The Stories of our Lives

Here is what I wrote in response to a post by Gunther today over at: http://expaa.webs.com/

I really miss Gunther's videos.  Gunther, I know you prolly have your reasons for not having them up, but seriously, I would *purchase* a DVD of them.  I remember that month, your "Park your car in the Harvard yard," all of it.  It was the month I realized you guys were all *real*.  I do not mean to make you uncomfortable; I know you sometimes analyze your “Part” for being a leader of sorts on the anti AA movement.  My unsolicited advice for you on this is to enjoy it and embrace it. 

I am rewriting my story, too.  All of the time and every day.  It is not like I am tacking on a new chapter though; it is like I am editing.  And while I am doing so, I am figuring out what my story actually is about.  And my voice is becoming so much stronger, too.  Even now, during the editing, there are times when I ask for "God's" help.  And this is interestingly, as I am evolving into an unbeliever. Sometimes I think leaving AA has completely changed me, everything is now completely the opposite of what is was.  It is like bizarro Jerry on Seinfeld.  But then I wonder if the change is actually infinitesimal, that things would be pretty similar if I stayed in AA; maybe I’d be uncomfortable with all the powerless stuff, the rapes, the control games, but I would look at these like they were only a   peripheral issue, and my voice would lucidly help new women coming in. 

If it is a huge change or not though, I wonder about my waning belief in God, especially my idea of God that was created in the AA context.  Today, I think it is OK for me to ask God for help, if only out of habit.  Some of the smartest academic and intellectual thinkers in our history believed in God with a fervor that I never felt, even while in AA.  Wanting to believe (even in the lame AA God) is not a weakness; for me, it is a way to make sense of this insanely beautiful, but mostly terrifying situation we’re all in, junkies, alkies, regular mentally ill people, or “normies.”   And sometimes I wonder if I had not hit AA, maybe I would have come upon another way to believe in God; the belief itself would have been similar, but it would have been a different mode.  And this different mode may have been far graver than any sick AA situation: think poly-type Mormon compounds, or think born time infinity.  I might have been the baby mamma opposite a sick, Baptist never nude with an appetite for teen girls.  Instead I am counterpart to an aging deadhead who still has visible track marks, but who loves our son like the stars burn into the night sky and who gave our spare cash (when we had very little) to Howard Dean’s misguided, but hopeful campaign.

(Unrelated Note: I drove with this same father and our son this weekend past the Eric Carle Museum, and Carle's stars danced unhurried in my mind.  This father, though intensely flawed is the father who, without question, would get the moon right out of the sky if his son asked.  The Eric Carle Museum is across the street from Hampshire COllege, where I saw Mary Lou Lord when I was like 18 years old.)


Mary Lou Lord is so fucking parenthetical to this post, but I gotta let you hear her sing, man, it is like watching a teenage ballerina dance.  And one last thing about her, the beginning riff to this song sounds like Big Star's "Thirteen."


Mary Lou:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvnMjZH9Zgk&feature=related

I have a tendency to write into what I am thinking.  As I write, I am not only expressing my thinking to the reader, but to myself.  It is a long, clumsy digression almost every time… And here is what I am reaching now, as I type this to you guys:  I think the germ of my overall life story has actually changed by leaving AA: if only my perception of my story.  And it is like this: in AA I was bad and sick and now I am flawed, but good.  And I am working on having the most fluid perception as possible, as I do not want to be imprisoned by that easy, black and white AA thinking that plagued me for so long.  It is hard, but, as Rilke says, I am learning to live the questions.  And I feel like I am in brilliant company, esp. with all of you, even the ones I fight with and say mean shit to sometimes.  To end this digression, I’ll say this:  I am glad you are all part of my story. Without irony or embarrassment I can say that we are like Eric Carle's illustrated stars, imperfect and splendid, bumpy and smooth against the darkness that is our collective experience.  Thank you.  

New Idea:  Expressive, autobiographical criticism of illustrated children's fiction. 

How to Let a Summer Go

Here is an essay I wrote an an undergrad.  I was often obsessed with how to let things go, as I as in AA, and trying to work both the program's steps and suggestions.

How to Let a Summer Go

"The days are bright and free, bright and free."  -Jane Kenyon

Start early, at the beginning of August.  You will know it is the right time, as you will being to feel the kind of anxiety so acutely that you cannot eat, cannot sleep.  Go running every night so you will not have to sit with the pain.  Wear a tank tops, shorts; pull your hair into a long ponytail if it's long.  Forget stretching, and just run.  Run down the dirt road until you get to the stop sign, then go left.  You will pa run past a Christmas tree farm, a pond, horses, a cornfield, and an apple orchard.  Fireflies will light the way.  They are no gone yet.  Run until you can barely breathe, then run faster.  Think about how your mother;s friend, Ed, had an affair with a twenty-two year old woman, and was thus alienated by his friends.  H trained for the Boston Marathon a a means to deal with the isolation.  Go five, six , seven miles, make sure you run right through the pain. 

