Good Morning Viet Nam

I was having an interesting dream, that I was trying to cross an elevated spillway while being subtly menaced by an ordinary looking yet mystical crow. This was somehow an off shoot of having coached many character building vague field games for odd, multiplying, packs of ragged urchins which caused me to find the magic packet of paperwork that would resolve all issues if only I would stop losing it again.
Suddenly Patsy Cline requested that I stop the world and let her off. This seemed incongruous and rather loud. Mainly because it was actually happening.
Apparently, the mighty, the clever, the very handsome, recklessly agile and ever curious Jetson had managed to: turn on the computer, bring up itunes, select the Patsy playlist and then hit play.
This seemed so very astute of him that I did not at that time apply the spray bottle as I knew in my heart that I would need that impact when a few minutes later he rejoined the task of destroying my jewelry boxes that he had left half done earlier.

Oh I am a beast

Well I did me some papering and if I don’t get my coveted A it will mean that I have gone insane w/out realizing and made no sense a’tall for 14 pages. Last night I was so very happily relieved and today I am bitch ugly and want to drink and fight.
So, if you run into me somewhere tonight, (because I now want no part of socializing and that just seems like a really good reason to force myself) and I seem a little buzzed, it’s probably best to just swallow any pride and be conciliatory to me. I have a bad habit of being a REALLY happy drunk until without warning I become extraordinarily vicious. Lon Chaney eat your heart out.

PS No moralizing required, as when these things happen I always hurt myself somehow, and usually pretty badly. It’s like perfect karma in a bottle.

I’m gonna add it up, yeah add it up

Please add an optical mouse to the list of broken things

Harumph

In the past couple weeks I’ve had to sink 2 bills that I REALLY don’t actually have to spare, into lil’ missy here to make her stop hating me as much and to make me less terrified each time I open the hood.
I was just able to learn that in addition, new keys, of which I need w,e,r,t,a,s,d,n,m, and l, are 10 bucks apiece or I could get a new keyboard for 79 + tax.
Also the service is a 79 dollar bench fee for diagnostics, with any repair being additional to that.
Harumph sez I. Harumph and feh.

Did you hear the drums Fernando?

This mornings dream was that a Satanist, pretending to be a member of ABBA, stole my cat. I shit you not. You can’t make this stuff up. Except that technically I guess I did....

Then I woke up to realize that I was probably trying to tell me that my cat IS Satan. He chewed through another mic cable yesterday and ripped open my rice filled neck pillow while we were sleeping. He can now turn on the bathtub tap. We started finding pieces of my jewelry in the basement. He chews up a whole Greenie™ bone in about 10 minutes then pukes. I think we are going to be purchasing pig ears and bull penis’ this week. He is like a bad puppy so I keep addressing it that way. I don’t know what else to do.

So this is how it’s just gonna be...

So tired, the store job kicks my ass. When I first started it kicked my ass also. Then I started getting stronger and stronger. I got some decent shoes. I started getting some muscles and stamina. I did better and better as the years went by. Then I had a couple surgeries the first of of which went kinda wrong, the next of which went really wrong. The horribly expensive shoes wore out. Now if I do a four hour shift I have to sleep 3 hours.

On Mondays, cuz I’m a homework slacker, I get off work then play drums until I’m really, really tired and usually quite frustrated. Then go to drum class. Then I can crash for awhile. While I tell myself its for just a quick, rejuvenating nap it invariably turns into a long stupefying nap, then I spend the rest of the day being a schlub.

This last month adds to the stultifying mix, extreme tension in my home life. The result is the house is dirty, the energy levels are all fucked up, and it doesn’t seem worth it to get up and do a damn thing. However something has to change the energy, I can no longer sit and stew. (I am so good at stewing, I meant what I said about grudge holding.)

So while I didn’t go about solving the problem the super high road way, I also didn’t take the lowliest low road. I, at least, addressed an individual face to face for the 15 seconds requisite and decided to skip the “preserve the friendship” part. I got some support for that approach from a few people who said if I didn’t want the friendship to just go ahead and remove the pain source.
Done.
Its not like I had zero interest in the friendship, but when alcoholism is the factor, what’s the point?
This is something like the 10th friendship of some significance that has terminated in the last 10 years or so, where I trace the real source of the problem to addiction. Not mine, someone else's. If we went back farther in time, the numbers would grow exponentially.

It’s just getting so very old. But when there is little or no return for your energy, so little actual dialogue, just boozy, stale monologues repeated over and over while someone breathes alcohol in your face what's left anyway? It won’t change until it changes and that's nothing you can control at all, so rather be done.

This whole giving your whole life to a THING is freaking me out. You just hand over everything you are, could be and will do, to an inanimate object. What the hell is that? I’m not saying I haven’t had my skirmishes with such slavery, but I seem to have a finely tuned sense of personal freedom. When a stupid thing starts requiring my very core self and values, I turn and run. I don’t care how much fun it’s promising. I don’t care if its a substance or a job or a relationship.

The other part that's bugging me, is the age of these people. I can see how in your twenties you haven’t figured it out yet, but the people involved are in their thirties, forties and fifties. One of them had already done over 20 years in prison as payment and just took another twenty to pay for just a couple months of getting high. Yet it’s his primary relationship and he’ll apparently never, ever, put anyone or anything ahead of it. It, an inanimate object, a thing.

I can’t think of a goofy, cheery, twist to end this on, everything about this is so annoying. I suppose the the best I can do is mention that at least I’m mostly over the furious and into the sad.

