i obsess.

pantsed.

Isn't it funny how women can wear both pants and skirts and be entirely socially acceptable but a man who wears a skirt is a freak?

And isn't it funny, too, how women can read men's and women's literature and be entirely socially acceptable, but a man who reads both is kind of a freak?

So if you're a woman and you want to be read by men, you better goddam well stop wearing skirts, is I guess what is to be taken from this lesson.

Because to think that you could keep wearing your skirts and still get the men to read you is to -- well, it's just unthinkable.  It doesn't happen.

Does it?

*

Sadly, I was getting a lot, BUT A LOT, of spammy comment-attempters, for whatever lame reason about which I care not, so I have to close the comments.  Stupid spam-artists.

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.

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.)

1 + 1 + 1 = magic. blood-curdlingly divine magic.

E.T.A. Hoffman's The Sandman.

Nancy Oliver's Lars and the Real Girl.

Neil Gaiman's Coraline.

Discuss.

the "health" exception.

I had an abortion when I was about seven weeks along.

I was working as a temp at the time.  Twenty-six years old.  No health insurance.  I made about $1200 a month.  Couldn't afford to live on my own because I couldn't cover rent, car insurance *and* living expenses simultaneously.  I had just moved out of my best friend's one-bedroom apartment, where I had been paying slightly less rent than she, with her in the bedroom and me in the eating area of the kitchen (I'd rigged up a wall of cardboard-and-fabric between the breakfast bar and the kitchen for "privacy").  Was in-between, uh, well, just generally in-between (and, yes, I'm referencing The Cure here, along with my horrific life in my terrible twenties).  Staying at my parents while I hunted for a reasonable place to rent that would be close enough into town that I could give up my car and just bike to work.  Had discovered a teeny 1-bed next to Laurelhurst, somewhere near 32nd and Stark - but adjacent to the park, so sort of between Stark and Burnside.  Just where the crummier houses leave off and the mansion-y places begin.

I was still sort of suicidal from being wrecked by my experiences in Alaska the summer prior; being molested by one of my roommates there really fucked up my head and I spent that winter after I returned being an utter mess.  I won't describe it.  I've done so before and I don't feel like going down that path just at this moment.  It was horrid.  I wanted to die but I didn't exactly want to have to be directly implicated in the process, so I just did all kinds of self-destructive things instead.

The abortion was out-of-pocket.  My boyfriend paid for it, as well as for the additional general anesthesia expense (more than doubling the cost, making the total around $500, as I recall).  He had allowed me to make the decision (I'm sure it hurt him very much to leave that up to me, particularly because of the one I did make) as to whether I would terminate the pregnancy, but he insisted that I have general anesthesia as opposed to local.  He knew I couldn't face such a thing if I were only locally anesthetized.

(I still live with the guilt of having had the privilege, the luxury, of general anesthesia for the procedure; because of all the other women who experience it with only local anesthetics, their thoughts of what is happening to them intact afterward.  It is - it is unfair, it is cruel, and I will never forgive that small part of me that was too weak to face what I was doing to myself, to my would-be baby, too weak to watch.  To be present.  I am still ashamed at my own cowardice in the face of it.  When others *must* face it because they cannot afford to do otherwise.)

I never allowed, to myself, to him, to anyone, that I was hurt.  That it hurt me to do such a thing.  I only cried when I tried to get assistance from the state of Oregon in order to cover the cost of the procedure and they turned me down, because, as they explained, I made approximately twenty-seven dollars too much for them to give me even their most basic level of coverage.  The person I spoke with said that I would have to have a child in order to receive benefits.  I explained, but you see, I plan to remove any need for Oregon to have to cover me on their plan on a long-term basis through this procedure that I need and cannot afford, if you could only help cover it.  I'm SAVing you! - the state! - MONEY!, I said, plaintive.  The woman simply shook her head, her mouth a line.  No.  No, she told me, adamant, you can't receive coverage *until* you have the child.  I said, hah aahhaahha hahah.  That's so funny.  I am trying to terminate the thing that would require you to pay for my insurance.  I just need a little help to do so.  And she said, Yes.  I understand.  You still can't get coverage until you *have* the child.

