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Wednesday, December 28, 2005
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Okay, so here's what I've been doing all this time.
Many moons ago, I had surgery on my neck to fuse two vertebrae and add a titanium rod to straighten out my spine, which was crashing down thanks to Degenerative Bone and Disc diseases. While home on sick leave recovering from surgery, I finally gave in to an interest in soapmaking. My husband's eczema had grown severe enough that there really wasn't any kind of soap left that didn't make things worse, and I actually had time on my hands for once, albeit time on narcotics and with my head strapped into a brace, but hey. When you work for someone else all the time, even surgery is a vacation of sorts. Anyway, I never could follow a recipe without changing things, and that's what I did with the soap. I followed the basic instructions, but I used my research into oil properties and herbal properties to make soap that would specifically help his eczema and my dry skin. It was pretty rough-looking stuff at first, but people were really happy with it anyway and soon it turned into a business and then that business just kept growing and growing. My first playdough-like bars turned into something more approaching the aesthetic image in my head:
The biz grew to the point where I had to make a choice: I couldn't do a good job making soap if I had to be at work all the time, and I was frankly turning into kind of a shoddy employee at the dayjob too, because my energy and attention was pulled in too many different directions.
Probably for the first time since I had my first baby 12 years ago, I chose the less-safe but more emotionally-satisfying option: I quit my safe, secure, well-paying, benefits-providing job with the Federal Government, and chose to stay home and nurse along my home business. This, with the clear knowledge that I have significant health problems and my husband can't provide health insurance. This, with the clear knowledge that my husband is currently not in a position to cover the loss of my income, which was actually greater than his. This, with the knowledge that I have a tweenager whose needs and wants are getting far more sophisticated and expensive all the time. Yes. I leapt from the cliff.
So far, every leap of faith I've made in this business has been rewarded. It's almost as if I'm being led along. I keep on working, and every time I have to take a scary risk, it works out well. I know that this doesn't have to be the case. Businesses fail every day. 80% of them, in fact. If this doesn't work out, I'll be really devastated. I'll feel really ashamed at having taken the risk with my family's sense of security, with our tenuous finances. I'll really, seriously feel like a dud.
But if I didn't do it, I'd never know. And ultimately, the things I've regretted most in life thus far have been the things I haven't done, rather than the things I have done. So, that's the choice I made. It's too soon to know what's going to come of it. I've got myself established in some local stores, I've been traveling to regional fairs and festivals selling stuff, and my website has been doing tremendously well. I have an extremely high percentage of repeat business, and that's important. I'm starting to do some wholesaling and private labeling. I'm getting there.
Meantime, I'm adjusting to not having an outside job to go to for the first time since I was about 11 years old. I'm actually able to say "yes" when the teachers call and ask if I can attend a school function, or volunteer for something. I have nobody outside of myself to enforce a schedule on me, but I know myself well enough to know that I have to enforce a schedule on myself or else I will crash into depression and blow this chance in a most spectacular fashion. I need daily structure to keep my brain chemicals in line. I also need daily structure to keep my blood sugar and hydration levels in line, since I tend to wander from one interesting, shiny thing to the next without paying any attention to mealtimes or whether or not I've ingested a single drop of moisture beyond my morning cup of coffee. I have to do all of this for myself, which is worrisome because it's easier to cheat on yourself than it is to cheat on anyone else in the world. The flipside of freedom is, in fact, responsibility. I have the freedom to create my life in my preferred image, but I have the responsibility to create a life for myself that is good for me, that doesn't lead to a meltdown which will then make my personal decisions a liability to those around me.
I'm also working on simplifying and streamlining my life to be more in line with my personal temperament, my priorities and my ideals. I got kind of corporate-like after ten years of commuting. I'm going back to growing significant amounts of the family's food, to entertainment forms that involve time and energy more than dollar bills. I'm going back to more basic things, thriftier ways. I get a joy out of creating something from nothing, always have. I wouldn't make soap otherwise, nor cook from scratch or any of the other things that I tend to do. I'm going to make my life more about feeding that part of my soul in a way that lets the family benefit from my tendencies.
It might be a cliff, or a rare opportunity. Time will tell.
11:36:25 AM 
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Okay, I think I may have this thing relatively workable now. I have no idea how I got there, though. I just kind of banged my head against it until it gave up and worked.
I am *NEVER* going through this garbage again with Radio. I swear, it's almost like they *dare* you to figure out how to make it work. Hahaha, sure, use our software for $40 a year. Need help? Have questions? Okay, roll these dice and maybe you'll get an answer. Don't hold your breath, ok?
See, it's not that I can't figure this out. I mean, here I am. I'll fill in the blanks with content when I have some more time, replacing my placeholders with the backups on my hard drive. It's just that I'd rather have something far more user-friendly. I think geeks are sexy as hell in a wrinkly-brained sort of way. But I'm not interested in being one. I'm happy being a computer software *user*, I don't want to pop the hood and stare blankly at the guts on a regular basis. Yawn.
Speaking of yawn, going to bed now. My blood pressure is probably way out of control after all of this.
12:43:57 AM
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The Guilty,
Common Dream When I was in college
the first time, there was this girl in my dorm who was dating a mind-bendingly
rich guy. You knew this because everyone whispered it behind her back
and watched her with covert awe and mystification wherever she went.
She wasn't anything all that special to look at.
She looked a great deal like Princess Fergie, as a matter of fact: red
hair, freckles and a wide, thin-lipped, sharp-toothed smile. She had
the kind of abrupt, shockingly ascerbic way of expressing herself that a lot of
people consider stereotypical of redheads. Or the Irish. Or
Irish Redheads. I used to wonder if she was really like that by
nature, or if it was a persona she had cultivated because it was sort of what
was expected of her. Kind of the way some blondes cultivate a
childlike voice and a certain look of innocent incomprehension.
What's beeping? Something keeps beeping in this house, and I
don't know what it is. It's making me nuts.
Anyway... So this harsh-tongued, fairly nondescript girl was
dating this incredibly wealthy guy. On weekends, when the rest of us
were scrougning together enough change for a pizza and a fifth of Dickel, she
was off to the airport to pick up the electronic ticket to Colorado her
boyfriend had called in, so that she could join him for a weekend of skiing with
his family. In January, they went to Hawaii instead, and she worked on
her tan over a weekend. How a freckled redhead can tan is beyond me
and totally unfair, but she did it. I remember having dinner
with her and her boyfriend one evening on campus. He was a very
clean-cut, reserved guy, wearing a turtleneck sweater, completely unfaded and
carefully pressed Bugle Boy jeans and a heathered gray cardigan with
leather-covered buttons and completely unscuffed loafers.
There's that beep again. WTF?? So, there
we sat, eating campus food in the dining room. The conversation was
about some safe, bland topic that I can't remember. What I do remember
is that, for no apparent reason and in an almost non-sequitir fashion, she
suddenly let loose with a string of curses beginning and ending with "Fuck" and
then she belched a loud, juicy belch that had people two tables away whipping
their heads around to look. I was completely at a loss, and I just
sort of smiled at her in an embarassed way and sipped some water. Her
boyfriend looked at her with amusement and an obvious sense of
detachment: I could tell that he did not have that fatherly "her
behavior is a reflection upon me" attitude, but simply enjoyed her for who she
was, separate from himself and his own demeanor, and didn't seem threatened or
embarassed by their differences at all. Later that
night, apparently, he asked her to marry him. They were both college
freshmen. She woke everyone up that night, banging on our doors and
flashing her rock in our dazed faces. The next day, we all got
together to give her an "engagement party" of sorts, which mostly consisted of
us all cramming ourselves into her room and scrounging for pizza-and-Dickel
money. Beep! AGAIN! Argh! Just
wait until that husband of mine comes home. Wait - I wonder if he's
messing with me. There might be a hidden camera around here
somewhere. I better finish writing this and get back to putting fresh
shelf paper in the kitchen. I can't give him anything interesting to
look at on his hidden camera or it will only encourage him.
No, I'm not paranoid at all. Why do you ask? Stop
giving me that knowing look. I'm trying to tell a story
here. So, we piled into her room and began discussing Dream
Wedding plans, since she had the best chance of any of us of actually getting a
Dream Wedding, what with marrying Daddy Warbucks and all. I got a
closer look at the rock on her hand. This ring was so big and
unwieldy, with a huge pear-shaped yellow diamond in the middle
(yellow! ew! who would want
yellow?) that I shivered as I imagined it
catching on every piece of fabric that touched her hand. It looked
like it was weighing down her tiny little arm, especially since that arm was
already.... Beeep! Argh!
....covered with a huge diamond and sapphire tennis bracelet and
several gold bangles. "You're going to have more muscles in your left
arm than in your right after a while." I said to her,
jokingly. She didn't miss a beat: "I'll have to use my other
hand to jerk him off with. That'll keep the muscles even."
she said. As we laughed in shock over that, she leaned over and let
out a huge fart. We all backed away, and she happily stretched out on
her bed now that we were no longer in her space so much.
I began to see what he appreciated about her: she was
completely uninhibited and unashamed. As reserved and proper as he
was, this was probably amazingly refreshing to him. He could probably
be completely relaxed with her without fear of judgment. The
more cynical part of my mind suspected that he probably had absolutely no
respect for her at all, though, and that she was more of a novelty than a life
partner in his eyes. Maybe this was the bitter part,
actually. It seemed so unfair that this girl, who didn't seem
particularly special in any way, was suddenly going to no longer have to worry
about scrounging for anything ever again and could just get
on with the business of following her bliss in life, while the rest of us
accumulated school debt and scrounged around for change for cheap whiskey
instead of going to Hawaii in January to work on our tans. Back then,
I almost hoped it wouldn't work out. Back then, I still wanted the
world to be a just place. I wanted that more than I wanted to be happy
for some poor schmuck getting lucky. I have no
idea, really, whether they got married or not. I don't even remember
their names. The person I am today, however, really hopes that it was
just as happy a relationship as it seemed, and that they really did manage to be
in love forever. The person I am today would rather hope for one
person to have something extraordinary, even if that person isn't
me, than for everyone to have the precise same mediocre deal, and
nothing to dream about.
Sun, 29 Feb 2004 17:38:57 GMT
12:30:54 AM
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Alright. I'm obviously missing
something. I tried to enable email-to-weblog posting. I set
up a dedicated email address for this purpose, entered the POP information in
Preferences along with the "secret subject". What
address do I send my email post "To" when I do this? I thought, since
Radio eats everything in the box, that the "To" wouldn't matter so I just
emailed it to the dedicated email address, i.e., back to myself.
And there it sits. I can't find anything
useful in the Tech Notes or FAQs. Who knows how to
do this?
Sat, 28 Feb 2004 13:32:00 GMT
12:30:07 AM
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Love Is Like A Rock
Video
Once
upon a time, there was a young man. Rough around the edges, misunderstood by the
world, with a deep and sensitive soul and wondrous gifts to give the world. He
traveled through his life alone, shunned by most, even as he worked at the
selfless task of giving to the world all the beautiful gifts he
possessed. A lonely cowboy, riding his steel
horse.
Once upon a time, there was a young woman. She had a
beautiful face and a sexy body and yes, there was probably some specialness
about her Self underneath of all that somewhere, I guess. Oh, wait - we have to
update this to be PC in a halfassed sort of way, so actually she was a trained
scientist with a Ph.D. and she made bucketloads of money and wore a
miniskirt-length lab coat and stiletto white lab shoes and a tight bun in her
hair and funky glasses and was all cerebral during the day. Right. She
Had Legs And Knew How To Use Them, except she hadn't learned how to
tease her hair out and wear inch-thick eyeliner yet, so she had no idea how sexy
she was. Sort of a hot little wallflower waiting for her prince to help tease
her bud into bloom.
One day fate brought these two together
and the universe screamed to a halt, amazed as it was by all the specialness and
sexy hotness come together in one place. She had eyes of the bluest skies and if
they thought of rain, he hated to look into those eyes and see an ounce of
pain. He had never felt this way before. Neither had she, of course,
because what else are you going to say to someone when they hit you with a
leading statement like that? Gee, that's
nice. It rather
ruins the moment to be all sensible when the other person has just tossed
their common sense over the embankment. So to keep things
poetic, they loved with an intensity unprecedented through the annals of human
history. The sex made angels in heaven cry with joy at the sheer beauty of it
all, even though they were just shacking up and her new silicone implants were
more like oranges in socks than breast matter. There was so much Hot and Special
and Never Felt This Way Before going on that the angels forgot to care about
gold bands. Their holy little tongues were stuck to the roofs of their
mouths with the hot, sticky sweetness of it all, preventing any protest or
acknowledgment of the absurdity of it all.
Oh, but he was a
complicated, tortured soul. An artist of immeasurable gifts, shunned by the
world, riddled with the scars of his entitlement going unrecognized for so long.
A rose riddled with the rips and tears of his own thorns, he was. He
was also really, really good-looking, but the stupid world just hadn't
recognized this before and thus he was backlogged on all the worshipfulness he
deserved. He would shriek with soul-wrenching intensity into the microphone, and
everyone who had ever felt a moment of impotent rage or insignificance, they
understood him. He reinforced his Every Man persona by wearing high fashion rags
carefully crafted to resemble the fetid workaday clothing of the Mortal Man, and
by looking as disheveled as possible at all times.
He rose
to millionaire status, and his girl writhed about prettily in
Fredericks of Hollywood sandpaper lace panties in the backseat of his limo. They
became fabulous and went to It parties and partook of the latest, most
fashionable methods of slow self-mutilation and spent intimidating sums of
money. The beautifully sinister excesses of their lifestyle got the best of
them, morals slipped along with tempers. There was arguing, hurt feelings,
shouting matches, broken whiskey tumblers, matted greasy bedhead undyed roots
atop swollen, black-rimmed heroin chic eyes squinting in the scrape-raw bright
of daylight.