(Unfinished, but saved and posted)

I adored this poet, Jane Kenyon when I was a young woman.  You saw her books of poetry everywhere, as she had just passed away.  I even used to go listen to Donald Hall read her poetry.  I craved her.  I almost went to her grave, but then did not, but fantasized about leaving her the one sand dollar I'd found in my lifetime.  She wrote with astounding articulation about the tyranny of melancholy.  At this time in my life, I needed a working anti-depressant; however I was thick into AA, believing I needed to be "squeaky clean" to be any sot of success.  I thought my success would buy me a head seat at the community of AA's table.  I thought wrong, so wrong.  FTG, in some ways, became my new Jane Kenyon while I was reading the S.T. blog; ultimately, I need to find a Jane Kenyon or ftg in myself.  

Who Is Violet?

Here is what I wrote on Gunther2000's new ExposeAA site.

Hello, I am pleased to meet or know you: 

It has been a trip and a half to meet all of you in this fragile, but intense Internet community. Some members of this site may know me well enough, but for those of you who are just joining this community, I am including some personal information (with caution, of course) and a description how I think and believe.

I desperately want to resolve the AA questions and my hatred of its ideology that remain, with murder, in my heart. I believe in reading with passion and with intensity that mimics any escape artist. I love the whole entire forest and getting lost in its labyrinth of light and dark; and mostly, I live to understand, speak, and make peace with what is the truth. I might disagree and even hatefully argue with some of you, but mostly I want to feel as though what expelled us from the rooms joins us in a way that is powerful enough to keep us from going under again, that horrible feeling of hitting the ocean's bottom, that feeling of despair and affliction that is so ugly that AA looks like it might in fact save us. It won't.

Believe in yourself now, this moment, and the moment after this. Of course, there will be times of questioning, doubt, for you are human. You are not; no matter how loud the AA voices might be in your mind, powerless. You have the power, if only a tiny germ or whisper, in the knuckle of your mind. Reach, and you will find it. Listen to yourself and trust this voice, no matter how shaky or faltering, for it is yours. The more you listen and believe in this voice, the fiercer it will become. I have left AA successfully. I am trudging the road of happy destiny and truth. I no longer look to a fictitious Higher Power, waiting for the miracle that will change my life, all the while looking for where I was wrong. I look first, to see where I was right. And in the words of Ntozake Shange, “I found God in myself and I love her/ I loved her fiercely.” It is my hope that you will also believe enough to look inside and find your voice, your truth, and your power. It is important to listen, to read, to absorb as much information as you can, but it is also important that you speak, and that you question all things. Please, let us hear that perfect sound that is inside of you like a lark singing through the night. xo

Miss Violet

My blog, which is awesome, or, will be awesome the day I can stop being so utterly verbose and can figure out how to get to my point:  Out of the Library and Into the Night @ Blogger or Blogspot.  Link: http://outofthelibraryandintothenight.blogspot.com/

Note: I write for this blog and with other anti AAers  in a sort of affected way, not of an intellectual, but more like a valley girl who would actually look somewhat like a 1970's, vintage Blythe (my avatar), but the heart of my message, and who I am, is the spirit and fucking outrageously smart words of Ntozake Shange.  

"I found God in myself, and I loved her/ I loved her fiercely."  Amazing words by this amazing poet and play write. I have been whispering these words to myself since I was maybe nineteen-years-old.  Sometimes, while in the cult, I would not believe them with conviction, but underneath this, I still had courageous wonder and hope... My belief in both myself and the truth was a whisper under the lie that was 12 step religion.  It is this whisper, thank you Ms. Shange, that saved me. 

I am Helping you Because You are My Mother

I am Helping You Because You are my Mother and You Asked Me to Help You....

(a REALLY, REALLY, REALLY ROUGH DRAFT)

(Below is a classic example of when a wannabe writer tells, and um, does not show; but the germ of my idea out there in this piece of writing, for the most part.) 

I heard this once:  

"I am helping you because you are my mother and because you are telling me to help you."  

And for some reason I always remembered it.  I kept on thinking about it as I was reviewing the rules of parallel construction when I had to take the teaching test.  I thought it was the most perfect "almost exemplification" of this rule.  It is not actually parallel construction.

However, the sentence's rhythm, especially within its context--a loving, loyal daughter speaking to her mother--creates a lulling like a lullaby sound and feel. When parallel construction is used, often the reader feels a sort of lulling, at least into understand a text or speaker's meaning.   This sentence--and so it also is for many sentences employing parallel construction-- ushers in a definition of meaning, an offering of an explanation in such a pretty, lyrical way that you simply cannot forget it.  These words from her daughter are like a stanza from a hidden poem that might have discovered. It’s a song, loved by many, but perhaps not yet covered in any great way. Her daughter's words are tattooed in my brain.  They were etched into the rhythm of my memory.  They have become part of my song, or at least, they have become part of my own voice.  

As she relayed the story to me, my eyes widened with anticipation.  But I wanted to stop her, too, to distract her at least a bit.  For the rest of the story, especially its ending, was going to be rich in a way that I wanted to prolong.  But mostly, my impatience and excitement overtook my desire for prolonging the pleasure from a story, this story in particular, and so I needed the details, and needed them rapidly.  I breathed in and willed myself to remain as silent possible.

But I needed to ask her and so I did.  "Did Lacy think you were crazy, Nancy?  Did she ask you why you were dong what you were doing?"