"Who knows what evil lurks in the mind?"

Because I have Diabetes I have a really weird syndrome. Apparently every diabetic has their own glucose release cycle from the pancreas, So at some fairly regular time during the day there is a release, and a time when they are running a little short just prior to that. Ok that’s the part I sort of, understand. We think we’ve figured out that mine is just around dawn based on 2 things, one being that I always have really high morning sugars, which then somewhat normalize throughout the day. The other being that I usually have really fucked up dreams right before I wake up. They are not exactly nightmares but are usually full of stress, aggra, and anger. A lot of the time there is a lot of me yelling at people who I’m fairly pissed off at in real life.

Today it changed from weird to furious in short order, something about freaky dogs, a creepy basement and a refrigerator box, moving quickly to me fighting with a whole group of people I’m having an issue with, and I’m pulling hair, slapping faces and calling people pussies and jerks. I’d like to try to be philosophical about it, and say to myself;
“see, this is a great example of how NOT to handle this situation and how it accomplished NONE of your desired outcomes.”
But I have to admit that what it mostly does is make me kind of depressed that I still have these kinds of situations in my life needing to be handled at all, and that the shrieking, bar brawling, kicking ass and taking names, Stella is still right here, uncomfortably nearby, ready to go it. It seems a little ludicrous that she should be so close to the surface as it’s been years since I’ve been in a physical altercation.

People express such shock and disbelief when I say I’ve been clinically depressed since the age of six, or that I just got out of the hospital again, or that I’m a person just brimful of hatred and anger. And that, man, I am just an evil, grudge holder.
I’m always hearing the likes of;
“But you look so wel"
"But you’re always so cheerful"
"But you’re always trying to be helpful, kind and funny.”
I’m not wanting to be thought of as a big fake or two faced Janus type. (Who would?) But I’m certainly not about love, light and unicorns. I'm just trying really, really hard to not take it out on say, the retail public, or the people nonchalantly hanging round when the jerk almost runs me over in his SUV, on the cell phone, when I had the walk sign and he was turning. Because expressing it as rage, out loud, is cancerous and I know it. Given the chance, that shit spreads like lymphoma. We all know it, and we all live examples of it everyday.

So I guess Im just wanting to acknowledge that when you are polite, friendly and reasonable to me, that I really, really appreciate it. Because I SO very well know how difficult that can be to keep up. And that, my friends, is why I so loved it when Kosmo Kramer said;
“Manners are the oil that greases the wheels of civilization.”

"It’s a thin line between love and hate"

“She opens up the door and lets you in,
never once asks where you‘ve been”

Here’s the thing about me and caffeine.
In the early 80’s I was, among other things, a serious tweaker. I have noticed this trend, ecto-morphs who use tend to become Junkies, meso-morphs who use tend to become tweakers. Cerebretonics seem to be fair game to all kinds of things but frequently it turns out to be sex.

Why did I become a tweaker? Well, I always suspect it was due in large part to my relationship to caffeine. I adore caffeine. I am highly allergic to caffeine. To this day I have not been able to kick caffeine right out of my life. Imagine my dismay when in ‘93 I went to visit my dying Grandmother in Seattle, and found a cappuccino machine in a Burger King. This was my first foreboding of the caffeine culture soon to reach across the country and now the world. It feels very much the same as being a nondrinker in this alcohol fueled culture. (Which is, for the most part, also one of my struggles).

So, given that I needed to work 3 jobs and party incessantly, and that caffeine compromises my immune system and severely aggravates one of my genetic illnesses, what other recourse did I think I had at the time?
Needless to say it was another in a series of really bad ideas.
I had no idea at the time that crank is the very devil, that one only has to smell it to know that it comes straight from the pit and that putting something in your body that looks, smells and tastes exactly like you scraped it off the bottom of the cat box is inestimably stupid. But it wasn’t caffeine, and it was so much stronger! How exciting was that?

I did gain one, single, boon from it, in an indirect manner, I met Uncle Bunny because of it.
I was sent to him by my friends who said to me;
“Stella, darlin’, you’re psychotic, and we think you should go talk to this guy who can help you. Tell him what idiot shit you’re up to and he’ll sell you some supplements to counteract that and you’ll feel and behave ever so much better.”
They were right.

I probably can’t get away with saying what he suggested, and what worked for me or the FDA will arrest me or something. But once I was assisted to stop being psychotic, I realized that caffeine, for all it’s problems was at least a known toxin. So I gave up the other and never went back. However, it didn’t end there, as I discovered that among other things my metabolism was now supremely fucked. It takes years to recover from that stuff. I still have some issues and its been what, over 20 years now.

So given those extremes I have decided that known toxins are generally the better choice. Like sugar. I happen to be a chocoholic diabetic. How pathetic is that? Its the caffeine thing again also, only in chocolate its the double whammy. When I work at the store, I stand right next to a huge stack of super-fudgy, chocolate-chocolate chip brownies, some of which I’ve found to weigh over a half pound, made at the restaurant by the fantastic baker. And, they just reek of chocolate. It’s like being madly in love with a married man, that you have to see socially, who doesn’t love you, but who occasionally uses you for sex.

But, in my distrust of Nutra-sweet, Splenda, other chem-sweets and chemicals, at least I know where I stand when I go back for more chocolate and tea. I’m making that perfect cup of properly brewed, black tea with milk, with my eyes wide open.
Someday I'll get what I want out of this relationship, someday it won’t hurt like this.
Then there’s tobacco.....