The Sad Month of October

I just spent a half hour googling the names of old friends, mostly to see if I could find tham and partly because it the birthday of one of them--Happy Birthday, Eileen, wherever you are... I did find two. One hasn't made an entry in her blog in 2 years. The other seems to be doing something out there in cyberspace.

I wish I had some real friends, not just cyber friends. The problem is, I keep kicking them out the door. Why? Because from my POV they keep getting toxic to me and I can't be around them anymore.

Take the case of this last. It was three years this October that I had to tell her, "I wish you well in your process, but I can't be there while you go through it." She'd had a particularly bad summer: losing her first real boyfriend, getting mono, having problems at work. And I tried to be there for her, I really tried. But it gets tiresome and draining hearing all the excuses and the "my problems are so much worse than other people's" and all that. I was spending hours with my therapist just talking about her instead of myself. I was spending hours on the computer writing her e-mails, trying to make positive suggestions and chatting with her. It got so bad for her at one point that my husband and I did an intervention: we told her, "Either you call this therapist right now, she's expecting your call, or we're loading you into the truck and taking you for an evaluation at St. Mary's." She chose to call the therapist, but I don;t think that did her any good either. And she certainly didn't appreciate the intervention. All I ever heard from her was "No one understands me," and "no one is there for me," and "there's nothing I can do." So I finally had to call it quits. On the day I did that I got so upset my husband had to take ME to the clinic to be sedated because I couldn't stop crying and crying over the last e-mail she sent me.

And yet, she contacted my husband around Christmas time about getting back some of her stuff I had borrowed and returning mine, and she said, "I don;t even know what happened." I think probably in her mind it was yet another case of someone she thought of as a friend stabbing her in the back and abandoning her out of the blue. I hate to think of her thinking of me that way, but I had to take care of myself.

I wrote a letter to this friend at the time which I never sent. But I'm going to post it here.

Dear A______:

I had decided I wasn't going to respond to your e-mail beyond returning your stuff. Then Michael told me you called him and said you "didn't even know what happened." So, on the off chance that you do actually want to know what happened, I thought I'd give it one more shot. Although the very fact that you don’t know “what happened” says to me that you haven’t been paying attention, so I can’t help but think that anything more I try to say is a waste of effort.

See, a big part of the problem is that for the last year or more you've pretty much constantly been asking "what happened," but when I (or anyone else, it seems) venture an opinion, you won't hear it. You don't listen. You prefer to believe that no one can possibly understand what's going on with you and no one has anything valuable to say. And you get angry and nasty and defensive, and continue in behaviors that are not helpful, all the while complaining about how much your life sucks and how powerless you are to do anything about it. You demean your friends behind their backs-and in my case, to my face--because they don't offer you some perfect solution, instead of making an effort to recognise and appreciate their real concern for you.

So what happened? I got tired, that's what happened. I tried really hard to be there, and listen, and validate your experience, and model a positive outlook, because I could see that you have issues that are bogging you down and I work hard to maintain my faith that a person in pain doesn't actually want to be in pain. That if I can shine a light on the hope that she can't see for herself, she'll naturally turn towards it and use it as the beginning of a step out. Because people don't want to be in pain.

But in your case, I've had to come to the difficult conclusion that that isn't true. Your conduct shows me that, in fact, you do want to be in pain. Instead of receiving a positive outlook as a sign of hope, you sneer at it as something moronic. Or you regard it askance, as if it's some kind of trick, a poisonous snake that will bite you the minute your back is turned. You look for the wrong and when you find it--as you inevitably do, as you're looking so hard for it--it just proves to you that nothing can change and you were right all along.

The last time I mentioned this to you, you claimed to recognise that everything good has a nugget of bad and everything bad has a nugget of good. But the reality is that you don't show any sign of actually believing that. You look really hard for the bad in the good, sure. But I've never seen you reach out to the good in the bad without going out of your way to enumerate all the reasons that good is false. Someone gives you a compliment and you turn it aside. You feel enjoyment and you're "stupid." Happy endings are "unrealistic," and therefore dumb.

