Which may edge out “Woman, Trapped, Survives on Moisture” as best headline ever. This via Mandarin—a little human-interest story that made my MONTH.
Three THOUSAND years. Holy holy-flower, that’s…that’s rare, is what that is.
Kind of like me posts. For simple reasons, some previously given, some new:
1) weekend head cold that has slyly shifted into sinus infection, and no I do not have a neti pot, nor am I about to dash out to procure one, since past attempts ended along the lines of Christopher HItchens’ experiments in waterboarding;
2) actual Al-Anon stepwork, as in Step One, as in, I may have gotten kind of carried away because my sponsor said, “Write a narrative….” and after that I think everything she said was just a blur. You don’t TELL Ms. Un, write a narrative, without the inevitable happening—in this case, 17 single-spaced pages, none of which are fit to appear in public. If I were my sponsor, I’d tell me that for Step Two, I’m only allowed to write with a crayon. In my left hand. In the dark. And the result can’t be longer than 3 pages anyway.
3) the usual failure to grade student work, failure to prep for class, failure to complete my incomplete from last semester, failure to format my thesis by arcane and uninteresting Graduate College standards, failure to, failure to. Maybe that should be the name of my new blog, especially since
4) I can’t say a motherloving, chickenchoking, treehugging THING about what’s happening and, more to the point, what’s spectacularly not happening, with me and the Brujo, here. Which really makes me feel insane(r). Like the song says, I’ve grown accustomed to your face. I’ve mostly grown accustomed to that horrified gaping pained expression it wears when I indulge in yet another verbose overshare. And with that outlet sealed to me…well, your gain is my loss. Anyway he and I have a (second) therapy intake on Friday, on which 45-minute slot all my hopes are, yet again, ridiculously, pinned.
5) SHIT I have to leave RIGHT NOW to teach.
I leave you with these lovely pads. I know, not much pad pr0n lately, right? Again you’ve probably been breathing sighs of relief. But Obsidian made them and dyed them herself with natural dyes made out of herbs and stuff, stuff like alkanet and annatto and alum mordant—basically, stuff which would’ve gotten her hanged and then burnt a thousand years ago. And I do not need more pads &c but I adore them. And her witchy purple badness.
So I’ve been using my Lunette quite happily for two years, and don’t need a new one, I really do not; the thing is made of indestructable medical silicon and even if I, like, ran over it while camping in Mexico, it’d clearly bounce back without hesitation. Good Finnish work(wo)manship that’ll last me until the climacteric, and has made my periods that much more free of pain. Plus, Kuukuppi = best Engrish email newsletters ever.
Not yet FDA-approved (blue Lunette that is), but soon! In the meantime I could order a Lunette Selene from Britain for £26; or a lovely lilac LadyCup for €24.
Must. resist. do. not. need. more. medical. silicon. in. twat.
•
ETA: oh whatever of course I do. Plus I discovered that tireless public servant, pragmatic menstrual eco-warrior and indefatigable cup-tester Obsidian has been at it all this time; and her website has these detailed, fascinating comparisons of the squishiness and resiliency and purpleness of all the new coloured cups. And thus I now lie in wait at the Bay of Evil for a LilacCup of a larger size, enough so I don’t have to get up in the middle of the night to deal with its runnething over.
Of course The Anatomy of Melancholy is very insightful on this topic; but look, another knowledgeable scholar turns out to be Doc Juma!
And also, he can make strong your pennis.
[God knows where the Brujo found this. He's more active than I on Fizzbook these days—as in, active at all—so it probably surfaced there. His favorite attribute was "CASINO SPECIALIST" but I was most impressed by "Bewithed P'ple."]
So the following is all pursuant to various conversational threads over at Repat Blues, whose articulate posts you might want to read first before you try to make sense out of the following. Anyway my yammering on, below, relates roughly to the following documentary, narrated (and presumably produced) by everyone’s favourite and allegedly cyclothymic luvvie, Stephen Fry:
Although, and now you have been warned, all the below probably won’t make sense anyway! Lovely. Carry on, then.
•
So as it happens, I then spent the better part of the (semi-delirious, extremely menstrual, painkiller-sodden) day “working from home” watching the entire documentary, which is—for now—available here (your second video comment!):
Over the course of the documentary it becomes clearer that Fry is perhaps playing a character for educational purposes…he seems to be mimicking the genteel horror and cluelessness of the general British public, who are, God help them, and I always forget this, but it is always true, about 20-30 years behind the rest of the developed West in terms of staying abreast of various technologies, particularly medical ones? (I remember an East German friend saying contemptuously, “It’s like the DDR,” and I could see her point.)
