LIFE AFTER DEATH
After the twin abortion, you left Ben.
His guilt over cheating on you preempted him to propose marriage. But you wanted to live now, not die some more. And honestly, you knew he would probably be happier with someone else. Someone else who was way better at doing this girlfriend thing than you were. He seemed to be alright, as he sat there watching you pack up your shit. But he knew nothing was going to stop you. He cried a little at the kitchen table. You cried too, but not until after your suitcases were loaded into the cab and it was pulling away onto Commonwealth Avenue. You had already become way too preoccupied with partying constantly to hang out at the apartment with him, all sullen and serious and sad. You could no longer see the point in discussing the unspoken issues of distrust this failed relationship now had. But you did keep his Joy Division 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' tshirt as a momento and wore it into the ground for the next 20 years in tribute to your one and only experience of domestic bliss.
By some twist of predictable fate, a few weeks after ending it with Ben, you found yourself hanging out with Adam, a guy who happened to be supplying you with all the LSD you could ever want or need. He had fallen for this new passionate vitality you now embued, but couldn't profess to know the Actual You, or that death had so nearly just claimed you. Usually, your starving mouth was too full of crullers from the latest Dunkin Donuts dumpster dive to talk about the past.
Adam's house was the kind of place where your circle of misfit friends gathered in groups; making art out of everything including shit and puke (as college sophomores do), playing chaotic music through random amps that invaded the basement, watching bizarre cult movies in the couch and bong infested living room. And sometimes just fucking, exploring each other in unisex groups of more than 2.
Don't overanalyze it -- it's what happens when everyone's young and uninnocent, drunk and on drugs, searching for something that always remains unclear. Just another bunch of punk kids in some other definitive-only-after-it's-over year, learning how to navigate and trying to dance on the dangerous transitional seas of a carelessly self-aware youth.
Tripping made you giggle at everything, including Adam. He was a tall lanky slim jim of a stretch toy with purple dreads, a drug dealing comic book dude. He had long fingernails, a lot of scars and a beautiful ancient sword mounted on his wall. Dead Can Dance, African Head Charge, Sleep Chamber, and Current 93 filled the room as he slipped a silver lizard ring on your finger. He said he wanted to marry you. That struck you as incredibly hilarious too.
One morning, whilst gently gliding back down to earth after tripping balls all night along the Massachusetts shore from Magnolia to Manchester-By-The-Sea, you watched the sunrise alone over the Atlantic ocean. In an instant, you decided you wanted to watch the sunset on the Pacific. Your first thought was "my parents won't let me." But then, the realization clocked you: you're on your own now. It's a fact. No longer do you need permission to live your life in whatever way you see fit.
Within the week, you sold some crap for cash, grabbed what few possessions you still had left, shoved them into a bag, headed for a plane direct to LAX, and told Adam you'd be right back.
*u can call me ph!*
Showing posts with label difficult. Show all posts
Showing posts with label difficult. Show all posts
5.26.2016
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.
4.17.2015
SOCIETY IS NOT JUST SICK, IT'S COMPLETELY ABSURD!
at the big fancy art museum opening for the sculptor in oakland, the film i made was the highlight of the evening and had people reeling, including the photographer who inspired me to make the film... the sculptor's wife told me people were sitting in the auditorium watching it loop 8 or 9 times ~ i did not attend the event, but have since received an invitation to attend an Art Table Meeting with the same racist, narrow minded bitch ass snobs that would instantly give me Stink Eye before they saw that film at the exhibit.
