LaurieWrites

Everything After

*I have no interest in publishing this post, but there you have the story of my blog life. 

I'm back home, wandering the rooms, frantically pounding out work that didn't happen when it was supposed to because so many other things were, not really sure of my space yet, pressing my thumbs against my arms for some sense of solidity. There is dust everywhere, half-dead pots of herbs, anthems on the tv and a newly strange sliding-glass-sized view. 

I feel weird, ungainly in a different way than I usually do in August. I promised myself last year at this time I would have a refuge slated. I dreamed a place -- anywhere in Europe, mostly, or maybe just a beach anywhere, because I am predictable -- to ease into where I could breathe out the exhaust of intense ideas and social interactions, of the competing pressures of moving and traveling and presenting and being, of speaking and hearing millions (what had to be, right?) millions of words, alphabets of them crashing into each other and melting in the New York heat.

I didn't end up doing that for myself, of course.  It was an extra, unhappenable thing, that ended up seeming untenable for lack of dollars and sense. So I'm trying to make that happen here, which would work better if I could drum up the energy for groceries beyond coffee rations and soccer game Prosecco.

It's not so bad, as it always isn't, unless it really is. It's quiet but a little too much, the familiarity not exactly what I wanted, but it will have to do, because the urge to work to go anywhere in this moment is absent.

**************************************************************

I want to be better this year. I am dissatisfied with myself, my thought processes, the way I dwell on wrongs. I'm not proud of so many things I'm thinking and feeling, of my dissatisfactions and my petty irritations. I am good things amid the wreck, but it's the wreck I mostly see. Mirrors are hard things.

I don't know what will happen now. I'm scared of it, to tell the truth. There is this next expanse of time to fill that I don't understand quite yet. I feel like I'd been looking at life since May as a pre- and post-BlogHer proposition, and now that the post- is here I'm out of mulligans (That is a golf term. I'm pretending to know something about golf now. See? I'm a damn dirty liar.)

I'm afraid of not doing whatever it is that I'm capable of doing, basically. I'm afraid of not fulfilling a prophecy that I can't possibly know, but feel like I should.

I'm afraid of being alone, of lack of love, and a little bit, of myself. That I'll never get it. That I'll dwell too much in possibility and miss the exit. 

I worry that I'll always be one step behind, that what I leave won't mean anything, that the things I've broken down will be the story. I'm sick of myself, of my indecision, of any kind of unhappiness, of grieving what I've lost and, worse, what I just can't have. I'm sick of working on boundaries and letting go. I'm sick of working on anything. I'm mad at myself for the things I can't stop being sad about, for resenting the relatively small things I have to endure, for not being more graceful in disappointment and want, for my inability to recover from pain more quickly, for my tendency to dwell, for being the worst. person. IN THE WORLD, right? 

I hate that I'm embarrassed to write this down, that I know I'll be embarrassed to send it out into the world, navel-gazing, self-loathing bullshit. Emotional dreck, whatever. 

I know I can be better, is the thing. I know that all I can do is take responsibility for the things I've done that aren't so good, and move on, to dare to hope, I guess, for a little slant of sun. 

I wish it would hurry up, though -- the better-getting -- because I am tired of this particular stretch of verge-of-midlife-suburban-wanderer highway. I aso know that I can sit down on my living room rug and turn up my hands and invite it, too, that I'm probably missing it in the fray. I know that I can forgive myself for the things I smack myself around for, that I can say for sure that even my most ridiculous actions are generally rooted in some hazy good intention, that I am not really all that bad. 

Maybe I feel like if I dump this out old-style  the poison of my thought processes that are wrecking up my plans will seep out of me. I told the people who so kindly and remarkably (honestly, I could not believe it. I was terrified to see it, as much as I was pleased and gratified) filled a room the other day to listen to Neil and Schmutzie and me that I am never as happy as a writer or an online person or a person of any kind as when I come back to this empty white blog box and type stuff into it, so maybe this is just some sick way of proving that true, that there's a comfort and satisfaction in it even when I can't see the screen for dumbass tears. 

**************************************************************

I need something better, you guys. It's been a long time coming dancing in front of me. I don't mind working but I feel like I've been grasping, and no good comes of that after a time. I think I know that I have to do some radical, physical, movement to get to what it is, the yard and the sun and the dog and the face I can kind of see but not quite, that I want to acknowledge as my truth, somewhere I can land to do what I know I want to do. I can't sit here anymore, not in this zip code or this head space, and expect to have the generalized sense of being on the right path that all of this 2012 drama has been about. 

I know this, and I know it has to start now. I knew it when I was walking those crazy halls in New York and I knew it when I hugged my friends with a peculiar sense of desperation. I really knew it when I bought myself an extravagant lunch and then took two cabs and finally ran for a train only to come back to sit in this spot again. I know it when I look for what I'll never find on the internet and yet can't seem to see here either, when I refuse phone calls and shut people down, when I do whatever it is I do to knit together a routine. 

I know it. I don't really want to, because for some reason it is a hard last hurdle to jump, but I do. 

This time I really do. 

*Photo by Leslie Fandrich, who is a very sweet soul, among other very good things. Text by Robin Plemmons, who is Robin Plemmons, master of train horns and human hearts. 

PS: One more thing! Tonight, Alexis Hinde posted a lovely video in answer to a dream Schmutzie had last night about Bret Michaels, who is one of my favorite last vestiges of the hair metal culture of my teenaged years, and who -- I am not kidding you -- I admire for his staying power. Say what you will, but dude is a master of reinvention, and also a mogul.

Every Rose Has Its Thorn is one of my favorite songs of all time, and for reasons only she can know, Alexis offered to sing it. She did a beautiful job, and it made me feel much better about life, the universe, and everything before I called it a day. We're not sure if it's cool to post it here, but just knowing it's out there makes me feel better.

It's the little things, the little things that are big things, that keep us going.  Thank you, Alexis, and Schmutzie for everything else, pretty much. 

Sunday is nobody's business

I have so much stuffed up in my head, and a compulsion to write, and I can't seem to get it out. 

I am all kinds of everywhere. I have been to Seattle and back. I loved it there. I have stories about it. I should probably tell those. I also have pictures. I should probably upload those. 

Since I came home on Thursday morning so, so early, my already-challenged focus has been broken. But it appears amid all that has been coming at me from outside, I've been obsessed with cleaning my apartment, a task that is every day effort, as I am basically a shitty housekeeper, and mostly I am so interested in things that don't have to do with chores that I get yanked off my course with things that are not normal in polite company, and oh look, there's a bag of cherries on the coffee table, and the mail falls down behind the tiny table by the door. If people ask me what I'm doing, I often say, "I'm trying to get this place organized," just like my grandmother would gesture towards her hopelessly cluttered dining room table every day of her life and sigh and say, "It looks just like Miz Larsen's in here, this is terrible," in a tone that insinuated it would remain like Miz Larsen's -- a neighbor up the street whose descendants may now be candidates for Hoarders -- in spite of its terribleness because now we had a scapegoat so would you like some coffee? You can set it on the address books (always more than one, I had no idea why then, but now I understand fully, I even use the same kinds of pens. IMPRINTING.) Don't even worry about the rings. 

Anyway. The laundry is entirely done now, in spite of my interloper neighbor from DOWNSTAIRS coming up to steal the washers last night, INFIDEL BASICALLY. The piles of clothing that I mostly hate are in less than crazeballs chaos, although the final sorting for giveaways and stacking into an as-yet-undetermined storage system is still unfinished, so I've just been ignoring those until I google the perfect storage system, because do I need one of those? I need one, badly.

I also have some groceries, if not particularly inspiring ones. The perishables are all stowed away. My list of things I want to make is sketched in my head for this week's return grocery visits, and I have spices and a knife set on my list of things to add to this parade of stuff that I'm trying to control in the coming days, because, you know, FOOD. Food is so important to me. (I am going to make pickles, for example. I decided that this week, after I had some of the most delicious pickles made by the person I was talking to at the time. Does anyone know where to buy a proper crock for pickles in DC?)