How can you expect good things to find you if you spend so much time and energy shoving them away? You don't have to do that. Nothing that's happened to you means you have to do that. You're choosing it. You're practicing an addiction to your pain by not challenging the patterns and the inner voices that keep you in it. It's not the pain I can't be around; it's the addiction.

And that's where this comes back to "what happened." Because in order to cling to your pain you got in the habit of invalidating my experience. If I tried to express concern for you, you got defensive and angry because I was misinterpreting you. You'd say stuff like, your life was so horrible and you were just going to die in a ditch somewhere and when I said that made me scared for you and I wished you'd get some help you'd say, well, you weren't going to off yourself so leave you alone and stop telling you what to do. You'd talk about how much you hated work and how much it got you down and when I said if it was so bad maybe it wasn't doing you any good to be there you came back with how it was the only positive thing in your life. You contradicted yourself constantly to make me wrong. When I tried to say pain sucks and I know how it is and there's ways out if you want to take them, you got down on me for "giving you a lecture" because I can't possibly know anything about you and how trapped you feel. You spat on what I had to give you and then claimed I hadn't tried to give you anything.

You kept saying no one was there for you. The reality is that your definition of what being there for you looks like is so narrow no one can fit into it. And I got tired of trying, and being spat on and told I wasn't doing it right and I wasn't good enough.

I tried to be your friend and offer stuff about me, but I got a pretty clear message that you didn't want that. Everything had to be about your pain. When I tried to share mine, your only response was, "Get a hobby." I tried to share things that I liked and you acted like I was an idiot. When we came home from Pagosa and I told you I had a headache one night and I stayed home and watched "Sister Act 2" on TV, your immediate response was, "Too bad." You didn't bother to wait to hear what I thought or ask whether I liked it. Then when I told you I had actually enjoyed it you had to tell me all the reasons it sucked. That was really rude and unpleasant and it just reinforced that you think I'm a moron. I don't need that.

You seem to have this impression that you're a really good friend and you're always there for other people, but it just isn't true--at least not in my case. I tried to share my work with you--which is the most important thing to me and involves struggles you can't even imagine--and you didn't even read it until I asked you about it six months later. And then you're all, "Oh, I didn't know what you wanted." What I wanted was for you to participate in our relationship. What I wanted was to share something with you that was important and scary to me. What I wanted was for you to be interested in me for my sake. And if you couldn't do that I would have appreciated your being honest enough to say, "you know, I said I'd read this but I'm just not up to it now."

You withhold yourself from real contact. In fact, when real contact tries to find you, you slap it away. And I have no doubt you have reasons for doing so that seem good to you. But it hurts me and it makes me tired. I don't want it any more.

In case you're interested, I'm going to go ahead and explain why I had decided not to answer your last e-mail. My original idea was to answer it with what I'm about to say. Then I decided since you haven't really been interested in my point of view for some time, it wasn't worth my effort.

The long and the short of it is, I'm not interested in "talking about" what happened because that last e-mail didn't demonstrate to me that you're willing to listen. What would demonstrate that? Something more like:

"I miss you. I'm sorry about what happened. I don't even know what happened (which you didn't bother to say to me, only to Michael) but I'd like to understand. I'm ready to hear what you have to say."

It certainly wouldn't include an attempt to lay a guilt trip on me for the fact that you had bought me a birthday present before I decided I was done being hurt, which is what you did. Though I am extremely unwilling to extend myself right now, it is possible for me to entertain the thought that you didn't intend it and didn't know you were doing it. So here's an explanation.

Maybe what you intended to say was, "I felt really bad and I didn't know what to do." That's not what you said. Saying, "I had this present all wrapped and then I lay awake for nights wondering whether or not to give it to you on your birthday. If you don't want it I'll give it to charity," says

"Look at all the trouble I went to for you. Look at all the pain you put me through. Poor me. Don't you feel bad now? Aren't you sorry you caused me such distress? And if you can't appreciate the trouble I went to I'll find someone who does because you don't deserve it anyway."

Well, no, I don't and I'm not.