(The irony, of course, is that those who would insist on a woman having her baby regardless of the circumstances, is that she must then scrap and scrape and save and work three jobs in order to support the child, because there is simply NO WAY those same insistent folks will fork over the social services, i.e., their taxes, to assist such a woman in caring for the baby after it is born.  No! to the welfare! queens!, they scream.  Get a job, loser!, they scream.  Have your baby, even if you were raped!, they shriek, and in the same breath, they blaspheme you for leaning on the system to raise that child.  The one they said you had to have because otherwise God would smite you.  You shouldn't have had sex, they simper, if you protest.  You slut, they imply, the corners of their mouths tucked in just-so.  That the man who fucked you and didn't have any requirements post-fuck?  Ah, well.  Such is a man's luck.  Oh, shame on those men, they cluck, their feathers bunched tight around their big asses.  But where is the man?  And where is the evidence?  And does that man get to go on and have a profitable, head-held-high kinda life?  While his child's mother toils and strains and struggles, the system with its allure of come-hither-and-have-your-child, the system giving you another good fucking-over, once you've had it, where you must place your child in daycare and work during the day and maybe another part-time or full-time job at night to pay for the daycare and the health care and the fucking mandatory car seat that costs a minimum of $150 for a decent one, never mind the pricey kind that consumerreports.org insists on if you're a good, mindful parent and want your child to actually be *safe*, the $300-and-up variety, and there are the co-pays and the medicines, the over-the-counter cough syrups and inhalants that you try to give your sick, miserable child in vain in order to help them sleep so you can sleep so you can work so you can pay for the care and the medicines and the formula because you couldn't breastfeed because you had to go back to work when the baby was six weeks old and you couldn't afford a breast pump and then you find out that the formula and the bottles and cough syrup are possibly, no, DEFinitely toxic for your baby, your sweet, sweet baby they insisted you have because God would curse you and where in the world are those people now?, you wonder in the spare moments when you have the energy and presence of mind to wonder and not fall into the pit of despondency over your life, your whirlwind maddening life of work and toil and never seeing the child you gave birth to because they told you you must, backed you into a corner and threatened you with everlasting hell if you didn't listen, and now the aspersions and looks and glances you get on a daily basis when you're with your child, the whispers and the looks and the withering eyes that burn you, because, while it's no longer socially acceptable to comment to a single mother that she's a slutty sinner, the eyes still have it.  Oh, they have it.  And the man is off somewhere in Ibiza with his new girlfriend, the one he met in college while you were with your baby working sixty hours a week and barely surviving.

And the irony of the system giving you the fucking-over after you've already been fucked over is not lost on you.

But I know you're already aware of that.  I just had to say it.  It feels good to say it.)

I left.  Head high.  Stumbling a little on the way out to my boyfriend's car, and letting that be the reason I cried.  But then, crying, because I knew, if I couldn't acquire state assistance, on my oh-so-robust wage, that there were women already with babies and kids who HAD to live on less than I was doing in order to receive state-provided benefits.  SHITTY ones.

and I cried for myself because I had to go through the procedure because I was too unstable to have a baby.  Drunk.  Drugs.  Series of relationships too miserable to recount.  Latest boyfriend totally, bizarrely different, but -- based on my experience leading up to him, I knew better than to rely on the notion that it would survive my - me.  however, I wrapped up that crying portion of the crying menu quick.  didn't need to linger.  this was too important.

I could not do that to another human, not knowingly.  Not with the little handful of sanity I clutched, desperate, like a miser with a small collection of dirty pearls gathered from dustbins around a large city with dark pockets.

I had a dream about it, just before the procedure.  A morning or two prior.

I don't want to relate the dream.  But I remember it.  I still don't know what it meant, if anything.  But that it has remained with me, that dream, makes me feel its significance, all of these years hence. 

I woke up after the surgery and I was sick.  So sick.  I threw up.  A lot.  My old friend happened to be a nurse's aid, worked with the doctor who performed my surgery, only at a different clinic.  I'd requested that she be present during the thing to - watch over me.  She held me while I barfed in the clinic's toilet.

