A Handful of Dust

"What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
--T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland"

Coming out of the long sleep. Almost a year: I have not been literally asleep, rather in abeyance. The self that is me has been curled up tight, perhaps undergoing some kind of metamorphosis, perhaps only waiting for some moment in time, this moment. I think this moment, yet I have no idea what makes this moment different from any other.

I know dissatisfaction with my life. This is something I have not known for long and long, though I have not really had a life for the past year or more. Only a waiting, an existence. A space of time during which I have had the barest consciousness of myself and the world around me.

Now I come to myself and I find myself dissatisfied. I am bored, restless and cranky. I want more. Yet I still feel very little connection with anything. I reach for connection, and I know only the sickness of fear.

It started, I think, with the reading. At first I was glad to be reading, because I had not been able to do even that much for a very long time. Now I have been doing little but reading for several months. And I begin to recognise the old hunger. I am tired of reading, of being a witness to things in which I have no real part. I want to create again.

And so, I turn my eye to writing once more. I have spent the last couple of weeks reading everything I have ever written. At first I felt nothing at all. I saw dead words that did not move me. I scanned novels of a few pages or half finished, and did not remember what they were supposed to be about or why I should care.

Then I began to feel a stirring in my belly. Not inspiration: fear. A throwing up fear.

I do not know what this fear is about. It refuses a name.

I wanted to say more about this, but at the moment there is nothing more to say.

I'm so tired...I haven't slept a wink...

I'm so tired...my mind is on the brink...

Enough with the singing, already.

Okay, so for those of you hanging on my every post, which admittedly are few and far between, I won my disability claim. W00t! But that's not the end of it. I have to deal with the mounds of paperwork from the office of Social Security and Disability before I see any benefits. At least, that's how it seems. I was supposed to get a deposit to my account this week but it still hasn't come. I don't know why. Usual bureaucratic delays, I suppose. But I keep thinking they're going to take it away from me or that something will go wrong somehow. I already found out my dentist doesn't accept Medicaid, which I now have, so I still owe him wads of money from my last visit. And we haven't paid our mortgage in two months now and I'm afraid our house is going to get yanked out from under us. I mean, I guess we could start selling the furniture or something. And I'm up over my head in credit card debt and...well, the list goes on and on, doesn't it.

But I'm really not sleeping right now because I located someone on Facebook. This is a person I was best friends with for a long time, and then she was going through a hard time and I was going through a hard time and there was a lot of badness between us, I guess, and the relationship ended. Okay, I ended it after she sent me a particularly acerbic e-mail. I didn't mean to. But I ended up crying for three days and had to be sedated and I couldn't go on with the situation anymore.

But the think is, I never stopped missing her. Or dreaming about her. And they were good dreams. In the last one we ran into each other and we both said, "Oh, I've missed you so much!" and hugged.

So, I messaged her. Well, first I spent an hour wondering whether to message her. Then I messaged her. And now I can't sleep because I'm wondering whether she'll reply or not and whether she'll tell me to piss off or not and why I even did such a stupid thing when she's probably moved on and doesn't even remember me.

It's true, I was angry with her for a long time about that last e-mail. But I'm not now. I just want us to be friends on some terms again. I'm not such a fool as to think it could ever be the way it was. Or maybe it could be, but I think we'd have to start all over again. I just hope she gives me a chance, is all.

My head hurts and I'm delirious with lack of sleep. I need to finish this smoke and go to bed for real.

The end.

Again with the not sleeping...

I don't think it's because of last night's nightmare, though I could be mistaken.

There's just so much stress in my life right now. Stress over money--we got another hate call from the bank today. And stress over my upcoming hearing. Did I mention that I'm having a hearing this Friday on my disability claim? I guess not, because the last time I posted before yesterday afternoon was before I knew the date of it. Not of yesterday, of the hearing.

I must be tired.

My head hurts too.

So, I'm having this hearing over my disability claim. It comes down to, I claim I can't work because of my Bipolar Disorder. The SSI doesn't believe me. I appealed their first decision and now I have to have this damned hearing. Before a judge and expert witnesses and everything. It's a video conference: they'll be in Salt Lake City while I'm in Grand Junction, but still. I'm totally freaking. I keep going over and over in my head the things they might ask me and what I'm going to say. My lawyer says he'll be asking most of the questions--the key word here is most--and we've rehearsed what I need to say...and he says we stand a good chance of getting something. But my claim goes back a long way--to 1998--and he doesn't know if we can substantiate my disability back that far.