If that isn't what you meant to say, a more appropriate was of putting it would be to say, "I already had your present and I know it's my responsibility to decide what to do with it, but I just couldn't decide what would be the right thing. So, I'm sorry to put this off on you, but I'm just going to leave it and you can take it if you want it." Or even, "I already had your birthday present and I hope that despite everything you'll accept it."

That's as far as that letter got, and I don;t remember now how I meant to finish it. At the time I was so hurt all I could say to my husband was, "Keep her away from me!"

I wish now sometimes we could talk. If this person approached me and asked to talk about what had happened between us, I would be open to that. But my condition is, she has to ask. So where does that leave me? Alone, I guess.

See, the thing is before I'd want to open a dialog I'd have to have some indication that she'd maybe gone a little way towards changing. I think of her and of that time and my stomach crawls. I don;t regain trust easily. But I'd be willing to try if only she asked. If we could start over.

But maybe there are no second chances. And so my friends are all in cyberspace, where we can;t get too close and hurt each other too badly.

And I think that's a damn shame.

The Power of Blood

I woke up to a bright, beautiful, crisp morning today...and the telltale cramps that mean only one thing: yes, it's That Time Of Month.

There's a relief that comes when the time arrives because it means that the PMS of the preceeding week or so is over for a time. I actually am in very good spirits. But the process itself is...not empowering to me, though some women see it so. In fact, I have such bad cramps that all I want to do is lie on the couch with a heating pad on my belly and moan softly until my husband brings me bonbons and tea.

as for the blood itself...I know of women who collect it and even make drawings with it, which they display prominently about the house. Okay, this seems icky to me, but I can understand the impulse. There's power in blood. That's why men have been afraid of women for years untold: we bleed and bleed and don't die. It's like we have such a vast reservoir of this power that it must needs overflow once a month just to bring us into normal territory. And old women are even scarier. What's happening to that blood power once they stop bleeding? Is it just building up? Making them more and more powerful? Some ancient and/or indigenous cultures have thought so.

Power in blood. When I was a cutter, back in high school, I used to write in my journals in blood. I would draw pictures like a child fingerpainting. I would splatter it on the page with wild glee, just to see the shapes it made. You would not believe how much blood it takes actually to write in it: a lot more than you would imagine. But it never scared me. It felt powerful, taking this substance from my body and using it to create. It feels like the most basic tool of creation is your own blood: the first ink. The one that says "Pay attention to this; it's important." I suppose that's why, in demon lore, contracts with the devil or any powerful entity are always signed in blood.

I don;t do that now, but sometimes I think about it. You can;t very well write a blog in blood and a red font just isn;t the same. Although I suppose the colour is why red is a popular ink for grading papers and the like: it harks back to the primal power of writing in blood. It says, "Pay attention."

Red is for stop signs and ambulance lights. Red is for danger. Red is for labels that warn you of the possible contraindications of your medication.

Red is for lots of things, but mostly, red is for blood.

The Power of blood.

Why I Hate the "Strolling Scones" (org. published Aug 2006)

As this evil band is one of the headliners at the festival I just mentioned, I felt the need to re-publish this blog from my myspace of a year ago:

Why I hate the "Strolling Scones"
Current mood: nauseated

I can't stand it anymore. I've talked around and around this issue without naming names (mostly in my other blog), and I can't stand it anymore. I may become the town pariah--like I have any friends anyway. People who think I belong to the so-called "artistic" community will certainly have to re-evaluate. But my disgust has grown to the point that it is stronger than my fear.

In Paonia, where I live, there are a lot of people who muddle around with music. I won't say musicians, because I think probably 75% of the people I'm talking about aren't actually musicians and calling them musicians is an insult to the 25% who actually are. And by being an actual musician, I mean not a person who plays any particular genre, but a person who has a particular respect for and relationship to music, and one who is willing to address issues and dysfunction and put the self aside for that relationship. Not just a person who gets off on the performance aspect, or someone who grooves to the bongos while stoned on Friday nights. Or someone who can muddle through a fakebook but who never practices. Or someone who plays when s/he gets paid for it but otherwise won't participate.