And yet it still totally looks like Miz Larsen's here (that "Miz" is bothering me, but that is exactly how my grandmother said it and I can't help it. It appears to be a tic right now.) I'm planning on that changing this week. 

I have been busy. 

I keeled over sideways on a cross-country flight, no longer as embarrassed by the threat of snoring as I was exhausted, listening to this talky talky man behind me saying how he hadn't been back to North Carolina since 1982 several times over until it buzzed my brain enough so I could sleep. I woke up drooling unattractively into a torn open bag of Southwest cheese crackery things, my earbud jammed halfway into my cramping ear, cranky that I wasn't home, grateful for no turbulence. 

I ate crabs today, an hours-long, long-overdue feast of a meal in a gorgeous setting that seemed to calm me in a way I knew I needed to be calmed but I wasn't sure how to make happen.

I tended a grave yesterday. I rinsed the scum of the underground off of a metal vase tucked down there for safekeeping and lawn mowing purposes, scrubbed the green film off with my fingers as best as I could, and finally, marginally dissatisfied, I filled it with water and placed it right side up with a few flowers from my newly deceased aunt's haul on my godfather's headstone. He resides in the same cemetery where a good number of my recent ancestors are, just one quadrant over. He was a bachelor, the longtime boyfriend of my aunt, who couldn't marry her, she claimed, because her divorce in the years of no divorces had never yielded an annulment, so the church was all, whatever. He died young, 53. His dust and metal plaque now reside just inches from his parents, underneath a shady tree. I don't think anyone goes to visit him anymore, and as much as I don't  believe that people are where their decaying bodies lie, it still feels like something that is nice to do. He was naturally great with kids, especially with me -- snarky but not creepy, showing a smart little person that he knew she could handle it. I think I learned to need a foil from him, and maybe the turn of a joke in the moment, too. He brought grocery bags of Italian deli perfect foods -- chipped ham, always chipped for perfect stacked sandwiches -- to my Nanny's house for lunches. He drank Schlitz and had what I know now I'd recognize as a delightfully sick sense of humor, as much as I know I could still see him leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his head. Anyway, it felt entirely right to clean up his spot. I think I will go back more often. 

Since I landed late late Wednesday night I have seen so many people from my extended family, called to mind so many memories, watched the world's most elderly altar boy stand guard at the funeral mass of my aunt, who was my first memory of independence and single parenting, of a woman who scrapped out her life in spite of difficulty, who raised great people who contribute to the world, all while being kind and conscious of others, all the time. I have spent time with her daughters and their families, fine women who have crafted lives out of nothing but love and hope and skill in a weird world, who relate to me in different ways for different reasons, who I'm happy to have back in my life a little closer in spite of the reason.

In my own strange little space, I have drafted and saved three abandoned blog posts, mad at my own dumb words and their inability to hang together. I have eaten mostly pretty badly. I gazed up at the blue sky (amazing weather here this week. Perfect.) wondering how to fix some things, deciding what else to leave behind. I'm carefully reading Joan Didion's elegaiac pre-death memoir about the life and death of her daughter and her own path into aging. It's made me think about my own style in an almost-pretentious way, my own work, my own mother, my own lack of a child, my own life. 

I got a little sunburned today, sucking down passable bloody Marys in a strapless dress in the sunshine. I have been incredibly hard on myself all week, so hard you have no idea. And tomorrow, in terms of the calendar of my world, I will start again. 

Happiness Is a Random Picture of a Lemon and a Tree

Leaving my job plus a few other recent brain breaks triggered signs of the descent into depression again, a danceathon with minor madness that accompanies major life change.

Even good change can be strange and mood-altering, in spite of reserves, support systems, whatever it takes to get through from day to day. It still sucks, it isn't good at all, and it's such a pain in the ass to write this down again. It feels so predictable, yet every time I'm shocked that it's back, that I can feel so at loose ends with myself, that the pieces scoot into old, unhelpful patterns, managed by old, invisible ouija board hands.

At least the anxiety is over now. It was so bad in May that I felt like the top of my head was going to fly off, frequently. Sleeping was a nice plan, because that offers some kind of physical break in that action, but that wasn't working so well either, and when I finally did it, it was the drugged sleep of the mood-altered damned, with dreams about people I don't even like anymore much less have any desire to see naked. 

My mind is not my friend sometimes. 

Meanwhile I waste energy I don't have burning up over the unfairness of it all, with just enough self-loathing to keep me stuck, and isolated enough from people who care about me that I grind those relationships down, too. So, you know, nameless faceless sadness and solitude. That's helpful for an extrovert. Some people who have walked this path may relate when I say that feeling a certain way, the downward pull of down, while yanking upwards mentally on the unequal yet opposite rope for several hours a day is exhausting. It makes my body tired and my mind cranky, strangles intentions and conversation and just the sheer joy of sitting still with nothing to do and nowhere to go, unless I plan it. 

But I know these steps, and I take them pretty well -- walk around the muddy puddles,  every single well-worn crack in the mental pavement, head down against the third steep city block on whatever-this-is street. 

That is a picture of a roasted lemon that is here because it's the first one in my Flickr stream that I came across that I really enjoy. I would make a lemonade joke, but, nah.  

I've been thinking a lot about happiness, too, conversely, for a few different reasons, wondering why it's so upsetting to some people that some people aren't, or why it's not easy always to maybe most of the time will ourselves to joy.  For a culture dosed in tragedy, actually, we love to talk about happiness. When you think about what we recognize as a collective -- wars, dead (a few murdered, think about that. That's insane.) presidents, the horror of 9.11, any of the things we were forced into dealing with as citizens of a place, or the other, less consistent things, like deaths of celebrities or the day they fall from grace and beat a car with an umbrella -- I don't think we have any room to talk. If we're not celebrating, we're watching, obsessively marking downfalls -- some of us for the sake and hope of rising again, yes, but not everybody.

I'm as complicit in this as anyone. I have to assume we're just programmed. 

We are also each of us comprised of thousands of tiny griefs, (except maybe for you it's 500. I hope so. Maybe. Lucky you.)Maybe five big griefs, if we're lucky? Hopefully not ten. (Maybe three, for you.) We are generally accustomed to slights and sadness. I can sit with you in that, help you cope, not with my eyes closed but almost, I have done it so many times, imprinted by ancestors who walked through times of war and famine, poor dental hygiene, fighting the land for a basic meal. Happiness, at times, even now, is unfortunately suspect, particularly for certain brains. We are not supposed to chase it. It does not come when it is called. It's so hard to trust that, especially when another human being or two or three is involved. How can we mesh our highs and lows when it's hard sometimes to decide on a restaurant? It's pure magic if it happens, even for a minute. But we know it then, or at least I do.

And I don't know about you, but I act out around it. I get nervous and giddy--happy, this is happy -- and I try not to crowd it and especially not to send it away. I work hard at understanding happiness these days, because I want to, although I don't believe what works for one person has any impact at all on another. I ust want to know what in me can make it so elusive, and what I can do to change that. I want it to stay longer. I don't want to go back to where I was before.

At the same time I reject the idea of a tendency towards sadness as a failing, because I've known it involuntarily too many times to think I'd ever have asked for it on purpose. I understand clicks on telephones and tears in parking lots, rejection letters and feelings of exclusion and unwanted inferiority. I understand death and loss and the daily grind of a job that steals serenity. It requires a certain kind of armor to survive the daily ebb and flow of trying and stumbling and getting back up and maybe just maybe getting back to good, to look around the next bend for a sliver of light, so this is not the done deal after all. Grand gestures can be great, joy when it hits is a godsend, but it's rough as a study in contrast, an addict's hit that you can't buy.

Recently, a good thing happened for me. Someone who loves me was so happy for me, I felt the feelings being felt along with me -- pride, recognition, celebration. It made me shy. I wasn't sure if I should take it in or minimize it, and it had nothing to do with her. You're not used to someone being happy for you, are you? she said. And I would have thought that wasn't true, but it was. And in a way that minute was the beginning of some small trust, a fragile agreement between myself and me, that that could actually be, for the first time since I lost it.

