Saturday, January 30, 2010

Summit of what


This is nausea.

I prayed for clarity, and this is what arrives. Panic. Regret. Alarm. Sadness. Despair.

And a raw, uncooked, unaided climb up the mountain face to try to reach the summit.

The summit of what?

What is there a top of? It never ends, until it ends.

"Tidal waves don't beg forgiveness..."

Thursday, January 28, 2010

cakewalk.


The door didn't give, initially.
I pushed against it and was instantly terrified that I would find her, crumpled on the floor.
This is what I've come to expect, on instinct.
To find a body, somewhere, when it doesn't seem to go right.
Which means that you have made it into my blood.
As I returned to bed last night, it hit me.
This is what I was spared.
Your dad took the hit for me on finding your body.
Because we ended, your father now has an image burned in his memory that would have otherwise been mine.
Had we stayed together - if things had gone the way I'd planned, and we'd been married - that would have been me.
And that's something I'm not sure I'd ever have been able to recover from.
Finding you, seeing you would have fortified the guilt, would have magnified it into something undeniable, irrefutable, inescapable to my mind.
It would have been the image.
That's what would have sealed me off.
It would have been me taking your limp body in my arms, and holding you, and crying over you, to no effect.
I was saved.
I was saved from hell in California by your death.
I was saved from an even greater grief when you left me, a year before.
The first loss of you was a great pain, but your death was the greatest pain.
And yet you saved me from something even worse.
And for that, for the gauntlet you have put me through, I must stop, and say thank you.

The priest had said, "Remember these stages of grief; the shock, the despair, the anger, the tears. Think about them as you're processing them, and write them down, so that when it happens again, you can be prepared."

When it happens again...

Your death is the benchmark against which all other pains will be measured.
Not this pain from that, and not that pain from this.
Not the loss of him, not the death of her, not the end of yet another, not the disappointment from yet another failed relationship...
It hurts, and I hate to think of those around me hurting, but I don't hurt as much, after you.
It is all a grazing.
A glimmer.
A deflection off the surface of my chest that doesn't get absorbed, except in the rare moments when it does, and then I am sick with grief.
And even then, it is a pin-drop in the deafening sound of your absence.
(But I'm also not asking for a challenge.)
For that, I must say thank you.
If I can survive your death, then everything else is a cakewalk.

She passed away this morning.
I'm concerned for my mom, and her pain hurts me, but the fact of it doesn't hurt.

Everything else compared to you is a cakewalk.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Beer and rockets



I loved you. I couldn't admit it. My actions proved this, and you know that. I don't know what you thought, but I know what you didn't think. But it's okay.

I want to rocket right out of the universe. I want to learn guitar, write songs, and become a rock star at local venues while I keep a day job. I want to be 60 years old with huge rolling waves in my hair and wear shiny sparkly swinging 50's party dresses and jeweled cowboy boots and play at cocktail lounges on a nostalgia tour. I want to sing until my voice runs dry and I want to give back all that I've perceived.

There is such an incredible energy when two spirits meet who operate on the same frequency. When that harmony doesn't exist, both of you can feel it, and it's a struggle. Yes, love can be work, but it actually isn't, at all. Not fucking at all.

It's nothing you can arrive at by thinking yourself to. It's something that would just happen naturally, like a force in the universe, written into its code, like gravity, or electromagnetism, or respiration, or mitosis. It would just happen. It is action, it is movement, it is a line drawn because one thing was done and another was not. This is how you can tell the nature of a person's character, and what, literally, comes out of them when squeezed, and what they are when at rest, and what they are when in motion.

I cannot fucking believe that two of them accused me of not having much going on, and used it as an excuse for their own behavior. Is it insecurity on their parts? Did they have their eyes closed to my situation? And why? Well, we all know why. For the past two years, I happen to have been in a period where I can't do much. Literally, am incapable. I have survival at hand. But this was all known on your part from the beginning. So the question I have for both of you is, why the FUCK did you waste my time? THAT'S on YOU. And you fucking know it.

I'm so sick of treating men as charity cases. Of silencing the best parts of myself to make them feel more at ease, more secure, more wanted, more attended to, more more more and all I became was less less less. "There are no victims, only volunteers." You're goddamned right about that. It's over. From now on, they can bend around me. I want to leave them all in the fucking dust.

