sleeping alone is fine

Appetite

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Weds already.

I woke up up early, for me, at ten. Discomfort levels are pretty high. Tired, sore, with the sort of pulsing ache under my skin that has always been the main symptom. it's beautiful and sunny out, looks crispy, so maybe after eating and giving the pills time to digest I'll get out for a ride.

The fixie Alex left me apparently had a suicide hub just Locktited on, and it fell apart Saturday night. Baffled the boys I was with. There's a women/trans' night at West Town tonight, and I'm hoping they can show me how to fix it. Guess it needs a lock ring. Otherwise it's gonna be chewing gum, which I was assured is a Rat Patrol secret. Can't be much worse than Locktite.

I don't know why I didn't make better use of the bike co-op back home. I imagine shyness and Saturday hangovers had the largest part to do with it. I wish I had. If wishes were horses, though, I'd have a floor full of shit.

I sorted a shit ton of old clothes into rags and Gaia offerings, so I am hoping my inability to cough up 10 Ds for the "donation" will be assuaged by gifts of shop rags and purple rice milk. I'm completely skint, probably 45 cents to my name if I look in the couch.

It's purifying, I guess, but I sure am tired of rice and beans.

fits in a goddamn manila envelope

Down to 100mg of Lyrica today and yesterday. Might stay there a while. Cymbalta cut to 60 from 90 without any of the nasty electrozappies I was expecting. Didn't quite bounce out of bed, but I did wake up after 9.5 ish hours instead of 13.

I've been just on the cusp of manic all day, unable to sit still, starting then abandoning multiple projects only to pick them back up. I made rice milk, joined with millions of slacker computer geeks skiving off work to lurk the macworld expo, registered and paid for pharm tech classes at the Humboldt Park Vocational thingy, biked to the library, read a book, worked on cellphone/vj self portrait, read through the medical terminology textbook...

oh, and made the bomb arroz con gandules.

My body feels more and more mine, but I am not sure how to tell you why. I'm sure part of it is that the vague dread I felt because of December/money stress is tco, but I feel like I've been missing something. Granted, the meds overload and the smoking pot in bed and crying all day could have something to do with why the end of last year seems so blurry.

It's going to be strange to adjust to having a schedule again. Already I have the next week almost completely planned out. Bike workshop, hang with the Other Ex-Pat, Dill Pickle Food Co-op benefit, pin-up shoot w/ vintage auto, then class starts.

I had all those days where it took me hours just to make breakfast. Hours of blurry headed misery, like a teenager again, stuck on the sofa with mono.

I can't go back to that.

I can't stop moving. I can't let gravity catch my feet.


Pray these wings don't melt.

sunday morning is every day for all I care

I cut the Lyrica down to 100 mg a day from 300 and I am already sleeping less. Just a normal 10 hours or so instead of 14 and waking exhausted and groggy. I can almost literally see my body deflating back to the size I am supposed to be. Hi, hipbones!!

the only real benefit I can see Lyrica having is that it does cut down a lot of the static in my nerves- the itching and hypersensitivity. So does megadoses of Omega-3/6, though, and I have high hopes for the acupuncture getting this body back in line.

GOOD day yesterday. Therapy, a good 25 miles of riding, an art show, and a party. just mild panic attackiness at the art show, mostly from the noise. it tends to short everything else else, loudness, making me twitchy like a bunny, and as prone to needing to sit in a corner.



also, I was the only girl at this party with short hair. wtf, midwestern girls. sorority time is over.

He used to call me Bean

I stole an undershirt at his house, thin soft cotton with tiny fraying holes. It fit so well and it was another little piece of him. He lent it me the last time he let me sleep over. Now I think I might sleep in it every night, and I wonder how I will continue to go on like this, feeling so much. Such a wonderful rush of warmth and then a dull cold bitterness. So swift and so sharp. It's got pincers, Mummy, and it reeks of madness.

I gave him a nickname another boy once gave me. This was a boy I met on the nets, who mailed me paintings of blank-faced teddy bears committing seppuku and texted me sweet nothings like, "I'm outside looking at the stars, wondering what it would be like to hold your face in my hands." He was stuck at his parents' house in New Jersey, having just had a nervous breakdown. We'd spend hours talking online and texting each other. It was almost like not being alone.

maybe this will come true

2007 was a hard year. I came squinting and groaning into it, ashtray and whiskey-breathed and in bed with Someone Who Was Not My Boyfriend. Granted, the Boyfriend had gone AWOL and I'd basically had to break up with his voicemail after 2 weeks.

