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!*
Showing posts with label self medicating. Show all posts
Showing posts with label self medicating. Show all posts
8.10.2016
5.26.2016
13% [chapter 3]
GOD IS NO PLACE
Growing up in the military, you were accustomed to moving to different places bi-annually. This made it difficult to form any real lasting relationships with people, always getting torn away from the friends you finally managed to make. In some ways you loved, and in some ways you hated being the new girl again and again.
And in many ways, you wished you could seasonally shed all of your skin like a snake, devour yourself tail first, yet somehow avoid ending up with your head up your own ass, so to speak. Oftener, you'd curl up into a protective armoured ball like a roly poly and just roll away.
So much of a child's life is out of their own control. So much of what they are taught is on the importance of learning how to obey rather than learning how to think for themselves. To have some illusion of control over your own mind and body was the only form of autonymous choice you could fully embrace. This is why you told yourself that it is a decision you make, whether or not you allow yourself to fall in love or go insane.
As a rootless kid, you had formulated the ridiculous paranoic theory that every new town to which you were forced to relocate was just an updated version of the same ten people in the same small place, having been elaborately redecorated while you were all stuck up in the air inside that massive military cargo plane.
Since you and your brother were often the only children on board, the pilots let you sit in the cockpit and gave you lollipops to keep your curious hands occupied. You strained your little necks up to get a good view out the front window. You could see the tops of huge thunderhead clouds as you cruised straight through them instead of passing by alongside. This was one of the most beautifully sublime places you'd ever been to in your entire short life, up there in the boundless sky.
While unpacking moving boxes in Warner Robbins, Georgia, you pretended it was Christmas again and handed out all the wrapped items to other people so they could feign surprise upon opening each new gift of that thing they already owned. Your first day in kindergarten, you said hello in thick German. All the kids gasped and screamed, "Hitler!" But you had no idea what this word meant. It must be something hateful judging by their scowls. So your 5 year old speech patterns quickly shifted into the long slow drawl of an American's southern accent.
In Austin, Texas, a tornado came and blew out all of the windows of the house while your family huddled together in the tiny tiled bathroom, gripping the sink and shuddering. Afterward, you all went for a grateful walk across the flat cracked muddy plains that
seemed to stretch out forever beyond the little grassy fenced in yards. You played with some scorpions and knew you should be afraid of them, but you were not. Nor were you scared when your brother threw down his fishing pole after spotting a huge yellow water moccasin on the river. You grabbed his hand and brought him back to the spot where his pole landed unharmed. Then you made yourself conquer your fear of the high diving board at the public pool. Soon, that new found thrill became an obsession. At 7, you were a drug addict just waiting to happen.
While living on the Greek island of Crete, you saw 'Star Wars' on the big screen in an outdoor 3000 year old ampitheater beneath a bright sea of stars. You rolled around happily in fields of poppy and clover and swam with seahorses urchins stingrays and starfish in the heavenly clear blue Mediterranean. At night, you covered your ears to block out the slaughterhouse sounds of pigs being butchered because they sounded like children screaming. Along the edge of their fence lay scattered dry dead hoofs and horns and snouts. In utter glee, you rode many a wide bellied and very unimpressed donkey. For Easter, a goat was hung by it's feet in an olive tree and left to rot for 2 weeks. You inspected it's decomposition daily. At Knossos Palace, you sat in the King's throne but knew it really belonged to the Queen. You also wondered if Jesus was a time traveller from the future, where we all know how to heal each other already, and that he was stuck here, keenly aware of exactly what he had to stoically go through in order for the Piscean Age to unfold in the inevitably brutal and neccessarily ignorant way that it should. You found an Ankh ring on the village street and wore it even though it turned your finger green. While watching an opulent wedding from the kid's table, it made you cry. This lavish act of ceremony glimmered so sweetly in your 9 year old mind.
Ultimately, it was great for your mental health to have lived in so many different places growing up. You were especially grateful to have been exposed to the ancient Celtic, Minoan and Egyptian cultures, where, with the clear third eye of a child, you could sense the presence of memories from people that passed eons ago. These emotional but ordinary scenes
from older civilizations felt far more expansive and equalitarian than that of the non-Native American country you now inhabited; imperialistic genocide having paved the way through these desecrated lands; shopping malls in defecit being converted into private prisons for profit; a poorly housed chemically tainted urban sprawl that, for thousands of years prior to capitalism's arrival, was a communally sustaining well-tended crop of sacred maize.
It was this loss of sacred nature, replaced by the punitive hard line formation of strict angry man-god and woman hating laws to obey that turned you against organized religion's Just Do As I Say. You shut the Bible immediately after reading the passage that if a man cheats on his wife, he pays for his crime with a camel. But if a woman cheats on her husband, she is buried up to her neck in sand and has rocks thrown at her head until she is dead. Although you were still a kid, the stink of this injustice was not something you would ever be able to obey, much less worship. Christianity was no safe haven. Even it was calling you a whore before your 12th birthday.
So you curled up and rolled away.
Traveling induces egolessness. It invites you to befriend the present moment as something from which you need not seek permission nor escape. It will begin and end as it does regardless of your participation, so you might as well be there and appreciate. Listen to what you might hear it whisper in the wind, what it might show you while gazing out from that oval hole on the plane. Traveling awakens empathy for others as you see them from the bus lane, struggling on the streets to get home with their overflowing burdens before it's too late. It instigates the truest feelings of spiritual freedom you've ever known, as motion and light never discriminate. It induces a timeless sense of psychic connection to the organic structures of conception birth life death and decay. Air fire water earth and ether are moving in space, in swirling patterns that are all exactly the same.