[Also they had this placid idiocy about Ribena and "orange squash" which I remember vividly to this day—well, they were just terrible about juice in general, honestly—as Mandarin once said succinctly about her inability to procure real orange juice: "You can't get it for anything, not even a carton of cigarettes and a blow job."]
Even given that this is a deliberate didactic maneuver, the character nonetheless irritated me—he either plays dumb or is very lurid and ridiculous on such subjects as, say, does lithium turn one into a quote shuffling zombie, and ooooh how scary there’s a locked ward! and agh ECT, doesn’t that make you drool forever, and all such various grating attendent entertainments.
Though to be fair there’s a very nice CBT therapist, and he does a great service by introducing behavioral therapy as a reasonable adjunct to and/or replacement for the spectral clichéd lobotomized bogies his investigation also raises.
And then over the course of the two hours he “decides” not to take medication, which (in his case) is apparently not necessary (but flagrantly psychotic people don’t have the luxury of such a decision).
And finally (oh why am I not just writing my own bloody post? instead of bogarting your beautiful one just this, and then I swear on a stack of WODEHOUSE I will hush up) there’s a kind of typically nasty class-unconsciousness (again, feigned or genuine?) which is revealed when he interviews his delightfully creative bipolar friends (e.g. Carrie Fisher, Richard Dreyfus), all of whom avow they would not give up their magical inspiring afflictions for all the drugs in Christendom; and then he alternates those clips with interviewing sufferers who aren’t protected from their behavior by a great deal of money and fame, and whose lives are rawly and transparently hellish, and involve daily rafts of pills. Without any intelligent acknowledgement as to why that difference might be, only some bromidic, nigh-fatuous commentary about how some people are sicker than others. When I just think, no, my dear man; some people are richer than others.
But I did watch the whole thing; and write all this; so it must have affected me somehow; and I do admire him terribly, and imagine him as the last of a certain breed, and therefore a lonely, even tragic, and beautiful figure.
(And it is true; bipolarity is absolutely built into the profession; as it is into that of lyric poetry; and why has no one done a study on mood disorders and actors? it makes no sense, the more I think about it—)
Forgive the verbiage; tomorrow is an English 102 day and I just simply do not want to face it, at all.
I saw my own formerly psychotic student Austin a few nights ago, at the national-chain burrito place to which the Brujo and I have stooped in our final year here. He weighed more—didn’t look quite as much like a haggard, beautiful, bone-thin, demented Jesus—and smiled to see me, and said he’d been working at the burrito place almost a year. For my part I was so relieved to see him standing upright and working in some capacity and not lying covered in sores etc. in an alleyway somewhere (as I have been surreptitiously been checking out young street people all year, expecting, dreading, to see him raving in public, uncared-for) that I nearly leapt over the sneeze-guard to embrace him. But I confined myself to inviting him to visit me in my office (?!), which is kind of hairbrained since in fact the State School wrote him a nice little restraining order last semester, but he seems well enough now.
[Oh Austin. Whose Mormon father called him a faggot and shoved him out of the pickup truck in the middle of nowhere after they'd been to see Numbers, an experience which I think helped trigger Austin's full-bore psychotic-manic break in my post-apocalyptic classroom the next day. Although apparently his father was angry with him because he was already manifesting flight-of-ideas and irritability, etc. Of course Austin had been my poetry student the semester before that. And I knew what was happening within seconds of his leaping up from his seat, unable to contain his enthusiasm—had my cellphone out under my desk dialling the counselling office—just thinking over and over again, of course, how textbook, he's a twenty-year-old poet. And a songwriter. He'd given me a CD of his songs. I felt oddly honored. He's having his first manic episode with me. That was before it kept repeating, and repeating, and I started to get a bit PTSD myself from the fact that he would always seek out me—]
[Madness, by the way, is how Burton refers to what we call mania. Insanity is more like psychosis, though he of course prefers to call depression melancholia. I think he must have been the first writer to distinguish clearly between these states?]