*pfffft*
for MONTHS in preparation for this exhibit & corresponding book on his work, i was made to feel like everything i do is just amateur bullshit by upper class art hags who then went about REDOING all my work by paying a "professional" 8x the amount of money i make to take the IDENTICAL photographs and redesign an IDENTICAL book. so this is indeed POETIC JUSTICE, that i STILL MADE SOMETHING they couldn't ERASE ME FROM, something that they COULDN'T REMAKE before the exhibition, and it turned out to be the "Best Part of The Show".
the bittersweet guts inside : when i recorded the "music" for this soundtrack last summer, i was alone in the studio working while the sculptor and his wife were on one of their biannual holidays at the studio in the south of france. suddenly, i decided to try an experiment and pushed my face up against one sculpture that i liked the best, pushed record on my android phone and emitted random frequencies that reverberated through the steel. i did 3 separate takes, then, with audacity, put the 3 recordings on top of each other randomly.
i thought of him as a mentor after working for him these 20 years. i thought he had some respect for me in return as an artist, as a woman, as a human being. i was so grateful for his presence in my life...especially since he was now one of the only people i ever saw or spoke to on a regular basis. he was the last thread i was holding onto, he was the last semblance of this life i was living in california.
so while singing these notes, i was OVERFLOWING with gratitude & the sadness one feels for the passing of someone they love ~ at the time, i could not imagine my life without the sculptor being a part of it, but he's 80 years old, so i had to start imagining life without him... after so much loss experienced during the last 5 years, i did not think i was ready for more. i thought i couldn't handle more death, more grief. i thought wrong.
that would be the last time i'd feel this bright shiny way about him because upon his return, his friendly pats on the back gradually began slipping further down to the small of my back and once, even reaching under my clothing. that's where my deluded loyalty to him ended.
i've often said to him that making art is so difficult, but more so for a woman because EVERYTHING you do is considered for it's artistic merit only AFTER considering the fact that it was made by a woman, and that a woman has a CUNT. duh. whenever you lose yourself in the creativity itself while making something that is Not About Being A Woman, people who see that work Always Assume You're A Man...wtf? he and i spoke on these issues Deeply Ad Infinitum for Years... you THINK you know a person...
and yet, he KNOWINGLY paid me far less than i was worth, saying to the woman i was training in the office to do my job, "Why should I pay a designer or photographer thousands of dollars to do work for me when I can get Tena to do it for free?"
$20/hr is ""free" in his mind, i guess. in comparison to all the other photographers' $150/hr fee, i guess it is nothing. but it was more than i'd ever made, and i was happy being around the art and ideas, so it's partially my own fault for not knowing my own worth or for not being completely concerned with money as if it were life itself... but a discrepancy that massively huge is not easy to overlook, it's just insulting. these are people who spend $25,000 on a 3 day hotel stay on a regular basis for christ's sake.
it's not like they couldn't afford to pay me more.
but it no longer mattered, i was done.
all the love was gone.
i always knew in the pit of my stomach that something was not right here, that something was being hidden from me, and once i was ready to see the truth, it revealed itself to me ~ on paper, in emails, in receipts, invoices, even in words said directly to my face, and then i could no longer feel any of that former love or gratitude or loyalty to someone who essentially just saw me as a cheap weekly entry in his jerk off bank, but who also just so happens to have a good eye for design.
ironically, the sculpture i sang all those grateful and sad notes through was called ELEGY, and it's one of the most prominent pieces installed at the exhibit.
so i say FUCK YOU to the art world that is no different from the pathetic 8th grade corporate world with it's unequal pay and discrimination in all ways across the board.
i say YOU'RE WELCOME to elitist art fags for giving me the chance to prove to myself that i do exist and that i am worth something, or at least worth as much as you poncey prats.
i say THANKS BUT NO THANKS to the sculptor for not having my back, especially since it was not going to give him access to the only thing he was really paying any attention to, my fucking ass crack. i'm sure i'll forgive him for all of it when there is no longer an older man in my life making decisions about where i will live or how i will pay my rent or how much i am worth to him Without Putting His Money Where His Mouth Is and/or Without Also Consulting Me In That Decision-Making Process About MY FUCKIN LIFE.
then i borrowed the camera with which i took over 5000 pictures of his work; pictures that were always credited to him in publications, even though he never took the photos or even knew how to work the camera, until the last set of three pictures on the exhibition invitation, when i was finally "allowed" to receive a photo credit in print, after a week-long argument with his tight fisted control freak of a wife. then i cashed my "little vacation" non-employment compensation pay that is, in fact, and unbeknownst to them, my Final Severance Check.
