THUNDERBIRD
There was a dream in 2013 that repeatedly tried to make itself heard. But for months, it would break off before you became conscious of its words. Until the night you stood lucid in this other world. Details merged and became too real. You heard a voice say, "This isn't a dream. This actually occured."
As the scene unfolded, you shrank down to the size you once were at the age of 4 and 3/4. Playing with your brother in a motel's swimming pool while your parents attended an Amway rally, all the other kids were slowly gathered up by their guardians as dinner time crept closer. Your brother said, "C'mon, let's go!" But you wanted to swim some more. So he went back to the motel room while you continued to pretend you were a dolphin or a guppy or a mermaid or a rock, totally submerged.
Finally climbing out of the pool, no one else was there, just you. Then you noticed an old man that looked like Santa Claus coming through the pool gate. He smiled and urged you to follow him into the changing room. You behaved. He lifted up your little body and placed you on a sink, slipping his fingers inbetween your skin and your wet bathing suit.
Pleased with what he saw he smiled some more. Turning you around, he whispered excitedly, "This won't hurt." He spread open your butt cheeks and stuck something inside your private parts that felt warm and squishy. But it did hurt. A lot.
You screamed and cried for him to stop, but he just covered your mouth with his rough hand and kept cramming it in and out.
Delighted with himself, he soon let your body go and it slid down off the sink onto the cold tiled floor. Trickles of blood were wiped away like inconvenient stains. As he calmly walked out the door, you scampered to your feet, ran outside and sat on the hot asphalt of the parking lot, screaming your fucking head off. Rubbing your ass against the blistering concrete, you wanted the heat to peel off all the skin from this place that now felt so gross and mangled and strange.
People walked by, looked down at you curiously but said nothing. You screamed and screamed ,"Mommy! Mommy!! Mommy!!!!" but no one came. A droning voice from somewhere unseen declared in a low monotonous tone, thundering, "Cry all you want, no one is ever gonna come save you."
Hoarse and silent, you sat staring up at the wind blowing through the trees as the sunset sank behind low generic buildings. Stood up eventually, you limped back to room 146 where the rest of your family was waiting.
Opening the door, your mother shrieked, "Where the bloody hell were you?!" and slapped your little reddened face. Numbness set in at that moment. And there it stayed.
Upon waking from this lucid dream, of course you did a fair amount of crying, but more importantly, a question that had always remained unanswered was no longer vague: Why was it that the first time your father sat you in his lap and began grinding against your 6 year old ass did you think, "oh no, not this again"? Your first rape stayed unretrievable behind a thick gray wall of fog, so you never knew how you already knew what sex was.
Clearly this memory had been repressed. Hidden from you so that in the coming years of further abuse, you would somehow not crumble under such tremendous born-to-be-deadened stress. Yes, if this had been known all those years ago, you definitely would not still be alive. And some weird level of gratitude was felt toward your minor saviour brain that it held this secret from you for as long as it did. And that it felt you were old enough now to deal with the truth.
It felt good to be complete, integrated, and happily unhinged. Free from the skepticism that all this shit happened because you deserved it. Nope. It was just a side effect of the disease of living, more or less.
*u can call me ph!*
Showing posts with label #metoo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #metoo. Show all posts
10.10.2017
10.06.2017
13% [chapter 25]
UP AGAINST THE WALL
It is said that the average American has about12 different jobs during the course of their career. Having worked since you were 13 years old, most often at 2 jobs simultaneously, you've had no less than 48. Clearly you're still unsure as to what constitutes a so-called career. But there was one job that was unlike all the rest -- a part time position as an archivist at a sculptor's studio in Oakland.
The paid internship began in 1996 while you were in art school. For 10 hours a week, as the artist assembled steel sculptures, you were left alone in the office to catalogue slides, transparencies and photographs, organize press clippings and prepare checklists of pieces for exhibition under the guidance of his wife's publicity campaigns. This soon led to assisting in the shipping and receiving of artworks to and from museums and galleries and later, upon the advent of the digital age, creating a database of the sculptor's 50+ year portfolio.
You also began taking photographs of his newest works upon completion. Each year, the images got imported into bigger fancier mac computers and his works mutated in medium and scale, swelling from 24 inch lacquered constructions to 14 foot towers of shining stainless steel. Your hours, pay and responsibilities also increased to include designing book layouts and shooting videos of the artist at work to be shown at his exhibitions.
At lunchtime, the two of you would discuss art or current events and laugh about some of the crazy stunts he'd pulled in his youth with the other stalwart figures of 1960's London from which he'd hailed. Barbara Hepworth, David Hockney, Stanley Kubrick -- these were not icons, they were his friends. In fact, that black monolith in the beginning of the film, "2001: A Space Odyssey" was one of the sculptor's inventions.
While he was teaching at Ealing College in London, an impromptu raucous debate on rock music lacking opera's gravitas of the human condition planted the seeds of both "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Tommy" into the minds of his young impressionable students, Freddie Mercury and Pete Townshend -- whose habit of destroying guitars wasn't just to have a wank; it was performance art, a symbollic act of deconstructing the establishment.
You felt genuine love for the sculptor. He was not only your mentor but the supportive father figure you'd never had. You could tell him things most other people would never understand. A kid during WWII's bombing blitz, he'd been through his own battles with addictive habits, abusive relationships and good thoughts gone wrong. He'd been further than that, done more than that. You actually trusted this man. And for many many years, you were happy as an uncorrupted clam.
Every spring and fall, the sculptor and his millionaire heiress wife would take vacations to their second home in the south of France, leaving you to man the phones at the studio, pick up the mail and pay the bills during their month long absence.
In September of 2014, while completing the video editing for the sculptor's latest documentary film, you decided to take advantage of this quiet time at the studio to record something that would augment the soundtrack. Pressing record on your android phone, with your face pushed up against hollow stainless steel columns, you sang random vocal tones. Fairly obsessed with this natural reverb effect, you recorded 3 short takes.
By now, deep in the throes of PTSD, you'd become completely isolated from all other people. Daily, you were held in the grips of your eclipsing drug addiction. And with an increasing dependence on this one last remaining job, this one last remaining person that still spoke and listened to you, the rawness of all that had fallen away flattened your entire past into this one glimmering instant.
Humming alone under the studio's large arching skylights, the late afternoon's soft dying light shimmered against vibrating steel plates. An irreversible sense of loyalty to the sculptor engulfed you. He was the only person, in all these 20 years of living in San Francisco, who had not abandoned you. So those notes sang an elegy of torrential gratitude.
Tears dried, you arbitrarily pasted the 3 takes together into a single wav file. But the random tracks fell into a seemingly preordained sync. Too strange. Pushing Save, you stuck it on the soundtrack immediately, not giving yourself the chance to screw up something so weirdly self-contained.
Sadly, after that culminating autumn, everything changed.
Gradually, pecks on the cheek and a "see you next week," mutated into a giggling hand sliding up your thigh or shifting down the back of your pants. Frozen, your dissociating reaction was physical absence. Then came his confessions, "I love you." "I really do love you." "I'd love to fuck you, you know that?"
Maybe since turning 80, he felt this was his last chance to shag a younger cunt. But that did not soften this insult's impact. Nor did it prepare you for the final collapse.
On the drives back to the BART station after work, the sculptor shared with you the wet dreams he'd been having. As if you should be psyched about that. He had no idea that he sounded just like your dad.
You said nothing. Just turned you head and stared out the window at the blaring sun as it bled dry this droughted land, cadmium plated colorless and bland. All the same repetitive torturous dooms from 4 to 45. Come home to roost. Damned. This one man you thought you could trust,who perhaps had some platonic respect for you being a fellow artist, who supposedly cared about you, nah...he just wanted to fuck you too. Just like all the rest. Sinking found you back down in the oubliette.
Heartbroken with unveiled eyes, you could now clearly see all the ways in which merits were being withheld from you. How horribly exploited was your true usefullness. Of the literally hundreds of photos you took at his studio, not a single one was credited to you. Others in your position would make triple what you were paid. But a simple pat on the back and some verbal approval was all they needed to give poor sorry stupid you. An invoice from another employee proved this inequality: the $150 hourly rate was happily paid in full plus another few thousand in "creative fees", whatever the fuck that means.
The gallery that represented the sculptor said your book designs were too amateurish, so a mound of money was spent on professional designers who then published a book that looked identical to yours. He then admitted out loud, while you sat slackjawed in the room, "Why should I pay a designer thousands of dollars for good work when I can get HER to do it for me for free?!" He considered $20/hr "free", apparently.
Ultimately though, it was your own fault for not knowing your own worth, squirt. Or for thinking that The Art World would somehow be better than The Corporate World or The Music World or Any Other World. They're all bollocks. People like us don't belong for long in it.
But the money didn't really matter, you could get over that. It was the sexual harrassment you could no longer put up with. So you told the sculptor one day as he squeezed your knee, "Please stop. This makes me uncomfortable." He excused himself, stammering something about how he was raised. Then he stopped taking you to lunch or updating you on what tasks needed to be done that day. Communication simply ceased. Now his wife was your new boss, telecommuting.
The recovering junkie in him always assumed you were doing shady shit behind his back, but in your blind loyalty, you never did. Whenever he misplaced something, he'd go on a rant about it being stolen until you'd find it laying in the place where he'd left it. Every one of those tantrums compounded this upcoming fracture after so many faithful years of working unstiff. His flexibility and easy going attitude suddenly vanished. Now he was threatening to fire you when you showed up hollow-faced and 15 minutes late, wearing extra layers, tucked in, buttoned up to the nape.
Many more insulting insights floated down the pike in the following months. In response, hints were constantly being dropped that you wanted to move away, that your meth infested house was killing you, that California had worn out your deluded gullible ass, that you just couldn't take it anymore. He said, "No, you have to stay here for the rest of my life and carry on of my legacy." Meanwhile, his wife told you to train the woman they'd hired for a large living wage to take over your soon disappearing position.
Not even gone, but already replaced.
The ice was thinning. Cracking had come at last, turning your harrassed rosey-eyed hurts into downright obliterated justice-hunting rage.
So while they vacationed in France the next May, you secretly planned your big escape. Adding an extra zero onto your final measly paycheck, you left a note that this was your "creative fee". You deleted all records of your labors, wiped harddrives free of your presence, shredded every scrap of paper that once held traces of mutual respect or artistic kinship or well-crafted catalogued crap.
