Chill of Summer

I can't believe that it's been so long since I've posted here. And Summer is halfway over and I still feel the cold inside. The truth is, it's been a somewhat colder summer all around. The weather is milder--we usually have temps in the 100s by this time and this year most days are in the 80s, which is actually nice, if strange. And the financial climate is definitely chilly. Most summers we have done well enough to keep more than afloat and have a few2 nice things, but this year we just can't seem to quite get our heads above water. I received one of those "when are you going to deposit money?" calls from the bank this morning, in fact. They think we're overdrawn quite a bit. (I thought we were overdrawn some, but not that much).

There's also been the chill of grief. Two weeks ago--can it be that already?--we lost one of our dear cats, Gwion Bach. From the evidence, he was torn off our screened back porch where he was resting in the sun by the cat door by a pair of roving dogs (we didn't see that part but surmised it from the damage to the porch). They then proceeded to toss him in the air like a rag doll, snapping his spine. We chased the dogs off, but it was too late. He passed over not long after.

Since then we've sealed up the cat door and kept all our cats inside. Since the cat door is sealed they can go out on the porch. This seems to satisfy all but Luna, who first threw fits of meowing and then peed all over everything in the house and now has settled down into a sort of grey funk, much like the one her human mother continues to experience.

I am cold inside.

I just wrote a whole paragraph and deleted it.

From the smell of it, one of the cats has peed in my office and I have yet to find where.

Existing

I'm having a really bad day today. Feeling restless and all I can think about is food and cigarettes. I've put on 10 lbs in the last week. How is this possible? A friend told me I need to get back to my Pilates or go out and take a walk, and I know she's right but when I started the motions towards doing those things I had a total breakdown and ended up having to call M. at work to talk me through it. Now I feel that I am just hanging on by my fingernails.

Ten more minutes and I can eat. Ten more minutes and I can smoke if I really want to. My life has become boxed in these ten minute intervals and I can't get it out. I want to be healthy--I think I really do--and at the same time everything seems so overwhelming. I wish I lived in a bigger town so there was at least somewhere to go. I wish I lived in the back end of nowhere on an uninhabited road so I could go out in my own yard and no one would see me. Give me about 100 acres of my own and I would be happy. Give me enough money to get out of the financial pit we are in and I would be content.

I can't get out of this. Right now I wonder if it's even worth trying. All I can remember all my life is pain and more pain; why do I have any reason to think it can be any better than this? I keep thinking "I want to go home" and then I remember that I AM home and that scares the shite out of me. Is this all I get? This constant feeling of everything being worthless--of MY being worthless and life being pointless?

I'm tired of being cold, too. Where is spring, really?

Luna brought me two birds this morning.

Not all at Once...

Well, the answer to yesterday's question is, "No, not cold turkey."

I did manage to cut down a lot though--from about half a pack to only 3 cigarettes. I am trying to see this as a success and not a failure.

Today I got dressed and have not had a smoke yet. I am concentrating on changing my routine so it doesn't have smoking it it.

I know I should go out and get more exercise but right now I feel as if it is taking all my energy and will just not to climb the walls. Besides, it's cold. When will it not be cold??

Cat in my trash can.

Can I do This?

A couple weeks ago I decided that today, May first, Beltane, I would quit smoking.

The decision was a long time in coming; I had for months been increasingly disgusted with the...general squalor that goes along with the practice: the dirt ashtrays, the smelly house, the odor that clings to your clothes and gets in them no matter what. I became obsessed with whether I smelled bad. I think this started when I sent a friend in a different state some of the clothes I had grown out of and she told me she had to wash them first to get the smoke smell out. I had never considered that I smelled, even though I could at once recognise a place that allowed smoking or another smoker, as if by some sixth sense. I guess it's just the odor.

I also had been noticing that my voice was growing increasingly hoarse and rough. This troubles me as I have been working on my voice and becoming a better singer for so long and have tried to get back to it in recent weeks. I knew that the cigarettes couldn't possibly be helping this.