And you don't even have to be totally high for motion to make you feel this serene, this constantly changing, this anonymous, this ok.
*u can call me ph!*
Growing up in the military, you were accustomed to moving to different places bi-annually. This made it difficult to form any real lasting relationships with people, always getting torn away from the friends you finally managed to make. In some ways you loved, and in some ways you hated being the new girl again and again.
And in many ways, you wished you could seasonally shed all of your skin like a snake, devour yourself tail first, yet somehow avoid ending up with your head up your own ass, so to speak. Oftener, you'd curl up into a protective armoured ball like a roly poly and just roll away.
So much of a child's life is out of their own control. So much of what they are taught is on the importance of learning how to obey rather than learning how to think for themselves. To have some illusion of control over your own mind and body was the only form of autonymous choice you could fully embrace. This is why you told yourself that it is a decision you make, whether or not you allow yourself to fall in love or go insane.
As a rootless kid, you had formulated the ridiculous paranoic theory that every new town to which you were forced to relocate was just an updated version of the same ten people in the same small place, having been elaborately redecorated while you were all stuck up in the air inside that massive military cargo plane.
Since you and your brother were often the only children on board, the pilots let you sit in the cockpit and gave you lollipops to keep your curious hands occupied. You strained your little necks up to get a good view out the front window. You could see the tops of huge thunderhead clouds as you cruised straight through them instead of passing by alongside. This was one of the most beautifully sublime places you'd ever been to in your entire short life, up there in the boundless sky.
While unpacking moving boxes in Warner Robbins, Georgia, you pretended it was Christmas again and handed out all the wrapped items to other people so they could feign surprise upon opening each new gift of that thing they already owned. Your first day in kindergarten, you said hello in thick German. All the kids gasped and screamed, "Hitler!" But you had no idea what this word meant. It must be something hateful judging by their scowls. So your 5 year old speech patterns quickly shifted into the long slow drawl of an American's southern accent.
In Austin, Texas, a tornado came and blew out all of the windows of the house while your family huddled together in the tiny tiled bathroom, gripping the sink and shuddering. Afterward, you all went for a grateful walk across the flat cracked muddy plains that
seemed to stretch out forever beyond the little grassy fenced in yards. You played with some scorpions and knew you should be afraid of them, but you were not. Nor were you scared when your brother threw down his fishing pole after spotting a huge yellow water moccasin on the river. You grabbed his hand and brought him back to the spot where his pole landed unharmed. Then you made yourself conquer your fear of the high diving board at the public pool. Soon, that new found thrill became an obsession. At 7, you were a drug addict just waiting to happen.
While living on the Greek island of Crete, you saw 'Star Wars' on the big screen in an outdoor 3000 year old ampitheater beneath a bright sea of stars. You rolled around happily in fields of poppy and clover and swam with seahorses urchins stingrays and starfish in the heavenly clear blue Mediterranean. At night, you covered your ears to block out the slaughterhouse sounds of pigs being butchered because they sounded like children screaming. Along the edge of their fence lay scattered dry dead hoofs and horns and snouts. In utter glee, you rode many a wide bellied and very unimpressed donkey. For Easter, a goat was hung by it's feet in an olive tree and left to rot for 2 weeks. You inspected it's decomposition daily. At Knossos Palace, you sat in the King's throne but knew it really belonged to the Queen. You also wondered if Jesus was a time traveller from the future, where we all know how to heal each other already, and that he was stuck here, keenly aware of exactly what he had to stoically go through in order for the Piscean Age to unfold in the inevitably brutal and neccessarily ignorant way that it should. You found an Ankh ring on the village street and wore it even though it turned your finger green. While watching an opulent wedding from the kid's table, it made you cry. This lavish act of ceremony glimmered so sweetly in your 9 year old mind.
Ultimately, it was great for your mental health to have lived in so many different places growing up. You were especially grateful to have been exposed to the ancient Celtic, Minoan and Egyptian cultures, where, with the clear third eye of a child, you could sense the presence of memories from people that passed eons ago. These emotional but ordinary scenes
from older civilizations felt far more expansive and equalitarian than that of the non-Native American country you now inhabited; imperialistic genocide having paved the way through these desecrated lands; shopping malls in defecit being converted into private prisons for profit; a poorly housed chemically tainted urban sprawl that, for thousands of years prior to capitalism's arrival, was a communally sustaining well-tended crop of sacred maize.
It was this loss of sacred nature, replaced by the punitive hard line formation of strict angry man-god and woman hating laws to obey that turned you against organized religion's Just Do As I Say. You shut the Bible immediately after reading the passage that if a man cheats on his wife, he pays for his crime with a camel. But if a woman cheats on her husband, she is buried up to her neck in sand and has rocks thrown at her head until she is dead. Although you were still a kid, the stink of this injustice was not something you would ever be able to obey, much less worship. Christianity was no safe haven. Even it was calling you a whore before your 12th birthday.
So you curled up and rolled away.
Traveling induces egolessness. It invites you to befriend the present moment as something from which you need not seek permission nor escape. It will begin and end as it does regardless of your participation, so you might as well be there and appreciate. Listen to what you might hear it whisper in the wind, what it might show you while gazing out from that oval hole on the plane. Traveling awakens empathy for others as you see them from the bus lane, struggling on the streets to get home with their overflowing burdens before it's too late. It instigates the truest feelings of spiritual freedom you've ever known, as motion and light never discriminate. It induces a timeless sense of psychic connection to the organic structures of conception birth life death and decay. Air fire water earth and ether are moving in space, in swirling patterns that are all exactly the same.
And you don't even have to be totally high for motion to make you feel this serene, this constantly changing, this anonymous, this ok.
*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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