Nancy cackled in a girly way that lit up her fifty-something-year-old face.  "Lacy told me, she yelled it to me, she screamed in my face, her face was so red, she was like rage itself, she said,  'I am helping you because you are my mother and because you are telling me to help you.'"

She launched further into the story, full forced, her voice intense.  Her body leaned this way and that, clenching and relaxing feeling every feeling it had felt all those years back.  Her hands and fingers molded the air, illustrating the scene and setting up the stage of her memory.  Her engagement right and wedding band jingled as she gestured, her finger thin to the bone.  I knew it was wrong to be jealous of her sickness induced skinniness. As she spoke I saw.  Her daughter, in a state almost as crazed as her own, flung the arm of the futon out the window.  Fake teak, splintered and graphic hit the ground without apology.  And then the futon's cushions, and then the TV, and then a single piece of the kitchen table, a lone leaf.  Among true, autumn  leafmeal, lay (look up--problem for Violet!) the remains of Dice's furniture.    They were hurried in this endeavor.  It needed to be finished before Dice returned from his mid shift factory job.  They held their breath hoping that his son would not somehow come home early.  It was imperative that the mom and daughter evict this father and son timely, quick quick!, before any sort of interruption could arrest their cathartic, cleansing solution.  They looked around their small, tired apartment, dull in its practical construction.  Their own TV, table, and beds remained.  School pictures and artwork created by Lacey and her sister, Megan hung neatly, zealously almost usurping the loneliness that invited Dice and his son into their lives in the first place.  In a hard scramble pile, looking very much like an earthquake victim's former life, was their new beginning.  Gingerly and then plainly, the teenage girl and young woman stuck their heads out of the apartment's window.  If they blurred their eyes and pretended just a little bit: below them were bodies without arms and arms without bodies.  

I picture her rage attack, their rage attack, on a day very similar to today.  I look at the window and see an evening similar to the one they saw that same day.  And then I look outside of her window, over fifteen years back.  And I see: all Dice's belongings, as well as his son's.  Everything broken, scatters, but also clumped in a sense, all dead, ruined, embarrassed and demeaned.  The young woman, the teenager, and now I saw this all.  And Nancy, today, she looked at the debris again as she had all those years back.  We looked as they had beneath them, and they began to sense a quiet so profound it was nearly heartbreaking.  Their apartment was now their own.  It was filled now only with their own things, cast offs not contemporary to the setting of that decade, the 90's.  Their present, a mother and her two daughters who became so quickly enmeshed with this leaching monster and his sad son was now their past.  It was a matter of the furniture.  

"Everything they owned, their whole entire lives was now..." Nancy inhaled here, pausing, and looked at me.  I looked at her.   This particular pause in the story was like an epic rock and roll pause, "It was out of the window and on the ground outside."  She exhaled, looking out the window of the restaurant, but I knew she was really looking outside the window of that long ago apartment she shared with Lacey and her other daughter, Megan. 

She giggled now, a noise or motion that seemed forced in order to shake a kid of permanent sadness.  Shaking her head at the younger, unbalanced woman she was once.  She explained,  "It was going nowhere, we weren't safe.  Dice had stolen jewelry, cheap stuff from the girls several times.  And their allowances had gone missing.  At first, Nancy had thought it was Dice's boy.  His sad eyes, never changing, not even at dinner, not even when they were laughing together.  She had believed with her whole entire heart that the meetings were supposed to get you better; they were supposed to help everybody, right?  Her sponsor told her to pray about it.  her sponsor told her to read a page out of the AA book, a page that ushered the ex user into a mindset of complete acceptance, as acceptance, it was believed in the meetings, was the solution to all of their problems. 

Dice, she had realized soon after he moved in, had never really gotten clean.  Sure, he was done with booze, it was a sloppy high that little to take the edge off.  But Dice was a heroin addict.  And he would never change, ever.  

Nancy's voice got higher and faster the deeper she went into the story.  "Violet," she told me, speaking my name to engage me in a way that I could hardly not bring myself to it was  the meditating that did it.  It was the meditating that led me to this."  She shook her had again, "I knew we had to cut up the furniture with the electric knife and the ax.  I told you, I swear to you right here in this restaurant, it came to me while I was in one of my many trances at the Buddhist Center.  I would go there sometimes three times daily.  I let Lacey and Megan make their own supper all the time, for god sakes.  I do not know what Dice and his son ever ate; I do not think they did.  I knew Megan would cook for Lacey; that much I did know...” She looked down at her plate of half eaten salad then.  It was a look that portrayed a shame, the kind of shame that only certain people live to articulate. The look struck me on a visceral level and it felt like seeing a  familiar, but long forgotten enemy at a party--a mean, mean bully from middle school who rushes momentarily back into your life, if only for that night. .  I shook for a moment, and then shook the shaking off.  I took a sip of chowder.  And I waited.

 "But I know that my girls were there alone... With them!  God knows what could have happened.  I did not know.  I did not care.  I was meditating.  Anything can become addictive, anything."  She looked at me and waited.  She wanted me back at meetings.  She said, really without saying, that I should drop a class, work less hours, stop spinning.  She wanted me to be a follower of hers at the local AA meeting.  

