Twenty Years Ago I Pissed And Got Off The Pot

Happy New Year!

I have spoken of many dark things this week. I've looked at things that need to change in myself. I've come up with a plan for the new year to achieve what I absolutely cannot fail at achieving in order to walk into my fortieth birthday next year feeling strong, healthy, and gorgeous. I think it might be a little funny how much faith I put into the changing of one year for the next. Life doesn't always show us the best place to begin change but the new year is an obvious annual starting gate. It feels good because January is so quiet and serious. January is when the weak get killed off by hunger, the elements, or frustrated sufferers of SAD.

I believe in mostly simple things. You know how some people get in a car accident and suddenly they get feverish about Jesus and how the light came and grabbed them out of the jaws of death and so now they're not going to beat their loved ones any more or have affairs, or cheat the tax man or take drugs? An accident creates this concise juncture at which point you can take off in a whole new direction. I'm not sure why so many people find Jesus at these moments...I mean, why not just realize that being drunk sucks shit and kills people and feels like hell on the bones and everyone ends up hating you? Why shouldn't that be enough reason to change?

For me the new year is a great starting point. Birthdays are too. My birthday happens to be six days after the new year.

When I was 17 years old I was still cutting myself and I was slowly coming out of an intense nervous breakdown that I'm not actually sure anyone knew about and going out with really stupid boys who mistook me completely for a dolt who follows and worships and pines and all the time I had no respect for them but used them for a very rich fantasy life. I never put out so they all left me pretty quick anyway. I remember sitting at some diner with this guy who was my boyfriend but who was screwing around on me and treating me like trash and I had him (and everyone) thinking I was so smitten that I was really going to marry him. I think my friend Carrie has always been onto my every facade and stupid crap.

I looked at the people I was with in the diner, late into the sleazy night, and realized that the worst thing was that I treated myself worse than any boyfriend ever had. I felt indignation that boys didn't respect me, truly want me, or actually particularly care about me. I suddenly saw that the indignation was because I actually thought I was worth their respect. I realized that in spite of myself I felt I was worth more than their cheap compliments and lack of chivalry. I realized I was better than them but treating myself worse than they were by carving into myself all the time.

I was going to turn 18 years old in a couple of weeks of that realization. I asked myself what the hell I was doing? I told myself, in my usual habit of having long involved conversations with myself, that if I was going to spend the rest of my life cutting into my own flesh then I was no better than the worst human and I may as well just kill myself. Because if torturing myself was the only way I knew how to deal with myself and my life then it wasn't really worth my investment of love and care.

It was your classic piss or get off the pot moment in life. A completely transformative moment in which I asked myself the one question that mattered more than all the other ones because even though I hadn't jumped off the cliffs like I had planned on doing almost three years prior I had continued to completely fixate on the theme of killing myself and in the meantime I opened myself up with every sharp instrument I could find.

So I asked myself to decide: are you going to live or die by your own hand? Because if you are not going to kill yourself you need to treat yourself like you matter, you old slag!

No, I didn't really call myself a slag, seeing as I never put out for boys.

I took a hard look at myself. I imagined what life would be like if I decided I wasn't going to hurt myself or commit suicide. How would life look if I had just enough optimism to assertively progress forward? How does one deal with the pain and the impossible frantic toxic self loathing that is the other side of my inevitable coin? How does one, as crazy as me, calm that awful threatening in my own spirit?

The most important thing was that I had seen that I really did care about myself and that my need to hurt myself was an irrational and desperate response to disturbing stimulation in my life and to traumatic past experiences that I had not been able to process because I was not able to look at them without wanting to die a little every time I did. Getting that glimpse of self love made me feel that I was worth the effort to attempt to heal.

Epiphanies often seem sudden and finite. You see the light and have all the answers because God handed them to you in a moment of clarity. I don't think that's really what happens. No one gets all the answers at once. The real epiphany is the grand opening of previously closed mental paths that allow something new to be learned. Obviously it's never going to be God with me because I see in terms of nature; human nature; wild nature; natural organization of an enormous universe representing a very well tuned and designed working order.

As I approached my eighteenth birthday I lost the dubious boyfriend (he may have dumped me, I'm not sure, it is irrelevant since he was already fooling around on me and I couldn't care less) and I tried figuring out what my path of mental recovery was going to be. I really couldn't figure it all out. I think I sensed at the time that the path itself wasn't nearly as important as the intention and all the things I was learning in consequence.

So I made a deal with myself: stop hurting yourself. It won't be accomplished immediately. All I promised was to stop cutting my own skin. Stop forcing myself to physically bleed to prove life. To prove pain. To prove that I was broken: message received! All I promised was that I would stop cutting and I would take one step at a time to try and find ways to heal myself. I agreed with myself that it would take time. That it might take a lifetime.

I promised myself that I was choosing to live.

And all that that entails.

For a suicidally obsessed person that is a huge promise. I think there's always a part of myself that still recognizes the risk.

That new year was one in which I was crossing the thresh hold of a new year with a really fresh step. I made that solemn promise to myself and I kept it. Even to this day. I can't tell you how often I have had to fight off the urge to lapse back into the thought of death, the comfort of oblivion. It isn't that I've ever really wanted to kill myself since then, but I've had to fight my mind from seeking comfort in those old grooves of thought.

I have kept that promise to myself ever since. It is the hugest piece of optimism I have ever indulged in: to be alive for another year and happy to be here to celebrate it even when the going has been intense.

That was over twenty years ago.

So when people talk about how they hate New Year's resolutions because they never keep them I can't commiserate. I think that when it really matters you can keep them. But you have to recognize a serious need. Needing to lose five pounds is not serious. Hoping to like your boss a little more isn't particularly pressing. But when you realize that change needs to happen or you may as well be dead-it feels a little more urgent.

The new year is a great stepping off point.

The diving board for reaching yourself. For reaching others.

I wrote my own epitaph and the main thing is that I want people to remember of me that I never gave up. I never stopped trying. I just kept hoping and let that carry me through it all.

I allow myself to hope, always. Without it the human spirit sickens and dies.

I think that's what the new year is really all about. It's about allowing ourselves to keep hoping, through the dark months of winter, that we'll still be alive in the spring time. That the flowers will bloom again and bear fruit that we can eat. We close one chapter so that we can begin a new one.

I nearly lost all my sense of hope this year. The most dangerous thing a person can do. Especially anyone who has lost all hope before and sought solace in dreams of the grave.

So I am one hour into the new year and I feel the changing of the guard like it is meant to be felt: that the new guard brings with it more alertness, determination, and discipline.

We just sat on our "front" porch in the cold and drank champagne and felt our good fortune to be in a house we love, have a healthy kid we love, and to live in a state we love. Life is good.

So right now I am giving a little call out to all my mentally ill brethren who have been where I've been- come with me into the new year, alive, and brimming with regenerative hope for change and for healing. All change takes time. No change happens over night but our intentions of change can take us deep into new terrain. Our intentions to heal can lead us to the answers we need. Don't be afraid to hope again. Don't be afraid to let yourself dream of a better year. Don't be afraid to look to yourself for some strength. Everyone needs others to lean on but we must all, in the end, depend on ourselves to start our own engines.

We can do it!

Happy new year everyone!!!

Stress Relief Manual

In order to reach a goal that has eluded me for three years I think an important step is to list out as many stress reducing activities as possible ahead of time and promise myself to look at the list every time I am feeling stressed, like a restaurant menu, to see which stress relieving activity might work to get me through that moment. All these posts I've been posting this week will be printed out and put in a notebook for reference. To be read frequently as a reminder and to strengthen my resolve. It will be like my personal manual. Incidentally- I'm also going to be writing a family manual for the three of us kooky people. We need rules and regulations and to have strict schedules just like employees. I've also thought of putting helpful labels all over the house like:

"This cabinet is for condiments only" mostly for my own amusement. I think it's seriously funny that me and Philip and Max would actually benefit from such labeling.

