bloody vikings
Monday 13 October 2008 | 3 cookies in the jar
Alas, we’re back to moderated comments, thanks to john422 and his many, many friends john112, john114, john211, john244, et al., who briefly managed to shut down the site last night with their spam, wonderful spam. I forgot that this being a mentally interesting blog, it’s liberally larded with drug names; and you can’t have egg bacon spam sausage and aripiprazole without the spam.
Days since last shower: 8. Pages still to be written for five-to-seven page modernism paper: 5-7. Days paper is late without explanation or extension: 2. Recipe for menstrual boilermakers: 1300 mg timed-release paracetamol every 12 hours, with chaser of 200 mg ibuprofen every 6 hours. Length of most recent unreturned phone message from Walt Whitman, who now amuses himself by daily free-associating on my machine until the tape runs out: 11 minutes. Number of very cranky sacroiliac joints: 2. Low overnight temperature: 48 degrees. Number of chilly yowling cats who follow me from bed-in-bedroom to bed-in-office, purring desperately, importuning me to faceplant again so they can squinch their chubby bodies into tiny icy spheres and balance precariously on top of me: fortunately, just the one.
Metric tons of melodrama I have available for wallowing: apparently more bloody infinite than spam itself.
Edited to add: Well, I did make two appointments with possibly permanent lady psychiatrists, one next Monday, one in December. Another two appointments made with therapists who sounded nice, or at least non-bonkers over the phone—one of those next Wednesday, and one in November. And half-a-dozen calls out to more non-bonkers-sounding mental health care providers of various degrees and descriptions. Even though at present I don’t actually believe in mental illness, psychopharmacology, or any of my diagnoses. Nope, because I know I’m just lazy and a slacker and self-pitying and have bad habits. Which is why I haven’t left the house since Thursday, or eaten, or done anything but stare into middle distance, read old journals (AA wisdom from the Brujo: “You can’t make the past a better place to live.” Un: “No, but you can definitely make the past a worse place to live”), and sleep. Yep. Straighten up and fly right. Pull yourself up by your own clichés.
I can feel myself already pulling out of this one, just a tiny bit, despite the usual ensuing interpersonal and professional water damage. The window, she once wrote tiredly, through which you not only can, but must, climb. This gives me perhaps another two or three weeks before the next storm surge, a few working days in which to scramble together a mood stabilizer, an antidepressant, and a behavioral therapist who will obligingly make little charts with me, give me homework assignments, and paste gold stars next to my name when I complete tasks I’ve set myself.
Now all I have to do, sometime before class tomorrow morning, is fill the bathtub with hot water and climb in. Not so hard, eh? A great luxury, really. We won’t be able to take long baths after the world ends. Fun! Soap! Bathtime! Bubbles! Brightly colored washcloths! Scrub-a-dub-dub! I should probably get some little boats or duckies or something. And I tell myself: Dark grievings for past failures/current losses and nagging, repetitive physical pains aside, baths are good. Turn your face to the wall if you must, but at least die clean. If I keep telling myself this, perhaps I will at least act on it, if not believe it.
3 cookies in the jar
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Don’t die at all! Climb in there and pretend you’re a mermaid.
Does the fuckin’ trick.
::GASP:: Haven’t eaten!?!? That is always something I can do when I’m self-pitying.
No, don’t die. No more death. Baths are good. The two lady psychiatrists signal hope, I think. Hold tight.