so. it’s official. after nine years of rabid urban bicycling i’m too scared to ride my bike.
i don’t know what brought this on. nothing brought it on. everything brought it on. i haven’t ridden for nearly a week, but today i had to, because i’m working in oakland, at my stupid job that i hate that i got a year ago today & was so so happy about. there’s no reliable, convenient public transit from where i live to where i work. there is public transit but it would take roughly an hour to go about three miles. so i said fuck it. because i believe in facing my fears. in not letting fear win. i made it about 6 blocks, to 47th & butler, before a school bus came up from behind me, roaring, tons & tons & tons of indifferent metal. nothing that hasn’t happened thousands of times before.
but this time i wasn’t brave enough. so i pulled over to the side of the road. i knew i wasn’t just going to let it pass and keep on going. i pulled onto the sidewalk & stepped off, shaking. i’m not brave enough anymore.
so i walked here, to the library. up & up the hill, looking to all the pedestrians like some stupid weak girl who couldn’t make it up the hill on a bike, like i have to push it. i know i can do it, physically, but i can’t, mentally. it took every ounce of strength & composure i may have left to not just throw my fucking bike to the floor and weep, right there.
so is this it? do i give myself up to the cruel mistress of public transit? do i give up on the idea that i can get places when i want to go to them, on my schedule. do i ignore the voice inside of me saying “don’t do it, you’ll get killed” and then get killed because i want to do what i want when i want to? is that worth dying for? once i would have said, inarguably, yes. yes it is. now i’m not so certain.
& the worst part is, i don’t know when i’m being intuitive & when i’m just being crazy. when i’m saving my life vs. when i’m ruining it. they look & feel & sound the same.
i’ve been in lots of pain all week with a truly relentless uti. at least, that’s what i assumed it was, so i took the herbs i always take when i get uti’s (about once a year). but it’s not going away, which makes me fearful that it’s something a little more serious. i actually took yesterday off work, which i never do, and i actually made a doctor’s appointment, which i also never do. the only halfway decent clinic for uninsured people in my city is 8 extremely hilly, traffic-y miles away–not exactly the kind of bike ride i would want to make even under the best of circumstances, and certainly not now. they also can’t see me until friday. fortunately, i have a sweet boyfriend who is totally willing to ditch work that morning, get up all early, and drive me there. i’m so lucky. i’ve never really had partners who’ve taken care of me when i’m sick before (either due to the long-distance nature of our relationship or the fact that they were self-involved assholes, or both) and, wow. it makes such a huge difference.
it’s interesting cuz my partner is from a more privileged class background than i am, and is also significantly younger than me and hasn’t really been through the wringer yet, in terms of really struggling financially & not having health insurance. and it’s weird to see how upset he gets that i can’t get healthcare–way more than i do, because i’m used to it, and was fully expecting to go through lots of bullshit, pay a lot of money, and not actually be helped significantly (or, if i am helped, wait a long long long time for that help). and that’s exactly what’s happening, and he is so taken aback and upset by it. and i had kind of forgotten that anyone anywhere expects to be taken care of when they’re sick in a timely fashion and not linger for days in severe pain because the sliding-scale clinic is totally overbooked and you really don’t want to pay three hundred bucks for a few urine and blood tests at the clinic in your neighborhood.
it’s interesting, what i have settled for, what millions of people settle for. it breaks my heart thinking of everyone who’s sick for years with no insurance and just puts up with it. chronic conditions, chronic pain. it makes me fucking crazy thinking about how one of my really good friends died when she was 25 and if she had access to healthcare that would not have happened. they would have caught the cancer in time & she would still be here. it makes me so fucking angry that my boss gives his bitch of a 41-year-old daughter health insurance, but he won’t give me any, even though i am significantly nicer to him than she is, and way more productive, and way smarter and cooler and more mature. [i realize this may sound like i'm just patting myself on the back here, but really just about anyone is smarter and cooler and more mature than this crazy fucking bitch.] [i almost never call women bitches, but she is a crazy fucking bitch and there is no other way to describe her.]
anyway. i am done, for now.
Filed under: destroy that tape loop, healthcare woes, ne'er-do-wells, wingnuts
i’ve decided it’s fall because i am tired of waiting. my goals for the fall are:
1. figure out what is going on with my heart (literally, my heart, not a metaphor for how i feel about relationships.)
2. get back into therapy
3. learn how to drive.
4. eat more s’mores.
i am doing well on #1 and #4. i have not even started #2 or #3. oh well. a beating heart is way more important than a driver’s license. i did not accomplish either of my goals for the summer, which were “get rid of backne” and “stop being embarrassing.” i think i am a lot less embarrassing, but that’s just because i quit drinking, not because i fundamentally changed. quitting drinking, incidentally, is great. it’s changed my life for the better for sure. quitting coffee has been atrocious, but i have no choice. i didn’t accomplish much of anything this summer. i hardly made out at all, i didn’t do a lot of fun stuff. i had a few good days & nights, i read a lot of good books & hopefully wrote a good book. mostly i was just aimless and depressed and/or despondent.
on a lighter note, i would like to share some highlights from my favorite police blotter of all time:
6:07 p.m., Columbia — A woman on the 21800 block of Sawmill Flat Road
was angry because her 2-year-old daughter returned home from a weekend with her father and had a “mullet” haircut.