Soon after they returned from France, with the employee gas card in your wrathful hand, you charged every gallon of diesel fuel from the Bay Area until Chevron stations no longer populated this ever-widening cross country scam. Just beyond the Rockies, the paper trail of your helpless fury and well guaged betrayal fell off the map.
Now all of those shady assumptions could satisfy themselves to their heart's content cuz you no longer gave a creatively collated fuck. And there could be no question in his mind, when he received his credit card bill the following month, that you were never coming back.
Art was dead.
Your big career. Fork stuck. Done.
Maybe now the sculptor sees you as more than just a pair of fresh tits typing out his commands. Maybe now he has some kind of twisted bitch respect for your vengeful third act. Maybe now he understands the pain of being a whole human being that refuses to get shafted down into their lowly station, regarded as nothing more than a usefully cheap snatch.
Yet, in all of my foolish wisdom, I somehow doubt that.
*u can call me ph!*
It is said that the average American has about12 different jobs during the course of their career. Having worked since you were 13 years old, most often at 2 jobs simultaneously, you've had no less than 48. Clearly you're still unsure as to what constitutes a so-called career. But there was one job that was unlike all the rest -- a part time position as an archivist at a sculptor's studio in Oakland.
The paid internship began in 1996 while you were in art school. For 10 hours a week, as the artist assembled steel sculptures, you were left alone in the office to catalogue slides, transparencies and photographs, organize press clippings and prepare checklists of pieces for exhibition under the guidance of his wife's publicity campaigns. This soon led to assisting in the shipping and receiving of artworks to and from museums and galleries and later, upon the advent of the digital age, creating a database of the sculptor's 50+ year portfolio.
You also began taking photographs of his newest works upon completion. Each year, the images got imported into bigger fancier mac computers and his works mutated in medium and scale, swelling from 24 inch lacquered constructions to 14 foot towers of shining stainless steel. Your hours, pay and responsibilities also increased to include designing book layouts and shooting videos of the artist at work to be shown at his exhibitions.
At lunchtime, the two of you would discuss art or current events and laugh about some of the crazy stunts he'd pulled in his youth with the other stalwart figures of 1960's London from which he'd hailed. Barbara Hepworth, David Hockney, Stanley Kubrick -- these were not icons, they were his friends. In fact, that black monolith in the beginning of the film, "2001: A Space Odyssey" was one of the sculptor's inventions.
While he was teaching at Ealing College in London, an impromptu raucous debate on rock music lacking opera's gravitas of the human condition planted the seeds of both "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Tommy" into the minds of his young impressionable students, Freddie Mercury and Pete Townshend -- whose habit of destroying guitars wasn't just to have a wank; it was performance art, a symbollic act of deconstructing the establishment.
You felt genuine love for the sculptor. He was not only your mentor but the supportive father figure you'd never had. You could tell him things most other people would never understand. A kid during WWII's bombing blitz, he'd been through his own battles with addictive habits, abusive relationships and good thoughts gone wrong. He'd been further than that, done more than that. You actually trusted this man. And for many many years, you were happy as an uncorrupted clam.
Every spring and fall, the sculptor and his millionaire heiress wife would take vacations to their second home in the south of France, leaving you to man the phones at the studio, pick up the mail and pay the bills during their month long absence.
In September of 2014, while completing the video editing for the sculptor's latest documentary film, you decided to take advantage of this quiet time at the studio to record something that would augment the soundtrack. Pressing record on your android phone, with your face pushed up against hollow stainless steel columns, you sang random vocal tones. Fairly obsessed with this natural reverb effect, you recorded 3 short takes.
By now, deep in the throes of PTSD, you'd become completely isolated from all other people. Daily, you were held in the grips of your eclipsing drug addiction. And with an increasing dependence on this one last remaining job, this one last remaining person that still spoke and listened to you, the rawness of all that had fallen away flattened your entire past into this one glimmering instant.
Humming alone under the studio's large arching skylights, the late afternoon's soft dying light shimmered against vibrating steel plates. An irreversible sense of loyalty to the sculptor engulfed you. He was the only person, in all these 20 years of living in San Francisco, who had not abandoned you. So those notes sang an elegy of torrential gratitude.
Tears dried, you arbitrarily pasted the 3 takes together into a single wav file. But the random tracks fell into a seemingly preordained sync. Too strange. Pushing Save, you stuck it on the soundtrack immediately, not giving yourself the chance to screw up something so weirdly self-contained.
Sadly, after that culminating autumn, everything changed.
Gradually, pecks on the cheek and a "see you next week," mutated into a giggling hand sliding up your thigh or shifting down the back of your pants. Frozen, your dissociating reaction was physical absence. Then came his confessions, "I love you." "I really do love you." "I'd love to fuck you, you know that?"
Maybe since turning 80, he felt this was his last chance to shag a younger cunt. But that did not soften this insult's impact. Nor did it prepare you for the final collapse.
On the drives back to the BART station after work, the sculptor shared with you the wet dreams he'd been having. As if you should be psyched about that. He had no idea that he sounded just like your dad.
You said nothing. Just turned you head and stared out the window at the blaring sun as it bled dry this droughted land, cadmium plated colorless and bland. All the same repetitive torturous dooms from 4 to 45. Come home to roost. Damned. This one man you thought you could trust,who perhaps had some platonic respect for you being a fellow artist, who supposedly cared about you, nah...he just wanted to fuck you too. Just like all the rest. Sinking found you back down in the oubliette.
Heartbroken with unveiled eyes, you could now clearly see all the ways in which merits were being withheld from you. How horribly exploited was your true usefullness. Of the literally hundreds of photos you took at his studio, not a single one was credited to you. Others in your position would make triple what you were paid. But a simple pat on the back and some verbal approval was all they needed to give poor sorry stupid you. An invoice from another employee proved this inequality: the $150 hourly rate was happily paid in full plus another few thousand in "creative fees", whatever the fuck that means.
The gallery that represented the sculptor said your book designs were too amateurish, so a mound of money was spent on professional designers who then published a book that looked identical to yours. He then admitted out loud, while you sat slackjawed in the room, "Why should I pay a designer thousands of dollars for good work when I can get HER to do it for me for free?!" He considered $20/hr "free", apparently.
Ultimately though, it was your own fault for not knowing your own worth, squirt. Or for thinking that The Art World would somehow be better than The Corporate World or The Music World or Any Other World. They're all bollocks. People like us don't belong for long in it.
But the money didn't really matter, you could get over that. It was the sexual harrassment you could no longer put up with. So you told the sculptor one day as he squeezed your knee, "Please stop. This makes me uncomfortable." He excused himself, stammering something about how he was raised. Then he stopped taking you to lunch or updating you on what tasks needed to be done that day. Communication simply ceased. Now his wife was your new boss, telecommuting.
The recovering junkie in him always assumed you were doing shady shit behind his back, but in your blind loyalty, you never did. Whenever he misplaced something, he'd go on a rant about it being stolen until you'd find it laying in the place where he'd left it. Every one of those tantrums compounded this upcoming fracture after so many faithful years of working unstiff. His flexibility and easy going attitude suddenly vanished. Now he was threatening to fire you when you showed up hollow-faced and 15 minutes late, wearing extra layers, tucked in, buttoned up to the nape.
Many more insulting insights floated down the pike in the following months. In response, hints were constantly being dropped that you wanted to move away, that your meth infested house was killing you, that California had worn out your deluded gullible ass, that you just couldn't take it anymore. He said, "No, you have to stay here for the rest of my life and carry on of my legacy." Meanwhile, his wife told you to train the woman they'd hired for a large living wage to take over your soon disappearing position.
Not even gone, but already replaced.
The ice was thinning. Cracking had come at last, turning your harrassed rosey-eyed hurts into downright obliterated justice-hunting rage.
So while they vacationed in France the next May, you secretly planned your big escape. Adding an extra zero onto your final measly paycheck, you left a note that this was your "creative fee". You deleted all records of your labors, wiped harddrives free of your presence, shredded every scrap of paper that once held traces of mutual respect or artistic kinship or well-crafted catalogued crap.
Soon after they returned from France, with the employee gas card in your wrathful hand, you charged every gallon of diesel fuel from the Bay Area until Chevron stations no longer populated this ever-widening cross country scam. Just beyond the Rockies, the paper trail of your helpless fury and well guaged betrayal fell off the map.
Now all of those shady assumptions could satisfy themselves to their heart's content cuz you no longer gave a creatively collated fuck. And there could be no question in his mind, when he received his credit card bill the following month, that you were never coming back.
Art was dead.
Your big career. Fork stuck. Done.
Maybe now the sculptor sees you as more than just a pair of fresh tits typing out his commands. Maybe now he has some kind of twisted bitch respect for your vengeful third act. Maybe now he understands the pain of being a whole human being that refuses to get shafted down into their lowly station, regarded as nothing more than a usefully cheap snatch.
Yet, in all of my foolish wisdom, I somehow doubt that.
*u can call me ph!*
8.30.2016
13% [chapter 19]
THE FREQUENCY OF SHIT
Before and after selling all of your precious records and disappearing down that long off-grid road, these are some of the bleak thoughts that plagued you on heavy rotation since being removed from that tiny happy Amoeba spot. Like a scratchy record skipping on the old tube amp player in glorious MONO:::
ON TRUSTING NO ONE:
It is true that you might not ever trust men but women can more cunningly deceive. Sometimes it would stun you, the degree to which certain long term malicious and well spun lies could be so meticulously planned out by such a friendly cheery knife weilding harpy. Must be some misguided notion of achieving global domination. Or receiving that Big Gold Medal Made Of Shit hanging from the sky. Only if she surrounds herself with All The Right Guys, believing this is the only way for a woman to get what she wants outta life. Play dumb, show cleavages, manipulate all dicks and bitches. Who knows, maybe she's right? But what fucking year is this? Who wants to put all that effort into being that controlling, that possessive, that uptight? And For What?! A big empty house to watch tv in? ...meh. Not tonight.
ON PORN:
During many unemployed amphetamine crazed porned out times, you saw the sense in this depersonalized state of lust for lust's sake. Some part of you not only understood the narrow tunnel vision of sex, but preferred it to the emotionally draining love-making parade. Too much drama. Just wanna get off. Enter sex toys and fantasies that never ask you to scratch their back or make them soup. It's soup. Add heat. Tah dah!! All done. Now go do it yerself, dick face. Not very nurturing for a woman -- whut the hell is wrong with you?!