So, here is the Stress Release Manual:

• Quick Change Tactic: If feeling really stressed out about something I'm doing- do something else for a while. Doesn't matter what. It's about changing the immediate energy. It works for dogs. It works for people too.

• Take Deep Breaths: Every part of my metaphysical cosmic upbringing says this is important and the little rebellious punk in me wants to say "hyperventilate instead!!". However, this really does help. Sit down for a few minutes and just concentrate of breathing deeply.

• The British Method: Tea. I'm not allowed to drink much caffeine on account of my "delicate" heart condition (I love to make fun of the palpitations) but I can drink as much herbal tea as I want. Best bet for me: Yogi brand "calming" tea. No, it doesn't fix the whole world or turn me into Mother Theresa, but the British have the right idea in taking a tea break whenever the going gets tough, awkward, dull, stressful, or anyone has just said something truly stupid.

• Stretch Muscle Matter: stretching does help relax the body. It is harder to maintain a deep level of stress when your body is feeling mellow. Even if it doesn't release any endorphins- your body will listen to you better when it's stretched well. It also distracts the mind temporarily.

• The Roman Method: take a hot bath. Preferably (if you're not Pam) with lots of herbs, salts, and essential oils. Light a candle too. Hot baths with home made herbal infusions dumped in with oils help make my skin feel smoother and less dry which always makes me feel happy. I don't take long baths because I like them hot and if I sit too long in any heat I will pass out. Bathing with additives is a luxury and one that has always had a tremendous ability to make me feel calm and pampered.

• Work on an art project: I used to calm myself by making collages. I haven't done this is years because all of my art efforts have been for business rather than strictly for pleasure. Now I have the freedom to sit down in my room and make whatever I feel like just because I feel like it and it doesn't have to be cost effective in the production end. Because there will be no production end. I can glue and lacquer, sew and bind to my heart's content. I may not always have time but I have whittled things down quite a bit so there should be room for more spontaneous creating.

• Write myself a good old fashioned pep talk: I write every single day no matter what. But writing for my blog (I consider a professional effort in spite of not being paid) and writing to relieve stress aren't always exactly the same thing. I got through a lot of really crazy bad times without alcohol or much cheese by writing the crazies away. I have notebooks filled with pep talks to self. They aren't masterpieces. They are silly and sound like cheerleader type crap- "yay! You're so special! Woohoo! You can get through this little peanut!" OK, I have never called myself sweet little names. More like "Alright old bag, you are strong and you can get through this!" Whatever works. I am alive today because of these little self-talk sessions and it's time to implement them again.

• Trim The Roses: Going out in the garden has been a great method of relieving stress in the past. Due to all this crazy job hunting and then having five jobs...I have gotten out of the habit of weeding for pleasure and mental pain relief. Deadheading my roses is relaxing and meditative for me. Weeding is like picking off the parasites of life one at a time with violence and satisfaction. Picking flower arrangements is like bringing new life into the house. It's also like art.

• Review my inspiration binders: I have binders full of fashion pages I've saved for the past twenty years. They are the best of the best of what I've seen that I like. Clothes, jewelry, gardens, and layouts that inspire me over and over again. It's important to remind myself why I'm going to work so hard to lose weight. So I can use that inspiration on myself.

• Listen to the chickens: Chickens make the best noises. They scuffle, they squawk, they coo like babies, and they chuckle. Plus they're curious and pretty. So, go out in the run and squat down on their level and talk to them. They love it- I love it. We all feel better!

• Do some hand stitching: Hand stitching is meditative. You get into a minute rhythm with it. The added bonus that my Capricorn soul loves is that all this meditation results in something useful and pretty like a quilt. I could embroider too. A newish skill of mine that is wonderfully relaxing as well.

• Knit to untangle: knitting isn't something I want to become a master at. It scares me to think of it on that level. However, just making a knitted scarf is very relaxing. Easy and repetitive. I have dreams of knitting a blanket too. I also have dreams of crocheting and if I start to learn to do that too it may turn out to be just as relaxing.

That is a pretty good list. I can add more to it as I think of all of the things I do that make me feel refreshed. The trick is to promise myself that I will review this list every time I find myself so stressed I want to grab something like a hunk of cheddar to gnaw on. If you all have things that help you, don't hesitate to tell me about it. I'd love to hear what things you all do to turn your mind from stress.

I'm Sorry For Every Punch You Threw

I am always apologizing. To friends, to family, to the helpless for not being able to help them, to the abusive for not being good enough, to the weak for running over them, to the plants for starving them.

I have let the longest streams of apology trail behind me and they get longer and heavier every day. I apologize to people who have hurt me as though I deserved it, asked for it, or somehow brought it all on myself. And maybe there are times when this is just. We all invoke trouble on ourselves sometimes. But all the time? No. I am hearing my commenter Kim's words now- her suggestion that my anxiety stems from anger, from rage.

I disputed it hotly. I will hold to much of what I said in response, but I think she got a piece of me right. She got the anger right, but the subject of it wrong. I am not angry at the world or at social convention or at constrictions that make me uncomfortable. I am angry with myself. Me. I hear myself saying I'm sorry for causing others trouble, for making a commotion, for making someone else uncomfortable...I am so sorry to have gotten in your space, for not being perfect, for disappointing your endless expectations. I'm sorry I'm fat, I'm sorry I'm insecure, I'm sorry I have mental illness, I'm sorry I didn't make your spotlight brighter.

Each time I say I'm sorry for someone else's disappointment in me or for someone else's bad trip I see myself prostrate at every one's feet like an inconsequential piece of shit wearing a posture of constant shame. It pisses me off that everyone lets me do it when I think maybe, maybe if someone really loved me or valued me they would tell me to shut the hell up and stop apologizing and maybe they would step up to the plate and offer their own. But really? That's so secondary to the real issue.

The person I'm most pissed off at is myself. Just as it isn't up to my friends and family to pick up my pieces every time I lose a few on the floor of my freak outs, it isn't up to anyone else to tell me to stand up for myself and stop apologizing for the sun setting every day, for lady bugs being crushed under the feet of careless gardeners, or for babies passing away in the night across the world. It is enough to feel those events and to carry them with me everywhere I go.

I have only one person to whom I owe a real apology: myself.

I have let myself down. Not because I am less than perfect. I expect to always be less than perfect. I have let myself down because I kiss other people's shoes when I ought to be standing tall next to them without words. Let uncomfortable silences hang. Let conversation shred into meaningless confetti rather than offer up apologies just to fill the silence. Just to evade the fear I might otherwise have to feel in seeing a difficult moment come to pass.

I am so afraid of being hurt all the time I would rather admit that I must be wrong rather than let someone accuse me of it and then have to refute them and defend myself. I put myself in the losing position before anyone else can.

I wasn't really going to say this tonight, but I see that to get to the next step in redesigning my intentions this year I am going to have to face this and it scares the fucking shit out of me. Here is my boogie man. The bones buried in my back yard. Here is what I have been running from as well as trying to protect.

I am used to disappointing people. I have known what it is to be beat down, beat down, and beat down again. The mark of an abused person is to cower at a suddenly raised arm. It is also the mark of an abused mind that it profusely apologize for any transgressions that may be made later...sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry...I will fail you so I will proffer my apologies now and I will lay on my own head all the curses you may be inspired to slug me with so that you won't have to.

I don't know how to say this. I've never tried to say this before. I have, since I was impossibly young, learned that if I anticipate the pain that will inevitably be inflicted on me by others and instead of letting them do it to me I inflict the pain on myself...it doesn't hurt as much because I'll know what evil is coming.

You want to tell me I'm not good enough? I'll tell myself that right now, I will beat the crap out of my own hope and pride until it hurts so bad that if you come along and actually do tell me I'm not good enough you will have no power because I will have already turned it on myself.

It is such a dangerous way to protect oneself. Extreme and crippling. Sometimes the cure can be as dangerous as the disease.

