i obsess.

hurted.

If you've been doing nothing but reading my posts from the inception of this blog, which would mean you've probably, by now, hung yourself often enough due to the rather long-ish breaks taken between entries to have become a porn star for how well-hung you are, oh, that was weak, anyway, ANYWAY, you might recall that I had a brother, and he is gone.  Well, not gone, just far.  Beachy.  Beachy in a lives-in-a-homeless-institution full-time.  In Florida.  But as I've poorly joked before, if you've gotta go homeless, why not go beach?

Why do you read this?

You need to really pause and reflect for a moment.  Seriously.  It's almost more sad that you read this than that I write it.  For I am truly a low, despicable creature in the game of the writerlies.

So it occurs to me, as I work and toil and sweat back here in the creating area, the area where I create things, I won't extrapolate for your unknowingness even though it may vex you, because I haven't time.  I am supposed to be churning and burning, bitches.  To the point, ho!  (Ye thundercats of glory and, gee, where are *those* plastic fast-food accessories for the movie that is yet to be?  Unless it already was.  I would not know if it came prior to my child's birth.  I'm unsavvy in the realm of kid-meal plunder from before a certain time.  Yeah.  I.e., uncool.  What.)

Point!  Ho!

*ahem*

(Pause for effect; or, more earnestly, pause to pretend, well, not pretend, but actually DO work.)

But I am back, and it is only to say that I think I'm afraid to have a second kid, because what if it makes my first kid hate me and us and everything and become mentally ill (but in a way that's completely un-hip and un-trendy and doesn't land him in art school and then showing in a gallery or whatever the fuck those kinds of mentally ill people end up doing) and end up homeless, in a very non-homie (yo) way?

In a way that hurts more than ever because it's already happened once?

Then again, what are the odds?

And yet --

My dad, his eyes.  Those hollowed-out eyes.

I can't commit onlineicide, it seems, because every time I'm ready to plunge into those soft, easy-on-the-brain waters of not-writing-blog-posts-in-my-head-every-waking-and-non-waking-minute bliss, I run into this:  the urge.

The bloody, inescapable urge.

Forgive me, I must beg, because while my desire to prevent you from having to seethe in my madness, or see the madness at all, my physical thundercat takes my arms and shakes the words out like flying bits of dirty fur.

I'll try harder, next time.

Promise.

why i started blogging.

Thanks for the (much-needed) reminder, Mrs. C.

what it's like living with constant, nagging anxiety.

It's funny, because, until recently, I didn't even realize how scandalous anxious I am, on a regular basis, ABOUT EVERYTHING.  But, no, really.  Everything.  (Normally, for instance, I would attach a "-ly" to the end of scandalous, but I've chosen not to, here, because it reminds me of how people spoke in the early part of the 1900s.  Which I dig, and sort of don't mind evoking on a miniature scale right now.  Even though there's zero context, it makes no sense to do so because I'm not telling a story remotely related to something from that era.  I just -- have a fondness for old things, I guess.  And the anxiety prays on me and says, but you can't just PUT something like that out there and not explain your reasons.  Although, generally, I do just that, at least in my blog, but sometimes also IRL, and I don't explain myself at all, but then I writhe and rage inwardly.)

Along those same lines of explanation-owing, though that's not necessarily true, I just feel too anxious otherwise to deny the urge to explain everything to very minutest detail, I couldn't sleep just now because I feel so anxious about getting back to sleep -- allow me to give you a minor amount of backstory, er, preface, to get the picture:  My son is still having accidents, at night, approximately once a week.  Sometimes oftener, sometimes less often, but it turns out, math-wise, to kind of be a once-a-week deal.  Thereabouts.

So this morning's accident came at 5:13 a.m., and I was already restless because my bedroom was too warm, but if I'd got up to open the other window, or even just to turn on the fan, I would've woken up too much, so I was doing my best to avoid waking, but then I heard Jack start to whine and realized it was too late.  After he'd gotten changed and I remade his bed (a thing I don't usually do without a lot of help from him, as I'm trying to help him learn that, even with accidents, he's got to assist in remedying the situation), I crawled back into bed (but not before I'd gotten my share of grousing in and had my husband point out that I was getting yelly, which didn't aid in making me feel exactly calm), and knew I was done for.  So I lay there for a minute and wrote never-to-be-written blog posts in my head, as per usual, until I remembered, HELL.  I could just go and write one.  So I got up and began the thing.  (And proceeded to get distracted by headlines and celeb-couple photos and other shit I don't usually look at, but DUDE, it's 5 in the fricking a.m.  "Usually" goes out the window, I'd say, at such a stupid hour.)