Things had gone badly between soon after he'd sold his house and moved here. His dog was ill a lot and had gone off the meds that had made him pack up and move 800 miles. He hadn't found a job that he liked and was just sitting around drinking beer and growing more and more barrel-chested and cranky. He had wild facial hair and a handsomely craggy face and tattoos like a sailor. I loved to lie on his bed in my underwear and watch him take things apart and put them together, but I needed to be petted just about as much as he needed to be alone. Crazy plus crazy just can't equal anything lasting.

That was the thing that made me craziest, I think.

Once I get boyfriended I start to get used to constant attention. Every damn time I let myself slip and I start needing him and then I quit paying the right kind of attention to myself. I am terrified of being alone. I guess that's why towards the end of last year I imposed some pretty serious solitude on myself. It got bad enough last year to where I was having trouble leaving the house. Not agoraphobia, just this tedious hesitancy. Now I spend a good amount of time glued to the nets or reading.

I took a vow of chastity on New Year's. I got so tired of fucking guys and falling in love with them at the drop of a hat, belly-up like a puppy, yipping and wriggling for their hands on me.


Fibro has fucked with my head an awful lot this past year. I just started a course of weekly acupuncture treatments and talk therapy sessions. I am going to cut my meds, force myself to exercise and meditate. It will really fucking hurt, but I can't sit in bed and obsess over dying alone anymore. I left the house so little in December, and I am damned if I am going to let this shit win anymore. I am so tired of being depressed and in pain

el primer intento

i totally just killed a kitten while thinking about your moms, dude

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=kill+kitten


I am very, very upset that this did not occur to me sooner.

i post on CL a lot cos of teh w33d

After I got my heart broke bad the first and last time, I thought I could fuck my way out of it.
I would train myself to never care, to play as I had been played, to feel the power of using my body to make men do things.. I hurt a lot of people, I ruined my reputation, and I had to move away because my sluttiness had rendered me unboyfriendable.

I was labeled as Crazy Girl and a Bad Girl (although also the Smartest Girl in the City) and I knew I would die alone, surrounded by my cats, watching Buffy.

That led, of course, to my friends and I deciding we'd live in a "tat bro" retirement home. Old rockabilly guys and tiny wrinkled old women with their hair died fire engine red and black, covered in tattoos, sitting around on our porches listening to records.


I may never have another relationship like the one that broke me. So I learn to be honest. Most of the people I hang out with are pretty broken. We're all just waiting for time to pass, hoping something would happen.

-We could hang ourselves.
-It'd give us an erection.
-And all that follows.

I might well be the kind of person who goes through life alone, who never finds someone. That could end up being ok. I have good friends I know will always be around, and if I just have casual sex with other consenting, absent-hearted individuals, that's better than ever going through that again. It'd kill me.

I've been chronically ill since high school, although it didn't truly begin to destroy my life until a few years ago. Fist my hands and knees started to hurt. I figured it was carpal tunnel. Then all my joints started to ache, a hot, flaring flame licking away under my skin. There were invisible ants chewing away at the muscle tissue in my neck and shoulders. Nails were being driven into me. I'd lie awake at night throbbing, and then stumble about the next day, feeling like I'd been thru a sleepwalked rugby game. I was so tired. They did a lot of tests and gave me some pills, kept telling me to come back later. Finally they told me I had fibromyalgia, a disease I'd heard very little about.

After years of keeping up with research, I know more about it than the rheumatologist I saw at Cook County, who barely even knew that it was, in fact, a nerve disease and not one of muscle tissue.

I've learned a lot about the brain. I spend hours reading random articles on Wikipedia and learned that burning wood re-ionizes the air, which affects the release of serotonin in the brain. I wonder why ionizers aren't just given out to everyone during the winter. I wonder this because I spent about 90% of my time in bed or on the sofa. If I'm not there I am on my bike (just switched to fixie), flying through the streets, feeling like I've defeated this crush of gravity that threatens to flatten me. It's the only thing that makes me not want to die. Fuck using the brakes.

I just recently stopped being employable. I went to college in all good faith believing that if I studied hard and was smart I'd be able to find a good job.

But I was too crazy to teach after that, so I worked in food. I got to where I really loved it, but then my body gave out.

I had a desk job over the summer, but the stress made me crazy and I just walked out. I hate rich people. I am not a capitalist. I have been very poor for a very long time and all I want is to go to the damn dentist. I don't need a damn Jetta and brazilian cherry wood floors and stainless steel appliances to make me happy. I just want my mouth to stop hurting.