Later, all porned out on your own, loneliness and shame would sometimes come into the room. But that's why an orgasm is called The Little Death. You might feel more grounded afterward. Or more in the ground. But the cycle repeats its process of releasing more annoying hormones, and inevitably you'd seek relief from death's outrage again. It is such a sad sorry state, being a slave to the impulses that are the most depraved. But you can't look away from guilt's keyhole. Like any other uncontrollable addiction. On repeat. In decay. So you began to experiment with transferring that erotic energy into other things, like performance art or music or paintings. And strangely, despite the work's non-erotic subject matter, onlookers would always say, "This turns me on for some weird reason." Perhaps sexual impressions can travel telepathically. It led you start thinking about what other thoughts or feelings could leak out and spill all over the things we touch or contact or make. The list is endless and amazing and most often leads a person to developing a more disciplined and dispassionate way of seeing those horny thoughts that started this whirlpool spinning around in your brain. Until the water is calm and still, that storm will never come to an end.
ON SEX:
It's just sex. Why must such a primal activity proclaim itself emperor and chief over every other aspect of life with its robotic mediocrity? Greedy control and total devastation seem to conquer anyone weilding power for more than one day. And here is that brick wall you'd always end up screaming at: Isn't there more to life than this worn out game of whack-a-mole? Lying there so easy, so trite and made to feel so cheap? Best Not To Think when it comes to sex. Just frig and forget about it. Then go on with the rest of your day. Uninvested. Unengaged. Half asleep.
ON EXPLORING DEVIANCE:
And in this way, supposedly straight men were so often unjust with their sexual affections. All those times you invited other women in for 3 ways with your boyfriends, and they always promised to do the same in return for you. But they never came through. Never. Too jealous. Too scared of being gay. Too just talking shit to get you to do what they wanted you to do for them, to fulfill their own fantasies. Like all the times they asked you what turns you on sexually, but never once performed that single unselfish act for your sake. Meanwhile, your arm is getting sore and your hip bones are turning black and blue from pegging this experimental dude's forest animals all night long. Again. Because this sexually deviant journey is all about His Path of exploration. Nothing to do with you. All those densely packed overgrown tracks winding around the night with no return policy quickly became about as exciting as watching politicians lie. Pointless. Repetitive. Insulting to your intelligence. The recklessness of a broken but staid system that is so distortedly skewed toward the animus view. You came to no longer care whatever others wanted you to do.
SEE DICK RUN:
Your whole life, gay boys seemed drawn to you in some sort of flailing platonic way. Especially those who were still stuck in the closet with their secrets, playing along with the straight world's betrayals. Through you, they'd open up, feeling safe to dance erotically with their skeletons, and you were never in any position to judge them. Cleary, you had no fear of the truth or of deviance or of perverse tastes since you were already a walking cemetary of the you'll-never-know-if-you-don't-like-it-unless-you-try-it excuse. All the while, depressed, dying to die. Scared but not giving a fuck either way and at the same time. Better it would be that people Be Who They Are instead of living a lie, taking out all of their narrow minded accusations on those around them. Others that they are simply projecting their own issues onto. As in, the more homophobic a guy is, the further back in the closet his gayness hides behind his self-hate.
RUN DICK RUN!!:
You often wished there would be a study done on the statistics of how many boys are abused sexually as children, but they are so much less likely to talk about it, so the staggering reality of this common trauma may never be fully disclosed. You read somewhere that in a safe sexually open environment, people are often driven to explore their own past sexual traumas in an attempt to mentally fully grasp and emotionally understand WHY that trauma happened to them in the first place. This is why S&M dungeons are performing a huge social service in harm reduction. When people understand the origins of their fantasies, they no longer feel lorded over by them. They are no longer crouching under their desires like a child hiding under the bed all ashamed. In the words of Buckshot Jack, Jim Miller's long lost granddad, "No one on their deathbed ever felt sorry that they stood up for themselves." Or wished that they'd spent more time being exploited by a corporation. Or wondered if they should have been more disingenuine.
ON UNCULTURED BARELY LEAGAL RAPE:
It's such an insult when an older man behaves as if he is still The Shit. As if a girl would not prefer experiencing her proactive sexuality with someone closer to her own awkward age. Though, realistically, men probably don't really care what young girls want. They are only seen in degrees of tightness, as fuck holes that are severed from the human beings they belong to. Objects onto which to ejaculate. But men will even see other men in the same way when they become the objects of their own piercing disdain. While watching porn, you found yourself complaining when the camera would pan up from the mechanics to reveal the ugly balding guy's sweaty face. All the attractive men end up in gay porn cuz it pays more. pft... Screwed again. Proof that the body severing spectacle is an equal opportunity deciever of seeing humans as full beings when overtly engaged in their sexuality -- Men see women as holes. Women see men as tools. (Unless they're all in love with each other or whatever, but the word love has no place in a paragraph concerned with rape.) Perhaps this mental severing is due to the debilitating effects of testosterone that causes a kind of frontal lobe blindness. This lack of impulse control also explains why 95% of all serial killers, murderers and rapists are male. Neural imbalances and a culturally celebrated psychopathy may explain why other people are not considered to be whole human beings. But that's too sad an answer for someone whose entire lifetime of hopes, dreams and aspirations comes to naught, and is only seen as a temporary random cumrag. When done, throw away, extinguish. Then the rapist calmly smokes a butt and figures out what to do with her dead body now that she has served some sick flicker of his dick's mindless 3 minute long purpose. This is why so many women's dead bodies are discovered in trash cans, dumpsters, junk yards, as human debri that was not considered human, really. America seems to admire this kind of deluded detatchment and it's resulting acts of violence, if the high price of a murderer's belongings sold on ebay or the number of murder mystery shows are any indication. Maybe these episodes are continually broadcast in order to feed misogyny's fire?
ME JANE. NO TARZAN:
Years went by of trying to keep your head above the tidal wave of post traumatic fury. In those gripping states of heated misanthropy, you could see yourself losing it on a cascade of fucktards that, one time too many, made a sexual remark to you in public or touched you in a way they had no right to. You'd send them weeping to their big momma in the sky righteously, but also indiscriminantly. Most likely the death toll would include someone who didn't deserve to get caught in the crossfire. And that's not a feeling that any amount of revenge could aspire to soothe. So, it's a good thing those violent impulses were controlled by taking up kickboxing instead. A small choice that made your world a slightly better place, I dare say.
FEMALE EJACULATION AND OTHER PARLOUR TRICKS:
Growing up, your adolescent ugliness kept all the boys your own age at bay. The only time they touched you was when the spinning bottle landed at your feet and they'd scrunch up, yelling "Eeeew grooosss!" shoving away your chubby acne covered face. Unless, of course, the boy later turned out to be gay. Then he'd be decent, peck your cheek, talk to you about all sorts of issues after school, trade mix tapes and at most, hug you, half-woodied, looking down at his feet in shame. They were wonderful genuine friends, these young sprouting gay men. But the adult straight ones, they hated you. Although nothing would stop them from fucking you if they decided they wanted to. Whereupon they'd lose all their confidence, become instantly pussy whipped and then reinstate their hatred because there was no controlling you after they'd gone all post coital and took an assumed possession of your entire life. And now they felt lesser than. Because they woke your libido up but could not make you climax 99% of the time. Blaming you for their internal pain of feeling powerless, for whatever reason, the word Whore would escape from their inadequate straight mouths right about the time their carresses turned into strangleholds. The sad fact was, all they had to do was take a step back, tickle you with a feather and give you the breathing room to admire their equal arousal or understand the vast imaginative beauty behind a blindfold and you would have flooded the room with unicorn juice. But that voiced sentiment went unheard time and time again, until you no longer had any words left. If men couldn't even hear what you were saying about sex, then how could you expect them to ever listen to anything you--? Hmm...? Oh yeah, no sorry... Yeah. No, totally. I was listening.
THE POTATO THEORY:
So, rather than constantly trying to figure out a situation that's ensconced in endless bias and speculation, you turned your attention instead to thinking about things you'd normally ignore. Like this pile of home fries you're about to hungrily inhale. Before devouring them, think about the long trip they took, from being immersed in the earth, growing into a potato, being dug up, tossed into a bucket and passed through a hundred pairs of hands, boxes and crates, trucks and vans before being dropped off, washed over, chopped up, fried on an oily skillet, and finally plopped onto this plate in front of you. In this way, gratitude began to enter your thoughts on a more regular day to day basis.
"I WILL NOT ALLOW THIS!":
"Smart girls know that the smartest thing they can do is act dumb," so the saying goes. But what about all the things women unconsciously believe they're not allowed to do? Ask yourself: you don't actually need a dick to use a power tool or hold a pool cue or drive a truck, now do you? It's quite surprising and sad that most people can't seem to understand how it is possible for a grown woman to live an ascetic life, alone in a box truck, without having a man around to "make love" to, without someone there to "take care" of you. You always tell them, "Life Has Fucked Me Enough, Thank You." And then you close the door to your Haustruk and go back to being an anomaly.
THE LONE WOLF:
Understanding other people has been your most difficult challenge in life. The only dead end you keep coming to on that issue is that Sometimes, It's OK To Not Understand. But some consolation came from discovering a recent study that said 70% of an average person's happiness depends on having a support system of family and friends around them. A Whole 70%! Now you knew you weren't insane and desperate and needy. You weren't just a downer like your mom always said. You were a drug addict because you felt a 69% deficiency in having a normal support system. It was so simple. Tragically so. Similarly, on a molecular level, cells will commonly self-destruct unless the other cells surrounding them tell them not to. Including them in the group's progression, encouraging them to live out their full life span, a cell can survive suicidal feelings and get by given a little help from their cell-friends.
ON SEEING WITH THE 3RD EYE:
There came a point when you understood that every frustrating little thing that was shoving itself up yer ass was really trying to teach you something, to show you some other perspective that you otherwise would've been blind to if you got too caught up in the anger that the burr in your butt would predictably produce. So before going all haywire on the world at large, this sort of mental eviction notice to travel light, opened a brief breathing space between being happy in your own insular void and then being pissed off the second you had to go outside and deal with other people, with their shifty eyes and condescending words. All you had to do was try to stay in that small space for as long as possible. Step away gently from the aggressive, always either Right or Wrong thoughts that did nothing but cause havoc in that struggle of You against They.