Lately , in the face of the big things that are changing, most of them by my own hand and with my own intentioned action, I'm trying to settle in to the every day. Walking. Sitting. Teaching myself to be without grasping because I'm afraid I've already lost what I'm not sure I even wanted in the first place. Waiting for someone else to speak without yapping over them, wanting to use their input to draw conclusions I normally trust to my own occasionally incorrect brain,

I'm not sure I'll ever get it. I may be on some other frequency that won't allow it. Maybe the government should get me one of those foil hats to see if I can channel these strange currencies for good, because when they're really working I'm pretty sure the force could power something pretty big, and I'd like for it to not be my mouth or my brain for a change.

I'm living life in strange vignettes, in fits and starts, really. The ogre comes back and he is chatty and deceptive. He says leavable, unlovable, incapable of understanding or focusing or doing anything the right way. He says that was the wrong choice, the bad idea, that the way you feel in this moment, this unmanageable sense of free-falling into despair is how it has always been since you could remember, so welcome back. 

But the point of all of this was to find me, again, or maybe ever, to be funny again because I feel that way and not because I am performing, to find the space where I want to be -- the space that allows for the unthinkable concept of happiness -- and the whoms and the whatsits.

And in spite of the recent increase in daily management of worn grooves and patterned moods that can be overwhelming at times and keep me from the things that I want so badly, I honestly don't think that I believe him anymore. The trick is to act like I don't, I think, and maybe that will come true. 

All in all and I'm loving every rise and fall.

All in all and I'm
Loving every rise and fall
The sun will make and I will take
Breath to be sure of this
In the end and then
All will be forgiven when
Surrender rises high and I
Gave what I came to give

I didn't get Red Hot Chili Peppers tickets this weekend. I was prepared to do so, and through a technical glitch I wasn't able.

I've been acting like it wasn't a big deal, because oh my God, do you see what else I have to spend and save my money on? Tickets to this show aren't a big deal. I need to learn to practice moderation in the every day and then I know I won't be so pressed when the big things come. I don't even know where I'll BE when these show dates roll around. Who would even go with me? Why am I even concerned about this?

Because.

This is one of my favorite photos I've ever taken, on the inside track at Pimlico five years ago when my boyfriend Anthony Kiedis and Flea and those other guys played Virgin Festival.

It was an amazing day. I was alone, I didn't care. It is a film shot from a disposable camera. I saw the Chilis and the Killers and some other people. It was fantastic. I crawled inside that music.

I loved every rise and fall. How often does that happen?

No one gets to miss the storm of what will be.

December. I cannot believe it. Another year just about burned and what? How did that happen? What happened?  Where did it go? 

I've been running since September, it feels like, inside and out, and with four days of rain and a winter weather advisory today I want to stay home and in bed and let it all shake out. (I have the best bed in all the land. I recommend getting a slightly shittier bed so you don't want to be in it all of the time, but I'm already screwed. I love my bed like a person, except slightly more appropriately.) It's true that things are circling back to some kind of center -- I've been having that thought lately, incessantly, actually: "sometimes the center holds." And I don't know where this comes from except it's what I keep thinking in spite of some data to the contrary from this stupid, irritating writer brain.

I could give you a list of where I've been beyond the bits and pieces I've shared here, but that's probably really boring. I could tell you about the people I've been with and that is so much less of any kind of boring, given as I am to hanging with compelling people whenever possible. But those stories will have to hang themselves on the line one by one. I don't know where to begin, so I'm going to let them pick and choose. 

I don't ever know how to catch up after so much time away. But I can say that I've been to Pittsburgh, California, Philadelphia and then back home. I've been in a place called the Mississippi Delta that I knew nothing of before some friends pointed me there, and it will take a good long while to share just what I think and feel from that experience. I've been consoled by rain on a tin roof and delighted by the sight of the Pee Wee's Big Adventure dinosaurs from the highway enough to put returning to see them on my ever-in-progress life list.

"Au revoir, Simone!" 

"Au revoir, Pee Wee!" 

Such is the state of affairs, constantly, around here. 

(The rain on the roof part is as good as you'd expect, and if you've heard it, you know.) 

I've shriveled from three hours drinking Champagne in a steaming hot tub under desert rain with some of the smartest and nicest people I've ever met. (I am not making that up. I am not.) I have chopped up and roasted a sick amount of winter squash hours before I got on a plane simply because I didn't want it to rot on my friend's counter. I have chaperoned a field trip. I have gawked at William Faulkner's story notes from where he posted them on his bedroom wall a long, long time ago, and watched a late-day southern sun slant beautifully through trees in his backyard. I have bought one single Christmas present that now I have to take back because someone else bought it too. I have won a football helmet autographed by this year's NFL rookie squad, and I have had a genuine Hog teach my best friend and me how to pour a Guinness. I had a wonderful Thanksgiving with my family, twice. I have won a $500 Apple gift card. I have lost a camera. I have held Crow for .5 seconds. I have not been eating my vegetables. I have communicated, incessantly, and mostly well. 

And that is just the past 30 days. I've been lucky, mostly. I'm guided and supported in some kind of providential way by some of the smartest and most compassionate people I have ever known. I have had friendship and love of an insane level thrown at me from various quarters. I've sung my way across four or five states in vastly different parts of the country. I have come to some kind of comfortable truce with not knowing much, with throwing my best light and dark intentions in the washer of the world and sort of hoping for a change that they'll run together. 

I have not been stopped once, not on the highway or in security. I have had two plane rows entirely to myself. I have been -- remarkably, and there are a few people out there who will know just how much -- almost entirely unafraid of flying, for the first time in my life. 

And in the middle of all of the problems and confusion and absolute lack of clarity that I've suffered for months on this latest go-round, I have a core of something now that I know is relatively solid in spite of the fact that my brain is porous and short-sighted enough that surely it could all come undone at any time. 

It's been an interesting span of days. 

Warm Card

I'm not proud of my behavior in Union Station last week. I'm really not. I'm also not proud of yelling at a stranger named Sergio in an unknown location, whose sole purpose in his job is likely to handle being yelled at by people like me. 

I'm also not proud of the fact that I'm listening to Air Supply on purpose right now, but the flip side of that is that I'm not ashamed, so whatever. 

YOU WANT TO CARRY ONNNNNNNNN. 

(Me, in Union Station, in happier, shinier times.) 

I took this crazy trip last week, from DC to New York to, er, Oxon Hill, Maryland, which is now herewith rechristened as "National Harbor", a fancy schmancy East Coast mini-Vegas of a place minus casinos and Elton John and coke and it's-totally-the-heat-not-the-humidity. So I'm wrong, it's minus almost all of the things that make Vegas Vegas, and I'm also pretty sure Nic Cage isn't going to be bottoming out in a hotel room there. But things are really big. 

My argument is failing here. 

Anyway, before I got back to National Harbor (good LORD people, this place is Oxon Hill. You know this, right? OXON HILL.) I was in New York, i.e., my favorite city in the whole wide world. I left Union Station because taking the train is one of my favorite things to do in life. And while I waited for my train, I decided to call my credit card company and confirm that my travel card was clear, as it certainly ought to have been, given that I returned the obscenely expensive camera lens rental six days before. 

I checked the website first, sitting amid a raucous group of Japanese tourists, all of us circled by a transit cop with a bomb-sniffing dog who really liked my bag, because hello there is always some errant piece of fruit or a whoopie pie or some shit in my bag that smells like drugs or a homemade bomb? The website said, "Fuck you, you still have that camera lens, as far as we're concerned," because of course it did. 

So I called Capital One, using the arduous iPhone keypad that I only use to enter bank and credit card pin numbers and to occasionally call a person I am required by law to call. 

"Hello, this is Capital One. This is Sergio. I am happy to help you today." 

