I’ve decided to accept the invitation to live with a middle aged diesel dyke and watch her cats for her while she’s on the road.
Kitchen, no internet.
I’ll take that exchange rate.
Archive for January, 2012
A government link to a government PDF form regarding firearm laws provided this ridiculous font in the footnotes.
I disagree with this choice.
Maybe it’s because it’s 20 degrees colder
or that the moon is waxing.
Maybe it’s because of six fish with yellow tails
long breaks
and refraining from physically attacking
a cloud of condescension.
Maybe it’s just because I’ve fucked up my whole life
have been living on sugar vapors and delusions
and just can’t fucking handle it anymore.
I don’t know where you are anymore
but for a few minutes tonight
we sat on a bench together
on the edge of a damned up crick
deep in suburbia.
We talked about why I invited you there
and while I was staring at the Cheshire Cat moon
you disappeared.
I took our dog for a long walk afterward.
He has also been damned to live a displaced existence.
He watched me color for two and a half hours.
Life is kicking my ass.
a ten minute exchange
self-imposed ten minute exchange…
—
I didn’t even read your letter.
I didn’t even open it.
—
I don’t want you to give me recommendations.
I don’t want you to like me.
—
Why did you leave?
—
—
I remember the first time, I didn’t think the feeling would ever go away. I don’t know if it did, or if I’ve just been shifting the weight
and letting it snowball
this entire time.
—
Why did my sister come here? She asked about you.
She doesn’t know I’m an addict.
She doesn’t know anything about me.
She left me a drawer of prescriptions someone like me can’t get
for some legitimate reasons
that I’ve been fighting with since she left.
She just wanted to help me.
—
I didn’t have a reason on the only occasion that I made a serious attempt.
No reason.
Not even in retrospect.
No forethought before and no reason afterward.
How do you fight something like that?
Something completely illogical that’s rationalized to death in medical texts.
It’s not…rational.
—
I’m not having a bad night.
—
You don’t care how I’m doing.
You ask, but you don’t want a straight answer.
I hate you.
I hate that this is now people relate to one another.
I hate it.
I hate this.
Don’t ask me anymore.
Just don’t ask.
—
I’m not okay, and I don’t want to fuck you tonight.
—
I made a mistake.
That means I regret something.
I can’t shut out the world.
I can’t even use the world to shut myself up.
—
Shut up.
—
—
It took four months last time.
It’s been nine.
—
You keep asking me how many days are in the month.
“What’s the trick to that?”
Memorizing December/January and July/August.
You should have paid attention in grade school.
It’s a leap year.
—
I’m sorry.
I miss the comfort that I got from knowing that you cared enough to listen.
It was as close as I’ve ever come to feeling connected and accepted in the world around me, which is something that I’m always missing.
I know that you didn’t take that small comfort away from me but that I more or less imploded.
Trying to tell myself that I don’t miss you is probably inaccurate, and selfish.
I think I regret failing to ever get to know you.
I was awake until about four in the morning tinkering with perpetually unimportant things.
Managing to get my headache to go away, I felt rather successful.
Then I went to sleep.
I woke up sick, threw up, and went to work anyway.
This shit happens. Generally, if I ignore it, it improves as the day gets worse.
Not yesterday.
Less than an hour into my shift, I had to call in a replacement.
Thankfully, we’re currently in the position wherein a replacement is available
for the first time in at least six months.
This was my first sick day in over two years, and here’s why:
I was not coherent enough to do anything but tussle with my blankets, stagger to the bathroom and sip water for an entire day.
I went home where my temperature started at 96 and progressed to 102 at around three this morning.
I lost 11 pounds.
That’s over a gallon of water.
Today, my headache is back. I’ll assume it’s from dehydration. My temperature is happily back down to 97. (I don’t run at the average 98.6 very often.)
Lucky me.
Back to work in an hour.
The difference between:
a grey cat
and a brown rabbit
You like me.
That wasn’t supposed to happen.
Everyone at work has noticed
since my sister left.
The latent aggression is closer to the surface
and I’m much further down.
I don’t want to pretend I give a shit about your boyfriend
or even your correction.
Fiance.
I don’t care.
He’s a guy that you live with and fuck exclusively.
I still don’t care.
He’s just as unattractive as you are.
You should thank me for pretending to give a damn.
You’re not important.
You’re not better than your job.
You’re a fucking nobody just like me.
I just refuse to factor love into the equation
and I don’t have the time or energy to pretend otherwise.
You’re not supposed to like me.