I have always had a hard time explaining the cutting until this year when I found the words to go along with the instinct that motivated me to saw at my own skin with steak knives. What blow to my solar plexus delivered by someone I trust could be so bad if I have already hurt myself worse? It is a form of controlled pain. It makes the sting of unexpected blows dull by comparison. I can't control you if you want to split my lip with your fist but I can see my own razor draw my life up out of my veins and if I can see that, if I can live through that, what else could possibly be worse?

I am endlessly frightened of how you are going to turn against me. You, strangers, anyone. The world is a dangerous place for me; it has abused my body and my head. I have never had anywhere to go but inward. I have never had anyone to protect me but myself. When I first remember needing protection I was only six years old and my stomach still feels the blows.

I have only ever done the best I could for myself. But it wasn't enough.

I am so much older now. I am middle aged and the only person I haven't apologized to is myself.

As though I don't deserve it.

Before I take a step forward I must acknowledge that my habit of trying to take every one's ability to hurt me away I rob them of a genuine right to express their own grievances to me. If I always anticipate what is wrong with me and tell everyone how I will disappoint, or see that someone is gathering themselves up to deliver a complaint and I try to diffuse the moment by apologizing for everything under the sun- I am stealing other people's rights. I am taking something from them that I have no right to take. I never let them tell me off because I'm afraid that if I hear it I will have to shrivel up into myself until I disappear completely.

It doesn't really protect me the way I think it will. It's a subversive way conduct relationships. I would rather die than face conflict with people.

I don't know if anyone will understand what I've just said. These are very steep crags in a troubled personal landscape. I've said more tonight than I ever thought I could, out loud.

I'm not six years old any more.

My fear of people is extreme. To grow up emotionally I am going to have to learn to take other people's blows like an adult. I'll have to learn to let people say what they need to say to me without trying to beat them to the punch and then I need to not apologize immediately. I need to learn to recognize when I've truly done something worthy of apology. I have the right to withhold them and sometimes I deserve them from other people. And I'm going to have to face the fact that I will not always get them.

My heart is pounding right now. In case you wondered what it feels like to write this stuff out. I feel feral right now. I might bite you. I feel like biting you because you're there on the other side of these words.

It's time for that apology to myself.

Chameleon Made Of Words

The big question for me in this very minute at which I am seated at my desk in my recently rehabilitated writing room is: can music fix rifts between the body and the spirit?

Funny writer girl wears underwear made of words- sits at her desk which is nothing less than a 500 pound piece of laminate stripped and shipped from a British correctional institution or some kind of animal house where having unmovable furniture is a major bonus to the staff. Seems entirely fitting. This animal girl is stripped down to her skivvies now- a chain of letters on letters lost in unseemly layers and undulating rolls.

I was calling this room my sewing room but now that the giant drifts of self-propelling trash have been tamed it has drawn me in and seduced me with it's window high above the monastery garden like an Erie, a perch for an imagination. I have yet to sew in it but I write in it every day. I have always wanted and needed a room of my own, a quiet place of observation. A place in which to change my colors without an audience. A place to set down my own rules for living.

I don't know why it is so hard to do anything as simple as saying what one is with a single word. I have spent so much time trying to be so many things and there's only one thing I've ever been in my entire life:

Writer.

I have so many interests and adventures because I have to feed the words, they don't thrive without care. But I've only ever been one single thing:

Writer.

I'm a writer who became a wife. A writer who became a mother. A writer who took fencing. A writer who designed costumes.

I will be 39 years old in almost exactly three weeks. In all this time I have fought what is, I have tried to reshape what is, deny what is, wish for something that isn't, and it has wasted time. It has created obstacles and I have to wonder if any one's restart button is as worn down as mine?

When I was 23 years old I admitted to myself that I was first, before anything else, a poet. I realized that saying it wasn't arrogance because I am not a brilliant poet and never will be- but it is how my spirit sees the world. My head sees prose, my spirit sees a more distilled, succinct version caped with boundaries of time and urgency. That was a big moment for me. I was already a wife but I realized that being a wife was a role while being a poet was my skin.

Women have worked hard to bring the pride back into mothering- to make people respect mothering as a life choice and ever since I have become a mother I have tried hard to put "mother" first in the line of my personal descriptors. Because it felt as though putting it second to anything else was belittling the role I played as Max's mom. Maybe for some women being a mother is who they are, the threshold to their spirit, their heart, and the ultimate expression of who they are.

But not for me. Being a mother is another role. It is another mantle of responsibility I took on. Another layer of life I added. But it isn't who I am and every time I put "mother" first on my list of things I am it kicks me down a notch. It belittles what came with me into this world. It belittles my calling, my skin, my soul, and my heart of words.

Writer.

From today forward I will call myself the one thing I truly am: writer.

Not: "writer and wife and mother and urban homesteader....and the whole miserable etc."

No more milling around with half truths. You, those readers of mine who comment, have often commended me on my honesty, my willingness to tell the truth- mine at least, if not yours. Yet I have not been honest. I have not told you all the truth because I feel scared to have one calling. I am scared to name it because I will probably fail. I can't fail in life if I have ten callings, surely I'll succeed at something if I increase the odds? But all I do by dividing my energy into a thousand fractions is dilute the power I was given for this one thing.

What's funny is that I knew what I had to do when I was sixteen and fresh from not killing myself. It was suddenly so clear to me, making friends cry with clumsy emotional poetry, that there was something living through my pen, however clumsy it was; living and shedding something tangible for others to grab at; like a life raft in the middle of the ocean. I felt it inside like something with a dangerously sharp edge it cut through the summer of dread and didn't hurt til later the way razors cut skin noiselessly first and hurt almost as an afterthought. I felt this blade reflecting light and I knew that it was the words that kept me from jumping off the cliffs. From impaling myself on the alter of my family's collective despair.

What I've found out is that what you are will never not be what you are. So you can bury it under a whole lot of snow and ice, under the dark cover of other lives, and you can run, but you cannot shake it. Maybe you never get famous, maybe you never win awards, maybe you never get a record deal-book deal- studio show-movie role-or even make money at it. That's immaterial. So you do what you have to do to pay the bills but you still are what you are and if you don't own it, do it, and honor it, you dishonor yourself worse than any other person on earth is capable of.

I believe, with my whole self, that we each know what we are without thinking about it. The answer has always been there. It doesn't have to be glamorous, heroic, exciting, or even original. But you know what it is and if you're still running from it or trying to change it- stop. I promise you that you can't. No power on this earth can change your alchemy.

This week I am redesigning my intentions. I have one week until the new year. One week to tell myself how it's going to be this year. I have one year until I'm forty and it seems as good a time as any to step into my own god damn shoes and embrace what I already am and slough off the dead weight I carry.

Everything I do in my life feeds the words. Everything comes second to writing and it isn't something I can change nor is it a choice to make. The only choice I have to make is to use what I have or trash it. I have a choice in how I balance my life so that the writing doesn't hurt my husband and child. But the writing cannot come last ever again. It's the whole reason for breathing.

It is my breathing.

So this week is about redesigning the minutiae of my life. It's about finding ways to recover self discipline. To recover my physical self respect. It's about redrawing boundaries for the three of us so that we will all feel more fulfilled and happy. We are all crazy creative beings in need of daily exercise, better nutrition, and more daily structure. I'm not sure if it's more funny or more sad that we are a wee family of completely obsessive compulsive people. We all thrash against our own restraints when there is achievable order for us.

But today is the second step. The first was to let go of disappointments and sorrows. To let go of what didn't work out, what wasn't meant to be, so that I can move forward with new intention. Today is the second step; to admit what I am and accept the single word that is my everything:

Writer.

I am a writer.

Period.

***********

If you, like me, have experienced similar struggles then I implore you to do as I did and first write out all of your disappointments and sorrows- then do what you need to to let them go. You can print them out and burn them or, if you're afraid of fire, you can bury them, or if just writing them allows you to let go- do it. DO IT.