"Hey Sergio. How are you?" (I am nice to these people. I am not an asshole. I swear to THE GOD WHO SMITES ME DAILY.) 

"I am doing well, hello, Mrs....White? How are you today?"

"I'm good, and it's not Mrs. And Laurie is good. Birthdate 12.27.70, pin number CAPITAL ONE SCREWS ME DAILY AND I LOVE IT SO HARD. 

(That is a joke. I did not say that.)

Then he asked me how he could help me, and basically I was like, look, Sergio, I need this pre-authorization code removed. I didn't buy anything, I took the shit back, it's gone from my life for half a pay period now. I didn't break it or lose it. I hate my pictures, I need to be able to buy wine and maybe a room in New York on this card because this is my TRAVEL NEW YORK CARD SO FUCKING FIX IT. 

"I am very sorry for your concerns, Mrs. White. I will see what I can do to alleviate your consternation." 

(Sergio is talking to my mom. Ignored. Bygones. Also they give these poor souls thesaurus.com with their training manuals, right?) 

"Look, Sergio, can you just clear my card? Because I have a train in 20 minutes and need an Egg McMuffin like Lindsay needs a bump, so really." 

I almost said this. Not super proud. GIRL YOU'RE EVERY WOMAN IN THE WORLD TO ME. (Related, that sounds like a lot of really hard fucking work. Multitasking.) 

I hear bleedeeebleepbleeps in the background that indicate that Sergio is scaring up some information about my relatively paltry financial situation. I really do just need this card to work. I had plans for this card. Dreams. 

"Hello. I see the concern."

(OMG THERE IS NO CONCERN.) 

"I see the concern, and if the camera company will please to call us soon we will remove it." 

The Japanese people started laughing more loudly, like the rotating clowns in Pee Wee's Big Adventure.

The dog sniffed everything six times. 

"Sergio. Honestly. The camera store is not going to call you." 

As I said this, I imagined the endless stream of iPhone calls I would have to make to work this out. Jack or Steve or Bill, lounging on the counter, completely disinterested in arresting his discussion of prime lenses and chicks who can't take pictures to make a phone call via many menus to Sergio in God knows where. 

I was never going to get my money back. I was not going to have my New York story financially told. And this made me mean. 

"That is unacceptable, Sergio. Unacceptable. I need you all to be able to call the camera store, if that is what you need to do, after THEY TOLD ME THAT THE HOLD ON MY CARD WOULD JUST NATURALLY FALL OFF LIKE THE LEAVES OF ADAM AND EVE AFTER A MAX OF 72 HOURS WTF SERGIO?"

He was contrite, yet unflappable. 

"This is a surprising development, I know. Please allow me to investigate further." 

And he was gone. For five minutes. And when he returned, he was saying stuff about tomorrow morning and telephone calls and the Dalai Lama and credit cards and whatnot. So, fully committing to hating myself for a refractory period of several hours, I said, 

"Hey Sergio? You got a supervisor." 

"Why yes. Yes I do. I will retrieve Melissa."

Sergio, Small Wonder, same difference. Melissa was on the line in a minute or two. I've worked with Melissa. Melissa went to my high school. Melissa was going to dispose of me in .5 minutes, and she had no idea my student council poster housed hers, hard.

"Hello, Ms...White? Yes. White. So you're traveling to New York?"

"Yes. And I  need you all to clear my card so I can move on with my life." 

"So you're going to have (redacted) call us to take care of this little charge?"

"No. I'm not, Melissa. (Because I have read the findings of repeating names and mirroring, yes I have. Also I watched The Office for years.) I'm standing in a line for a train to New York, a situation that normally takes all of my Oregon Trail survival skills, clutching an Egg McMuffin, an unconscionably hot-regardless-of-burning-lawsuit McDonalds coffee AND MY PHONE. I need you all to get in touch with the camera store, if that is what you need to do, and settle this." 

"And you can give us the number of the store?" 

"No. No I cannot. Do you have a computer in front of you, Melissa? Because, Google."

And I spelled it for her when she responded like this: agveargvaer;nhagraga;agvnbaga??????? And oh my God. I felt myself transforming into a Sleestak by the minute, but the rage, the RAGE. MELISSA! Seriously?  

And then I lost the call, because of course I did. And then the Northeastern line started moving, which, if you've never been in it? Is intense. It evokes a primal need to move and be first and elbow people that is not frequently seen outside of exercise class space placement and the lawn seats at the Indigo Girls. It is a horror show.  

As Melissa's stupid ass call dropped, the lady with the embroidered bag in front of me, who hasn't traveled since the Reagan administration, tried to Battle of the Network Stars elbow check me, and I wasn't having it. As I tried to aggressively reestablish my place in line, my phone rang.

Ringing phones: worse sounds on earth besides IT'S LATE NIGHT WITH JAY LENO, hands down.

I answered.

"Hi, Mrs....White? It's Melissa. I was able to contact (insert popular 90s name here) at (redacted) and he said all was well, that that equipment was returned unharmed several days ago. Capital One is happy to return the full functioning of your card to you, and we hope you have a fabulous time in New York City!" 

"Well. Okay. Thanks. Great." 

And I will leave it there. I will not tell you about slowly going insaner over the next 36 hours, as this company tracked my every move, shutting down both of my credit cards no matter where I went within an EXTENSIVE 500 MILE RADIUS. I won't detail talking to some guy whose complicated name I forget from a bar in New York, when they decided to "confirm" that my destination that I had told them about three hours before was accurate. I will spare you the details of my conversation with Brian, the next day, (I had learned by then to just ask for the supervisor immediately, because, well, the comedy.) who declined my card until I called to tell him I was back in Maryland, just to alleviate any more "concerns" that a thief was purchasing my one beer and rainbow roll at a dinner with colleagues, in my home state. 

It was like someone who hated me had called this place and told them I was a rogue person charging exorbitant amounts of, oh, say, $32.67 at a time. I was not to be trusted. This operation was to be shut down, before it tried to pay for another ten-dollar cab ride. 

Because I know this is my fault. I know this is our fault. This credit situation. This need for confirmations and codes and deposits, when really we'd be likely better served by stacks of dollar bills in mattresses, or trading beans for Etsy shit.

No, I won't. I'll just say this: Sergio holds it down. You want Sergio on your team. Hell, I want him on mine. He held the flare gun throughout my two days of Stockholm Syndrome with Capital One, and he made it feel like sugar going down.

I really wish I could friend him on Facebook. I'm pretty sure he would help me move. 

If I say I don't need anyone I can say these things to you.

The first time I sought psychological help, I was 29 years old. The man I had dated for almost a year broke up with me, three weeks before Christmas and my 30th birthday. 

He was the guy they tell you to wait for, the one who you immediately recognize as "the one," the one you build ideas and thoughts and plans around, even against your better judgment. And that was the first time (of what would turn out to be five, by the time it was all said and done) that he decided that I wasn't that for him. 

I flipped the fuck out. I lost it. I cried or was a second away from tears for days. I couldn't sleep. I felt close to insane, whatever that means, most of the time. I felt like the bottom had fallen out from under me. 

I remember coming home the night it happened, to my parents' house, where I was living since I'd come home from Ohio a year before. I knew that I just needed to get from the car to my room without any conversation, which is entirely possible with my father but not so much with my mother. 

I walked in the door and they were sifting through what they'd just purchased on what may be one of maybe five trips they've taken to the grocery store together in my 40 years. I don't know why they went together that night, why for one night of his life my father had channeled his father, a person whose sole purpose in retirement besides working at the rectory had seemed to be traveling from grocery to grocery within a ten-mile radius plus the Navy commissary to score ten cents off here, 20 cents off there, on staples -- beans, napkins, dishwashing liquid, cigarettes. My grandparents' basement would have been the perfect place to end up in a post-Apocalyptic world, Nirvana for that guy from The Road with his shopping cart, as long as he could get in through the window well. 