ON BINAURAL MEDITATION:
This minefield that is the human race made you self-impose exile so often. It has exhausted you beyond belief, having to deal with this harrowing can of worms that is people and their hidden agendas, their snake-haired needs, their sexually charged greed. Sweet solitude might have kept you cloistered, but you were never immune to others and their clawing trickery. Your radar for disaster seemed defective. But the fuzzy reception from your broken antenna wasn't to blame. It was your own unconscious frequency, endlessly streaming disortion, sending out the signal
"i am worthless so abuse me."
*u can call me ph!*
Before and after selling all of your precious records and disappearing down that long off-grid road, these are some of the bleak thoughts that plagued you on heavy rotation since being removed from that tiny happy Amoeba spot. Like a scratchy record skipping on the old tube amp player in glorious MONO:::
ON TRUSTING NO ONE:
It is true that you might not ever trust men but women can more cunningly deceive. Sometimes it would stun you, the degree to which certain long term malicious and well spun lies could be so meticulously planned out by such a friendly cheery knife weilding harpy. Must be some misguided notion of achieving global domination. Or receiving that Big Gold Medal Made Of Shit hanging from the sky. Only if she surrounds herself with All The Right Guys, believing this is the only way for a woman to get what she wants outta life. Play dumb, show cleavages, manipulate all dicks and bitches. Who knows, maybe she's right? But what fucking year is this? Who wants to put all that effort into being that controlling, that possessive, that uptight? And For What?! A big empty house to watch tv in? ...meh. Not tonight.
ON PORN:
During many unemployed amphetamine crazed porned out times, you saw the sense in this depersonalized state of lust for lust's sake. Some part of you not only understood the narrow tunnel vision of sex, but preferred it to the emotionally draining love-making parade. Too much drama. Just wanna get off. Enter sex toys and fantasies that never ask you to scratch their back or make them soup. It's soup. Add heat. Tah dah!! All done. Now go do it yerself, dick face. Not very nurturing for a woman -- whut the hell is wrong with you?!
Later, all porned out on your own, loneliness and shame would sometimes come into the room. But that's why an orgasm is called The Little Death. You might feel more grounded afterward. Or more in the ground. But the cycle repeats its process of releasing more annoying hormones, and inevitably you'd seek relief from death's outrage again. It is such a sad sorry state, being a slave to the impulses that are the most depraved. But you can't look away from guilt's keyhole. Like any other uncontrollable addiction. On repeat. In decay. So you began to experiment with transferring that erotic energy into other things, like performance art or music or paintings. And strangely, despite the work's non-erotic subject matter, onlookers would always say, "This turns me on for some weird reason." Perhaps sexual impressions can travel telepathically. It led you start thinking about what other thoughts or feelings could leak out and spill all over the things we touch or contact or make. The list is endless and amazing and most often leads a person to developing a more disciplined and dispassionate way of seeing those horny thoughts that started this whirlpool spinning around in your brain. Until the water is calm and still, that storm will never come to an end.
ON SEX:
It's just sex. Why must such a primal activity proclaim itself emperor and chief over every other aspect of life with its robotic mediocrity? Greedy control and total devastation seem to conquer anyone weilding power for more than one day. And here is that brick wall you'd always end up screaming at: Isn't there more to life than this worn out game of whack-a-mole? Lying there so easy, so trite and made to feel so cheap? Best Not To Think when it comes to sex. Just frig and forget about it. Then go on with the rest of your day. Uninvested. Unengaged. Half asleep.
ON EXPLORING DEVIANCE:
And in this way, supposedly straight men were so often unjust with their sexual affections. All those times you invited other women in for 3 ways with your boyfriends, and they always promised to do the same in return for you. But they never came through. Never. Too jealous. Too scared of being gay. Too just talking shit to get you to do what they wanted you to do for them, to fulfill their own fantasies. Like all the times they asked you what turns you on sexually, but never once performed that single unselfish act for your sake. Meanwhile, your arm is getting sore and your hip bones are turning black and blue from pegging this experimental dude's forest animals all night long. Again. Because this sexually deviant journey is all about His Path of exploration. Nothing to do with you. All those densely packed overgrown tracks winding around the night with no return policy quickly became about as exciting as watching politicians lie. Pointless. Repetitive. Insulting to your intelligence. The recklessness of a broken but staid system that is so distortedly skewed toward the animus view. You came to no longer care whatever others wanted you to do.
SEE DICK RUN:
Your whole life, gay boys seemed drawn to you in some sort of flailing platonic way. Especially those who were still stuck in the closet with their secrets, playing along with the straight world's betrayals. Through you, they'd open up, feeling safe to dance erotically with their skeletons, and you were never in any position to judge them. Cleary, you had no fear of the truth or of deviance or of perverse tastes since you were already a walking cemetary of the you'll-never-know-if-you-don't-like-it-unless-you-try-it excuse. All the while, depressed, dying to die. Scared but not giving a fuck either way and at the same time. Better it would be that people Be Who They Are instead of living a lie, taking out all of their narrow minded accusations on those around them. Others that they are simply projecting their own issues onto. As in, the more homophobic a guy is, the further back in the closet his gayness hides behind his self-hate.
RUN DICK RUN!!:
You often wished there would be a study done on the statistics of how many boys are abused sexually as children, but they are so much less likely to talk about it, so the staggering reality of this common trauma may never be fully disclosed. You read somewhere that in a safe sexually open environment, people are often driven to explore their own past sexual traumas in an attempt to mentally fully grasp and emotionally understand WHY that trauma happened to them in the first place. This is why S&M dungeons are performing a huge social service in harm reduction. When people understand the origins of their fantasies, they no longer feel lorded over by them. They are no longer crouching under their desires like a child hiding under the bed all ashamed. In the words of Buckshot Jack, Jim Miller's long lost granddad, "No one on their deathbed ever felt sorry that they stood up for themselves." Or wished that they'd spent more time being exploited by a corporation. Or wondered if they should have been more disingenuine.
ON UNCULTURED BARELY LEAGAL RAPE:
It's such an insult when an older man behaves as if he is still The Shit. As if a girl would not prefer experiencing her proactive sexuality with someone closer to her own awkward age. Though, realistically, men probably don't really care what young girls want. They are only seen in degrees of tightness, as fuck holes that are severed from the human beings they belong to. Objects onto which to ejaculate. But men will even see other men in the same way when they become the objects of their own piercing disdain. While watching porn, you found yourself complaining when the camera would pan up from the mechanics to reveal the ugly balding guy's sweaty face. All the attractive men end up in gay porn cuz it pays more. pft... Screwed again. Proof that the body severing spectacle is an equal opportunity deciever of seeing humans as full beings when overtly engaged in their sexuality -- Men see women as holes. Women see men as tools. (Unless they're all in love with each other or whatever, but the word love has no place in a paragraph concerned with rape.) Perhaps this mental severing is due to the debilitating effects of testosterone that causes a kind of frontal lobe blindness. This lack of impulse control also explains why 95% of all serial killers, murderers and rapists are male. Neural imbalances and a culturally celebrated psychopathy may explain why other people are not considered to be whole human beings. But that's too sad an answer for someone whose entire lifetime of hopes, dreams and aspirations comes to naught, and is only seen as a temporary random cumrag. When done, throw away, extinguish. Then the rapist calmly smokes a butt and figures out what to do with her dead body now that she has served some sick flicker of his dick's mindless 3 minute long purpose. This is why so many women's dead bodies are discovered in trash cans, dumpsters, junk yards, as human debri that was not considered human, really. America seems to admire this kind of deluded detatchment and it's resulting acts of violence, if the high price of a murderer's belongings sold on ebay or the number of murder mystery shows are any indication. Maybe these episodes are continually broadcast in order to feed misogyny's fire?
ME JANE. NO TARZAN:
Years went by of trying to keep your head above the tidal wave of post traumatic fury. In those gripping states of heated misanthropy, you could see yourself losing it on a cascade of fucktards that, one time too many, made a sexual remark to you in public or touched you in a way they had no right to. You'd send them weeping to their big momma in the sky righteously, but also indiscriminantly. Most likely the death toll would include someone who didn't deserve to get caught in the crossfire. And that's not a feeling that any amount of revenge could aspire to soothe. So, it's a good thing those violent impulses were controlled by taking up kickboxing instead. A small choice that made your world a slightly better place, I dare say.
FEMALE EJACULATION AND OTHER PARLOUR TRICKS:
Growing up, your adolescent ugliness kept all the boys your own age at bay. The only time they touched you was when the spinning bottle landed at your feet and they'd scrunch up, yelling "Eeeew grooosss!" shoving away your chubby acne covered face. Unless, of course, the boy later turned out to be gay. Then he'd be decent, peck your cheek, talk to you about all sorts of issues after school, trade mix tapes and at most, hug you, half-woodied, looking down at his feet in shame. They were wonderful genuine friends, these young sprouting gay men. But the adult straight ones, they hated you. Although nothing would stop them from fucking you if they decided they wanted to. Whereupon they'd lose all their confidence, become instantly pussy whipped and then reinstate their hatred because there was no controlling you after they'd gone all post coital and took an assumed possession of your entire life. And now they felt lesser than. Because they woke your libido up but could not make you climax 99% of the time. Blaming you for their internal pain of feeling powerless, for whatever reason, the word Whore would escape from their inadequate straight mouths right about the time their carresses turned into strangleholds. The sad fact was, all they had to do was take a step back, tickle you with a feather and give you the breathing room to admire their equal arousal or understand the vast imaginative beauty behind a blindfold and you would have flooded the room with unicorn juice. But that voiced sentiment went unheard time and time again, until you no longer had any words left. If men couldn't even hear what you were saying about sex, then how could you expect them to ever listen to anything you--? Hmm...? Oh yeah, no sorry... Yeah. No, totally. I was listening.
THE POTATO THEORY:
So, rather than constantly trying to figure out a situation that's ensconced in endless bias and speculation, you turned your attention instead to thinking about things you'd normally ignore. Like this pile of home fries you're about to hungrily inhale. Before devouring them, think about the long trip they took, from being immersed in the earth, growing into a potato, being dug up, tossed into a bucket and passed through a hundred pairs of hands, boxes and crates, trucks and vans before being dropped off, washed over, chopped up, fried on an oily skillet, and finally plopped onto this plate in front of you. In this way, gratitude began to enter your thoughts on a more regular day to day basis.
