KID A-MINUS
Like a bright red thread stitched alongside your wayward militaristic drift, Oxford, England ran loosely in and out, connecting every embroiled rift.
As a kid, a consistent return was made here bi-annually to visit your mother's side of the family. At 4 Salisbury Crescent, up a wooden ladder on the 2nd floor, through a hobbit-sized door, lie the children's vaulted attic room with a window opening up onto the sky, forgiving all spry imaginings of the young. Holidays spent at this address had a particular scent. Like a lush fertile garden, a damp compost heap of tranquility. Sinking into the big soft bed, under an enormous fluffy feather douvet, this was the one place in the whole world where you always slept soundly. Protected by the presence of your stalwart grandparents in their separate bedrooms downstairs, steeped in constant cups of hot sweet milky tea, amidst their jovial nonstop bickering, bad things never happened here. It was like living inside a fairy tale with a Little Match Girl ending, where what would normally seem morose was actually serene. And you consistently hated having to leave.
Until the last holiday visit in January of '88. Hammered, your drunk dad clamoured up into the attic where you were quietly drawing. He stood you up and hugged you for way too long, blubbering something about how much he loved you. Your marble arms clung to your sides, preparing for the worst. Reaching his hand up your shirt like a fumbling adolescent, he tried to french kiss you while squeezing your teenage tits. WHATTHEFUCK?! Such an impetuous offense after testifying against him in court and going through all those years of state-appointed therapy. Yet, This Shit Was STILL Happening. There are no words for my contempt.
Sprinting down and out of the house, ripping on your coat, you snagged some cash from your mother's purse and just ran. It didn't matter where. Realizing later that the legal drinking age in England is 18, you slowed your pace after careening past Squitchy Lane and decided to go do the adult thing. Deal with this fresh contamination by getting shit faced at the nearest drinking establishment.
Happening upon a local pub called Jericho's Tavern, you went in and tried to order something fancy and punishing. Like a marguarita or a long island iced tea. The bartender was having none of that. He finally agreed to pour you a few stiff rum and cokes begrudgingly. "Schtupid yankee twat," you could hear him thinking. Though he warmed up to you after asking him to teach you how to hand roll cigarettes.
The pub was fairly empty for a while until a group of kids came in carrying a ton of music equipment. It took a while for them to set up their gear in front of the stained glass window at 4 in the afternoon, but they laboriously sturdied themselves to play what appeared to be their premiere gig. A few of their friends straggled in to offer support. Then they launched into a confusing barrage of something ska-ish but slower in tempo and with minor keyed melodies.
What really captured your inebriated attention was the painfully self-conscious tremor of the singer's voice and the vortex of his presence, there on the floor, no stage present. Too human. Too tender and uncongealed for your current state of mind. He shone with an agitated energetic flood-light that you were already drowning in on the dark side of the room; that angst-fueled youthful resentment for a world you're born into without your full consent, but given enough sensibility and fuck-it-ness to reckon with another Cerberus head. Feeling stripped skinless after a few songs in, you stumbled out of Jericho's and went trouncing back to the house, weeping half-heartedly as the setting winter sun glittered across the icy banks of the river Thames. Turns out, that singer was Thom Yorke performing one of his first live sets.
On another visit to England in 1997, your cousin John gave you a cassette tape of the new album a local band had just finished making at your aunt Shirley's recording studio in Chipping Norton. It was called 'OK Computer'. And you replayed that tape til it stretched out beyond capacity.
By 2003, you sent a bunch of your xeroxed comix and cds of some music you'd made to John and asked him to pass the extra copies onto that band. It was your way of saying thanks because it had been a long time since you'd fallen entranced into a widely shared soundtrack after the release of 'Amnesiac'. You were inspired to hear a group that kept evolving, housing different emotional chasms, not just repeating itself or petering out or starting to wholesomely suck within a decade. As it was with precious few other musicians whose work you loved, their music had become a coping mechanism. Like a plumb line to hold up against the internalized trials of life, and see that somehow, you are still doing alright. A sounding board, a psychic connection, a sonic imaginary friend.
John soon replied, saying that he saw your comix strewn around the studio in between recording sessions and that they loved them. Thom listened to your cd but thought "it's quite dark." That still makes you smirk like a blushing self-promoting yet totally obscure jerk.
But it's called Feedback, yo.
Since the 192 bands you played with in your own neighborhood rarely gave you any, it was worth its weight in words. Otherwise, you might have continued to believe that you didn't actually exist. That everything you made was "not suicidal enough." That, after all that work, you were "lazy", and "striving to be ignored." That "the songs you wrote were too heavy -- we're just trying to sell records here not change the world." Beyond people exhibiting surprise (though you'd never understand why) that such "spooky" music was being composed by a woman, that was it for a decade's worth of feedback, yo.
For this reason, you remain indebted to Big City Orchestra, Lance Grabmiller, Skullcaster, Andy @ Last Gasp, Weasle Walter, Chicken John, DarphNader, Dave Ligon, OX, Zoey, Willow, Charlotte, Fred @ Thrillhouse and Trixy Grace, the righteously good-hearted ranks of LCM, 5lowershop, The Lab, Church of The Buzzard, SPAZ, MediaAlliance, MaximumRockNRoll and A.T.A., Twerk, Eve Tekromantik, China of Boyskout, Skott Cowgill, Headboggle, Margarita Lara, Neighborhood Bass Coalition, Joe Donohue, Motion, 12K, Leafcutter John, Matt Flynn, Brendan Seibel, Filthmilk, Doug Poore, Fatima, Prizehog, Chupa, Kat Genikov, Tony de Jesus, Alan Dubain, Paul Smith, Jonah Rust, Dark Muse, Heartworm, Aviatrix, Ethan Port, Tamara Glass, Angel Bethke, Despicable Alien, Rachel Haywire, nullspace, Pandiscordian Necrogenesis, Common Eider King Eider, SYMPLX, Lucia Patino, Brianne Hanshaw, Brice Frillici, Realicide, Cy, Leland Kirby, Dromez, Crebain, Bill Reeves, Thorsten Sideb0ard, Nature Abhors Normality, Zac, Billy Bragg, Mick Nasty, Sinda Koslinka, Fernanda Loaiza, Stuart Chisholm, Burmese, Mitch Levay, Torn By Teeth, small drone orchestra, Debbie Dingledong, Lob Instagon, Don Haugen, Horseflesh, Horn of Dagoth, Derek Kelly, Shane DeSilva, Josh @ The Guardian, Jeff Ray, Petey, Heidi Alexander, John Dwyer, Eric Bauer, Josh Pollock, Jef Templar, Henry Larsen, Cameron Gibson, Dylan Simon, Gorpy Endockle, Derek Pardue, HausArafna, Brent St. James,Noah of Cameltoe, Jeannine & Bill Thibodeau, Maz, Dale Lankford, Douglas Land, Erika Dillingham, Rob Gillespie, James Tracy, Casey Appeldorn, Healamonster & Tarsier, Eddie The Rat, Not Breathing, Ramsey Kanaan, Gerald Hawk, Beth Custer, Keith Curts, Joey Hurt, Colin Studybaker, Raub Roy, Vetivert, V.Vale, David James, Evil Moisture, Screamo Leemo, Bonfire Madigan, WendyOMatik, Legendary Pink Dots, XtraAction Marching Band, Rich Westmeyer, Phoebe Garofano, Mary, Dolce Maletesta, pirate radio Jake, Abra Jeffers, Sarah Lockhart, Diego Gonzalez, Nebbie Loon, Kelli Winslow, Luca Garino, Lik Neon, James Tracy, AC Way, 6ixes, Stubee, Swoondoll, Vyvian Looper, John Burkhalter, Brandi Obsolete, Demonsleeper, Chris&Cosey, Styrofoam Sanchez and Sharkiface for their encouragement and appreciated aid.
Plus the letter that arrived from Svetlana; a lone female employee working 12 hour shifts at a crowded light bulb factory in Croatia. She said your music helped her get through her unremitting hellish days. So you mailed her a big free box of everything you'd ever made. Following your own string is the only way to escape the Minotaur's maze.
At the tail end of 2011, the 2nd half of 'In Rainbows' haunted your last visit to England long after its initial release. All surviving family members were now scattered far and wide from 4 Salisbury Crescent. Riots in London had just ended a week previous to your arrival in Hackney. The police had altered their original "beeboo beeboo" siren sounds to the typical American cop car whine because, according to a local radical, too many U.S. crime shows had desensitized the population and those old siren sounds held no crowd controlling power anymore. But that healthy disrespect for authority is something you've always admired about the people living on the Isles.
Crossing the channel by overnight ferry, everything you once loved about Belgium's unconventionality had mutated as well. Buried in an amalgamated blue gray EU mush. Gentrification on a continental scale. It broke your heart to see Ghent become so expensive and overblown. Just like SF. All you could do was sit on the little bench beneath the 15th century cathedral spires and sigh. Europe was losing it's local hues to The Big Nothing of steamrolling globalization, trickling down its unelected debts. Doing no good for anyone except, of course, the 1%. But no one seemed to be all that upset. Because now their heads only stared down into their iphones, grasping onto some new form of virtual protest. Note: Belgium holds the record for being the longest running country with no official government. And your friends there were rightly proud of that accomplishment.
In the spring of 2013, just in time to stay inside and deal with the debilitating effects of post traumatic stress, the 'King of Limbs' arrived. The song 'Codex' encapsulated a mountain of inner turmoil and still raw regrets inside a 10 second segment: "No one gets hurt. You've done nothing wrong." Like driving over a speedbump or hitting the same huge pothole over and over, you could not hear those lyrics without sobbing uncontrollably. No matter what else you were focused on before that melody came up on the 8000 song shuffle. This phrase seemed to drop an emotionally devastating atom bomb every time it came on and blew all else away. Standing still. Separated and wailing. But slightly more fascinated by the mind's ability to catalog and contain such an irrational magnitude of gnawing desolation within one short and specific musical refrain. Then you'd pick up where you left off again. Patch the leak. Do more lines. Renumb the brain. Continue selling everything on ebay.
Nothing is easy. But dealing with shit would be impossible without music. It's where all of our true colors thrive. Despite the trend you noticed of anti-emo Californians trying to emulate cold calculating machines cuz they seemed to be so ashamed of being human beings. As if they couldn't spare the time. Or maybe they were just like you, only capable of temporarily relieving their grief when left alone with chemical substances in private. Subsiding on the inside, not out there in real life.
