the sanest days are mad

yesterday while packing, i picked up arthur’s bed because it was taking up too much room, so i could lay it on its side and have that space for boxes. i was horrified to find a dead mouse, its fur chewed off in patches. weirdly, it didn’t smell bad at all. i went downstairs, got an old bread bag, and went to pick up the mouse. i had forgotten how stiff dead things are; its claw went through the bag and poked me and my body shuddered fully and i was genuinely scared in a way i haven’t been in a long time. it seems silly to be scared of a dead mouse, but i was.

right now i’m at the library sitting next to the card catologue, which has computers smushed up against it. i can see a few drawers, though, and for some reason the subject headings are funny to me. “o-paddle” (sounds like a new nickname) “pittsburgh-privy” is another good one. “privy” is such a hilarious old-fashioned word, from a more genteel era where bathrooms needed to be alluded to, if mentioned at all.

i have more to say but some library-talkers are working my last nerve, so there you go.

yesterday i came home from a genuinely terrible day; a day where i felt like everything important to me was thrown in the shitter. amongst other things, my ex-love informed me she doesn’t want to talk to me ever again, & i signed the lease on my dream house only to find out, ten minutes post-signing, that my new landlords are x-tian missionaries! and they are, at this very moment, heading to a rez in montana to spread the gospel!!!!!!!!!!!!! i have a very hard time containing emotions, especially horrified ones, and they exchanged a tense look. hee hee.

anyway, i came home feeling utterly defeated and relaxed in my gorgeously green backyard, on my soothing lil’ (actually huge) hammock. the sky was the most intoxicating shade of blue & the weather was cool enough to allow me to pretend that it’s fall. i enjoyed last fall while it was here, but i spent all winter & spring waiting for summer because  i predicted that things would be different & better. now that summer’s here, and it sucks, all i can do is wait for fall. it’s stupid.

anyway, i was laying in my hammock & listening to my neighbors fight with each other. above me, there was a family that is half-charmingly loud, half-disturbingly loud. they were being mostly charming yesterday. the matriarch of the family kept repeating this story that culminated in, “and he said, ’suck my dick!’, and i said, ‘go home to mommy, little boy!’”

the family to my feet is always having the most disturbing, upsetting fights. the matriarch is this older, worn-out lady who i nickname “old yeller” because she is completely incapable of sustaining a normal speaking voice. all she does is yell, all day, about the most mundane things. she said something mildly amusing yesterday, but i’ve already forgotten it. oh, my pollution-induced bad memory is reaching new heights! or shall i say depths.

in the moments where the families paused in their screaming at each other, i could hear the slight noise that the birds’ wings made when they flew overhead. it was nice, to be surrounded by all this noise & all this city & still hear something like that, something that you only hear deep in the woods, usually.

haiku about today:

“WARNING!: contaminated soil”
that girl hates me now
i was the tree. she was the
ground from which i grew.

haiku about yesterday:

“even when they’re sweaty”
excessively long
walks beat working. the sun’s out.
the city is yours.

haiku about my job:
no one’s coming in.
sad songs on radio. go
ahead. you can dance.

(in case you hadn’t guessed, my heart broke its final break today; my boss never showed up to work so i’ve been alone in the office all day; i’m trying to distract myself from the unpleasant chain of events that my life has become as of late. i need clarity, i need love, i need delicious pizza, i need satisfying hugs, i need a functional bike, i need a moving van, i need strength, i need compassion, i need feedback, i need someone to spoon with in my hammock, i need coffee that won’t make my heart race uncomfortably, i need a massage certificate, i need a new social security card, and i need some more raw homegrown zucchini. )

so i lost my wallet like a goddamn dumbass this weekend. after raging about it, throwing stuff around and yelling like my stupid father, going out and getting really drunk and leaving in a huff, i have come to accept that stuff like this happens sometimes. i just went to the DMV to get a new photo i.d. card and it was oddly kind of fun. i saw a hot dyke when i walked into the state office building (who, sadly, was not going to the DMV), i saw a dirty personality-filled tandem bike chained up outside. the whole place had that slightly sweaty linoleum smell that makes me think of elementary school. that 1960’s-public-building smell. do you know what i’m talking about? it made me feel oddly comforted and safe, and i happily read zines until it was my turn. i thought i’d have to do a whole lot of bullshit to get a new card, but they just verified my info and printed me a new one. huzzah! now i’m downtown, at the library, and it’s fucking gorgeous outside. i totally would love to go to the beach right now, but i’m okay with just strolling around downtown, visiting friends at work, looking at hotties, and living life. if i hadn’t lost my wallet, i’d be stuck at the stupid TBH, and i would be missing out on today.