The only reason you would ask "You're used to being the dominant one in a relationship, aren't you?" is because your last girlfriends were doormats. And you fucking know it. And that shit is on YOU.

Man, I love beer. I never, ever, ever used to drink it, I hated it, hated the taste, the feeling, everything. Now, I actually get thirsty for it. My AA friends would probably tell me to watch the eff out for that, but I'm cool. It's a great taste. I'm glad to have spontaneously developed it all of a damn sudden.

I went to my apartment tonight after having spent a few days at my mom's house. My place smelled...stale. Absent. Absent of me, of human life, of human breath, and human interaction in a basic manner: the smell of shampoo and shower gel having been wafted through steamy air; the absence of the smell of my perfume. It's sad, when people aren't around. This applies on so, so many levels. I miss my people.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

(untitled)


I didn't choose the ones that I knew.

The ones that I chose I sought because I did not know, but I suspected, and I needed to be certain.

If I had chosen the ones that I knew, I would not now be here; I would be in a different place, and I would think a different thought, and I'd look back at the canvas and say, "I was wrong, and it is a good thing. I was wrong about them. I am so happy that I was wrong about my life."

But I pushed it all over the edge. I chose the uncertain; the unknown. Or really, the ones that I thought I could prove wrong. Every single one, every single time, I backed it up to the edge of the cliff, until I pushed it over. I was all wrong. And I was the same kind of wrong.

If it looks shaky, knock it over.

Now, nothing that was uncertain is left standing.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

13 but so much more


1. i wish that i could co-star on "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia." that is a funny-ass show, even after non-stop viewings, whether drunk or sober, sad or happy, or anything in between.

2. after 15 years of indulgence in alcohol, as of yesterday evening, i've actually developed, all of a sudden, a taste for beer. it's good stuff. minus the gas.

3. i don't know what's going to happen. all i know is, you've gotta draw a line. unconditional love only hurts you, if you don't get it in return, as a condition.

4. i still wonder about that fucker. i don't know why. i wish i didn't. but i still do.

5. this is where specific, localized lobotomies get my two thumbs up. waaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyy up.

6. "so filled... so filled for you!" is perhaps the funniest shit i've heard in, oh, a decade.

7. california is looking pretty good about now.

8. he's right. there may not be a lot going on. but that doesn't mean he's perfect.

9. and no, i'm not afraid to say that.

10. really? now? really?

11. if this were a decade ago, but i were still 29, i could totally see a pill addiction in my future.

12. i wish someone would watch that movie with me so we could have inside jokes with it together the way that he and i did. but no one will. big fucking boo-hoo. i'm serious.

13. i sure hope this internet lasts.

Monday, January 18, 2010

The Sin of Indifference


"Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity then was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment that to be a victim of His anger. Man can live far from God - not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering.

In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony. One does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it.

Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor - never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees - not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them the spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.

Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment."

(On the commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday, a few excerpts from a speech given by Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel, originally expressed at the Seventh White House Millenium Evening, Washington, D.C., April 12th, 1999. Transcript provided by the awesome book, "Speeches That Changed the World: The Stories and Transcripts of the Moments that Made History.")

Sunday, January 17, 2010

74 Days Ago

it has been a life spent
staring up at big branches
and leaves of startling swaggering

it is a life spent under tall grasses
and the muscle ache of parting,
always only peering
between eyelashes.

the exhaustion is scaffolded by
the sitting still.
if it moved and had life,
it would be a thing untired.

it is not a thing in motion
that needs rest;
it is that a thing not moving is
not exhausted.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Drought


It's been a while, since I've been struck by something.

I don't know why, but I have my suspicions: enlightenment arrives at those who are searching, and I've got my head in the sand. I guess I am not even looking around.

I made a painting, that I'm very proud of, for the first time in months. I did it last night. I woke up at 2am after sleeping for four hours, and read some of my previous writing because I couldn't fall back asleep. I forgot a lot of what I had written. I remembered that I had forgotten what it was like to arrive at something special; to realize something hard, to have it hit me, hard.

It's strange to me, how the drought arrives so slowly and yet all of a sudden, and it's hard to even remember what it was like when it was raining.