It occurs to me, while writing, that one of the many reasons I can include in my explanation to self of why I quit blogging for awhile, why I always try to quit, not just blogging, but writing altogether, is that it no longer soothes the anxiety.  It once did, just as everything does initially, but it no longer does.  Rather, it incites it.  The very thought of writing anything beyond a laundry list is a menacing one.  I quake in its lion-eye'd gaze.  And so goes my blog, down the crapper, because I do anything I can to avert the gaze of that which makes me anxious.  I do, really and truly, hate to pine, and it is seemingly what I do best.

Another thing that gives me no end of anxiety-worthy trouble?  Friendship.  I'm lousy at it.  So I do the very best thing I can:  I avoid it.  I quit it.  I get out before I can get quit on.  I would like to take this opportunity, then, to apologize to any and all who I've done it to in the past, as well to those whom I may do the same discourtesy in future.  I really don't fucking mean to.  I just inadvertently shut people out so they can't beat me to it.  Isn't that sad?  It's fucking sad.  I'd rather, though, than sit around after every horrid encounter, no matter how lovely in the moment, wondering what decibel of offensive I managed to hit for that particular friend/foe.  It's much more soothing to the inner core of anxiety that is my rotten, fetid, seedy middle to simply circumvent the entire exchange to begin with.  And so - I miss out.  On friendships.  Rich, beatific friendships.  And my son suffers, because he doesn't see me interact with friends, he is disallowed the side-benefit of being adopted-nephew to my not-friends. 

The thought of which, needless to say, gives me endless anxious turmoil to bat about at the awful, dark hours of bedtime. 

Insomnia sucks, but especially so when the time isn't even put to some other good use.  Instead of using it to allow the self-loathing to take deeper hold.  Which is where I excel. 

I am, in fact, so gifted in the realm of anxiety, I have to wonder:  is that a skill I can apply to a job?  Because if it were, I'd be aces.

(This entry has not, by the way, soothed the anxiety, as I'd hoped, thinly, but knew, more thickly, that it would not.)

(Also, I am so busy resenting myself about the friendship thing that I can't think of anything else anxiety-related to say.  Though I realize this blog is, once again, missing its right name, which should really be:  I confess.  As confession seems to be the one avenue to mild relief from the all-consuming anxiety beast in my belly.  It only lasts a short while, but it's better than taking the anti-anxiety medication I no longer have any of, because I'm too nervous to contact the doctor about the whole thing because that would require explanation and sorting-out of shit, an anxiety-intensifier if there ever was.  Plus I'm lazy.  A right capital sloth.  And the only other relief from anxiety is feeling sleepy, but even not sleeping well doesn't gift me with that always-too-quick-to-evaporate yawning glory of fuzzy-headed bliss the way it used to.  

And I like ending my blog posts on a hopeless note, as self-derision does seem to provide a slight salve for the angst, however momentary.

So, basically, I'm fucked.)

i think i'll begin by calling everyone "ducks." like i'm madonna-style-british. how sensible of me.

There's this link up at the top of the page I'm on.  It says, "Need exciting new blog topics?  Get a dose of inspiration with our 10 TIPS FOR FINDING NEW BLOG TOPICS."  (That last part isn't actually in all caps; it's where the link is embedded.  I just - oh, bloody fucking fuckity fuck.  I was trying to illustrate the link without having to actually include it.  But this explaining is feeling way more like overkill than it was supposed to.  OH MY GOD WHY CAN'T I DO ANYTHING WITHOUT GETTING DISTRACTED.)  So the link.  It's pretty funny because it's not why I can't blog, because I lack topics.  No --- my problem is much more, "when?"  And, "which of the hundreds of them?"  And then I get overwhelmed and have a goddam aneurism and try to quit for the seventieth time and about -4 people notice and I fight with my husband and yell at my son and kick the dog and wish I could get rip-roaring drunk and lose myself for a few minutes and then I attempt drinking and either fall asleep on round two or get drunk enough that the next day is pure, unadulterated shit through a straw and I don't do it again for a long time.  And I'm still not writing in the interim and I'm still wallowing in my own bloody stew of whatever-the-fuck-my-problem-is-today and I -- oh.  Well.  I have, at least, conquered the audience of my peers who stare at my fingers as I type blog posts; they're but outlines of their former sunless selves in their deep, glowering, grimace-laden stacked-to-the-rafters horrificalities.  And the outlines are made of sugar.  Sugar that reminds me of coke.  Coke would be fun.  Haven't done it in so long, now.  I've a much too depthful taste for it.  So it's good that I haven't access to such things.  No; I'm only allowed access to shams, imitators of the powdery stuff; i.e., pharmaceuticals.  I have reams of untouched bottles of various stuffs that are supposed to knock the a.d.d. square in the proverbial kisser, but they don't do anything but make me insaner.  Plus, these days, I get panic attacks when I drive, and that's its own plateau of ridiculous that I can't even begin to tear open, much as I'd like, since what I most need to do is go to bed, even though it's old-lady-bedtime-hour and my ancient, still-longing-to-be-badass part is fairly hair-on-end about breaking down this last OLD, old habit of mine to stay up too late and think thinky thoughts far into the night.  I've chosen, recently, to see sleep as my new stimulant, my new intoxicant.  I want it like I once wanted to fuck certain gorgeous, weird people.  I want to sleep until I wake up and don't feel tired anymore.  If that means going to bed at old-lady-time, then SO FUCKING BE IT.  Got that, brain?  I defy thee.  I'm gonna go to bed at 9 motherfucking p.m.  OH, YEAHHHH (Kool-Aid wallbreaker style).