Then acknowledge who/what you are. You know what it is. Maybe you are a healer and you work as an RN but keep looking for some other answer because you want more glamour- just say it "I am a healer" I am a nurse. And then make yourself into a glamorous one. But don't look away. Look at yourself: say it. Say it. Say it again. Set your course of intention to honor who you are. No more excuses. Are you a singer? Don't worry if you're already 65 and there's no sexy life on stage for you (though, who knows?): you must say it- "I am a singer." And embrace that, honor it, and do it. Even if you only do it every single day in your favorite room. Give it the honor it deserves. Who and what we are isn't about recognition from others, it's about recognizing ourselves and if we use these gifts of ours, whatever they are, it will flood into the lives all around you and the people you love. You will only become more powerful in everything.

So do it with me if you need to and feel free to tell me about it in the comments because I DO want to hear. I want to know.

But don't worry, if all is silent out there, I won't mind either. I move forward regardless of the world of people around me.

You Can't Get Off This Train Without A Rope

Before true hideosity set in.

A girl in her element.

Chickens moult, people do too.

Time for a 100% overhaul.

For those of you who read the post I wrote and then deleted yesterday, I am sorry. I am sorry if I hurt friends and would-be friends. I cannot take back the sentiments because they were raw and true. I can only say that if I had the money for a therapist I would have saved that one for the couch and not put it here. A lot of things end up here because I don't have anyone appropriate to tell my most troubling and grief inducing feelings and experiences to.

I missed the chance to symbolically acknowledge the solstice and to go through the ritual of writing my troubles and disappointments down and then burning them. Which I now realize is what I need to do. So I'm going to do it late. There's still the less mystical more Roman approach of the New Year coming up and it's just as good a time for a personal overhaul and a release of past disappointments, of which I have quite a few.

The disappointments that need burning are these:

The infamous incident of the Needle Junkie t-shirts which marked the complete collapse of all trust I had left in the universe and in myself: It had to be. This whole year was about scouring out the last of my faith. Down to the funky-ass crumbs.

That when I hit rock bottom my support system turned out to be somewhat absent: It isn't the responsibility of friends and family to pick up the goddamn pieces of me that cracked up and fell all over the floor. The bulk of comfort garnered during the toughest moments came from people I've never met in real life. Thank you for that.

The therapist who made me more angry and lost: Well, there's no excuse. I can't put that one on my own shoulders. But there's nothing anyone can do about the fact that chemistry rules our lives. Her chemistry and mine- OIL AND WATER.

The teacher who made my kid's school year complete torture: She sucked. I've since found out that mine was not the only kid whose year was completely rotten for the same reason. We never liked her. She didn't like us. That's the way it goes.

Friends not liking my kid: It's a fact of life that not everyone you meet is going to like you or your kid. There's nothing to be done about it. I don't like every one's kids either.

Not getting a job with the city: They're still the big time losers. As bad as it made me feel that my own city wouldn't hire me for work I would have given 150% to, if they were ever to get a glimpse of what they missed out on? They would feel way worse than me.

Death of a business: Lesson learned. The Etsy shop goes next.

My inability to apply proper strength of will to weight loss goals: Disappointment in myself is much worse than disappointment in others because I have to live with myself until I die. I not only didn't make any progress in this department this year, I actually got bigger to my limitless shame. The black hole of shame threatens to devour me and I can hear voices out there saying "just do it". I'll get on that right after I amputate my own foot.

Me not being enough of an advocate for my son: I let him get stepped on by too many people, made unnecessary excuses for him, and let my concern for other people's opinions of him matter too much. Fuck everyone else's opinion of him. I'm lucky to have a kid with such a strong sense of self. It's time to get him the support he both deserves and needs.

Guilt for getting us into a deeper financial pickle: Shed the guilt lady! Buying this house has done me a world of good and we'll get out of this mess this coming year. This house was one of the actions that helped me restore some faith. It was worth the pickle.


That I have continued to tell people "It's alright" to make them feel better about something when it isn't alright with me and won't be until they make amends: An old habit that is as tenacious as a cockroach in a nuclear meltdown. There are a lot of things people have said to me, or done to me that aren't cool and I continually excuse them from having to say they're sorry. Probably because I know they won't and I don't want to find out that people I care about aren't sorry for hurting me. Time to stop excusing the behaviors of others and if they don't excuse themselves? Let 'em loose.


It's been a rough year times 100. I obviously have a huge load of crap to unload into the fires in order to grow something fresh from the nutrient rich ashes. I was thinking that I might erase this entire blog. Kill all trace of Dustpan Alley. But that comes only from a place of frustration. Instead of killing off what has been a conduit of strength and support from strangers, I should let go of last year completely now. Start fresh inside. Like an engine overhaul. I have sooty engine and I won't go anywhere until I clean out the gunk. We had to do that with our Volkswagen a few years ago. It was really expensive and sucked big time.

I don't have a lot of money to rework my engine. The one last real extravagance we are going to purchase for our anniversary present which comes up in a couple of weeks is a new bathtub. One that is great for soaking in. That will be my meditation center and my detox unit. Whatever else happens this coming year- I'll be damned if I go another year without one of the most significant methods of de-stressing that I have ever known that didn't come out of some form of bottle.

Now it's time to go downtown in the snow. With snowshoes on. And be mellow. And free of this sooty stupid crap I've been wearing in a thousand pound locket around my neck.

May you also let go of all the crap that's holding you back. Let's move forward together and see what we can make of 2009!

Butcher, Baker, Candle Stick Maker

When I woke up, late, this morning at 6:15am I was a headline editor. I had grammar intact, an intellect sharp, and diplomacy beating like blood with coffee in my veins. My mind grasps words like art, I correct writing in my head not just for spelling but for grace because I want to feel it in every one's prose. I see the budding voice and I don't want to squash it, I want to move it, encourage it, and blow a little gold dust into it. Help it evolve, transform, and become more than it is. Because words have kept me alive. Words alone have kept the dark lit and the razors from dermatological contact. In words I have found everything a human heart needs most: hope.

By 11am I was a freelance photographer. I snapped grapes getting dumped into industrial vats for making wine. I stood high and looked low. I invaded the everyday work place of people whose job it is to feed yeast, to punch down the grapes, to wash and wash and wash an endless parade of dirty bins big enough to hold twenty dead bodies. My technology watched and wormed into private work moments, the sweat of ordinary men watched. I realized that the longer you stand with an apparatus to your eye the less weird those around you find it. But I take this role gingerly. I am naturally shy. I pretend often that I'm not. I bluster and chatter my way through everything. But being the eye, the great watching eye is uncomfortable. Photographers often talk about the comfort and anonymity of the camera but I find it makes me stand out more and I feel like a heel. Yet as I find my opportunities I lose myself eventually because others do too.

By 12pm I was a metal grinder. My hands forced weld to smooth. My hands took matter and made it different. I shaped and smoothed acres of weld into smoother joints that hands might grip without pain, without incident. Metal on metal makes directional fire that you must manipulate away from your own skin, your own hairs. Missing, I smell singed hair. Not sure if it's hair on my head, my chest, or my arms that have burnt. Body matter changes as you use muscles that remember nothing at first. In all these actions there is a deeper memory that eventually everyone remembers. The fires of early man being stoked with wood; hot breath on chilled open air, the clang clang of hard steel being hammered into swords to make mothers weep.

My eye has seen it all. My blood hammers through my veins like a mantra of faith. I have been here before. You have been here before too. These rituals of living. Rituals of survival. Of art seen through arteries of everyday life. So many people seek answers in the divine, yet all the answers are written everywhere if you look. You need no epiphany to know who you are. You need no express note from god to see magic when all the time it is reflected in your own cornea.

When I woke up this morning, late, all I thought was that I had some jobs to do, on a Sunday. I didn't know I was going to be so many people and bend so much matter. That at the end of the day my hands would ache from gripping a metal grinder for hours, that my cameras would be so full of hopeful apertures, that my inbox would be so full of words to translate and send back out into the ether. I merely woke as a simple human with the simple hope that this day would have a rhythm.