He says to just let it go because it's out of my control and what will happen will happen. But I'm scared to death. I can;t seem to let it go even though I know it's good advice to be able to follow.

Hence the not sleeping lately and the stress eating and all the bad things I'm doing to my body and mind.

I'm bored with this now. I'm nored with being awake. Please let me sleep.

I think maybe I can write this now.

I had a nightmare this morning. It was a bad one. It seems kind of silly, now, that I should have been so frightened and am still so frightened that I'm shaking as I try to write this; the events were not at all spectacular. But It frightened me so badly I woke myself up screaming. I usually can't scream when I'm having nightmares; I just wake up. But this time I managed it.

It started out as one of those bathroom dreams: you know, the kind where you badly have to go to the bathroom and you can't fin a toilet, or you finally do find a toilet and just as you're about to attend to your business you realise it's standing in the middle of a crowded office. Or a lion is in there, or you have to aim and pee into this little tiny hole or something like that.

So, I'm looking for a bathroom and finding bathroom after bathroom that isn't suitable--one actually was in the middle of a crowded office and another was full of body parts and such. They kept getting more and more unsuitable until I finally found this big room with a dresser and a dirty toilet in it. And though the toilet was REALLY dirty, like, from the worst pit stop you've ever visited, I thought, "Fine, it'll do," because all the others were so very much worse and I had to go really badly by that time. So I sit down to pee and then I realise there's this guy in there and I realise it must be his bedroom I'm in, because he's getting ready for his day. And he's smearing this terrible strawberry-scented lotion through his hair and the smell is so strong it just makes me want to vomit, but he doesn't seem to be taking any notice of me so I just think I'll do my business and get out of there as soon as possible. But he's taking a really long time at it: even smearing the stuff through his armpit hair and all. And then he grabs me and starts smearing the stuff all over me and I can't get away and I can't get it off and I try fighting him but he's too strong for me. So I decide to scream for help and at first nothing came out but then it did and I woke myself up screaming. And I heard M. in the kitchen making his breakfast and he shouted "What the hell was that?" or something and came running in. And I had to get up because I was so freaked out.

So, being in a bathroom with a strange guy who was smearing strawberry-scented lotion on me was the essence of it. I felt so trapped and out of control. I wonder now if it was some throwback to the rape I suffered 25 years ago. Was there some hint of strawberry in the rapist's smell? I can't remember. And like I said, it seems silly now that I've written it. But it's still giving me the heebie jeebies even now.

Another 25 things...

25 Things To Do When You Can't Sleep...

1. Make a stupid list of 25 things to do when you can't sleep.

2. Visit all your forums. Find nothing spectacular is going on.

3. Drink a cup of hot chocolate.

4. Smoke to excess.

5. Watch the cats spazz out.

6. Wonder why one cat is sleeping behind the microwave and then remember she's afraid of the other cats as much as I am.

7. Worry that the pain in your side is the onset of appendicitis.

8. Pee about a thousand times.

9. Think about cleaning your office. Decide that you don't care your office is a pit.

10. Go back to your regular forums again and find nothing new has happened since your last visit.

11. Consider writing something profound.

12. Fail to come up with anything profound to write.

13. Rehearse the bad dreams from last night in your mind.

14. Wonder what your day will look like tomorrow...oh, that's later today, isn't it?

15. Curse your diet because you really want to eat something fattening.

16. Get really thirsty and not drink any water because a) your water bottle is in the bedroom with your sleeping husband and b) because you don't want to spend the night peeing a thousand more times.

17. Play stupid computer games until your eyes fall out.

18. (DJs only) wonder what you will play on your next radio show.

19. Wonder what to wear later today.

20. Wonder if taking a shower would help relax you enough to go to sleep.

21. Consider sending really obnoxious forwards to everyone in your address book.

22. Wonder why you started this list in the first place.

23. Be relieved that you're almost at the end of it.

25. Yawn. A lot.

What to Do Today?

Nothing momentous to report. I'm writing this mainly because I'm done with all the usual stuff I do at my computer in the mornings but I don't want to leave cyber-land.

