Satire Sunday: Zombie Edition

Shiv and I saw this in the book store. Clearly a priceless work of err… something:

if i only had a brain…

i’m ok. i’m not ok…

i’m ok, i’m not ok…
rinse and repeat.

i’d make up my mind:
if i had a mind to make up.

this week holds one of my favourite anniversaries. (nb: sarcasm and serious trigger warning ahead. don’t read it if you’re not safe or you don’t wanna hear it, folks. seriously.)

January 24, 2004. what were you doing around, say, 3am?

4am?

5am?
i was in Peru.

so no, i’m not OK. but you know, i really am

much better than i was, and as “over it” as anyone can be, realistically. even though i’ll never be over it, as such.

but i can talk a little, look at it for what it was, at least –
some dude with a hard-on for his inner jerk.

means, motive and opportunity.
that’s all it takes. i promise.

it wasn’t my doing and it so wasn’t my call. though i was told it was and i got told to forget. yeah, that’s the way it works… ’cause you can just forget about those nights where you walk the line –

i wasn’t half-hearted about the signals i was sending: he simply chose to ignore them.
it happens way more than you’d think.
you know how annoying it is when the driver in front of you turns without indicating? this was that guy, only drunk and drunker.

so, much as i chose to say no, with every fibre of my body, mind and being…
it didn’t mean much. never could’ve, never would’ve. i get that now.

it was OK, i guess – right up until his eyes turned to the desert in the night and i disappeared.

i saw how he couldn’t see me. maybe he never had? but that moment, with one of his meaty paws around my neck and his knee dug into my side, i was gone.

i remember.

i had to look away…

his thumb massaged my windpipe like he was daring God to stop it. he said it all with one look — i was a plug he could pull if i wasn’t worth the trouble… just because he could. then, those few seconds, with his dark, raw eyes full of ice and thunder. i saw all that.

about as much fun as it sounds, being a meat puppet for someone who got a bit horny when you happened to be around. i could excuse him…

i’m tempted to say how lust melted his mind but i’m not that hot and his mind wasn’t either, frankly.

it’s not that he was a bad guy but that’s the terrible thing.

he allowed himself his weakness. a couple of hours, here or there. what does it matter, right? lots of people think like him. i bet the guy slipping his dollars down the slot machine thinks the same way: trying his luck, pushing those buttons, getting a thrill.

all junkies do. most people have, more or less, here and there. difference is, i could tell he wasn’t listening from the start. so nothing got through, and nothing got through and…

it didn’t matter. that isn’t an easy thing to face. especially when it’s the next morning and everything looks just the same and you pull yourself together because that’s what you do, if you’re me.
and you move right along.

lots of people think they don’t matter. it’s one of those phrases i hear pretty often and sometimes it pisses me off. especially when i know it’s coming from folks who use it as a stock phrase for not having a great day or something like that.
whatever, right?

only they’ve never really realised how much they don’t matter. that sometimes you can not even matter enough for someone to bother letting you breathe unless you do exactly what they want exactly when you don’t want to do it. that. well, that’s a different story. isn’t it?

Psychs call it “trauma.”
i call it Fucked Up.

Not so much resolutions as Revolution.

just so you know, i’m writing this in what i laughingly refer to as my spare time, which essentially involves the few extra minutes i can steal from ‘work’ and not feel like a lazy boo hound with a big L printed on her forehead. i assure you, this isn’t very long.

am also mostly asleep (i think?), and exhausted beyond belief by two amazing weeks with my beloved Shiv379 and a little bit of Svasti goodness thrown in for good measure :)

bought new shoes today! 12 bucks. nice work if you can get it. they’re kids’ size 3. TFW?! either children have turned into Godzilla-like creatures over the course of the passed decade or so and i just failed to notice — obesity epidemic, anyone? — or i’m in a little more trouble than i thought as regards the whole eating thing.
it’s plausible i am just living in denial. this would not be altogether unusual, as usual.

i have noticed i now fit better into girls’ clothes than womens’. but i’m really not that skinny, i’m sure of it. or i don’t think so, at least though and i swear on all that i find remotely holy that if one more relative pokes my hip bone, pinches my stomach fat or comments on how much i’m “allowed” to eat then i may have to re-think that whole non-violence policy.

