mean, he died, he killed himself, and i was crushed. but it wasn’t about me at all, it was all about him.

chapter twenty.

who are you again? oh yeah. well.

no news about pudgy today in case you were wondering. i wasn’t up when school started and i missed him. it’s funny - now i’m making it sound like my life revolves around pudgy and his school mates! well it doesn’t, but pudgy has become a character in the sitcom that is my life, and i was wondering if we’d see him again, although since he evolved so much yesterday - being with a friend and all! - it’s probably normal that we won’t see him for a while. such are sitcoms.

last night i decided to paint my kitchen cabinet doors. with markers. neon green, neon yellow, neon pink and neon blue. it actually looks very cool, to have those spots of many colors amid all the blue. i started after i came back from dinner - the boyfriend took me out and then dropped me off - and it took me most of the night. which is why i was asleep when and if pudgy passed by. but anyway, now the kitchen stonks of cheap ink and my landlord would kill me if he saw the result of my inspiration, but i think it looks pretty fucking sweet.

this morning (last night, if you prefer), i decided i wanted tea. i went to this little health food store the boyfriend introduced me to (and i fell in love) and i bought twelve different kinds of tea, all in bulk. and then i came home, i mixed them all up - well, not all - i chose four or five and i mixed them together and i steeped my mixture for a long time and i drank it and it was good so i made another one and another and another. i’m quite hyper now, thank you. actually i am already doubting that i will veer be able to sleep tonight at all. not that i’m quitting my newly found insane tea habit. i like it. and when a cup of it gets too cool, i add another kind of tea and then i reheat it. the english would probably have my head for what i do to their national beverage, but fuck ‘em. i know very precisely how to make proper tea - i’ve read everything i could by douglas adams, and he’s brit enough to know and want to educate the masses - but i simply prefer my own radioactive potion.

i think i can already safely predict that tonight is going to be one of those nights when i’m too hyper so i take something to bring me down and then i get too down and i need uppers again, and then i’m way too high so i take some other form of downers, and… well. those nights often end up lasting for a couple of days. then i fall asleep wherever i am, confused to the point of not remembering whether i was even high to begin with. i’ve been told i’m not always pleasant in those circumstances, but who cares. and sometimes i am. sometimes i’m very funny and entertaining when i go on long up and down binges. when things are going well and i’m happy and for example it’s one of those perfect winter days with a bright sun that warms nothing at all and people outside are smiling as the light reflects on the pristine snow everywhere, but they also walk very fast and try to cath up with their visible breath, and i’m inside and i’m warm and i see it all, and joy swells within. when that happens i can be enteratining. and i dance and i sing and i fall without any reflex to break my fall (and therefore i don’t get hurt). and i laugh. i laugh because i fell. i laugh because falling to the gorund often gives me the hickups, i have no idea why but it does, and having the hickups and laughing at the same time hurts like hell but it’s even funnier when it hurts so i laugh even more, and hickup even more, and that can last for a while, as i giggle and hickup on the floor.

one time a long time a go i was babysitting my nephew and he was a very active baby - toddler by them i guess - and he barely slept and i tried to keep up with him and i was completely baked and i took - i don’t even remember what, something to wake me up and keep me up - and when my sister got back, the nephew and i were rolling on the living room floor, drinking ketchup from a hundred little packs of ketchup i’d stolen from the corner greasy spoon and laughing our head off every time we opened a pack. there was ketchup everywhere, though mostly on our faces and clothes and hands and the floor, and we’d been opening some with his cute little plastic hammer, popping them straight from the floor and trying to catch the squirt in our mouths, and his mother was not quite happy to find us in that state. plus, the little guy was usually forbidden any kind of sugar, so i had loaded him up for most of that day and the next. i got a long speech about never babysitting again and how irresponsible can you be and what were you thinking and he’s the child you have to be the adult and did you think i wouldn’t find out and that’s not how i want my son raised, there are rules and he needs to obey them, life is not the roller coaster ride you make it out to be, blah, blah blah. the whole time, he was behind her, filling his pockets and socks (a trick i had shown him) with the remaining packets of ketchup, and he even slipped a few in her coat pocket, from behind, and he had the nerve - i must say i was proud - to put some in her boot. when she put it back on to leave she screamed bloody (ketchuppy) murder. i gladly took the blame for that one. and as she left, insulted and snarling at me, i slipped the boy a high five. good boy. question authority, bypass authority, annoy authority.

i like that story. it reminds me that i love my nephew, that he’s a cool kid. it also reminds me not to have children. i’m clear headed, tea notwitstanding, to know that those kinds of things are fun and necessary - in my book - experiences of childhood, but that they should reoccur in a daily basis. well, you know, mostly on account of all those laws and shit about sending children to school and all. i don’t think a child i would raise would do well in a traditional school, or surrounded by normal ordinary boring kids, and boring ordinary subnormal adults. and in any case my sister eventually came around. it didn’t even take long. it just took her usual babysitter to have the flu one night and be busy the next week, and i was back on the babysitting roster. and sinc ei don’t get paid for it, i can say yes or no at will. from what i hear, that’s not quite how it works when the child is yours.