Anyway, I took one look at Austin’s heavier build and immediately thought, Okay, good, I can talk to him, he’s stayed on his meds—on all the nice meds which I myself keep refusing, since I only try to off myself quietly, or lie around my office and cancel class at the last minute—to date I’ve never dashed around alarming people by shouting about the end of the world in 2012 unless we construct a giant human computer RIGHT NOW, etc. Anyway he quietly reminded me of this restraining-order type letter, and I politely waved that off, and told him to come see me before I graduate and move away. And I introduced the Brujo, and then we all stood there grinning like morons, until the people behind us started coughing anxiously, wanting their burritos, and so then we (talk about your class anxieties) had no choice but to order from him, my former student, who had, when I last interacted with him, been jumping up and down, sprinting in circles, and telling me that he wanted to shave off all his hair and spray-paint his body black, so as to warn people about our imminent demise. And this is what I mean when I think, very loudly: Oh Stephen Fry, when you’re in Austin’s position, you don’t get to dither in the way you and I get to dither, about whether Big Pharma is the devil or whether it could OH NOES quash our beautiful creativity and dash it into ordinariness. You just have to suck it up and take your crazy meds, so you can work at the burrito place.
Anyway the post about Austin is clearly a whole other blogpost I need to write. Like this one. And in fact, heck, I can’t put this on your blog, it would just be too rude. I take it outside. But thank you for getting me going—love & squalor, yours unreliably, etc.
So I’ve just finished reading First Steps, an odd kind of historical compilation of various Al-Anon documents, which taken together, poorly annotated and referenced, nonetheless manage to give a very clear picture of the organization’s early days—mercifully the founding members decided not to call it “The AA Wives’ Auxiliary,” even though the unintentionally hilarious watercolor illustrations all depict them wearing white gloves and pearls and anxious smiles, like graduates of secretarial schools named for ladies, who now can’t decide whether they should ask the cook to make chilled aspic or deviled eggs for Sunday dinner.
Anyway, entertaining class markers aside, one of the things I appreciated about this book is the way in which such nascent, developing groups are able to permit of certain heterodoxies, earlier on, which are later often ironed and starched out of the consistently monolithic face of program literature (though in fact even that isn’t true, with either Al-Anon or AA; there are always nice pockets of dissent and contrarian interpretation, as in fact the startling difference between the pious, Marcus Aurelius-quoting One Day at a Time and the blunter, less tiptoey Courage to Change demonstrates quite clearly). (God, what horrifying syntax. You’d think I’d just worked a 12-hour day or something, and had in my lap an unhappy hairball-stricken cat and was trying to type around her.)
For example, speaking of dissenting voices, the charming piece below. I wish I knew when and where it had originally appeared; I’ve tried to ballpark its provenance by studying the typeface of the reproduction, which explains why I’m so vague with the attribution. No matter. The issue is still, je t’assure, right there to be dealt with, if you have a problem with someone’s drinking or sobriety (as the preamble says).
I wonder what kind of program’s being offered to this writer (or what she might be reading into what’s not being said), even as I admire her strong voice, her polite but sharp forestallings of counterargument/inventory-taking, her weary admissions of surfeit, her frank distaste of groupthink, her evident longing for real intimacy. And I find myself wondering what became of Ms. Anonymous. For reasons of identification which are probably so self-evident as to require no announcement. Did she find community and connection in the Wives’ Auxiliary? Did the oft-invoked gas oven put in an appearance first? Did she ever just GET A JOB (besides Jim)? Did she at least get him to agree on a date-night? Or did she get bored with program gossip and eventually DTMFA?
On this, as on so many matters, the Conference-Approved Literature™ remains enigmatically silent.
•
I Am Confused Wherein A Wife Wonders Why Understanding Must Be One-Sided
I have read and tried to live by the Twelve Steps. I may be reading and studying them with blinders, but I can’t for the life of me find a line in them that says we have to devote all of our leisure hours to our AA friends. Surely, there is time to be found for others…surely there is other conversation than AA. There are millions of things going on in the world but to listen to our living room conversation one would think that all the world revolves around Alcoholics Anonymous, its group politics, its clubroom problems, whether Joe Blow really wants the program or whether he’s just flirting with it and…”Didn’t you think he looked like he was on pills the other night?”
