I am here.  Here and feeling a bit like a Who from Horton Hears a Who. 

Floating aimlessly through the air in my own world, in my own head so that no one can hear me, the thoughts never making it out of my head, off my little bit of world floating in the ether. 

It is cold today.  16 degrees below zero when I woke up this morning and my body protested loudly when I tried to move.  I have yet to find a weather that suits this stupid disease.  I now cross ‘artic’ off my list.

My furnace has decided to make my life more interesting.  There is a small red hose behind the cover plate that connects to a hole about the size of a bb pellet.  Every few days, that tiny little opening fills up with a hard, chalky substance and stops the furnace from heating the air. 

Until the part comes in, I have to teeter down the stairs, avoiding the herd of cats that rush with glee down the stairs between my feet, to remove the little red hose and take a thin drill bit and gently clean out the crusty gunk.  I then have to round the cats up and drive them back up the stairs or they roam from room to room meowing to hear their voices echo.  

Teeth chattering, shattering cold, still lost in my head, and surrounded by what I can only guess are the reincarnated souls of vaudeville comedians in the guise of the cats and I am thinking of Horton Hears a Who and not Cat in the Cat.  

Drifting.  It has to be because of the sensation of drifting through the days like that dust spec rather than sitting glumly at a window, watching it rain and having chaos break out around me while the search ensues for a moss covered three handled family grudunza.

I am here.  Quiet, contemplative, but here. 

I have been wandering around my blogroll catching up and seeing what everyone is up to but rarely commenting.  It feels like window shopping.

The summer is nearly over, the leaves haven’t started turning yet but the morning temperatures are cool rather than sultry and there are mums and lusciously colored plants everywhere. 

T & J stormed my house and cleaned the kitchen and laundry room for me.  This has been a pretty bad summer for me pain-wise and I haven’t been able to keep up with things around the house.  I was lamenting my frightening living arrangements on the phone with T when he asked if I wanted him take care of it.

Nothing is more mortifying to me than being vulnerable.  To let someone see me at my weakest and assist me is worse than any other type of embarrassment or humiliation that I can conceive of or have already been through. 

I refused to let T into the house.  I didn’t want him to see me as I currently am.  I can let J in, he and I share a different history, a different knowledge of each other.  T hung up on me and called J, arranged the details of their invasion and then had J call me to coordinate telling me to go unlock the door, go to my room and hide so that I didn’t have to see them. 

I was moved beyond words could express that they would do this for me.  Horrified, mortified, humiliated, and grateful to my very core.

I can’t write because things are in such chaos.  I exist but I don’t live. 

I was about to write “I have no joy in my life” but that is not right.  Joy is a quiet thing for me, and I have very deep and profound moments of it on almost a daily basis.  It is just the time in between those moments seems to drag and it is what I think of first when I reach for a description of myself these days.  But that is not who I am, not really.  

I have been sad for so long and there is an odd comfort in that.  It is familiar and cozy.  It encourages me to stay nice and neatly bundled up in it so I don’t venture too far, I don’t risk myself but where it once felt safe it now feels suffocating. 

I find myself waking up, still dreaming, saying over and over “I don’t want to be this person”.  My subconscious mind is rebelling from this cocoon with more efficiency and determination than my conscious mind is.

I am trying to figure out how I can write about being sad…again…without sounding like that is all I am.  It seems like the grief that I carry over Jeff’s death is always with me, always so close to the surface that just mentioning him can bring tears to my eyes again yet he is not the focus of my thoughts. 

It has been a year and a half and it is a fresh wound and I cannot just let it be, I must turn it over and poke at it, abuse myself for having this pain because who am I to mourn so.  I am not a family member, not a close friend.  I was just a friend, one of so many people whose life he touched, who he made a difference to. 