Well, anyway. Where I live there are a whole lot of dilettantes who get off on strutting around calling themselves artists while not ever really doing the work of acquiring consistent technique. I was in a band with one of these people for a number of years. She was hostile, manipulative and disruptive; she was not honest about what she wanted or what she was willing to do, she refused to learn or practice, she would not allow any kind of criticism or her abilities or performance, she alienated the audiences, threw fits when she wasn't the center of attention, expected the rest of the band to read her mind and resented it when we did or would not, and expected the rest of the band, and me in particular, to cover up her lack of preparation while she swanned around playing the rock star.

this person, who I still balk at mentioning by name, once said, "I'd play the triangle if it meant I could be in a headline band." To which I would have said, "Great, since there's no place for a triangle in this band you can leave and we'll find someone else who can really play the instrument you pretend to play."

This person, when my husband and bandmate told her that "he never really felt like he had a chance to get to be her friend," looked at him with a superior air and replied, "Oh, is that important to you?" as if she had scored some kind of point.

Well, the upshot is that after several years of trying to make things work out--and yes, I really should have wised up sooner, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa--I left the band, which promptly fell apart. (I heard later from various sources that this person went around telling people this was my fault because I was so controlling and wouldn't let people do what they wanted to do--a blatant lie.)

Anyway. Some time later, another band in town--one whose members, incidentally, I count among the real musicians--put together a 60s revival act for a New Year's eve party. They called this group "the Strolling Scones." Cute. I had no problem with this UNTIL the original 4-piece line-up added two more members, one of whom was my former bandmate. I could have dealt if the New Year's eve gig had been a one-shot deal, but the Strolling Scones (and I think this was a cute name for a one-shot deal but just too precious for an ongoing venture) have been playing ever since. They've even made a CD.

It makes me literally sick at my stomach that a person who was pretty much solely responsible for destroying my band is now getting strokes for being a prominent performer (although, as an acquaintence recently said, "she's still a really unpleasant person"), while I came out of the whole band debacle so emotionally damaged that the very thought of playing music where anyone can see me plummets me into an anxiety attack.

It makes me doubly sick, as well as angry, that I've heard that this person has actually become a pretty good performer. I suppose that's petty of me. I try really hard to be happy that she's got something out of her new situation that she didn't get in our band. But I'm not. Because I think that only will allow her to continue to blame me for our band not being the band she wanted it to be, when it was really her lack of honesty and participation. And also, I'm totally pissed off that she would make an effort in this situation that she refused to make before. But maybe the Strolling Scones environment is less demanding of personal responsibility than I was.

And it makes me just ill to see a comment on the Scones' myspace page that reads "if (this person) is involved, it must be good..." when I have first hand experience of her morbid toxicity, over-inflated opinion of herself and just plain lack of talent.

So, I HATE THE STROLLING SCONES. I hate them without ever having heard them and with no intention of ever hearing them. I hate them because this person is involved. Rick, Helen, Carol, I'm sorry. You guys are great--Rick is one of the best bandleaders I've seen in action--and sweet. But I can't respect anyone who associates with the other female member of your band. I simply can't imagine anyone with an ounce of sense putting up with her in any kind of creative endeavour for any length of time. And if you haven't noticed the problems...well, it makes me wonder.

So sue me.

I also used to go get my hair cut by one of the members of this band but I find I just can't bring myself to be in her presence ay longer. I'm really sorry about that because she was a really good stylist. But seeing "Scones" memorabilia all over the studio makes my stomch churn.

Come for the Festival, Brother? (II)

So the last weekend of September here in lovely Paonia, Colorado is the time of the infamous Mountain Harvest Festival. This event has been going on for something like six years now--I know because my band played at the first one, shortly before we broke up.

I do not go to this festival, although this year I REALLY should because SMTtF is based on a festival very much like it. I do not go because it irritates me. It irritates me because it seems geared towards a certain clique in town: they're the ones who go and even the ones who perform in it. The Music acts are always the same and I ask myself, "Why should I pay $17 to go see all of them at one time when I can see any of them for free practically any time I want to at other times of the year?" I ask myself, "Why is there never anyone new on the program?"