Weeks later, I still bled freely.  New, orange-red blood (because my uterus had been swept clean, so the lining had to replenish itself, which takes time).

I will never forget.

I will never forget what it meant to decide with lightning speed that I would not produce a child that I could not give up if I were to carry it to term because I don't trust people.  That I could not be a mother to. 

I occasionally -- maybe once every few years -- do the math.  Think about him, especially now, in relation to my son.  How old he'd be (of course I have no idea whether it was a boy or a girl but I have somehow, in more recent times, chosen his gender as boy.  Not sure why). 

My health exception was life-and-death.  My own life.  The child's life.  My prescience regarding this subject was crystal clear, the cleanest pane of glass you ever laid eyes on.  I could not mother that child, I could not give it up to some stranger to mother.  I would have done terrible things that the child -- oh, I don't dare think of what I would have done.  I cannot.  They are unspeakable.  Unthinkable.

I was not in the third trimester.  But my health was at stake.  Sanity.  My life.

Now - I have a child.  One who will be (relatively) unscathed by my current bordering-on-insanity, because of, thanks to, my supportive, wonderful parenting partner, and our family.  (I hope.)  This, after I've aged and settled down and done some soul-searching and taken some anti-depressants and other shit, besides.  Grown up a little (as much as someone stricken with the permanent childishness of adhd can).

Is that not to be made exception for?

I would not have this now, my son would not exist, this life we have now, it would not exist, if I had not been able to decide to release that first child from me.

Is that not a health exception worth excepting?  Accepting?  Is that something someone, anyone, could have possibly decided for me, given all the details I have deliberately not shared here - the ones that would convince the most ardently anti-me beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was choosing correctly - that is, if thou hast spent any longer than a sliver of time inside this skin, this spirit?  That thou canst do if not in possession of this uterus, this heart, this head?  And to think, for but a moment, that thou wouldst attempt to do so for any NUMBER of women.  I am mortified by it.

Am I a blip on the lefty-liberal agenda?

dry.

I think about my grandpa a lot, lately, while I paint.  I think about his having been a painter, coming home from work at the end of the day smelling of turpentine and sweat.  I like to imagine, as my brush goes over its canvas of wall and wood, what he used to think about as he crouched and stood on ladders and peered into corners, his steady hand at work on the task.  I like to pretend I can smell him, hear him, hear into his head, to know how he felt about his family, his life.  My father has described how, when he was small, he would beg to go to work with his father, just so that he could be there to pick up small items, run for things grandpa needed, help lay drop cloths, wash brushes.  He said he felt such pride in doing these things for his dad. 

When grandpa came home, down the alley, in his ancient truck with the running boards on the sides, my dad and his siblings would rush toward the vehicle and leap onto the boards, riding back to the house, yelling and screaming, excited as all get out, because Dad was home.  About what he might have saved for them in his tin lunch pail.  Maybe a scrap of sandwich, a piece of cookie, something.  From what my dad says, no matter the item; it was always a treat when it came from grandpa's leftover lunch.

I like to think about these things as I hunker down in the face of the economic storm headed toward us, uncertain of its breadth and its speed, pondering my grandpa, pondering his having faced such a storm with my grandmother and already one son in their care (my dad's oldest brother, his senior by ten or so years). 

I drag the bristles up and down through the paint as it toughens in its hastily-drying state.

And I whistle at the rapidity of things.  Of the mind-skewing surreality of our time.

smut blogging.

I refrain from posting really often, because there are so many smutty items of business that dance like wee, naked gingerbread hookers across my mental screen that I just really don't think you, yes, you, care to read about.

You're welcome.

(unless -- ?)

(cough you love smut cough?)

(cough please debbie post more smut more often hack?)

You know.  Feel free to - discuss.  With me.  Here.

I'm (really obviously) pretty open.

quick, quick, out with it before it quicksilver-slithers away.

I'm living in a hovering state of panic about blog posts; reading them, writing them.  I'm filled with a daily-more-noxious sense, the threat of my ability to do either will be snuffed out, those wee licks of flame that still tease the bottom of the cylinder in which they reside in my core.