I've decided I'm beyond all hope in the weirdo dept.  I'm just trying to sit tight and get through this part of the program where I repair my lack-of-sleep dilemma and then somehow magically find a box of extra time and use it and write and write and write and my soul grows back together and then, oh, THEN.  Food will taste like rainbows and sunshine and sunshine will grow inside my skin and people will stand near me, once that part of my life unfolds, so they can capture some of the effervescent golden light that my body creates, like a weather pattern, with a rainy season and even some snow but always with a cup of hot cocoa handed out to anyone who requires one.

So that's it.  That's what I want to be when I grow up.

Magic.

modesty and semi-nudity, reconstructed poorly.

I forgot about how interesting it is to witness the behavior of the unprofessionally half-naked. It is, first and foremost, decidedly amateurish. Also, I got nothin'. I'm suddenly too desperate to be gambling, an activity I have avoided deliberately since my arrival in Vegas. Probably because I was a.) initially too hungover from drinking on the plane and b.) trying to recuperate. Um, I'm gonna go gamble. Blogging from my phone is super, but it takes perseverance due to lacking the ability to re-read my nonsense at a glance. Adieu. p.s. I've missed you. And this. Shhhhhhhhhh.

stagnate. no, make that stagnatey.

Parenting is forcing patience, forcing modulated tone and even pace and planning and forethought (yes, and not the sexy kind, either, you kinky-azz bitches) on my sorry, stubborn frame. I'll let you know whether that's a good, grand thing later. Also, I'll inform you as to whether I am newly worshipful of blogging again because I can do it on my phone (okay, now that one sounded dirty to me, too) or whether I am forced to finally shoot my blog in the face, Cheney-style (so, pepper-spray of buckshot). The sole dilemma I envision with this option is that my blog isn't old enough (mid-eighties, that is) to necessarily understand the importance of respecting me after said shooting by taking full responsibility for the whole event. Like a good blog should.

not to be read if you possess a blueprint for enjoying your life.

The thing is, I'm going through a mid-life crisis, but it's kind of precious since it's my first one of what is certain to be a regular item on the menu of my life for the next, oh, fourteen-odd years.  It's kind of sweet and darling and golden in its twirly, twirly petticoats and its first-serious-wrinkles way.  It's adorable in its holy-shit-that-old-broad-in-the-mirror-is-me kinda fashion.  The genuine taken-aback by the quasi-unrecognizable element - it's nothing short of bizarre.

I was never traditionally gorgeous.  I wasn't a looker in high school.  Allow me to qualify that statement: I was not asked out on dates.  This was possibly more a lethal-to-sexual-development combination of an older, protective brother who was a well-known senior upon my arrival as a freshman, who most likely warned everyone of ugly mishaps if they so much as dared to turn their head while I bounced in blissful unawareness down a locker-filled hallway, and my being a gigantic fucking nerd.  I wasn't nerdy in dress, but I was nerdy in reputation, having been a member of the TAG (talented and gifted) program for all of grade school, etc., bla-dee-blowhard-blah.  I got academic awards and achieved - uh, stuff.  Good grades.  High marks in fitness, even.  Presidential fitness award.  Played classical piano for school assemblies.  Was in choir.  Church-attender.  "Good girl."  You know.  Typical hallmarks of your classic nerd.  (That and I have adhd and don't edit my thoughts super-well and was much, much verbally stumblier than I am now, and I am now very stupid in social settings so you can guess at how gawky and stumbly and unpleasant I was in all my excited, bubbly dorkiness.