As soon as I walked through the door, I sat down on a 24 pack of toilet paper that sat atop a pallet of kidney beans in our small, dark foyer. And I cried, amid the passel of crap my parents had assembled at the Giant and the Shopper's Food Warehouse. I remember them both gaping at me, as I disrupted the unpacking and shelving. And then I remember my father talking to me for two hours while I sniveled on the kitchen table. And then I remember several weeks of hell. 

**************************************************

So don't chastise me
Or think I, I mean you harm
Of those that take you
Leave you strung out
Much too far

**************************************************

It was the first time I lost it for real, after years of losing it mildly. I'd always had an edgy, rarely satisfied sort of personality. I had periods of time where being upset was the norm, but I ascribed them to typical things -- school and work stress, relationship stuff, my weight and endless obsession and dissatisfaction with my body, social anxieties. 

But this time, I knew it was worse. This time I knew that the loss of this relationship had tripped a terrible cord. I felt crazy. I felt out of control. I felt like nothing would be okay again, and I knew that there were certain patterns in my life that weren't right. I came to understand that for a long time I'd been operating on a certain, shifting level of daily discontent, and that this was a final trigger. 

And on a practical, physical level? I couldn't sleep. If you want to feel crazy, easy peasy: don't sleep, not much if at all. And when I did, I'd wake up between 4 and 5 every morning and lie there crazy for two hours until I finally passed out from physical exhaustion just before my alarm was due to go off. I also experienced anxiety that made me long for any other state of physical or emotional being. I wrote a bad poem about it, the electrical impulses I felt shooting through my arms and out the bottoms of my feet and through the top of my head. This was real, excess energy trying to get out of my body. To top it off, this is when my dog who was the other center of my life started having epileptic seizures. And if you've never seen a living thing have a seizure in your fucking bedroom that is very lucky for you and I hope it never happens. Because yeah. 

I was so awake I felt like a tragic superhero, like I could lift a car or climb a mountain, but I didn't really want to do those things or to go anywhere so I just walked around the usual places. Somehow I still had to go to work, and I still had to figure out what to do. I knew this was a problem that was beyond my scope, and I was scared. So I took myself to therapy, and I went to my primary care doctor. My doctor gave me anti-depressants, the first ones I'd ever had after many years of Tom Cruisian-resistance to medication. I would have tried leeches at that point, I swear. I wasn't ready to kill myself and I didn't want to feel like I felt so I did things. Desperation is an alternately shitty and amazing motivator. 

The first wacko shrink I saw -- at her only available appointment, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, days after the breakup when I still couldn't speak of it or really speak at all without weeping -- told me after 10 minutes of discussion that I was probably bipolar. 

I should mention that I'm not a morning person. And that I was still crying nonstop. 

I knew even then as a counselor myself that throwing out diagnoses like that after knowing someone for ten minutes was extreme, particularly when I had told her that I was in crisis, essentially -- that I was dealing with an acute life situation and I needed to sort that out before I went any deeper. If a kid I've never met walks into my office I'm not all "Oh hey, ADHD yeah?", even if he can't sit still and can't complete a sentence but can go over and over the same concept one million times with surgical precision. It's not cool and it's not ethical and I don't know if he's had more Red Bull than usual this morning, right?  So I told her I didn't think I was bipolar, I satisfied the requirements of the visit, and I never went back. 

Somehow I dredged up the ability to find another therapist, a lady who challenged me mildly on some things but seemed more fascinated by my life and family history as a story she was reading for entertainment, rather than one she was helping me to sort out in the here and now. She dozed off a couple of times, as my appointments tended to be in the afternoon and the sun slanted just so over her chair. So essentially, looking back, I guess this lady was a house cat of a shrink and my visits were story time. She was in love with my genogram. She reminded me that I was 30, like I didn't know. She was nice enough -- better than the crazy fellowship student I saw in grad school who snapped her fingers in my face whenever I went off topic, which is a lot -- but nothing revolutionary happened. 

Nothing revolutionary has ever happened in my efforts to tend to the interiors of my mind that have such a tremendous effect, naturally, on the exterior that is my life. And typing that amazes me, how much we do in our culture to try to minimize the concept that what happens in there can go awry, that the things we see on the outside AREN'T profoundly affected every minute, second, hour by a seemingly random collection of chemicals and cells and nerves and impulses. 

We are animals. Fucked up crazy ass animals. We're all lucky we aren't walking around shooting off fireworks in public places, is what I'm saying.

**************************************************

I can turn on anyone
Just like I've turned on you
I've got a tongue like a razor
A sweet switchblade knife

**************************************************

It has been almost 11 years since my first serious problems surfaced, and over the course of that time I have had good times and bad times. I have been lucky and I have struggled. I have felt like I wanted to die and I have had moments, like one yesterday, where I walk outside in to the sunshine, look at the sky and think that this very space in time is perfect, that it makes all of the hard ones worth it. 

 The past few months have not been the good times, although within them there have been good times. They have been largely dark and frightening, on the worst , self-indulgent kind of existential level. They have been unattractive. 

And these are the worst kinds of times to acknowledge that I do not live this life in a vaccuum. I have friends and family around me sometimes, and a lot of people who care in various capacities. There are people who feel like they want to help me, and this is not my favorite thing. In fact, it is my worst, neurotic nightmare. When I am in the bell jar, I hate attention as much as I love it. I hate my interconnectedness with others, because I know that I can't trust myself. I know that I am wired to reject support and to expect everyone to leave me, because if I cannot even stand myself, how can anyone else? Why would they?  

My friend Jenny posted again this weekend about her most recent trip through what this is that some of us go through. And again, I read it and was moved to speak up because I don't think that we can do that enough, especially if we haven't done it at all. I admire her more than I can say. I admire myself not at all right now. It doesn't matter what I do with the information I'm given as long as I don't take other people down with me. There is nothing that makes me feel worse. 

I have friends in spite of myself. I have people who want to hang out with me and who continue to seek out my opinions even in the worst of times. I don't understand this. I have eaten more humble pie, as it were, in the last two months of my life than I maybe ever have, and it is gagging me as much as it is healing me. 

The sad truth is that by the time I get to this point, it's possible that I have ruined good things. I know that's true, and I know my propensity to either wallow completely in that knowledge or to ignore it and act like I don't care. 

This is the sentence of this particular chronic disease. This is the need to act like everything is fine because dealing with everything that's not fine is a killer for real. It's hard and it's time consuming and it's lonely fucking work. 

I am mean. I am impulsive. I am selfish. I am rude. 

I am the most loving person in the world. My empathy is off the charts. I will do anything for you if I love you or maybe even if I don't. 

I will break your heart and I will sweep it up off of your kitchen floor. I am a procrastinating asshole and I am the best of my worst on the worst possible days. I can pull a solution from anywhere when you lose your shit, and I will only hope that you forgive me for how forthright I can be in telling you that a solution is really, really important. 

I blame other people for my problems sometimes and yet I take full responsibility for everything from the immolation of Joan of Arc, the Afghan war, the death of the dictionary with the addition of fake words like LOL and gangsta and the bad day you had yesterday. 

I want you to be with me and I never want to see you again, with all of the things you know and the way that I care about you and the ability you have to hurt me because of all of this.

I am the sum of my chemistry and in that  (some chemistry word here) there is the best of my DNA and the results of all of the ways I've been nurtured and neglected as well.

I am a sad fucking case and I am an absolute rock star on my best day. I don't know how else to describe it, except to say that as self-aware as I have prided myself on being, the past year has been mostly an exercise in denial and fear and self-loathing. And once it killed or tried to the two things that I love the most that is when I woke up, to a place so lonely it shone, to a silence I hadn't known in a very, very long time, and yet could identify from one of the saddest spaces in my history. 

It's really, really bright here.  

Duran Duran (make me smile)

I turned 13 in December, 1983, and like so many other kids my age, I was madly crazily in love with Duran Duran. 