And their perfect,
never-before-experienced-in-the-history-of-mankind love began to sink
into the swamp of its' own idealistic and superficial poison, poison running
through their veins, and they turned from one another with bitemarks on their
beleaguered necks and spitwads melting into the dust of their emptiness and
realized that they did, in fact, want to break those chains. We're not
going to take it anymore, each of them railed, fists in the
air.
They fell deeper and deeper into depravity and despair,
and then one manic night they faced one another again under a filthy streetlamp
in a bad part of town where they were escaping notoriety. And each searched
deeply into the eyes of the other, and guitars wailed and waves crashed and
fireworks burst as they realized that They Were Both Too Fucking Hot to
be alone, and they writhed in a pretty sort of greasiness into each
others arms and twisted bourbon-flavored tongues and ashtray-scented limbs
together until the drummer cried "For crying out loud, get a ROOM already!" and
of course, they could not, having wrecked too many rooms prior and so they
laughed at each other and became suddenly well-adjusted and stable and rode off
into the sunset for to be Happily Ever After in the coolest, most special and
unique way ever, having lots of little Love Babies because, you know, babies are
the cement that keep a family normal and stable and together, and they kept
churning 'em out without ever thinking past the romantic crescendo of having
these Products of Love to the reality of getting up at six every morning to fix
cereal and scrambled eggs.
And all of
their fans followed their lead, from music video beginning to music video
ending, and then were perplexed to find that their lives became wastelands
littered with the tattered remnants of One Stormy, Ill-Fated Relationship After
Another. And they kept on trying, because it all turned out so well in
the videos their idols had made.
~The End~
Fri, 27 Feb 2004 00:04:20 GMT
12:29:33 AM
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Following the lead of two illustrious Salon
Personalities, Dick Jones, Of
The Patteran Pages and Dr. Omed, Of The Tent Show
Revival, I bring you this slightly mangled image, a relic of my youth.
Also one of the very few pictures of me that I have of
myself from between the ages of 8 and 20. :)
I had these done for a boyfriend who was going off to Marine boot camp
at Parris Island. 
Mel
At 16
**Look closely,
and you can see my fangs. ;-)
Wed, 25 Feb 2004 02:22:59 GMT
12:28:43 AM
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Back To The
Precipice So, I didn't call him.
Instead I went home, scrubbed the aluminum paint off of my legs as best I could,
and slept. The phone woke me up around sunset. It was a
friend of mine, a guy I had dated on and off over the years, never
seriously. We had one of those arrangements where each found the other
attractive and fun to be around, but the really deep emotional chemistry just
wasn't there. I liked his mother more than I liked him, frankly, but
she just didn't turn me on quite the same way. During periods when one
or the other of us was "attached", we sometimes went out anyway, just as
friends. Actually, most of our dates were Friend Dates, since we both
seemed to always have some relationship or other going on. I
poured out my anguish at him on the phone, even though I knew he wasn't
interested. If Erin was calling me, it was because he wanted me to go
out with him somewhere, not because he wanted an angle on the workings of my
soul. I didn't care. The words needed out, and he was the
one who called me first. He surprised me by listening patiently, and
then he surprised me again by asking if he could come over. I figured
he was going to try to turn my tears into sex. After all, I was
already pregant; what better time to sleep with me, repercussion-free?
But he kept on surprising me, doing all sorts of things that were out
of character. He brought me dinner, and he brought me tissues as I
continued to break down here and there. When all else failed to
distract me, he brought me to his mother, who acted so happy about my tragic
news that you would have thought I was married to Erin, and that we had planned
to have a baby together. Eventually it dawned on me that she thought
it *was* Erin's baby, and he wasn't trying to correct her. It was
very, very strange. When he took me back home, I addressed my concerns
with him in the car. "I think your mom thinks I'm
having your baby." I said. "Yeah, wouldn't that be
something?" he said, an absentminded grin touching his mouth.
"It would be...something." I said pointedly. He
noticed, but he didn't take offense. "I never should have
dumped you before, Melanie." he started. Who dumped
who? I thought, but I waited for the rest. "You're going to
be a real good mama. You're smart, and mature, and you always take
care of things. You will do a good job." "I'm not
going to do this job." I said. "I'm not keeping this
baby. I can't. I have no real-world job skills, nobody to
help me...I'm not prepared. I'm not equipped to do this
right. I'm going to give it up for adoption. There are
plenty of good families out there who want newborns, and who have a life
arranged so that they can do it the right way. It wouldn't be fair to
this baby for me to keep it." He looked upset. "You
have to keep this baby, Mel. All babies deserve to be with their
mamas." I let it go. There was no point in arguing
about it. It was none of his business, anyway.
"Hey, are you sure this can't be mine?" he asked. I
looked at him, startled. "Are you insane?" I
wondered aloud. "There's no possible way it could be yours.
We haven't had sex in years." I couldn't believe he would even think
such a thing. "We went out a few weeks ago, and we were
pretty drunk. You think maybe something happened and we
forgot?" My jaw had dropped toward my chest with
such force that I couldn't pull it back up again. For several minutes,
I just sat there, my mind doing loops around his crazy suggestion.
"First of all, you were drunk. I was not. I was
designated driver, remember? Second, I was engaged. We
didn't even hold hands that night, much less anything else.
Third...are you fucking insane?" My voice was rising with my
incredulity. Why on earth would he even suggest this? What
was the point? He shrugged his shoulders, still
grinning. "Why? What would you do if it was
yours?" I asked. I just had to know. He shrugged
again. "Marry you, I guess. Momma would love
it." I just sat there, shaking my head, mouth hanging open in
shock. He pulled into my driveway, and I gathered up my purse and
keys. I climbed out of his car. "How
romantic. And futile." I said, and shut the door.
He rolled down his window and called to me as I was unlocking my
door. "Mind if I come in for a while?"
Then he winked at me, meaningfully. I sighed and closed my
door.
Wed, 25 Feb 2004 00:53:51 GMT
12:28:04 AM
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|
I have another story to write, but it's so hard. There
are so many obstacles in the way, if I stop to take inventory of them
all. For instance, the past two days I have put off writing
this story because my arms hurt. Wah. But by the second day I was too disgusted
with myself to continue counting this excuse in the lineup.
I will write when I get home, I thought.
I will take a hot hot shower, swallow a muscle relaxer and a naproxen,
and I will extract the next story. Yep.
But when I got home, I felt really grungy. The dog, in a fit
of boredom, dug up half my bed of daffodils today, depositing all the dirt on my
doorstep. Dog was reprimanded, dirt was replaced, grunge was felt.
Well, this will never do, I thought, because I
always think in italics. Actually, my thoughts use loopy letters conveyed in a
decidedly spidery hand, but italics will serve. I decided to improve my mood for
writing by throwing together a Nag Champa-scented sugar scrub for my hot hot
shower: 
Look!
It's Althaea's Bathroom!
There's nothing to those salt and sugar scrubs, by the way.
Don't you dare go out and spend $35 dollars on them! For shame! Just fill a
container with sugar or salt, (I use sugar because I always seem to have tiny
scratches everywhere and the salt BURNS!) saturate it well with oil (almond,
sesame, olive or just about anything, really) and then add several drops of
whatever essential oils you want. Stick your fingers in and muddle it around
some. That's all there is to it.
Oh, it was lovely. The Nag
Champa-scented steam has pefumed the entire house. Lorelei was set to fix
mac-n-cheez to accompany the cranberry beans, mustard greens and smoked pork
with apple cider vinegar which has been working in the crockpot all day. All
that remained was for me to pop my muscle relaxer, nuke a cup of herbal tea (the
irony of using a micro-zapper to heat a cup of organic herbs does not escape me)
and purge the story. Alas, this is what I found at the
computer: 
Storm
Alexis
Magnificus
Could you evict something as cute as that? I could not.
Besides, she would stand next to me and stress the injustice of it all for the
next hour, or else wail pitifully from her room if I sent her away. None of
these options are conducive to writing my story.
I had to
spend time reading, trying to keep the idea fresh in my head as I gave her a
fair shot at the computer. Then I joined them for dinner, because ignoring them
to piddle on the computer just seems wrong, most days. Then she needed cuddles
because her sister threw a giant, plush doll at her, bruising her feelings
terribly. Now my arms hurt from hugging, and my story is
wandering away from me. But I'll try. Give me a few. We shall see.
Tue, 24 Feb 2004 23:36:57 GMT
12:27:09 AM
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Me,
8 yrs. old
The
Precipice I was not
afraid of heights when I was younger. Mom told me stories of amusement
park ferris wheels, where my Uncle David (whose self-appointed goal was to make
me have a sense of humor, even if it killed me) would rock the seat violently as
I hung over the edge, watching the ground in fascination. Mom, true to
form, would be clutching the back of my shirt and gasping for breath, but I was
utterly unafraid, delighted in watching all the tiny ant-people on the ground
below. I remember similar incidents
with my dad, during the short periods of my childhood when he was
there: a carnival in Baton Rouge, riding the roller coaster again and
again and again, joyously, and then my dad staggering out to the car, stopping
for a moment to vomit behind a trash can. I wasn't afraid at all, to
start. I remember when it
happened: the first time I felt out of control while high in the
air. Dear Uncle Dave and I were hiking Caesar's Head mountain in South
Carolina. I was eight. We crawled into Caesar's Mouth and I
stood, in my red cowboy boots, corduroy jeans and green Oldsmar Elementary
shirt, looking out over a vast expanse of minuscule pine trees and puddle-sized
lakes through varying degrees of cloudy haze. And then I was hurtling
out over the nothingness, and I suddenly realized that there was no pillowy
softness below me: just trees and rocks and earth and water that
becomes like cement when you hit it hard enough. Uncle Dave set me
back down, grinning. To him, this was the David equivalent of jumping
from behind a doorway and shouting "Boo!" But something switched over
in my brain when he whooshed me out over the valley, holding me by my arms and
swinging me out over the edge. I hadn't cared before that the bottom
of my boots were slick, or that the rocks were wet. I had never before
hallucinated everything flailing and quivering around me like gelatin.
It had never occured to me before that a sudden, strong gust of wind might
happen and knock me off of my perch. But now I knew it. I
had experienced sudden gusting winds before - not just hurricanes in South
Florida, but once right in downtown New Orleans in our huge black truck,
Jethro. We were stopped at a red light and suddenly a gust of wind
happened that was so strong, all the dirt rose into the air and everything went
black for a moment. The truck shuddered so hard that I thought it was
going to fall over onto it's side. And then it was gone, just as
quickly as it had come. That could happen again, at
any time. It could happen up here, right now. And it would
just blow me right over the edge. Or I could slip on the wet
rocks. They were sort of icy, too. Where I had almost
skipped into the Mouth of Caesar before, I crawled back down, grasping at tree
trunks and roots. Being up high never felt safe
again. I should note here that my Uncle Dave
really did have the best of intentions. I was a very solemn, serious
little kid. I needed for someone to teach me how
to relax, how to laugh a little. He did accomplish
this eventually. But not on this day.
Ten years
later, my beloved betrothed set me to work on the top of a multi-story tobacco
barn, painting over the rust with fresh silver aluminum paint.
Cowardice was frowned upon in this family, as was any hint of laziness or lack
of Herculean strength. I leaned a tall, flimsy ladder against the side
of the barn and went up. It wasn't so bad, once I made the transition
from the ladder to the roof. I could crab-walk around on the areas
where the nails were, and it felt...well, it felt like I might have a chance of
not falling. I had a very long handle on my roller, so I didn't have
to climb all the way to the pinnacle of the roof to get it painted. He
frowned at me and shook his head from below, because I was wasting expensive
paint by letting it drip all over as I used the long-handled roller, so I felt
guilty and inadequate, even though I was getting the job
done. Then, around nine in the
morning, I got help: a lovely young lady named Marissa crept up the
ladder, all cheerfulness and sunshine. She looked like a shorter
version of me - very much so. It was disturbing how similar we
looked. My stomach turned over. I knew Marissa.
What was he thinking, sending her to the top of a roof with me? The
arrogant ass. Marissa was his latest
"friend". He always had these "friends", and they were easy to pick
out. They were the ones that he was reluctant to introduce me
to. They never bothered to introduce themselves, either: if
he had them, then obviously, I was on my way out. Why bother with
politeness? I knew when I was dealing with a "friend" if he refused to
come within three feet of me when they were around. He would turn on
the charm, would laugh and joke and suddenly act like an optimist whenever they
were around. I would go from his fiancee to some person he vaguely
knew and barely acknowledged. I knew that if I stayed another night,
he would not stay in the room with me if she was there. He wouldn't
want her to realize that we were *that close*. He would justify
himself to me by pulling the Religion Card, saying that he was too ashamed for a
Christian girl to know he was sinning with me. Uh huh. He
was never a "Christian" unless it was a way to justify being weird.
Somehow, he thought that any bizarre, illogical behavior could be put above the
line of questioning if he just attached Religion to it. Actually, that
works sometimes for some people. So here we were, painting the
roof together like two little blonde-haired, blue-eyed, freckle-faced
twins. We made polite chit chat. She talked about nursing
school. I talked about working on the boat. She talked about
her ex boyfriend. I talked about my fiancee. She got silent,
tried to ignore it. She continued talking about her ex, about what a
cheater he was. I was sloshing paint all over the place. I
was painting her into a corner. She was trying not to
notice. I wanted to belt them both in the stomach. I wanted
to throw up. I wanted this to not be happening, to have never
happened. I wanted things to go right for once, damn it, for a person
that I loved to not be a total asshole to me, just once.
Too
late. Around eleven, we took a break for breakfast/lunch.