You’re not supposed to pay attention to the shit I do.
What’s missing from your shitty, little perfect life
that makes me show up on your radar?
Fine.
You hate them, too.
Maybe you’re not more like them than you are like me
but I’m less like you than you seem to think.
You strive to be happy.
I just try to stay sane without being able to find any fucking rational reason
to stay on this side of the wall.
I don’t have a place here
which is predominately why I read on my breaks.
I don’t have a place at all.
It’s not a woe is me sentiment.
You’re just not supposed to like me.
How am I supposed to respond?
I spent four hours crying last night
over shit I’m not even sure happened
that I don’t even care to amend one way or the other.
If it happened, the conversation happened between assholes
and if it didn’t happen
the conversation still happened between assholes.
They just might not exist.
This time, I’ve been jarred so far from my previous mindset
that everyone I keep at a staggering distance still knows
and gauging from that
I must be worse than when I lost
the only place I ever felt I might be okay
outside of myself
folded up and tucked away in someone else’s empathy.
I hide in the back
and I’m not nice when I’m provoked to respond.
I don’t care what’s happening.
I’m busy drowning.
Stop shaving your pubic hair.
It’s not cleaner.
It doesn’t improve any act I’ve come across.
It looks awful.
I’m going to start rejecting anyone that shaves
on the spot
from this point on.
No exceptions.
Yes, I’m just as shallow as you.
From Social Security, huh?
Interesting.
Very.
I’m not going to complain, because the holiday is over; but I had to listen to my fucking boss complain all year about something that was a slight perk for his Libertarian ass.
What kind of bullshit is that?
I paid off one creditor this morning!
That’s three in the clear with…nine to go.
Fuck this bullshit.
The first time I knew I had a problem was with a stuffed animal that winked at me.
I also remember a situation with the sky being the wrong shade of blue and the sun failing to go down.
A history of night walking and talking goes back as far as my parents are willing to share.
I once became the ass of Freshman jokes for carrying on coherent conversations with no recollection and screaming profanities at random on the few occasions when I let myself sleep soundly in college dorms.
Wake up in the middle of fucking…repeatedly.
My parents thought I slept a lot as a kid.
I had a relatively strict bedtime. Lights out.
From about nine years old, I read books via street light into the dead hours of the morning
and then “slept in” when morning came.
I’ve averaged about four hours of sleep a day for a very long time
broken into two shorter periods.
The main problem with this is REM rebound.
I probably don’t dream more than average, but I remember.
My dreams have their own history, and I remember some from when I was very young.
I was still in grade school when I started to manipulate lucid dreaming.
I rarely dream without lucidity…or recall upon waking.
Not sober anyway.
I have to be so exhausted that I forget to breathe when I fall asleep for memory to evade me
and that is an entirely different problem.
That level of exhaustion provokes night terrors as well as apnea.
Great combination, by the way.
I was still in grade school when I could recall flashes of my night terrors.
Yes, I do know the difference between a night terror and a nightmare.
It’s like the difference between boredom and a panic attack.
I have read what information there is available on the subject of sleep in most capacities.
Don’t correct me.
I know what I deal with when I sleep.
I’ve definitely earned the dark rings under my eyes.
You’ve got to be kidding if you want me to cover them with makeup
and deny that I like taking or doing
anything
that makes sleep the least bit
comforting.
I’ve had chronic insomnia for most of my life.
It’s one of those things that I don’t suffer from, because I don’t know differently
except vicariously.
As with a few of my other problems, though, I find it hard to respect other people’s superficial common usage of soft science definitions.
I also still resent being told that I’m sick, but sometimes; yes.
I want help.
I don’t have to lie or exaggerate to find myself on a cocktail of Ambien, Seroquel, and Prozac after one visit when I won’t be able to pay for a second one.
I want to know what it’s like to be my sister
and have allergies to cashews and internal organs that require removal for sabotage
instead of…this shit; this shit in my head.
What’s it like to be a woman that suggests Passion Flower in lieu of Librium?
In what state of existence are those two interchangeably useful?
She tells me that the gene we share that’s responsible for Parkinson’s is active
because we have trouble sleeping.
I refrain from telling her that I hate just about everything she has to say.
She tells me about a doctor that didn’t ask for her medical history
and prescribed something that made her hallucinate.
I don’t tell her that I hallucinate.
I don’t tell her anything.
She lives in a world where she can resent her MD and praise her herbalist.