All day I kept remembering my nightmare. One of those boomerang dreams in which everything you never wanted to express for fear that if you did the whole world would explode gets expressed to its fullest ugly extent. It was full of moving, which I never want to do again, and my parents who never divorced twenty years ago*, and my brother and sister, all of us in a trailer, plus the girl my parents decided to adopt. I can't hold it together and I become the family bomb that makes an enormous explosion by imploding. I scream like a shrew, accusing everyone of everything I've ever imagined accusing them of, I am betrayed, alone, my lap full of crumbs. My family abandons me and I keep seeing them everywhere. We intersect at a Scottish inn that isn't in Scotland. I am ugly, shrill, and unbending. Except that when I'm in the inn I am seen for the person I thought I was, not the person I have become. It is a haven.

I don't know, when I wake up, how my family really sees me. Maybe I never will. Do they know what color my spirit is and what coat I wear when no one is looking? Do they know that today I was three people? That I can be an editing eye, precise with words, intent, and execution? That I can find the truth behind the eye of a shutter? That I can talk to wine makers about their craft and know enough about the process to not get lost? Do they know that I ended my day covered in grit from grinding metal smooth for a welder?

At any given time we are all many people. I know that my mother has spoken disparagingly of her tendency to be a "jack of all trades and a master of none" as though this was some kind of shortcoming. Better to be a master of one thing? I don't think so. I think it's pretty amazing to be a renaissance person. It fulfills so many needs, so many desires. It taps into something so much older than "career paths" and vocational dedication.

What all of us are when we are necessary.

It's 10:47 pm now. I came down here to bleed words. Even as I need sleep. I needed to channel this rhythm into something more tangible. It always comes back to words for me. I will vomit them in my sleep. I exude them. They leak from me and evanesce from my atmosphere. They drip from my fingers and seep into my shoes. It always comes back to words. A hammer of words that drive through my head like a grave digger's shovel in dirt.

I am afraid to stop. To quiet down. To stem the flow of thoughts. I wonder if I might bleed internally if I cut the line now and crawl into bed. Everything comes to me in sharp contrast. I feel so young and so old as though my spirit is suspended in some place just out of spitting distance of reality.

Sometimes I feel like a conduit of information. Like a fortune telling idiot savant for sleepers. Sometimes it feels like I know what is going to happen to everyone. I have looked at people and seen their spirits suspended brightly above their bodies, like hovering ghosts. I have felt my bones tingle and my hackles rise with these moments like I am a guest at a table of bodiless souls.

It has never scared me. Except when I try to pretend it isn't real. I hear what others might hear if they bothered to listen. That is all.

That is all.

And now I hunger for that silent embrace in sleep. That anonymous protective set of arms that finds me when I'm abandoned at train stations. The spirit that crouches close to the breaking point and softens the corners of madness; the spirit that kept hope alive when I was six years old and irreparably damaged. I hope that whatever guardian of sleep it is that visits me will visit me tonight, like it often does when I feel so small I might pass through the eye of a needle.

Take these words. Please hold what I was close to the fire and to your warm skin. Please don't let go until the light of early morning shivers through the air and breathes new ghosts into clouds. Please protect what still believes.

That is all.

I am butcher, baker, and candlestick maker.

That is everything.



*They really did.

She Don't Shave Well

This one's for Capello

Talent is a funny thing. Some of us have it, and some of us don't. I've been accused, many times in my life, of putting myself down. People have expressed concern for the health of my self esteem because I readily admit to my million shortcomings, generally using a megaphone to admit them to the most possible ears at one time.

You might almost say I have a talent for exposing my foibles to others.

A talent is generally anything we seem to have a knack for doing well, as opposed to skill, which is something we work hard to achieve. Talent comes to us like a fluid extension of who we are. It comes to us the way rivers rush to the ocean. Almost without thinking we can do things that others have to work harder at.

So when I said (in a previous post) "I don't come up with clever phrases like 'It's a good thing' because they make me want to shave my ass and roll in salt afterwards" I mistakenly assumed that shaving is a special torture for everyone and that everyone consistently nicks themselves and gets razor burn every single time.

Salt on nicked skin is no gentle frolic. Hence my comment.

What I didn't recognize is that I actually have a special TALENT for nicking myself every time I shave and no matter what razor I use or products I slather on my legs or in my arm pits, I effortlessly get the most fabulous razor-burn. You couldn't get a better one than me even if you trained for it like an Olympian. If it weren't for Capello's comment I might never have recognized my own shaving achievements.

Talent is malleable. You can look at it from different angles. So, in honor of discovering one's hidden talents and yelling them into the mega-phone, here are a few more of my talents you all may not be aware of:

• I have a talent for not walking the dog. It's not as easy as you might think to get the spouse to do all the dog walking. You really have to be capable of tuning out the dog's constant eyeful reproach and become impervious to her long doleful stares at her leash. Plus you have to have incredible debating skills in order to convince others to pick up your own slack.

• I have a talent for ruining clothes in the laundry. For an activity that used to involve rubbing your garments against a washboard in the creek and hanging them to dry, you'd think it would be hard to ruin clothes while washing them. And you'd be right! You have to concentrate hard to forget to empty the pockets of hard candy, lip balm, frogs, sharp bike tools, and spare kittens.

• I have a talent for not getting things done. Some people see this as a "fault" but I like to think of how good it feels, most of the time, to do nothing remarkable. The trick is to avoid guilt. For most people this is near impossible. They cannot let go of the "should haves" and "could haves". I tell guilt to go to hell and consequently enjoy the time I spent picking at my nail polish, checking my empty in-box, and day dreaming about all the ways I could be spending my time.

I'll save the rest for later. I don't want to overwhelm anyone with my unbelievable talents. How about you tell me some of yours?

Suicide For Beginners

It can easily be argued that an appropriate response to losing someone to suicide is to feel anger. Not only does the bible consider suicide to be an unforgivable sin* but the law ridiculously forbids suicide and so if you attempt it you can be arrested. So why not be angry if someone you love has performed the ultimate gesture of hopelessness and exhaustion? You have God and the law on your side, not to mention the many psychologists who will say that it's perfectly natural for you to feel that way.

I strongly disagree.

Anger at a suicide is a wholly self indulgent emotion. A lot of suicides live life feeling alone, unheard, and hopeless. Their motivations for leaving this earth aren't usually** to spite the living, to thwart them, to inconvenience them, or to hurt them. Suicide itself has been thought of as a selfish act, so why not have selfish emotions around it too?

I'm not entirely sure that once you've courted death, as a suicidal person does, that you ever lose your connection to those feelings of what it's like to really not want to exist. You may come through suicidal periods in life knowing that you don't want to die if it's not your time; you may find happiness and joy in life that you never thought possible when you reeked of the end of the life tracks; covered in the grease of despair; but it leaves an imprint in your consciousness that colors how you view life no matter how strongly you wish to live.

You develop a language and an understanding that the average person doesn't have. Most people, at one time or another, go through such a hard time that they briefly entertain the thought of offing themselves. Most people don't live in that head space for long enough to spare compassion and empathy when they hear that someone has killed themselves. Instead they trot out anger, pity (not the same as empathy by a long shot), or grey indifference because they're scared of the whole subject.

In high school I had an English teacher who was reputed to be one of the hardest in the school; the kind of teacher whose name was hissed fearfully in the dark corners of long scrubbed hallways for fear of invoking the teacher beast itself. His name was Mr. Pierce. Not that that matters. I figured it didn't matter what teacher I had because I was headed for hell in a great molten basket anyway. What difference would it make if I got there with one more D on my record?

As it turned out Mr. Pierce was one of the very first English teachers to inspire in me a longing to become a better writer. His strictness, his reverence for literature, language, and words made me see in him a person whose admiration was actually worth achieving. It was one of the first times in a very long time that I found myself actually caring about my homework because this guy, Mr. Pierce, was a stickler for a well turned phrase, or at the very least a great effort towards one. He wanted to foster a better vocabulary in his hormonal students and hadn't lost his own great passion for his subject. No teen-ager's indifference could wear him down.