1:46 p.m., Valley Springs — Nearby residents were “unappreciative” of a
male sitting on the hood of a vehicle and playing a guitar at Messing Road and Highway 12.
7:21 a.m., Lake Don Pedro — A man said he was kidnapped from Fremont and
brought to Fleming Meadows on Bonds Flat Road. He then said he voluntarily came up but he felt lured there under false pretenses.
Midnight, Columbia — A woman on the 10900 block of Green Street said she
swallowed gum and was very nervous about the situation.
11:55 a.m., Tuolumne area — A woman on the 15100 block of Mountain Lily
Road said she was selling her couch online and received eight $100 bills from “Bruse Willis.” The money was determined to be counterfeit.
6:20 p.m., Big Oak Flat area — A woman said her ex-girlfriend’s mother
threatened to have her killed following an argument on the 17500 block of Highway 120 over exercise equipment.
1:39 p.m., information report — A caller left a voicemail saying she received a piece of metal that looked like a quarter sometime over the past two weeks and did not know where, or when, she received the piece of metal.
i love this. i’ve been to this region before (rural tuloumne county, ca) and it is every bit as wacky as the police reports make it out to be.
i quit coffee, can you believe it? it was making my heart feel very uncomfortable every time i had more than a few sips, and making it beat irregularly too. i don’t have health insurance or tons of $ laying around for an ekg or anything like that, and my mom has a disease where she can’t drink coffee or her heart will go haywire. so i just quit coffee. cold turkey. i still drink green tea, even though it makes my heart a little race-y it’s not too bad. man! i am only twenty-six! and everyone who knows me knows how much i love my coffee.
but, i have to say, i am feeling a lot of clarity and peace that i don’t feel when i’m all caffiened-out. i do more dumb things in the morning, like sending emails that unintentionally offend people when i am just trying to explain, or losing shit at work, but once i’ve fully woken up i have lots of insight. lots of calm.
i am trying to embrace the heartbreak and pain that this year has brought me. it’s made room for a lot of other things, like growth & change. if all the fucked-up shit that happened this year hadn’t happened, i wouldn’t have written 65 pages in 7 months (!) because i would have been too busy having fun. well, i was too busy having fun in may, and my wrists hurt too bad to type much in march, but other than that i’ve been diligently trooping forward. and it feels so good! so much better than anything ever.
i think once i finish this book & get things moving with it, it might be time to start scouting for a new place to live. pittsburgh is great and i love everyone i know here, but i feel like my purpose in being here was to have a space where i could write this book, and i think if i stay for too much longer i will just stagnate. there are so many reasons to stay: easy life, cheap massage school?, good friends, good job (although it’s extremely tenuous and subject to end at literally any second due to my boss’ lousy health), vegetable gardens. and there are so many reasons to leave: new adventures, new inspirations, excitement. a fear of stagnation & permanency. & the dating pool here is rather dry. i am rather preoccupied with someone at the moment, but she’s a tough nut to crack & there is a huge barrier to us getting together. i am willing to overlook that barrier, but most people aren’t. i don’t think she’s willing to overlook it. she’s so cute & so awesome though, and i don’t know how to tell her. sigh.
oh, i don’t know. i know that every emotion i have is subject to change at any second, and i know that everything i write on the internet immediately contradicts itself once the “publish” button is hit. i know i’m a flighty aries, i know i will always be spiritually homeless. i thought that was over, but i don’t think it is; i don’t think it will ever be. as thomas builds-the-fire (or, i guess, sherman alexie) so brilliantly put it in one of my favorite short story ever (“this is what it means to say phoenix, arizona”), nothing ever stops.
so lately i’ve been doing a lot of reading about ACT-UP & the AIDS crisis in new york city in the 80’s/early 90’s. i was around new york in that time, but i was a child being raised in a white middle class heterosexual nuclear family in the burbs, so i was mostly sheltered from that whole brou-ha-ha.
but there was this one time. i was 12 or 13, i think, although i could have been a little younger or a little older. i think i was at that angsty teen stage, which started for me at 10. i was just beginning to realize how fucked the world is, doing a little reading, hanging out with rough ladies who’d already been through a lot. but this was the day i realized, 100%, just how fucked everything really was (and is).
we had some cousins visiting from out of town, the ones from san diego i think, and so we went to the city to do tourist-y stuff. we went to the FAO schwartz store, which, if you didn’t know, is this very opulent toy store in a wealthy part of town. lots of songs, lots of things with faces. normally something i would have enjoyed, even though i was a disgruntled teen.