I can't get jobs any more. I can barely walk some days, and I have no way of knowing when those days will be. I look fine, I'm in great shape, but I'm in wretched amounts of pain and all I want to do is distract myself with a book or a dvd or the Nets. I consistently have Kervorkian fantasies.

I answer porn ads from here on Cl to make a living. I don't feel particularly ashamed of it. It's all I can get. I'm good at sex, I have a great body, I've been modeling naked for years, and emotionally it's about the same as taking a guy home from the bar. And the money can't be beat. I just wish I knew I could get enough of it to pay my rent every month. Still, it's definitely contributed to my being off dating. I just don't have the energy to be emotionally AND sexually involved with the same person, not on top of fucking for money.

The snow is lovely, and I am dying to go ride in it, but my stomach has decided to burn and rumble. Fun with IBS on top of all the other annoying things like feeling like I have a sunburn, or being unable to wear long sleeves indoors. Or itching all the time, even after slathering myself in pecan oil.

I have to get a good night's sleep, because tomorrow I am going to take all my anger out on a man who will pay me to do it.

Nice work if you can get it.

I have no clue what is happening in my life. Sometimes I really just want a nice boy to love me, to want to take care of me so I can go back to school and get a job I can actually do even if I'm in a damn wheelchair. Sometimes I just want to die. I'm so tired. I'm sleeping 12-14 hours a night and I just get more and more exhausted. I wish I could just be in a coma. Wake up when they have a stem cell cure. or nanobots. I can still get excited about those. YEAH! nanobots might fix me one day!!!


or else we just get through each day until the zombie invasion happens.
or the plague hits. or the floods start. or the robots take over. or the aliens attack. or we start to live in space.

see, there is stuff worth waiting for.

Poem for Monday, December 10, 2007

The Story

by Mark Strand

It is the old story: complaints about the moon

sinking into the sea, about stars in their first fading,

about the lawn wet with dew, the lawn silver, the lawn cold.

It goes on and on: a man stares at his shadow

and says it’s the ash of himself falling away, says his days

are the real black holes in space. But none of it’s true.

You know the one I mean: it’s the story about the minutes dying,

and the hours, and the years; it’s the story I tell

about myself, about you, about everyone.

Burke's Book Store
936 South Cooper
Memphis, TN 38104
(901) 278-7484
www.burkesbooks.com

please don't take my picture

The year has begun its final tumble toward the exit.
So many things have added their weight to the push that first started its stumbling.

I walked out of a fulltime job, a "green collar" job running an environmentally friendly cleaning service, at the end of the summer. I couldn't keep my mind focused, I was stressed out all the time, and when the owner and I came to anger and yelling I just walked out.

I'd started performing for some femdom pr0n out in the suburbs, and would make as much money in six hours as I did in two weeks at my "real job." It was a bizarre feeling, but it was just like the acting I did in High School, in the long run.

Despite biking twelve miles a day, the new medication I'd started taking for fibro was making me bloat and gain weight. I look at pictures of myself at that time and I cringe. I was pasty and puffy and I weighed almost thirty pounds more than I did ten years ago.

I spend almost all my time now in bed or tucked up in the sunroom.



It's so hard to walk or stand. The ground slips and stutters under me. I panic at bars, need to sit with my back to a wall and drink fast, drink til the leg cramps stop. Smile and talk loud about my cat, about Memphis, but always always I end up talking about being Sick.

It's becoming all I am.

Poem for Monday, December 3, 2007

Poem for Monday, December 3, 2007

At a Loose End

by D. H. Lawrence

Many years have I still to burn, detained

Like a candle-flame on this body; but I enclose

Blue shadow within me, a presence which lives contained

In my flame of living, the invisible heart of the rose.

So through these days, while I burn on the fuel of life,

What matter the stuff I lick up in my daily flame;

Seeing the core is a shadow inviolate,

A darkness that dreams my dreams for me, ever the same.

Burke's Book Store
936 South Cooper
Memphis, TN 38104
(901) 278-7484
www.burkesbooks.com

get that serotonin in me

This reminds me that tomorrow I have "meds clinic" instead of a regular visit with my p-doc. I never know how these sessions go. Sometimes I go and it's a teeny room crowded with professional looking men betrayed by their leg-joggling, sometimes it's like a bus just unloaded from a halfway house.

we'll see.

monday

Preoccupation with death.

Perceiving one's body as crippled,
lame, uglier than average,
more flawed than average,
useless, decrepit, defunct.