yesterday i went to work and received this voicemail, from one of our craziest clients, at 1 a.m.: “you people are a bunch of evil, evil people. EVIL!” i just laughed. my lawyer didn’t think it was funny, but i guess, as a lawyer, he’s used to being called evil. or maybe he knows that he is kinda evil, whereas i am relatively certain that i’m not.

the other day i was at book ‘em and one of the youngest, weirdest ex-cons paused in his packing to read “curve” magazine. i guess someone had thrown it in a package or something, and it caught his eye. his jaw was hanging open and he looked fascinated as i’ve ever seen him. (this is a guy who has a tattoo of his own name on his neck, loves the southside passionately, and is always making extremely obvious comments, if that helps put him into context.) he didn’t look titillated (as curve is not really a t&a kinda mag), just completely shocked at this other world. he seemed vaguely insulted, but he also couldn’t put it down. when he finally tossed it aside, i avoided eye contact. i didn’t really want to know.

i haven’t sung karaoke in a week, which means i haven’t screamed straight from the gut in a week. i am feeling the effects; screaming is very theraputic. one of my fave things to do back when i was at purchase & surrounded by woods was to organize group screams. i wish i had organized them on larger scales, like hundreds of people instead of just me and a handful of stressed-out friends. i am bored at work, sitting here making faces at my computer. it feels weird.

what things do you miss about your old life? my life changes frequently, so i have lots of old lives to think about. i miss stifling summers when i was a kid; i miss wandering around the supermarket with my mom to get cool. i miss the whole block (30+ people) getting into my neighbor’s small aboveground pool and it being so packed that nobody could move.

i miss the smell of a slightly sweaty girl in her bed (strangely, i don’t miss this actual girl much at all.) i miss the angle of my head while offering my cheek for a girlfriend-kiss, casually, while flipping a page on a book or stirring vegetables on the stove. i miss feeling the exact spot on my cheek that needed a kiss, & her finding it, and feeling better.

i miss cigarettes dangling from my lip. i miss everyone i stood in the cold or the heat with, coughing, smoking, talking. i miss dancing at gay clubs with eric. i miss screaming with kastoory, i miss dancing at the mall with nora, i miss laughing until we fall over with erin b. i miss doing stupid shit with my siblings.

what will i miss about this phase once i’ve moved on to something else? i think i will miss the way the vines creep up the side of my brick house. i will miss laying in the hammock at sunset surrounded by plants. i will miss the stacks of good books, the long quiet, the words everywhere, in every dimension. i will miss good music coming through scratchily on my clock radio while i work for hours and hours. i will miss the particular friends i have now & the way we all configure at this moment. i will miss the small adventures, the dance parties, the drunken nights, the loud conversations overheard by the wrong people, the river-sits.
i don’t want it to go away, but i know it will eventually. not necessarily to be replaced by something worse, but still, it will change. it always does.

i am at work, but can’t bring myself to do any, you know, work. such is the perils of having an absentee boss & hardly any co-workers, i guess. i’m going home to NY soon & i am super-excited about that.

a few days ago tiffbop was weeding her garden & found a plant growing in a crack in the wall & was going to pull it, but then decided not to because i’m always talking about how much i love the plants growing in cracks here. & it’s true, i do. they’re everywhere–sprouting out of walls, in the tiniest tiniest cracks in the sidewalk. down in my ‘hood, which still has brick roads in some parts, it’s like a lush jungle, and i love it. absolutely love it. she named it the “ocean capewell against all odds” plant, which makes me smile.

so close to being done with my zine! i am just waiting on my voter registration card, so i can get a PO box & not give my home address out to hundreds of strangers. i just have to write an outro, trim some odds & ends & then it’s copyfest 2008. look out, world. this is going to be the first zine i’ve ever done that is about something other than myself (carpal tunnel syndrome!) and i am a little surprised that i went through with it. i’ve only showed it to one person, but she really liked it, and even though i honestly don’t respect her opinion too much anymore, it was still encouraging.

i need to do more yoga, in the hopes that it will untangle this knot in my lungs. i need to drink more herbal tea and less coffee. less boozing & more writing. less pining & more hoping. more goddess dressing, less cheese & sugar. is sanity boring? does fun kill? maybe, maybe.