Big-ass sigh.)

So.  Threatening older-brother who was a decorated athlete and over six feet tall in high school, x nerd signs all over my personal front yard = devestating lack of courting from all but the most annoying male members of the society of my high school for the bulk of my participation in its circumference, unwilling as I mostly was.  This informed my theory of How I Looked To People, Both Male and Female.  I.e., unattractive.

(A year in Brasil as an exchange student during my junior year, as a sixteen-, and then seventeen-year-old horny-ass girl in a foreign locale rife with seriously hot, very willing protagonists, UNaware of my nerdy persona nos Estados Unidos and aWARE that I was a horny-ass Americana, gave me a new perspective on my appearance.  I still chalked up the interest in my sexual wares as my being foreign, being American, sort of like how boys at my school would've probably behaved toward the female French exchange student, no matter how mildly attractive, if we'd ever had one, simply because of the stereotype about how sexy French girls are.  There sure as hell was a stereotype about American girls in Brasil, thanks to American cinema.  I was a disappointment to an awful lotta fellas who assumed we'd be fucking within seconds of an embrace based on the myth.  So I had enough sense to recognize I wasn't merely attractive as a result of my physical merits.  I just wasn't sure what the balance was.  I got that I was taken more at my current value than I would have been if I were still at home, attending my regular school, allotted all of the baggage of having grown up alongside the people there.  Still - a somewhat muddy reflection of me, in the end.)

Once my sentence at public school had been served, with time off in the foreign spot for good behavior, etc., I began to have a better idea of my appeal.  I wasn't sure, despite that, because the adhd is so off-putting and socially crippling.  I'd assess the mirror for hours, turning this way and that, smiling, pouting, mincing, but it never gave me that final assent: yes, you are pretty.  No, you are not pretty.

I just wanted to finalize it, just nail it down, so I could carry on and walk through my day either confident that I was, and behaving accordingly (whatever that fucking would've entailed), or not.  I settled on -- feeling unsettled.

I had a few boyfriends after high school, between the years of nineteen and twenty-one, one of whom was very outdoors-adoring, and once I'd been on enough adventure-dates with him I realized I hated a) makeup and b) him.  (He was an utter ass; lovable, but really, just as ass as a human can be.)  The important thing I took from the relationship was how stupid and pointless makeup is (I'd already come to this conclusion about bras that give the appearance of larger, rounder breasts) - the deception is just embarrassing once the moment of truth arrives, and then you feel like you owe the lucky person an explanation, which sort of totally sucks the sexy out of a moment like nothing else. 

So I was determined to discover the level of my attractiveness to those-who-would-be-attracted based on my natural appearance.  (Also, I figured out just how much I genuinely liked sex, having it, and not allowing stupid shiz like embarrassing, oh!, my breasts are NOT double-Ds! moments to complicate or, truly, dilute the pleasure potential.  HEY, YOU, EMBARRASSMENT: GET OUTTA MY ORGASM.)

Enter stripping.  (I know, it ain't classy-sounding, like "burlesque."  I don't sugarcoat.  As already explained w regards to the makeup and bra business.  You will eventually adjust.)  The convoluted beginnings of the stripping I may have already explained in some prior post, but I don't remember, and I don't much care.  That was that story, this one is this.  And I cannot pinpoint just what it is making me so pissy about refusing to extrapolate that part.  Guess it's my dislike of the imagined audience giving me a scolding look.  Your scolding looks are angering me.  Especially the imaginary portion of the (imaginary) audience, which, btw, includes you.  Yes.  You.  Stop smirking.  Let's un-de-rail this thing, shall we?

It took a while, and some coaxing on the part of many acquaintances/friends made in those cloying strip-club dressing rooms that were sometimes closets with a mirror and a low shelf and a bulb dangling from a string, to recognize the validity in costume for the role of stripper.  I had to be almost held down at one point, by a woman who viewed herself sort of club-queen at the Pure Platinumb (the "b" in that is my clever addition) marched me over to her chair, who plopped me down and proceeded to clown my face out of existence under several trowels-full of heavy makeup.  The works.  Then she shoo'd me out of the dressing room where I'd been dithering and into the dark club, where I was suddenly reacted to by SEVERAL customers at once.  As in, more than two.  Possibly as many as three.  It was weird.