I cannot seem to write.  I cannot seem to tease out those flames, lure them into a cascading roar-and-echo, my leaping store of faith in my ability, diminished, diminishing, to forever put words together on a page, knowing they will succeed once they have joined up, like a militia, well-ordered and shining bright with their buttons and filigreed elements in the fiery light of the reader's eye, shins connected to smooth shoe-tops that come down clean and firmly-planted on the firmly-packed dirt of the trail, the trail that leads, winding, into the middle-distance of harps and furies and a smoky-amber'd ether.

It's thanks only to the efforts, hard-fought, I'm sure, of those who I rarely brave reading, it's thanks to their more quietly exerted, yet exceedingly exquisitely wrought, perfectly-tumbled gems, set to their most lovely angles in supple lines and worshipful sentences and passages of humbling brilliance, that I am even capable of 'fessing my fears of reading of writing, of hearing of their perfect, poignant, gripping telling of things such as:  pain, and the resulting discomfort, and of their experiences with shocking, raw beauty.  I owe them a debt I'll never repay, not because I lack the desire; merely the means.

But here is a game attempt to say it, to thank them for their work, their constant polishing and laboring over their love, for sharing it, bravely, regularly, in a way that I cannot.  For whatever reasons that I may or may not remember just now. 

the no-one-cares post, edition 308.

I hate blogging.  I love the community, but I hate the blogging part.

I'm psyched about SF, but I'm completely terrified that, even though everyone has basically already witnessed me handing myself my own ass via the dancing solo mio at the first social function of last year's conference, at a bar where there was no dance floor, and yes, I'm aware that "basically" is crap and constitutes English-abuse, I will manage to somehow further disappoint everyone and only be able to grunt monosyllabically this time around, and everyone will say, wow.  She can't write AND she's a fucking boor/bore/halitosis-riddled drunken hot tranny mess w/excruciatingly overblown sense of fashion that has no basis in reality whatsoever (take yr pick).

What I *really* want to know is, when do we get to all just begin communicating telephathically and BASTA with this writing-it-all-down shit?

*taps nails, twists hair around boring (aka left) hand's index finger*

a lady of very small brain.

I just ate some of the cookies I made yesterday (and no, Gwen, I did *not* eat any lunch yesterday, either, just cookies, so I felt kind of hollow and light-headed toward the end of the day, especially after gulping down two glasses of Andrew Rich's decadent white table wine - tabula rasa - screw top!, double points!). 

I chased the cookies down with a more-than-half-full (ha!  see?  optimist) glass of coldy-cold milk, something I almost never allow myself since Jack started drinking it, because I save it for him.  Almost unconsciously do I do this.  Same goes for fresh fruit.  I buy loads of it, the expensive, local, organic kind, and Caleb and I give it to him.  Once in awhile, one of us eats an apple or something, but mostly Jack has been granted quasi-sole proprietorship of the bounties of the fruit bowl.  I'd try to be sad about it, but my deep mother-longing to see him eat well and thrive stubbornly resists such silly emotional play.  I figure, hey, he's already eating me, eating my knowledge, eating my energy, eating my spirit, and don't think for a minute I don't give it freely and with a full, amply extended will and heart, because, oh, hell, do I ever. 

Just - it's a little strange, sometimes, staring into the blur of the chrome edging of the butcher's counter, catching a glimpse of the wizening skin 'round my eyes, my eyes are my best feature, btw (or so I've been told - who really knows, as to *facts*), so yes, it pains a little, this best-feature aspect being surrounded by increasingly fragile, ever-thinning cobwebs of tissues, that will eventually be the thing people point to when I am eighty and whisper, look, you can see that she once had lovely eyes, though now they are rheumy and wistful, their whispers like whiskers that flick past my ears of knowingness and beyond, into the darkening room at my back, and I will see into their futures and their also-wizening eyes and years and comprehend that they will see a similar view - I know all of these things as I recognize a watery, vague reflection of myself, this slowly-quickening age, in the butcher's chrome-edged counter.  I stare at the bottles of wine in boxes at my feet, still hip-shod, for how long who knows but today they rock something the kids still recognize and so I am stay'd my fate for a moment.