She escaped down the ladder as quickly as she could, and I followed once she was
out of sight: I couldn't bear for her to see how scared I
was. We made our way to the house where, the day before, I had pulled
out the ceiling boards and cleared out a huge snake infestation. I
wished there were more ceilings to rip out: It was less scary than the
barn roof. I watched with great pleasure as she shivered,
passing the pile of minced snakes sitting in a wheelbarrow, awaiting
burial. We entered the kitchen. My fiancee was frying bacon,
slicing bread and making coffee. The heavenly fragrance of bacon and
coffee hit me, and I felt a wave of deep nausea. I couldn't eat a
bite, even though it had been a very long time since I had eaten
anything. Marissa went outside for a cigarette. I felt
annoyed: every man I dated seemed to have this Big Issue with smoking,
but it only seemed to apply to me: if I smoked, I was too gross to be
near. But they had no compunction about starting affairs with
smokers. I will never understand that double-standard. Maybe
they didn't count, because they weren't keepers. Maybe they were just
so much more attractive than I was that a little ashtray breath didn't
matter. I don't know. At any rate, I noticed that he was
following his usual patterns: he sat next to her on the sofa to eat
rather than sitting with me at the table.
Something
clicked in my mind. I entered that state which I have learned to
describe as simply "Enough". I sipped my coffee, dug out a forbidden
cigarette and started smoking it right there in his beloved kitchen.
He looked at me with disgust; she didn't look at me at all. I told him
I was going home. He followed me out to the car, denying the obvious
as usual. I drove away. I went to my mother's house in
Greenville, stole a new pack of cigarettes. I had a strange sort of
heartburn/nausea that I had never experienced before, and something told me I
should go to the pharmacy. Back then, the tests took
about ten agonizing minutes. You had to pee in this tiny pill cup, dip
a stick very carefully and set it aside and wait. I walked around in
rapid circles in Mom's bedroom, saying "Please, God, NO. Please, God,
NO!" over and over again, a cigarette in each hand. Two minutes into
the test, the stick was deep blue. I held out hope: maybe
the test gave a "Positive" initially, then changed back.
Yeah, maybe. Please, God, No. Please, PLEASE
NO. The stick stayed
blue. My mom looked at me, no reaction of her own, just waiting for
mine. No judgement, no gloom, no excitement. Her face said
"Well, kid, what're you going to do now?"
I crushed
out my cigarettes and gave her back the stolen pack.
She took me
out to the store for peppermint tea.
I didn't
call him.
Sun, 22 Feb 2004 17:34:29 GMT
12:26:07 AM
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PThe Snake
At one point in my life I was going to marry this guy who was in law
school. He came from a long line of lawyers. His
great-grandfather was a lawyer. His grandfather was a
lawyer. His father, who was sixty two when he was born, had also been
a lawyer. One of his sisters was a lawyer, the other had gone on to be
a judge. They took their tax shelters in the form
of cows and tobacco patches, and they dignified it by referring to themselves as
"gentleman farmers". Right after we got engaged, my ex bought 180
acres of mountain land in southwest Virginia and set about dismantling two
houses in order to combine them into one, and refurbishing three old Tax Shelter
Tobacco barns. He was a philanderer, a racist, a
sexist, he treated me poorly all the time except when I got fed up enough to
leave, at which point he would grovel shamelessly at my feet just barely long
enough to make me stay. I didn't know any better; I had never seen a
healthy romantic relationship before. When I had left him before, he
once starved himself to a skeleton, frightening me into coming back to
him. I did love him, in a sad, futile sort of way. And he
would get so angry and indignant at my suspicions about his
philandering. I hadn't learned yet that this sort of overwhelming
indignation, coupled with intense jealousy, is often a sign of guilt.
The guy could be mindbendingly arrogant. Once, for instance,
I was up at the property on a weekend, helping him get the place in
order. He was on his tractor, digging trenches for new water
lines. He set me to work, ripping out ceiling boards in one of the old
houses we were tearing apart. The fun thing about
this was that the house had been abandoned for a few decades, and a massive knot
of snakes had set up a den in the attic. There were various snakes
writhing around in the attic together, but mainly they were
copperheads. It's also important to note that this was in July, so it
was warm and the snakes were very active. In a
sick sort of maladjusted way, I enjoyed it. I felt damned brave, doing
this all by myself. I tried not to think about how shitty it was that
he was asking it of me at all. So, here is how I spent my
days ripping out the ceiling boards: 1. Put on
gloves. 2. With hammer claw, pry loose
one end of board. Go to other end of board.
3. With long stick in left hand, pry loose second end of
board. 4. Jump back quickly, so that falling snakes
do not land on head while simultaneously (and quickly!) switching the hammer for
the long stick. 5. If snake falls out of ceiling,
quickly pin snake's head. Check ceiling to make sure another snake
isn't about to fall out onto head. 6. When coast is
clear, carefully pick up snake just behind the head.
Take downstairs. 7. Go outside
to black walnut tree. Hold snake's tail in other
hand. 8. Very, very quickly (don't mess
up!), drop snake's head while making a whipping motion with tail, whacking
snake's head against the tree. 9. Cut off snake's
head, in case the fucker is only stunned.
10. Go back upstairs. Pry loose another
board. Be careful not to bend the nails, if possible. Your
darling future husband is saving them. Stay Tuned
for the sequel to this story, wherein a height-phobic Althaea climbs atop a
six-story tobacco barn roof...with her fiancee's Flavor Of The
Week.
Fri, 20 Feb 2004 21:32:38 GMT
12:25:12 AM
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I Just Can't Resist.
Remember:
Bob Is
Love.
Fri, 20 Feb 2004 01:34:45 GMT
12:24:19 AM
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Greetings From
Northeast Tennessee 
Mon, 16 Feb 2004 13:30:04 GMT
12:23:40 AM
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Alright. I'm starting to
think that someone is just messing with me now. First it was "shitting
girls". Then it was "real alone shitting girls". Now it's
"shitting girls trailer". I thought the fascination with such things
ended once you were above the toddler stage, frankly. Listen,
if that's what you're looking for, you're going to be disappointed
here. Notice the little dot dot dots between the key words on my
little Google site blurb? They mean that the words you are looking for
are not sitting right next to each other on my page. They are a
paragraph or two apart, and the context is really very different.
About six years ago, there was a strange little hack on the
University of Paris website that had pictures of bestiality, girls vomiting and
people eating excrement. It really traumatized me; you would probably
love it. I doubt it's there anymore, though.
Not sure what to suggest, except to try putting your search in quotes,
like I did above. And thanks for stopping by anyway. And go
wash your hands. Thanks. (Yes, I do realize that
now I'll be even higher up on the hit list for "shitting girls" and it's
subsets. I'm a glutton for
punishment.)
Mon, 16 Feb 2004 13:11:14 GMT
12:22:35 AM
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Nations Within
Nations Part
3 of 3: Planting
Seeds
A
Sample Alphabet, probably from the Latin Kings. Notice the strong use of an
inverted Shepherd's Hook, indicating disrespect for this People Nation (Bloods)
symbol. The Vice Lords are strong rivals of the Latin Kings, and they are also
very fond of the Shepherd's Hook, which is what leads us to believe this
alphabet is from the Kings.
Read
Part 1 of 3: How NeoNazis And Gangsters Are The
Same Read
Part 2 of 3: Crisis And
Reflex
First, a note
about the scanned doodles adorning this piece – these are pictures
found in the possession of various students we have shipped out from the Center
over the years.
They represent common graffiti figures from several gangs and
offshoot gangs. The
last entry was of graffiti symbols used by the People Nation and their
offshoots. The
People Nation is more commonly known as the Bloods. Five-pointed stars, Shepherd’s Hooks
and Five-pointed Crowns are some significant identifiers of this gang and their
offshoots. The Vice
Lords, in particular, are fond of using the Shepherd’s Hook, which
means “staff of strength” to them. The Folk Nation, more
commonly referred to as the Crips, feature the Star of David prominently in some
of their graffiti
to honor one of the founders, David
Barksdale. From the umbrella header
of the Crips or the Bloods many smaller gangs have been established. Some are smaller and more
localized, such as the El Rukins, the Puerto Rican Stones and the Mickey
Cobras. Others,
such as the Latin Kings, the Black Gangster Disciples, etc. are pretty well
known.
I believe in this
program. I believe
that we do good things out here.
It's true that some of our cases turn out like JB and GC, and it's
true that a lot of our folks quit before they finish and go back where they came
from, seemingly unchanged. Or are they? You can't measure everything on a statistical
analysis report. We
can only watch to see who graduates and goes on to follow the standard linear
path that leads to getting and keeping a job. To tell the truth, helping a kid to get his GED
and to learn the basic skills of a trade is the least of what
we're trying to accomplish out here. All the skills in the world won't help you if
you don't have the life skills to respond to an alarm clock in the morning, or
dress professionally, or keep up with your personal hygiene, or refrain from
taking your first paycheck and disappearing on a week-long drunk. Yes, these are things we
have to teach them, because they didn't learn them from watching the folks back
home.
 Anybody who has worked for a Job Corps for any length of time
knows that this program is about a whole lot more than mere job skills and
equivalency diplomas.
Sometimes we have to start at social development kindergarten, and
build up an entire lifetime of "Emotional IQ" from there. We have a maximum of two
years to work with each student officially, but in practice we seldom have more
than six to eight months before they are so anxious to get going that we have to
place them, whether they are truly ready or not.
Obviously, our short-term success
rate* isn't going to be phenomenally high. If you have ever tried to kick a bad habit, you
know how hard it can be to make that change, and how hard it is to stick with it
forever after.
Imagine having to change dozens and dozens of bad habits, in a very
short period of time.
Imagine that you don’t even realize all the bad habits you
will have to discover, acknowledge and change. A lot of these habits may be your major source
of coping skills or emotional comfort and safety. You are asked to acknowledge these personal,
important pieces of yourself, acknowledge them as harmful and then throw them
away in favor of some esoteric ideal that is completely untested for you, in
your own life. It's
not simple or easy, what these kids face. I think our students who make good are nothing
less than heroic. But even those who don't look like they'll make
it can't be discounted.
Here at Job Corps, we plant many seeds. We expose our students to
so many new ways of living, so many new concepts and ways of grappling with life
that of course they are not always able to discard their reality and grasp onto
ours without faltering.
 Especially if they've been brought up in a way that makes it
difficult for them to trust others, asking them to trust us and our radically
different attitudes is asking a whole lot. But they get a chance to see other ways, even if
they reject them.
They are asked questions that no one has ever asked them before,
and the memory of these questions will stay somewhere inside of them. They hear philosophies that
they never heard before, and even if they protest, they are changed because it
has touched them in a way that cannot be wiped away.
Even if they reject everything we stand for, at
least they have been given another option to consider. They are more aware than
before of the breadth of choices they never knew about. I think it's hard for a
student to spend a night here and leave without being at least a little more
personally empowered than they were when they arrived. Who knows what they might do with that? It may be that someday,
when they are ready, those extra pieces of the puzzle that we gave them will
help them muddle together a better life. Haven't you ever rejected good advice because
you were not ready for it, right that moment? Haven't you ever heard words you weren't ready
to face echoing hatefully in your head as you tried to avoid believing
them? Haven't you
ever swallowed your pride and faced the truth, that you were wrong and those
hard words were right, and set about putting yourself on the right path
again? Haven't you
ever had something that seemed absurd suddenly click into place and make sense
for your life? I have. And I believe that this happens for our
graduates and dropouts, too.
You can't ever count anyone out completely. That's when they are most
likely to prove you wrong. * By "short-term" I mean 2-3 years after graduation, the maximum length
of time that we are able to keep tabs on most students' post-placement
progress.
Sun, 15 Feb 2004 13:51:26 GMT
12:21:43 AM
|
|
A Valentine's Day Story
Onceuponatime, there was a woman and her two
daughters who wanted to make something special for Dad for Valentine's Day.
"I know," thought Mom, "We'll use some of those freeze-dried
strawberries from the health food store to flavor the ganache of some handmade
bonbons!" And away she went. At the
health food store, Mom was chagrined and panicked to learn that they were all
sold out of freeze-dried strawberries. "We have some
freeze-dried peas," the cashier suggested helpfully. With 15
minutes to spare before daycare closed, Mom made a quick decision: zipping
through the aisles, she purchased a $7 box of health food cereal that contained
freeze-dried strawberry slices. After picking up the
children, she put them to work sorting berries from flakes. The girls were very
good about resisting their urge to nibble the berries as they filled a bowl for
Mom. Meanwhile, Mom began melting bittersweet chocolate,
cream and butter on the stove,l using an improvised double-boiler system rigged
from a saucepan, custard cups and a cut-class sugarbowl, to create ganache:
Once
the chocolate was melted, she whipped it well with an electric hand mixer,
dropping in half of the strawberry bits as the ganache cooled and fluffed. Soon,
it was time to put the bittersweet ganache into the refrigerator to cool until
firm enough to shape. While it cooled, she prepared an
identical ganache using white chocolate in place of the bittersweet. The other
half of the strawberries were whipped into this filling before placing in the
refrigerator. While both varieties of ganache cooled, Mom crushed a few reserved
berries in her mortal and pestle to create Strawberry Dust:
Once
the ganache fillings had cooled enough to firm up the butter, Mom took spoonfuls
at a time and rolled them into balls.
These
were placed in the freezer for a few minutes to get really
firm, so that they could withstand the next step, dipping into bittersweet
chocolate to coat:
These
were left to cool until the chocolate coating had firmed up, and then a few of
the bonbons were rolled in a coating of Strawberry Dust:
Yes,
those are my wedding rings in the upper right corner of the
photo. But wait! The box is looking sort of
empty, there. We need another layer of candy. "I know," said Mom. "Let's dip
these chunks of candied gingerroot in chocolate!" And so she did:
Now,
when we put the other bonbons on top, the box is full to the top - just as it
should be.