I watch a lot of true crime or crime dramas and I never noticed before how many people are done away with by fire.  I watch and I wonder.  I cannot help myself.  I wonder if that is what he looked like.  I wonder about my friend and it is no longer his smiling face I see, it is no longer his laugh I hear.  What I think about, what I imagine is what the amount of meat left on his charred bones was. 

I was talking to a client here at work and at the end of the conversation, I edged into asking her about Jeff.  I asked her if she still had a copy of the commercial he did with them for their business.  She said she thought she had it in a file on her computer and she sent it to me. 

I just needed to see him alive again.  I needed to see him moving and interacting with people so that when I think of him, I can stop thinking of him as a charcoal briquette and remember him.  Remember him laughing as he told me how many takes it took and he still couldn’t make a break on the pool table. 

T called a few weeks ago to tell me he had applied for a job back here and that he would be here for an interview.  I told him that was great but I wouldn’t be seeing him.  The next time we spoke he said he was looking for a piece of his glasswork to bring me.  I asked him if this was by way of a bribe so that I would see him. 

He just didn’t understand that I really wouldn’t see him.  I would talk to him on the phone, I would text him, but I wouldn’t open the door.  He knows that I have done this to other people, most people, he just didn’t think he would ever been included in those I withdrew from. 

I am broken, I told him.  I am broken and I don’t know how to fix me yet and I just need time, time to figure it out and this is the only way I know how.  He pouted and I just wanted to scream at him,

“It is not about YOU!  It is about me, what I am thinking, what I am feeling and what I am going through – you have no part in it – none at all – you can’t fix me, seeing you will do nothing for me.  I don’t need to be cheered up, I am not a child with a scraped knee, I am broken, God damn it, broken, shattered and the pieces slide around and refuse to fit nice and neatly back together and I am not going lie to you to make it easier for you.  I am not going to apologize to you because you don’t understand!”

That all being said, I am watching Last Comic Standing and very much enjoying my loathe/hate relationship with that show.  See, I do have joy in my life, I do have things I laugh at and that make me feel something other than morbid and sad…I am just not going to pretend the other doesn’t not exist, that is so much more wearing on me than the grief.

Sometimes it is easier to just let the days go by and write nothing.  Sometimes, the words that course around in my head just want to keep me awake and refuse to let me do anything with them. 

What all do I write about?  Do I write about George Carlin’s death?  It is not like I knew the man, but he was a fixture in my childhood, nonetheless.  His record FM & AM was was played on my little 45rmp sized turntable so often, it warped.  He and people like Sandy Baron, Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson, Richard Pryor, and David Brenner were my introduction into comedy and were the voices I used as early as kindergarten to try to express myself, my thoughts, my humor. 

Do I write about all the things I am learning about being a vegetarian?  I have said I was a vegetarian off on most of my adult life, but the only thing I gave up was eating meat.  I never thought about how animal by-products are in medicines I have taken because of the gel coating, the cheese I eat because of rennen, in gum, mints, the list goes on and on and I am beginning to understand why some people give it all up and go vegan, something I never would have ever considered before.

I have never been a concious eater.  I don’t eat meat most of the time not because of any ethical concerns I have about eating flesh, about conditions in which the animals were raised and butchered or any of that.  I would stop eating meat because I don’t like the tactile sensation of touching raw meat.  I don’t like the smell of meat frying in the pan, so I quit buying it at home, and only ate it out.  Then I just stopped eating it all together because I found I naturally leaned towards other things. 

I go back and forth but have decide to start to take it more seriously because of getting sick, and it is, for lack of a phrase that doesn’t make me sound like the aging hippy I probably am, it is blowing my mind, man. 

I don’t drink, smoke, or use drugs.  I don’t even take pain killers anymore although I do still from time to time use muscle relaxants when things get to the point I am afraid I will be unable to walk…that is how I missed all of Tuesday last week.  I cuss like a sailor so I still have that as a vice, but other than that, I am boring as paint drying.  Why not go all the way and become a full fledged vegetarian?  Give up the one last thing that I vaguely feel dirty about doing. 