I developed a deep, personal relationship with John Taylor then, and I should probably minimize it now. I should probably tell you I'm over it. I should probably tell you that there is not a creepy time every June 20 when I remember that it's his birthday. I should probably say that when my friends who have similar feelings tell me that they love him more that I'm kidding when I tell them with a fierceness that they are absolutely stone cold wrong. 

I can't. I'm not. I won't. I can't.  

He looked like this then.

Seriously? How do you process that when you're an (extremely) awkward 13-year-old? Well, if you're me, you make a scrapbook. (Yes, I still have it.) You swindle your mom out of money to buy overpriced British music gossip magazines because they had pictures that American magazines didn't. (Thank you, Smash Hits.) You paper every possible surface of your room with his face.

You play air bass, although you have no musical skill. And when you get to high school two years later, you take a creative writing elective wherein your first story is a pitiful fictional account of your MARRIAGE to this man and your vacations ("holidays", naturally) on the very islands where his band's videos were filmed.  

(That last one may have been a little bit painful to type. Oh well.)

I loved him. I thought he was beautiful. I was 13 and he was...24? 25? Sure. Then I was 14 and the video for "A View to a Kill" debuted on Friday Night Videos in the spring of 1985, and I sat up and wrote a NOTE in INSTALLMENTS to my friend Carmen, who was doing the SAME THING at her house, while we waited for our ONE CHANCE that week or maybe, oh my hell, EVER to see this video.

If that doesn't amplify the knowledge of our collective access to media now, I don't know what does. And really, all of my love for immediate gratification aside, was that so bad? We learned anticipation. We had to wait and wait, and doodle flowers and "I LOVE JT" in bubble letters (Simon, in her case) and sit up later than we usually did and then, all of a sudden, there it was, the three-minute thing we were waiting for. There they were, and then they were gone.

That summer I went to what may have been the first concert of my teenage years -- Howard Jones and Paul Young were in the same timeframe -- to see John with Andy Taylor in Power Station, partially processing my grief at missing the entire band on tour in support of Seven and the Ragged Tiger the year before. 

My parents sat in the Merriweather parking lot and drank beer and waited for my cousin and me to emerge. I was even more smitten. He had started another BAND. He could do anything, truly. He was even more beautiful in PERSON.

Seriously. The energy of my love for this guy I didn't and would never know probably wafted the 20 miles or so from where I lived to the White House and contributed to the finer points of policy. Mr. Reagan asked Gorbachev to tear down that wall two scant years later. Coincidence? 

Maybe. 

Anyway. It continued. Power Station quit and Duran Duran took a break with no known end and reconfigured. There was Arcadia, which I thought was quite good, actually, and then in 1998 John put his "Trust the Process" site together. A shirt I bought from that project is still one of my favorites and I'd show you a picture of that too if it wasn't in the laundry. 

But I wasn't just a groupie, I swear. I may have had Duran Duran posters taped on every surface of my room, including the ceiling, which was a huge effort as I've never been terribly coordinated. But as I grew into my appreciation for their music, and spent crazy hours focused on what they produced, I knew they were talented and not just hot pieces OMG. 

Because John said to, I listened to Chic and Bryan Ferry and Ultravox and T. Rex. He dated Jody Watley briefly, so I skipped over "Don't You Want Me" on my dubbed tapes with a certain level of disdain that only matched my envy for her hair. My mother had no IDEA what these cassettes were that she was after for my Christmas stocking (except for Chic, because everybody knew "Le Freak" and "Good Times", and my mom has always been pretty hip.) I knew who Nile Rodgers was, because they told me about him, and I learned early on that I didn't quite get Andy Warhol, but okay, I probably should. I knew that Barbarella was a Jane Fonda movie, and I thought it was funny that they were so obsessed with Debbie Harry, because who wasn't, then? And although language has never been a huge problem for me, "contrived" was one of the first 50-cent words I ever worked into my vocabulary on a regular basis, because they used it constantly in their interviews and it was something that I knew they really didn't want to be. 

And yes, I owned one of those stupid fedoras, and may have purchased some jazz shoes, and rounded out that ensemble with my "Choose Life" t-shirt a la Wham's "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" video, because I was Brit Pop all the way. I only pronounced the "True" band's name as "SPAN-dau BAL-let" in what I knew to be entirely supportive company, but the truth is that I was a tiny Anglophile tool, immersed in the music and the vibe of a country that to this day I have never visited. 

It was really, really fun. It was a sickness and a habit, and looking back over how it all evolved I know for sure that there is no way that I could have been any different. 

And then there were songs. I knew every word to every song on every single Duran Duran record. Try me. 

I can peform, in its entirety, including sound effects, the 12-inch single of "The Reflex" (this isn't easy, people) and when I am alone and I listen to "Come Up and See Me (Make Me Smile)" which was a cover tune lifted from a British band called Steve Harley & Cockney Rebels, a B-side on that Reflex remix and, in my opinion, one of the best on a very short list of what I consider great live recordings in all of pop music I cry every time. I also air drum, in this case. It's just a great song. 

We had a thing, me and these guys. I don't know when it happened, although I entirely know why (it's not something I can explain, it just makes sense.) It has lasted since 1983 and I'm pretty sure it will always be with me, because why not?

In 2004 (I think, it may have been 2003) they came to D.C. -- to Constitution Hall, in fact, where I will see them this weekend -- on their reunion tour. I had never seen the group intact, and never even seen them perform in any configuration as Duran Duran, only Power Station.

I worried that it would be disappointing. I was concerned that it wouldn't live up to my memories, and that I was too old and too past the point of excitement with them for it to be a good idea. 

I was wrong.

My sister and I went. We were in the upper deck, and it didn't matter, because it's one of those venues where you can see pretty well from anywhere. I lost my mind. I screamed like a teenager. They sounded great. The old songs were as I remembered them and the new ones weren't bad. I was so happy to be there.

We went back again in 2008, to a show at an outdoor venue on the Red Carpet Massacre tour. We had -- I think -- even more fun then. It was everything I needed it to be. 

As for John and all that he portends?

Well, I think this. I think that in the mess of relationships and real life and growing up that is an adult, American life, that if we are lucky a few unsullied things and places and connections remain among the mess. He is one of those things, for me. He was one of the first men -- real or fictional or fictionally real -- who I thought was gorgeous and talented, tall, funny in interviews, with an accent that made me die and a strange little lispy voice that I can hear in my head right now. Was I ever going to know him or be around him or date him? No way. But could I have an uncomplicated, purely appreciative relationship with him at a time when I didn't know how to do that with anyone? Sure.

I don't think I still know how to do that with anyone. Can I still have that with him? Sure. My reasons for this are scarcely different from the reasons why pre-teens chase after Justin Bieber on his Segway, or why my mom's peers passed out for The Beatles on Ed Sullivan or why any of us feel any glorious moment of fleeting, unimaginable joy when we drive with the sunroof open on a perfect weather day. 

Some things just are, and in our culture, this is one that we get for pretty cheap. I can always see the "Save a Prayer" lighter reflections in my mind's arena, is what I'm saying. 

Sure, I could ascribe some kind of weird meaning to how John Taylor, as my first teenaged celebrity crush, represented the first of several (in an entirely fictional and unrequited way, of course) weird relationships with real live bass players and drummers that have taken place across the span of my life. I could say that he was the original representative of men I've driven around and waited for outside of crappy venues, carried their stupid amps and then kissed. I could talk about how scarily prescient it all was, and also the reason why I tell anyone who insinuates that I ought to go out there at 40 and look for a musician to shut her hole, because no thank you. The rhythm section is shut down. We have all retired, unless at some point I pick up a drum, which is entirely likely. 

But I don't want to do that. I just want to call that coincidence, really. Because it's shut down, that is, except for him. JT is forgiven, everything, because in my life, he didn't do anything wrong. He played the bass line on "New Religion" and "Come Up and See Me" and "Last Chance on the Stairway". He smiled that tremendous smile.

And in the most kickass way possible, me 40, him 51, he's still bringing it full circle, back to where we started, which was my favorite part anyway. 