One thing was for sure, you were now surrounded by droves of bland khaki fucktards who were fond of using the phrases "win/win situation" and "get in on the ground floor" sans irony. Not while nonchalantly strolling down oh-so shabby chic Valencia Street, but just beyond your bathroom window. While taking a shit, you'd overhear your new cherry-faced neighbors upselling to their clients over the phone on the weekends. And no one else within a thousand feet of your room ever played or listened to music anymore.
During one of the last free noise & doom shows at bleakhaus, prior to being shut down amidst threats of eviction, you were alone naked and drunk in the bathroom, lights off, door closed. Soft warm tones echoed from down the hall where Black Thread was performing a bittersweet analogue tape looping set to an intimate crowd through the solid state PA in the front room. Crawling into the clawfoot tub, submerged in hot water, you quietly cried, knowing it would all be over soon. Knowing the time had come to leave the Mission. Forevermore. Just as you were finally figuring out how to appreciate the small glimmers of joy discovered there, after wasting so many years ignorantly overlooking them before.
Bukowski once said the most beautiful roses can only grow in the grossest of gutters, and there was nothing subversive or down to earth or close to the bone left in that town anymore. The fact that a bigger crowd showed up to burn trash cans and stop traffic in celebration of a baseball game rather than to protest the deadly police brutality occurrances in Oakland and Ferguson and Chicago and Baltimore every other day was proof enough of San Francisco's completely diluted whitewashed droll. The city's historically class-conscious backbone had collapsed under the weight of a massive bankrolled jellyfish. Now this town was all about priviledged fratboys spattering in your face, "YUH!! GIANTS!!" Unamused, you retorted, "DWARVES!!"
But the city's spirit did not go down without a fight, without sounding out a clarion howl of every civilization's repetitive cyclic self-importance destroying truth: Depression creates necessity creates creativity creates vitality creates media attention creates corporate ascension creates proprietary greed creates hyper speculation creates overpopulation creates migration moving out creates mutation blending in creates stagnation creates irrelevance creates apathy and sinking down and bleeding out until it again creates depression.
And so, in the summer of 2015, 'Truth Ray' spent a lot of time behind the wheel of Haustruk, driving with you those thousands of miles away. No specific gps coordinates to call home so that you'd never have to go through feeling raped again.
Oftentimes, 'A Moon Shaped Pool' will discreetly bathe with the cleaner simpler version of you that now lives with your beloved piano in 100 square feet of solitude. No electricity, air-conditioning, wifi or plumbing but thinly subsisting on the non-detrimental freedoms of Less. Tweeting more to the birds with a handful of seeds than to a Twitter feed. Making plans only as grand as the distance from your face to your hand. Singing to yourself in the trees while chem trails streak criss crossing clouds across the sky. Sitting by the fire. Reading books like they're going out of style. Listening to shows on the short airwaves. Drinking hot sweet milky tea. And however hungry you may get, nothing feels as fulfilling as being able to fall asleep to the sounds of crickets, wound up in a sheet like the peacefully resting dead. Leaving a smaller carbon footprint on anyone else's unsuspecting Radiohead.
*u can call me ph!*
Showing posts with label mind control. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mind control. Show all posts
11.03.2016
8.10.2016
13% [chapter 17]
HAUNTED CLOSETS
While you were still in college at the Art Institute, you flew from San Francisco to Utica, New York to visit your mom and dad during Christmas break. They lived in a beautiful old turn-of-the-century house with white plastered walls, all soft molded corners and black iron cornices. The windows were small and deep, some still retaining their original lead panes. The turreted two story cottage sat on a corner lot like a fairy castle in a Thomas Kincaid painting, embedded in a deep sloping wooded field, home to a raucous murder of crows.
Your parents were in the midst of trying to sell the house because your dad found a better job in Indianapolis and was moving there. But your mother was reluctant to go this time. She'd been teaching yoga classes in town and had developed a healthy sense of financial independence. She'd also grown close to a solid following of students that she didn't want to leave behind. One such student was her secret lover. So your mother stayed at the cottage in Utica while your father lived and worked in Indiana. Insisting that there were simply no offers on the property from any interested buyers, blaming the delay on the housing market, bad timing or whatever else --in this way, your parents' first real separation continued. And your mother finally seemed to come blossoming out of her shell.
Rather suddenly, she came out to you over the phone one day. Claiming she'd always been more attracted to women than to men ever since she was a teenager. You just said, "Okay..." She was so relieved to tell someone, "I knew YOU would understand." And for the first time, she seemed so happy and in love. "Life doesn't even BEGIN until you're 50!" she exclaimed gratuitously.
When you finally met your mom's girlfriend on another short trip to Utica, you definitely caught the spark. She was astonishing, overflowing with a quick wit and a bright eyed vitality. Part of you was truly happy for your mother's authentic joy. But another part of you was completely pissed off that she was, suddenly, so open and caring and warm toward you; sharing her untold stories, calling you all the time, asking your opinion about things, buying you plane tickets to come and visit her inbetween every semester, being there for you, all nonjudgementally -- just because she was now a lesbian. This kind of behavior never occurred before. Or since. And you really didn't give a fuck whether she was straight or gay. Sexual identities never shocked you.You just wanted to feel like your own mother genuinely loved and accepted you, too. But this point has always remained convincingly vague.
But for the short duration of this Christmas visit, your dad was also present, so you agreed to quietly avoid any and all discussions at the dinner table that might leak hints about your mom's newfound lesbianism. Ugh. The burden of secrets that are imposed upon us to keep. Add them to the scapegoat's unwanted heap. Then slap it's ass and hope that it takes away your wax doll guilts before running off the edge of something nonredeemably steep.
You were already bogged down with another secret you did not want; knowing that your father was beaten so severly as a child because his dad was sterile and knew this was not his kid. This secret, shared with you 15 years prior, wasn't revealed to your father by his own half-sister until after their
angry sterile dad was dead. When it was finally found out, he brought his shotgun to the cemetary and unloaded a round of shells into that plot of hallowed ground. Secrets cowards and shrouds, release the hellhounds.
The summer after graduation, after your last spring visit to Utica, a tumor had been found. Within 3 short months, your mom's girlfriend was dead. Brain cancer culled her, this fully functioning, highly intelligent older woman that had just taken you and your mom to a politically invigorating Edward Albee lecture was now instantly stuck bedridden. Losing her vision to a tunnelling darkness, her brain was quickly shutting down. She reached out her arms to everyone standing around her hospital bed and cried, "Why won't any of you help me?! Pull me out of this hole! Please, help me... I'm sinking!" Balking at the starkest futility.
More than a year passed before your mother told you about her girlfriend's death. She just stopped talking to you. As suddenly as she had begun. Soon after that, the cottage was sold and she moved to Indiana to rejoin her husband. Gone back to being the good ol' critical hetero milf. Mourning her lover and her lost self. Crammed back into the brutal closet. Shrinking. Forgetful. Unblest. You cannot even begin to imagine how sunken in run her regrets from doing all the things that were expected of her, being the "weaker" sex.
One stuffy night during that close to the chest stiff upper lip Christmas visit to Utica, you were trying to sleep in the tiny room upstairs while your parents were in their bedroom across the hall. It was freezing cold, yet under the covers you felt feverish and clouded. Burning in discomfort. Sick with unease. You kept slipping in and out of consciousness. Not into dreams but into a thick swampy nightmarish lucidity. The crushing weight on your chest would not stop torturing you and stealing your breath as you lay frozen in sleep paralysis. It felt as if someone was trying to strong arm you into doing their bidding. "GET UP!" it hollered inside your sweaty immobile head. "Go downstairs. Into the kitchen. Open the back door. Grab the axe. Come back up here. And GIVE YOUR PARENTS WHAT THEY REALLY FUCKING DESERVE!!!"
The whole massacre played out, over and over vividly in your mind, as if this horrific scene were trying to convince you of its justifiable rationality. "Just think of how happy you will be once they are gone," the voice coaxed. It took a ton of light innocent resistance and a touch of dispassionate detatched indifference to not give in to this bottomless well of rage and bloodlust. Growing more irritated than scared, you declared impishly at the overbearing manipulative presence, "no. i won't. i won't do it." Perhaps it is a good thing that you're such a stubborn selfish bitch, eh?
The next morning, your mother looked concerned when she saw your pale sleepless face emerge from across the hall. She was dutifully making their bed. As she slid the bedframe to one side to tuck in the sheets, you pointed down to a dark brownish mark on the hardwood floor that was peeking out from under the bed. "Yeah," she said, revealing the whole atrocious width and breadth of the massive pooled stain, "I've tried everything to get it out, but it's too old and too deeply soaked into the wood. I think it might be blood."
Ya think?
But you thought nothing else of that night back then, except to remind yourself that you need to drink more booze and smoke more weed in order to drown out any and all experiences of psychic shit like this cuz you were too busy
trying to be normal, which is really important to most people before they go turning 30.
One huge advantage to age is that the number of fucks you give annually gets peeled away, until you are who you really are the moment you reach your grave. Sometimes it seems as if all those lucid dreams about flying, or altering your space, or learning how to keep still and protect your egglike shell, or increasing your skill for riding those emotional horses is all just practice for leaving this plane and crossing the bridge to the north.
Until you have to come back again. And again, of course. Life is hard, then you die. Death is hard, then you're born.
*u can call me ph!*
While you were still in college at the Art Institute, you flew from San Francisco to Utica, New York to visit your mom and dad during Christmas break. They lived in a beautiful old turn-of-the-century house with white plastered walls, all soft molded corners and black iron cornices. The windows were small and deep, some still retaining their original lead panes. The turreted two story cottage sat on a corner lot like a fairy castle in a Thomas Kincaid painting, embedded in a deep sloping wooded field, home to a raucous murder of crows.
Your parents were in the midst of trying to sell the house because your dad found a better job in Indianapolis and was moving there. But your mother was reluctant to go this time. She'd been teaching yoga classes in town and had developed a healthy sense of financial independence. She'd also grown close to a solid following of students that she didn't want to leave behind. One such student was her secret lover. So your mother stayed at the cottage in Utica while your father lived and worked in Indiana. Insisting that there were simply no offers on the property from any interested buyers, blaming the delay on the housing market, bad timing or whatever else --in this way, your parents' first real separation continued. And your mother finally seemed to come blossoming out of her shell.
Rather suddenly, she came out to you over the phone one day. Claiming she'd always been more attracted to women than to men ever since she was a teenager. You just said, "Okay..." She was so relieved to tell someone, "I knew YOU would understand." And for the first time, she seemed so happy and in love. "Life doesn't even BEGIN until you're 50!" she exclaimed gratuitously.