I took a breath.  I put a spoon filled with chowder into my mouth and considered my furniture without her.  I looked into the road ahead of me and I felt the sort of loneliness that kicks you from the inside.  It kicks and then seems to, almost at the same time, hollow you out like a kid's jack o lantern.  But you've got no scary face.  You've got no face.  You're hollow and you're forgotten.  You were going to ornament a festivity, but then you became flawed, and you were tossed.  The air outside was brilliant, clear, sparkling, fall sunshine, eclipsed only by the occasional deep evening clouds.  I wondered if she was part of my forever.  Was she going to be the mother I never really had, or was she going to be a soft memory usurped by sadness, sadness over losing yet another person.

"You cut up all of all of Dice's furniture and threw it out the window with your daughter's help?"  I asked.  There was no point of clarification; it was not really a question.  It was a silly stall tactic. And Lacy helped you, being the dutiful daughter that she is?"  I imagined Lacy just then.  And though I knew my days of friendship with Nancy were numbered (she was not a proper mommy sub, nor was she interested in the job, she was dying after all) I felt the familiar pang of jealousy I always did when Nancy talked about either one of her daughters. Lacy looked like me a bit.  Were wee a similar height, build, and coloring.  She had a broader, more ethnic looking nose.  I thought, "Jewish?”  when I first saw her.  But then her crucifix style cross looked more like a rosary in it gaudiness, cheap carrot gold with fake ruby gems dotting its slender chain.  Lacy was certainly more endowed than me, but I will not e that this is not saying too much about her bust size.  I could see her cross skimming her cleavage in a way that suggested nice girl, bad girl, simultaneously.  

"How many meetings are you going to?" Nancy furrowed her brow and continued with, "And when was the last time you went to a meeting?"  Did you go here, in town?  Or did you go south to the city.  I know you're lonely and I do not blame you."  

At least she empathized somewhat.  I was stuck in this tourist town that became nearly deadly in its dullness over the autumn, winter, and early spring.  I had tried forgiving the men at the meetings in my town, but I could not bring myself to.  I loved myself more; I had to.  And the meetings out of town took time.  It was too much time away from Sammy, and Sammy needed me.  His dad was in a fucking shelter after all.

How could I tell her that I was finished with all of it.  The idea of sobriety bored me to tears, and then there was “my using” and how it was not the true issue anyhow.  I had PTSD from abandonment issues.  My boarding school days--I know, poor little rich girl--among other abandonment examples had essentially fucked me for good.  And soon, she would be leaving, too. "I'm trying, "I smiled in a pleading way.  "Love me," is what I meant. "Invite me to your family's Halloween party. Anything,"  I wanted to shout. 

I looked out into the autumn evening and then I looked at her old, tired face.  How long would she be here?  Even if she did not choose to leave me, she was being pulled away from this planet faster than I could control.  My throat tightened as I saw a hospital bed in my mind. Cancer.  And then the worse thought, "Does she really even have cancer."  I had been around in, or avoiding AA for so long that I had become pretty apt at picking out all sorts of cons.  It was true that I was most certainly still ridiculously naive; however, I got hunches that others missed, too.  And I had to wonder at the authenticity of her sickness.  She'd been stage four forever.  

I saw her check her watch then.  And I saw where she was going in her mind.  Lacey. The prettier version of me.  Me, with an ethnic nose and bigger boobs.  Me, with a mom.  And I saw them crouched by that garden style window, ugly in its function.  I see the ceiling pop corned.  I see the carpet, that depressing, apartment, beige carpet.  It is the kind of carpet that echoes, "Lower middle class, lower middle class." Mom and Lacy together.  They have gotten rid of the monster.  And they will always rid themselves of any monster, together, the two of them.  Today, Lacy's cross, Nancy's sensible Aerosole shoes.  In those days, Nancy is more sluttified.  Plunging V-Neck, tight, camel toe jeans and her daughter, probably fifteen the day of the furniture, in an equally sluttied up outfit.  Like mother like daughter, slut like slut. 

When I was fifteen I was at my father's mostly.  I did not have the sophistication to wear a bra that helped.  I wore make up to hide, not invite.  And I wore my clothes at least two sizes too big.  Nobody bothered to tell me I was a petite, especially not my mother who was five foot seven inches tall.   My petite grandmother, whose height I had inherited, was so ugly and had double d breasts to boot.  She was not me; she was nothing like me in her frumpy, matronly overbearing almost sickness.  I tried to borrow my friend’s femininity back then.  I remember friends literally being about twice the size of me.  So I then took to learning how to look female from Seventeen and from the ratty college students who lived in my town.  And I tried to cover some seamy episodes with my conservative preppiness.  I did not blow my boyfriend, thank you, do you notice my Keds?  No, I did not puke when he came in my mouth, do you see my impeccable Champion sweatshirt tucked into my Gap Jeans?  Note how my bob hairstyle is undercut professionally. Look, my mom does not speak to me, but she picked me up from school in our Peugot.  Instead of saving me from the monster, she pushed me out the window.  She looks out with relief, as she sees me broken, a bird who permanently is unable to fly.  I am stuck in the clump of furniture debris tossed, ended lives; I am outside of the window.  It is autumn again and I am alone; it is growing cold.  I’m scared because I am with Dice and his son.  My artwork has long since been forgotten.  I close my eyes to remember a puffy sheep water- colored with an intensity I no longer remember.  I am scared out here without my artwork, without my childhood belongings, and I am hiding with and from thee kicked away men.  Do you hear me?  I am calling you name? 