"I WILL NOT ALLOW THIS!":
"Smart girls know that the smartest thing they can do is act dumb," so the saying goes. But what about all the things women unconsciously believe they're not allowed to do? Ask yourself: you don't actually need a dick to use a power tool or hold a pool cue or drive a truck, now do you? It's quite surprising and sad that most people can't seem to understand how it is possible for a grown woman to live an ascetic life, alone in a box truck, without having a man around to "make love" to, without someone there to "take care" of you. You always tell them, "Life Has Fucked Me Enough, Thank You." And then you close the door to your Haustruk and go back to being an anomaly.
THE LONE WOLF:
Understanding other people has been your most difficult challenge in life. The only dead end you keep coming to on that issue is that Sometimes, It's OK To Not Understand. But some consolation came from discovering a recent study that said 70% of an average person's happiness depends on having a support system of family and friends around them. A Whole 70%! Now you knew you weren't insane and desperate and needy. You weren't just a downer like your mom always said. You were a drug addict because you felt a 69% deficiency in having a normal support system. It was so simple. Tragically so. Similarly, on a molecular level, cells will commonly self-destruct unless the other cells surrounding them tell them not to. Including them in the group's progression, encouraging them to live out their full life span, a cell can survive suicidal feelings and get by given a little help from their cell-friends.
ON SEEING WITH THE 3RD EYE:
There came a point when you understood that every frustrating little thing that was shoving itself up yer ass was really trying to teach you something, to show you some other perspective that you otherwise would've been blind to if you got too caught up in the anger that the burr in your butt would predictably produce. So before going all haywire on the world at large, this sort of mental eviction notice to travel light, opened a brief breathing space between being happy in your own insular void and then being pissed off the second you had to go outside and deal with other people, with their shifty eyes and condescending words. All you had to do was try to stay in that small space for as long as possible. Step away gently from the aggressive, always either Right or Wrong thoughts that did nothing but cause havoc in that struggle of You against They.
ON BINAURAL MEDITATION:
This minefield that is the human race made you self-impose exile so often. It has exhausted you beyond belief, having to deal with this harrowing can of worms that is people and their hidden agendas, their snake-haired needs, their sexually charged greed. Sweet solitude might have kept you cloistered, but you were never immune to others and their clawing trickery. Your radar for disaster seemed defective. But the fuzzy reception from your broken antenna wasn't to blame. It was your own unconscious frequency, endlessly streaming disortion, sending out the signal
"i am worthless so abuse me."
*u can call me ph!*
13% [chapter 18]
A PISSING CONTEST
At Amoeba Records on Haight Street, a solid 28 hours a week were spent making garnished minimum wage paychecks and thinking about your anti-social issues while sorting through dollar records and putting them into boxes labelled with their various genres. Over the years, being left alone to listen to music and sort records in that small hallway behind the stage and in front of the bathroom, you came to almost love that job.
In this spot, you met the likes of Thurston Moore, Jonsi, Mos Def, Paul Rubens, John Waters, James Spader, Tura Satana of Faster Pussycat Kill Kill and Joan Jeanrenaud of Kronos Quartet after their in-store performances or during their low key shopping sprees. Then, along with many of the better paid and insured long term employees who'd been there since the mid 90's, (like Ox, of the notorious band United Blood), you got laid off in the spring of 2010.
It had deeply impressed you that most of those famous people were not complete assholes. Especially Jonsi. In his presence, you instantly felt comfortable, like you'd already spent hours hanging out, giggling and watching cartoons. Other famous people, however, seemed like total idiots. Ariel Pink took like 9 hours to set up their gear, spent long hours in the bathroom while their weeks old body odor fumigated the corridor, then left half their gear behind on the stage for days before schlepping back in to pick up after themselves. Vampire Weekend, wunderkinds of the Music Industry were so adept they forgot to bring guitar picks to play their million dollar instruments. Yeah, duh. Clearly some dues had been waived in their favor and would never have to be paid, as it is for lots of marketable bands.
Flip through any major music magazine and you will see 5 White Guys, 4 White Guys, 3 White Guys, 3 White Guys and 1 Black Dude, then 1 White Woman half naked. Lack of diversity and absence of critical thinking doesn't even begin to decribe The Mainstream Ineptitude that blinded all the kids who flocked into the store to purchase every album Vice Magazine told them to.
Not everyone on earth seeks to hide. 33% of the population are capable of not doing as they are told, according to the Milgram experiment; a shocking study on the nature of obedience that was inspired by a social-psychologist's desire to know why concentration camps happened, and how likely human behavior is to lead us into atrocities via groupthink, for the sake of belonging, no matter how much harm is done to others in the process of aligning with popularity.
With a Steppenwolf scowl, these hangups, or lack thereof, and too many preconceived notions fed your alienation and heightened sensitivity. A lot of it had to do with being an overlooked artist, yes. And then there's that seizure of a brain you possessed. Plus the incessant toxic coffee breath. And your sick pleasure that this one stupid thing, a thing so easy to fix, was so successful at keeping other people at bay, satisfactorally. But after you left, you realized that you had, inadvertently, come close to almost loving some of those coworkers that you'd never see again.
Like a compound fracture, too much built up unmanaged rage lived inside you to lay down and take any harrassment or intimidation that showed up at every job you ever had. While working at Amoeba, you were no longer on drugs every day. So you had no buffer zone to quell that overbearing bone that you'd be caught chewing on, down to the pourous bloody marrow. Whistleblowers usually get left out in the cold, alone. But it was better than saying nothing and passively allowing shitty behavior to go on unencumbered, affecting many other women who agreed that they felt the oppression but weren't willing to complain.
Unlike these other women though, you had no capacity to deal with dating your coworkers. In this way, your meager salary was more necessary to you than the ensuing drama that would stink up the room once the relationship inevitably ended. And you couldn't afford the heartache or the stress of keeping both jobs -- Employee AND Girlfriend.
Don't shit where you eat, as the saying goes. Wise words. Until you start hating your job and find yourself crying in the bathroom on your lunch breaks because of the way your boss treats you or the way certain coworkers talk about you. Then, all you wanna do is get fucked up and rub yer face in shit all damn day. Cuz getting that little fix of a dopamine boost from seeing that guy you're crushing on is the only motivation left in getting your depressed ass outta bed and in to work every day.
However, drunk at the bar or at a party after work, some of your peers tried to stick their tongues down your throat, and you ran off in a disturbed haste. Butthurt victims of blue balls make for dangerous hostile work environments so watch out! But you refused to live in fear, so it seemed easier to confront them rather than hide everytime you had to pass them in the hall. Just like high school. A middle finger and a friendly smile can work wonders sometimes. Alas! It's always the people that you're not attracted to that want to ride yer pony. The ones that you would've enjoyed spending time with, watching movies or playing music or spooning fully clothed, they had absolutely no interest in being saddled with your janky mule. Again, just like high school. It was all lies. High school was NOT the Best Time Of Your Life. How very convenient that high school dynamics would unfortunately continue throughout adulthood in every group setting ad infinitum. Sorry, kid.
To dethrone Romance -- there's that reality that once you do spend time with those whose company you craved, you are setting yourself up for failure. Down drops the veil of disappointment and they are not what they seemed. You're irritating to them in some sandpapery way, too. Or simply not resonating in the correct way. Fair enough. But that makes the whole process of getting what you want not only impossible but moot. The only thing that can keep up the illusion for the clinging to others, as if you'll fall off the face of the earth when you finally let go, is your willingness to forgive them their faults and wish that they could do the same for you. Trying not to end up as one of those half-people, connected to the hip of the other half-person, seeking to live out a greater fantasy other-life buried in the digital backyard, right under a faithful nose, 10 or 20 or so years down the yellow brick relationship road.
Feel that hopelessness? Embrace it. It's all you can do. This is as good as it gets, dude...!
So you did. It felt real and true. And the more you embraced the hopelessness, let it in, saw it for what it was, really looked it in the eye, the less fearful and ugly and alarming detatchment from that sphere of mortal love became. At some point on the way down the asexual slide, the realness of that soft hopeless embrace became preferrable to wasting more of your precious time chasing beguiling shadows. Perfect imperfections. White pee. Fantacide. Fake glory. Future lovers who would also one day stop listening. Or finally admit to you that they're gay.
All that confusion caused by love and hate transformed itself through a nearly constant production of music and art. So it was good that you never got too close to crushing your male muse. The intense creative energy that was produced from being in his presence was the best kind of love that could've ever happened to you: non-mortally. So it all worked out just great. So you say. Now if only you could give up, stop flogging the dead horse and let him slide away, the way that he naturally would if you could stop picking at it. Like a scab. Just to see if it still hurts as much as it used to. Just to prove to yourself that healing has occurred. But whenever you peek back into those rejected memories, you find a new distracting weed of hope growing. Hope, that some day you might be Good Enough to share your life with another person who neither worships the ground you walk on nor beats you down into a diminutized pulp, but stands there next to you on equal footing. Not bloody likely.
Like a disease, everytime that hope flares up, it slowly kills every sense of stillness and peace inside you that made you feel worthy, that made you, at long last, feel free. Free from wanting or needing anything from anybody. And in that way, you could be complete and giving, unconditionally. No strings of wishful thinking, no grasping, no emotional defecits dangling. Maybe it's unrealistic to think anyone can ever be free from those haunting self-doubts, from useless subjectivity, from cowardice and inadequacy.
Your truest strength is your weakness, your willingness to face the pain of annihilation because that is where the indestructible and the infinite always live. There is a Buddhist saying that everything in life is like a starving dog standing over a burning bowl of oil. The oil's too hot to consume, but the dog is too hungry to abandon it. Though some short bright sparks marked the fragile times sequentially between the black matter of long slow loss, all you could do was be patient. Wait for the constellations to rise again. But there's nothing to grab onto when they do.
And this is how you saw through The Pissing Contest.
It was infuriating to see men act all jealous when you spoke to other men, but then ignore you when you approached them alone. The only time they seemed to show any interest in you was when other men were watching. Especially those who employed you. All of your short-lived jobs in SF after Amoeba suffered from this dichotomy. Some kind of claim had been placed on your slaving ass, and it didn't matter how good of a job you did or didn't do. You were quickly fired for not complying with this other after-hours duty that was expected of you.