When you finally met your mom's girlfriend on another short trip to Utica, you definitely caught the spark. She was astonishing, overflowing with a quick wit and a bright eyed vitality. Part of you was truly happy for your mother's authentic joy. But another part of you was completely pissed off that she was, suddenly, so open and caring and warm toward you; sharing her untold stories, calling you all the time, asking your opinion about things, buying you plane tickets to come and visit her inbetween every semester, being there for you, all nonjudgementally -- just because she was now a lesbian. This kind of behavior never occurred before. Or since. And you really didn't give a fuck whether she was straight or gay. Sexual identities never shocked you.You just wanted to feel like your own mother genuinely loved and accepted you, too. But this point has always remained convincingly vague.
But for the short duration of this Christmas visit, your dad was also present, so you agreed to quietly avoid any and all discussions at the dinner table that might leak hints about your mom's newfound lesbianism. Ugh. The burden of secrets that are imposed upon us to keep. Add them to the scapegoat's unwanted heap. Then slap it's ass and hope that it takes away your wax doll guilts before running off the edge of something nonredeemably steep.
You were already bogged down with another secret you did not want; knowing that your father was beaten so severly as a child because his dad was sterile and knew this was not his kid. This secret, shared with you 15 years prior, wasn't revealed to your father by his own half-sister until after their
angry sterile dad was dead. When it was finally found out, he brought his shotgun to the cemetary and unloaded a round of shells into that plot of hallowed ground. Secrets cowards and shrouds, release the hellhounds.
The summer after graduation, after your last spring visit to Utica, a tumor had been found. Within 3 short months, your mom's girlfriend was dead. Brain cancer culled her, this fully functioning, highly intelligent older woman that had just taken you and your mom to a politically invigorating Edward Albee lecture was now instantly stuck bedridden. Losing her vision to a tunnelling darkness, her brain was quickly shutting down. She reached out her arms to everyone standing around her hospital bed and cried, "Why won't any of you help me?! Pull me out of this hole! Please, help me... I'm sinking!" Balking at the starkest futility.
More than a year passed before your mother told you about her girlfriend's death. She just stopped talking to you. As suddenly as she had begun. Soon after that, the cottage was sold and she moved to Indiana to rejoin her husband. Gone back to being the good ol' critical hetero milf. Mourning her lover and her lost self. Crammed back into the brutal closet. Shrinking. Forgetful. Unblest. You cannot even begin to imagine how sunken in run her regrets from doing all the things that were expected of her, being the "weaker" sex.
One stuffy night during that close to the chest stiff upper lip Christmas visit to Utica, you were trying to sleep in the tiny room upstairs while your parents were in their bedroom across the hall. It was freezing cold, yet under the covers you felt feverish and clouded. Burning in discomfort. Sick with unease. You kept slipping in and out of consciousness. Not into dreams but into a thick swampy nightmarish lucidity. The crushing weight on your chest would not stop torturing you and stealing your breath as you lay frozen in sleep paralysis. It felt as if someone was trying to strong arm you into doing their bidding. "GET UP!" it hollered inside your sweaty immobile head. "Go downstairs. Into the kitchen. Open the back door. Grab the axe. Come back up here. And GIVE YOUR PARENTS WHAT THEY REALLY FUCKING DESERVE!!!"
The whole massacre played out, over and over vividly in your mind, as if this horrific scene were trying to convince you of its justifiable rationality. "Just think of how happy you will be once they are gone," the voice coaxed. It took a ton of light innocent resistance and a touch of dispassionate detatched indifference to not give in to this bottomless well of rage and bloodlust. Growing more irritated than scared, you declared impishly at the overbearing manipulative presence, "no. i won't. i won't do it." Perhaps it is a good thing that you're such a stubborn selfish bitch, eh?
The next morning, your mother looked concerned when she saw your pale sleepless face emerge from across the hall. She was dutifully making their bed. As she slid the bedframe to one side to tuck in the sheets, you pointed down to a dark brownish mark on the hardwood floor that was peeking out from under the bed. "Yeah," she said, revealing the whole atrocious width and breadth of the massive pooled stain, "I've tried everything to get it out, but it's too old and too deeply soaked into the wood. I think it might be blood."
Ya think?
But you thought nothing else of that night back then, except to remind yourself that you need to drink more booze and smoke more weed in order to drown out any and all experiences of psychic shit like this cuz you were too busy
trying to be normal, which is really important to most people before they go turning 30.
One huge advantage to age is that the number of fucks you give annually gets peeled away, until you are who you really are the moment you reach your grave. Sometimes it seems as if all those lucid dreams about flying, or altering your space, or learning how to keep still and protect your egglike shell, or increasing your skill for riding those emotional horses is all just practice for leaving this plane and crossing the bridge to the north.
Until you have to come back again. And again, of course. Life is hard, then you die. Death is hard, then you're born.
*u can call me ph!*
13% [chapter 7]
THE 3 FACES: IS THIS A DREAM?
Professional help never helped. Until one autumn day in 1990 when you felt compelled to seek the counsel of a Jungian psychotherapist in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts named Dr. John Huele. Initially, your parents agreed to pay for your weekly visits, relieved that at least you were finally out of their house and living "in squalor" in the big city. But once they received his bill for your first $90/hr session, they did not think your mental health was worth it. Dr. John did however, and asked you how much you could afford to pay without the help of your parents. So you continued seeing him for the next 18 months at the adjusted rate of $15/hr.
Long before the advent of hallucinogenic substances in your life, dreams had always been a place to receive guidance and insight, a place of both secret joys and enormous horrors. Often, it was easier to recall your childhood nightmares than to remember the actual events that took place.
The longest running reoccurring scene began at age 5. The whole family would sit in a small pink tiled bathtub inside a palatial space like a sound stage, always too brightly lit. One by one, they would pass around a plastic orange gun and point it at one of their own eyes. Pulling the trigger loudly sucked that eye out. Then they would all turn to you. Staring, one-eyed. The red hole of their newly exposed occular cavity dripping with bloody severed nerve endings. They'd hand you the gun and pressure you to do the same. Waking up screaming every time, your hands covered your face, guarding your precious double-eyed sight.
Together with Dr. John you moved through these quirky and cruel psychological imaginings, pieceing together an intricate and imposing map of your subconscious landscape. You began to uncover by emotional associations what certain colors, words, sounds, animals, people and places really meant. It was the only type of therapy you felt just as excited to engage in as did the Dr. himself. Whenever you would rattle on about the frustrating things happening in your regular life, he would patiently sit and listen. Inevitably, the words would come, "...and then, i had this dream," at which point, he would excitedly grab his yellow pad and pen and start scribbling down your dream's details like an inspired madman. The two of you would then set about working on the decoding process, slowly adding more elements to the expanding cartography of this emerging new found land.
It was fascinating and sometimes heartbreakingly illuminating. You would always have to take a step back in the presence of this other, higher mind. It would record and playback so many complex issues, effortlessly weaving together a song of solution, so delicate and so simple. You never felt quite qualified to take credit for coming up with these mechanisms for coping. They never seemed entirely yours.
Those sessions enabled you to first conceive of the viable possibility of self-healing through dreams. They birthed the connections your mind made to the infinite sources of healing energy out there in the unknown universe, inside the quantum omnipresent vibrating fields. You're forever indebted to the knowledge gained from Dr. John. You also thanked fuck that Jungian psychoanalysis existed at all. Otherwise, you might have succumbed to your parents wishes that you be committed to a mental institution for being depressed anti-social bipolar defective or whatever. It should come as no surprise then, that when you first heard the song "Institutionalized" by Suicidal Tendencies in 1986, you had found a long loyal friend in punk rock. And, incidently, the more involved you became with Jungian dream journeys into the collective world of ancient archetypes, mythological beasts, and other archaic symbols,the less involved you were with the outrageous consumption of drugs and alcohol in order to deal with the ongoing psychological and socioeconomic trials of anyone trying to stay alive below the poverty line.
Lucid dreams happened sporadically as far back as you can remember. But practicing "dream yoga" almost religiously, you were having sometimes 2 or 3 lucid dreams a night, most often in the form of nightmares. Gradually, you learned how to transform these repetitive haunted terrors. Becomming lucid, you could bolster the courage to take control of your own mind. The nightmares then began to diminish and nearly ceased. Getting to know those Black Dogs that chased you for so many years, you now took ownership of your imagination. You screamed at their snarling, "STOP!" No longer would you run from them. You stood still, commanding them with a pointed finger to "SIT." And they did. Their faces shifted to little grins with tongues dangling and tails began to wag. The Black Diamond Dogs became a crazy bitch's best subconscious friends.
However, for some reason, waking up from these exalted states of consciousness became more difficult. Equal amounts of curiosity and fear caused you to question the nature of reality itself in a much more intensely tactile way, having up to 8 or 9 "false awakenings" after each lucid dream. This was so exasperating that you worried if you would ever really wake up at all. And a part of you started to feel the distinction between real life and the lucid dream waning. Thinner and thinner. The difference was disappearing. It got to be a bit much.
This persistent fear of losing your mind, without the reliable excuse of being fucked up on drugs, induced a sober admiration for the practice and a larger sense of responsibility toward approaching this state of mind with sincerity, not aggression or greed. In return, you discovered many valuable truths within each dream's revealing riddle. It seemed these riddles were coming from, again, a source of higher intelligence you couldn't even begin to understand. Nor could you make any sense of why it would feel your damaged brain was worth receiving the wisdom embedded within these undazzling, but inspired insights.
Insights so hackneyed, yet they stood the test of time. Recalling these unvarnished mantras helped you regain a sense of internal calm while caught in the constant storms of stress and strife. All you had to do was take the time to look, feel and listen...because sometimes, it IS all too much. You get so tired of having to fight nonstop for every single little fucking scrap of some stupid bullshit basic need; like being heard, like being seen, like being treated with the barest thread of common human decency. Not being overlooked or ignored or cut off or pushed aside when waiting in line at the corner store or at a red light. Taking a timeout from society's infantile needs to go inward instead calmed you. It calmed the defeatism that would leak from feeling like the blank faced rusty little cog that amuses itself by squeaking in sync while it's trapped inside this massively malfunctioning male dominated earth raping kindness killing machine.
But this is life in the Natural World; even single-celled organisms have to defend themselves in order to survive. Every living thing is a sentient being, struggling just as hard as you to feel a momentary peace. Every single molecule is capable of reflecting intentions, of resounding vibrations of consciousness. Paying attention to those equally sentient cells involved alongside you in the act of living, breeds compassion and kinship. Insights are then bestowed upon us all when we open ourselves to the auras within empty spaces because they are Not Empty At All.