My mother will survive as will Lacey, Megan, and their mother.  They are crafty and can cut up furniture just short of an hour; it is a quick autumn, evening’s work.  I am calling to her, I am screaming her name, “Nancy, please, it is not too late for me, I can see out the window.  I can see myself below.  I need you to come out here, now.  I need you to help me get back inside!”

Later--about a week later--October 2, 2011

I was reading an interview with E. Schappell's man, Rob Spillman.  He writes about started where the story starts, not starting before this.  For example, if a man shoots a gun in a car, not writing about the man putting his socks on, finding his keys, and then getting into the car, but shooting the gun off in a car!  This was not his example, prolly obviously.  Fuck! I cannot write anymore.  But I am trying.  I am like the dilettante craftsman, building sloppy birdhouses, punctuating my already shitty yard was something sad.  Spillman also speaks to the notion of writing with confidence.  Um, yeah.  I will try to get to this.  

Castle

I just finished Jennifer Egan's gothic literary novel, The Keep.  If I think of heaven I think of it in this way:  it is always autumn there and it is the nineties.  I look the same way that I did when I was nineteen, men's Levis sliding down my babyish hips, long blonde hair.  The difference will be that I wear smart looking eyeliner and a bra that helps.  When I am in this always autumn heaven, I am writing, and I am writing better than, but in a similar way to Ms. Egan.  All I know is that I need to show and not tell.  I need to stop with the modifiers.  I need to get to hate point, to start where the story starts, to stop with the over explanation.  and I need to fucking write.  I know what good writing looks like, but I have no idea even how to imitate it.  Sucks.

I do not want to get too deep into my description of the novel.  I loathe book reviews.  I am sitting here trying to imagine The Keep, its tower, it's windows, its edges, turrets, and all that.  And I am now remembering Berto.  I am the real 19 again and I am living with a creepy 42 year old due to scratch the fucked up itch that is my ever so fucked up daddy issue.  He makes, in terms of money,  what I make now.  Mind you, today I am not even working.  I get a teensy bit of cash for being a mom from the babbydaddy.   Berto made about 20 grand, tops, in those days as a tutor and busker on his odious instrument.  And he would exclaim, upon learning that a colleague, friend or peer made 50K or whatever that he wanted to ask them, "What, do you live in a castle?"

Berto was not the sort of boyfriend you'd bring to meet your friends, as he'd prolly already hit on them in some sort of creepy way.  He had he worst titty fetish I've elver come across, which was prolly linked to not growing up.  I seriously have never met such a breast obsessed dude.  And for those of you who know me at all, I was not the girl for Berto.  I am still so ashamed of that relationship.  What I wanted then, and still want now is an adopted father, the kind who will stop my night terrors.

Don't you dare fucking laugh, but this is my dream relationship:

In the blog I am trying to boycott, this idiotfuck, Disclosure write of Go Go Rach, and her rightfully stressed out response to the pseudo academic MA, "Therapy is needed."  I would argue to him, "Personality is needed, Douche,"  But it is not worth it.  But, this lame as fuck response popped into my head as I posted my sick as sadness picture of the teeny bopper movie and shameless admission of this blog author's daddy complex.  Um

Berto and I lived in a rural tenement; however, in my mind, its windows, the hand hewn beams, the wooden floors... All of it equaled a castle.  I still believed in "the program" back then.  Interestingly,
in some ways, it kind of worked...until it didn't.  I realized living with Berto took more out of me than I ever had imagined possible.  He was so hateful underneath what only appeared as mentally ill and partly perverted.

He had a castle sticker, a sparkling one, that he put on his throat losenger tin.  I bought him this sticker after he told me how he felt about people who made a normal amount of money.  I can see it there, in between by the clutch us in his used car that smelled like every kind of health food you could imagine, but mostly of garlic.  I can hear the tin opening.  I can see his long fingers.  I can remember what it was like to feel you had a future so brilliant you could afford to emotionally mutilate yourself with a mentally ill boyfriend.

The castle of Berto's imagination would be some sort of lefty, green-as-fuck hastily put together commune compound deals.  Think the commune on Lost.  WACO without the guns.  Maybe something that Michael Rapunzel of Western MAssachusetts would have built, with his, um, fifth thousand a year.  That commune, but nicer, more nineties.  The scared cult of daddy.  This, below, but much, much nicer, with a mote.

Here is what I imagine the castle looking like from the Keep.  I have very few fantasies of Europe.  If any, I dream of going to Sweden, alone, most certainly without the boys.  I would rent a clean room (think minimal, Raymond Carver, Hemingway...), and I would walk and write.  I would also visit middle class family's houses so I could peer into their bookshelves and admire their castle-looking chimney.

Fuck, do I love those; and I have only seen them in Swedish design blogs, like this blog where I have spent hour after hour lusting with an intensity that seems foreign to my bod:  http://dosfamily.com/all-home-tours/

I will find a castle/chimney/wood-stovey-thingy later.