I decided this time, if I do it, I am doing it right.  No cleanses and all that, but really understanding what it is I am giving up, what it is I will be eating instead and being a concious consumer for once in my life.  It is so much easier not to think about these things at all.  To not think about what is put into the things we eat and why it is kids today are being born with allergies to foods that kids in developing countries don’t have.  Why think about how the incidents of Autism have increased?  Why think about why auto immune diseases are on the rise and new ones are being recognized more and more?

I am starting to sound a little Oliver Stone’ish and really, my mind is not on all that right now, it is ticking back to my childhood, to those comedians who I love so dearly.  I love stand up comedy.  I respect it more than other performance – over actors and musicians.  I have met actors, met musicians that I really respected and admired, but none of them left me speechless like meeting Steven Wright did. 

There is a brillance that exists in stand up.  It is the improvisation – of being quick of mind and rolling with whatever happens that I find awe inspiring.  I am not saying every comic has it, but those that do, those are the ones – to me – that are like watching a master piece being painted, or an overture being written. 

This is why sometimes it is easier to just let the words exist in my head.  My strange little rants that twist back on themselves and never come to a completion, at least not for anyone but me.  Being concious, being aware, being in the moment and rolling with whatever comes, I learned it as a child, I learned it from George Carlin, I am learning it again as I learn how to care for myself, by what I put in not just my mind, but my body, the one that aches and betrays me daily but that I can laugh about, must laugh about because laughter is all there is when you think everything else is gone.

I am deep in my head these days, not in a dangerous way, but so much so that writing about it falls by the way side. 

I have a lot of things to consider and ponder and I shyly mention one of them here because I need feedback.  I have been asked to write a book.  I have been challenged to try to become a writer and not just someone who writes. 

I am not sure how I feel about this.  I tend to balk when it comes to committing to things – people, jobs, places, life…you know.  I think a lot of it is insecurity.  The people who have been the most vocal about liking my writing are my mother…and well…she is my mother…and someone who turned out to be completely untrustworthy so his opinion is void. 

I made the error of giving family members that I am not close to links to where I write to get their feedback and the crickets are still chirping.  W won’t respond one way or the other as to what he thinks about what I have written which means he doesn’t care for them. 

So…do I attempt to fail? 

I am not sure how many people who frequent this blog also check out the other writing I do, but if you are of a mind to, please weigh in with your 2-cents. 

The thought of writing a book is why I haven’t really been writing at all right now.  I have been thinking of what I would write if I were to write something that was more than a short story or an essay.  It is there, spinning around, weaving itself and I have been afraid to let anything else hit the page.

I have been researching publishing, how to submit manuscripts, as I don’t want to count too heavily on help if I actually follow through.  I figure it is best if I do pluck up the courage, to do it quietly and on my own.  It is the way I have done everything in my life from learning to walk, to riding a bike, to getting divorced. 

Being so lost in my own head, realizing I have always been someone more at home in my internal life and even at my worst being someone who is comfortable in my own skin, I have been jarred out of my introspection by an article on Hulk Hogan’s son.  Yes, Hulk Hogan’s son, Nick Bollea. 

At the beginning of the week his request to be moved out of solitary confinement was denied by a judge.  I had to re-read it.  He wanted to be moved out of solitary confinement because it was causing him too much anxiety.  Being alone caused him anxiety. 

I just don’t understand.  Being with other inmates would cause me anxiety, not being alone.  It got me thinking about Paris Hilton and I hate when that happens.  What it made me start to wonder is – is it being in jail that causes all the anxiety or is it the forced introspection of solitary?

Are these two kids the way they are because they can’t stand to be in their own skin?  When forced into a situation of confinement where they are alone, left only to their own thoughts, they buckle.

I try not to turn too much of my thought process over to it but it is there in the back of my brain. 