This morning, before I took Jack to his daycare, I was emptying the filter on the vacuum cleaner and singing The Lady is a Tramp (while he badgered me to sing Heavenly, something I've lately begun crooning to him before bed, and it's his current favorite on the mommy top hits-list).  As I knocked the filter against the edge of the garbage can, the big one just outside the door of the garage, singing the last line with a big finish, along the lines of my own persistent tradition, "that's why the lady! is! a! traaaamp!," he repeated, "that's why the lady is trapped?, is that right mommy?"

I nodded.  Yes.  Yes, honey, she is trapped.  The lady is trapped.

She may wrestle in its cloying tangle, but she was ensnared willingly, and remains so.  Willing.

I gave him a smacky, loud kiss on the head, and we went back into the house.

what it's like when you have a disability but can't get assistance because you forget to call because of the disability:

I'm on hold but it's already afterhours for the mental health triage for Kaiser and I have a feeling I should've tried to call maybe slightly earlier than I did, which was, hilariously, right at five o' clock.  You know.  Quittin' time.  So, basically, I nailed la hora solid.

What I want to know is this:  after I get the help I need, and b'lieve you me, I need it, N.E.E.D., should I write a book about my ADHD experiences?  Now don't you all (hee!  I said "you all," like there are more than three of you reading) kiss my ass and say, sure, honey, you should do it!, sure's shootin', don't just blow a bunch of hot air at me; tell me if you think there might be someone who would benefit from my semi-horrific collection of disarranged, colossally messy life puzzle pieces, none of which fit together in any coherent fashion.

Or, conversely, tell me if you think that, oh, poor dear, she really *is* a big, sodden, ridiculous mess (and please take note of my having deliberately NOT described myself as a fierce, hot tranny mess, b/c I am simply not that interesting anymore, people), and she just needs to find somewhere quiet where she can whisper to herself and rock out in her kewl granny chair.

Book?  Or whispery chair scenario?

It all starts here, people.  IT. ALL. STARTS. HERE.  (It also all falls out of my ear, or ass, depending on your pov, or maybe quite possibly where you're standing, in which case, I apologize and -- you're right.  Absolutely no more beans/beer at the same time.  Scout's honor.)

Dweedle deedle dee!

Feminist. Mother. ADHD-Afflicted. Lurid-Past-Possessing. What Does It All Add Up To?

I don't know.  I've been trying to do the math on just what my problem was for so long (and finally got the sum worked out; for those of you following for the last few years, you know it's that I was diagnosed as having ADHD, much to my simultaneous relief/chagrin), but the complex self-interrogation left me incapable of dealing with larger-picture stuff like politics, gender issues, racism, and the like. 

One of my fellow MOMocrats referenced this (really thought-provoking) article on Senator Clinton and Fourth-Wave Feminism today in an email.  I read the whole thing and was challenged by it at several points throughout the piece; I encourage you to read it and consider just where you think you may be as a woman in our culture.

I want to break it all down right this minute, but -- wouldn't you know it? -- life, my life, as a mother and partner and household manager and small-business helm-er are all summoning me away from the writing of these things. 

I'll still be musing about them, though, and not just today; no, these are the issues that I turn over in my mind on a regular basis.  They are a part of me.  And I want to understand.  Because I want to be a part of the solution, a part of the process that moves us forward and away from the stagnation of negativity, of gender bias and race bias and people bias.

So I guess this is sort of a to-be-continued piece.  Feel free to do some of your own analyzation on the matter and link back, and either email me or leave a comment about your posts so I can update this one with your links.  This conversation *does* need to be had - much like the one Senator Barack has begun on race.  It's all timely as hell, isn't it?

And I'm energized.  Ready.  Let's do this.

the current dem candidacy smackdown, as viewed through the lense of an ex-stripper.