As for the castle in my mind, and prolly yours, too:

I had such a terrible day today.  The rain crucified me.  I was running on empty.  I was astounded by her--Jennifer Egan's--articulation of addiction.  Though I was low and depressed all day, her articulation, her poetic ability to fucking GET IT--stayed with me all day.  It seemed to punctuate--to pierce--the lowness of the day.  Yesterday, Mr. Z's big day was good.  He was so terrific when he came home from his day.  All I could think of as I listened to his low manly voice and concentrated on the circular, unjaggedness of his Polish baby boy cheeks was the song Pink Moon.  That lullaby melody, Nick Drake's perfect, harmonized sweet voice.  My perfect boy on his first day of being older, going to the place where there are no more babies.

In the novel, The Keep--I have tried to get to this and I am in such a tangent spiral--the female protagonist is a meth addict, not an opiate addict, like me.  However, her description made perfect sense to me. During this shitty as fuck day, I hung onto certain parts of her novel:

     Egan's character is using here:


I smoked my fist pipe with Seth. I knew the stuff was bad, but I was so tired of being the cop, begging and raging at him, throwing pampers in his face when he walked in the door.  I wanted to be on the same side again.  So I smoked with Seth one afternoon when the girls were napping, and oh my God, I can only think about this for a minute of every part of me will turn into a mouth wanting more; the sexiness of it, fucking Seth like wild for the first time in months, going on even when the girls started to whimper an bang on the door.  The looking out of the window and seeing the world shake itself to life: the heavy trees, the sky.  And I was bak on top.  We were going to make it, Seth and I.  The voice in my head was back again, telling me to write stories, too may to write down or even tell from one another.  


And she is not here:


And after all the horrors, the searches and arrests, after losing Corey and those dark blank months in the hospital, after all that I was relieved just to be alive and clean and have my children back, the two that were left to me.  I moved carefully, like the world was made of glass.  I got the job at the college and finished my BA and started a master's in writing.


But even with all that, which I was grateful for and knew full well I didn't deserve, I can't exactly say I was happy.  Relieved yes.  Lucky, yes.  God yes.  All that.  But I thought happiness only came from getting high, and I was never dong that again, never, ever, even if it meant not being happy one more day in my life. 


And she falls in love and realizes that this feeling is like being high; she is happy again:

The excitement that rocks through your body when you're a kid like lust does when you're a grown up: just pure excitement--for Christmas, for grape Kool-Aid, for playing in a treehouse--I felt all week long as my teaching night got close.  I started reading again, finishing a novel every few days.  On my lunch break I'd sit outside at my picnic bench and listen to traffic, those big loops of sound, and behind it I'd hear something else, barely there, so shadowy I tried not to scare it away by paying too much attention, but I knew the voice was back.  

In my memory, the character talks about how teaching is like a high, but when I just went bak to my kindle, I do don't see it.  But I was so outta my mind with identification while reading that I was speed reading.  I am pleased and calm and confident about this:  If I were still in AA, I would be thinking I "got her disease" and I'd be thinking my fucking disease knew her disease.  I'd utter that it is "the blue that knows you, it knows where you live, and it is never going to forget" echoing the Kate Braverman story I read in high school straight outta The Best American Short Stories.  But now I realize:  She used and so did I.  I get the whole feeling of being blown away that comes from getting loaded, whether your deal is meth or opiods.  And I totally get her , as she is literary; she discusses her addiction and her writing voice as if they are nearly one n the same, which is so fascinating.  What I am writing here, and what Egan depicts through her character seems so real it is almost tactile; I feel it viscerally.  Being at a meeting, and hearing someone, even if they're literary like S.P.: it is bullshit.  It is the epitome of inauthenticity.  Interestingly, Braverman writes about this same inauthenticity in AA in her latest book of stories, Small Craft Warnings.  I love seeing her progression as a writer and as a person in this way; I was completely impressed.  I did wonder how much of my own experience I was bringing into my reading.  But this is what we do as readers.  We read autobiographically, or at least many of us do.

Remainder of the Ramble

It is basically impossible to write this evening, as I am completely emotionally exhausted by what happened today on the Stinkin Thinkin blog.  The Stinkin Thinkin blog is a blog that’s main purpose is to support the ever so normal questioning of AA.  Many members of this group are ex AA-ers who have been hurt by the program at its decided belief that Alcoholics, Addicts, and the like are powerless.  We have a disease from which there is no cure, except for more AA meetings.  I have loathed AA for quite some time.  Sadly though, I went for years, believing that I was fucked up in many ways because I could not wrap my head around these AA principals.  I know now that I was incorrect.  This blog, and many of its members have helped me to do this.  I do not want to discuss the blog any more.  It is hard for me to stop thinking about it.  My bf has told me that he will put blocks on our computers, if I need them.  The blog, I am embarrassed to say, has become another addiction.  I need to move on.

Here is what I do need to focus on:

Trying to find a job, in education or at the local paper

Deal with the cohabitation situation, whether this means moving or making more space

Make the middle school transition

Pass second scary test

Figure out what is going on in the Master’s program, should I do it, can I do it, etc.  Only four more classes to go

Start looking into local private schools

Start another blog, without this freaking Violet identity.  I cannot obviously talk about who I am on every level on my blog, as I often discuss addiction and cuss like a sailor.  But Violet is prolly a bit more caustic than I am in real life. 