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it’s later now and i’m drunk. quite drunk. i chose alcohol as a downer tonight, because it works well for me, and because once i open a bottle i finish it and once i finish it and its sister, eventually i collapse into a drunken stupor, which is one of the nicest stupor for me, but then again that’s because as long as i don’t trespass my personal mixing limits, i don’t throw up. i don’t know what i’m doing here. a feeling about something to finish. do you love me? that’s the drunk in me talking. i embrace my inner drunk like some people their fucking inner child. why not, esti?

throwing up is not even that bad. i had my bulimic episode in my teens, who didn’t? it was the fashionable thing to do back then, the proverbial cry for help that is not quite a suicide attempt (although i’ve had my share of those too - no, not really - i’ve always thought that if i intended to kill myself i would, no questions asked - the last thing i’d want if i was suicidal would be to end up and the emergency room with my stomach being pumped - how the fuck is that supposed to give people the will to live back? i never understood that. what i meant is that i’ve had my share of suicides and suicide attempts in my life, they just didn’t have me as the instigator, slash victim, slash criminal (how ridiculous is that, that suicide used to be illegal? what was that, a message, to the distraught, that if they wished to off themselves, they should do it well, or else they’ll go do it in prison? what the fuck?)). i figured, why not? i can eat for two like any other chick! so i did. and a lot of good that did me too. not. but i got out of it, mostly when i realised throwing up didn’t even bother me anymore. i figured, sweet, i’ve defeated my body’s natural impulse on another playing field. that was enough of a victory to me. i didn’t need the skinny at all costs part.

one thing i’m not good at, never have been, is endings. deaths for example. oh i can talk and i can rant and rave about suicide and other people’s death - people i don’t care about or don’t know or never wanted to be close to. but people i actually love dying? or animals? no way. i can’t deal. i’ve had a fucking shrink tell me that’s what i’m trying to avoid, what i’ve tried to avoid all my life, dealing with the loss, any loss, of loved ones. well bravo shrinko! did it take all four years of your degree to learn to diagnose people like that? bra, fucking, vo. idiot. as if that wasn’t everybody else’s problem too. trying to avoid an end, trying to delay everything in every way possible, because eventually people understand, grasp, what finite means, and i just fucking happened to grasp that at a younger age than the median. how that makes me fucked up and not the rest of the world, i’ve never understood. why i’d have to learn to deal with loss better either. fucking hell, who ever said a human’s life’s goal is to accept the unacceptable? and whose to say what i should do, one way or another? but this is bigger than me. i say no one has to accept the end of anything. stop accepting. anything. refuse. question. say no, in big fucking bold letters in that bubble above your head. say fuck you and say never. never say never? that’s bullshit. don’t let the fuckers win, don’t let them be right not even once.

i’m dying. did you figure it out already? that’s what i’ve been avoiding, what the boyfriend, with his sweet sweet red eyes, has been avoiding. and if i hate losing, i also hate avoidance. but tonight i’m drunk, and i might as well face it. well no, i’ve faced it a long while ago, and my decision when i came face to face with my death was to refuse it. it and all the fucking doctors who had nothing better to say or do. they don’t care. they’re trained not to care. the rest of us, though, are stuck caring, caring an awful fucking lot, about what little existence we have. and i fucking hate my little pudgy sometimes, to think that an ugly fat kid can live beyond my years, will be able to fuck when i’m - i don’t even know what i’ll be at that point - what are you when you’re beyong worm food? worm castings. worm shit. and then what? and then i’ll be good fertilizer. woohoo. like each and every fucking one of you, i’ll reincarnate into fertilizer. are you as thrilled as i am? probably not actually, because i like flowers, and fertilizing soil will be more than i’ve done, in the grand scheme of things, than i’ve done in all my fucked up sacriledged, sabotaged life. which is such a sentimental way of putting it that it makes me want to thrwo bottles at the wall again, but no, the boyfriend is asleep, he gave up when i was still high on the radioactive tea and passed out before i opened the wine, and as one last nice-like gesture, i’d like to let him sleep. i love him, you know. as much as i’ve ever been able to love. and i’ve got a hard time telling him so, but i think he reads me better than anyone, and he knows.

i don’t want to drift into sentimentality. i still have a few weeks to go, and we’re leaving tomorrow. he’s taking me somewhere down south, for me to see palm trees finally and to say goodbye to the sun. i’ve said goodbye to snow already. and it was ever my favorite.