All
that remained was to hide them carefully in the refrigerator so that Dad
wouldn't find them before the big day.
Lorelei
signs her approval before candy is hid
~The End~
Sat, 14 Feb 2004 20:25:15 GMT
12:20:48 AM
|
|
Nations Within
Nations
Part 2 of 3: Crisis And
Reflex (Read Part 1 of
3: How NeoNazis And Gangsters Are The
Same)
Let's not ignore the allure of easy money.
Several years ago, we had a kid
here, JB. He was a
bright young man with an expressive, outgoing personality. He was from inner city
Chicago and had a background, evidenced by various tattoos on his arms and
neck. Like so many
of our students, he was here to get a second chance at a good life. Also like many of our
students, he had a personal tragedy that had given him the motivation to
change: his brother
had been shot dead in the streets, walking right next to him. JB was here with us for a little over a year, struggling hard to
fathom all the millions of details that had to be changed within himself in
order to make another lifestyle feasible. When you've been peppering your sentences with
"Fuck" since you were old enough to speak, for instance, it's awful hard to
become aware enough of it to suppress it. JB had other problems. He had ADHD secondary to
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, which made it extremely hard for him to concentrate on
his studies long enough to work through his dyslexia. He had a quick temper and a
flair for drama, and his value of human life had been degraded by years of
watching death happen all around him.  JB
was always in trouble for something. Every time I came to the front of the building,
it seemed, he was sitting in a chair with a note to see the Director. Still, it was obvious that
he worked hard and tried hard to be different, and it was impossible to help
liking the kid even though he took a hell of a lot of routine
maintenance. We all
worried about him, and hoped that he would make it. There was so much to get over, but he tried so
much.
He was here over Christmas one year. I remember that initially
he planned to stay, because he couldn't get in touch with his mother to get
permission to come home.
Finally, on Christmas Eve, he heard from her. I called in an airline
ticket for him to go home until the day after New Year.  Late at night, I got a phone call at home. JB needed another ticket to
come back home. The
first flight I could get him was early in the morning, day after
Christmas. I came
to pick him up from the airport when his flight came in. He sat next to me on the
bench seat, crumpled up and hunched against the door.
"What happened?" I asked. "I got home, but nobody would
answer the door. I
waited around for a few hours, thinking they were out or something. It was really cold though,
so I broke in the front door.
Momma was in there, but she was passed out in front of the door
with her crack pipe.
I couldn't get into the house because she was blocking the
door. So I went
back to the airport and waited for my flight."  I
didn't say anything else.
What could be said?
If I apologized, I would be disrespecting his mother. Forget about railing
against the injustice of his spending the holidays in an airport, alone. It's one thing for a person
to say something about their own family, but if you're not family, you don't
chime in, so I didn't.
JB graduated from the program. He finished his trade,
passed the GED exam and was sent home on a job. We tried to talk him into taking a job somewhere
else, but Momma was in rehab and he wanted to be there to help her out when she
was done.
Two months later, his Momma sent us a newspaper
clipping. JB's body
had been found folded into the trunk of an abandoned, carjacked car. He had been shot twelve
times. Working as a
painter just wasn't enough to take care of business back at home. He had had personality
issues with his boss from the start, and JB just wasn't able to make the
sweeping adaptations necessary to keep the job. Jobless, with Momma to support
and with strikes against him from the moment he opened his Fuck-riddled mouth,
he didn't have the luxury of doing something different. Back in Chicago, he didn't
have the GollyGosh Job Corps Crew there to cheer him on or remind him that a
professional man's pants were supposed to cover his ass, not his knees. He had plenty of people to
laugh at him, though, and plenty of others who would take his desire to be
different as a personal affront, much the same as a meatpacker might take a
vegan's choices personally.
In these circles, insulting someone –
disrespecting someone, could easily be a death
sentence. Playing
along, however, would keep food in your belly and a whole crew of folks to
ostensibly watch your back.
When you're in a crisis, you fall back on your
reflexes – the things you know that you
know. Falling back
into the game was as effortless as rolling up a pants leg, untying a
shoe. The Fucks
were free to flow once more.
The tattoo on his neck was all the business card he would ever
need.
Thu, 12 Feb 2004 22:36:14 GMT
12:20:00 AM
|
|
Nations Within Nations
Part 1 of 3: How NeoNazis And Gangsters Are The
Same
"We live in a nation of the unattended. No one cares. No one spends any
time.
We have a huge percentage of people who are growing
up like that. They
have No skills, no ability to deal with other
people. Parental
impact is almost nil.
“In these communities, the average father
communicates with a child in a
positive way for about 1 minute per
day, 7 minutes per week.
Mothers are only 49
minutes per week. So the most powerful socialization tool that was
ever developed in human history is having
an influence in the growth of the young for less than
an hour a
week.
“Constantly you see kids who are by
themselves. They
watch TV. They play
computer games.
They have no relationships with anyone and are very selfish, very
'What's in it for me?'.
I don't agree with gangs by any stretch of the imagination,
but gangs are filling a need, a very real human
need."
Jack Enter,
Ph.D. North
Georgia College Dahlonega,
GA
This morning, on my way to work, I followed this
truck into the Center:
This truck sits up the road from us at a
residence, except when it comes out to have breakfast or lunch at our dining
hall. (Our dining
hall, run by Culinary Arts students, is open to the public for $2 meals) I was reflecting on the
irony of a person driving a swastika-bedecked truck and enjoying a cheap meal at
a place where over 70% of the residents are minorities, and then I passed this
trailer home at the end of our access road:
What you don’t see in the photo is the
mass of children’s playthings in the yard. Another generation, primed to soak up the
culture of their surroundings like sponges, learning that they must hate in
order to be loved. When one of our students decides enough is
enough, they must walk off campus and pass this trailer. When our new students
arrive on Center for orientation, they pass this trailer coming in. Welcome,
it says. I thought about a young man from years ago, an
American Indian student who grew up on a reservation, GC. The child of alcoholics,
although I hate to propagate the stereotype. Stereotypes do often develop for a reason, and
this kid was a typical example of the Native American tragedy that happens
today. Born with
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and raised in desolate squalor, this kid was dumb as a
box of rocks and full of anger.
He was a tall, scrawny thing with a big mouth, and he got himself
beat up regularly tossing off stupid inflammatory remarks to the wrong
people.
We did our best, as we do, to play Life Skills
Triage with him, to give him enough pieces for his fragmented puzzle that he
could realize a bigger picture and be okay, somehow. It's hard to repair
eighteen years in two years, though. Sometimes we can patch things up enough that
they do okay, but sometimes we just can't. GC stayed in the program a long
time. He never
passed the GED test, but he completed all the requirements of his chosen trade
and we managed to get him a job doing offshore welding. I gave him a couple
thousand dollars of graduation money, translated into money orders, and drove
him to the airport.
He was unusually quiet, and was working hard at studying a book
whose cover he was hiding from my view with a magazine. I snuck a peek over his
shoulder – he was reading NeoNazi propaganda. A full-blooded Cherokee
Indian, and he was going to try to pass himself off as some cheesy, pockmarked
string bean of a white boy just so he could belong to something. I think this is the sort of sad motivation behind
many versions of hate.
When you're down, w-a-y down in the pecking order, it's comforting
to have fantasies of grandeur.
Consider abused children. I have read over and over again the accounts of
these kids coping with their circumstances by devising a dream world for
themselves. Common
themes include the discovery that they are actually adopted, and that their real
family is rich or royal or something similar. It's all too human for people to cling to the
parts of themselves that are special and exquisite, either real or, if
necessary, imagined, in order to feel good about themselves when downtrodden by
the world at large.
It seems only natural that the adult who grows up
with this sort of compromised self image, aggravated by the buildup of helpless
rage over time, can easily slip into a group that exalts itself by stepping on
the heads of others.
It's a perfect fit, really – they get to feel special
because they are of the Chosen Race (their "real" parents are King and Queen),
and they have a convenient target upon which to focus all of their impotent
anger – the blacks, the Jews, the disabled…all the non-chosen
ones, who do not share their exalted origins. They also have a place outside of themselves to
place the blame for their own failures: the sinister lower life forms eat up all the
resources, the good jobs, the compassion of society. It's sad, but it fills a
very real need. I hoped, for his sake, that they wouldn't take
him. On the other
hand, wouldn't this just be reinforcement, another log on the fire of his anger,
his isolation? I
don't know how he could have been helped, except by big heaping doses of love
and compassion regularly slathered onto his prickly self until eventually things
softened up enough to let it soak in. And he was pretty damned annoying. It would be hard to find
someone who could pour quantities of love on a big ball of dimwitted, ugly hate
like that. It might seem unlikely that Neonazis and
gangsters can be mixed up together in the same place at the same time. Hell, it's hard enough
trying to comprehend that we sometimes have representatives from both People and
Folk Nations sharing a dorm.
Nobody who works out here would ever wonder why things could be so
volatile. But if
you think about the reasons why our youth are drawn to these types of groups,
you see that they have a lot more in common than even they would like to
admit. It's a sense of belonging. You can't underestimate
that. All of these
groups have rites of passage, but once you're in, it's damned hard to get back
out. For kids who
grow up in families riddled by dysfunction and apathy, it's a new kind of family
that will never turn their back on you. It's a way to survive when you live in a war
zone. Being in a
gang is like having a spot in the bunker; staying out is like walking across an
open field in the middle of the battleground. You and I might think that the answer is to bide
you time, grow up, then get the hell out of the battlefield. But you have to remember
that other ways of life are completely foreign. They have no coping skills for living any other
way. It would be
like living on a farm in North Dakota all your life, then one day finding
yourself dumped without provision or friends into the middle of a
desert. You might
have learned plenty of survival skills for where you're from, but what good
would they do you in this alien place? How fast could you figure it out?
There are even more hindrances for these kids,
though. They might
bear the scars or tattoos of their local tribe, alienating them from the rest of
the world. They
might speak a dialect that is only acceptable (or understandable) within their
hometown. They make
have suffered such emotional damage or neglect that they lack the social skills
to relate to others in a normal way. They may have learned survival mechanisms that
are completely at odds with life in the larger world. And who knows? They might have been born
damaged, from parents caught up in the same nightmare cycle of drugs, violence,
and desperation.
This isn't a slur. It's a fact. An overwhelming percentage of the kids we deal
with here have mental disorders, personality disorders, Post Traumatic Stress,
ADD and ADHD, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, Crack Baby Syndrome, you name it. This is the card they are
dealt before they even get started. How well would you fare, with such a
disadvantage from the start?
Thu, 12 Feb 2004 02:31:16 GMT
12:18:39 AM
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|
 Vampire School Long
ago, in my early attempts at climbing out of the hopeless cycle of the minimum
legal wage, I spent a year learning how to take blood from people. It
was exciting, in a way. I came to appreciate soda-straw arm veins with
a type of fascination that would make most people's skin crawl. I
could suck the blood from all types: from the tiniest newborns, who
required so-called Butterfly needles to puncture their minute veins, to aged
diabetics with veins made of rubber cement, and even people who were dead,
although that was right tricky. Every Stick had an entire scenario
surrounding it, an entirely new set of considerations which needed careful
attention and swift reaction. In a hospital, few situations lack some
amount of crisis atmosphere, after all. Sometimes,
the crisis was purely emotional, and purely the patient. I once
approached a young man who had been run over by a truck. He was
recovering nicely, was actually sitting in a recliner in his room watching
sports when I came in. When he saw my basket of vacuum vials (they
have all air removed, so they actually suck the blood out once a vein is hit) he
immediately went dizzy, vomited, and passed out. The kid had lived
through a fight with a couple tons of metal, and my tiny little pinprickers were
enough to make him faint. It's not rational, but neither are most
phobias. It can't be helped. Eventually, I got my four
little doctor-ordered tubes filled from him by using the art of
Distraction. In Distraction, you prepare the patient for
something they are deeply dreading. You make a very careful and
deliberate task of preparing for the awful moment, and then you inform them that
you are done before they realize it has happened. I did this by
vigorously rubbing, tapping and pinching at veins in his arm while my other hand
stealthily inserted the needle into an enormous trench of a vein by his
wrist. He was so focused on his inner elbow that he never even noticed
what I was doing. When I was five, the nice lady who pierced
my ears used Distraction. She told me that she would hit the trigger
on the count of three, and I started counting:
"One...Two...[click!]...Two....Two....Two....Two...." It was all
over. Other times, the patient wasn't the one with the
emotional issue. Parents of newborns don't like to see their precious,
delicate babies jabbed with sharp objects. There is an especially
gory-but-necessary test that involves pricking a newborn's heel, "milking" it
for as much blood as you can as you fill in six circles on a piece of absorbent
paper. You literally have to color in the circles with the blood, as
the baby is crying and thrashing around in bewilderment. Our teacher
exhorted us to "be careful to fill in the lines completely". I always
did. And the parents were often standing directly behind me, breathing
aggression and protectiveness down my neck as I did what needed to be
done. Sometimes I could feel all the conflict inside of them as they
suppressed the urge to maim the person who was hurting their child.
Often, they would settle for staring daggers at me instead. I
understood. Sometimes, I was the one with an issue.
There was a little girl, probably seven or eight, who was severely ill with
leukemia. I had to take her blood every half hour all night long one
night, the poor thing. She was too exhausted to even wake up when we
shook her. "Just do it," her mom told me. I looked at her,
at the resignation, powerlessness, insecurity on her face. "Let her
sleep." she said. I stuck the needle in her arm.