Back in the dark ages when I was, indeed, a stripper - and I happened to be one for several years, so it wasn't as though I just dabbled; I know from whence I speak - I encountered loads of conflict.  From every arena, in every gender-on-gender way.  I saw men fight men; once, when Jay, my best gay boyfriend, drove me to work for an evening shift, he kind of didn't really want me to go in because right before I got out of the car, we watched a stream of dudes exiting the rear of the building, the first of whom was badly bloodied from face to groin.  The second was carrying aloft what appeared to be a javelin, but was, in fact, I kind of remember, a closet pole dowel thingy (you love me for my scientific specificity, huh).  The first guy had evidently stabbed some dude, boyfriend to one of the other dancers, and then got walloped by some yokels.  It was dumb.  Another friend of ours, along for the ride, happened to be an EMT and was all, "do you think I should *gulp* go in?"  I said, sure, yeah, alrighty.  The subtext of that statement was YES PLEASE DO NOT MAKE ME GO IN THERE ON MY OWN.  It ended up fine, and I danced the night away to fun tunes like "Rock and Roll All Night (and Party Every Day)" - it has been my humble opinion for the last few years that the title of that song ought to be altered to "Walk and Crawl All Night, and Potty Every Day," but then, I'm the mother to a toddler who has lately made me want to chew through my chains and bolt.  But that's just this week.

Women Who Weld Together, uh, Support Their Families.

Here's a project that could certainly be looked to as a model to expand upon with the new, Democratic administration that takes the reins come January of '09. (I refuse to acknowledge any other potential outcome.  I'm blithely optimistic like that.)

A quote from Melissa Kutz, one of the participants in the project:

“I spent a lot of years trying to figure out what to do, how to make things work, and after a while you reach a point where you’re completely hopeless,” Ms. Kutz said recently at Climb Wyoming’s training center. It is a barracks-like building at Laramie County Community College, where workstations are a jumble of computers, blowtorches, copper pipe and circuit boards.

“You hear it all: ‘You’re white trash. You’re a welfare mom. Why’d you have kids if you can’t feed them?’ ” Ms. Kutz said. “But I just have never been as hopeful as I have in the past few weeks.”

This isn't a national issue; it's our conjoined human plight.  But we've gotta start somewhere.  I think it's precisely the kind of thing that our Dem nominee ought to be encouraged to broaden and develop in the coming years, if we're going to breathe new life into the idea of the American Dream - the one everyone gets to participate in.

Cross-posted at MOMocrats.

or, you know, okay, i could completely disagree with myself.

I've said so many dumb things in my years playing a human being here on this planet that I'm not surprised to catch myself out having said one more dumb thing.

For instance, I've now switched stances wholeheartedly from what I just posted about ignoring the network media, although not so much about ignoring them, but mainly ignoring the suggestion that McCain's winning because he's no longer having to struggle with another candidate for the nomination, while Barack and Hillary are still in a heated contest.  Rather, what this dude says:

Matchups Against McCain Will Suffer

Expect Clinton to start closing the general election performance gap on Obama, but not necessarily gain on McCain. I have long argued that whoever has the monentum in the primary campaign will always perform better in the general election. For the next several weeks, neither Clinton nor Obama will have momentum in the primary campaign, but McCain probably will. As our campaign gets nastier and remains somewhat inconclusive, there is a good chance McCain will gain on both Clinton and Obama.

I dislike eating my words, because they taste narsty, but I'll do it.  Bleah.

(Mainly, I just DON'T want this to be true! - I don't want to see the Dems infight to the point that we can't win the election in November - we are only hurting ourselves with this crap.  Hill and B DO just need to have a thumb-wrestling match and call it, already.  And we know they won't.  And it makes my head hurt.)

look, i'm sorry. really.

I know.  I said I was quitting. 

And - I meant it!  I did!  I don't say these things idly, just to dance the feathery toy and see who will bat at it with vigor.  I want to quit.  STILL.  But I'm - I'm just no GOOD at it.  Do you want to know how long it took me to quit smoking cigarettes?  It took me, no fooling, ten years, and that was the *wind-down*.  I started saying I was quitting when I was twenty-four.  I then went off and on until -- wait.  When *was* the last time I smoked?  Well, I don't remember, but don't get all huffy with me.  My point is still the same.  I suck the BIGGEST, nastiest, ugliest, wrinkliest, uh, yeah.  I was gonna try to emphasize how much I suck by saying the thing that most easily comes to mind after saying the words "I suck," but then I chickened out just there at the last split second.  You would have, too, if you knew your MIL read your blog occasionally.  I should go wash my brain out with soap.