Put into the context of each individual's map of their own subconscious symbolism, any manner of things can take on new magical meanings, or renew a childlike curiosity with the mysteries of life. And despite society's attempts to carve, cut, shock, tranquilize and otherwise mute different kinds of creative thinking, as a species, we continue to be mystified with the ancient ancestral magic of dreams, with the connection we all have to the collective unconsciousness, with the innocent divinity we keep secret but secretly celebrate inside our sleeping minds as it delights us with it's absurd little insights on the nature of being.
Absurd little insights like "There is no such thing as Winning, there is only Spinning"- a phrase accompanied by an image of the cyclical rotation of the earth that occured while you were, once again, feeling like a total failure and considering suicide.
A song, whose humorous showtuney chorus,"Men are Minor, Waste of Eyeliner," was a response to your frustration with the misogynistic inequality you repeatedly confronted both in your intimate relationships and at work.
Your personal favorite, "If you take lots of small steps to hell, you will end up in hell. If you take lots of small steps toward heaven, you will end up in heaven."
After the more recent addition,"All there is is IS," you found some sense of ease in regard to making big life altering decisions, viewing the consequences of your choices as neither good nor evil, but knowing that no matter what you chose to do, all you would ever have to deal with is exactly what is in front of your face. Every decision therefore forces you to face simply THIS. And this 3rd face then revealed itself to you as a face that is All Faces, yet faceless.
*u can call me ph!*
Professional help never helped. Until one autumn day in 1990 when you felt compelled to seek the counsel of a Jungian psychotherapist in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts named Dr. John Huele. Initially, your parents agreed to pay for your weekly visits, relieved that at least you were finally out of their house and living "in squalor" in the big city. But once they received his bill for your first $90/hr session, they did not think your mental health was worth it. Dr. John did however, and asked you how much you could afford to pay without the help of your parents. So you continued seeing him for the next 18 months at the adjusted rate of $15/hr.
Long before the advent of hallucinogenic substances in your life, dreams had always been a place to receive guidance and insight, a place of both secret joys and enormous horrors. Often, it was easier to recall your childhood nightmares than to remember the actual events that took place.
The longest running reoccurring scene began at age 5. The whole family would sit in a small pink tiled bathtub inside a palatial space like a sound stage, always too brightly lit. One by one, they would pass around a plastic orange gun and point it at one of their own eyes. Pulling the trigger loudly sucked that eye out. Then they would all turn to you. Staring, one-eyed. The red hole of their newly exposed occular cavity dripping with bloody severed nerve endings. They'd hand you the gun and pressure you to do the same. Waking up screaming every time, your hands covered your face, guarding your precious double-eyed sight.
Together with Dr. John you moved through these quirky and cruel psychological imaginings, pieceing together an intricate and imposing map of your subconscious landscape. You began to uncover by emotional associations what certain colors, words, sounds, animals, people and places really meant. It was the only type of therapy you felt just as excited to engage in as did the Dr. himself. Whenever you would rattle on about the frustrating things happening in your regular life, he would patiently sit and listen. Inevitably, the words would come, "...and then, i had this dream," at which point, he would excitedly grab his yellow pad and pen and start scribbling down your dream's details like an inspired madman. The two of you would then set about working on the decoding process, slowly adding more elements to the expanding cartography of this emerging new found land.
It was fascinating and sometimes heartbreakingly illuminating. You would always have to take a step back in the presence of this other, higher mind. It would record and playback so many complex issues, effortlessly weaving together a song of solution, so delicate and so simple. You never felt quite qualified to take credit for coming up with these mechanisms for coping. They never seemed entirely yours.
Those sessions enabled you to first conceive of the viable possibility of self-healing through dreams. They birthed the connections your mind made to the infinite sources of healing energy out there in the unknown universe, inside the quantum omnipresent vibrating fields. You're forever indebted to the knowledge gained from Dr. John. You also thanked fuck that Jungian psychoanalysis existed at all. Otherwise, you might have succumbed to your parents wishes that you be committed to a mental institution for being depressed anti-social bipolar defective or whatever. It should come as no surprise then, that when you first heard the song "Institutionalized" by Suicidal Tendencies in 1986, you had found a long loyal friend in punk rock. And, incidently, the more involved you became with Jungian dream journeys into the collective world of ancient archetypes, mythological beasts, and other archaic symbols,the less involved you were with the outrageous consumption of drugs and alcohol in order to deal with the ongoing psychological and socioeconomic trials of anyone trying to stay alive below the poverty line.
Lucid dreams happened sporadically as far back as you can remember. But practicing "dream yoga" almost religiously, you were having sometimes 2 or 3 lucid dreams a night, most often in the form of nightmares. Gradually, you learned how to transform these repetitive haunted terrors. Becomming lucid, you could bolster the courage to take control of your own mind. The nightmares then began to diminish and nearly ceased. Getting to know those Black Dogs that chased you for so many years, you now took ownership of your imagination. You screamed at their snarling, "STOP!" No longer would you run from them. You stood still, commanding them with a pointed finger to "SIT." And they did. Their faces shifted to little grins with tongues dangling and tails began to wag. The Black Diamond Dogs became a crazy bitch's best subconscious friends.
However, for some reason, waking up from these exalted states of consciousness became more difficult. Equal amounts of curiosity and fear caused you to question the nature of reality itself in a much more intensely tactile way, having up to 8 or 9 "false awakenings" after each lucid dream. This was so exasperating that you worried if you would ever really wake up at all. And a part of you started to feel the distinction between real life and the lucid dream waning. Thinner and thinner. The difference was disappearing. It got to be a bit much.
This persistent fear of losing your mind, without the reliable excuse of being fucked up on drugs, induced a sober admiration for the practice and a larger sense of responsibility toward approaching this state of mind with sincerity, not aggression or greed. In return, you discovered many valuable truths within each dream's revealing riddle. It seemed these riddles were coming from, again, a source of higher intelligence you couldn't even begin to understand. Nor could you make any sense of why it would feel your damaged brain was worth receiving the wisdom embedded within these undazzling, but inspired insights.
Insights so hackneyed, yet they stood the test of time. Recalling these unvarnished mantras helped you regain a sense of internal calm while caught in the constant storms of stress and strife. All you had to do was take the time to look, feel and listen...because sometimes, it IS all too much. You get so tired of having to fight nonstop for every single little fucking scrap of some stupid bullshit basic need; like being heard, like being seen, like being treated with the barest thread of common human decency. Not being overlooked or ignored or cut off or pushed aside when waiting in line at the corner store or at a red light. Taking a timeout from society's infantile needs to go inward instead calmed you. It calmed the defeatism that would leak from feeling like the blank faced rusty little cog that amuses itself by squeaking in sync while it's trapped inside this massively malfunctioning male dominated earth raping kindness killing machine.
But this is life in the Natural World; even single-celled organisms have to defend themselves in order to survive. Every living thing is a sentient being, struggling just as hard as you to feel a momentary peace. Every single molecule is capable of reflecting intentions, of resounding vibrations of consciousness. Paying attention to those equally sentient cells involved alongside you in the act of living, breeds compassion and kinship. Insights are then bestowed upon us all when we open ourselves to the auras within empty spaces because they are Not Empty At All.
Put into the context of each individual's map of their own subconscious symbolism, any manner of things can take on new magical meanings, or renew a childlike curiosity with the mysteries of life. And despite society's attempts to carve, cut, shock, tranquilize and otherwise mute different kinds of creative thinking, as a species, we continue to be mystified with the ancient ancestral magic of dreams, with the connection we all have to the collective unconsciousness, with the innocent divinity we keep secret but secretly celebrate inside our sleeping minds as it delights us with it's absurd little insights on the nature of being.
Absurd little insights like "There is no such thing as Winning, there is only Spinning"- a phrase accompanied by an image of the cyclical rotation of the earth that occured while you were, once again, feeling like a total failure and considering suicide.
A song, whose humorous showtuney chorus,"Men are Minor, Waste of Eyeliner," was a response to your frustration with the misogynistic inequality you repeatedly confronted both in your intimate relationships and at work.
Your personal favorite, "If you take lots of small steps to hell, you will end up in hell. If you take lots of small steps toward heaven, you will end up in heaven."
After the more recent addition,"All there is is IS," you found some sense of ease in regard to making big life altering decisions, viewing the consequences of your choices as neither good nor evil, but knowing that no matter what you chose to do, all you would ever have to deal with is exactly what is in front of your face. Every decision therefore forces you to face simply THIS. And this 3rd face then revealed itself to you as a face that is All Faces, yet faceless.
*u can call me ph!*
7.05.2016
13% [chapter 16]
TRUKLIFE
In May 2007, as a last desperate attempt to revive your sputtering relationship, you and Evan stopped doing drugs and drove a rented 16 foot moving truck from San Francisco to Chicago, delivering his sister's furniture to where she now lived. Armed with 2 weeks free from work, an old school Nikon camera and rolls upon rolls of 35mm film, you went the long way around. Avoiding all major highways, it came as a complete surprise to stumble upon one static and decaying town after another. All those bustling hubs that once thrived from the railroad traffic that steadily flowed through til the 1930's, but got choked off by interstate highways, slowly subsided and died. You took hundreds of photos portraying the sad beautiful things life had left behind.
Fords with open suicide doors ditched in dry deer tick fields encrusted with snakes and rust. Dandelions and ivy sprouted up through bathtub drainplugs. Bedsprings clung to plastic bags blowing in the breeze. Windmills missing most blades still turned with a squeak. Schoolhouses buckled under warped belltowers that won't ring. Potbelly stoves stood more solidly than the homes they were once warming. Swifts and swallows nested in a hand painted nursery. Owls guarded proudly marked depots where trains no longer came. Rodents undermined an efficient bank office filing system. Pigeons cooed and pooped all over an empty factory lunchroom. Dark crooked barns, leaning at a frail 45 degrees, were propped up with feeble sticks to combat the inevitable sag of gravity.
Arriving in Portland, Oregon one rainy Monday night, being in an urban environment made both you and Evan want to get high. To quell the drug cravings, you instead got wicked drunk pretty quick at a little bar on the north side. Usually, this doesn't work and only makes the cravings worse. But for some reason, it distracted you from going out on the prowl just long enough this time. Staggering back to where you had parked, you both decided it would be easier to pass out in the back of the truck than to slovenly drive to some cheap motel that was nowhere near in booze-goggled sight.