I will learn to walk with a cane,
I will fuck you like it will be the last time, like
this churning might break me
open at the hips.

homesick

i spend too much time looking at personal ads. lately i have so much trouble thinking of any possible reason anyone would date me. ok, sure, i'm damn cute, i'm smart, well-read, blah. but everytime i meet someone i like a lot they scoot as soon and they learn What I'm Really Like.

lately i feel like Jabba the Hut.

randomness

i'm only partially employed, and so i spend days in bed with a book, smoking pot out of apples, talking to my friends at their shitty desk jobs via gmail, which everyone has now. i openly disdain people who don't use it. minus fifteen with-it points. whatevs. i sport a little old lady hat i adopted from brown elephant and cheap knit gloves with the fingers cut off.

i am starting to accept that my current employment has rendered me temporarily if not permanently unboyfriendable. there were myriad factors already and i believe the mousetrap on the scrotum for the internets as a means of making money is just a final straw. the snowball. etc.

there's being sick, being an ex-crazy, being far tooo well-read, being hypersexual, being a comic book nerd, sci-fi reader, lover of vampire slayers, owner of multiple well-designed sex toys.

ghostface killah, lucero, magnetic fields. xena in bed. once a week i coach and costume primadonna amateur dominatrices thru a couple hours of dick torture. i make damn good cornbread. i have tattoos in elvish. i am a cultbanger.

the sads (how to fight loneliness)

After the equinox I have to take special care not to plunge into the depths of the black dog; doing this while detoxing from Lyrica is particularly obnoxious. I have to force myself to listen to the Arcade Fire instead of Otis Redding, I have to bore myself into cleaning my room, and I have to keep all the lights on full-blast as soon as dusk even hints at erasing shadows.

and then there's the weed maintenance program. Zak used to joke about it back when I was on Depakote and Risperdal and Effexor and all that other ridiculous shit.

-All you need is meditation and marijuana. And Doral menthol lights.

When he broke up with me, I burned myself numb for months. And then I started smoking pot again and things got a little bit easier to handle. He died three years ago right when I lost my shit. Sometimes I envy him. I'd never leave a mess for someone else to clean up like that, at least I'd like to think I wouldn't. I fantasize about just disappearing off to Canada to sit on a cushion and hum, but when the black dog starts howling I've started to look down at my arms and think about blistering heat and knife blades. I am only lucky not to be back home with the drinking and the pills.

Until things get better, or until they get worse, I'm going to only do things that make me feel better. I have to. this masochism is killing me.

I have a winter full of stoned evenings lying in bed listening to a blissed-out shoegazer mix ahead of me. That or red nights prodding at old scars.

scurvy

my teeth have grown unaccountably sharp.
I chew through my cheeks when I sleep.
I cannot stop prodding at the sore place with my tongue.

Poem for Monday, October 8, २००७

The Fall




by Heather McHugh






Gold leaf fell

to the rake and the fire.
Leaping headlong into those
upholstered yards, we couldn’t tell


rags from riches, loving a little
trash by nature, having
an orange crush. But love
becomes a set of pet


names, all diminutive,

and as for God,
we saw it was the dark
that made the stars. As time


went by,
the jeweled movement
of the loan shark’s car
would utterly impoverish the sky.








Burke's Book Store
936 South Cooper
Memphis, TN 38104
(901) 278-7484
www.burkesbooks.com

too heavy

I'd love to detox off Lyrica. I can't tell if it's helping or not anymore. the weight gain has been around 10-15 lbs, just enough to make me hate my body palpably, bulimically, once again. at this point I'm not sure which is worse, the all-invading ache or the head-bashing mirror hatred. but when I read about cerebral edema and hallucinations it just makes me feel that much more helpless.

the worst part about being chronically ill is the complete disenfranchisement. i have no say in this. I am lucky if I can sucker my np for some codeine sizzurp when I am coughing up green shit. part of me thinks it's cos of the tattoos and the yard-long medical record with the state hospitalization and the crazy meds. I'm still in pain, y'know.

i mean, I stopped driving after I totalled my car stone sober in the middle of the day. I just didn't care how fast I was going or what I hit anymore. that sort of recklessness means I am either a total asshole or on the verge of suicidal, right?

i bought a whole bunch of fancy chinese diet tea. gonna try to eat nothing but brown rice and kimchi for a few days. meanwhile the hunger is as bad as it was with Effexor. i have to get off this shit. i dont care at this point if it helps or not. i have found that fibro pain plus self hatred are unbeatable. i give in.

my third rail.