She woke up, alarmed, and shot a questioning look at her mother. Her
mother and I looked at each other, guiltily, the way mothers do when they've
made a mistake with the best of intentions. Sometimes, being
the token vampire could be exciting. Every call to the ER was a
surprise. Once, there was a man having a full-on Vietnam flashback,
strapped down hand and foot to the stretcher. He was shaking so
violently that the siderails were coming loose. He could not be roused
from his trance. I looked at him fearfully, wondering if he was
killing someone over and over in his head. Then I jabbed a needle into
his arm, and I missed. I could feel my face flushing hot and cold in
rapid succession as I fumbled for another needle, a fresh alcohol pad.
I stuck him again, and he let out a howl that was otherworldly. I
half-expected to lose control of my bladder, or faint dead away, but I did
neither. I was immensely grateful to look down and see the Tiger Top
tube filling quickly with deep maroon blood. Once, I had to
take blood from a man who was in the middle of a massive heart attack.
He was in great pain, writhing and yelling between gasped breaths. The
doctor needed to know how much thinner was in his blood before he made his next
treatment decision. I had to stick him right then. I
apologized, tried to let him know what was going to happen, but he clearly
couldn't hear me. I stuck him. He reached over, gripped my
face with a meaty hand, and slammed me against the cinder block wall
HARD. I saw stars. He apologized. I apologized
too, understanding that he was in a desperate situation. I told him I
needed to stick him again, but he was already reverted to his former
incoherence. I stuck. He backhanded me, and my nose began
bleeding so much that I thought it was broken. I couldn't
blame him. Sometimes, it was just sad. There was an
elderly German gentleman, Conrad, who had been recovering nicely from a heart
attack. I had seen him every day for a week, and he was cordial and
alert. I wished him well the day he told me he was being discharged,
and enjoyed one last small conversation with him, auf Deutsch.
Three days later, I had a call to the ER, to take blood from
a Code. These were always hard. It's hard to pull blood from
someone who has no circulation. Arms are generally useless.
Sometimes I had good luck with an ankle, or perhaps a toe. This one
was not working. I stood by for a paddle hit, then the doctor pulled
me in for blood. Feeling desperate, I sought a neck vein. I
got a half tube, but then it collapsed. The man's bald head was
spidered with tiny, superficial veins. I fished out a baby Butterfly
and poked the top of his head to fill my tube. I stood back again for
another paddle hit as I labeled the vial. The man moaned, momentarily
revived. As the blood rushed back into his face, I suddenly recognized
him. It was Conrad. He moaned again, then again he
died. This time he did it in a way that they couldn't
reverse. I felt relieved.
Tue, 10 Feb 2004 01:32:55 GMT
12:17:10 AM
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P
Image By MisterX Road
Trip On road trips, I like to drive as long as I can
manage to without stopping – it’s almost a personal
competition. On
this occasion, handicapped as I was by having made my unplanned escape on a
less-than-full tank and questionable rear tires, “long as I
can” only amounted to 6 hours. By then my rear had a shimmy and my ass was
completely numb.
Interpret that however makes you happiest.
I pulled into a brightly lit combination
truck stop/diner at about two in the morning. Waterlogged country music sobbed from the
loudspeakers above as I set the pump and proceeded to check vitals: tires, oil, water. I could feel the sharp
stares pelting me as I went about my business, and I could guess the reason.
I like to wear long, loose,
flowing dresses when driving distances, just for the sake of comfort. It’s easier to
curl up one leg at a time, alternately, as they go numb over the passage of
hours. I guess
it’s an odd sight to see, especially at this hour. I tried to ignore the
appraising glances as I pulled my car around to the diner and chose a booth
overlooking my car - a sure sign of my heightened paranoia - and opened up my
magazine, giving myself a safe place to direct my eyes.
I could feel more hard looks,
but I did my best not to meet anyone's gaze. Another dog training lesson that seems to work
with men, which is not to say that men are dogs, but if it works it
works: avoid eye
contact. It is interpreted as a direct challenge, or an invitation at any
rate.
I ordered coffee when the
waitress came around.
She looked at me, annoyed at the effort to wait on a table that
would probably only amount to a quarter for a tip. I resolved to leave her at least four dollars
regardless of the price of the coffee, but still could not help but feel guilty
under her resentful gaze.
I wished that I could tell her that I understood what it was like
to try to survive by waiting tables.
I wanted to commiserate with
her on the fury of dealing with The Regulars: the ones who came in daily or weekly, ordered a
small meal and made it a personal challenge to the waitress to always top off
their coffee the moment the cup was less than two-thirds full. They would reward your
careful attention by proudly presenting you with a nice, shiny quarter; maybe
they would actually wave you over so that they could place their generous gift
into your palm personally, with a warm, benevolent smile on their faces that
showed how confident they were of the praise they deserved. And you would have to smile
and thank them, careful to avoid the slightest hint of sarcasm or bitterness
from entering voice or face.
Because, after all, they were The Regulars - and far more difficult
to replace than your cheap, unskilled, two-dollar-per-hour self would
be.
They were almost invariably
elderly widowers, starved for attention and clearly still adjusting to the
cost-of-living increases from the forties. They probably really believed that they were
doing you a favor by leaving you that quarter. Hard to believe, but possible.
I wanted to let her know that
I understood what it was like to pay the rent with rolls of coins, and that I
would do my part to raise her up to at least minimum wage, at least for the hour
that I was around.
But she was already gone, busily working at serving other
customers, trying to make up for the tips she feared she was losing by having a
mere coffee drinker wasting her booth.
She came by to refill my cup
at the two-thirds mark and I pulled the cup away and thanked her. Still feeling guilty, I
asked for a grilled cheese sandwich wrapped to go. I could not hold her attitude against her,
knowing what I know about that life.
I wished that I had a flower
to leave behind at the table as well, something extra to make her night a little
better. In lieu of
any better ideas I drew a big smiling face on one of the napkins and wrote
"Thanks" underneath it.
I piled several ones on top of the table and wrapped the napkin
around their center like a band.
A napkin ring, to be sure. I smiled a little to myself as I headed to the
car, imagining her surprise.
I was feeling too good to remember my rule about eye contact, and I
found myself inadvertently smiling at one of the truckers stopped for
fuel.
He started talking to me
then, of course, asking me where I was going and how long I had been
driving. I made up
lies for every question, afraid of inviting a stalker to harass me.
Long-haul truckers are a
particularly scary lot, especially if you happen to be a young woman, alone in
your car in the middle of the night. There's no telling how many long, lonely hours
they have spent away from home, in an environment that is almost exclusively
male. Even the most
cultured and sophisticated of men tend to hit a decline in an environment where
overt sexism is so thinly veiled beneath the pretense of rude humor. The acceptance and
promotion of rude behavior leads more or less directly to the acceptance and
promotion of aggressive behavior, still often justified beneath the blanket
banner of "joking around."
They get busy trying to one-up each other, and the crudeness just
gets worse and worse until the only way left to up the ante on your buddy is to
add aggressiveness to the mix.
Take a man who is lonely,
overtired, and being egged on by male buddies who applaud rude and salacious
behavior, and then feed him a bunch of Black Mollies or perhaps a hit or two of
cocaine – hell, maybe a little of both. Then put him behind the wheel of a multi-ton
truck hurtling down the highway at 90 miles an hour, joking with his buddies on
the broadband and getting more and more agitated. Now, put a young woman in a little sports car
five inches off the pavement and set her down on this highway, surrounded on all
sides by men in this condition.
If you do not think it is a good reason to be afraid, then you're a
lot more optimistic than I am.
So I fed this guy all the
lies he could swallow and never broke my stride as I went to my car, got in and
locked the doors.
For a moment I wished that I had a CB radio of my own, so that I
could know what was being said about me as my position was being tracked down
the highway. Then
again, maybe it was better that I did not have to listen to it.
I pulled back onto the
Interstate and accelerated enough that I was passing all the other
traffic. Maybe I
could get ahead of some of them, anyway. I'd rather take my chances with the cops for
sure.
By the time the sun broke
open in the sky, I had relaxed a bit. I figured that enough time had passed for the
truckers' attentions to have turned to something else. I was cruising with the
flow of traffic, one hand resting on the wheel, the other searching through
channels for an appropriate morning song. I noticed a truck catching up to me, and I
glanced at the passing lane to see if it was clear.
When I looked into the rear
view mirror again my stomach clenched as I realized how fast the truck was
catching up to me. I sped up a little bit. The truck was so close it looked like it might
run into me. Still,
it did not turn on any signals.
I changed into the left lane, hoping the truck would pass on the
right. It changed
lanes almost in sync with me, staying so close that I expected a crash any
moment.
Nervously I shifted back to
the right lane again and started to slow down, hoping the truck would go ahead
and pass. As it
started to drift back over into my lane again, I
was forced to floor the accelerator to get in front and avoid being hit. The truck came roaring up
on my bumper again, and I kept speeding up. We were going way faster than I was comfortable,
and still he was right on my back.
Suddenly he began flashing
his lights on and off behind me, then honking his horn. It dawned on me: this was a psychotically
coked-up trucker, and somehow he was angry with me. I did not know if he was trying to scare me or
truly trying to kill me, but the way he was acting could get me killed
regardless. I kept
up my frantic speed, nervous and tense and becoming angry at being pushed along
the highway like this.
An exit was coming up. Oh, how I wanted to get the hell off of that
road - but what if he followed me off the ramp? Then I would really be in serious trouble,
especially if this was a dead exit with just a
few rural gas stations that don’t open until regular business
hours. I thought
about my rapidly withering options. I could take this exit at the last possible
moment, but it was a sharp turn and at the speed I was driving I would probably
flip. Even if I
made it, I would have to stop at the bottom of
the ramp to avoid oncoming traffic. I knew too well how quickly and forcefully a man
on cocaine could enforce his will. The last thing I wanted to do was let him bring
me to a stop. I
could continue letting him push me along in traffic until a cop noticed and
intervened, but the idea of having to keep driving this fast for an
indeterminate length of time was terrifying. Already I was afraid of catching up to morning
gridlock, or running into a wall of fog, or entering a construction zone with
concrete barriers on the sides.
I was going way too fast to be able to react to any unexpected
occurrence. The
exit ramp became visible, and I turned on my signal. The truck backed off
slightly and I started to brake in preparation for entering the ramp. The truck took the ramp
right behind me without turning on its' signal. I went as far as I could, then suddenly veered
sharply to the left and cut across the bumpy guide lights that separated the
highway from the exit ramp in a sparkling wedge. I dropped gears and my car screamed as I raced
to get back up to highway speed again and weave myself safely into the flow of
regular traffic.
The truck honked angrily as I sped out of sight, then ran the stop
sign and started up the re-entrance ramp to the road. But I was speeding like
crazy again, weaving back and forth between the cars, putting as much distance
between us as I could.
When the truck was completely out of sight, I quickly took an exit
and hid my car behind an abandoned warehouse until it was gone.
Thu, 05 Feb 2004 01:22:31 GMT
12:16:20 AM
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|
Random Memory: Tyler
I was coming back to the dorm one night with a
group of my friends, Suzanne, Megan, Penny, et al. My roommate was not
amongst us; she was probably back in our dorm room trying to find new ways to
torture me with mass quantities of Rose Pink Frillies or C&C Music
Factory posters. I had just bought a new white jogging suit with the
Emory & Henry College logo on it, and had been wearing it for the first
time. As we crossed in front of the chapel, I noticed a figure running
toward us. A moment later, he was close enough that I could tell he
was a he, and then I could tell, as he continued running toward us, that he was
Asian. Then he was close enough that I could tell he was looking
directly at me, although I didn't know him. Then he was
really getting close, but still running, and I
stopped walking because I figured he was coming up to tell me something, or
something. Then, he ran straight into
me, in a full-body tackle, and threw us both bodily into a large puddle of
mud. "Oh, I'm sorry; I thought you were someone else." he
said to me, with an amazing amount of composure and an utter lack of
embarassment. I was too shocked to even be mad,
somehow. I went back to my room and threw away my $60 worth of new
merchandise, because red clay dirt and white cotton do not mix. He was
calling me from the other side of campus by the time I got into new
jeans. I mean that literally: he stood on the front lawn of
his residential hall, and shrieked my name repeatedly. I was at the
other end of campus, three floors up. The news passed from residential
hall to residential hall until someone in the lobby of my building called me to
tell me that he was out there, shrieking for me. I called him and his
roommates dragged him into the room to answer the phone. I informed
him of my number and told him it might be a little more reliable to use that,
rather than the Ye Olde Towne Crier method.
We went back to the chapel with a couple of friends and shared a bunch
of contraband beer. (It was a dry campus.
right.) Paul had a book of poetry, and we took turns reading things
while Penny tried desperately to suppress her urge to jump his bones.
Tyler sat on the floor and drew pictures of us all. On my picture, he
drew tears in my eyes. I actually had been laughing and clowning a
lot. It was odd. We got to be friends.
Tyler was adopted. He had been born in Korea. When he was
about three, he was found, naked, going through garbage looking for
food. They put him in a Korean orphanage then, and when he was
five his parents adopted him and brought him to the
US. He told me this automatically and without emotion one night - it
was what his parents had told to him. He had no memory of his early
life at all. Even while telling me this, he was drawing
another picture of me. I was always self-conscious around him, because
he was always drawing my picture. I made sure to keep good posture and
not make any weird faces. Which meant that I actually made a lot of
weird, trying-not-to-look-weird faces, but anyway. I never cried in
front of him; yet he always drew me with tears in my eyes.