That was how you concluded that this real life video game had Absolutely Nothing To Do With You. You were just so much meat. A pawn made of pussy in the scheming between bored men competing with each other. They had no real interest in the winning "the prize" that they seem to be jostling over, but only in humiliating the other competitors for their own sense of pride.
Yup. That's how evolved we are. Might as well be beating on our chests, swinging in the trees, chomping on bananas and flinging shit.
Oh wait. We still are.
*u can call me ph!*
At Amoeba Records on Haight Street, a solid 28 hours a week were spent making garnished minimum wage paychecks and thinking about your anti-social issues while sorting through dollar records and putting them into boxes labelled with their various genres. Over the years, being left alone to listen to music and sort records in that small hallway behind the stage and in front of the bathroom, you came to almost love that job.
In this spot, you met the likes of Thurston Moore, Jonsi, Mos Def, Paul Rubens, John Waters, James Spader, Tura Satana of Faster Pussycat Kill Kill and Joan Jeanrenaud of Kronos Quartet after their in-store performances or during their low key shopping sprees. Then, along with many of the better paid and insured long term employees who'd been there since the mid 90's, (like Ox, of the notorious band United Blood), you got laid off in the spring of 2010.
It had deeply impressed you that most of those famous people were not complete assholes. Especially Jonsi. In his presence, you instantly felt comfortable, like you'd already spent hours hanging out, giggling and watching cartoons. Other famous people, however, seemed like total idiots. Ariel Pink took like 9 hours to set up their gear, spent long hours in the bathroom while their weeks old body odor fumigated the corridor, then left half their gear behind on the stage for days before schlepping back in to pick up after themselves. Vampire Weekend, wunderkinds of the Music Industry were so adept they forgot to bring guitar picks to play their million dollar instruments. Yeah, duh. Clearly some dues had been waived in their favor and would never have to be paid, as it is for lots of marketable bands.
Flip through any major music magazine and you will see 5 White Guys, 4 White Guys, 3 White Guys, 3 White Guys and 1 Black Dude, then 1 White Woman half naked. Lack of diversity and absence of critical thinking doesn't even begin to decribe The Mainstream Ineptitude that blinded all the kids who flocked into the store to purchase every album Vice Magazine told them to.
Not everyone on earth seeks to hide. 33% of the population are capable of not doing as they are told, according to the Milgram experiment; a shocking study on the nature of obedience that was inspired by a social-psychologist's desire to know why concentration camps happened, and how likely human behavior is to lead us into atrocities via groupthink, for the sake of belonging, no matter how much harm is done to others in the process of aligning with popularity.
With a Steppenwolf scowl, these hangups, or lack thereof, and too many preconceived notions fed your alienation and heightened sensitivity. A lot of it had to do with being an overlooked artist, yes. And then there's that seizure of a brain you possessed. Plus the incessant toxic coffee breath. And your sick pleasure that this one stupid thing, a thing so easy to fix, was so successful at keeping other people at bay, satisfactorally. But after you left, you realized that you had, inadvertently, come close to almost loving some of those coworkers that you'd never see again.
Like a compound fracture, too much built up unmanaged rage lived inside you to lay down and take any harrassment or intimidation that showed up at every job you ever had. While working at Amoeba, you were no longer on drugs every day. So you had no buffer zone to quell that overbearing bone that you'd be caught chewing on, down to the pourous bloody marrow. Whistleblowers usually get left out in the cold, alone. But it was better than saying nothing and passively allowing shitty behavior to go on unencumbered, affecting many other women who agreed that they felt the oppression but weren't willing to complain.
Unlike these other women though, you had no capacity to deal with dating your coworkers. In this way, your meager salary was more necessary to you than the ensuing drama that would stink up the room once the relationship inevitably ended. And you couldn't afford the heartache or the stress of keeping both jobs -- Employee AND Girlfriend.
Don't shit where you eat, as the saying goes. Wise words. Until you start hating your job and find yourself crying in the bathroom on your lunch breaks because of the way your boss treats you or the way certain coworkers talk about you. Then, all you wanna do is get fucked up and rub yer face in shit all damn day. Cuz getting that little fix of a dopamine boost from seeing that guy you're crushing on is the only motivation left in getting your depressed ass outta bed and in to work every day.
However, drunk at the bar or at a party after work, some of your peers tried to stick their tongues down your throat, and you ran off in a disturbed haste. Butthurt victims of blue balls make for dangerous hostile work environments so watch out! But you refused to live in fear, so it seemed easier to confront them rather than hide everytime you had to pass them in the hall. Just like high school. A middle finger and a friendly smile can work wonders sometimes. Alas! It's always the people that you're not attracted to that want to ride yer pony. The ones that you would've enjoyed spending time with, watching movies or playing music or spooning fully clothed, they had absolutely no interest in being saddled with your janky mule. Again, just like high school. It was all lies. High school was NOT the Best Time Of Your Life. How very convenient that high school dynamics would unfortunately continue throughout adulthood in every group setting ad infinitum. Sorry, kid.
To dethrone Romance -- there's that reality that once you do spend time with those whose company you craved, you are setting yourself up for failure. Down drops the veil of disappointment and they are not what they seemed. You're irritating to them in some sandpapery way, too. Or simply not resonating in the correct way. Fair enough. But that makes the whole process of getting what you want not only impossible but moot. The only thing that can keep up the illusion for the clinging to others, as if you'll fall off the face of the earth when you finally let go, is your willingness to forgive them their faults and wish that they could do the same for you. Trying not to end up as one of those half-people, connected to the hip of the other half-person, seeking to live out a greater fantasy other-life buried in the digital backyard, right under a faithful nose, 10 or 20 or so years down the yellow brick relationship road.
Feel that hopelessness? Embrace it. It's all you can do. This is as good as it gets, dude...!
So you did. It felt real and true. And the more you embraced the hopelessness, let it in, saw it for what it was, really looked it in the eye, the less fearful and ugly and alarming detatchment from that sphere of mortal love became. At some point on the way down the asexual slide, the realness of that soft hopeless embrace became preferrable to wasting more of your precious time chasing beguiling shadows. Perfect imperfections. White pee. Fantacide. Fake glory. Future lovers who would also one day stop listening. Or finally admit to you that they're gay.
All that confusion caused by love and hate transformed itself through a nearly constant production of music and art. So it was good that you never got too close to crushing your male muse. The intense creative energy that was produced from being in his presence was the best kind of love that could've ever happened to you: non-mortally. So it all worked out just great. So you say. Now if only you could give up, stop flogging the dead horse and let him slide away, the way that he naturally would if you could stop picking at it. Like a scab. Just to see if it still hurts as much as it used to. Just to prove to yourself that healing has occurred. But whenever you peek back into those rejected memories, you find a new distracting weed of hope growing. Hope, that some day you might be Good Enough to share your life with another person who neither worships the ground you walk on nor beats you down into a diminutized pulp, but stands there next to you on equal footing. Not bloody likely.
Like a disease, everytime that hope flares up, it slowly kills every sense of stillness and peace inside you that made you feel worthy, that made you, at long last, feel free. Free from wanting or needing anything from anybody. And in that way, you could be complete and giving, unconditionally. No strings of wishful thinking, no grasping, no emotional defecits dangling. Maybe it's unrealistic to think anyone can ever be free from those haunting self-doubts, from useless subjectivity, from cowardice and inadequacy.
Your truest strength is your weakness, your willingness to face the pain of annihilation because that is where the indestructible and the infinite always live. There is a Buddhist saying that everything in life is like a starving dog standing over a burning bowl of oil. The oil's too hot to consume, but the dog is too hungry to abandon it. Though some short bright sparks marked the fragile times sequentially between the black matter of long slow loss, all you could do was be patient. Wait for the constellations to rise again. But there's nothing to grab onto when they do.
And this is how you saw through The Pissing Contest.
It was infuriating to see men act all jealous when you spoke to other men, but then ignore you when you approached them alone. The only time they seemed to show any interest in you was when other men were watching. Especially those who employed you. All of your short-lived jobs in SF after Amoeba suffered from this dichotomy. Some kind of claim had been placed on your slaving ass, and it didn't matter how good of a job you did or didn't do. You were quickly fired for not complying with this other after-hours duty that was expected of you.
That was how you concluded that this real life video game had Absolutely Nothing To Do With You. You were just so much meat. A pawn made of pussy in the scheming between bored men competing with each other. They had no real interest in the winning "the prize" that they seem to be jostling over, but only in humiliating the other competitors for their own sense of pride.
Yup. That's how evolved we are. Might as well be beating on our chests, swinging in the trees, chomping on bananas and flinging shit.
Oh wait. We still are.
*u can call me ph!*
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!*
4.28.2016
13% [chapter 0]
THEY CANNOT KILL US,
WE ARE ALREADY DEAD.
All you wanted to do was go home.
You hate hospitals. Their slippery smell. That look people get when they're paid to care but can't afford to anymore. The nurses were so curt with a fuckup like you. Pregnant again, barely 22, unmarried, uninsured, minimally waged and oppressively uninterested in life or in bringing any more into this world.
Pain thresholds are actual places. You found yours in a windowless little room at South Boston's General Hospital on February 4th, 1992. As they inserted bamboo spikes into your cervix, one after the other, the nurses complained about your screams, "It can't hurt that bad." When you stood up and stumbled through the door, you let out a stream of yellow puke that decorated the long hallway. Then you passed out onto the floor, so they carted you off into another darkened little room.
They couldn't understand why the induced miscarriage wasn't working, working under the assumption that you had waited too long to have a regular abortion and that this fetus was now at 15 weeks. Later, looking inside your womb with an ultrasound and some cold goop, the noise that came outta the nurse's mouth when she uncovered the truth did nothing to soothe you. Quickly, she turned the monitor away so that you could not witness the state of what was growing in there, all misconstrued. It was not one infant, but a conjoined two. Aggravated, they agreed that an operation would have to be performed the following morning to remove this misery your uterus was attempting to reproduce.
That night, your thoughts drifted back to Ben, the one and only boyfriend you ever got an apartment with after falling into some kind of love. The relationship itself felt much like the type of music you both coveted - industrial. Cathartically exorcising your demons every week by dancing at a venue in Cambridge called Ground Zero, you reveled in the electronic barrage of Controlled Bleeding, Revolting Cocks, Skinny Puppy and Front 242. No spooky gently flowing hand gestures here, just hard sweaty aggressive transcendence. But the underlying coldness of your young detatched love that lasted a whole 7 months revealed itself upon the discovery of this unplanned pregnancy. "Oh well, there goes my new carburetor," Ben exclaimed with all the joy of any proud father.
