My Mother the War

I waited out a rageful weekend and did not put out into the world all the curses and death threats I was brewing. How much more can be said, thought out, rationalized? I'm left with the feelings and the weary rebuilding. I am teasing out a Hiroshima metaphor: my mother is the Bomb. Atoms aren't inherently poisonious but you can make anything mutant if you shake it long enough. Maybe I don't understand physics. I understand pain, and what it does to you if you don't acknowledge it, whether by misguided humility or complete lack of empathy for yourself, for us: it eats you up and makes you crazy. So, again, let me say--I'm hurt. I'm weary. I'm rebuilding and it's exhausting work.

We fed the shark to an eagle.

Old people are dying. They have gotten so old that every old person I have known, that then died, has had the Big D. I thought this meant Divorce, or Death, but those were rooted in their time, when Divorce or Death were fearsome events. Dementia is, currently, the biggest D, until the temperatures soar and the ice caps melt. I bet that the next big D will then be Diarrhea, like it is in the Sahara, and we will remember fondly when we could just up and die or divorce our partners or get old enough to start forgetting how to think.

The two best ways to prevent dementia are to 1) die young and 2) think outside the box, keep that imagination rolling, take another route to work, become a completely different person and start like Suduko or crossword puzzles. I have been re-evaluating my life, because why not? I am in a rut. Last night I tried to not be a social worker or Chicago-lover, and was further encouraged when A Very Important Person to Me laughed at my attempts. "Those are the two things you define yourself by" and then I decided that's it. Soon, very soon, I am going to up and switcharoo, change so much that no one, much less the Big D, will be able to recognize me.

My complete and total transformation will be much less effective if I write about it on my blog. But it's fun to think about, fun because I have already offered this coming year up to the Gods of Solitude and Poverty, and the future is a light box in the Seattle apartment of my soul. Oh, Upsilamba Outpost, is this what you were feeling when you decided to up and go? You are doing the right thing. Not only do you speak five languages, including Computer, you will be completely impervious to Dementia! Your brain is the locked box. Mine is oatmeal in a bowl made of paper doilies.

Now wait just a moment. I thought of another way to outrun the Big D: 3) pre-emption. If I begin to think improperly now, abandon linear thought and syntax, I will have been the captain of my destiny. I am a certain genius. Surgery will I have for bird-making. Everything from now on is magnetic poetry is a lightning storm, people.

Four pairs of scissors for 4:00 am. Four pairs of scissors for The Voice of Distinction's known children. A picture of scissors because I can't sleep for identity panic and scissors are something I know rock steady. I went into the woods but I tattooed myself should I be lost. "Return St. Renegade to God." If everything else about me changes, the Saint I was marked the Saint I became.

"Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster."

The only upside of watching a horrible Cameron Diaz movie about sisters was that Cameron read Elizabeth Bishop's poem "One Art" to a dying old man. This was during the humbling phase of the movie in which she changes her life and becomes a better person. My suspicion right now is that 1) I am not actually being filmed and therefore cannot guarantee the proper narrative arc and also 2) were I being filmed, this would be my humbling montage, and I don't know what is coming next, because what if I don't end up a better person?

I have ridiculous worries. I worry that if I come to know myself I will unearth a love of money, violent pornography, or cruelty to waitstaff. These kinds of patently ridiculous worries keep me up at night. That and poverty and the anxiety provoked in me by men, and I think I should be exercising this meat machine I was born into, discharging bile and impure thoughts and other various and sundry. Where can you buy a medicine ball at 4:00 am? Time for some 1920s style calisthenics, sissies.

With regards to sainthood, and my neglected legacy, it is time to concern myself with miracles. From the internet, I read that "Most Americans who pray for miracles ask for cures—for themselves or for loved ones. Indeed, half of those polled (50 percent) credit God with bringing back to life people who have been declared dead by medical authorities." This will take some concentrating, maybe some squat thrusts and lunges, some serious scissor flexing and midnight typing. I will need to be well rested. All of the scissors I polled (100 percent) agreed that it is time for me to try and sleep again.

I started a blogarhythm last week about my Best Day Ever, officially September 26, 2006. Not a great day like I learned a lesson or made a human connection; I mean a lucky and lazy day of the highest order. In that one day alone I: won a semi-real trip to Las Vegas, called off work, got my car fixed by an Armenian for $20, I saw two great musical performances (boy and girl R+B combo at the Jackson Blue Line stop and Sufjan Stevens), was served a tasty Crunchwrap Supreme by a man with a beautiful smile, walked around the downtown of the greatest of the Great Lakes Cities, easily found every book I wanted at the library, and I ended the day with one free pair of super kickin' green and white Adidas.

So I get that day and a whole bunch of other people get raped and tortured and killed. That was their day. And just in case someone out there has an answer about all this, like a ranking of American lives compared to Iraqi lives compared to Amish lives, or rape vs. murder vs. torture, I say to you: bullshit. Or congratulations. Because I think about these things not all the time, or even a majority of my time, but a fair chunk considering my general self-obsession, and I can't get anywhere but Sad and Confused. I attended a three hour training on working with children who exhibit problematic sexual behaviors and it turns out that 'sexually abused leads to sexual abusers' doesn't really play out, you know, empirically. Dr. Spacarelli of CAUSES knew as much, knew that the correlation between having been abused and abusing was weaker than, say, narcissism and sexual abuse. Not necessarily fancy DSM-IV narcissism but generally assholishness. And that sexual behaviors, while Law and Order: SVU and our general sexual culture in the US would have you believe otherwise, may not actually be more heinous, but we view them more heinously, that the line between adult and child gets blurry and my God, my Lord above, what is with human sexuality? And then, because it gets harder to separate the sexualized behaviors from the non-sexualized behaviors if you keep looking at them, what is with the strong and the weak and the lions and the lambs?

I promise you, these questions seem much deeper and insightful in my head, but then when they exit my body it comes out like "ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee" like DFW said "the sound of a stick of butter being hit with a mallet." Along those lines. I think I get that we are not, in fact, living in the end times, that, in as close to fact as we can get, this is just how crappy we humans are, and just as terrific as we are likely to get. At the same time, however, it is raining like crazy outside and I think maybe we could have another big flood? Just wipe it all away. I just read 'Oryx and Crake' by Margaret Atwood and she basically laid it all out, although she seems to be more upset about the environmental degradation whereas I get more jumpy about rapes and murders but then, really, isn't it all the same thing? And speaking of how everything is everything, what is with poop related to sex? One of the signs that a kid is struggling with some sex-related trauma is that they poop themselves, hide poop, stuff toilets, smear poop all over bathroom stalls. I have seen this process and I don't really get it. And also: poor attachment seems to be a big indicator of later sexualized issues, meaning one is more likely to sexually assault others if they didn't really bond with a caregiver early on, more likely even than had they been sexually abused themselves. At the same time I'm learning this I'm reading about the erotic bond of mother and child, and isn't that fascinating? Maybe there was no erotic connection forged early on. Thinking is so much fun and all the time, people live and die, have horrible things happen to them, some get Crunchwrap Supremes instead. So, to sum up, what have we learned today?

-be nice and snuggly to babies

-seriously.