Mon, 02 Feb 2004 01:13:58 GMT
12:14:58 AM
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|
PSA
(not to be confused with
PSI) I very
rarely discuss political issues, because I can't be political in any sort of
moderate way. It either takes over my entire life, or I ignore
it. Yes, I vote. Yes, I am pretty damned far on the left,
although I'm not standing with the eco-terrorists, quite. I will
always be far left, and that is an absolute fact - because, if it were for the
right, my ass would never have been able to claw out of the poverty and
corruption of my youth in order to achieve a better life. After all, I
get depressions fairly often, which to a righty is just another way of saying
that I am a lazy slug with no ambition and I deserve to starve. I just
don't talk about this stuff. Because it gets crazy. For
instance, I found out about a month ago that my inlaws are staunch republicans,
and THEY LIKE DUBYA.
They're good people. It's just that the political
stance of the republican party is optimally suited to their specific
socioeconomic status, and their particular
lifestyle. It's not because they are judging people "below"
them or trying to be selfish and heartless to the lower-down portion of the
population. It's because the republican interests protect
their hard-earned interests best. They have worked to
get where they are. They want to protect it.
But I could never be on the right, even if I became a
millionaire - because I know that the right-wing political stance, if they had
had their way with policies more exclusively, would have kicked me
while I was down and it would have taken a miracle for me to ever get
back up again, barring the sudden appearance of Fairy Godparents or a Daddy
Warbucks or a significant lottery win or somehow becoming a pop
star. And yet, this knowledge hits me at least
once a day like a hot cup of coffee in the face. I wish I didn't know
it, I really do. I was a lot more comfortable before I knew
that. I feel like there is a barrier of understanding between us now,
even though rationally I know it is just a different way of perceiving
policy. I choose policy on the basis of how well it allows most people
to have a fair shot at things. They choose policy to protect what they
have managed to build up for themselves. There is a feeling
that, as nice as they are to me, they judge me for my origins and would have
been party to the many slammed doors I had to wade through.
It's not that they'd look me in the eye and slam a door in my face, of
course. It's just that they vote for the party that, in
effect, would do just that. It seems that the
republicans like to tout the "up by the bootstraps" success stories, but
they are the ones who would remove all the tools for doing just
that. Sometimes I hear righties say
that this isn't really true, that they just think that people should
help people, not governments. Well, that's all good and
fine, but what about people who don't have people? Like me?
Who did I have, that I could get help from? Nobody but the government,
to whom I've been paying taxes since I was way too young to be paying any sort
of taxes. This is a fact, folks: if it
weren't for all these "pork barrel" government aid programs, my po' white trash,
unwed teenaged mother self would be permanently trapped in the
projects. We might have been homeless, if not for the illegal
bartering of excess food stamps. How could I have gone to school so
that I could someday earn more than minimum wage, if not for government
subsidies? Would it have been my fault if I hadn't found some generous
benefactor to take an interest in me and carry me through? Should I
have depended upon my terribly broken, desperately poor family? That's
a laugh. If the righties had had their way in politics to a
greater extent, I'd have never been able to dig myself out of the hole of
dysfunctional, youthful decisions. I would have been a repeat of the
cycle of poverty, that's all. So now, whenever they act like they
respect and admire me, I have this bitter taste in my throat.
Good show, girl. You made it through the obstacle
course. Granted, if we'd had our way, there would have also been a
minefield in there somewhere... It's
true, they've been extremely kind to me and they have helped me,
us, a lot since I've been a part of
their family. They are good, kindhearted
people. But the way that they vote would have doomed me to
pay for the sins of my youth with the rest of my life. I wish
I didn't know. Sun, 01 Feb 2004 14:47:50 GMT
12:09:43 AM
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From 1/31/04
The Deal With
Althaea Part
2 I've avoided this for about as long as I can,
and I still cannot decide where to begin. I have decided, instead,
that I will just toss out assorted tidbits in the hopes that it will paint some
sort of picture. I'm 30, the mother of two daughters, ages 10
and 4. I'm done with the kid-having thing. Done, done,
done. Married once, for seven years so far. I work
for the Forest Service, US Department of Agriculture and the Department of Labor
- yes, all three, in various aspects of my job - at a federally-operated Job
Corps facility in Cherokee National Forest. Officially, I'm an
accountant. But accounting-type activities only eat up about a third
of my time. The rest of the time I play travel agent and social
worker, sometimes also tutor. I've been trained fairly
extensively in Gang symbology and I often have to work at deciphering
graffiti and artwork as it appears on Center so that we know who we
are dealing with. I have a form of bipolar
called Cyclothymia, which means that I get a lot of depressions and not so much
of the manias. It's probably just as well, because the
depressions are fairly well controlled by medication but the
manias are trickier. When your brain is lying to you, and
it's telling you lies that you like to hear, it's
awful hard to make yourself disbelieve
them. Manias have come closer to screwing up my life than
depressions ever have. When I was younger, before I was
diagnosed and had an idea of what the hell my problem was,
my friends used to always write down my address
and phone number in pencil - it was bound to change. I would
wake up manic one morning, decide that the life I was living just
wasn't going to work out, and I would just drop everything, leave and start over
from scratch. It always seemed like the right thing to do at the time,
but then I would have this enormous new, Build A Life project in front
of me and another depression would hit. I'd not get anything much
done, and then mania would hit again, I would declare my life unworkable and I'd
start over again. A lot of people are still very
secretive about mental illness, but I just don't see the point. Most
people, except perhaps those who are extremely close to me for years and years,
probably wouldn't know that I have a form of insanity if I didn't tell
them. I tend to give people the heads-up when I'm starting to crash or
when I feel myself getting a little too high up. Acknowledging it
helps me govern it, somewhat. Frankly, considering the more severe
mental illnesses that run through my genetic lineage with as much regularity as
blonde hair and blue eyes, I feel rather fortunate that I've been hit so
mildly. Above all else, I'm eternally grateful
that I didn't end up with Borderline Personality Disorder, because that is just
damned hard to work through. True, it
generally tends to even itself out by the time a person reaches middle
age. Also true, by middle age the person is usually broken in body and
spirit, and has burned all their bridges behind them. Getting better,
by middle age, when you've already destroyed so much of your life, isn't a very
big bonus. My mom was riddled with disorders: Borderline PD,
plus chronic depression, OCD symptoms that fluctuated over the years, chemical
dependencies, eating disorders. It could be argued that the first two,
the Borderline and the depression, gave birth to all the others, as well as to
most of the physical ailments that disabled her by her mid-thirties. I
could probably create five hundred different theories about how my mother
self-destructed. I have already created dozens. Every time I
do so, I imagine what she would think if I were to present the case to
her. Mostly, I think she'd probably just nod her head and say "Sounds
about right." In the right frame of mind, when things were calm and
she didn't feel attacked, mom seemed pretty aware of her various
insanities. Talking to someone about mental illness is akin to telling
a woman she's suffering from severe PMS: it all depends on the
person's mood, the setting, and the way you phrase yourself. You might
get fury and denials, you might get calm acknowledgment. It's all in
how you set your mouth before you speak. Nowadays, I try to
work through it on paper, or with art projects instead of packing up my car and
moving to Montana in the middle of the night, intent upon building a cabin out
of sticks and twigs and living off the land. If it gets really bad, I
might carry one of my daughters out of her bedroom in the middle of the night
and spend hours painting a mural on her bedroom wall, or scrub out the
air vents with a pipe cleaner or turn my husband into my sex slave for
a while. One year I was able to use up a mania by
changing the hard drive on my work computer without backing up all the Standard
Operating Procedure files. That gave me 500 documents to retype over
the course of a week, before anyone noticed the mistake. I stayed busy
and didn't suddenly pack my life into a car, so I consider it a
success. Plus, I fixed the grammar on many outdated documents, and
gave them a pretty new official-looking header. I don't read
much fiction, and never really have. I like facts. I read
textbooks and how-to manuals and biographies and history books and compilations
of grad school anthropology theses. I love antique household chemistry
texts. I read cookbooks like some people read Danielle
Steele. I adore Carl Sagan, and on the other end of the spectrum, I
adore Carla Emery. The only real exception to my tendency toward
nonfiction would be poetry. There are few things that I cherish as
much as a poem that kicks me in the stomach and haunts my mind for days after
reading it. I have tattered poetry books spotted with mildew from
living in a tent with me for a year, and I can't ever part with them no matter
how nasty they are because every page holds a raw emotional memory for
me. I have a very acute sense of smell - I believe
it's my strongest sense. I consider this to be part of the reason why
I learned to cook early and without much instruction - I can smell something, or
smell it and taste it, and I'm able to pick apart all of the ingredients that
went into the dish. Same with perfumes: I can smell them and
pick apart all the different notes that make up the whole. Of course,
there is a very obvious down side to a strong sense of smell.
Some days, the odor of iron from the red blood cells passing through a person's
lungs is more than I can bear. People's breath smells like knives being
sharpened, and that makes me think of metallic scraping noises, and that gives
me the shivers. I cannot stand the sound of metal scraping against
anything. People who scrape their utensils
against their teeth as they eat, or squeak their forks across the surface of
their plates, they drive me insane. I
have poor hearing, on the other hand. I hate talking on the
phone. On really bad days, I hate talking to people out loud
period, because it makes me look stupid.
I have nerve deafness from a bazillion ear infections when I was a
kid. When I was about 5, I was virtually deaf - my mom had to use sign
language with me for a while and everything. It got better, but with
nerve deafness, there is a disconnect between the ability to hear
sounds and the ability to interpret
sounds. If someone talks, I'm probably going to hear
them. But there is a second or two lag before I am able to interpret
what words those sounds create, and in the interim I end up standing there
looking vacuous. I avoid talking on the phone for this
reason. It's just an ordeal. I get off the phone feeling
tired enough to almost need a nap, sometimes, just from the effort of puzzling
out the sounds into words that make sense. On the other hand, there is
this board game where you pick up cards that have nonsense phrases which are
phonetically similar to common sayings, and I am a genius at this
game. After all, puzzling out meaning from seeming nonsense phrases is
what I do every day of my life. I have lots of
hobbies. Currently I'm into crocheting extremely crazy-looking
hats. I don't wear hats; I inflict them upon other people. I
like to crochet lace and such, but I end up giving it away because it's too
frilly and girly to suit my decorating tastes. I like the process more
than the finished results, I guess you could say. I can make jewelry
of woven seedbeads, both Indian-style and Victorian-style. As a
present for the maid of honor at my wedding, I made a batch of beads from a
paste made out of wild rose petals cooked with lavendar blossoms and pathchouly
leaves. I filled a Victorian-style woven bead tube necklace with these
small, pastille-like beads. Seven years later, it is still redolent of
roses. I love wildflowers and herbs. On years when my
depressions don't interfere with spring planting season, I grow huge gardens
filled with many varieties of useful herbs and plants. My wedding was
done entirely in dried flowers and herbs, the floor beneath the tents covered in
dried summer flowers. I and my older daughter spent a whole summer
before the wedding picking and drying all the flowers that we used that
day. I still have several gallons of the potpourri from the wedding,
and it still smells sweet from the wild roses, mints and basils.
I'm a good cook, and I love to create exotic things. It's the
process. Cookbooks are only for entertainment, or getting
inspiration. Once I'm in the kitchen I can't make myself follow a
recipe - it's all improvisation. I'm not so much interested in eating
the results as I am in the meditative activity of creating things.
I am a little bit of an adrenaline junkie, which is why I do things
like jumping off of ferry boats or rafting Class 6 rivers.
I've almost drowned before. It was interesting. Nothing
really flashed before my eyes, and I didn't feel scared at all. It was
kind of like I just looked around me and thought "Well, this is it.
Yep." And then it occured to me to reach down and remove the foot
inside of the trapped shoe, and I lived. I don't indulge in most of my
impulses these days, because I have the girls. They'd be financially
better off with the deluxe death benefits the federal government would give
them, but I didn't have them with the intention of letting anybody else raise
them. I want to be there. If I hadn't wanted to be there, I
could have stayed on the yachts and left them with a nanny, like other people
do. What else? I'm not good at saying "No", and I
have no clear idea of my personal limitations. In my life, you live
through whatever you're faced with - and so far, that's what I have
done. So I don't know what my breaking point is. The whole
notion of "I can't take it anymore" doesn't make sense to
me. If you are conscious, physically capable of
uttering the phrase, and able to make a deliberate choice to
give up, then you are still alive and hence, you are taking
it. You will have to take action in order to no
longer be taking it, and if you can still take action, you can still
live. You breathe in, you breathe out, you humor the universe by
pointlessly feeding your body and giving it an occasional cleaning, you
ironically watch the sun go up and down day after End Of World day, and
eventually, the situation will change of its' own accord. No matter
what, you just don't ever actually die from it, unless you deliberately make the
choice. And if you still have the power of making choices, you still
have the power to keep looking for another day. You may not want to,
it may not be an option you like, but it is still a choice.
I can't take it anymore is just untrue. Either
you will or you won't, but there is no
can't. I know that's overly simplistic, but
that's really how it works inside my mind. I'm well aware that other
people's minds don't work the same way. But for me, I have been to
places that looked like The End before, and all I could think about was the fact
that I could still breathe. [well, except for the time I almost
drowned, of course.] If I can still breathe, I know I can
still live. So, it was never too much for me, whatever it
was. It may have been excruciating, but experience has shown me that
no matter what the issue is, whether it's something that makes you happy or
something that wraps you in psychological agony - eventually, it's going to turn
into something different. Change happens. You can't stop
it. You can't predict it, except to predict that it will
come. To convince yourself that another beautiful thing will never
happen in your life is insanity. You can't know it, unless you stick
around to find out. To be continued later, maybe. I
have a birthday party to attend. ~The Management
12:08:29 AM
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Originally posted 1/31/04
12:06:52 AM
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Originally posted 1/31/05
Image
By MisterX
Ghost Writing What do I get out of
exorcising to paper? Who is my audience?