 

Disclaimer: My friend Sarah is working with Duran Duran on blogger outreach for this tour. I have a ticket to the show, and have agreed to use the #duransocial hashtag and to write a post about my experience. But as I hope I have made abundantly clear, I would have gone anyway, and shared my appreciation for these guys with you regardless. 

September

It's harder to talk here when I've been away. I feel like we should have a gathering-in of some sort, me and the strangers and small cadre of friends who drop by. It feels a little forced to pick back up again, because I've never been one of those vignette sort of bloggers. Not the "Hey, so this one time, when I was doing this thing? And that funny thing happened?" Not me. I sometimes wish I were, sure -- that I had a handy toddler sidekick to provide me with material. A goddamned dog, even. But nope. Just me. And I also don't feel so touchy feely lately, nor into the creative writing and the developing of a construct or a flowery means by which to impart a central truth. 

I am beat down tired. I am exhausted and dehydrated. If I were Brittney in the dark days I'd have shaved my head and beat the crap out of a paparazzi SUV with an umbrella last week. 

It's a good thing I'm not her. 

I've been thinking about this blogging thing more because I happened upon a comment recently from someone very popular in a particular social media SPACE. She said that she was so glad her awesome life happened in the awesome place where said life currently happens, because if she'd stayed in the shitty environment where she lived before all of the CRAZY SUPER AWESOME, all by herself, ostensibly, she wouldn't have had anything to blog about, not ever. 

Her shitty environment resembled mine in some ways. 

I wasn't sure what to do with that information. Maybe blow my brains out? Maybe just stop living my entirely boring, unbloggable, less madcap than the average person like that person kind of life? Maybe apologize for inflicting all of my nothing on the world for years, all my pointless, useless, not-even-Seinfeldian not awesome? Because whoa. I know it's one person's point of view, but a lot of people happen to co-sign this person's words. And if she said it? Well yeah, here's my nothing. Eat it up. 

I am, as they say, winning with this train of thought. 

Anyway, I have always been really irritated with discussions of "the writing life", of what it means to be a writer and where people write and how they write and what provokes them to write and what they eat when they write. It's like losing weight, kind of. You eat less and you exercise. There's no magic answer and billions of people spend years trying to conjure it up. In this case, you just have to write. 

And a lot of times, I don't want to, although it is, sadly, one of maybe three basic strong skills that I possess (the others are guessing with freakish accuracy how much grocery store salads will cost before they're weighed, and also I make a perfect grilled cheese. So basically, science.) To avoid writing, I tell myself that I can't. I tell myself that I'm blocked. I do every which thing to work around it except the thing itself, because I have some kind of stupid gold standard for what people will find, here, on a blog I've had since aught-six, on which I write for entirely free, which very few people read. 

I'm not sure what I'm after anymore. I started with minutiae and terrible fonts. I started with the desire to write about anything but the devastating, disgusting heartbreak I was going through at the time, and in some ways I succeeded. I wrote my way into a minor part-time career as a writer on the internet. I got a journalism degree. I met my best friends. 

This blog has been crazy good to me. Incredible things have happened. I have opened up so many doors. I've gotten better at some things. I've stayed the same at some things. 

I'm not entirely sure that I'm a better person. I'm thinking a lot about that lately. 

But the deal is that I still come here. I log in and there's still this blinky white box that I am supposed to fill with something. And I feel the need to do that still and I feel weighted by the knowledge that I have no idea what to say right now or where to go or what to do. I see so many people doing things and grabbing things and being things and calling themselves things and the options and the intersections and the noise make me a little bit crazier, I think.

And I know in my heart AND mind that these are some of the most annoying posts I have ever read on other blogs and it kind of makes my mind hurt to be responsible for one. But it's just true that I process by dumping words, whether spoken or written, and if I don't do it right now, I don't know what else to do. So here you have it. So just for kicks, here are some segments of posts that I have in draft that I can't finish:

*We had an earthquake and the aftermath of a hurricane here, which meant that it poured rain for days on end. It was like the whole world went dark. It was weird.

I wrote this in draft and never hit publish. 

Thus it happened that I was napping yesterday at a completely inappropriate time for a grown person. I was racked out so hard, I was dreaming about Kate Winslet saving that person from the fire and Ryan Gosling breaking up the street fight and at some point I was back on a boat in California too. This nap was kind of like that freaky Wonka boat ride.

Then my bed started moving.

I have a big bed. I have what I consider the best bed in the world, and this sucker just, well, this is not to say that it has never moved with assistance (shut up) but it has never just spontaneously moved itself. 

"Ryan? Kate?" my dream self said. "California? Lunch? Oompa Loompa?"

And then I woke up. And yes, not only was my bed itself moving back and forth like I really was, finally, in Oz, but, oh hey look, my building was moving too. 

I didn't understand it, because I am rather dim when fully conscious and I was just waking up. And also, as it turns out, I am fairly calm when I assume that my 12-floor high-rise big ass apartment building is going to fall down into the courtyard whose renovation over the past eight months has been the stuff of my jackhammered nightmares. I love a screw-up like that. Whoops. 

For some reason the bed moving and the swaying of the whole structure fit together. It wasn't until the interior walls of, well, my whole PLACE started shaking and threatening to cave in that I assumed the obvious: 

My across the hall neighbor was knocking out a wall. Everything is construction around here, all the time. 

See? Dim.

My litany went like so: 

"The building is going to fall down. The fucking building is going to fall down. The neighbor is knocking out a wall, and the guys downstairs probably finally hit the essential parking garage column that was holding the whole shebang together. Isn't it funny how that happened at the same time? That is really crazy. Whoa, moving. Still moving a little.I'm probably going to die in this building. Hmmm. Wow. I hear sirens."

Not once did an earthquake occur to me.

Dim. Dim dim dim. And also I live in such a general state of enslavement to construction at every turn that I just assumed that that was it. 

*Whoops. That was long. Sorry. 

Then I tried to write about yoga:

I was standing in the yoga studio hallway last night, outside the class that I had given the task of making or breaking my shitty day. 

No really, it was a shitty day, a shittier day than average in what has seemed to be a string of more of them than usual since the spring. But as has been my habit since January, I pulled myself out of my force field of anxiety, self-flagellation and unfinished tasks and dragged myself to the yoga studio that I haven't really been to enough since my car blew up last month. 

I was a few minutes early. This is the only place to which I am early on a regular basis, because I like to nest in my corner of the room. A very nice woman I've spoken to before was standing next to me. She said hello, and then she asked me if I would be willing to let her observe me in class and offer me hands-on adjustments throughout the hour and a half. She is in the teacher training program, and she had one more in-class private session to go for her certification. 

"Sure," I said, to her smiling, serene face and calmly modulated tone of voice. And then my brain kicked in. 

"Sure! Sure I'll let you touch me during the whole class, and move my legs around and press on my shoulders and oh yes, you're holding a strap, too! Oh my God. What did I just do? Are these leggings clean? This is a hot class, right? I hope you like sweat, yoga teacher lady. A lot."

She looked  so grateful that I could almost ignore my lunatic brain. I've been in that kind of a jam, where I need to cross something off of my list that requires another person, and it's a pain in the ass to ask, because no one really wants to be jarred out of their semi-comatose routine to do anything out of the ordinary, they just want to go in there and down dog their crappy work day away. 

Especially people like me, who don't really like to be touched by strangers, and who are jumpy enough that the prospect of a person, however nice, watching me go through an entire yoga class and moving my limbs around randomly when I screw up is enough to cause a mild sociopathic break. 

But I said yes. And then I babbled some more things, including a stellar moment when I told her I was okay with this as long as she didn't get too "handsy," like she was a guy at a bar with dollar bills and not a nice middle-aged lady in an unassuming yoga class outfit. The only handsy out of line she'd probably get would be to bust out some Reiki moves when I wasn't looking.

Handsy. Really, Laurie. HANDSY. 