thing is, i can kinda sorta, ok yeah, fine i wear the same clothes i wore when i was 12, OK. there. i said it. i fail at the food thing. is that really so bad??

hrm. ok, so that’s as it may be. for now. but if anyone has some suggestions that they truly believe i’ve not heard 5 gazillion times before then please go ahead and serve them up in whatever sumptuous form you so desire. otherwise i suggest staying quiet before CK finds a loophole or two.

i am eating so that’ll just have to do now won’t it?! suspect body just is meant to be a little thing. i’m strong. fit. all that jazz.

more than likely i should be vastly more concerned by the number of strange psychiatric cocktails various medical “professionals” have put me on over the years.

oh sure, i ‘needed’ something at the time but i’m pretty sure i didn’t need them to the point i got to my mid-twenties and had no idea who i might be underneath them all because i’d been on whichever fad, new “promising” antidepressants/antipsychotics were about near constantly since age 13. no wonder my mother thinks i’m an alien, since i came off the meds.

i didn’t even know what my baseline might be. turns out, it’s not so bad… at least for someone with as many diagnoses/issues as me. as my T recently put it, she’s surprised i’m not more screwed up than i seem to be.
which is rather a lovely compliment, when you think about it.

having an Aspie day, and plan to sleep in these shoes… i put them on and spent a good 20 minutes engrossed in the beautiful textural sensations running along my feet, zipping up my spine to spin round my brain like the clouds and stars and rain.
i’m not taking them off unless somebody makes me. ok.

wrote a log of the time i spent with Shiv. it helps, to keep track. neither of us has great memories. well, mine’s eidetic but the whole dissociation thing does get in the way. just a touch.
writing helps. and of course stuff came up with sooo much emotion and doing and being packed into just 2 weeks. it had been 6 months since we’d seen each other. agony, i assure you.

now there is much to organise to move to London shortly. big plans for a future that fills my heart with a sense of things i’ve never known. good things.
i think. i know. i hope.
i hold to.
difficult things, because they are good. i don’t know a lot about good but i want to know. maybe even need?

i don’t like that word: need.

i try to shake it off, like a wet dog out of the water, headed back into the sun. doesn’t always work so well.

something keeps me going. something deep in my veins, that lurks by daylight and curls up in my head whilst i sleep. it watches me as i pretend to rest when really i am more alive than during the day…

mostly i’m a space case. but at least i can put words on paper. that’s something, yeah? i’ve done good with that. can’t say how because it’s too hard and i don’t like people being nice so much. that’s tricky for me but i will say things are happening and i might, just might have the confidence to call myself a writer one day soon. it says it on my business card. but i don’t believe it.

i wake up in dreams lately – inside the strangest places. does that happen to you, too? have you ever realised you were being poisoned by a couch? that happened to me last night but someone had the remedy nearby. it made me numb. i didn’t mind.

it was my father’s couch, you see. you would, if you knew that history but those sorts of things aren’t history. they’re just stories, that happen in the night. stories i must’ve imagined.

their truth is the kind of truth that sees cities fall. and that’s not truth but empty, lost destruction.

lucky thing, though — i haven’t died in a dream this year. it’s early days but that’s OK. it’s hope? a surreal improvement, but improvement nonetheless.

i used to. die, that is. with a rather awesome degree of regularity. not sure why exactly…

still feel like a ghost. a friendly ghost. maybe even a powerful one. but a ghost, all the same.
i don’t mind. i mean, i realise it’s hardly normal but then, neither am i!

maybe i’m meant to be a ghost…?

and i’ve been thinking —

these things are more as we make them,
than as they make us.

and i’ve been thinking —

choice is the key that’s been missing, all along.

my shoes, maybe they’re little red slippers? they may not shine but they’ll get me back to Oz.

Home.

i don’t know what it is exactly.
i just know i’m gonna like it there.

p.s. my about page is more fun now!
*yes, i get bored easily. that’s hardly a secret ’round here.

And chocolate for all!

Happy New Year

the world’s yummiest chocolate liqueur. nom!