I live in a world where those entities don’t even exist
where I’m two steps away from becoming a ward of the state
defaulting on life
and half the time hoping I lose the lucid moments and become certifiably insane
after killing a client
or a boss
or my sister.
Do you ever just stop short and wonder what the fuck your life has decided to do to you while you weren’t looking?
I don’t mean the piteous, What the fuck happened to my life, shit. I mean…what the fuck.
Just…what the fuck?
What the fuck?
What the fuck?
I willingly reached into an old mans front pocket today at work
on the day job.
One closer to my own age scrawled half a dozen band names on a piece of paper for me.
This slip of paper is something someone should have given me twenty years ago when my sister was giving me shit about my favorite color and lucky numbers.
I don’t want to see my sister.
I haven’t seen her in almost three years
she’s been nothing but nice to me for the past ten
and I don’t want to fucking see her.
I don’t want to pretend to give a shit about her stupid little family.
—
If I had been patient…
I’m not going to chase after you.
I don’t care.
You hate it when I say it, but I don’t fucking care.
Why should I?
What’s so irresistible about you?
—
I’m older than most of the girls I work with
and I’m not as pretty
and I’m not even good at what I do.
—
She’s normal.
She’s picket fence normal.
She went to school
and married her high school sweetheart.
She has a career
in a field
which she went to school for.
She has a dog
and likes yoga
and loves soft science touted as fuzzy fact.
She can pay her bills and buy organic groceries.
—
Fuck off.
—
If I had just been patient, you would have lost interest.
She took your money.
She took a lot of people’s money.
People just like you.
Why?
Why were you interested at all?
Because she’s pretty?
Clever?
Unattainable.
—
I don’t want to see her.
I don’t want any more pressure to be someone I’m not.
I don’t want any more pressure.
—
The prick said he was open minded
while judging everyone in that pretentious philosophical way.
If you’re wondering what stopped me from fucking him
that was more than enough.
—
Why are you with a 21-year-old girl?
I’m just curious.
—
New Orleans is the new trendy place to be.
You don’t have any originality, but you lie well.
—
I lied, too.
I don’t want to see anybody anymore.
I don’t want to see you.
You’re flaky at best, and nothing you can offer me is worth
bending back
jacking up
painting on
or shaving off what I’ve got going.
I don’t really care that much that you have a drunk girl in your bed right now
while everyone on the day job just found out today
that I sleep on my floor.
I put up with a ten minute exchange about how I should get a bed
and why it’s weird that I don’t have one.
On nights when I want one, I borrow
and on particularly shitty nights, if you’ll recall,
I’ll make you volunteer to take your own floor while I feel out a place on your mattress.
When I want someone to choke me and spit in my face, I don’t come to you.
I don’t expect to be for you what that drunk girl is.
We’re not in competition.
I don’t have sparkly vanilla mango lotion bronzer
and I don’t even know what to do with women that do…
I’d rather taste salt from sweat than cocoa butter and wood alcohol,
so I don’t have a drunk girl from the club passed out in my blankets.
That you know what to do and want to…
Telling me about it is a little bit sad, but…thanks.
I’m going to keep what I do predominately to myself
because you’re not involved, precisely because I don’t want you involved,
because just like I know that I have very limited common ground
with the girl you’re with now
I’m also filling in gaps with individuals possessing qualities
I enjoy
that you lack.
I don’t know what you want from me.
I haven’t met up with you in months
since you asked me to be a specific way that I’m not,
and despite recanting in the wake of my stubbornness in an attempt to salvage an ever malleable potential
I’m still not.
I’m not sad because I’m alone, getting ready to attempt sleep after the flip of an arbitrary Gregorian calendar year. Yes, I’m an unhappy person, and you’re right that I dismissed any celebratory actions over the weekend.
I actually worked the entire duration much like any other weekend, but you know.
I work a lot “and still no money,” because I’m one of those strange birds that pays the bills before buying dinner.
Thanks for calling though.
For thinking of me while you’re happy without me.
I’m sure she’s beautiful and all that thrillingly satisfying jazz.
I’m sorry if I somehow…detracted from the joy of your life
by sitting here completely minding my own business.
Substitutions make poor replacements, but feel free to call again when you’ve decided to openly admit that I’m what you want.
Otherwise, I’d rather not hear from you again.
It leaves me with a slightly acrid, empty feeling as if I’m awake and alive solely thanks to pumping too many stimulants into my system.
This is why I easily topple into dependency issues with depressants.
Pretty much exclusively depressants.
I don’t care what day it is. I just want some fucking sleep.
and so we meet again 