Pick an idea for a story and stick to it.  I do not want to write the story on the blog.  The blog is for my rambles.  Not sure why I even have this blog.  I was inspired by GO GO and Gunther to write this blog, initially.  I wish G2K still had his blog.  I wish this a lot.  I miss Gunther.  It is interesting that the three of us have all at one point taken issue with the blog.  I do not think any of us took issue with the blog’s friendlier moderator. 

I am not sure how much writing in this overly general way about the blog and my feelings toward it help.  At all. 

Migraines

Updates on 9/23
Originally written sometimes in February 2011.


Here is an old entry from last winter.  I do have migraines.  I know this now and am paying a fucking pretty penny to purchase Treximet to deal with them.  They are hell on this earth!


Here is the entry:


I am also using this blog to chronicle the migraines. Just skip these entries, if anyone else is reading.

The last one I had was the fifth of February. I subbed on Friday and woke up on Saturday morning feeling extremely tired, so I let myself go back to sleep. When I woke up at 12 pm (yep, I know, so gd lazy!), I was an agony. My nausea was outta control, and to my utter horror,  I was outta Promathezine. The level of pain I was feeling in my head was astounding to even articulate.  There is another type of headache that is not in the migraine family.  They are called suicide headaches.  I am not having these, but I feel like the level of pain may be similar.  I understand well why suicide headaches are called suicide headaches.  Like dental pain, had pain is all encompassing and you cannot escape from it.  Suicidal ideation is normal.   I got into bed after walking around my kitchen, lost, puttering lie a wounded zombie, took advil and Sudafed. I drank ginger ale and chewed on some generic anti nauseau tablets. On Monday, I got more Promathezine. And my doctor gave me two free tablets called, Treximent.

Since this time I have felt sick a few times, but pushed through, taking one quarter of a promethazine....

I talked to a girl I went to hs with today. I have been posting my symptoms--often--on facebook.  She told me to give her a call as she has a long history with migraines.  I felt weird doing so, as we were not even that close in high school.  I did always like her though.  Not to totally digress, but she was a lot younger.  I always thought she was pretty funny.    She has had migraines her whole life. I took notes on the conversation.

One of her helpful hints, among many, was lavender, Dr. Teal's lavender bath salt in particular. She made dietary suggestions and pressure point suggestions. She discussed weather being a trigger, the barometric change. She suggested getting tested for allergies. She talked parenthetically about how our bodies change all the time, for example our taste buds change every seven years. Sugar can cause headaches, as can caffeine. But then again, caffeine can save you from intense headache pain. Aside from lavender, there are many homeopathic cures, too. All of this has to do with opening blood vessels.

For her, coke helps settle her stomach. Sometimes salt can help. She told me to eat what I craved during a migraine. She suggested massage. She also discussed wearing glasses that help with gare, yellow glasses. And also sunglasses, polaroid. She also recommended making pillows out of tube socks and rice. These can be put in the freezer and/or microwave. She discussed how sun can be a trigger and a solution. And she discussed acupuncture.

I am going to track each time I have any sort of headache or nausea. Amazed, on Stinkin Thinkin, thought I might have a mold allergy. She is not the first person to say this. Maybe mold is even a trigger?


I have totally not done this.  Sucks.  But I will say here that I just spent over 200- on more Treximent.  The barometric pressure shifted on Friday--the 23rd of September.  I  took two pills and it helped. 

Here is what my sister who is at Blank Medical School thinks. I cut and pasted much of an email convo we had. I was happy she helped. Sometimes we do not speak to each other for months (sometimes years) at a time. I do LOVE LOVE LOVE my little sister and am SO FUCKING PROUD OF HER.


(Edit:  I pretend to love my sister at times.  I pretend so I will not go outta my mind.  But this is a topic for another day.  Truth is, I cannot stand her, as I think she might be a sociopath.  These letters are latest to first in order...) 

Dear Julianne,

I hope you're living somewhere that has a person who shovels for you... If you have a sec., can you tell me what you think?

I have been subbing, so I am not in the school every day and feel like my body cannot handle the kiddie germs like it was when I was there every day. But, I am not sure about this.

It seems like I have been really, really sick maybe four or five times since xmas. Here is what happens:

I start to get a mild headache, but I have this feeling like, "It is *that* kind of headache, the bad kind." Then, pretty quickly, the headache is so intense that I almost feel like I could die. I take sudafed, advil, and drink tons of water. And this barely lifts it. The only thing I can do is shut off all of the lights and pray I fall asleep. During the headache I am pretty nauseous. I got someone to write this prescription for me: promethazine. It helps with the nausea. I have not thrown up ever since Christmas. But other times, with the same headache, I have.

People have said they think I am allergic to mold. But our house in Milton Mills was basically a mold factory and I never felt like this. It may be stress? Or, I might just be getting flu symptoms from the germ-y kids?

Do you have any ideas?

Love,

Violet

Here is her response:

Hi Violet,

This sounds like it's definitely not from the kiddie germs. It sounds exactly like a migraine (severe, sudden pain w/photophobia). A lot of different things can cause migraines--it can be related to your menstrual cycle, hypertension, depression or pain disorder, or just no reason. It could be related to mold, but probably not--that would make you get really congested and wheezy, but your headache wouldn't be as intense and sudden and sporadic as you're describing. You should go to your PCP and let him/her know that this is happening repeatedly.