This one comes from Shiv, Svasti and me.

If all has gone according to plan we are picnicking and watching the New Years fireworks over Sydney Harbour. Welcoming the blue moon with a smile…

special shout-outs, peace and much love to PA, Trini, Ash, Rika, isabella, DC, Jackie, La, Immi, Bobby, Lisa, Suze, Wily, TherapyDoc, CC and Tre!

Love, love, love… everybody now ;)

i am an extremely excited, shaky, bruised beyond belief but contented CK on this all too early Boxing Day.
happy holidays to one and all, no matter what you’re celebrating/not celebrating/vetoing on grounds of consumerist horror that Xmas seems to have become –

i live next door to a mega-mall. Xmas is weird. most days of the year the place is packed with hoards of shoppers. today it will be hellish, once again. ahhh, normality ;)

but the whole place shut today/yesterday. it was a little eerie. however, the drunken Christian neighbours made up for it with rousing renditions of “Happy Birthday” to Christ. somewhat worrying, if endearing. and given how drunk they really were i’m surprised they remembered the date, let alone the words!

a quick update, because my excitement is over what is very possibly the best gift the Universe could possibly bestow on me short of instant Enlightenment. my guy, Shiv, arrives today (and then the 31st, our dear friend and fellow blogger, Svasti, which is the icing on the cake of all this).

i’m importing Shiv from London. we haven’t seen each other in 6 months (ack!) and that has not been easy but gosh, nor is this waiting thing. i’m not good at that at the best of times! so i’ve been cleaning all day (hence the bruises. oops. didn’t notice at the time.) keeps my hands/mind too busy to notice that time drags on and on. not long now, though.

ok. taken my Xanax and it’s slooooowly helping but the real cure is being together again, i’m sure. also sleep. suspect i may end up being more jet-lagged than my Honey.

really wanted to thank each and every one of you who visits here, reads, gets something out of it (i hope) –
whether you guys know it or not, you help. your wisdom and generosity, well, that just means a whole lot, in my world.

have a whole bunch of family stuff going on over the next couple of weeks. not sure how much blogging will happen. apologies in advance for that but will be thinking of all my bloggy friends for whom i know this time of year can be so terribly difficult. please take care, and i will hold you all in my heart.

the aim is to try to do short blog bursts when/if i get a free moment over the next couple of weeks. my brother, sis-in-law and niece from NYC arrive about an hour after Shiv. it ain’t nothing but a family thing. total chaos, but of course. nice, though. for the most part. difficult. but nice. especially my niece time. i treasure that!

it won’t be easy to set aside my fears, self-doubt and troubled feeling-thoughts but i’m going to do it. if only for 2 weeks but hopefully, in the long run, by doing this…

involving my whole heart to the best of my ability: things shift. i don’t know how. i’ve never had the glimmer of a chance at this sort of reality before, nor thought i ever would…

but it is what we want. need. and there is no choice, to put it simply. there is only a coming together that, even though i’m not sure i believe in destiny, seems simply to fit. and that seems right. doesn’t it?

So, Happy Holidays to everybody who reads here, and here’s to Life!

enjoy the little things. they count for more than we’d dare imagine.

is Cupid home? tomatoes not included.

At midnight i eat a ripe tomato taken from the fridge, slow warmed by angry, trusting thumbs. they open each soft wall to speak a greasy language, converting my tongue
with faithless seeds.

you see? perhaps.

there is an Amazon box, covered in poetry. it has been sitting on my desk for days, no. weeks. no matter, torn apart
ragged and re-used. close to my scattered omissions…

Each partial phrase we climb an arrow only to slip upon a snake.
is Cupid home?
of course! i sent him out, for cigarettes;
checking that the epilogue hasn’t passed its used-by date.

He is my reasoned apprehension and the box was, Once Upon A Time

a myth of ill-containment;
see? how the ink bleeds.
and suddenly, i understand –

the woman sits in her Volvo, in the midst of the parking lot. sirens and speed, hands that tremble, swallow each sober scream,
foil quivers on the dash.
the chocolate painting parted lips -
these plentiful privations embraced
by expectation and yet, the drought remains,
one hand white-knuckling the parking brake
such meek depravity but still, and soon, release.