I ask myself, "Why am I never invited to read my work at the so-called "Harvest of Voices," a gathering of poets, writers and performance artists that usually kicks off the show?

When I was doing my book signing a year ago, one of the organisers of this event was present. She was carrying on a spirited conversation with another woman about how their group is not, in fact, a clique; "We just want to make sure that people with some quality and experience in their work are the ones performing." SHE SAID THIS RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME, AT MY BOOK SIGNING, NEVER HAVING ASKED ME. I about fell out of my chair. I wish now I had said something to her, like, "Marion, if your group isn;t a clique why have I never been asked to participate in your little parties?" I mean, it's not like she doesn't know I'm a writer. I used to go to open readings all the time and she always gushed about my work when I read it.

The truth is, this year I'm not nearly so upset about it. I think I have halfway convinced myself that the reason they don;t ask me is that they are threatened by my ability and professionalism. I have halfway convinced myself that asking me to read at their little "Harvest of Voices" would be like asking Stephen King to read at the Presbyterian Ladies' writing association social. Anyway, I didn't have my hopes up like I did some years. I spent many of the first years of this festival thing dying to be asked to participate in some way. Now I really just don't care.

This, of course, does not keep me from wishing the whole thing would be visited by a violent rainstorm that would knock out the power during the musical portion of the program. Tee Hee. Unfortunately the skies seem to be clearing from their earlier grey state. Hmm, it IS windy though. I had a power outage from the wind not too long ago. Maybe if I pray to Boreas...

I'm a wicked, wicked woman.

Falling

Falling apart: that's what I feel like. I just realised (at twenty after two) that I totally spaced taking my morning meds. Then I freaked, wondering if it was okay to take them now. I finally decided it was and I took them and now my stomach hurts really badly.

Can't sit still can;t concentrate can;t get dressed can;t get out of bed can't go anywhere can't seem to avoid hitting the semi-colon when I mean to hit the apostraphe...I don;t know how I feel except I feel that I'm slipping again. Slipping into a darkness.

There was a time once when I was so depressed all I did was sleep. I took one sleeping pill after another, everytime I woke up I just took one. I think I stayed asleep for three days that way. I wonder if I'm heading that direction now?

But I don;t feel the crushing weight of depression. This restlessness is foreign to me and I want it to go away.

It would be okay if I could actually DO anything but I can't....I can't concentrate on anything for more than about five minutes at a time. I have the first bits of She Moved Through the Fair going through my head over and over like a mantra and I can;t seem to sit still long enough to write them down. I'm afraid if I start writing I won't be able to stop and though that would actually be a good thing it terrifies me. What is that about?

Why did that last paragraph refuse to turn the right colour?????

More than anything this sense of falling all the time.

I have an appointment with my psychiatrist in October and I'm so afraid he's going to stick me in the hospital. II've managed to avoid that for over 20 years and I don't want to go back. We can;t afford it; we have no insurance. If we did it wouldn;t be so bad, I suppose. At least something familiar in this weirdness.

Where's my coffee?

Today: Anxiety

There's a line from a song that goes:

"Insanity: I can feel the knives inside my brain
I stand alone at the threshold of my pain."

And if you replace the first word with Anxiety, that's how I feel today.

I could have guessed this was coming. What with everything yesterday, I totally spaced taking my anxiety meds not once but twice. And so...

It starts right away, as soon as I open my eyes. I don't want to get out of bed. The bed seems the only safe place for me, really. But I know I have to get up so I convince myself it won't be all that bad just to get up and peruse the Internet and have a cup of coffee.

My stomach is churning and my brain is churning. My shoulders feel stiff and tense and I can feel a scream building in my throat, just behind where my Adam's apple would be if I had one. Even my ears feel tense. I swallow and I get no relief. I try to breathe and feel as if I'm slowly being strangled. When I take a deep breath I begin to shake and pant like a dog or an unbroken horse.