Believe it or not, I'm not baring the secrets of my soul here. The
things that happened to me in my past are not secrets, and haven't been for a
very long time. There was a time in my life when I was compelled to hide things,
and when that time had passed, I found that I was strongly disinclined to ever
hide things again. I've talked it out enough, since then, that I don't become a
puddle of quaking neuroses anymore just thinking about it. I
carry these things with me every waking moment, but they aren’t a
secret, shameful bundle anymore. Like the women who embroider their mastectomy
scars with beautiful tattooed vines, I've tried to wring out the terrible beauty
of it all. I have accepted that it is part of my integral composition. It is not
a hollowness, but a space filled with intangibles solidified by my actions.
This is not a way of speaking to the people of my past.
They're all either long-dead or long-gone from my life in some way. The ones who
were scum, were scum; the ones who were broken, were broken, and it's all
finished now. The ones who could not offer compassion and
understanding for my point of view back then, the ones who wrote me off as a
flake and turned their backs, expecting me to be just like my parents, the doors
closing in their eyes as they looked at me – I have no reason to
believe that hearing my story now might somehow change their minds. Even if it
did, the doors in my eyes have long closed to them. I write
it down because these things happen all the time, and
although we tend to know that on an intellectual level, it is different when
it's coming from the middle-class working mom in the business suit next to you.
You can't relegate it to third world countries or seedy trailer parks, because
there is no real domain. I write it down because I have a deep conviction that
it's important to be aware of our stories, our personal histories. And I write
it down because I'm always hoping that someone can look at it and gain something
useful from it for themselves. I don’t assign
morals to my stories, I just relate them as completely as possible. If you tell
someone the moral of a story, then you effectively erase whatever alternate
meanings they might have pulled out for themselves. Who knows, perhaps their
alternate meaning would have been more useful to them than the prefab thing you
handed to them. A story can have more meanings than any one person can fathom,
because every person comes from a very particular place. Everyone who arrives
here has been on a different track, and they all approach at their own angle. I
can't speak to anyone's truth but my own. As part of my job,
I often counsel what are referred to as at-risk youth. I
was once one of them. There are a lot of kids that come through here who have
been through far worse than I have, and they take one look at my conservative
workplace demeanor and surmise that I've never seen an ugly day in my life. I
can't sit there and proselytize at them, telling them "What you need to learn
is…" Of course not. I have to let them know that they can talk to me
about bloodcurdling things and I won't crumble, or hide my face, or eschew them
because of it. When a kid goes through some bad things, they feel utterly alone
in the world, as if nobody could ever understand their perspective. Indeed, they
don't think anyone wants to know their perspective, because it is dark. They
feel like freaks, and they either hide their freakishness or blare it out,
chasing away the timid before the timid get close enough to them that they have
to hear a real voice outside of their own head confirming to them for all time
that they are defective, unfit. Ugly inside. Stained. I've
never really learned how to receive sympathy, just as I've never grown adept at
receiving help. When I write out my stories, receiving sympathy is not a goal in
any way. It’s a little awkward, although I’ve learned to cope
with it over time. I know that people are going to respond that way, because
it's the polite thing to do. But I don't feel it. I accept their gesture of
concern, but if that gesture were to disappear I don't think my need to say what
I feel compelled to say would be diminished. It's my story, but telling it
doesn't really feel like it's about me – it's about you. It's about
whether or not you can look, and understand any portion of it. Can you reconcile
the fairly normal, fairly average person that I am now with the child I was
then? Can you only see one or the other? Are the doors going to close in your
eyes, too? Perhaps it is about me, after all.
Perhaps I am attempting to chase away the timid still. But, really,
that seems entirely too simple an explanation. I do know that the time when I
feel the most gratification from this exercise is when someone grabs something
I’ve said and tells me “You know, I’ve always felt
that way, but I never knew how to express it.” To me, that’s
about the best feeling in the world. I have helped them to give shape to an
emotional knowledge they already possess, a building block upon which they can
devise their own internal pieces of experiential art. I’ve laid out my
dented and rusted remnants, and they have found just the thing amid the rummage.
Everyone wins. For someone who once believed that all the goodness in the world
was smoke and shadows, a mutually winning situation is a good step toward being
proven wrong. I keep writing about it, I suppose, because it
has to be good for something.
12:06:05 AM
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Originally posted 1/29/04
Photo By MisterX
Evan He was a gregarious, energetic
twentysomething boy, probably a person who would be diagnosed as ADD if they had
had such a catchphrase back then. When I met him, we still had our big, windowless
black van. It
swerved to the curb one muggy New Orleans morning and this slightly
unraveled young man with shaggy blond hair hopped inside. There were only two seats
in the van, so I had to perch on the edge of the passenger seat, hip to
hip with him. I was seven years
old, and mere months out of convent school. He turned to me with a manic smile and said "HI!" in a high-pitched,
excited voice. It
occurred to me that he was probably speaking to me as one would speak to a
child, but I wasn't accustomed to this. I nodded at him quietly, and he began with a
torrent of enthusiastic small-talk. He was friendlier and more attentive to
me than anyone had been in a long time. Within
minutes he won me over.
I never let him know this. It's just as well. He became a House Regular – one of the
endless stream of strays that were camped out on the sofa or the living room
floor throughout my childhood.
Before long he fell in love with Annette and got married, but they
still came over almost daily.
My mother didn't like Annette. My mother never liked any
woman who was thinner than she was, and Annette was under five feet tall with
the childlike body of a ballerina. I remember that they
often came over on Saturday nights. We would have cinnamon-chicory coffee and watch
Saturday Night Live.
That was back when SNL used to be funny. I mean really
funny.
So funny that everyone would bolt to the bathroom on commercial
breaks, because otherwise you'd piss yourself laughing. Belushi was on back then,
as was Chevy Chase and Gilda Radner. I would sit on the floor and the
adults would line up on the sofa, mom's signed Jazz Festival art prints on the
wall behind them. I
would crumble the sticky, skunk-y pot leaves off the stems, then sift the seeds
out with the back of a paper matchbook. They would roll languidly down the long
metal cookie pan with a thready metallic sound. I was still too young to have the coordination
necessary to roll with the fragile rice papers. I could make a pipe screen from a sink faucet
filter, though. Once, when my parents went out of town on a
"business trip", they left me with Evan and Annette. I was sitting on their
couch downstairs, rolling bits of hash into balls to pierce on the tip of a
pin. They liked it when I was
helpful that way; I got a lot of praise. The scariest
news cast ever came on TV:
a little doll, programmed at the factory to say "Kim loves mommy"
somehow developed a mechanical malfunction. The words slowed and slurred when you pulled the
doll's string. On
the live news, a deep, sluggish voice erupted from the smiling plastic face of
the doll. "Killll
Mommy" it said. I
had nightmares for weeks.
I have never liked inanimate objects acting too animated, since
then. This was all before the Cocaine Phase, when
things got really exciting.
When the Cocaine Phase started, I never saw my parents smile again
for two years.
Drifters didn't hang around the house anymore during that time
– drifters were too broke to afford the goods. Even if they hadn't been, Stepdad was
too paranoid to tolerate company. Stepdad, pale and sweating,
hustled me through a boat show in the Superdome one Saturday morning, and we
left with a speedboat hooked to the tailgate of his new truck. A deep red Lincoln
Continental with Power Everything was in the driveway. We lived across the street
from the superintendent of schools, and next door to the head of the Narcotics
Division for the NOPD. 804
Hickory Street in Gretna, Louisiana. Right between Terry Parkway and
Carol Sue Avenue. They had beautiful green grass in their
backyard. Our yard
was all dug up by our purebred Great Dane, Dottie. I was strictly forbidden from talking to them,
as with most people. By the time we entered the Cocaine Phase, Evan
and his wife didn't hang out on Saturday nights anymore, but once a week Annette
would come over to our house and provide maid service in exchange for assorted
expensive favors.
This was when my mom was laid up with a broken back and
neck. Evan was at
home, recuperating from a gunshot wound in his thigh. One day, Stepdad and I were at the grocery store
when we ran into Evan, hobbling around on crutches. Stepdad offered him a ride in the
continental. He
popped into the front seat, turning a bright, shaky smile to me. "Melanie! See anything different about me?" he asked excitedly. I knew there was something
weird about his face, but I thought it was more about his expression than
anything else – the happy didn't seem real somehow. Finally, he had to tell
me.
"Look! I don't have any eyebrows!" he said, as if this
was the coolest thing in the world. I stared at him, confused and worried. "What happened?" I ventured. He laughed. "I got wasted –
really wasted – and I shaved them off!" he said, laughing loudly. "Look at this!" he said,
and he held up his hands for my examination. They were trembling wildly. "Are you okay?" I asked. In future years I would meet two other
men who would shave off their eyebrows. Both were in the midst of
mental breakdowns. One also shaved his head. Then he tried
to kill himself, taking his family with him. His family
escaped. "Yeah, I just ate three Quaaludes and did two
lines." He said,
giggling some more.
Stepdad was silent and stoic. He started the car and headed toward Evan's
apartment. I knew
that things had gone bad, somehow. A few weeks later, Stepdad took
me on a little "family vacation" to the Florida Keys. We stayed in our usual
hotel, and various Hispanic-looking men with greasy, curly hair passed in and
out of our room. I
was surprised when Evan showed up. He seemed excited and happy, but
there was something surrounding him that didn't seem right. It was as if he didn't
smell right. I could smell something sad and futile, like
hysterical tears and nervous vomit. Of course he really didn't smell like this
– it was just a thing I sensed about him. I do this sometimes. It's like a scent
premonition. I
wanted to get away from him at first, but after a while the smell premonitions
of the entire room numbed me and I forgot that I was sensing them. We all got in the car, riding to Miami for
dinner, Stepdad said.
It was going to be a long ride and I was already hungry, but I knew
by the look on his face not to mention either of these things. A greasy-haired Hispanic
guy got in the front of the Lincoln with Stepdad, and I rode in the back with
Evan. For the first
hour or so I read my Nancy Drew mystery novel, but then the driving started
making me sleepy. I
put my pillow on the seat between us and laid down to nap. Evan patted my head with
his spastic, shaking hand and smiled at me. I woke up with the car still
running in park.
Everyone was outside. We were at a car wash and it was late afternoon,
the beginnings of a brilliant Florida sunset coming up blush in the sky. I sat up and blinked
around, trying to figure out what was going on. Stepdad and the Hispanic guy were standing in a
trashy field of weeds behind the car wash, talking to Evan. They were all huddled
together very close, and my stepfather's stance was aggressive. Evan glanced at the car and
saw me looking. He
seemed relieved.
Stepdad followed his glance and saw me too. His face was completely
mechanical, inhuman.
He turned away, ignoring me. I didn't have to be told what to do. I laid back down on the
seat and closed my eyes.
I heard balloons popping, and then an odor like blood and vomit
filled my nose. At
the same time, I knew the odor wasn't real. I also knew that there weren't any balloons in
that field. I
pushed my pillow all the way to the other end of the car seat where Evan had
been sitting, and stretched my legs out across the length of the backseat as I
continued to pretend my nap. Stepdad and I and the Hispanic guy finally made
it to Miami for dinner.
We stopped at a restaurant with a blue crab-shaped sign atop a
thatch-type roof.
For dinner I ordered a huge snow crab leg platter and had several
Shirley Temples, with extra cherries. I barely ate any of it. Stepdad didn't
protest.
12:05:06 AM
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Originally posted 1/27/04
Of course we're married! Who else would have
us? Being the expert I am on long, happy
marriages [cough], I have long maintained that the secret to sticking together
for the long haul are these three simple guidelines:
1) Show respect for one another always, even when you ain't
feelin' it; 2) A strong live-and-let-live attitude
toward life, which does NOT end at the front door of the home;
3) Complimentary neuroses. That's
right. Because we all have them, so it's pointless to continue looking
for Mr. or Ms. Well-Adjusted. Chances are, even if you found such a
freak, you'd be too neurotic for them anyway. And they would hate your
friends. Plus, you'd be walking on eggshells the rest of your life,
and who needs that kind of pressure? Better to look for someone who is
roughly just as much of a spazz as you are, not necessarily in the same ways,
but in ways that complement your own spazzy ways. Just accept that you
are both hollow, damaged shells of former human beings, and appreciate the
unique beauty that arises from that. Like snowflakes, shot through
with unique hole patterns from the turbulence of Past Baggage, wonder
at the priceless, fragile beauty in one another. Or at least have
a sense of humor about it. Any sense of humor, good or
bad. Case in point: my husband and I.
Nobody would ever accuse either one of us of being completely
well-adjusted. True, we put on a good game face in our professional
lives, but after hours, all bets are off. However, our weirdnesses
seem to have evolved over the years into a complex but mostly well-coordinated
dance of spazzy synchronicity. Consider this heart-warming
conversation between man and wife, from earlier today:
MisterX: [notifies Alt of Yet
Another The-Hell-You-Say Glitch In Microsoft Security]
MisterX: They use a trick to
create a folder on your local hard drive. When you click the folder to see
what's inside, it runs their
code.
Althaea: that
would get YOU in a
heartbeat.
MisterX:
Indeed. I am a
file-a-holic.
Althaea:
a regular
fileophile.
MisterX:
At least I don't catalog flaky pastries. Then I'd be a
Phyllofileophile.
Althaea:
or obsess over rough-edged papers on your pastry catalogs, which would make you
a
Fileaphyllofileophile.
MisterX:
or keep track of my fetish for plump cowgirls from Pennsylvania, cuz then I'd be
a
Filledphillyfillyfileophile.
Althaea:
or monitor the contents of overstuffed vacuum bags, because then you'd be a
fullerFullerfillerfileophile.
MisterX:
or catalog the cool, hip nature of carbon spherical structures, because that
would make me a
Flyfullerenefileophile.