It was freezing cold. Evan lit the propane gas stove and camping lanterns, turning up their hissing blue glows as high as they would go. You tugged out a long couch from under a pile of boxes. He rolled down the back door and yanked up a bunch of moving blankets. Collapsing there together, curled up for warmth, Evan commented, "We might die of asphyxiation if we leave the gas on all night." You slurred, "So what...at least I'll die happy." "Me too," he replied.
As grim as it might sound, that was one of the most intimate and romantic moments of your life -- facing such a silly demise together. After so much hard lined loss had dredged up all your disappointed desires, this gentle surrender to death was a sweet little delight. In the morning when you both woke, you collectively sighed, "Oh well, we're still alive," and smiled. Rolling up the back door invited the bird songs and dew drops and rising sun's light to come in. Full on. Hangover bright.
While pulled off onto a dirt road somewhere outside Missoula, Montana, Evan was putting another pot of coffee onto the stove. You sat on the couch, smoking a cigarette, looking out past the rolled up door to the lolling yellow ochre expanse of open prairie. Pale violet peaks teased it's distant edges. Endless and abrupt. Sustaining winds whispered and hummed. Pink clouds drifted down. Waist high grasses swayed and bent, swishing like a woman walking in a long tafetta dress. Taking a snapshot of Evan against this backdrop, you said, "I could live my whole life like this." He answered, "Yep." Then you took a long clean deep breath.
This idea of living in a housetruck was neither new nor novel.
You first considered it a future possibility when you were still a kid in the late 70's, during one of the many long drives your restless parents took across the country to attend Amway conventions. Another one of their attempts to succeed at building a pyramid scheme American Dream of materialistic prosperity. But you noticed that while on these road trips, there was a consistent absence of the violence and abuse that was so common during periods of housebound stagnation.
Maybe it was being in motion that made attitudes shift. Or the limitless light in the big round sky stretching over wide carved out canyons. Or the acerbic serenity of change itself that smoothed the behavioral snags into well-contained conduct. No one knows, but these motorhome memories were happy and golden-hued for everyone in your entirely damaged family.
While traveling through Europe in your early 30's, you befriended a photographer in Ghent named Wim. He lived in a converted 20 foot freezer truck he called Babu. He drove Babu all over the place. From his home town in Belgium to Ireland, Croatia, Russia, Mongolia, Morocco and back, always taking pictures of the people he'd met along the way.
One such image held your gaze, spellbound. It was a black and white portrait of a handsome middle-aged woman sitting on the wooden steps at the door of her vividly decorated caravan. Wearing a thick sweater, rain boots, and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, her long dark hair was pulled back into a loose bun, but riotous strands broke free and were blowing in the breeze. From a hook under the stairs hung an empty bucket. At her feet sat a muddy mutt, smiling up at the camera playfully. She did not smile but stared off to the left, deep in thought, a thousand kilometers beyond the lens. You could sense that the reality of her life was not easy. Yet this picture sang a song of raw liberation, a lament of redemption. Perhaps society had exiled her to the bitter margins, but she exuded a contented resilience, a defiant inner strength. Inspired, you could see yourself living well like this woman. Solitude, animals and nature are your most trustworthy all-weather companions, too.
More than a decade later, during the autumn of 2011, you got the chance to revisit Wim and his housetruck in Belgium. He was now married with a 4 year old daughter, a black cat and a large comfortable RV in tow. Babu functioned as the "guest house" in which you gratefully spent a week living simply. You took to it immediately. Like a fish inside a duck to water.
The housetruck's shower was in need of some plumbing repairs. Early one October morning, you could no longer bear your own ripe stench. You didn't want to wake up Wim and his family next door in the RV. So with a clean towel and a full gallon jug, you walked out into the woods beyond the industrial lot where you were all parked next to a friend's circus caravans restoration and repair shop.
Dumping water over your weary body, the invigorating icy coldness made you gasp for breath. Swabbing soap around in the roguest spots, rapidly rinsing, gasping again and dancing like a spaz, you quickly dried off. Clamouring back up into the warmth of Babu, you whipped on some clean clothes, that, by comparison, smelled almost heavenly.
Then you sat down and smoked a cigarrette on the stoop, checking out the updated status of the sunrise. With wet hair on your warm head, foggy wisps of vapor trailed off to join the haze of dawn's discreet ascent. You couldn't remember the last time you felt so alive. So quiet inside. Or so clean, emotionally. Although you were still hopelessly mired in the cross-continental smuggling embrace of an ether-soaked amphetamine addiction and global alcoholism, here, in this hidden back lot, you were cloaked with invisibility for at least a week. Free in the anonymity. Somewhere so much closer to safe.
9 days later, you were walking down a London street toward Victoria Station to ride the tube to Heathrow and board the plane back to San Francisco. You heard the startling sound of a pack of mad dogs barking orders behind you. "Dump the drugs!" your intuition distinctly heard them say. Weird, but ok.
So you took a quick detour into a local pub next to the Eurolines bus station and ordered a cup of coffee and a glass of cognac. Locking yourself in a toilet stall, one of the few places you ever felt unsurveilled, you methodically did line after countless line, devouring all of the substances you had left in your possession. So much so, you felt gluttonous and nauseated half way through. But waste not, want not. You couldn't bring yourself to throw away perfectly good drugs. Spread out over a cd cover of "The Fountain" soundtrack, each powdery pile that got injested slowly revealed more of the mesmerizing image on the cd cover beneath. The words that appeared there, "Death Is The Road To Awe" would be imprinted indelibly upon your memory for the rest of your at-risk life. You had no idea you were still capable of getting this stupidly Whoa Hey Goofy Magic Mountain high. Oh holy shit. Hold on tight.
Immediately upon arriving at the airport's security checkpoint, one of the uniformed guards pointed you out in line. As if to say, "She's mine!" Every square inch of your baggage was manhandled, scanned and rescanned, sniffed, rubbed down and rifled through for such a long time that you would now have to run impossibly fast in order to make it to your gate before departure time. They even confiscated your box of matches. You complained that you had a stop over in Chicago and would want to smoke a butt after the long flight. The officer snarled and threw down a single match. You bellowed, "I said, CHICAGO! It's called 'The Windy City' for a reason! Wanna gimme more matches, please?!" She acquiesced politely to your request. You were now allowed 2 matches but nothing on which to strike them. Dismissed. Next!
In the ensuing funnel of chaos and on the verge of a panic attack, 3 separate strangers empathized with your obvious plight and gently said reassuringly, "It's going to be alright," at each heaving pause while waiting for the next disasterously overcrowded shuttle car or at the bottom of every compressed escalator line. After being run through the vigorous gauntlet of official friskings, you took off without grabbing your wallet which held your passport inside. Somehow, it arrived before you did at your departure terminal. You didn't even realize you'd left it behind. "Oh, THANK FUCK!" you screamed as the smirking airline employee shoved it into your sweaty palms just as you were slipping through the swiftly closing gate.
Running onto the plane, you were so exasperated you thought you might vomit, have a heart attack or just faint. But none of these things happened. The stewardess held your shaky shoulders steady, gave you a glass of water and showed your toxin soaked body to it's assigned seat. As soon as you'd buckled yourself in, you threw the soft blue complimentary blanket over your head and began quietly sobbing like a little child. Not due to any invasive anger, but because you were too overwhelmed with gratitude.
Gratitude for the dogs that warned you to get rid of your stash. Gratitude for the completely unexpected kindness that came from those 3 strangers each time you nearly lost the plot during your mad dash. Gratitude for those who had returned your wallet and passport back to you in time. Gratitude for the airline staff who recognized but did not ridicule your messy distressing display of anti-ennui. Gratitude for all the choices you had made, even the ones
disguised as mistakes, which were now easier to define between the voluptuous bookends of a decade. Although those decisions had born hardships, they also lit the way to this self-sufficient life in which you were now wed to music and art, not breeding more resentful spite.
Saf, another old friend from Ghent, had commented on this devotion to creativity you were still engaged in when he said,"I can't keep up with you, crazy." Ten years ago, he was too self-conscious to stand up in front of people and sing the songs he was writing back then. You bombarded him with encouragement, saying, "Fuck Them, Saf! Do it anyway cuz one day, yer gonna be dead. And so will they. So who gives a fuck!?" He recorded his first album that summer and was now one of Belgium's most celebrated performers, "The Flemish Tom Waits". Gratitude that, even though Saf never acknowleded this or said thank you, here was real proof that one person's kind words could make an actual difference in another person's trajectory. Recompensed and respected, words now became something so much closer to sacred.
And gratitude for this melting pocketful of Belgian chocolates that you were now gobbling down and offering to the Indian man beside you. Because, when you removed the blanket from your swollen tear stained face, he looked worried about sitting so close to your highly charged emotional state. This was your way of telling him, "It's ok. I'm ok." He shook his head side to side, smiling, and relaxed back into his window seat.
And then came that shifting lift from asphalt to air, held again in Ariel's arms, on tenderhooks but holding it mostly together, swimming through space, peacefully sighing, "Everything's gonna be ok...everything's ok...it's all alright."
*u can call me ph!*
In May 2007, as a last desperate attempt to revive your sputtering relationship, you and Evan stopped doing drugs and drove a rented 16 foot moving truck from San Francisco to Chicago, delivering his sister's furniture to where she now lived. Armed with 2 weeks free from work, an old school Nikon camera and rolls upon rolls of 35mm film, you went the long way around. Avoiding all major highways, it came as a complete surprise to stumble upon one static and decaying town after another. All those bustling hubs that once thrived from the railroad traffic that steadily flowed through til the 1930's, but got choked off by interstate highways, slowly subsided and died. You took hundreds of photos portraying the sad beautiful things life had left behind.
Fords with open suicide doors ditched in dry deer tick fields encrusted with snakes and rust. Dandelions and ivy sprouted up through bathtub drainplugs. Bedsprings clung to plastic bags blowing in the breeze. Windmills missing most blades still turned with a squeak. Schoolhouses buckled under warped belltowers that won't ring. Potbelly stoves stood more solidly than the homes they were once warming. Swifts and swallows nested in a hand painted nursery. Owls guarded proudly marked depots where trains no longer came. Rodents undermined an efficient bank office filing system. Pigeons cooed and pooped all over an empty factory lunchroom. Dark crooked barns, leaning at a frail 45 degrees, were propped up with feeble sticks to combat the inevitable sag of gravity.
Arriving in Portland, Oregon one rainy Monday night, being in an urban environment made both you and Evan want to get high. To quell the drug cravings, you instead got wicked drunk pretty quick at a little bar on the north side. Usually, this doesn't work and only makes the cravings worse. But for some reason, it distracted you from going out on the prowl just long enough this time. Staggering back to where you had parked, you both decided it would be easier to pass out in the back of the truck than to slovenly drive to some cheap motel that was nowhere near in booze-goggled sight.