We had to write a creative writing paper. He gave a number of examples of the kind of story lines we could use. I could sense the great upsurge of fear and dread amongst my classmates even as I found my mind racing with a million possibilities in excitement. In the end there was only one story I had to tell at that moment.

I wrote a first person narrative about a youth locked in a bathroom preparing to kill themselves. It was something like a stream of consciousness piece of work. I honestly can't claim it was a masterpiece. Yet the teacher, bored with every student doing a riff directly off of his proffered examples, must have felt some kind of frisson of life explode from the page because after turning it in he approached me and made the first real personal contact with me of the whole semester. He said "I think you must read a lot."

I nodded in the affirmative.

He then recommended a few books to me that I might enjoy, some of which I was happy to say I'd already read.

He then had me read my piece out loud to the classroom. Which I did reluctantly. I do not enjoy public speaking or being in the limelight in that way. I was honored that he had chosen my story to be read out loud. So I did.

As I predicted, when I finished reading my story and put down the paper, the class was completely silent. They squirmed. The teacher looked at them sternly. The bell released them.

I felt exposed and icky. That was the first time I'd ever shared my most private thoughts. Out loud. The teacher knew. The other students knew. Thank god I didn't have many friends already or I might have had to experience the agony of losing a couple.

The appropriate response to hearing that someone you know has killed themselves is to feel sorrow. Sorrow is appropriate. Missing them, if you liked or loved them, is entirely appropriate. Shedding tears and wondering what you might have done to help, had you known they needed help, is appropriate. Torturing yourself with that thought is not. Wishing they could come back, that you could replay experiences you had with them, perhaps rewriting a few, is natural. In the end I want to suggest you express your love for them and give them what they sorely lacked in life- give them the ear of your spirit and remember them not as you wish they had been but as they really were. They won't mind if you remember the drool sliding down their cheeks as they slept like babies, so long as you remember it kindly.

You should know that sometimes the people in a suicide's life could have done a lot to help and didn't, and sometimes they couldn't have done anything to prevent death. Each of us knows the real answer in ourselves. No one else can tell us what we might have done different. By the time we're processing our pain over the loss of a loved one to suicide it's too late to ask what we might have done for the dead, but it's never too late to ask what we can do differently for the living.

I cannot speak for all suicides. I wish I could because lord knows someone needs to speak for the ones who have no mouths where they have gone. I remember when I was sixteen and had just found out that a poem I wrote made a friend cry. I remember thinking about the power of words. About how my spirit and my pen and paper seemed like the same entity and that if I had any power at all in using them the most meaningful thing I could do is to help another suicidal person come through the other side, as I had done. If anything I could write would help them feel less alone, more hopeful, like someone out there spoke their own language without rebuke...I would have used my gift truly well.

So if you know someone you suspect is contemplating suicide, please check out the following resources. You may get some answers, some ideas how to help, and be less afraid to stick your foot in. Think of this: if someone is determined to commit suicide, what's the worst you can do? The worst you can do is nothing. You might be concerned about making mistakes, making it worse, but the truth is, if someone is determined there may be nothing you can do to stop it. But many people contemplating or attempting suicide desperately need to be seen and heard. So even if you don't know all the right words to say or the right things to do, just listening-seeing-and most of all- hearing them can make a world of difference.

Don't let them be invisible and soundless.

And if you lose someone to suicide? If anger rises, ask yourself- NOT HOW IT'S AFFECTED YOU- but what it meant to that person to exit life. Spend some time sending them love. LOVE. They need it. Even post mortem. We all need a lot more love.

Suicide Resources:

• McMinnville Suicide Hotline: (503) 434-7465 or 1-800-560-5535

• The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a 24-hour, toll-free suicide prevention service available to anyone in suicidal crisis. If you need help, please dial 1-800-273-TALK (8255)

• San Francisco Suicide Prevention -I checked this site out and they have some really useful information and pointers on dealing with suicidal people.

• Untied States Department of Health and Human Services while I'm not crazy about any governmental institutions, this site has some good information and doesn't mention George Bush anywhere, always encouraging.

• National Institute of Mental Health I consider this site to be a reliable source for information on mental illness and mental health. There is tons of information available here.

*I don't read the bible so I have only heard this second hand. There is no way I can believe in a God that will forgive the molestation of children but not suicide, a frequent result of those who've been molested as children.

**This may rarely be the case but isn't generally the motivating factor behind suicide.

Passing For Normal

In a routine that is as unbreakable as the rushing force of a rising speeding tsunami I cannot sleep until I have watched some old familiar episodes of "Friends" or "Frasier" or some other soothing DVD old news. Before I quit smoking it was books. I had to read before bed. Even if it was just for two minutes of slurring blurred sentences bringing on a comfortable dark. Routine is everything to me.

We are suddenly too broke to even rent DVD's from the video store so the indulgence of watching CSI episodes is over for the moment. So for the two hundredth time I am going through my collection of "Friends", watching favorite episodes that bring on that deep soothing white noise in my brain that I have come to depend on to recover the stresses of a day necessarily spent amongst people, animals, babies, noise, complications, stress, obligations, shortcomings, brain twitches, and the all important effort not to stand out too much for the wrong reasons.

Brain white noise is essential to my peace of mind. In fact, white noise in my head is essential to my survival. It's how I wake up the next morning refreshed and able to function in a world that largely doesn't understand how much work it is to be people like me.

As I mentioned before, I recently checked some books out of the library hoping to break into my DVD evening routine and work my way back into my very old tried and true deep love for reading. I got myself a couple of Mary Stewart books for familiar comfort and I also brought three books home from the psychology section. That book on cutting turned out to be a very dangerous jolt in the gut for a person like me with no health insurance (and therefore no access to mental health support). I had no idea a book could shake me up so much, make me feel so exposed, raw, broken; like a specimen dragged up from the deep sea- rarely seen and fascinating in a science fiction style extravaganza of unbelievably large breasted assistants getting caught up in the tentacles of raving toothy half squid/half human beasts.

There were two other books I brought home. For one whole week I have eyed my stack of books with rightfully deep suspicion. I can't afford to go into a tailspin. My family is depending on me. I can't be peeling my layers of precious denial and protection away just so I am not tied to some iron-clad routine that I am partly ashamed of.

While one of my favorite episodes of "Friends" played (the one with Ross's sandwich) I skimmed the other two nonfiction books. Books that I checked out in the hopes that they might have strength to impart. One of them, called "Passing For Normal" by Amy S. Wilensky, grabbed me like a hand by the wrist and dragged me through 32 pages before I realized that my episode of "Friends" had ended and I was reading in silence. Just like I used to almost every day and night of my life since I could read.

It is almost two in the morning and I have read almost half the book. It's about Amy (the author) who has Tourette's Syndrome and OCD and how much of her life has been consumed by her efforts to "pass for normal". It's also about how people like her never do really pass for normal because people always know. Even if it's just out of the corners of their eyes, they know.

Reading this book feels like being with my own tribe. I don't have Tourette's. But I know all about OCD. The great thing about mental illness is that you don't have to have the exact same mental illness as someone else to understand them. There are universalities. Ties that bind. That make us into a kind of family. So many of us have clusters of issues and between us we often share one, if not more, challenges in common.

Every time I think that thought, the things we have in common, I think of Danette. I saw her every week for a couple of years. She was the brightest light at the local grocery store. She easily outshone every other employee there in light, in grace, love, acceptance. She was like an incredible embrace. I loved her. I never realized that we were the same. Like mirror images in spirit. I didn't realize, until talking to her, how I must seem to others. One day we got confessional and it was like unveiling a great secret. We mutually admitted to suffering depression and that to counter the devastating effect of depression on our lives we spent every possible ounce of energy seeking light. Reflecting it off of our skin, soaking it in where our body would accept it, and giving freely every bit of ourselves we could.