In a fit of optimism that I would not only read the books I ordered, but be able to pay for them, I joined Book of the Month Club and Quality Paperback Club.  Even though they are essentially the same company, I have joined them off and on over the years because they always inspire me to read outside of my comfort zone.

I tend to gravitate to fiction.  I love a great grisly crime novel or something weird and wonderful but it takes a little more to pull me to history or biographies.  It is not a lack of interest; it is a lack of attention span. 

One of the wonders of fibro is something they call “Fibro Fog”.  My short term memory is impaired as is my attention span.  I also have difficulty finding words.  I used to have a near photographic memory.  If I had seen it, read it, heard it, I could recall it and parrot back the information.   It was a running joke that I was a storehouse of little known and who gives a shit trivia. 

No more.  I will try to quote something and the words are floating in my minds eye, but they will not come out of my mouth.  I will start to talk about a book I read or a movie I saw and where I used to be able to recall minute details, now I am fumbling for the simplest of information. 

It drives me crazy.  I had all but given up reading when I found the complete letters of Vincent Van Gogh on Ebay and bought the set.  Let me explain. 

Years ago I had seen a really bad documentary about Vincent Van Gogh narrated by John Hurt.  While disjointed live images and pictures of either pencil drawings or oil paintings flickered across the screen, Mr.  Hurt read Vincent’s letters to Theo.  From that moment on, I knew I wanted to read all of them, not just the few the movie had used. 

If anything were going to get me back into reading again, it would be those letters.  I have gone through the first book, but haven’t made it through the rest.  My brain wanders and while reading never made me sleepy before, as I get such little REM sleep, when my eyes begin moving back and forth across the pages, I find myself roused a few minutes later having knocked myself out. 

All this to explain I have started reading again and have managed to stave off the narcoleptic like attacks long enough to finish a few books.  Armed with the same sense of accomplishment I had when I was 8 or 9 and finished my first book, I went shopping online for new fodder.

I got some James Patterson because I enjoy mindless violence.  What can I say?  For my fill of fluff I got:  How Starbucks Saved My Life by Michael Gates Gill, Marley & Me by John Grogan, The Life & Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson, Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill and You Suck by Christopher Moore.  I also got the new David Sedaris – When You’re Engulfed In Flames and am awaiting it with near giddy anticipation. 

The other books I got are How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone – 10th Anniversary Edition, You, An Owner’s Manual, Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate.  The more I want to become a full time vegetarian, the more I crave steak. 

I awaited the packages like a kid on Christmas morn, ripping them open and going over each book as I removed it from the box, flipping the cover open and reading the first few pages just to say hello. 

I have the books stacked up next to the bed.  I am currently reading 5 of them and trying to keep everything straight but I suppose the bonus of the fibro fog is that where I used to be able to read a book and have full recall, I will now be able to read the same book over and over again with only the vague sensation that it is familiar. 

So…from thinking about writing a book to immersing myself in other people’s efforts.  I think I will slip back inside my thoughts and leave you to yours. 

I hope you are tucked in nice and cozy as this may be a long ramble, folks. 

No sooner did I type that first line, then my mind went completely blank and I no longer knew what it is I was I was all geared up to say.  It must be spring finally hitting me, making me all daydreaming and absent minded. 

I have been emailing my cousins since my aunt passed away and I am thinking that this is going to fall by the wayside here pretty soon.  I have only met each of them twice.  Once when I was child, and once when I was an adult.  We have never made any kind of connection.

I feel intimidated by them sometimes – both are successful professionals and I doubt that were there not a blood bond between us, that I am anyone either of them would be interested in knowing. 

I lack direction.  That is the polite way of putting it.  I dropped out of college twice.  I have no desire or passion to be anything other than myself.  There are hundreds of things I think would be ‘fun’ to do, but not one of them strikes a cord in me.  I have never had a deep burning passion to ‘do’ anything. 