It was freezing cold. Evan lit the propane gas stove and camping lanterns, turning up their hissing blue glows as high as they would go. You tugged out a long couch from under a pile of boxes. He rolled down the back door and yanked up a bunch of moving blankets. Collapsing there together, curled up for warmth, Evan commented, "We might die of asphyxiation if we leave the gas on all night." You slurred, "So what...at least I'll die happy." "Me too," he replied.
As grim as it might sound, that was one of the most intimate and romantic moments of your life -- facing such a silly demise together. After so much hard lined loss had dredged up all your disappointed desires, this gentle surrender to death was a sweet little delight. In the morning when you both woke, you collectively sighed, "Oh well, we're still alive," and smiled. Rolling up the back door invited the bird songs and dew drops and rising sun's light to come in. Full on. Hangover bright.
While pulled off onto a dirt road somewhere outside Missoula, Montana, Evan was putting another pot of coffee onto the stove. You sat on the couch, smoking a cigarette, looking out past the rolled up door to the lolling yellow ochre expanse of open prairie. Pale violet peaks teased it's distant edges. Endless and abrupt. Sustaining winds whispered and hummed. Pink clouds drifted down. Waist high grasses swayed and bent, swishing like a woman walking in a long tafetta dress. Taking a snapshot of Evan against this backdrop, you said, "I could live my whole life like this." He answered, "Yep." Then you took a long clean deep breath.
This idea of living in a housetruck was neither new nor novel.
You first considered it a future possibility when you were still a kid in the late 70's, during one of the many long drives your restless parents took across the country to attend Amway conventions. Another one of their attempts to succeed at building a pyramid scheme American Dream of materialistic prosperity. But you noticed that while on these road trips, there was a consistent absence of the violence and abuse that was so common during periods of housebound stagnation.
Maybe it was being in motion that made attitudes shift. Or the limitless light in the big round sky stretching over wide carved out canyons. Or the acerbic serenity of change itself that smoothed the behavioral snags into well-contained conduct. No one knows, but these motorhome memories were happy and golden-hued for everyone in your entirely damaged family.
While traveling through Europe in your early 30's, you befriended a photographer in Ghent named Wim. He lived in a converted 20 foot freezer truck he called Babu. He drove Babu all over the place. From his home town in Belgium to Ireland, Croatia, Russia, Mongolia, Morocco and back, always taking pictures of the people he'd met along the way.
One such image held your gaze, spellbound. It was a black and white portrait of a handsome middle-aged woman sitting on the wooden steps at the door of her vividly decorated caravan. Wearing a thick sweater, rain boots, and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, her long dark hair was pulled back into a loose bun, but riotous strands broke free and were blowing in the breeze. From a hook under the stairs hung an empty bucket. At her feet sat a muddy mutt, smiling up at the camera playfully. She did not smile but stared off to the left, deep in thought, a thousand kilometers beyond the lens. You could sense that the reality of her life was not easy. Yet this picture sang a song of raw liberation, a lament of redemption. Perhaps society had exiled her to the bitter margins, but she exuded a contented resilience, a defiant inner strength. Inspired, you could see yourself living well like this woman. Solitude, animals and nature are your most trustworthy all-weather companions, too.
More than a decade later, during the autumn of 2011, you got the chance to revisit Wim and his housetruck in Belgium. He was now married with a 4 year old daughter, a black cat and a large comfortable RV in tow. Babu functioned as the "guest house" in which you gratefully spent a week living simply. You took to it immediately. Like a fish inside a duck to water.
The housetruck's shower was in need of some plumbing repairs. Early one October morning, you could no longer bear your own ripe stench. You didn't want to wake up Wim and his family next door in the RV. So with a clean towel and a full gallon jug, you walked out into the woods beyond the industrial lot where you were all parked next to a friend's circus caravans restoration and repair shop.
Dumping water over your weary body, the invigorating icy coldness made you gasp for breath. Swabbing soap around in the roguest spots, rapidly rinsing, gasping again and dancing like a spaz, you quickly dried off. Clamouring back up into the warmth of Babu, you whipped on some clean clothes, that, by comparison, smelled almost heavenly.
Then you sat down and smoked a cigarrette on the stoop, checking out the updated status of the sunrise. With wet hair on your warm head, foggy wisps of vapor trailed off to join the haze of dawn's discreet ascent. You couldn't remember the last time you felt so alive. So quiet inside. Or so clean, emotionally. Although you were still hopelessly mired in the cross-continental smuggling embrace of an ether-soaked amphetamine addiction and global alcoholism, here, in this hidden back lot, you were cloaked with invisibility for at least a week. Free in the anonymity. Somewhere so much closer to safe.
9 days later, you were walking down a London street toward Victoria Station to ride the tube to Heathrow and board the plane back to San Francisco. You heard the startling sound of a pack of mad dogs barking orders behind you. "Dump the drugs!" your intuition distinctly heard them say. Weird, but ok.
So you took a quick detour into a local pub next to the Eurolines bus station and ordered a cup of coffee and a glass of cognac. Locking yourself in a toilet stall, one of the few places you ever felt unsurveilled, you methodically did line after countless line, devouring all of the substances you had left in your possession. So much so, you felt gluttonous and nauseated half way through. But waste not, want not. You couldn't bring yourself to throw away perfectly good drugs. Spread out over a cd cover of "The Fountain" soundtrack, each powdery pile that got injested slowly revealed more of the mesmerizing image on the cd cover beneath. The words that appeared there, "Death Is The Road To Awe" would be imprinted indelibly upon your memory for the rest of your at-risk life. You had no idea you were still capable of getting this stupidly Whoa Hey Goofy Magic Mountain high. Oh holy shit. Hold on tight.
Immediately upon arriving at the airport's security checkpoint, one of the uniformed guards pointed you out in line. As if to say, "She's mine!" Every square inch of your baggage was manhandled, scanned and rescanned, sniffed, rubbed down and rifled through for such a long time that you would now have to run impossibly fast in order to make it to your gate before departure time. They even confiscated your box of matches. You complained that you had a stop over in Chicago and would want to smoke a butt after the long flight. The officer snarled and threw down a single match. You bellowed, "I said, CHICAGO! It's called 'The Windy City' for a reason! Wanna gimme more matches, please?!" She acquiesced politely to your request. You were now allowed 2 matches but nothing on which to strike them. Dismissed. Next!
In the ensuing funnel of chaos and on the verge of a panic attack, 3 separate strangers empathized with your obvious plight and gently said reassuringly, "It's going to be alright," at each heaving pause while waiting for the next disasterously overcrowded shuttle car or at the bottom of every compressed escalator line. After being run through the vigorous gauntlet of official friskings, you took off without grabbing your wallet which held your passport inside. Somehow, it arrived before you did at your departure terminal. You didn't even realize you'd left it behind. "Oh, THANK FUCK!" you screamed as the smirking airline employee shoved it into your sweaty palms just as you were slipping through the swiftly closing gate.
Running onto the plane, you were so exasperated you thought you might vomit, have a heart attack or just faint. But none of these things happened. The stewardess held your shaky shoulders steady, gave you a glass of water and showed your toxin soaked body to it's assigned seat. As soon as you'd buckled yourself in, you threw the soft blue complimentary blanket over your head and began quietly sobbing like a little child. Not due to any invasive anger, but because you were too overwhelmed with gratitude.
Gratitude for the dogs that warned you to get rid of your stash. Gratitude for the completely unexpected kindness that came from those 3 strangers each time you nearly lost the plot during your mad dash. Gratitude for those who had returned your wallet and passport back to you in time. Gratitude for the airline staff who recognized but did not ridicule your messy distressing display of anti-ennui. Gratitude for all the choices you had made, even the ones
disguised as mistakes, which were now easier to define between the voluptuous bookends of a decade. Although those decisions had born hardships, they also lit the way to this self-sufficient life in which you were now wed to music and art, not breeding more resentful spite.
Saf, another old friend from Ghent, had commented on this devotion to creativity you were still engaged in when he said,"I can't keep up with you, crazy." Ten years ago, he was too self-conscious to stand up in front of people and sing the songs he was writing back then. You bombarded him with encouragement, saying, "Fuck Them, Saf! Do it anyway cuz one day, yer gonna be dead. And so will they. So who gives a fuck!?" He recorded his first album that summer and was now one of Belgium's most celebrated performers, "The Flemish Tom Waits". Gratitude that, even though Saf never acknowleded this or said thank you, here was real proof that one person's kind words could make an actual difference in another person's trajectory. Recompensed and respected, words now became something so much closer to sacred.
And gratitude for this melting pocketful of Belgian chocolates that you were now gobbling down and offering to the Indian man beside you. Because, when you removed the blanket from your swollen tear stained face, he looked worried about sitting so close to your highly charged emotional state. This was your way of telling him, "It's ok. I'm ok." He shook his head side to side, smiling, and relaxed back into his window seat.
And then came that shifting lift from asphalt to air, held again in Ariel's arms, on tenderhooks but holding it mostly together, swimming through space, peacefully sighing, "Everything's gonna be ok...everything's ok...it's all alright."
*u can call me ph!*
6.02.2014
The Ouroboros Years...
** a lot of this post is a broken record, but the longer it plays, the more things you begin to hear.. stuff you never noticed before....
so i wish you luck, gentle reader...**
obviously, i half-aborted this blog…
as well as many many other things since 2010 - having fallen into an abyss of the unamusing kind. it was very difficult to process things in life the way i normally did, by seeing the satire and absurdity in each event and tri-annually turning what seemed like crisis at the time into small, dark humored comix. i did not realize how important this process had become as a coping mechanism until, after the events of said years of darkness. i could not find humor in this new series of Total Failures. nothing about any of them was funny. and i could not see how they ever would be.
a couple years passed until one night's events replayed in my head, and suddenly, YES it's FUCKING HILARIOUS, so i laughed a lot and knew that i was indeed healing without drawing it all out in comic book form, but i also knew i needed a major shift to occur, both in my work with art and music and also in my brain....
all of the supposed progress i had been making as an adult woman who had grown up in an abusive home was instantly shattered the second i found myself in an abusive situation AGAIN. i knew the only common denominator was me, so the problem HAD to be ME.