How to Drown (101).

feeling pummelled, black&blue (literally)… i sense the visceral illusion of my skull striking the ground. body memories. did you know they can do that? the things the body experiences during severe trauma are remembered so well that simply to recall it once again, years later, can mark it in your flesh. presence is a complicated thing, yes?

so this is all learning by experience. the plus side is responsiveness… energy i can use to alter what remains of the day. it’s why dance brings such a lightning charge to every fibre of naked being.

i’ve been thinking about a lot of things lately… not easy between daily flashbacks that can go on for hours sometimes. mostly in the shower. i get frozen, stuck whilst the water falls in ceaseless rhythms against my flesh. i crave that sensation. the droplets sting in the marrow, where i meet my better twin –
i come out of it, portion by portion but exhausted, after what needs must flows away.

that’s one of the things i struggle with in general. welcome to the world of dissociation — we’ll take a right turn, down an unknown street:

was always told nobody would believe me anyway. and truthfully, they didn’t. i’d tell them something hurt, they’d say it didn’t, just being stupid, that i was hurting them not that the pain was mine to feel.

mother always said that…
from the moment i was born, if i cried, she’d tell me how it hurt her and ask why i’d want to do such a thing?
i still don’t have an answer. i still seek out the best way to let her be.
there is information, facts, the skeletons of memory and mind but i’m not sure i can be upset — truly, madly, deeply — in anybody’s presence except my own. i need quiet to enter into that space. it is a private land. a place to visit and to heal because you do not have to filter what you feel. nor sit through too much of that ever-present fear that you are not enough.

i can put it into metaphor but even that, well, that wasn’t allowed when i was growing up. before i was that catatonic kid, just slipping slowly into silent realms, i wrote a few poems, in my more lucid dreams. well, part of me did. she needed a name because it’s when i started really getting into the whole online forum thing. i know her well and like her –
a study in devotion that sometimes whispers in the night. a comfortable state but only that…
a frozen piece of times gone by that holds to might and magic.

perhaps i shouldn’t tell you this. but there are plenty of things i shouldn’t and so many more i should. exultation is the summary of all those sometimes where we spell paradox again.

far too tired to fight, my mind capricious — i’ll get a sound talking to later.

there’s one way out and that’s through…
i have to find the keys. they are my companions and my clues.

i hear him more these passed few days… “stay down, bitch.” i try. i try to make it all ok.

there is too much goodness to be found in the moment, when i can get near enough to ask. questions come from the past that perhaps, as they say, i should just get over. except, now i can say yes, if i want.

yes.yesyes.
the need for answers. they may not stay for long but if you build it they will come.

i make wishes to ward off the fear, that i am as wrong as i was taught i must be, in order to do the right thing. that’s the funny thing…

i always held the right thing in mind. everything a test, though the lessons changed with the seasons, desire did not.

there are terrible notions that rise like the wind off the sea but the sea itself is my blanket of mystery.

i dive beneath the waters and i will drown as it sets me free.

Satire Sunday: The best kinds of Angels are right here on earth…

There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face. ~Ben Williams

this week’s satire and silliness goes out to J, Rika, Svast, Monsieur Bear, Tiger Girly & Sooz for, well, totally being there this loooong week. You are teh awesome.

Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all. ~Voltaire

Keeping Faith in the Cookie Jar.

My one, silent rebellion was prayer.

In Oz it’s rude to talk about spirituality/religion much, certainly not the private kind so I really have no way of reading how ok you’d all be about the mention of it?
(not that I mind being rude, you understand. The odd verbal spanking appeals to me but there is such a thing as context and I get enough spam as it is…)

Sufficiently armed with the above disclaimer, I was thinking (they tell me it’s dangerous, so naturally I find it hard to stop)…
about the resources I have to hold onto. then and now.

Back then the question seemed about externals. I mean, technically God is an external, too except it’s hardly the same. (God is not a Disney film.) But it’s notions like that that kept me even vaguely this side of sane, even with militant atheists for parents or perhaps because of them.

Sounds funny because we normally associate prayer with conformity and with a brand of conservatism that is so mainstream as to go largely unacknowledged and yet remains a central feature of many peoples’ daily lives.

