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.
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