After that, I got more comfortable with the idea that I was attractive.  I got used to being whistled at or looked at as a pretty, a beautiful, woman, though -- not really.  I was always sort of surprised by it when it wasn't at a strip club.  If someone spoke to me on the street or wherever people say random things or make animal noises at pretty people, it always sent a shock of color to my face and a mumbled thanks or stupid thing that would burble helplessly from my lips.  The reason this is kind of amazing is because, if I were dressed in a two-inch skirt and fishnet half-shirt minus any undergarments, with a full face of makeup and hair pinched and prodded and six-inch stilettoes, I had no difficulty firing back immediately if someone said something to me regarding my appearance, or really, anything at all.  It was the costume - it empowered me to be bold in my response to an approach by a strange person, woman or man.  In my day-to-day, where I wore large, balloon-ish, clown-y clothes that never alluded to my job, I was incognito, and as such, unequipped to respond to comments about my looks.  Shocked, even, when people would hit on me when I was dressed - goofily, in thrifted, sloppy, ill-fitting things that hid my shape, my hair in a low bun, my fifties-librarian glasses with no lenses masking my face.  Why would they? - I wasn't pretty.  I didn't have any of the markers of a pretty girl on my person.  Surely it was fool-proof (it wasn't). 

So looks are mostly about markers, I figured out, especially because I leapt from dancing to acting school, and got even more into costumes and props and markers and what does and does not conspire to make someone react to one's appearance.

At a certain point, I realized that there was an element of basic, good genetic shape to my physique and my facial structure that made people think I was pretty or good-looking or whatever, but that I could disguise it, mask it, or I could appeal to a certain sub-set of people based on the costume I was wearing at that moment.  Some days, I deliberately appealed to the crowd, because I needed it.  I needed them to tell me I was pretty, good looking.  I needed them to approve of me without knowing me, without learning about my tics and my dorky, shivery-lapdog behavior that would out me if I were sans costume, because I needed the ease of approval from strangers.

Some days, I did not want that approval.  I would go as far as I was allowed (particularly at work, where, uh, looking ugly and unappealing was rather frowned-upon, but I pushed it as far as I could, just to test the people around me, test them to see if they would discover an attractive person beneath the ugly, crusty, off-putting exterior, because I wanted to believe that if *they* could find that attractive person in there, maybe she really did exist).

(This was all very organic, very indirect.  I wasn't aware of all of this on a conscious level.  I can see it now, plain as day, natch, but back then it was just some foggy feeling I intuited about how I should operate, some weird, ingrown vibe that I found irrestible and was obedient to.  No better explanation for the behavior than that, which seems sad, somehow.)

And then some good and bad things happened, and I quit acting and I quit life, sort of, at least, I seriously tried, and would have succeeded but this dude who eventually became my husband intrigued me and then insisted that he wanted me to stick around and have his babies and be his incredibly argumentative wife who refuses to do or be anything he would really view as "dream girl" quality but then be horribly contrary and work tirelessly to do and be all of the things that constitute that person when he isn't expecting it, and oh!, did I mention, my husband's a (medal pending) saint?  Because he is.  A grumpy, mostly perfect saint.

So here I am.  Thirty-six and grabbing the last dregs of these days of what I finally realize are pretty ones.  But get this: it's already nearly gone.  The sands have shifted downward, they have slipped trickily out of my grasp even as I scrabble over the surface of my body of my face of my head of my sanity and clutch, clutch, clutch.  The costume days are drawing to screechingly abrupt halt.  I am - aging.  I am not pretty any longer.

I wouldn't resent it so goddam much if I could have ever, just for one goddam day, really believed it in the first place.  I didn't know I had it 'til it was gone.   And - make no mistake.  It is GONE.  Irrevocably, irretrievably departed.  My costumes now will involve ridiculous old ladies.  How much costume they'll be is anyone's guess.

I reach out for old age and I beg for it.  I am no pious patient.

*attempts to leap over yawning chasm onto opposite shelf where old age rests, refusing to acknowledge how that maneuver has never yet worked, that cutting in the line is impossible and the growth necessary in the interim is vital, and in fact the attempt to cheat somehow seems to delay the growth so much that it will arrive later than it does for everyone else and she will be left, standing, alone, behind, ashamed of her attempted circumvention of the necessary route through painful reality and its resultant pain will lacerate her more as it is coupled with shame*

Eat me, oh, young, oh, youth, oh, offspring.  Pierce me with a skewer and devour me.  Save me from this slow, wretched amble into obscurity, into the dust, into ever-deepening madness.  I am not so dried and hollowed that I won't still make an excellent meal. 

Just be sure to put some gravy on the table.  In case.

full of piss. and more piss.