…that lately, i’ve had a lot of free time on my hands & i have been re-reading my online diary from when i was a late-teen/early-20’s kinda gal, and it just makes me sick how much i write about hating myself, how much i did hate myself. how every statement i make is couched with a negation. how much this behavior spiked when i was with my abuser, & how it still remained for years and years afterwards. how even after i left her, her modes of control were still completely present, almost as if she were really truly there, because she had colonized me so thoroughly. & peeps don’t take me seriously, because we weren’t together for all that long, because she never hit me. now i don’t hate myself, now i believe in what i have to say, so i can say fuck that noise and not back down from it. what i went through was real. i am over it now, but it did not come easy. it took years and years of self-destruction, hate, processing, endless punishment and even more endless rage. it took years of avoiding my friends when they did the slightest thing to upset me, because the slightest thing seemed like a pathway to that huge bad inescapable place, because i couldn’t deal with the slightest loss of control. because i said, “this will never happen again.” still placing the blame on myself, as much as i try not to, like it’s my responsibility & not hers, and i took extreme measures to avoid it. it took years of not being able to say anything when people did fucked-up shit, just going home and raging about it for hours on end but when i said anything, even the slightest thing standing up for myself, i was so panicked. (this summer, actually, i yelled at a friend for keeping me waiting for hours while she blew coke off a kitchen table with some hipsters, and when i was done yelling at her she said, “i am so proud of you. a few years ago you would have just stormed out and we wouldn’t have talked for six months,” and i realized that she was right.) throat closing up, knowing i was going to be punished in some way.  & i knew i couldn’t keep living like this, but i didn’t know how to stop.

what helped? time. unconditional love from my ex-partner. talking with other people who have been hurt by her & realizing that this isn’t just me being crazy or oversensitive or making shit up, like she said it was. what maybe helped the most was getting a tarot card reading from a wacky older friend of mine about the situation maybe 3 years after it happened. he knew nothing about what happened or any specifics. i asked him the question in the vaguest terms possible. he said, “in this past situation, you were convinced that you were the most evil person in the world. but it just isn’t true. it’s not true, and it never was.” even though i already knew that on some level, i think that hearing that from an external source helped the most.

my boss is in the hospital. broken leg with pins all over. i am worried about him, even though he is a tough m.f. like all arieses are, a fighter; he says he won’t retire until he’s dead and i believe him. but he’s on the southside reciting letters over the phone, i am alone in the office placating the various lawrencevillians who come in.

anyway, i have lots of interweb time. the last time he was in the hospital was at a very devastating time in my life when having lots of free time was the worst thing ever. i bought a lot of patches on etsy and filled out a lot of myspace surveys and wept in the bathroom. but now i am using this internet time for productive ends and making some good changes in my life, i think. i am doing a lot better than i was in that last post.

it’s sunny out and the soul station is playing less depressing songs than usual. i remember when the gloom first broke, it was like the most upbeat 8 hours of radio music i’ve ever heard in my life. i was dancing in the office by myself, so good. amanda and i finally put together this hammock we’ve been slowly dragging from her house to mine for six months. we lay in it and listened to iron and wine and it was perfect. the big dipper is directly above my backyard.

singing, laughing, crying, worrying, fucking, crying, worrying, cutting, pasting, writing, hugging, screaming, barfing, dancing, screaming, laughing, drinking, worrying, worrying, worrying. i have also laughed nearly as much as i have worried, so perhaps this isn’t quite as draconian as it seems when reduced to mere verbs.

last night a friend got emotional about my possible demise. i felt real bad for bringing it up. i didn’t mean to, it just kinda came out.  then i went home where my ex made me cry for the first time in 7 years of friendship/dating, where she said all sorts of terrible things. all i wanted was a little support. after i screamed & cried & went off to my room to cry some more she came in & held me & apologized for being jerky, which is nice, i guess. still, i could hardly sleep, kept waking up overheated & not sure if it was the over-heat of two bodies crowded into one bed or something far more sinister. now i am at work feeling wrecked.

my horoscope keeps saying things like, “you’ve been having so much fun! enjoy it while you can, because things are going to get bad real soon”. my horoscope today says that i may get what i want, but it’s not what i need, and that i don’t have to fake being happy. my horoscope for tomorrow (when i am going to the doctor & hopefully get to the bottom of this freaking thing) “You must stay focused today as you push up against some of the same fears that previously held you back. The difference is that this time you are even more highly motivated to get it right. <b>A major shift is about to change everything,</b> so your clarity at this time is quite helpful in clearing the air.”

so vague, i know, so probably not even rooted in reality, but hard to not take seriously. a major shift could be really good or really bad & i am trying to tell myself that whatever happens i can get through it. it’s so weird, though, to stay hopeful when both my body & this planet are failing. yesterday sharon & amanda & i sat in my backyard reading zines, surrounded by my cute little hopeful plants & lots of other cute little hopeful plants growing in the cracks & i read a zine amanda’s boyfriend had gotten about how doing things like greywater & low-energy lightbulbs are just a way to placate ourselves because what we do doesn’t matter at all with factories & wars & landfills everywhere. it was hard. it’s hard to think that all this destruction is happening & yet huge plants are growing in the cracks. usually they give me hope but i am feeling very hopeless right now. the most important relaysh to me is being destroyed & i think it’s my fault, i think it’s because i brought her in my house & my house is truly where romance goes to die. not friendship, it seems, which is good because i have lots of great friends here & i don’t want to lose anyone else.