.......[pause
for
lunch]......
MisterX:
surely you aren't throwing in the towel?
:)
Althaea: of course
not. i was just pausing a moment, feeling grateful that at least
you're not an obsessive documentor of disparaging references to pastry,
for then you would be a
Fie!Lo,phyllofileophile.
MisterX:
Fie! indeed. I was just about to say that at least I don't create volumes of
written hatred for parasitic insects, or I'd earn infamy for being
a Fie!fleaphylumfileophile. It would be
much more honorable to calmly track the outbreak of virulent microorganisms in
the decorative canine population, because then I would bear the proud title of
Fifiphagefluflowfileophile.
Althaea:
you could also probably make a name for yourself by compiling flowery, artistic
new phrases for people to use when bemoaning the encroaching Tax Day, which
would make you a
FYophilolofileophile.
MisterX:
I could use a change in employment. I suppose I could always chronicle
a race of giant humans living at the top of beanstalks, as a
Feefiefofileophile. Or I could create an index of iron
smoothness evaluators on a central Azores island, and earn a living as a
FaialFeFeelerFileophile.
Althaea: you could
specialize in statistical analysis of the number of incidences of cats who have
been startled enough to leap into bodies of water, or a
Fleyedfelidofluidfileophile.
MisterX:
I was considering creating a journal of low or no cost visionary enemies, in
case Dubya runs out of evil axis members and taxpayer money. I’d call
myself a
Feefreefeyfoefileophile.
Althaea:
or if history's your bent, you could compile documents on flaked-out, stylish
young women of the twenties who fell through the chimney of homes where they
attended Gatsby-esque fetes: a
Fiddle-footedfloridflue-stopflapperfileophile.
Althaea: Uncle! I cry
uncle. Love you. MisterX:
Love you too. I guess this makes the
Fileophilefinale Fini. ;)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As you can see, it's not about pointing out one another's freakishness
and pushing for change. It's about embracing the inner freak, and
learning to walk together on the long trail to the deserted Isle of
Outcast. It's also about having the lamest sense
of humor possible, for to properly humiliate the children.
12:04:14 AM
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Originally posted 1/26/04
Back To MallowHistory I have found a
glitch in my previous story. Apparently, Casimir Otto Ficht,
the wandering watercolorist from Bulgaria, was not
Louise Ficht's father. He was her grandfather. That would mean that he was
actually my GreatX4-Grandfather, rather than my GreatX3-Grandfather. It was easy
to miss the intervening generation, since it didn't seem to bear much on
Louise's life. Anyway, I managed to find a photo of her
father, Raffaele Moline Ficht. One photo. A single, lonely
photo of one of her parents only, out of trunks full of old photos. He
must not have been around much. And there is one
line in the genealogy notebook in my possession, on perpetual loan Ex
Libris from Mrs. Lelia Ficht Furman to her sister, Louise. [Another
interesting note: Lelia Furman, while referred to as "Leila" in the Furman
genealogy records, is always spelled "Lelia" in my
family records. Perhaps she just gave up, exasperated at having to correct
everyone over and over again?] At any rate, here is a photo of Louise Ficht
Fitz-Randolph sitting on her Trenton, New Jersey porch with her father, Raffaele
Moline Ficht, and her grandfather, Casimir Otto Ficht, shortly after her
marriage at age twenty:
Left
to Right: R.M. Ficht, Louise Ficht, C.O. Ficht
I do not know for sure whatever happened to poor Raffaele Moline or his
wife, but I suspect it was not good. He seems to have left home and moved far,
far away to California, where he married a woman whose first name was Penelope.
Nothing further is mentioned about them in the family history, and it looks as
if Louise and Lelia were actually raised by their grandfather,
Casimir:
Louise
as a baby, ca. 1870, with Grandfather Casimir
It also appears that, while Grandfather Casimir wandered the country
with his two granddaughters, his wife took no part in it and stayed home with
her parents. I can only wonder if Louise and Lelia chose the traveling life, or
if it was dictated to them. At any rate, Louise seemed to be a progressive,
stylish and sophisticated young Victorian woman:
I
have Suffragette pins and Daughters Of The American Revolution pins, as well as
Certificates of Appreciation granted to her from various charitable
organizations she chaired before starting her family. And then, she married
Raymond Bernard Fitz-Randolph at a good age for a Victorian girl: twenty years
old.
Raymond
Fitz-Randolph, age 25
Doctor Fitz-Randolph seemed a sharp, serious man, and Louise
became far more formal in her portraiture after marrying him. Part of this is
the culture of the time. How much, I cannot know.
Formal
Portrait of Dr. R.B. Fitz-Randolph However, I
get the impression that theirs was a loving relationship, and that Dr.
Fitz-Randolph took deep pride in his family, since they were so often the
subjects of his second passion, photography. I cannot locate it at the moment,
but there is a beautiful close-up profile shot of an elderly Louise, her
eyeglasses clipped to her nose. She seems to be serenly focusing on something,
perhaps a bit of needlework. She is old, but the love of the photographer for
the subject makes her seem beautiful nonetheless. Whenever I uncover that photo,
I will have to add it in here, next to the photo Louise took of her elderly
Doctor husband.
12:03:19 AM
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Originally posted 1/25/04
Thanks to MisterXfor pointing me to this
article on how the Republicans have been downloading private Democratic party
documents since 2002. Boston
Globe Article Now, if THIS, also, gets swept under
the rug with the barest of mumbles, I might just implode.
12:02:38 AM
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Originally posted 1/22/04
That’s
what my neck looks like, from the inside. You can see my spinal cord,
my brain stem, the base of my skull, everything! How
neat. See how much I share with you guys?
Recently
I found out that I have a chronic, progressive, degenerative condition. It
wasn't the news I was expecting to get that day, not at all. I went in for the
MRI expecting that the images would reveal whatever the problem was, which could
then be treated and I could move on with my life. This won't
happen. The vertebrae in my neck are degenerating. The
rubbery discs that cushion those bones, stop them from grinding against one
another, are drying out. The natural curve of the spine in my neck has almost
completely reversed, snaking in the opposite direction of where it should be. On
the tips of the vertebrae, small, splintery bone spurs are inching toward one
another, like ragged upholstery needles wrapped in fiberglass insulation.
I don't want to talk about how this feels, because it's
boring. With emotional pain, at least, you can wax poetic for hours on end, and
people will come to you, beguiled by your ability to express something they have
felt. Not so, with physical pain. Nobody wants to hear about physical pain, nor
be reminded of what it is like. So, it doesn't feel good, that's all. This is
why I was going to get it fixed. I can't get fixed, though. There is nothing to
be done. Well, they could do something. They could put me to
sleep, cut my neck open and spread apart all the muscle and viscera until they
reach the affected vertebra. Then they could screw a fixed metal bracket to the
bones, freezing the spine in place. This is called "fusing" the neck
vertebrae: 
...and it isn't really necessary, because
the bone spurs in my neck are growing toward one another anyway. The bones are
going to fuse and become immobile all on their own. All I can do until then is
hold my head as straight as possible for the next five or so years, and keep
drinking milk. I am thirty years old, and this seems absurd
to me. Degenerative bone diseases are for the elderly, or for women who have
neglected their calcium intake all of their lives. I don't fit either category,
not really, with the exception of a phase in my teens where I fought against the
development of curves by living on one extremely small meal a day. I have
stronger muscles than just about any woman I know, except for the serious
athletes. Muscle strength is supposed to be good for bones, but not for me. For
me, the muscles are like rubber cement, and they are forcing the bones into a
bad position. I don't seem to be accepting this with the philosophical attitude
I should. It's hard to accept that I can have permanent, unfixable problems this
early in life. It makes me terrified of the future, of the progression of my
aging process. If it's like this at thirty, what on earth will it be like at
fifty? Seventy? Do I want to stick around to find out? But I
am deeply resentful of the finite quality of life. I hope that this will change
before I grow near to the end, but for now, I hate the idea that death gets
closer every day. I have so much to do, and barely any time to get it done in
just one lifetime. I already have the depressions eating my time on a fairly
regular basis, now I have to have this neck pain thing eating my life away, too?
I must hurry and experience more of life. The fine lines around my eyes may be
of the smile variety, but the smile grows ever more mocking.
I get unreasonable, sometimes hysterical images in my head:
great-grandmother at seventy, like a four-foot-tall camel, her hump was so big.
Grandmommy, who was bedridden and partially paralyzed from neck injuries by her
mid-fifties, including the surgical neck fusion which hurt her so much that she
wore a neck brace for the rest of her life. My mother, who had the same
reversed-curvature, the same bone spurs, the same arthritis, and who took hours
to "warm up" enough to move in the mornings by the time she was in her forties.
My daughter, whose neck has begun to shift curvature already at ten years old. I
can't think about that one for long, though. It makes me want to cry, to run
home and apologize to her for giving her my genes, to jump off a bridge before I
become a pathetic wreck in front of her. I am learning to
argue down these panic fits. Great-grandmother, I can remind myself, was
allergic to milk. All of her bones were in horrible condition, because she was
less than five feet tall, with a DDD chest and a distaste for the only other
real calcium source available to her, goat's milk. Grandmommy had several falls
over the years that injured her neck, but she also was something of a Munchausen
case, taking a perverse pleasure in being hospitalized and having surgical
procedures done whenever she could talk a doctor into it. It was almost as if
hospitals were glamorous to her, and she felt like a queen pampered by her
antiseptically-clean servants. My mom was a magnet for people who liked to
rear-end cars, and she also had abusive relationships over the years. Me? all I
have is the bone disease and the disc disease. I've never really beat myself up,
so I should go into this with an advantage. My daughter, with the benefit of
early knowledge, will have an even better advantage. I shouldn't apologize for
what I didn't know then, and I shouldn't jump off any bridges. Besides, I'm
almost as afraid of heights as I am of becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy.
So, the MRI: They make you lie down on a cushioned drawer, a
pillow supporting your knees. You get some earplugs to make the clicks, taps and
jackhammers a little quieter. They put a cage around your head to hold it still,
and then they slide your drawer into a tube-shaped hole in the wall. The ceiling
is about eight to ten inches above your eyes, and your arms are almost pressed
to your sides. You go in head-first, which is unfortunate for people who don't
like closed-in spaces: you are completely at the mercy of the technician at this
point, unable to escape without the help of another fallible human being, a
fallible human being who is an apathetic stranger, no less. As soon as they slid
me into the wall, I realized this and could barely swallow a panicked shriek. I
closed my eyes and forced the world to stop existing. There were many different
percussive noises which almost formed a bizarre, otherworldly rhythm at times.
There was a sound like someone popping the aluminum side of a soda can in and
out. There was a sound like drumsticks being clapped together. There was a noise
like a jackhammer and the Emergency Broadcast System warning bleat had married
and produced offspring. Since they were looking at my neck, most of these clicks
and bleats were aimed directly at my head, several feet inside a wall. I deeply
regretted the fact that I turned down drugs for this. The machine produced
images that were as though my neck had been cut into thin, cross-sectioned
slices; it was actually fascinating to look at: 
(Another view of my neck, from inside. The black patches are not
actually discs oozing out, but areas where the once-oozed discs have now dried
up. Yay, me.)
The news was not good, as you now
know. I have a deteriorating condition that cannot be stopped, and I'm only
thirty years old. I wasn't prepared for this, and I wasn’t prepared for
how much it would make me think about my mortality - a subject that I sincerely
try to avoid, being as resentful as I am of the fact that I have to die some
day.
I went home and told my husband the news, had a short
cry. Got myself together before the kids were due home, but I wasn't ready in
time. I escaped to the store instead, wandering through the aisles, trying to
sort things in my head according to what I could influence and what I could not.
I tried to remember that thirty is young, just barely past the much-touted
twenties: still moist and springy, but a little less ephemeral…more
grounded. It's not so bad, and I'm not really old, I told myself. Look, I can
walk without a cane. My teeth are bright, and they're mine – and not
only because I paid for them. My chin is where it ought to be, not drooping
toward my chest. I can pinch the skin on my hand and it snaps back. My body
hasn't deserted me, not really. It has a glitch. It is not hurtling out of
control down a winding mountain road. Finally, I caught my
breath. I found some object to purchase, to justify the time I had spent in the
store. On the way to the counter, I stopped in Health and Beauty. I avoided
Health, feeling a little bitter. But I did buy myself the most expensive eye
cream on the shelf, as if smoothing the crinkles around my eyes could somehow
influence my bones to slow down, give me a little more time.
This isn't old. It's just a first step.
12:01:12 AM
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Originally posted 1/22/04
So. What would you
guys like to hear about next? Ancestors?
Weeds? Rabid Rantings? Mental Landscape?
Other? Hmmm? Speak up. I know
you're out there. I see your ping shadows. Speaking
of which, Hello Out There, to my Italian readers. I'm not sure how you
found me, but thanks for stopping by. I
need to add more links to the people I read, but you see, I'm a lazy
slug. Fried Green Al-Quaedas was going to be added, but I'm confused
over what's happening on that page right now. How To Save The World,
Criminal Mind, Rayne, Blogcabin...see? I'm tired just thinking about
it. I'll have to start chasing the Wellbutrin with a 24-oz cup in the
mornings, at this rate. It's only January, but I can feel
spring coming. By February, I should be out haunting the fields and
woods again, scaring the natives by stealing big bunches of their yard
clippings. Last spring, my daughter Storm got into the
act. She went out one relatively warm morning and picked a big basket
of wildflowers for me. "Oh, thank you, sweetie," I
gushed. She nodded seriously. "Mommy,
will you cook these for me?" That's my
girl.
12:00:19 AM
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© Copyright
2006
Melanie Teegarden.
Last update:
1/1/2006; 4:21:35 PM.
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