You know what bugs the bejesus outta me?  (I'm sure you're on the edge of your seat.)  It's the phrase "these uncertain times."  Like, when people get all twisted up about "these uncertain times," and wring their hands a bunch while sighing and looking morose.  FUCKing HELL.  Show me a CERTAIN time.  Yeah.  I thought as much.

And another thing, while I'm ranting; you know that whole business about how celebrities shouldn't read their own press?  That ought to apply to your own blog comments, as well.  No matter how lovely and wonderful and encouraging it is to get feedback, with the I-must've-just-orgasmed-I-feel-so-glowy vibe that attends a heap of praise in the comments section, you really, REALLY shouldn't read that (awesome) shit.  Because it totally fucking warps your sensibilities about the writing itself.  First, because you get all over-confident and swaggery about it, and after, because you recognize people are, oftentimes, just being nice, and sometimes even just being ass-kissy or using your comments section to pull people to their sites which seems almost cruel but then I've probably done it on occasion.  Probably.  (Uh, probably?  Tell the truth, Debbie.  Okay.  *wrinkles face in disgust*  TOTALLY.  Ugh.)

Anyway, once the whole comment-thing stops mattering so much, which it never does, it always matters, so my full-of-shitness is apparently running the show this evening but I SHALL PERSEVERE, but the comments thing *does* sort of stop affecting you as much as it did in the early days, so as least that's something, it isn't *quite* as painful or soaring or whatever, and you're *kind of* capable of writing a sentence without agonizing over whether certain bloggers will stop by and be amused or impressed or bowled over and subsequently flatter you with their genius responses.  You kind of manage to tune it out, sorta.  On occasion.

But you just shouldn't fucking read it, read them, at all.  The comments, not other blogs.  Although, to be honest, sometimes you shouldn't even read those, either.  You should just steer clear altogether of the blogs you read that convince you to never write, because then you've fucked yourself.  It should be obvious why.  And of course you'll fail miserably at that, you'll read them anyway, because they write like liquid jewelry, the kind you would never tire of, and you love how they think and how they compose and articulate and it thrills you, but DAMN if it isn't dispiriting to recall you'll never write anything approximating what they can, and you just can't manage to coerce yourself to write afterward.  So that's shit.

Because, you love to do it.  To write.  It is, more than anything in this world, what you wish to be doing, at almost every waking moment.  When you're not doing it.  When you're DOING it, you kind of hate it, and hate yourself, and how imperfect your process is.  But when you aren't writing, you kind of loathe everything keeping you from it.  LIke a jealous bastard of a lover who you fucking despise but cannot get enough of, you want to be stabbing them and licking the sweat off their skin all at once.

Anyway.

Yeah.

some like it lukewarm.

It's so weird to wake up every day and feel it, feel the thirty-six years all settled into me, pressing down on me, and to rise and stumble because the years don't just feel heavy, they also have wreaked serious fucking havoc on my ability to walk gracefully.  And this breath, my GOD, my mouth, it's truly like I am renting a pet hostel from an extended family of miniaturized nutrias, that, while I've slept, have done nothing but have stinky nutria-sex all night, in my mouth, and it's warm and rancid and dry and my teeth feel like small, cheap, generic Legos, all clattery and clumsy.  But that isn't the worst part.  The worst part is my hair.  Not the gray chunks (which used to be, even up until several weeks ago, merely strands.  Separate strands of gray kind of quietly spreading throughout my hair.  Turning into a fucking gray-hair army, it seems; they're uniting in a subtle-yet-discernibly hostile takeover of my scalp.  I don't care as much I thought I would, though).  It's the FRIZZ.  The curly hair that has always been my bane, oh, it continues.  Not the curls.  The old-lady frizz.  It's AWFUL.  It's like Einstein and

oh who the FUCK am I misleading with this?  This lunacy.  It ain't me.  I'm not writing it for me.  I'm writing it for you, today, and it feels like complete bullshit.  I have to just face facts:  I can't make myself write.  I thought I'd try, but all the trying is doing is giving me a pain in my gut, and there's a streak of bile headed for my mouth as I clatter these stupid horrid words out.

I can only write when I can.  No matter how hard I try to convince myself that I'm in charge of this thing, this setting-down-of-words in long, pale strands, I cannot cheat. 