Which made our darkest struggles invisible to the naked eye.

Danette killed herself a few years ago. It's something that happens to my tribe from time to time.

Reading this book makes me feel like the nebulous world of mental illness is surfacing from the bottom of the pond in medicine to the part where sunshine skims and slips through. It gives me hope that more stories are to come. Less from the professionals and more from the trenches.

Tell me how you live.

Tell me how you breathe.

The more our stories reach oxygen the more research will go into answering all the murky questions. The more you know how our brains don't work the more you will understand how we compensate. The more everyone understands the more stigma fades. When stigma fades a place is made for coexistence.

What's wonderful about my tribe are the colorful stories we have to tell. We are a shiny group. We can see things that others can't see, know things you wouldn't believe, and we can distill the essentials of the everyday into an irresistible elixir of entertainment.

I believe that there is a point at which all of our minds can meet. No matter where on the spectrum of "normal" you fall, there is some point where all of our minds meet. Where we are all just humans learning to navigate life, where we are all on the verge of something magnificent, where we can realize some incredible human potential. It's a gorgeous point from which we all diverge. If we work at it we can find that spot, that common ground, and discover that we understand each other.

Waiting For The Light Of Spring

OK, I'm not, but lots of people are. This feels like a restless time of winter. People are getting tired of the rain and clouds and meager pools of light. Me? I'm in no hurry for spring. I have this whole tree situation to work out. I need to get a definitive report on what is going on with them (I'm pretty sure it's some form of fruit tree canker but there's, like, a thousand different varieties...so which is it?) I have put in a formal request for information from the master gardening group. My mentor didn't know. So it could be a week before I find out.

I also need time to plan out different parts of my garden. I have a lot of space and I want to use it efficiently and beautifully. Form+function=perfection.

Once again, in class yesterday, we had the guy who usually teaches children and seems to believe that if it's good for kids, it's good for adults. I swear this guy must eat Lucky Charms for breakfast and wear Power Ranger undies. He prefaces every sentence with "When I'm teaching children..." or "Kids love this activity..." or "I always do this activity with the kids..." or "Kids love this..."

IN CASE YOU HAVEN'T NOTICED: I AM A FAT MIDDLE AGED WOMAN, NOT A CHILD!!!!!!!

I didn't like being a kid when I was a kid, so I am not an adult who relishes silly kid activities. Am I unusual that way?

Seriously, he doesn't know how to teach adults. I had a very hard time not screaming. Yes, the challenges of my Master Gardening course are surprising. Not at all the challenges I expected to have.

It is also painfully clear to me that what I think is beautiful in the garden is not at all what some other gardeners find beautiful in theirs. The first three hours were taken up with learning about "xeriscaping" in which you plant your landscape according to watering zones and try to have zones that need little or not watering at all. I think water conservation is very important but I just don't think ornamental native shrubs are going to serve my kitchen well. There are two or three kinds of flowering currants that are very drought tolerant but when I asked "do they produce edible fruit" the instructor said "They produce some fruit, yes." So I clarified "Do they produce delicious fruit?" She demurred. She hemmed. She hawed. I think she joked that the birds like them.

I am impatient to learn what I came to learn.

Luckily for me the second half of the day (right after the child-man's presentation) we got to hear about "lasagne" gardening, a sustainable method of gardening that not only keeps more of your household waste from ending up in a landfill but also sustains a healthier back by keeping you from deep tilling your clay dirt. The guy who gave this talk made lots of bad jokes but I loved him for his passion about sustainable gardening and for wanting everyone to grow as much of their own food as cheaply as possible. My friend Lisa B. is doing lasagne gardening and I have been thinking about implementing some of it in my own yard.

I wanted to stand up and shout "Right On Brother!!" just like my parents must have done at political rallies in their day. I looked around the class and I have to report a little disappointment at the response this talk garnered (glassy stares that constantly surreptitiously scouted out the bright pink cupcakes and other offerings on the snack table).

The next speaker was also speaking to my own heart. She was dressed up in pioneer clothing (well made and historically correct, I might add) and although I'm not sure that her portrayal of a pioneer woman really would have stood up in a movie, she charmed me. Her whole talk was about winter gardening. Well, you don't have to tell me twice to get my winter garden going on time this year! I kept wanting to stand up and say "Sing It Sister!" like an out of place athiest feeling God in a Baptist Gospel Choir. She's a home-schooler so I'm thinking that she must be known by some of my friends. I can't say that everyone else there was as excited as I was by the possibility of going out in the sleet to cut a basket of homegrown produce...but we got some great tools for planning our winter gardens.

Lots of grumbling about the rain. Lots of desire for spring expressed.

Now I want to say a word about the peanut gallery that lives in my head: as most of you know, I am not a lesbian. I only want to say that so that you will understand the non-lascivious nature of the likes and dislikes I develop for people, both men and women, which often manifest themselves as little child like crushes. When I dislike people it's also generally pretty childish. I rarely dislike people in a malevolent manner. So, as I spend seven hours in the company of forty other people there is always a running commentary in my head that goes something like this:

(someone comes in the door a little late-)

"I like you. You have great teeth."

(someone grabs my attention with weird question-)

"ACK!" (gasp of horror) "You look exactly like the Grinch and I'm scared of you."

(Grinchy person still talking-)

"Plus, you're squinting at me."

(person who came in late who has great teeth sits behind me and I eavesdrop-)

"I like you. Yes I do. How come you're so pretty? How did you get such wonderfully shaped teeth? Would you adopt me as your niece?"

(someone walks past vision-)

"Are you for real? Oh my, those pants won't do at all!"

(someone engages in light conversation-)

"I don't like you. You really need to stop coloring your hair and wearing it like a defensive helmet."


See what I mean? There are a couple of people I like in class and every time they come in my view my peanut gallery repeats it's feelings about them. I would not survive in public if these running thoughts could be heard. I am lucky that I don't have some disorder in which I blurt out these unfortunate pronouncements. I'm pretty happy not to hear what everyone is thinking about me because I know I'm an oddity and among other things I have the queer habit of speaking out of the side of my mouth like a film noir gangster. I never noticed this until a friend video taped me when I was in my twenties. I was so embarrassed and couldn't figure out how anyone could keep themselves from talking about it.

I'm happy to say that the voices in my head have never directed me to do evil in the world. In fact, they never direct me at all. Do any of you remember the Muppets? You know those two critics who sit in the theater commenting on everything? That's exactly what the peanut gallery in my head is like: two grumpy old man-muppets running off at the mouth.

It's extraordinary how often the commentaries revolve around teeth.

I have a tooth thing, for anyone who didn't know that.

And no, my "thing" for teeth is not a love of Hollywood white/straight teeth. I do enjoy white teeth (though my own are quite yellow) though that is hardly my main criteria for tooth-admiration. I have a complicated set of criteria for tooth admiration. Sometimes teeth can be pleasingly crooked and it angers me when people with gorgeously crooked teeth get them capped or straightened, but there are certainly some crooked teeth that are not so gorgeous. I also very much enjoy gaps in front teeth which both my mom and sister were blessed with and got "fixed".

I could never explain the tooth thing. But right now I have a fascination for a lady in my class who is the only truly lovely person there and my fascination is 85% centered around her teeth. I could look at them all day.

So go now, my friends, and know that you are not the weirdest blogger out there! Take heart! Know that there are fat middle aged tooth fetishists out there who will trump your weirdness any day!*





*I am acutely aware that there are many weirder people out there than me. But sometimes it's good to embrace one's weirdness and just shove it out in the public eye for examination.

Shall I Fall Down On My Knife
Or Yours?

I wish the leaves would finish falling already. I'm impatient for the full blow of winter. Sometimes, no, not sometimes, a lot of the time I would like to crawl under a rock and never speak to another person again. I could hide in my house and not come out again until I'm a six hundred pound freak the police and paramedics have to come and pry out of my narrow hallway. I can definitely imagine never leaving the house again. I also think my access to the Internet should go away. I would never give it up willingly, which means it will have to be pried from my vice grip. I should not be allowed to communicate with other people. I also kind of think other people shouldn't be allowed to communicate with anyone either, especially me. We might all be better off if we hadn't come up with language.