Anyway.  I suck at quitting. 

So don't you look all smirky and self-satisfied, when you see I've once again written an entry, that I said I was quitting, and I lied, and now my word has been worn even *more* paper-thin than it was prior to that statement, my word is beginning to resemble fishnet stockings, which is kind of hot, so maybe I LIKE coming off cried-wolfish, you know, trampy-wolfish-fishnet-untrustworthy red-lipped-come-hither-go-away-get-back-here no-actually-go-the-fuck-away-you-louse, not YOU internet babe, just the pretend louses, the ones that still hang about in the gray shadows *beneath* the treehouse where my brain lives, because oh my GOD how many times I've said it, in reference to just about everything under the sun, and meant it, meant it like I've never meant anything ever before in my entire, sad, miserable, bloody life, ooh!, that reminds me of something *else* I want to write about, but - *ahem*.  I meant it, I still mean it, I just -- I can't.

*hangs head in bleak shame*

It's this weird thing I'm tangling with right now; this whole understanding I've been trying to grapple with since the ADHD diagnosis/confirmation.  I finally put together that I have, for as long as I can remember, always done the opposite of what I say I'm going to do.  Which was really horrible for situations like, say, church, where during Wednesday prayer meetings, we would sit quietly and discuss sinful stuff with one another, and open up about things we were struggling with.  The whole idea was this: to put it out there, to confess to it amongst the group, to have others to be accountable to.  Accountability.  It was this huge, big thing.  So that's kind of my first important memory of deliberately breaking the accountability clause; that is, the moment I'd confess it, stating that I would never want to do that thing, in the very next moment, I'd LONG to do it.  Or long to not do it.  Whichever was apropos.

But I know I didn't begin the habit there; I recall my mother helping me with selecting clothes by saying, "Well, I know whichever one I point to, you're just going to choose the opposite."  (She didn't *say* harrumph afterward, but she looked it.  Strongly.)  That started happening regularly when I was -- prior to my being an adolescent?  I think.  I don't know.  It's foggy up in here in the treehouse in my head where my brain likes to hang out.

I'm a rebel.  For no good, apparent reason that I can suss out.  I've tried - I've laid awake for hours, those horrid, middle-of-the-night anguished hours, trying to do the math.  I've even punched with my index finger at an imagined calculator in a mad, scrambled, exhausted attempt to arithmetically resolve this giant conUNdrum of stupidity that dwells in the treehouse between my two still-clogged ears. 

I say I'm going to do something.  I mean business.  The very next moment, I want nothing to do with that idea - I want to run, shouting, yelling, away, away!, and never think of it again.   And I kind of do it, too.  I mean, sans the ridiculous banshee behavior.  I do it internally.  I pretend I never was going to do that thing, I pretend it doesn't freaking exist.  *What* idea?  What in tarnation are you TALKING about?  Never heard of it.  Nope.  Nu-uh.  lalalala!

I say I am going to stop doing something.  And it is like a new, beautiful thing.  It is like ambrosia.  It is my favorite thing in the world.

Now.  I know this bit, I get it - the oppositional behavior (because I am fated to live as a toddler for my entire existence).  But if it has to be, then can't I make it work for me?  Can't I somehow psyche myself out, trick myself, fool the treehouse-dwelling mental tissues to peep out only in time to see what I *want* them to?  (Granted.  This means having more than one brain; a brain that hangs out in an imaginary treehouse, and another, separate, *smart* brain that does the work, cleans up the place, keeps order, is the pit boss.  Is that even possible?  And before you answer that ridiculous question, be aware that Bobby McFerrin was able to sing with two parts of his voice simultaneously, one high note, one low note, sustained.  Now, you, with your hands on your hips all sassy, go ahead and mock my idea.  It's not THAT dumb.

Well.  Okay.  It's pretty fucking dumb.  But - still!  Bobby! McFerrin! People!)

Sigh.

Anyway.  If someone could, you know, explain how I might manage to sleep better because I can finally put the imaginary calculator away, stop doing the musty math on how to trick my brain, using the same brain, I would be grateful.

I need some fucking sleep.