So one day, quite out of the blue (we were in the frozen foods aisle of the grocery store) I announced to my husband, "I think I'm going to quit smoking on Beltane."

And here is it, Beltane. It's 1:43 p.m. and I feel like I can't get dressed because I haven't had my first cigarette yet. My usual practice has been to cruise the internet for a while (I call this "maintaining my correspondence"), have breakfast and my pills, and then play a casual game while smoking my first one before getting dressed. I have not done the last step. So I feel my morning routine is unfinished. When I think of going on to something else I think, "I need that smoke before I can move on!"

I am chewing gum. It does not help.

As I look at it, so much has revolved around the next cigarette. "I'll do my Pilates and then have a cigarette." "I'll have lunch and then have a cigarette." "I'll go for a walk and then have a cigarette." It's like they've been my reward for doing difficult stuff and now I don't have anything to reward myself with. This sucks. If I had more money I would go out and get my eyebrows waxed or get a manicure or something. But I don't have any money at all.

It doesn't help that the weather today just plain sucks. It's supposed to be spring, for Gods' sakes! It is NOT supposed to be snowing.

So at this point...I don;t know if I can do this. But I am keeping up the fight so far.

It is now 1:51 p.m.

Shocked and Horrified

I found out today that a moderator on one of the forums I frequent passed away very suddenly from an aneurysm yesterday morning. She wasn't very old--not much older than I, in fact--and the whole thing was totally unlooked-for.

I didn't know here very well, not even as well as you can come to know someone on the internet: considering them a friend you have never seen. She was just a mod on a forum, someone who was there to help out, who posted a lot... but I find her death has really shaken me.

Part of it is the manner of her going. I have always been terrified of going that way myself. My brother used to tease me with it; when I'd have a headache he'd say, "there's the aneurysm acting up again..." The first time I had to have him explain to me what it was and he made the details as graphic and brutal as only a teenage boy can. I was not very old, only about seven or so and I think the experience left a profound mark. No: I'm sure of it, because ever since then whenever I get one of my headaches, no matter how mild, I'm certain that this is it and I'm about to die.

I don;t want to go that way: suddenly and with no warning or time to prepare.

I remember several years back I watched my cat, Tamlane (who is also now gone from me), hunting a spider. The spider was walking along the edge of the wall and Tamlane just came up, swept it away from the wall and ate it. I was horrified by the suddenness of it. One minute there, the next gone. I am horrified by the way life can be like that: one minute you are there; the next you are not. I am horrified by death anyway, but the way it can take you without warning seems the worst thing about it.

I suppose I would not be so horrified about it if I had any sort of faith about any sort of afterlife, or even any sort of caring god or gods. But I don't. I think when you go you just stop and there is no more of you. No second chances. No way to go on and make it better the next time. No merging with the great here and now and knowing eternal bliss, no reunion with loved ones who have gone before. This is what makes death terrible to me. There is no comfort in it. I used to believe in reincarnation until I saw that spider get eaten. And then I thought, if there is an afterlife, it can't be just for humans. It has to be for humans and animals and insects and even vegetables. For every blade of grass there has to be a second chance. And that's when I stopped believing. My mind just can't encompass it. Can't make it balance or come out even with conservation of energy laws. I want to believe, but I can't do it.

There is no end to this blog and no end to this horror. I want to stop thinking and can't do it.

Good night, Sue.

Flute Musings

After not playing in nearly a year, I have finally started trying to play my Irish Flute again.

It is very hard and frustrating (especially when a cat insists on "helping" by draping himself over my lap). I am a good player on the Boehm flute, but Irish flutes are not nearly so forgiving. That's probably why Boehm flutes were invented. Irish flutes take more air and more breath support and more attention to embouchure and the position of your mouth--all those things it's so easy to get lazy about. I can only keep it up for 15-30 minutes before I get too tired and frustrated and quit.