My prayers were always tinged with guilt. Surreptitious and vehement as the stars I’d look to. I heard them swallowed by the silence, the depth and magnitude of nature rang out in response and I was sure they were still there.

My parents were strangely devout in their atheism… and I mean these were people who would disown friends/family for ‘turning religious on them.’ There was a deep-seeded fear of it, for good reasons but at the time all I knew was that you keep it underground.

So day by day it grows a little stronger in response.
Because it’s always there when nobody else is, and precisely because it’s meant to stay out of sight. It’s like telling a prisoner not to mind the bright red escape hatch on the wall… these are not the ways to keep the curious from killing the cat.
I’ll go there because you tell me not to. I’m obsessive like that, or is it stubborn? Either way, it was there.

I went to an Anglican school with enforced prayer but it was the music and the wholeness of each note that did it — a thousand voices soaring, the organ piercing sunlight that had only just before seemed so absolutely void. Scriptures I could take or leave, for the most part. Parables you hear regardless — the lessons had already been marked on my skin, one way or another.

And so they told me, you can sing but do not dare to feel. Leave it at the gates and go… nowhere. offer… nothing. tell… no one.

Sometimes I’d write to God because it turned out Santa was just another fat, middle-aged pervert pretending to be something he was not.

See, there was no replacement for the wonder and belief that had long before been poured into my heart. How do you tell a child they can’t believe in the Moon? It’s right there.

But I learned to ignore those things, somewhere along the way, deliberately forgot the rest, most likely. It is an emptiness, an invitation to deny yourself and in the process lose a little hope with every breath. Not that I hoped for so many things, certainly not that some mystical power would save me from what had by then become my life.

I doubt I wanted to be saved. Kindness hadn’t proved much of a boon up to that point so I thought to myself, just don’t hand me another fairytale. I’m not a princess and there is no pea. There’s just you, me and… ?

What I did want to know was that I could be understood. And if there might, just might be a light switch to find, if I kept to the path I couldn’t help but know lay deep within, then that would be gravy.

These were my messages in a bottle, stored on the very top shelf. I stuffed them in the cookie jar, perched right below the bright red sign that tells you not to dare.

learned helplessness: of wishes and nightmares.

had an awful nightmare because the new house my mother and step-father have moved into is far too much like the house i grew up in, in appearance, design and no few details. i thought i’d be ‘ok’ with that but it’s going to take some working on and i’m not going to be able to stay with them right before i move, that’s for sure. so my apologies if this post rambles somewhat. i’m bleary eyed and my heart throbs with such intensity that i think it will burst. it doesn’t, of course but it might be better if i did, once in a while…

“someday i’ll wish upon a star and wake up where the clouds are far behind me…”

Tori Amos sang that at what was a truly blissful concert the other night. seeing her live is like nothing else. her voice does things to you. deep and marvellous things.

it makes me want my feelings back… all of them. including the ones i was forced to give up or forgot, denied, never got the chance to have or just plain suppressed along the way to wherever it is i am now.

i want them back. technically i don’t need them. but i want them. and i don’t think that’s such a crime.

it is to some people in my life, though. it scares them. makes my family think of me as an alien that has appeared in their lives. my mother keeps calling me that. she doesn’t understand… never has, she said.

doesn’t see that i’m not who i was because i’ve worked hard to get here. where maybe i can have a life and really live it… someday.

and of course and very naturally does not realise that part of it is a reaction to the deeply rooted, damaging helplessness my parents respond to things with. i don’t believe either maliciously ever did anything. but that’s just the thing. they didn’t ever do much of anything for anybody, on an emotional level, let alone for their own true selves…

and just because none of it was meant to harm doesn’t mean it didn’t. or that it was ok.

everything has always been done to them, for them or against them. in their minds, at least. even Love.

and what kind of a way to live is that?

i can’t do it. i don’t want to. so even if it means i’ve got to carry a sword on my back i won’t play it that way.

there are so many days that i just don’t feel like i have any armour left but i have more options. i intend to use them.

it isn’t quite the same as having decent self-esteem but maybe self-protection isn’t such a bad start.