Is this what it means to be restored to sanity? Somehow I can’t believe that it is. Yes, Jim’s home sober now, sometimes, but that’s the only difference. He’s hitting AA just as hard as he ever hit the bottle. And I’m worried. Before someone jumps up and says that I’m resentful, I’ll say it myself. Maybe I am. I think worried is a better word. I’m worried because I see him developing into a man with a one-track mind. I’m worrying because my children have no more father now than they ever had and, above all, I’m worried because I don’t know how to help.
From all that I can hear or gather from what I read in the Grapevine or other literature aimed at the non-alcoholic, I’m supposed to jump on the bandwagon, too. I’m told that I should straighten out my character defects. Well, I’m trying, but if it means incarcerating ourselves in a silken web of group hypnosis I don’t care for some, and I can’t believe that Jim’s sobriety depends upon it. I have a strange notion that both his sobriety and our peace of mind lies in the study and the living of the Twelve Steps, and the “practicing these principles in all our affairs.”
So far I haven’t reached the point of confusion where I’ve done anything drastic….and I mean drastic. I know of one wife who is becoming a closet drinker, another whose public antics are causing some conversation and still another who stuck her head in the gas oven.
From where I sit at present, it looks to me like I am again trapped. When Jim was drunk I had the choice of taking him or leaving him. I took him. Now, again, I have the choice of taking him or leaving him. I’ll no doubt take him, but I’m fighting like a steer against becoming such a serene glob of humanity that I can tolerate anything. It occurs to me that I was cut out for neither martyrdom nor sainthood.
Don’t think that I don’t want my husband sober. I do. But I do also want him restored to sanity. Therefore I am confused. Does being restored to sanity mean that he must substitute one over-indulgence for another? And that again, all the understanding must come from me? Or does it mean that now with the help of God and these Twelve Suggested Steps we can and should, at long last, fit into our small niche in the wonderful world in which we live?
Can someone unconfuse me?
—Anonymous, New York
[exact date and publication unknown, but printed sometime between 1953-1967? in probably either The AA Grapevine or Al-Anon Family Group Forum?]
[NB also that all these wonderful, Chick-tractesque cartoon panels are grace àEthan Persoff's collection, generously shared here.]
[The Brujo always says this but I think he's quoting Yogi Berra.]
Well, now that I’ve succeeded in running everyone off, of course it’s Saturday and raining and I’m hemmed about and pent in by admin/teaching work I don’t want to do, none of the tasks are so big and awful in themselves but it’s that death-by-a-thousand-cuts kind of thing, and the B. is in his office glued to his computer, and I’m lonely. Which as we all know is how poetry starts anyway. I’ve lost their tracks, the beloveds / perhaps my singing will bring them.
Only what do I have to say? Only it’s Saturday and raining?
No,—when I run out of words, which I have done just because I wrote comments on 42 papers and handed in a 70-page thesis draft? then clearly it’s time for PICTURES! With brief, dumb, and/or inscrutable captions.
First trip of last summer—from our week in Santa Monica/Venice:
I take its message perhaps more seriously than I should, seeing that it is in fact just a pretentious plaque on a Santa Monica ad agency.
Yes, apparently someone in Venice really did painstakingly paint every twig on their ornamental tree bright turquoise blue.
El B. celebrates his six-month anniversary of freedom from Demon Baccy.
I have to admit this cracks me up for all the wrong reasons.
I am quite clearly thinking: so. tired. of. cacti.
•
Then, the second trip of last summer—from our 10-day junket back East in which I Met the Family, and the Brujo gritted his teeth, and we lolled about/were fêted variously in and around Rutgers, suburban Philly, upstate New York and on the Jersey Shore. We also went for daily long walks along the Delaware during which the Brujo would let off steam and I would admire gorgeous mushrooms.
I wish I had pictures of the mushrooms, which were magenta, pumpkin, lemon, maroon. But all these pictures were taken by the B., except when I snatched the camera away, which is why, in fact, there are so many pictures here of me—I haven’t had a camera for like a year now. Mine died, as I seem to kill all electronic objects merely by touching them, of late. But it’s okay, the B. has been informed that I want a new camera for my birthday. “What kind?” “A blue one! Or a purple one.” (I think that was not really what he was asking, though.)
Here I am, surrounded by many Brujo-relations. Eleven of them, to be exact. Sometimes I hid in the guest room and read Infinite Jest.
In upstate NY; I think this picture is just too Bloomsbury for words. All that's missing is the croquet set. And the handsome gay men.
"Yes, very well, but I rather imagine that what Ezra Pound was TRYING to say in the Cantos...."