Why am I up so early? I got up at 7 a.m. because Onyx was being a total butt head, chewing on my ear and digging his claws into my neck. I could have just thrown him out of the room and gone back to sleep, but I had to pee and after that I decided I was hungry so I got up.

I'm hungry again already. That often happens when I haven't had enough sleep.

I could:

Mop the kitchen--it really needs it, but I don't want to do that. I never want to do that. Mopping is my nemesis. I think it's been four months since the last time I mopped in there (good thing we have slate grey tiles so the dirt doesn't show!) and a year since I mopped the hardwood floors. There; I've confessed to being a poor housekeeper.

Read. Don't really feel like doing that either, but it's an option.

Practice my flute. I've been into doing that lately. I've finally reached the point where practicing is a joy to me and not something I dread and I'm seeing vast improvement. M. and I play and sing together almost every night, too. Sometimes we do well, sometimes not so well. We have a tentative goal of putting enough of a set together that we could play at the Grand Junction Ren Faire at the end of the summer, but if that doesn't materialise that's okay too.

Anyway, it seems too early to practice somehow. My usual time is two, two-thirty-ish. I find it helps to stick with that routine.

I wonder sometimes about my lack of significant thought. Other people I know who write blogs always seem to have a theme, something to say that's relevant. I don't. I just drift along most of the time and keeping this blog is a random occurrence. I suppose that's why I call it "Random Mutterings."

But then, I don't have a life, do I? My pdoc brought that up, not the last time I saw him, which was just a few days ago, but the time before last. He said, "How can you have anything to talk about if you don't do anything?" My friend S. and I decided he must be a classic Meyers-Briggs "S" type personality, to think that only concrete things matter in conversation. But sometimes I wish I had more of a life. I'd like to do more. Take an art class, for example. I'd like very much to take another dance class, if there were one taught by an instructor I really trusted.

That's the problem with living where I do. I know most of the people here and, face it, except for a few, I don't like or trust them very much. Many seem to be stuck in a party-hearty state which I passed through in my late teens. I just don't find I have anything to discuss with them. And the ones I'd like to know better are all in hiding, as am I.

This is not to discount the fact that I am naturally quite shy and aloof. Maybe it's all my problem. Maybe if I gave other people another chance I'd find someone I really hit it off with. But the last two times I got burned were pretty severe strikes to my self-confidence and now I just don't want to deal...

For the most part I'm happy with my Internet life. But there's a problem with my closest friend being in San Francisco and others being scattered around the globe. You just can't go out and get a cup of coffee with the Internet. I guess you kind of could, but it isn't the same as sitting in a coffee shop and chatting with someone you really feel close to.

I'm sleepy now. Maybe it's time to try to take a nap...

Upset

So, yesterday in the mail I got an invitation from my old High School to the (sic) "25th reunion of the 1978 production of Godspell." It seems they're doing a revival and have invited all the old cast members to a special showing and party. (It also seems they haven't noticed that 1978 was 31 years ago, not 25, but that's my High School for you...)

This invitation upset me. It brought back a lot of memories of that production and of that period of my life. The production aspect wasn't so bad--I never became close to anyone in the cast but that's me for you. Never quite fitting into a group. My best friend was in the band, though, and we had some good times. And I liked the director quite a lot. Sunday rehearsals also gave me an excuse to skip church, which I had never liked going to, but had to go to as my father was the minister.

But that period of my life was a bad one. I was severely depressed and sick most of the time. I hated school--not because of the classes, but because most of my peers treated me with utter contempt and even downright abuse. My family viewed my spiraling depression as...I don't know what. Just me being a bad kid, I guess. I constantly heard I was "not living up to my potential." I nearly flunked out of Physics and that was a sign I was bad, too, not that something was severely wrong in my life.

I started keeping my first journal at that time.

Last night as we were sitting on the couch vegging after dinner, M. asked me, "So are you thinking of how we can get the money to go back to this reunion?" He asked it with a laugh and I knew he wasn't serious but it made me think. Maybe if we were closer to Grosse Pointe and not in such economic distress, I'd want to go. But why? I can't think of one single person from that production that I'd want to see again in real life. Well, maybe one. But that's not enough to make me want to relive the trauma of those days. So why am I even interested in going? Why am I somewhat sorry that I can't?

I had nightmares about being back in High School all night.

M. is back from the store now and I have to go help him unload the groceries, so once again I am left with no answers, only questions. And I leave you with the same.