I like to write, have to write a lot of the time, but when I have been approached about turning it into a career, asked to sit down and take some of my short pieces and flesh them out and try to write a book – I can only shrug. 

I write because of some strange need within myself to put words on paper.  If the Internet did not exist, I would still be writing.  Having a place to throw them up online and let others read them and allow me to remain anonymous has been fun, but I don’t want it to be…work.  Yuck. 

I like getting tattooed which is something I think both of them would take a dim view of. That is something that further underlines the differences between us. While it has become wildly popular, I am awaiting the backlash that should follow and will allow it to go back to the way I grew up – where tattooing was not done at the mall between lattes and a mani/pedi. 

My cousins want to stay in touch but they want to do so in that polite surface way where we send Christmas cards with a couple of lines scribbled on the bottom and vague emails that give updates as to progress in work weeks and other yawningly general information.

I don’t do surface well.  I don’t do it with people who want to know me in real life so I have no desire to do it with family.  I refuse to try to dig to find out who my cousins are, what they like, what they want.  These are the things that interest me. 

I am mortified at the idea of anyone ‘knowing’ me but I am fascinated by others. 

I have been thinking a lot about grace.   About living in a state of grace, or at least of trying to attain what I believe to be grace.  My mom, who is a Quaker minister, is someone who really can ‘let go and let God’. 

She was not always a minister.  I did not grow up in the church.  She became a minister about 10 years ago. When I was growing up, we did not discuss religion or spirituality.  I attended Sunday school briefly.  Enjoying vacation bible school not for the message but for the crafts we would make and because we got to play “Red Rover, Red Rover” during our breaks.

I decided at about 7 or 8 I was an atheist and stopped attending.  I was not quite sure what that meant; I just knew I liked the look on the people’s faces when I said I was one.  I have sought my own path spiritually ever since and do not subscribe, prescribe or in any other way attach or align myself with any form of organized religion.  I look up on organized religion as a torturous continuation of the junior high school caste system. 

My mom, who had already read the bible several times already, began reading it daily after my brother died.  She would get up early and I would find her as the sun rose, a cup of coffee steaming in one hand the bible in the other. 

To my great relief, she is not a holy roller.  That would be near impossible in the Quaker faith, and I am not saying this because she is my mother, but she is no different as a minister as she was my mom.

I envy her the level faith she has achieved.  I have spoken about it before, I will probably write about it again, but I cannot surrender.  I cannot, no matter how much I believe that whatever happens I will be okay; I will still struggle and try to control the situations.

I have always been this way.  My mom has given me plaques, magnets, bookmarks and whatever else she found with the serenity prayer on it.  12 steppers have nothing on me where that is concerned.  I read it, I say it, and then I worry, plan, plot and bargain. 

I have been beating myself up for the financial pickle I got myself into by helping someone out.  I was an idiot in a long line of idiots and let myself get suckered and I will be paying for it for some time to come. 

This is one of the more inane things that I cannot just let go of.  The others being death and grief, but I think that is a little more understandable.  My mom keeps telling me it will be okay and then trying to reassure me that no matter what, no matter how my life may feel as though it spirals out of control from time to time and all of the other whiney bullshit that I could type but why bother, that they are proud of me, love me as I am.

To which I responded, wait till I get more tattoos.  My dad is appalled by the two he is aware of and when he mentioned the one on my ankle today, I told him it was just fine and that I had more now.  His first response is always the best – “You big dummy!”

I think he will need to take some of my mom’s advice to accept the things he cannot change.  Ink is forever. 

So when I was last heard from, it was a little blurb on my aunt.  My cousins had her funeral service last week and money that is sent for her memorial will be going to the Parks and Recreation Department in Washington, D.C. to plant cherry blossom trees in her honor.  I can think of no better tribute. 

I was going to get a dog.  I thought that getting a dog would help to get me out of my head, out of my house.  It wouldn’t.  It was a nice thought and right up until I was going to get him, I kept telling myself it would fix me.  That all the little jagged broken pieces of me would slide cleaning back together if only I had this dog. 