Abortion was a given. There was no discussion. There was no fucking way you'd be a good mother. This, you most emphatically knew. Barely able to feed yourself or pay the rent on time, you were too drunk, too high, too self absorbed and too unstable to raise children - especially and/or inevitably, on your own. Hell, you couldn't even manage being someone's girlfriend.
Already, at the ripe old age of 8, a boy told you he liked you. The second you agreed to go out with him, he snatched you by the wrist and dragged you around the schoolyard to all the places he wanted to go. When you spoke, he told you to shut up. You got angry, snatched your limbs back, yelled that you didn't like being treated like a dog and broke up with him by the end of recess.
This trend seemed to have no end. To you, the word "girlfriend" meant being socially cajolled, sexually objectified, emotionally suffocated, spiritually stifled and wholly controlled. As if it were expected of you, being born female, that all of your interests, skills, duties and concerns in life should revolve around the pleasing, nurturing and supporting of men, no questions asked, no two way street of equality. Yeah. So Fuck That.
The next morning, as they put the anesthetic mask over your mouth, you found it noteworthy that the doctor made sure to reprimand your slut life. His eyes glared barely beyond that clipboard holding your sordid medical record. "This is you third abortion?! You gotta stop doing this to yourself," he declared. Counting backwards from 10, you fell under at 7, but not before muttering a nice muffled "fuck you" to all those comfortable judgements standing above you in that operating room.
You gotta stop doing this to yourself...
Thusfar, all of your experiences in life had taught you that sex was all you were good for. This belief found itself compounded by your mother's accusations as to why your father had been sexually abusing you for so many years. "It's your own fault," she said, "for dressing like a slut." She never took into consideration that the abuse started when you were so young that she was the one dressing you.
By the time you were in 8th grade, you outted your father's disturbing sexual proclivities to the school counselor. As a result, your mother stopped speaking to you for a couple years. Maybe she harbored some kind of deluded, jealous resentments? Perhaps the guilt from knowing her husband was fucking around with her daughter while she did nothing to stop it, forced her into a hard corner, painted thick in denial? Because, several years earlier, your father had confessed to her that he wanted to seek professional help for this compulsion toward pedophilia, immediately after he molested you for the first time. But she convinced him not to seek help and assured him that everything would be just fine.
Sitting there in the school principle's office with both of your parents in rapt attendance, your father rapidly admitted his guilt and let out a sigh of loathsome relief. On the next downbeat, your mother bleeted, "She's a liar!" Huffing and stamping her feet, teeming with a ridiculous display of disbelief. You just sat there, frozen in that wooden seat. Staring deep into the swirls of a knot in the rounded worn out armrest, gripping the chair to ground out some momentary stability, to find some faith in the reliable forces of earth's gravity. Had you the strength to raise your thoughts out of that knot, you might have been graced by the wave of compassion that came crashing toward you as the principle stammered at your dad, "I have a daughter too, but I just cannot imagine...how you could...how Could You?!"
It was a profoundly sad sense of pseudo-community to later read that statistically, this anti-intuitive abandonment by the mother is a typical response for over half of all daughters molested by their fathers; the mother lashing out due to the achingly insecure notion that her own daughter represents some kind of sexual competition in her gapingly sad dysfunctional marriage.
Observing also the shrugged off stance of your father; guilty only of repeating his own childhood traumas. Offhandedly, he succumbed to his sexual impulses. So What about his giving in to the almost culturally permissive right to have this primordial fascination with sticking his dick into the tightest orifice possible? Oh, Whoops was his attitude toward his need for total control over these other people that belonged to him exclusively, that he perceived as being his own private property.
And perhaps your mother was just another one of the countless women that unconsciously clings to those remnants of Victorian-era thinking; believing that without a man she is nothing, worthless, not a real woman, nonexistant, less than a whole human being?
Nothing could be more pathetically tragic or hopelessly banal in this supposedly advanced civilization -- save for the predictable vicious cycling of grown victims victimizing their own flesh and blood, doing others in as was done to them as though that makes it less of a sin, ripping open their own calcified scabs of self hate, guilt and shame all over their own offspring's spit and skin, ad nauseum.
However, given your mother's ignorance of what the word incest meant (you had to spell it out for her when you were 13), what the fuck was Her Excuse for this loveless level of protection? How quickly after giving birth to her second mouth to feed had she written you off as a downer, a bad egg, a lost cause, a reason for regret, the dreaded black sheep? Why would the frequent violent beatings put upon both you and your older brother cause her to do nothing but stand aside and helplessly weep? How many paces away would she publicly stay, hoping others would not think you were related in some way? How deeply ingrained was her conviction that your conspicuous independence was a liability to making you a 'good wife' some day? How hammered in was the dogma that, by not hiding your intelligence for a fragile male ego's sake, you'd render yourself useless to this domineering patriarchal world, to this shit hole that your only goal should be to submit to and to accommodate?
Not surprisingly, this pattern of being the scapegoat in every relationship, both professional and personal, would remain on heavy rotation for years to come. You could take the blame, bear the brunt of other people's unresolved pain because being hated was better than being ignored, any day.
But, you gotta stop doing this to yourself...
Now you were old enough to pretend you actually enjoyed having sex with other people. And sometimes, in a drunken dissociated state, some other animal in you did enjoy it; the way you enjoy being stuck in bed with the flu when you're sick of your crappy job. Or the way you enjoy getting so fucking high and deprived that you keep creeping up to that tipping point where, at any second, you might altogether transcend life. But you wielded your martyred pussy like an unholy weapon, aggressively pointing that thing at whichever half flung demented ill-conceived hard-on dared come near you. As if you were getting revenge on the world by giving it exactly what it wanted...WTF?
Any chronically depressed deathwishing tomboy would behave likewise. Listlessly giving in whenever a dude predictably bitches about his pitiful lack of sensation from wearing a condom during those few minutes that he'll be fucking you from behind with his eyes shut tight. His momentary pleasure always outweighs any of the consequences that you, the disposable drunk slut, might incur from this lackluster, futile attempt to feel loved by another human being -- albeit, another random jackass of a human being that you just met at some lame keg party down the street. But rest assured, he will tell you the next morning, almost immediately after you've spit his cum out of your mouth, how much he truly loves his girlfriend. And for a moment, you'll sit with the despised wondering of why there was no mention of any girlfriend last night. Then he will magically vanish after taking down your number, just in case, and politely inquiring, "Uh, what was yer name again?"
Stop doing this to yourself.
So as you laid unconscious on that operating table, with all that scar tissue to cut through and anemic as a paper plate, you rapidly bled out. Your soul easily slipped your body off and for a minute or two, you were gone. An immense peace engulfed you as you floated above your body and flew through a long dark tunnel toward the warmest golden white light you've ever seen, completely beyond even the concept of beautiful. A vividly androgynous being of unknown origin, bathed in a radiant royal blue light appeared before you and asked you, in a deeply soothing oak tree voice, to make a choice. Begrudgingly, you chose to live. The blue being then said, "There is a lot of work you must do."
"We almost lost you there," the glib nurse said when you woke up in another semi-sterile metal bed. Twisting the stiff white sheets aside to go take a piss, that 5 foot shuffle pretended to last an eternity as you dragged that drip bag behind you like a life line. "Lucky yer not dead," she said with a chuckle and left. Closing the bathroom door, you sat surreally slowly down onto the toilet seat and stared at the silverfish slivering indifferently across the flecked olive puce and tan colored linoleum tiled floor. Eyelids heavy as lead from the morphine that flooded your veins like teddy bear stuffing, you listened to the drops of pee echo as they fell into the porcelain bowl's belly.
Still no visits from your boyfriend Ben. But J9 came by. She'd left a little jar of yellow and white Get Well daisies, there on the window sill. You were so grateful for this gesture then, and even now still.
One day later, you were pushing hard against the glass doors. Despite the hospital staff's concern that they should not release you until someone showed up that you could hold onto, you informed them that you had no more quarters left for the pay phone and that you wanted to wait outside. "I'm sure my boyfriend will be here any minute," you said. But you knew he was never gonna show up.
Soon enough, you'd be home. Soon enough, you'd lay your eyes on your bed and instantly know that Ben had cheated on you during your 3 day vacation with death. Soon enough, you'd see it behind your actual eyes in one sudden flash - a short, stocky woman with brown curly hair flailing about wildly while he did her doggystyle. His infidelity would not shock you. You wore cynicism like a suit of shining armour. Rather, you'd be more intrigued by this newfound clarity with which you could psychically perceive what had happened in your absence, as if those rumpled sheets would hold this memory of his betrayal just long enough to show it to you. And soon enough, Ben would admit that the event you could somehow see in your head was indeed,
correct.
Bolting out of the hospital doors into the soft sting of winter's air, breathing never felt so good. You had made the choice to live, to return to this bittersweet hell, to smack back down into grim reality after being absorbed in the pure infinite peace of that other place. It had changed you. Your soul now felt wide awake, palpable, real. It exists ~ it is aware and alive, inside of and in spite of, this damaged scarred beaten down motherless and childless but fucking resilient young begotten body.
Yes, there is a lot of work you must do. And this new driving force fueled your long walk all the way back to Allston. It's godlike song kept your steps in time as you trudged through the snow and ice with the threatening determination of a thousand furious horses on fire.
WE ARE ALREADY DEAD.
All you wanted to do was go home.
You hate hospitals. Their slippery smell. That look people get when they're paid to care but can't afford to anymore. The nurses were so curt with a fuckup like you. Pregnant again, barely 22, unmarried, uninsured, minimally waged and oppressively uninterested in life or in bringing any more into this world.
Pain thresholds are actual places. You found yours in a windowless little room at South Boston's General Hospital on February 4th, 1992. As they inserted bamboo spikes into your cervix, one after the other, the nurses complained about your screams, "It can't hurt that bad." When you stood up and stumbled through the door, you let out a stream of yellow puke that decorated the long hallway. Then you passed out onto the floor, so they carted you off into another darkened little room.