@ 850 Bryant Street: to fill out a form in which hospital charges can be waived for women of domestic violence based on income level and lack of health insurance, as i was entering the building, i realized why i was subconsciously drawing psychotic men into my life: because i wanted to
Be An Artist,
Not A Mother, Not A Girlfriend, Not A Wife. however, human needs and incessant loneliness would seek comfort, so every few years, i'd meet someone with whom i'd become intimate. instinctively, i knew they would never stick around long enough to have "that talk" about children, or meeting their moms, etc. those few that did express this desire, would at some point, feel that they were not getting their needs met, that i was neglecting them to spend time painting or drawing. even the men who initially said they loved the art i make, would eventually force the ultimatum "it's me or the brush". needless to say, i always chose the brush.
but this last "relationship" became a brush with death - literally - as he screamed at me while grabbing my neck and pushing me to the ground just outside my front door on mission street, "I'm gonna fucking kill you!!" staring into his eyes and on fire with rage, i replied "Go Ahead! Put me outta my fuckin misery!" but he immediately went limp, let go, and ran into my house, throwing things out windows and destroying various pieces of musical equipment.
this moment gave me 3 extremely important things:
1.
my left ring finger was broken in this altercation, i did not seek medical attention because i interpreted this particular injury with symbolism. all the years of longing to be with someone with whom i would feel the kind of love that i felt when i was making music or art, was BROKEN. it was never going to happen. here i was 40+ years old, still having the same issues with men that i had at 23, it had become completely pointless, knowing that i was not willing to give up on the 2 things that have Been There For Me, the 2 things that over and over have Saved My Life - MUSIC & ART - i would not sacrifice those 2 things in order to nurture a man & his creativity instead of exploring my own, or to do the work that is required to Be In a Relationship, so i stopped looking for the ring, so to speak, from a male OR a female. it's hard enough to have a REGULAR female friend without her Single White Female-ing me (look it up) or doing some other truly shocking, well played, that must have taken you ages to plot out that kind of sinister shit to make me look like whatever you want me to look like to the other people you feel the need to impress... plus, it already takes me years to trust people that are NICE to me.... so, to commemorate the decision TO STOP LOOKING FOR SOMETHING THAT IS NEVER GONNA BE THERE, i tattooed a triple spiral on my ring finger as a symbol of my permanent marriage to the art and music that have shown me more true, unconditional love than any human being ever has.
2.
a man at the bus stop across the street witnessed the choking in public event. as i looked over at him grabbing his cell phone, i had one of those time stretching tunnel vision experiences with someone who is far away, but it's as if you are 2 inches from their face. i could hear things breaking from where i stood outside while the psycho was upstairs, but he ran out of the house mere moments before the police arrived.
but i had a witness. i'd been telling people that after drinking bourbon, the psycho would attack me, usually by choking. no one believed me because there were no giant marks to show. they looked at me like i was stupid. "WHY are still with that guy? just throw him out." but for someone who has grown up with violence, i knew i had TO WAIT for him to make the decision to leave me - and i knew it wouldn't take long - rather than take the dominant stance and throw him out. he is a locksmith with a giant ego and a gun who would not hesitate to break into my house and shoot me in the face.
* it should also be noted that the neck can go through way too much abuse before it starts showing signs on the skin - and abusive men tend to know this.* he also knew, as i told him i had filed a restraining order against him on one of these prior events so as to make a paper trail in case he did actually kill me, that he could not be served with the restraining order since he had no home address, and gave me this sickly grin... rather proudly, he announced that he had 7 or 8 dead ex-girlfriends as well.
yet here he stood because I LET HIM IN.
i let him in, not just because he was an old "friend" i hadn't seen in 15 years since the week i stood by his bed at SF General when he almost died after a motorcycle accident, i let him in because i didn't care about my life anymore. i had gotten laid off a few months before, and was losing touch with all the coworkers i thought were my friends all these years, but no one was there for me. i seriously needed some kind of support and could not find any. each one of my longtime mostly male friends seemed to only be, in essence, waiting for fucking to happen between us - they did not want to listen to this, so it became obvious they were not really paying attention to anything i ever said to them over the years, just nodding their heads, acting supportive while thinking about the blow jobs they thought they were going to get for "putting the time in".... i keep forgetting that i am on this planet to please men and clean up after them, and no matter what i write, say, make, paint, sculpt, play, organize, invoke, destroy, scream out, barf up, or do in any way shape or form will EVER BE TAKEN INTO CONSIDERATION IN ITS OWN REGARD, it will only ever be considered AFTER-CUNT.
yup. pretty much over it as i stood @ SF General, after one of those bourbon nights, seeking an x-ray for my ribs that had been in pain for days, but instead i'd been sent to the Psychiatric Ward for evaluation. a social worker asked me, "are you depressed or angry?" there were no words... i've worked in the mental health eugenics complex. psychiatry is simply a fancy word for house of torture on the unwanted with random chemicals.....so i told her "i just want an x-ray." suicidal thoughts had been on heavy repeat even though i'd been drug free for years now, and i knew i was running out of reasons to keep trying because i couldn't win no matter what i did. i was sick of life whether i was on drugs or not and i'd been wanting to die since the age of 10, so finally i realized this threatening person's presence in my life was also due to my own deathwish.
every time a roommate opened or closed the front door, i'd jolt up instantly - so not much sleeping happened for a while....which was weirdly traumatizing for someone who wants to die anyway. 2 weeks later, he did break in. i stood behind my bolted bedroom door, listening intently. he wandered around for a minute, then took a crappy old lamp instead of one of my heavy peavey amps.
and that was that.
3.
having faced that moment of death - again, as an adult - i remembered facing it when i was 19. essentially, i'd been reconnected to who i was, where i had come from. i remembered that feeling of being more angry than afraid and so sick of this shit that i no longer cared if he killed me, so i fought back, and in a sense i won.
i am convinced that ACCURATELY PLACING MY RAGE with a pair of steel toed boots into the groin of my father on that summer day in 1987, saved me from going through years of misdirected anger onto random men. though, i would OBVIOUSLY still suffer several other issues with sex, rage, depression, body image, drugs, alcohol, suicide, night terrors, dissociations, seizures, the inability to trust others, etc. this event of Looking Death in The Eye seems to have been a deciding factor in how i might be able to evolve emotionally without being stuck in the mindset of My Childhood Sucked, So Now The World OWES ME SOMETHING.
this time, it was also a battle against loneliness - the emotion that drove me to Every Bad Decision I Ever Made. i No Longer Want To Be With Anyone. instead, i started meditating every day and focused on spending time with my true loves - music and art, and this might just be the post traumatic growth talking, but i've never been so productive, or present, or felt like a part of the world, and lacking nothing.
after countless hours watching documentaries and absorbing as much information on the combination of epigenetic factors and environmentally induced behaviors on the developing brains of children being abused - especially those that experience it before the age of 7 - and after doing a checklist of degrees of damage for each type/frequency/time length/relationship to the abuser and other varying factors = this shocking discovery that i have an 87% chance of growing up and doing one or more of these 4 things:
1. becoming a prostitute
2. dying of an drug overdose
3. committing suicide
4. being incarcerated - most likely for assault & battery, possibly for manslaughter.
therefore, if i continued NOT DOING any of those 4 things that, up til now, i still had not done thanks to channeling it all into Art & Music, then i am in the 13%....and that was the shift i needed...to see myself as one of the lucky ones...how incredibly grateful i became to those tiny breezes that would wake the quiet voice inside...the quiet voice that, in those boiling red moments where you want to peel off your own skin, says to you, "no...just wait....don't cross the street yet...."
When Things Fall Apart, a book by Pema Chodrin, that my roommate Alex gave to me as i was LEAVING NEW YORK CITY- (the only serious regret i had which i then tortured myself with for 10 years) that book probably saved my life. the ideas in it became such a central part of this transition, i was able to see that regret of leaving new york completely OUTWEIGHED by all the positive things that flowed from that book since then... just last night, he was in sf for one night, on tour with his old band - a total fluke that i saw the show listing - i knew i had to go there.... arriving late and without the $30 door charge, the doorman said a bunch of tickets had been left for latecomers so he let me in free....! after the show i told Alex how grateful i was for that book. he didn't even remember giving it to me, but it felt so good to let go of the regret. it's likely i'd still be going through all the same transitions with different names no matter where i am living.
another motivating factor to Say Thank You to Alex was that i never want to feel the way i felt when I DIDN"T GO to the anal cunt show on their LAST tour w/ the original members... i had wanted to give them the comix i had dedicated to them - to seth in particular [bitter pie #20] but feeling anxious that night, i did not fight that feeling and go do the right thing...so i missed my chance... Seth died of a heart attack soon after the tour ended and i was Fucking Wracked - so fucking pissed at myself for Not Showing UP, not that it would have made a huge difference to them, but like anything in life, sometimes, it's the small things that actually matter so much more... as i learned soon after that when, within 6 weeks of each other, 3 separate men from my past contacted me completely out of the blue and verbally apologized for things that happened over 25 years ago -- the almost frighteningly immense power words can have - i was so familiar with those of a harmful nature, but never suspected their equal ability TO HEAL so quickly....
it's nothing, a sentence. but it is everything, to say it and to hear it.
so i am Embracing Hopelessness. i am ok with being alone with no false sense of security to cling to... i'm learning to ride emotions like horses, to not let them take over, but to acknowledge them, even the dark ones...even those Dumb Girl thoughts that pop up from time to time, that self-pitying weakness, the unmedicated mess that cries non-stop & won't get outta bed cuz she's writing the longest blog post on the planet, that Dumb Girl that wanted affection from others at any cost, She Almost Got Me Killed, so she's been told to Stop being Such A Downer & has been grounded with her deluded Dumb Girl dreams until the gradual decline brings us all home again.
SO ANYWAY>>>>>>
this is what i’m currently working on –
so i wish you luck, gentle reader...**
obviously, i half-aborted this blog…
as well as many many other things since 2010 - having fallen into an abyss of the unamusing kind. it was very difficult to process things in life the way i normally did, by seeing the satire and absurdity in each event and tri-annually turning what seemed like crisis at the time into small, dark humored comix. i did not realize how important this process had become as a coping mechanism until, after the events of said years of darkness. i could not find humor in this new series of Total Failures. nothing about any of them was funny. and i could not see how they ever would be.
a couple years passed until one night's events replayed in my head, and suddenly, YES it's FUCKING HILARIOUS, so i laughed a lot and knew that i was indeed healing without drawing it all out in comic book form, but i also knew i needed a major shift to occur, both in my work with art and music and also in my brain....
all of the supposed progress i had been making as an adult woman who had grown up in an abusive home was instantly shattered the second i found myself in an abusive situation AGAIN. i knew the only common denominator was me, so the problem HAD to be ME.