I am sitting here at my desk with a hundredth beer because the only way I know to sooth my spirit is to write. My blog is the best place I know to do it. Yet there are a thousand things I can't say. What I want to do is lash out right now and make a list of every opinion and thought I have that I know will alienate someone and just get it over with. I'm going to alienate everyone eventually anyway. You don't think I am? Just talk to the right people and you will find out.

I'm being a little unfair to myself because other people have words too and I don't force anyone to use them unwisely or hurtfully to me. I have feelings and right now they are pretty crushed.

What I want to do is to curl up with my seven year old heart- my kid who is no longer interested in curling up with me because he's seven for god's sake which is practically grown up, and I want to protect him from a lot of people in my life. I feel that primal flush of tiger love and I have realized too late that I have exposed him in ways I didn't realize were unfair to him. Where was my tiger love when he really needed it? And Lord knows, he's going to need a lot of it still.

Even a mother who gives birth to the Devil's spawn, as I have, has to love and protect the evil she's created.

Life was so much more simple when I was just a housewife with no child. When I hung out with people who did or didn't have children but didn't have to care what their views on parenting and education were.

You can't always be looking back though.

Besides, you know what? Max is a wonderful kid and when he's had a chance to mature he will surprise a lot of people. He's got a good heart but he's 100% testosterone and that's not a quality much appreciated by a lot of my peers. I promised myself recently that I was going to stop mentioning how hard he is to parent and instead I'm going to tell people how proud I am of his intelligence, curiosity, his deep understanding of life and the universe and the incredible questions he asks me that blow my mind away.

I promised that I would stop putting him and myself down. I don't see other children who are better than him. He hasn't developed a filter for his thoughts which means that what comes out of his mouth is always truly what he is feeling. 100% honest. Which more often than not is hurtful. I am trying to teach him to think before he speaks and to not share everything. But I can't entirely malign him for his honesty, which is inconvenient for sure and pretty antisocial, but he's just saying the kind of stuff everyone would say if you asked them for total honesty. Which I don't recommend you do.

He's only doing what I always end up doing at some point in time-saying what I really think. He's going to have to find out, as I am, that people don't like honesty unless it's them that's dishing it out. I find that I don't care for it either. Highly over rated in my opinion.

My boy is an amazing kid and I wouldn't want any other kid in his place.

I am in a very bitter place at the moment and I want to say terrible blasphemous things about God to piss off pretty much everyone, but what's the point anyway? I don't even believe in God and I do believe I'm responsible for the life I'm living, for both the good and the bad in it. So let me just vent a little of this bitterness off so that I can move on with it and find my better, kinder words again.

So let me recap my life where it's at right now:

We aren't making enough money to pay for anything but the mortgage.

Even after I get myself a minimum wage job I will have to give up my health care.

Once I give up my health care I will break something.

Or get cancer.

Or a lobotomy.

Which I think I might actually like. Can one get an elective lobotomy?

I can't get family assistance because there is a waiting list.

I had to cut one friend loose already this year.

I am pretty sure I've just lost another one.

I won't be able to afford my psyche meds soon.

Some people will rejoice over that because they don't believe in psyche meds.

Those people can go shove a metal pole through their ears.

I'm pretty sure I'm a lousy excuse for a human.

But I'm also pretty sure that that opinion is made stronger by the fact that this month
I have continually been forgetting to take my meds.

My kid deserves a better parent than I've been.

Which other circumstances have made clearer than I wanted to see it.

I'm a maintenance alcoholic and I'm not open to anyone's opinions on that.

I only mention it so that anyone who thinks I don't know it will know I know it.

I'm fat and gross.

I'm not funny.

My cat is getting so mean I think he's going to kill me in my sleep.

There are some things I can't talk about with a single other human being on earth and it really really hurts to keep it inside.

On the plus side, my sister is visiting.

And I am really amazed by the things she's doing and the person she is continually becoming.

Plus she gave me, like, ten zillion compliments on my dill pickles and my food.

I loved her before she complimented me though.

My mom also gave me lots of warm compliments and helped my Thanksgiving be so good in spite of the awfulness I set in motion that same day.

My husband loves me even when no one else does.

He's crazy too.

(Yes, that's on the plus side)

I haven't lost all my friends.

My friend Chelsea called me up to make me feel better.

I feel a little better now.

Even though I've still had to cry a lot today and yesterday.

And I don't cry easily or often.

My friend Sharon apparently still loves me too and called.

Unfortunately I missed the call.

I have considered closing down this blog. I have considered not writing ever again (which amounts to deciding to never breath again). When things go wrong in my life I have always had an unfortunate tendency to turn the knife inwards. Even when I have a righteous anger at someone else. (And what anger doesn't imagine itself as righteous?) When I was thirteen I would bite myself until I bled. Then a couple of years later I would cut myself which has had a never-ending effect on me because I wear and see the deep scars every single day of my life. Then it became just a mental exercise of self-castigation. Mental knives I twist into my own gut whenever I make a false step in life or whenever anyone else hurts me. My fault, my fault, my fault. If I had a leach I'm sure I'd bleed myself.

I take that back. That's like a tick and is one of the most disgusting things I can think of.

If you ask my friend Chelsea she will tell you that I'm a baby about ticks. Although I would like to argue that because it puts me in a poor light...it's true. Damn it.

My fault, my fault, my fault, my fault...

As I have become mentally healthier this tendency has become less vitriolic. Yet it still persists. If you throw a dart at me I will twist it deeper in my gut. Or my heart. Or whatever you were aiming for. I'll make sure it gets there. Sometimes, without being asked, I will just take the stupid knife from your hand and I will do the whole thing myself because, truthfully, you'll probably do it wrong anyway.

Life doesn't live itself.

That just in from planet Angelina.

Which I think is much too small to be a "planet".

You know what? Everything isn't always my fault. Just like everything isn't always Max's fault.

If I just keep typing here and never go to sleep and therefor never have to wake up, then I will never have to deal with anything again except these fucking annoying tears that I don't want anyway because I'm super tough and I don't let my heart break over the little stuff right? Right. Fucking life.

Fucking stupid complicated life. I think it's the things that I can never ever say out loud or in print or even whisper to another human being, even Philip, that are going to kill me in the end. Maybe sooner than I expect. Is that why people write fiction? To tell the things you can never really tell without absolutely cutting yourself off from every other human being?

I lose friends when I open my mouth with questionable stuff, what would I lose if I open my mouth with the unquestionable impossible words that no one is ever allowed to say because if they do they betray every human being on earth and break our trust in the unknown and the trust we all have that it will remain unknowable?

Maybe if I don't let my fingers leave this keyboard they will not find some other weapon to turn. A knife would be cleaner, but cheating. If you think I'm talking literally at this moment, then you are your own sick bastard. I shouldn't even bother reassuring you that I would never leave my wee bairn in this world with the legacy of a suicidal mom. I have not been truly suicidal in over twenty years. I know this week, better than ever before, how much my bairn needs me to be his champion, his PR company, and his mother. His loving imperfect crazy mother.

My child says to me "Are you CRAZY?!"
I say "As a matter of fact, I am. And not ashamed."

If I wasn't on a seven year campaign not to swear in front of him I would have said "Totally BAT-SHIT FUCKING CRAZY."*

So I say to my kid "Are YOU crazy?!"
and my kid says "Yes. Yes I am. So who cares?"

Who indeed.





*An assertion that annoys everyone I know who is in the Therapy profession who feels that this only applies to people who have psychotic episodes. I think I know who I am and my own diagnosis so I'll appreciate not hearing anyone deny my clinical diagnosis which entitles me to call myself crazy if I want. After all, there are thousands of degrees of crazy and I'm not claiming to be non-functioning. Just leave me the fuck alone already!