Still, I consider that something to write home about. For a long, long time I couldn't even think of my flutes without severe distress. I don't assign blame easily, but I do assign blame for that. Blame for the bad experience that was Beat Smash Square. Blame for the half of the band that just sat back and expected me to carry them and yes, blame for the other quarter of the band that saw what was going on and did not speak out against it. I feel that the laziness and rank hostility that was so much a part of my experience in that band really squashed my desire to make any kind of music.

I don't know if I can ever wholly forgive that. I try every day. But music was one joy I had in life and having that joy stripped away...well, let's just say it did a lot to put me in my current depressive state.

I would like to get back to performing again, actually. I think about it a lot. I think about performing at ren faires or other smallish venues. I think this will be a long time in coming unless I make better progress, so I try not to focus on that. I try to focus on getting back the enjoyment. Right now when I play, I do not make a huge deal of my mistakes. I think, "I am playing just to play and progress will be made." Even if no one but M. hears me, it is enough. I'm fooling myself, I know. It is not enough. In my heart I have always wanted to be a performing musician and the thought I have come to this age without reaching that goal is a cancer to me, eating away at my insides. I try to tell myself that I have many more years to achieve some kind of proficiency at my instrument and at my voice--the voice I had those years ago with the band is gone and I wonder if I will ever get it back. But every day seems like too long. I want to be good NOW.

M. and I have been playing a little almost every night and I like what I hear, for the most part. He is learning; I am learning. We are in it together. That's one thing I never got from BSS--the sense of togetherness on the project. There was always some hidden agenda, or even spoken agendas: play more gigs, add more people to the line-up, be more, more, more. More than we could be, being who we were. And somehow I always felt it was up to me to make that more happen. Maybe that was true, maybe not, but it was and is my true feeling.

Anyway. Six years after breaking up the band I am finally playing again. It has taken me twice as long to recover from the band as the band existed. That says a lot.

Maybe I finally have a chance at this. I hope so.

Still Sweating

So, I was sitting at the table, innocently eating my breakfast when I got a moment of HORRIBLE pain in my calf--the kind of pain where you break out into a sweat all over your body and your heart starts racing and you feel like yo can't breathe. It was just a moment, but I was convinced in that moment that I was going to die. From a pain in my calf. In fact, I'm still not sure that it wasn't a harbinger of some deeper issue or problem. Hence the "Still Sweating" title of this post.

Pains like that always set off terrible anxiety attacks for me and that's another reason I'm convinced I'm sitting here waiting to die and M. will come home to find me slumped over the computer, my lifeless hands making senseless words on the keys. Put like that it sounds almost funny, but the experience is anything but. Imagine living your life in constant terror. That's what my life is like. Every day some little twitch or random neurological impulse sets me off. It totally incapacitates me for the rest of the day. I did manage to get dressed--in case I needed to call 911, for heaven's sake; I didn't want the EMTs to find me still in a state of dishabille at 12:30 in the afternoon. Funny how you can be concerned about stuff like that when you think you're about to die.

The pain is gone but the anxiety is not. I am trying to drink a cup of tea and calm down but the chamomile is not helping much; I feel like I'm going to choke on every swallow.

I hate this. I hate not having a life because I feel like I have constantly to be on guard against my own body. I hate that your body can do things to you that you can't control. I think this mainly goes back to the two miscarriages I suffered several years ago; I don't remember it being so bad before that. But those two experiences--body out of control when it should by all rights be having a normal pregnancy--just made me realise how iffy life is: how you just don't know what's going to happen or when. Another part of my trauma, I guess.

I was going to do things today. I was at least going to do my Pilates workout and wash my hair but those plans are shot for the moment. I will have to put them off until tomorrow, again. I hate that too.

Maybe I can get it together enough to brush my teeth, at least. That's how bad I feel: that even something so simple is beyond me.

My hands are very cold. Cold sweat. Slipping on the keys.