Anyway, she said "handsy" back at me, and nodded solemnly and said she would not be it. I yapped something about my neck hurting and gestured oddly to a part of my neck that didn't really hurt. I also wondered again why I leave the house so frequently.

I tried to write something coherent about depression during suicide prevention week. That didn't get very far:

Someone fairly prominent in the social media world killed himself last week. I didn't know this guy, and I'm not linking him up here, because there's really no point, and I'm guessing it was peace that he was after. But I did go to his Facebook page from the link provided on Twitter , and there weren't that many messages yet. I guess people had just found out, although 2011 provides degrees of hearse-chasing like no other year, basically. 

The top message that I read was typed by a woman who, oh, I don't know where she was sitting? On her fucking lanai? In her goddamned bed? At her shabby chic kitchen table sucking down coffee? And she was all, oh, I'm so sorry for your friends and FAMILY, so and so, but you know, life is a choice, and you made the wrong one. I'm sorry you felt like you had to do that.

Maybe she tacked on an "xoxo", I don't remember. 

Really, social media lady? That's big talk, calling out a newly dead social media guru on his Facebook page. Let's have our last interaction with a guy who was miserable enough to end his life be a mild beratement. That's productive. Because he was apparently not excited enough about the stuff that amps up your stupid ass to keep this train going for one more day? Good for you.

And also he is dead so he can't flame you back. He can't even unfriend you.

No, really. Good for you. 

I tried to go to her profile. I'm not proud of it, but I did. I don't know what I thought I was going to do there, maybe sneer at her pictures of her Maui vacation or what, or of her living, berater-of-dead-people self. I couldn't see anything, though, and it was just as well. People like that woman suck. There are a lot of them, these people who think they have it all down, especially when it comes to the life-ending choices of others. They suck when they invoke the Bible as a reason why it's a sin to take one's life, and they suck when they use guilt and no knowledge whatsoever of what it's like to be in those sad, sad shoes as an excuse to feel superior over a dead person.

I would say that of all the bullshit ways to use Facebook? A crappy comment to a dead person about the way they died clinches the top loser prize.

And there you have it, the random detritus out of the way.

I'm going to start fresh tomorrow.

Story so far

When I told Karen a few years ago that I believed in creating my own story, I had no idea that I'd end up sitting weeping in the front row of an auditorium a few years later while she spoke, those words of mine projected on the screen. 

I knew I'd meant it when I said it, the morning I originally told her some fragments I could remember of what had brought me from all the places I'd been to that Chicago lobby. I thought it was true then. So maybe that made it even more upsetting when I saw it so big in front of me and knew that if this was the story I'd put myself in charge of creating, I wasn't sure I'd done that great of a job. 

That didn't feel very good. 

#######

Some of it I can't tell you. Some of it I'm not even that good at telling myself yet. I know whatever this is this time that it's big and impossible and existential, that it has to do with the roads I drive and the places I go every day, a life that doesn't feel like it fits that well at all, even though I've done the human dance of adaptability and forced myself into a barely functional mold to make it look like it does enough hours of the week to get by.

I know that it's hard to see families and compare them to my life of fractured time with lots of people, on the fringes of everywhere, never going home to anyone or waiting for them to come to me. That's sad, I know, but it's just true. I was telling a friend last week that I look around at other women my age and I feel like there was a point where something happened for everyone else (gross generalization, yes, and "everyone" is hyperbole) and that it did not for me, even though I tried.

And I know that even worse than that, even beyond the preemptive grief for babies I'll never have and maybe even any kind of family life, who knows, that I could tolerate this chasm of a feeling so much better if I felt a stronger drive to do anything, really. It would be nice to have some sense of mission or purpose beyond the grind of groceries and gym and social activity. 

I would like it if I liked what I did, for the most part. I would enjoy feeling competent again. It would be nice to be in a place where people actually came over, maybe. Community, that would be good. 

It would be useful if within the world of opportunities and possibilities I know exist, that I would have the capacity to choose one, a few maybe. That I would not constantly look even through my third eye and see nothing but a swirl of too much, and have no idea which way to go. This kind of confusion shorts out a brain quickly, it turns out. 

#######

I don't know what I ever dreamed, if I dreamed, because a lot of times I wasn't about big dreams in the way that I usually hear people talk about them. I more trusted that something good would happen, something basic and cool and maybe even worthy of comment. I never wanted too much, just enough, to be it, to have it, to exist within it. And whatever that was, I know it wasn't this, and I can't explain to you the chaotic, horrible, silent nature of that feeling. I know that I wasn't meant to spend so much time alone, or to live my life in its current structure. I wonder what I'm paying for, sometimes -- what gift I've wasted or god I've shamed. I wonder what wrong corner I turned, what debt I left unpaid besides all of the ones I know about. 

And yeah, I do think, shamefully, a lot of the time, that it's no fair. I think of good intentions and hours of brain-splitting work, of parking lots and pizza trays and faith and love and trust. I think of pointless hours on the elliptical and karma and time spent invested in other people's well-being, of people invested in me.

And then I know that's wrong, immediately. You can't count beans or dreams or people. It was all just what it was. 

I don't know how you put so many broken pieces back together. 

#######

I'm two weeks in to getting better, again. I'm two weeks in to taking the pills and walking the walk back from this place, because a month or so ago I crashed again and it's always ugly when it happens but it takes some time and trauma to wake up. 

I went to the doctor. I sat half-naked on the paper on the table and told a stranger who was looking at a laptop instead of me -- new computer system, damned thing, have to input everything as we go -- the bare minimum of what was wrong, and got bored advice about what to take, and none about who else to see. She didn't know. No leads. So I called a person I thought might be able to help me, using my own bush league clinician's brain to scan through lists of MDs and LPwhatevers on a website. And when I called, my office door shut, my mantras shut down, a bored receptionist told me that I might be able to get in in July. I repeated July back to her as a question, told her that wouldn't help me and hung up. 

I wondered, if I gave up after one call, what people did who didn't speak the language well? Who were even more fucked up than I was? Who were old or truly alone or permanently terrified, beyond my ability to snap into functional for the three minutes such a loathsome phone call takes. 

July. 

I went to my yoga studio again, instead, where the oms flow and so does a fountain, where I contort myself silly in 90-degree rooms and feel peace like I don't have anywhere else. I went to work. I shot a big job. I took the little pink pills, willing them to work faster, apologizing to myself again for quitting the last time, when I felt better, when I got my cyclical attitude about medication, my stubborn aversion to things that work, that seem just the slightest bit easy. And as I felt the chemistry start to right itself again inside my head I was able to do some other stuff, the things I find impossible when I'm in the bad place. 

It's mostly nothing big. I cleaned my refrigerator. I did laundry. I picked up most of the clothes off of the floor of my closet and hung them up, categorized by the part of the body they cover. It's still a wreck in here, mind you. Vegetables keep rotting faster than I can eat them. Blouses fall down wispy from the hangers. But I try to stay a step ahead. I even shut the computer down sometimes. 

I envy you, you know, the people who are able to do this without assistance, who can just...do this, all of the time. 

I haven't been writing though, because when I do I ramble. And I'm afraid of what it means to talk about this, and for me lately, this is all there is, pretty much. I'm afraid of what it means to talk about anything these days, honestly, but I'm not sure it matters so much if I do. I'm pretty sure it matters if I don't. 

It's not like this story hasn't been told ad nauseum, both explicitly and in millions of desperate, flailing words that dance around it, so many things said instead. The truth of this is tricky. And the thing is, if you run into me tomorrow, after I've forced myself to get out of my bed that I love and want to live in, made myself get dressed to go to somewhere that works for me on no level to do something I don't like, I'll be okay when we talk. It'll be the usual non sequiturs and wisecracks. I might even offend you, probably accidentally. 

I probably won't tell you then that this chemistry is a low-grade kind of hell, and that two weeks ago, again, I couldn't see my way out of it. And now, today, I can, just a little, the slightest bit of enough to think my way around the hypothetical failure of my story so far.