I go to my desk with my coffee and that's all right for a while, chatting with my internet friends--the only friends I have, really. Then I begin thinking that spending so much time on the Internet is really wasteful and dumb and I begin beating myself up for it. That makes the anxiety worse. I begin to think of ending the session and doing something useful. My breath comes in gasps. Those knives in my brain are twisting and there are words there: words I can't quite make out but I know they're berating me for being lazy, among other things. They often call me a liar. It's like a constant buzzing in my ears, or like ny brain is infested with flies. Everything I do is wrong somehow. I just want to curl up in a corner. I want the buzzing to stop.

Finally I manage to get up and eat some breakfast. I take my morning meds. I tidy up the kitchen, shaking all the while. Then I begin to think about getting dressed and the shaking gets worse. There are so many steps to getting dressed and I don;t know if I can handle them. There's washing. Do I just wash my face or do I take a shower? I know my hair needs washed because I haven't been able to accomplish that in a week or so--eeeww--but if I wash my hair it will just get sweaty again if I manage to do anything like go out for a walk or do Pilates. I fully have intended to do Pilates today but right at the moment I don't know if I can. Even popping the DVD into the player seems like too much. It's a decision and I can't make decisions.

I don;t get dressed. I sit down and play a computer game and smoke. Then I write this. I still feel sick at my stomach and I don't know what to do. Everything seems so difficult. So full of consequence. If I get dressed without washing my hair I have to do it later because tonight is my radio show and I can't go out of the house looking like this. If I wash my hair I can't really do anything active, which I ought to do because I've been so inactive all week. Can I do Pilates without getting dressed? That seems wrong somehow in a way I can't define.

So I come here and write this and it doesn't help. It doesn't make me feel any better, setting this down. I wonder if anyone will read it. I wonder if people will think I'm crazy. I wonder if I think I'm crazy. I don;t really, but this anxiety is too much.

I think I willl not get dressed just yet. Maybe later...

Wednesday is Geek Day...

So I got up at WAY too fucking early in the morning so I could be at least in a semi-conscious state by the time my computer repair person arrived. He was supposed to be here at nine. Nine came; he didn't. Nine-thirty, ten, ten-thirty...what, did he get stuck in World of Warcraft and spaced out that we had an appointment? Finally around eleven I got a call: "I'm on my way! Really!" By this time I'm on fire and also bouncing off the walls from too much coffee and not enough tobacco (I didnt smoke all morning so he wouldn;t have to breathe my evil fumes; wasn't that considerate of me? I have since made up for the lack by smoking like a chimney.) I funed around some more. Then he shows up. And he's SUCH a nice guy, I immediately felt like an idiot for being upset with him for being 2 hours late. I mean, in a small county with only 2 real computer services this poor guy is really overworked and he doesn't charge near enough.

Anyway. He went to work and pretty soon had my system sorted: yes, ma'am it WAS the CPU fan which was no longer functioning as a fan in any capacity--it was more like an interesting sculpture stuck in my hardware. Then we networked my computer with my husband's, which we had tried to do on our own but hadn't been able to manage. I got to play geek on one computer while Scott did his thing on the other and that was fun. It kind of makes me regret the days when I trained as a computer tech and then never went anywhere with it. I could be making loads of money now...

Goodbye Norton; Hello Avast! I'm an honorary geek, I have it on good authority.

Then came the freak out. After Scott left, I decided to update my website. I click on the website design software icon and nothing happens. WHAT THE FUCK? I keep doing this for about fifteen minutes and am wondering all the time if my whole website is lost somewhere in cyberspace. I sign onto the net--no, it's still there, I just can't do anything with it. I call Scott in a panic, but being the honorary geek that I am I keep trying to find the problem on my own. FINALLY I locate the download for my sitebuilder software (Yahoo had this REALLY well hidden; I can;t imnagine why). I redownload and reinstall the software and ta-daa! it works. None of my data was even lost. So I call Scott back and tell him to disregard my previous messsage and spend the rest of the day adding new stuff to my site.

So go there already!