MORAL OF THIS STORY:
please world, don't force me back into that corner, cuz I WILL FIGHT BACK, I WILL LASH OUT, AND I WILL CUT YOU A NEW ONE ~ I HAVE NOT LIVED THROUGH THIS FULL BULLSHIT LIFE WITH OPEN EYES TO JUST END UP ON MY KNEES SUCKING OFF SOME RICH MAN BOOBS BEARDED DICK FACE CUNT.
I'D RATHER DIE.
*u can call me ph!*
4.09.2015
WHAT GETS MY POST TRAUMATIC GENERAL RELATIVITY GOAT RIMBAUD?
Last night was the longest amount of time i've sat in my room in the company of a male friend since Feb 13th 2011:
[that date being the last time i stood in this room, holding onto my broken bones while a full-blown psychopath thrashed about destroying my shit (not including the 3am break-in that occurred 2 weeks later), and simultaneously giving my roommate/landlord the real reason why i should be evicted~eh whatever. wrote a song about it that i care about more than either one of those 2 fuckers.]
lo and behold, here i was, actually feeling nearly comfortable. i didn't flinch, didn't feel weird if my back was turned toward him, i was not afraid to leave him unattended in my room with my piano....and i thoroughly enjoyed having a conversation with someone who knows when to write "you're" not "your" -- albeit my reoccurring case of mouth-diarrhea. it was good to be around someone who was there because i'm a person, not because they want a tattoo, or because they want to make their partner jealous, or expect anything from me. we were just Being There.
after the movie was over and he went home in the wee hours, for no reason that i can explain, as soon as i sat back down in that spot that i've been sitting in for these long 5 years, i just started bawling like a baby.
i'm 5 years old again, completely helpless in the face of being a full grown fucking human being that Cannot Deny that it DOES feel better when there is some form of social contact, even if it's just a meager amount. talked myself down fairly quickly though, made another cup of tea and tried to stick with thinking about other things today instead, like how amazingly awesome that movie was…especially the ending, and in fact, i think INTERSTELLAR could possibly be the Best Film I've Ever Seen, despite how much others say they hated it.
i also absolutely LOVED "ALL IS LOST" which is one of those films that only a person who has experienced the broken-down-on-the-side-of-the-road-dragging-a-ton-of-bricks-and-an-empty-gas-can-to-the-next-town-that-might-as-well-be-a-thousand-miles-away-but-you-have-no-choice-but-to-deal-with-this-difficult-situation-so-you-do-just-that-&-deal-with-it-scenario could appreciate. people who have not lived through much hardship hated that movie too. they found it boring. because all those quiet subtle moments where it's just you and that cold wet cement you're up against, but somehow you find a small piece of string hanging off the end of your sweater that just might hold your heart in it's chest cavity long enough to get to the next tiny moment which offers you some small but immense feeling of relief that you've made it this far.
i also absolutely LOVED "ALL IS LOST" which is one of those films that only a person who has experienced the broken-down-on-the-side-of-the-road-dragging-a-ton-of-bricks-and-an-empty-gas-can-to-the-next-town-that-might-as-well-be-a-thousand-miles-away-but-you-have-no-choice-but-to-deal-with-this-difficult-situation-so-you-do-just-that-&-deal-with-it-scenario could appreciate. people who have not lived through much hardship hated that movie too. they found it boring. because all those quiet subtle moments where it's just you and that cold wet cement you're up against, but somehow you find a small piece of string hanging off the end of your sweater that just might hold your heart in it's chest cavity long enough to get to the next tiny moment which offers you some small but immense feeling of relief that you've made it this far.
i've seen a shit load of films…..
every big space adventure movie is always about how necessary it is to save the human race and yet the reality of our current situation on this planet clearly shows us that if people had any interest in saving the human race, along with all the other species facing extinction, all those billions of dollars would be spent on stopping the rape of planet earth, instead of perpetuating it, even if out of our own apathy and/or nihilism. and yet, just as it is the case with Burning Man, we humans always seem more willing to spend way too much money, effort and time to EXPERIENCE CREATIVITY AS A REMOTE ESCAPE FROM THE REALITY OF OUR LIVES IN SOCIETY instead of CREATING A DAILY REALITY WITHIN OUR OWN COMMUNITY THAT WE DO NOT FEEL A NEED TO ESCAPE FROM, experiencing a society made better with all that money, effort and time, a society into which you do not need to decompress before reentry.