It doesn't seem fair.  So many seem to be in such firm control of their writerly parts.  I am in as little control of them as I am of my hair going gray, the skin on the backs of my hands growing thin and the veins there looking more luminous and blue and traveled all the time, the apparent transparency of this aging and of my participation in its full-throated bloody rapacious scream, and that's fine, I suppose.  It has to be.  Seriously, I could kind of care less, because I'm so caught up in the minute scrap of control I have over my writing, after all of these bloody evidenced years.  So many stories I ache to release in a sublime thrust all over the page, so many stories I want to vomit and shriek and spurt and shatter and whisper and they're all holed up inside me like so many useless children I'll never birth and I'll be gasping my last stupid breaths and the only thing I'll leave as evidence of my existence, finally, is the terrifically bad nutria-sex stank.

When all I ever wanted to do was write.  (Well, and sing and dance and fuck and strip and gyrate and snowboard and drink and carouse and bust up assholes with my sharp fists and get high and talk high-falutin' multi-layered trippy nonsense with all them stupid fuckers.)

(And drink good, black tea and climb into the hills and smell the damp under the trees and examine the underside of a fern, acknowledge its curly edges and the wee rust-brown spores gracing the lengths of each branch, and read the classics and consider just what so-and-so meant while staring down a bloody sunset with glittering eyes, then finding someplace simple to rest and eat my little sandwich on hearty bread and a hearty lunch of William Carlos Williams or Vonnegut or Salinger or Dostoyevsky or, oh, beloved Fitzgerald.  Rising, strong in my body and fortified, enriched, in mind.  And THEN off to the strip club for a night of hilarious banter with drunks after -- and during -- my silly stripper antics.  Sometimes accosted by a frisky friend in the dressing room, sometimes pleased by it, sometimes annoyed, always intrigued.  Who would want to touch me, embrace me, kiss ME?  Why?  It's all so strange, our mingling, as people.  As creatures.)

I've stored up enough experience to get me through the early to middling years of parenting, I think, but - will I drag it out and kick it into some kind of literary shape as I would do if I could but MAKE IT SO?

I must bear with myself in this unquixotic struggle, this banal battle of unholy proportions, while I fight to dare my muse to strip, while I use all my wiles to convince her to pull those drawers down around her ankles and shove her naked ass against some stranger's steamed glasses.

And I'm gonna do it, no matter the shame coursing through her now.  She'll get used to it.  Grow to like the feeling, even.

i'd say it's about time to hang it up, if i could be certain it wouldn't make me begin posting furiously in response.

Which simply means I have an uncontrollable urge, on a constant basis, to behave like an adolescent. 

At best.

FUCK, I miss blogging.  I mean, I miss writing.  I don't miss what blogging has kind of become, for me, which is this nightmare of social obligation that I cannot uphold.

I care about the people I have met through interaction created as a result of my writing here, but I do not crave regular social interaction.  I'm not super-good or whatever at that shit.  I kind of hate having to be social.  Mostly, I want to be left alone.  Sometimes, of course, that's absolutely untrue, and I wish ardently to be flitting, mothlike, diaphanous, under a moonlit night, threading through a maddening crowd, smiling, looking fantastic, making the other moonlit creatures laugh at my insightful jokes based on the quantum theory of poo, and wisely gleeful at my sojourn through life as a young, beautiful, diaphanous creature drawn to that one low-hanging light over there in the corner, oh, life, how long and beautiful you will be, how I will remain lovely and fresh and dew-bedecked, how there will always be other young, diaphanous creatures to love and fuck and kiss and spurn and worship and laugh with and oh, how that light beckons, I must just sneak only the merest inch nearer, I must just peer into its wizened depths for but the smallest speck of an instant, so that it may whisper its glowing secrets to me and I will grow only more beautiful and young and life will open and become more wonderful and the sounds will deepen and all the world will spin in a constant WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED WHY DOES IT BURN??? OH GAHHHDD WHAT! WHY! WHO THE FUCK SHOT ME UP WITH THREE AMPULES OF ELECTRICAL METHODONE HOLY FUCKKKK!

Owwie!

That's how it feels, somehow, lately.

Now that I am no longer beautiful, I can say all of these things, because my life is no longer that of the one where what people think matters.

It does not.

And I am glad.  I am glad to know this part, this clarity, this growing clarity that brightens and brightens and stings and burns the retinas, although that could also very well be the pain my eyes give me now in this era of my time from looking too long and too well into the depths of a stupid-ass computer screen, and from other equally eye-beauty-thieving shit.  I mean, don't get me wrong, I could read/ogle glowing screens from here until my personal eternity has quit me, because I am a suckling wretch at the teat of technology, but I will not score any points in the eyeball-beauty arena.  It ain't easy on the eyes, is all I'm saying.