If it's a migraine, the best thing you can do is take the promethazine (which is for nausea) and 1000mg of acetominophen (tylenol), which is the best thing for headaches. Opiates (morphine, codeine etc) do not work for this kind of headache, which is related to the blood vessels in your brain. BUT like opiates, you can build a tolerance to the analgesic effects of tylenol, so you should only use Tylenol for these headaches.

See if that works, but if they keep happening there are things that your doctor can do for prevention, like putting you on birth control or adding a blood pressure medication (even if your BP isn't elevated)

I hope that helps

XO

Julianne

And then I wrote back.  9/24/11


Honey,

I forgot if I wrote back. Thank you. The Doc gave me a sample of Treximent to try. I have not had one since last wekend, but am hoping if I have one again that it will work! Merci to Dr. Julianne!!! (note: all totally fake names of course!)


Love, 


Violet

Update on September 2, 2011


I do have migraines.  I would estimate that since I was writing with my sister back in February that they have gotten a bit worse.  I seem to get them around my period.  The might have to do with my relationship and stress?  Or, it could be from stress around not getting on the ball in terms of a career.   It could also be from Suutex/Suboxone or Serequel. ANd it could be linked to my weight gain, though I think I as getting these migraines predates the weight gain, for sure.  I have also noticed headaches linked to Adderal.  The Treximent / Promethezine solution is working physically, though not financially.  I have had at least two since last Jne, maybe more.  It seems like I was getting them a lot last December and January.  And I got a lot of them last summer, but not the summer we just finished. 

Optimistic Voices

"Hold onto your breath/ hold onto your heart/ hold onto your hope./March up to the gate and bid it open." -The Wizard of Oz, Optimistic Voices

Teaching is exhausting. Often, I forget the reason I am there, thinking, in that moment, my ultimate concern is only to stay awake.

The truth is: I hated school. Well, I mostly hate school. I did like college. And then there was the amazing alternative boarding school that I went to instead of a foster homw. The foster home was my suggestion to my parent. That is another story for another day. College, and alt. school aside, I loathed the idiodic, competitive public school I went to in the douchey college town where I had the decided misfortune of growing up. I worry that I have made a grave mistake in choosing the career of teaching. But then I think again.

I am a pessimist by nature. I am often annoyed by the stupidity of many optimists. I hated the stupid pseudo optimism of AA, the dbag organization I was trapped in for years. I am an embracer of cycnicism and skepticism nd feel thay are importnat for human survival and for our ability to know ourselves.

I wonder if the truth, no matter how shitty it seems, can actually all be a form of optimism. The truth, and the pusuit of this truth, assumes something that a glossy simonizing of reality never can. I think the truth assumes that will be OK no matter what, that we are strong and have power. Looking for the truth demonstrates that we have courage to deal with anything.

I love kids. I love to read. I am a wannabe writer who is cool enough to admit it. For me, literature is prayer. The connections I can make: text to self, text to text, and then text to the world is a way of being alive, living the truth, that was never possible when I was living in addiction. Or, when I was living in a cult existence that was life in AA. I do not fit into the public school groove. I hate controlling these amazingly brilliant, funny, wonderous kids. In this festering irritation, I need to note there is something more important than the problem. The most important truth is this: I love the kids. I love their a-ha moments. I love their connections even more than I love my own.

I love, most particulalry, kids who struggle. I love working with students who face learning challenges and/or disabilities. I have faced many people in and out of the educational system who have little tolerance and who lack even mild empathy for these students. I LOATHE these ignorant pieces of shit. Their stupidity is what makes this world the dark place it is. Really, darkness at least has some romance to it, right? So, these people make the world dull. These people are robbers or both the dark, jagged edges and the brilliant, sparkling possibilities of what these kids are now and what they can be in the future.

Here is a writing I found when I was living with two *stoopids* who believed smugly that special education is WASTE OF MONEY. I almost killed them, really. This sort of ideology makes me feel crazy, like it makes me want to throw a brick at your head type crazy.

It is important for me to remian optimistic when dealing with people of this ilk. Not stupid optimistic, where the truth remains lost. But brave optimistic. The sort of optimistic badass mindset where you throw out the gratitude list which was pushed out for your illiterate AA sponsor, and then you get the FUCK outta the roomz. I found these awesome words by Jack Pearpont and love them. These words, and others like them, are my optimistic voices:

Exclusion:
"We are not all equal in capacity or value.
It is not feasible to give equal opportunity.
We must choose and thus train an elite who will take care of the rest.
They will benefit through the trickle-down theory.
Inclusion is the opposite and works from opposite assumptions:
We are unique in value; however, each has unique capacity."
Inclusion which reads to me like an astounding poem:
"All people can learn.
All people have contributions to make.
We have a responsibility and an opportunity to give every person the chance to make a contribution.
The criterion for inclusion is breathing, not IQ, income, colour, race, sex or language.
It's too expensive.
They can't learn.
They don't know what's best for them.
(Megan is saying FUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCK YOU oh so loudly)
It can't be done.
As a critic of exclusion, I say:
It's too expensive.
But they can learn.
They - people - know a tremendous amount if asked.
It can be done.”