but outside, on the sidewalk, there was this dude. he was sitting on the sidewalk with a cardboard sign saying that he had AIDS and needed something like 50 bucks to get to florida to see his family again before he died. he was about the age i am now, white, slightly artsy, probably gay although i wasn’t looking for that yet. he was sitting on the sidewalk but leaning forward on his hands. he was crying hysterically, so hard that he was turning red, saliva dripping from his mouth in long ropes. he was screaming, in this truly desperate scream that i’ve rarely heard: “NONE OF YOU PEOPLE GIVE A SHIT! I AM DYING, AND NONE OF YOU PEOPLE GIVE A SHIT! NONE OF YOU HAVE ANY HEARTS! I’M DYING AND YOU JUST WALK ON BY!!” i stood, transfixed, utterly horrified. i think i might have cried a little too, although very subtly (years of being abused left me a very subtle crier, because i didn’t want my abusers to have the satisfaction of seeing me cry). i was just shocked at this raw humanity in front of me, at how bad life could get. my parents noticed, and hustled me away.
my mom said, “just ignore him.”
my dad said, “these people, they just want ya money! he’s not going to florida, he just wants drugs.”
and so we went into fao schwartz, where a gigantic three-story clock sang a cheerful song, where families of all types flocked around gaily, where employees with high pitched voices wished us a nice day, where cute toys smiled at us from every shelf, where everyone was brightly lit and every color of the rainbow jumped out at us. people danced on the giant piano keys and played with acres of legos. and all i could think, the whole time, was, “every single person in here saw that man. every single one. and nobody cares. he’s right, we all have no heart. he’s right.” and every little bit of artificial happiness inside the store made it even worse. to this day, i can’t go into or walk by any FAO schwartz without my skin crawling (ironically, i still love cute things, perhaps to a nauseating degree).
i cried the whole time we were there. again, very subtly, so it just looked like i was being sullen and wiping my face a lot. maybe i found a bathroom and broke down, or maybe i just held it in the whole time, i don’t really remember. all the other kidz in our party frolicked and had fun. i was silent, arms crossed. that guy wasn’t there when we left, but i felt much better once we were back on the cold, gritty streets of manhattan. at least we weren’t being completely utterly lied to. my mom asked me, “everyone had so much fun, except for you. why do you always have to ruin everything?”
Filed under: healthcare woes, the 90's, wingnuts | Tags: disease, fear, karaoke, unsexy twins, wingnuts
a lot of funny things have been happening. the unfunny ones are what is plaguing me, but perhaps the funny ones would make a more interesting blog entry. like: we have two clients at the law firm who are twin brothers. they are both very socially awkward & troubled–my unscientific diagnosis is asbergers’ syndrome in the quiet, well-groomed one and unmedicated manic-depression in the wild-haired one. this is just a guess. they are both very sweet, even if they do call me at work 5 times a day asking questions like, “my phone has been shut off. what do i do?”
anyway, they are selling their dead father’s house, which is why they are in here. yesterday they were hanging out in the waiting room, right next to my desk, waiting for my lawyer to see them. their perky, normal-person real-estate agent was there. i overheard the following conversation:
perky, normal real-estate agent: so, did you get rid of those…problems in your house? [the wild-haired twin has been having roommate issues, to put it lightly.]
wild-haired twin: huh? [pause, then his eyes grow wide, crazy, and bright] oh, you mean the demons and the concubine? i kicked ‘em out!
the demons and the concubine. what precise nicknames. i heart my job.
i also heart a lot of our other clients: the 80-year-old black lady with a foot-high blonde bouffant; the lady who tells the funniest fucking stories about playing pranks on a woman who wore spandex pants with her adult diaper; and more. i could go on and on, but i shan’t.
things are kind of lousy with me, honestly. i am dealing with something that could either be life-ruining or totally benign & i won’t know for a while. the list of evidence in the “life-ruining” column is escalating & the list of evidence in the “not a big deal” column is dwindling. i don’t know how to talk about it, mainly because i am highly superstitious & don’t want to jinx anything. also because it is too scary, because opening my mouth makes my throat close up. mostly i feel like i can deal with anything, but sometimes i don’t think i can deal with this. i asked some girl to come home with me largely because i want someone’s arms around me because i am tired of dealing with this alone. did you know that in acupressure, the trigger points for letting go of grief and deep sadness is at the front of your chest, exactly where someone else’s chest presses against yours when you hug them? i learned this while researching a paper years ago, and i’ve never forgotten it. anyway, that girl didn’t come home with me but i had a good phone convo with one of my best friends, who’s been through this sort of thing before, and in a way that was a lot better.
in brighter news, i have become a karaoke fiend and gotten far more recognition for it than i had ever expected. i remember i lost my stage fright around this time last year at the queer studies department end-of-the-year party, reading poems & finishing up with an amazing piece by david wojnarowicz and i had everyone, i mean they were really truly with me, and they all cheered, and it felt so good. an ex-zine pal once said, “being up at the mic is better than fucking, better than being fucked.” and it’s true.
i don’t have any poetry outlets in the burgh so i just sing songs from the 90’s that i remember hearing on the radio back when the radio mattered. i didn’t think it would mean as much, or be as satisfying, but it’s pretty close. close enough. cindy from doris wrote this amazing piece in “doris” #24 about how she never felt okay until she sang in a band because her scream was powerful & she never knew she had it in her. i scream a lot anyway, but i can totally relate.