(Okay, that was weird.  I had to spend, just now, easily a good minute trying to relocate my finger-stance on the right side of the keypad because I'm still getting used to this ever-so-slightly-smaller keyboard on the new netbook I work on, and it felt sort of like senility, like I had never seen the keys of a typewriter before, I scrabbled my right fingers over them attempting to place myself, place my extended-digit-self on the pad, and it was like forgotten-yet-known and so - scary.  Should it have been scary?  I. don't. know.  Yes?  Sure.  What's right, what's wrong, when your hand cannot find purchase on the keys of your mind's table?

I'm gonna give myself fucking Alzheimer's at this rate.)

Oh, the scourge of needing to write, and knowing how trivial, in the end, the pursuit.

There is no rhyme, no reason, and I should be loathe to share this nonsense, this drivel, and in point of fact I am, but I am compelled.  I am fire, I am heat, I am this stream of syllable and pronoun, and all while I whisper, faint, at night, late at night, when no one cares to listen, when I am shush and tuneless and all keyed up, and I turn disquieted on the spit in my steadily-deepening bed-coffin, there, in the night, I am burning it into my own little soul that I will never, no, never, write the things that matter, the epics, the torrid novels, the novellas, the pamphlets, there will be no great production, I will not matter, in this historic river I will not be trumpeting from the heights, I will be small and quiet and my voice will crack slowly and break into crumby bits that will not even float downward into the rocky crevasse and remain, stubborn, black, but instead dissolve, a foam of gentling acquiescence slipping out to sea.

I love these late-night rhythms of blur and tangy oblong heady chopped-up soups I whip up out of a child's purple cracked-plastic bucket filled with dark stars and cold, wet sand and dreams eddied into these arms, these fingers-of-brain that tell me stories when I cannot dream, cannot conjure my own dreams, am dreamless as I am currently barren, as I stroke my fingers down the length of the cave's walls and find etchings that remind me of a time so long ago that nothing hurts there, it is all wine-dark and wet and cool and there are gentle whispers of breeze along my forearms and about my neck, eliciting shivers that remind me I would prefer to go inside to the rickety rented house and away from the cold, but not quite yet.  Not yet.  Not when the chill and the stars and wine-darkness can cajole me with their guilty asides.

I long to know what they would tell me, but I am too impatient.  I must run inside!, now, and huddle close in a dog-hair-bedecked blanket, one that does not quite cover me, and I must choose between wrapping it around my neck while my feet dangle, bare, chilled, outside its snug embrace, or giving my feet its shelter and leaving my neck and shoulders naked and forlorn.

The hot cocoa is delicious but it burns my lip and is short-lived in its intoxicating splendor.  Why is nothing what it promises?

Oh, what I wouldn't give for the perfect cup of cocoa.  The one that is bottomless and hot but not stinging.

Fingers-for-brains, what say ye?  To bed, to curl up in crone-shapes and remind me of my pending death (which may be ages from now, but what's in an age, you fucking wretched bits of flesh and bone and sinew and shaped so very like the fingers of my forebears, that you would remind me of my own brief fling with this flesh fresh-that-is-not-fresh-and-grows-less-so-by-each-tick-tick-tick?  Hmmm?  Callous.  You're all callous as fuck)?

Obama's on Leno.  Tivo just winked on, but it can seriously fuck itself.  It cheated me out of a new episode of The Office tonight, and for that I will curse it roundly before allowing it to worm its pathetic way back into my life tomorrow at some stupidly weak point, preferably in the afternoon and we've gone and had some decent form of exercise and I can give myself the admirable excuse of having exercised our bodies adequately in order to feed on tivo's meager offerings for a few slices of hour.  Fucking tivo.  Ugh.  Tivo doesn't even deserve a capital letter at its front, the wretched brain-miser.  I could write things, you know, you beast, if I weren't slaving for you, panting to make my way to you and fall captive to your nightly spells of pithy, neatly encapsulated 22- and 44-minute dreams.

God.  What would Hemingway have to say about tivo.  Would we even know?  Would Hemingway have managed to escape its hungry maw?

I'm fascinated to ponder that.  I have to believe he, as well as my other literary heroes, would have stayed just out of reach of the miserable brain-eating machines.

Better me than them.  I am the martyr.  Yes.  Look to me so that ye may be saved from the existence of watching anything and everything your television shows you so that you do not prescribe thoughtful thinking on your porr, beleaguered brain.

I will bear that crass, er, cross, for you.

(I don't really think it's necessary to say anything.  It's cool.  I got you.  It's all me.  I got this one, baby.  I got this.  That's just how I do.)