A lot of pressure to put on a poor little puppy, especially since what is broken in me has been this way for a decade or more and will take a pry bar to get my head out of my ass, not a pooch. 

I keep thinking projects will help me.  Fix someone else, take care of someone else and I will not have to face myself.  If I move the furniture, clean the house, paint the walls, get rid of papers, knick-knacks and brick-a-brack from the past that gather dust it will make all the difference. 

My writing was so introspective a year and half a go, so many demons and secrets purged that I could not understand why this only gave me temporary relief from my usual ennui. 

I understand part of it is the fact that I can never surrender to any situation.  I can never just let go and believe that everything will work out the way it is supposed to.  Not really.  I try to, but in trying I struggle.  I want to control everything – from the event to my reaction to it – both the initial impact and the long-term effects. 

It is a misery I cause myself.  My thoughts are smooth, like river rocks.  Worn to a shiny gleam by my mind’s constant tumbling of them. 

It would be nice to give you a piece of myself that is not wrapped in over analytical self-abuse.  For all that I write here, there is the other 95% of me that stands outside under a clear blue sky, breathes deep and smells the sweet scent of trees budding and grass growing. 

The smell of life and my brain recognizes it, makes me smile.  I remember every other moment like this before it, every other first smell of spring.  Those memories fall behind my eyes like cards being shuffled, I have only to pluck one out of the deck, hold it close to me and experience it all over again. 

The sound of children laughing carried on the breeze.  They are blocks away, perhaps in the school playground or a back yard somewhere but the sounds drifts, warming the day more than the sun. 

I find the beauty, I find the humor in every moment, but I never lose the shadow.  Not for one moment.  It is always there, and my mind turns to it, focuses on it because it is in such stark contrast to everything else. 

I want to share my laughter, not my neurosis but to know me, is to know all the aspects of me, and I can only be known from a distance, as type across a screen because I am only vulnerable here, in print. 

I absolutely love this video.

I have been here, quiet, but here. 

My aunt is dying.  Her cancer has spread to her brain and it is just a matter of time now.  Funny to say that.  “A matter of time…”  What the hell does that really mean, anyway? 

Time is always the enemy, isn’t it?  Too much and never enough.  It flies, it drags.  It heals all wounds.  It stretches out, seemingly endlessly.  Infinite and finite. 

She lapsed into a coma 4-12-08 and passed away at 2030 on 4-14-08. 

I am up, watching my recording of this year’s induction for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  The cats are heaped around me, Smokey draped acrossed my hip as I type this.  His eyes are shut but at the sound of my typing, his ears twitch a little and his tail snaps across the keyboard.  (I am laying in bed, on my side, typing.)

I am trying to stay up because I think Ted will be calling later.  He tried to speak the other night but I slept through it and by the time I got him called back, his work was busy and we missed our window of oppurtunity. 

I am flipping around my links, to see who has written what.  Floots has amazing photos/poems up, as usual.  Straight from the Farm is just back from a trip to Portugal, Karma Free Cooking wrote a lovely piece giving her “Make My Day Awards” and making my day, she mentioned me. 

I went to see what was going on with Sher at What Did You Eat and upon reading the WCB (weekend cat blog), I find her beloved Upsie is sick.  Upsie has cancer. 

I wanted to say something profound, but all I could do was leave a brief comment expressing my sympathy because I was afraid what I was inspired to write would not be appropriate.  What I wanted to write was this:

Pets make me understand what it might be like to be immortal.  I think of all the cats and dogs I have outlived and each one holds a special place in my heart.  Each one saw me through some period in my life giving me their companionship and affection. 

Each one has made me feel I am not sure I could go through the pain of losing them.  Each one has made me realize it would be more unbearable not to have them in my life.   How wonderful they make the brief time we get to share together, so much so that there will always be another to love and lose.