They couldn't understand why the induced miscarriage wasn't working, working under the assumption that you had waited too long to have a regular abortion and that this fetus was now at 15 weeks. Later, looking inside your womb with an ultrasound and some cold goop, the noise that came outta the nurse's mouth when she uncovered the truth did nothing to soothe you. Quickly, she turned the monitor away so that you could not witness the state of what was growing in there, all misconstrued. It was not one infant, but a conjoined two. Aggravated, they agreed that an operation would have to be performed the following morning to remove this misery your uterus was attempting to reproduce.
That night, your thoughts drifted back to Ben, the one and only boyfriend you ever got an apartment with after falling into some kind of love. The relationship itself felt much like the type of music you both coveted - industrial. Cathartically exorcising your demons every week by dancing at a venue in Cambridge called Ground Zero, you reveled in the electronic barrage of Controlled Bleeding, Revolting Cocks, Skinny Puppy and Front 242. No spooky gently flowing hand gestures here, just hard sweaty aggressive transcendence. But the underlying coldness of your young detatched love that lasted a whole 7 months revealed itself upon the discovery of this unplanned pregnancy. "Oh well, there goes my new carburetor," Ben exclaimed with all the joy of any proud father.
Abortion was a given. There was no discussion. There was no fucking way you'd be a good mother. This, you most emphatically knew. Barely able to feed yourself or pay the rent on time, you were too drunk, too high, too self absorbed and too unstable to raise children - especially and/or inevitably, on your own. Hell, you couldn't even manage being someone's girlfriend.
Already, at the ripe old age of 8, a boy told you he liked you. The second you agreed to go out with him, he snatched you by the wrist and dragged you around the schoolyard to all the places he wanted to go. When you spoke, he told you to shut up. You got angry, snatched your limbs back, yelled that you didn't like being treated like a dog and broke up with him by the end of recess.
This trend seemed to have no end. To you, the word "girlfriend" meant being socially cajolled, sexually objectified, emotionally suffocated, spiritually stifled and wholly controlled. As if it were expected of you, being born female, that all of your interests, skills, duties and concerns in life should revolve around the pleasing, nurturing and supporting of men, no questions asked, no two way street of equality. Yeah. So Fuck That.
The next morning, as they put the anesthetic mask over your mouth, you found it noteworthy that the doctor made sure to reprimand your slut life. His eyes glared barely beyond that clipboard holding your sordid medical record. "This is you third abortion?! You gotta stop doing this to yourself," he declared. Counting backwards from 10, you fell under at 7, but not before muttering a nice muffled "fuck you" to all those comfortable judgements standing above you in that operating room.
You gotta stop doing this to yourself...
Thusfar, all of your experiences in life had taught you that sex was all you were good for. This belief found itself compounded by your mother's accusations as to why your father had been sexually abusing you for so many years. "It's your own fault," she said, "for dressing like a slut." She never took into consideration that the abuse started when you were so young that she was the one dressing you.
By the time you were in 8th grade, you outted your father's disturbing sexual proclivities to the school counselor. As a result, your mother stopped speaking to you for a couple years. Maybe she harbored some kind of deluded, jealous resentments? Perhaps the guilt from knowing her husband was fucking around with her daughter while she did nothing to stop it, forced her into a hard corner, painted thick in denial? Because, several years earlier, your father had confessed to her that he wanted to seek professional help for this compulsion toward pedophilia, immediately after he molested you for the first time. But she convinced him not to seek help and assured him that everything would be just fine.
Sitting there in the school principle's office with both of your parents in rapt attendance, your father rapidly admitted his guilt and let out a sigh of loathsome relief. On the next downbeat, your mother bleeted, "She's a liar!" Huffing and stamping her feet, teeming with a ridiculous display of disbelief. You just sat there, frozen in that wooden seat. Staring deep into the swirls of a knot in the rounded worn out armrest, gripping the chair to ground out some momentary stability, to find some faith in the reliable forces of earth's gravity. Had you the strength to raise your thoughts out of that knot, you might have been graced by the wave of compassion that came crashing toward you as the principle stammered at your dad, "I have a daughter too, but I just cannot imagine...how you could...how Could You?!"
It was a profoundly sad sense of pseudo-community to later read that statistically, this anti-intuitive abandonment by the mother is a typical response for over half of all daughters molested by their fathers; the mother lashing out due to the achingly insecure notion that her own daughter represents some kind of sexual competition in her gapingly sad dysfunctional marriage.
Observing also the shrugged off stance of your father; guilty only of repeating his own childhood traumas. Offhandedly, he succumbed to his sexual impulses. So What about his giving in to the almost culturally permissive right to have this primordial fascination with sticking his dick into the tightest orifice possible? Oh, Whoops was his attitude toward his need for total control over these other people that belonged to him exclusively, that he perceived as being his own private property.
And perhaps your mother was just another one of the countless women that unconsciously clings to those remnants of Victorian-era thinking; believing that without a man she is nothing, worthless, not a real woman, nonexistant, less than a whole human being?
Nothing could be more pathetically tragic or hopelessly banal in this supposedly advanced civilization -- save for the predictable vicious cycling of grown victims victimizing their own flesh and blood, doing others in as was done to them as though that makes it less of a sin, ripping open their own calcified scabs of self hate, guilt and shame all over their own offspring's spit and skin, ad nauseum.
However, given your mother's ignorance of what the word incest meant (you had to spell it out for her when you were 13), what the fuck was Her Excuse for this loveless level of protection? How quickly after giving birth to her second mouth to feed had she written you off as a downer, a bad egg, a lost cause, a reason for regret, the dreaded black sheep? Why would the frequent violent beatings put upon both you and your older brother cause her to do nothing but stand aside and helplessly weep? How many paces away would she publicly stay, hoping others would not think you were related in some way? How deeply ingrained was her conviction that your conspicuous independence was a liability to making you a 'good wife' some day? How hammered in was the dogma that, by not hiding your intelligence for a fragile male ego's sake, you'd render yourself useless to this domineering patriarchal world, to this shit hole that your only goal should be to submit to and to accommodate?
Not surprisingly, this pattern of being the scapegoat in every relationship, both professional and personal, would remain on heavy rotation for years to come. You could take the blame, bear the brunt of other people's unresolved pain because being hated was better than being ignored, any day.
But, you gotta stop doing this to yourself...
Now you were old enough to pretend you actually enjoyed having sex with other people. And sometimes, in a drunken dissociated state, some other animal in you did enjoy it; the way you enjoy being stuck in bed with the flu when you're sick of your crappy job. Or the way you enjoy getting so fucking high and deprived that you keep creeping up to that tipping point where, at any second, you might altogether transcend life. But you wielded your martyred pussy like an unholy weapon, aggressively pointing that thing at whichever half flung demented ill-conceived hard-on dared come near you. As if you were getting revenge on the world by giving it exactly what it wanted...WTF?
Any chronically depressed deathwishing tomboy would behave likewise. Listlessly giving in whenever a dude predictably bitches about his pitiful lack of sensation from wearing a condom during those few minutes that he'll be fucking you from behind with his eyes shut tight. His momentary pleasure always outweighs any of the consequences that you, the disposable drunk slut, might incur from this lackluster, futile attempt to feel loved by another human being -- albeit, another random jackass of a human being that you just met at some lame keg party down the street. But rest assured, he will tell you the next morning, almost immediately after you've spit his cum out of your mouth, how much he truly loves his girlfriend. And for a moment, you'll sit with the despised wondering of why there was no mention of any girlfriend last night. Then he will magically vanish after taking down your number, just in case, and politely inquiring, "Uh, what was yer name again?"
Stop doing this to yourself.
So as you laid unconscious on that operating table, with all that scar tissue to cut through and anemic as a paper plate, you rapidly bled out. Your soul easily slipped your body off and for a minute or two, you were gone. An immense peace engulfed you as you floated above your body and flew through a long dark tunnel toward the warmest golden white light you've ever seen, completely beyond even the concept of beautiful. A vividly androgynous being of unknown origin, bathed in a radiant royal blue light appeared before you and asked you, in a deeply soothing oak tree voice, to make a choice. Begrudgingly, you chose to live. The blue being then said, "There is a lot of work you must do."
"We almost lost you there," the glib nurse said when you woke up in another semi-sterile metal bed. Twisting the stiff white sheets aside to go take a piss, that 5 foot shuffle pretended to last an eternity as you dragged that drip bag behind you like a life line. "Lucky yer not dead," she said with a chuckle and left. Closing the bathroom door, you sat surreally slowly down onto the toilet seat and stared at the silverfish slivering indifferently across the flecked olive puce and tan colored linoleum tiled floor. Eyelids heavy as lead from the morphine that flooded your veins like teddy bear stuffing, you listened to the drops of pee echo as they fell into the porcelain bowl's belly.
Still no visits from your boyfriend Ben. But J9 came by. She'd left a little jar of yellow and white Get Well daisies, there on the window sill. You were so grateful for this gesture then, and even now still.
One day later, you were pushing hard against the glass doors. Despite the hospital staff's concern that they should not release you until someone showed up that you could hold onto, you informed them that you had no more quarters left for the pay phone and that you wanted to wait outside. "I'm sure my boyfriend will be here any minute," you said. But you knew he was never gonna show up.
Soon enough, you'd be home. Soon enough, you'd lay your eyes on your bed and instantly know that Ben had cheated on you during your 3 day vacation with death. Soon enough, you'd see it behind your actual eyes in one sudden flash - a short, stocky woman with brown curly hair flailing about wildly while he did her doggystyle. His infidelity would not shock you. You wore cynicism like a suit of shining armour. Rather, you'd be more intrigued by this newfound clarity with which you could psychically perceive what had happened in your absence, as if those rumpled sheets would hold this memory of his betrayal just long enough to show it to you. And soon enough, Ben would admit that the event you could somehow see in your head was indeed,
correct.
Bolting out of the hospital doors into the soft sting of winter's air, breathing never felt so good. You had made the choice to live, to return to this bittersweet hell, to smack back down into grim reality after being absorbed in the pure infinite peace of that other place. It had changed you. Your soul now felt wide awake, palpable, real. It exists ~ it is aware and alive, inside of and in spite of, this damaged scarred beaten down motherless and childless but fucking resilient young begotten body.
Yes, there is a lot of work you must do. And this new driving force fueled your long walk all the way back to Allston. It's godlike song kept your steps in time as you trudged through the snow and ice with the threatening determination of a thousand furious horses on fire.
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