but the impetus for this kind of shift would probably only occur after some drastic loss of convenience, after people had overcome their cell phone separation anxiety, and start to see things differently -- really SEE just how much blood is dripping off all of our hands, to hold that bottle of water after you've just gulped the last drop, and KNOW this plastic bottle in your hand will exist on this earth LONGER THAN YOU WILL for that short 10 minutes of refreshment. refreshment who's RIGHTS HAVE BEEN BOUGHT, yes water rights, by yet another corporation.
it's the same thing that is so frustrating when it comes to every genius invention or discovery that could potentially do so much GOOD, but the best ideas are derailed or corrupted in order to cause more harm.
for example, the Rife machine, which can cure just about every disease known to mankind through the direct application of FREQUENCIES that alter or eliminate that molecular structure. it's been discredited widely by mainstream funded experts saying some people still died. yes, people do still die. in fact, the number of people dying every year from side effects on psychotropics is over 100,000. but if it's got the stamp of approval from "trusted" medical establishments, it's ok that so many people are test subjects for this great experiment that has yet to actually substantiate any of it's claims. better still if those people are poor.
our endless anthropocentrism = thinking we humans are The Shit, and still doing Really Stupid Things to the earth like FRAKKING without having an ounce of distrust that the ENERGY COMPANIES THAT EXIST FOR PROFIT, NOT BECAUSE THEY LOVE US are lying about how much methane is leaking into the atmosphere and making our situation 8X WORSE than it was with coal emissions.... and we cannot claim ignorance anymore, we already have all the pieces of the puzzle and slowly as people lose their fear of how they will be judged by the mainstream, the parts will come together. once that habitual assumption of respect for some antiquated authority erodes after everyone knows that the authority figure was secretly fucking all those kids behind closed doors, the authority figure cannot keep the fear mongering machine going because now you reject it's authority and no longer listen to it.
none of this, in my book, will be possible for the human race in general, until one thing becomes crystal clear: ALBERT EINSTEIN DID NOT DISCOVER THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY ON HIS OWN. Mileva Maric, his wife, saw this in a dream, and brought it to the chalkboard to work it out with her (then, EQUAL) husband....only to be whitewashed from it's publication, divorced, and eventually committed to a mental institution purposefully, so that she could be closer to hers & albert's schizophrenic son. if the human race can't even bring itself to admit that one half of it's population is worth being considered equal, not treated like a dog tied up in the back yard, or paid less than, or derided when in positions that "should be" held by the other half of the population, then we don't DESERVE to fuckin live. i've heard a theory on why man looks upon something beautiful, loves it, then goes about destroying it -- because he has no uterus. he cannot create life. and since women CAN create life (with men's spooge duh!) then, she shouldn't be allowed to DO ANYTHING ELSE OTHER THAN GIVE LIFE. pfffft. and the LAST thing this planet needs right now is More Fuckin Human Beings. so uterus-envy. get over yourself. although, the upside of that is, if men could give birth, abortion would probably be globally legal and more children would grow up without being damaged by parents that didn't really want them = less crime = less drug addiction = less sexual slavery = less of lots of shit that all stems from the fact that women are still not 100% allowed to have control over their own reproductive systems.
it's easy to become overwhelmed in that scenario, and the ONLY way anyone could sane in the process of so much fluctuation would be to look at the changes ahead in the same way that the surviving mountain climber actually made it down off the mountain in that documentary K2 == never look at the TOTAL DISTANCE you need to cover. Look only at the next small mile marker and aim for that. once you make it there, aim for the next small mile marker, and just keep going, in small increments...
The Mother of Invention once told me in a lucid dream:
"If you take lots of little steps to hell,
you will eventually end up in hell.