@ 850 Bryant Street: to fill out a form in which hospital charges can be waived for women of domestic violence based on income level and lack of health insurance, as i was entering the building, i realized why i was subconsciously drawing psychotic men into my life: because i wanted to
Be An Artist,
Not A Mother, Not A Girlfriend, Not A Wife. however, human needs and incessant loneliness would seek comfort, so every few years, i'd meet someone with whom i'd become intimate. instinctively, i knew they would never stick around long enough to have "that talk" about children, or meeting their moms, etc. those few that did express this desire, would at some point, feel that they were not getting their needs met, that i was neglecting them to spend time painting or drawing. even the men who initially said they loved the art i make, would eventually force the ultimatum "it's me or the brush". needless to say, i always chose the brush.
but this last "relationship" became a brush with death - literally - as he screamed at me while grabbing my neck and pushing me to the ground just outside my front door on mission street, "I'm gonna fucking kill you!!" staring into his eyes and on fire with rage, i replied "Go Ahead! Put me outta my fuckin misery!" but he immediately went limp, let go, and ran into my house, throwing things out windows and destroying various pieces of musical equipment.
this moment gave me 3 extremely important things:
1.
my left ring finger was broken in this altercation, i did not seek medical attention because i interpreted this particular injury with symbolism. all the years of longing to be with someone with whom i would feel the kind of love that i felt when i was making music or art, was BROKEN. it was never going to happen. here i was 40+ years old, still having the same issues with men that i had at 23, it had become completely pointless, knowing that i was not willing to give up on the 2 things that have Been There For Me, the 2 things that over and over have Saved My Life - MUSIC & ART - i would not sacrifice those 2 things in order to nurture a man & his creativity instead of exploring my own, or to do the work that is required to Be In a Relationship, so i stopped looking for the ring, so to speak, from a male OR a female. it's hard enough to have a REGULAR female friend without her Single White Female-ing me (look it up) or doing some other truly shocking, well played, that must have taken you ages to plot out that kind of sinister shit to make me look like whatever you want me to look like to the other people you feel the need to impress... plus, it already takes me years to trust people that are NICE to me.... so, to commemorate the decision TO STOP LOOKING FOR SOMETHING THAT IS NEVER GONNA BE THERE, i tattooed a triple spiral on my ring finger as a symbol of my permanent marriage to the art and music that have shown me more true, unconditional love than any human being ever has.
2.
a man at the bus stop across the street witnessed the choking in public event. as i looked over at him grabbing his cell phone, i had one of those time stretching tunnel vision experiences with someone who is far away, but it's as if you are 2 inches from their face. i could hear things breaking from where i stood outside while the psycho was upstairs, but he ran out of the house mere moments before the police arrived.
but i had a witness. i'd been telling people that after drinking bourbon, the psycho would attack me, usually by choking. no one believed me because there were no giant marks to show. they looked at me like i was stupid. "WHY are still with that guy? just throw him out." but for someone who has grown up with violence, i knew i had TO WAIT for him to make the decision to leave me - and i knew it wouldn't take long - rather than take the dominant stance and throw him out. he is a locksmith with a giant ego and a gun who would not hesitate to break into my house and shoot me in the face.
* it should also be noted that the neck can go through way too much abuse before it starts showing signs on the skin - and abusive men tend to know this.* he also knew, as i told him i had filed a restraining order against him on one of these prior events so as to make a paper trail in case he did actually kill me, that he could not be served with the restraining order since he had no home address, and gave me this sickly grin... rather proudly, he announced that he had 7 or 8 dead ex-girlfriends as well.
yet here he stood because I LET HIM IN.
i let him in, not just because he was an old "friend" i hadn't seen in 15 years since the week i stood by his bed at SF General when he almost died after a motorcycle accident, i let him in because i didn't care about my life anymore. i had gotten laid off a few months before, and was losing touch with all the coworkers i thought were my friends all these years, but no one was there for me. i seriously needed some kind of support and could not find any. each one of my longtime mostly male friends seemed to only be, in essence, waiting for fucking to happen between us - they did not want to listen to this, so it became obvious they were not really paying attention to anything i ever said to them over the years, just nodding their heads, acting supportive while thinking about the blow jobs they thought they were going to get for "putting the time in".... i keep forgetting that i am on this planet to please men and clean up after them, and no matter what i write, say, make, paint, sculpt, play, organize, invoke, destroy, scream out, barf up, or do in any way shape or form will EVER BE TAKEN INTO CONSIDERATION IN ITS OWN REGARD, it will only ever be considered AFTER-CUNT.
yup. pretty much over it as i stood @ SF General, after one of those bourbon nights, seeking an x-ray for my ribs that had been in pain for days, but instead i'd been sent to the Psychiatric Ward for evaluation. a social worker asked me, "are you depressed or angry?" there were no words... i've worked in the mental health eugenics complex. psychiatry is simply a fancy word for house of torture on the unwanted with random chemicals.....so i told her "i just want an x-ray." suicidal thoughts had been on heavy repeat even though i'd been drug free for years now, and i knew i was running out of reasons to keep trying because i couldn't win no matter what i did. i was sick of life whether i was on drugs or not and i'd been wanting to die since the age of 10, so finally i realized this threatening person's presence in my life was also due to my own deathwish.
every time a roommate opened or closed the front door, i'd jolt up instantly - so not much sleeping happened for a while....which was weirdly traumatizing for someone who wants to die anyway. 2 weeks later, he did break in. i stood behind my bolted bedroom door, listening intently. he wandered around for a minute, then took a crappy old lamp instead of one of my heavy peavey amps.
and that was that.
3.
having faced that moment of death - again, as an adult - i remembered facing it when i was 19. essentially, i'd been reconnected to who i was, where i had come from. i remembered that feeling of being more angry than afraid and so sick of this shit that i no longer cared if he killed me, so i fought back, and in a sense i won.
i am convinced that ACCURATELY PLACING MY RAGE with a pair of steel toed boots into the groin of my father on that summer day in 1987, saved me from going through years of misdirected anger onto random men. though, i would OBVIOUSLY still suffer several other issues with sex, rage, depression, body image, drugs, alcohol, suicide, night terrors, dissociations, seizures, the inability to trust others, etc. this event of Looking Death in The Eye seems to have been a deciding factor in how i might be able to evolve emotionally without being stuck in the mindset of My Childhood Sucked, So Now The World OWES ME SOMETHING.
this time, it was also a battle against loneliness - the emotion that drove me to Every Bad Decision I Ever Made. i No Longer Want To Be With Anyone. instead, i started meditating every day and focused on spending time with my true loves - music and art, and this might just be the post traumatic growth talking, but i've never been so productive, or present, or felt like a part of the world, and lacking nothing.
after countless hours watching documentaries and absorbing as much information on the combination of epigenetic factors and environmentally induced behaviors on the developing brains of children being abused - especially those that experience it before the age of 7 - and after doing a checklist of degrees of damage for each type/frequency/time length/relationship to the abuser and other varying factors = this shocking discovery that i have an 87% chance of growing up and doing one or more of these 4 things:
1. becoming a prostitute
2. dying of an drug overdose
3. committing suicide
4. being incarcerated - most likely for assault & battery, possibly for manslaughter.
therefore, if i continued NOT DOING any of those 4 things that, up til now, i still had not done thanks to channeling it all into Art & Music, then i am in the 13%....and that was the shift i needed...to see myself as one of the lucky ones...how incredibly grateful i became to those tiny breezes that would wake the quiet voice inside...the quiet voice that, in those boiling red moments where you want to peel off your own skin, says to you, "no...just wait....don't cross the street yet...."
When Things Fall Apart, a book by Pema Chodrin, that my roommate Alex gave to me as i was LEAVING NEW YORK CITY- (the only serious regret i had which i then tortured myself with for 10 years) that book probably saved my life. the ideas in it became such a central part of this transition, i was able to see that regret of leaving new york completely OUTWEIGHED by all the positive things that flowed from that book since then... just last night, he was in sf for one night, on tour with his old band - a total fluke that i saw the show listing - i knew i had to go there.... arriving late and without the $30 door charge, the doorman said a bunch of tickets had been left for latecomers so he let me in free....! after the show i told Alex how grateful i was for that book. he didn't even remember giving it to me, but it felt so good to let go of the regret. it's likely i'd still be going through all the same transitions with different names no matter where i am living.
another motivating factor to Say Thank You to Alex was that i never want to feel the way i felt when I DIDN"T GO to the anal cunt show on their LAST tour w/ the original members... i had wanted to give them the comix i had dedicated to them - to seth in particular [bitter pie #20] but feeling anxious that night, i did not fight that feeling and go do the right thing...so i missed my chance... Seth died of a heart attack soon after the tour ended and i was Fucking Wracked - so fucking pissed at myself for Not Showing UP, not that it would have made a huge difference to them, but like anything in life, sometimes, it's the small things that actually matter so much more... as i learned soon after that when, within 6 weeks of each other, 3 separate men from my past contacted me completely out of the blue and verbally apologized for things that happened over 25 years ago -- the almost frighteningly immense power words can have - i was so familiar with those of a harmful nature, but never suspected their equal ability TO HEAL so quickly....
it's nothing, a sentence. but it is everything, to say it and to hear it.
so i am Embracing Hopelessness. i am ok with being alone with no false sense of security to cling to... i'm learning to ride emotions like horses, to not let them take over, but to acknowledge them, even the dark ones...even those Dumb Girl thoughts that pop up from time to time, that self-pitying weakness, the unmedicated mess that cries non-stop & won't get outta bed cuz she's writing the longest blog post on the planet, that Dumb Girl that wanted affection from others at any cost, She Almost Got Me Killed, so she's been told to Stop being Such A Downer & has been grounded with her deluded Dumb Girl dreams until the gradual decline brings us all home again.
SO ANYWAY>>>>>>
a 4 foot square painted graphic novel that i’m photographing/animating as it is being created…
this is the 3rd working edit of the project so far...
it's called Children of the Black Sun
(named after the NON album)...
most often, updates will spawn from here
most often, updates will spawn from here
but i'll try to be less lame with blog posts
now that i can remember the password.
art and music are nothing without you looking at it, listening to it, and reading it.
so THANK YOU...oh, hey look!! you made it thru this blog post!
BUTT FUDGE. i didn't intend to write all that,
it just kinda..fell out....
*[plop]
love,
xx bitter pie
*u can call me ph!*
art and music are nothing without you looking at it, listening to it, and reading it.
so THANK YOU...oh, hey look!! you made it thru this blog post!
BUTT FUDGE. i didn't intend to write all that,
it just kinda..fell out....
*[plop]
love,
xx bitter pie
*u can call me ph!*
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