If you take lots of little steps to heaven,
you will eventually end up in heaven."
To which Rimbaud now replies:
"To whom shall I hire myself out?
What beast must I adore?
What holy image is attacked?
What hearts must I break?
What lie must I maintain?
P>S> regarding the recent double-edged event of the solar and lunar eclipses &
all the crazy things happening everywhere therein...
don't think i'm done processing the effects of this major shift yet...
still trying out this Becoming Friends With Death & Endings, but we're still in the honeymoon phase
and so far, it's like depeche mode says:
it's a lot
8.14.2014
enjoy the silence
too often, i have too much to say to those that are not listening, so i'll talk about shit again someday but for now it's easier on my constitution to not talk to people....
and just keep working, just keep going, and continue making gradual progress - because without Perseverance, slow progress can grind to a halt and leave you with nothing.
Children of the Black Sun parts 1 - 4 [WORKING EDIT #12]
i do i undo i redo
*u can call me ph!*
6.17.2014
fuck it like a duck and a muppet in a bucket seat truck
this is edit #6 - the first 2 of 16 pages that will be inserted into the text footage.
and tho probably no one will bother watching this, that is beside the point. it's about completing the creative bucket list, so that i can face eviction and possible living in a cardboard box & the inevitable death in a gutter without feeling as if there were a bunch of things i wanted to create.
here's a link to the youtube video tho which is a little less compressed as we all should be.
~~~~mmphrmmmgrr~~~~~~
Know what's AWESOME?
when you tell your friend you are Done, as in No Longer Interested In Attempting to Be In A Relationship For The Rest Of YOur Life & Have Committed Blood To That Oath, and a few weeks later, they tell you that some guy you used to like (in that Dumb Girl kinda way) is single now..... Not Only Do I Not Care, but worse, i became very disheartened by the lack of meaning any of those words coming out of my mouth had to my friend. So, Stop Talking To People, Because Clearly, No One's Listening or Putting Any Value On Anything I Say Anyway since i'm just a joke, someone to talk shit about and laugh at but Never Hang Out With, a cunt that is difficult to fuck, and (according to one of my awesome ex-boyfriends) if you did fuck this cunt, you'd wanna make sure you don't give it your phone number in case it follows you back to the apartment you share with your girlfriend. so, all in all, of little to no use to you.
has it been a total waste? all 20 years in this town? SF taught me how to Enjoy My Own Company and to not rely on anyone else for anything. ever. So FUCK IT, FUCK THEM ALL, FUCK THEM ALL WITH AWESOMENESS.
*u can call me ph!*
and tho probably no one will bother watching this, that is beside the point. it's about completing the creative bucket list, so that i can face eviction and possible living in a cardboard box & the inevitable death in a gutter without feeling as if there were a bunch of things i wanted to create.
here's a link to the youtube video tho which is a little less compressed as we all should be.
~~~~mmphrmmmgrr~~~~~~
Know what's AWESOME?
when you tell your friend you are Done, as in No Longer Interested In Attempting to Be In A Relationship For The Rest Of YOur Life & Have Committed Blood To That Oath, and a few weeks later, they tell you that some guy you used to like (in that Dumb Girl kinda way) is single now..... Not Only Do I Not Care, but worse, i became very disheartened by the lack of meaning any of those words coming out of my mouth had to my friend. So, Stop Talking To People, Because Clearly, No One's Listening or Putting Any Value On Anything I Say Anyway since i'm just a joke, someone to talk shit about and laugh at but Never Hang Out With, a cunt that is difficult to fuck, and (according to one of my awesome ex-boyfriends) if you did fuck this cunt, you'd wanna make sure you don't give it your phone number in case it follows you back to the apartment you share with your girlfriend. so, all in all, of little to no use to you.
has it been a total waste? all 20 years in this town? SF taught me how to Enjoy My Own Company and to not rely on anyone else for anything. ever. So FUCK IT, FUCK THEM ALL, FUCK THEM ALL WITH AWESOMENESS.
*u can call me ph!*
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