The mighty Delaware.
A very modestly sized, by comparison, me.
LBI! They have a restaurant there? that serves SIXTY KINDS of ravioli.
Little chapel/cemetery nearby the Brujo-relations' house. Wearry.
Best of all—as we made our rental-car escape from back East homeward, this little guy was on the underside of the trunk lid. So much for that scene in Out of Sight; J.Lo could have popped the trunk AT ANY TIME.
•
And finally—I was looking at this nightgown today when the Brujo wandered into my office.
“Do I want this? I don’t know if I like it.”
“Well, if you died, and then you decided to come back as a ghost and scare the shit out of people? It’d be perfect for that.”
The good news is, hey, happy Valentine’s day! And it’s sunny here!
The bad news is, somehow I can still manage to feel self-pitying.
Following is a brief extract from an email to beloved MFA Skool colleague Raeface, in which I bemoan my sorry white-girl lot.
The good news is…I have a new MacBook Pro!
The bad news is…it’s ready for me now but I can’t pick it up until 2:30.
The good news is…I can borrow the Brujo’s car when he’s done teaching and go get it then.
The bad news is…it cost $1,750, with AppleCare. Which I had to get because of what happened last time. [Cf. kernel panics, below.]
The good news is…I had $1,750 to drop on it. [Thanks in part to my assiduous over-savings AKA being a MISER. Also thanks to Team Bohemic, in which the B. and I have pooled our finances to alarming success. Seriously, it alarms us. We lie in the dark being frightened of our relative solvency, i.e., hardly any debt and a small but cherished savings, with which we plan to run away to, variously, San Diego, Albuquerque, Tucson, L.A., Baja, Sonora, and/or Guatemala, not necessarily in that order.]
The good news is…I got up at six and was here at school by 7 am to put comments on drafts, because I have no computer.
The bad news is….it’s 10 am and I’ve only put comments on 7 drafts. Because it takes me fucking forever per draft no matter how hard I try.
The good news is…that was 7 more than I had done at 7 am.
The bad news is…there are 35 more of them.
The worse news is…the students are frustrated, despite having been workshopped. They want MY comments.
The worst news is…their final paper is due on Monday. So I now have to push back the due date to Wednesday, because they haven’t had my comments.
The other good news is, I went to yoga!
The bad news is, OMG OMG MY ASS HURTS. Haha yay yoga. First class since roughly 2003.
Oh, and still more good news is, I got a haircut yesterday randomly and it’s okay verging on cute.
And the other good news is IT’S FUCKING FRIDAY, why do these students want my typed feedback, why? why? when they’re not going to incorporate it anyway.
The good news is that since then I’ve done another half-dozen papers.
The bad news is, that still leaves roughly a jillion to go. I have 21 students in each of 2 sections this semester (which is nice, it means I can divide the class 3 x 7 to get workshop groups) and Walt Whitman is harrumping down my neck about a rough draft (!) of my thesis (!) and I am pretty much constantly FREAKING OUT.
The good news is that I can afford a computer on which to do all this. And that I can afford a therapist who tries, really tries, to help me do it. And that I can afford yoga to try to calm down my ridiculously overly frayed nerves (it’s not like I’m a cabinet member or have three small children or anything) and to settle my jibbering mind and help rest and repair my shredded ulnar/carpal/medial nerve bundles. The good news is really that the amount of priviledge in which I daily wallow is demonstrably insane and completely out of proportion to my contribution, and that the Brujo and I can go to our favorite sushi joint for Valentine’s Day and eat hamachi kama which seems to have been pulled out of the ocean about five minutes previously. It is charred and buttery and kind of makes my eyes roll back in my head, even as I am aware that my literally inconceivable children will someday hate me because I singlehandedly fished out the Pacific.
“We didn’t have to catch this and clean it ourselves.” “We wouldn’t even know how.” “If we were Cochimi in Baja, we wouldn’t bother. If you’d somehow managed to spear one of these suckers, we’d just slice it up and have sashimi on the beach.”
So much other stuff happens and never gets in here. I am telling this all out of order anyway. The Brujo and I tried to help an extremely violent drunk lady on Monday, seeing her weeping and throwing punches on the sidewalk at a bus stop as we were driving home with our Thai food. (It sounds like all we do is go out to eat but in fact we have settled into a pattern where every day but Monday, because I am in workshop through Monday night, I cook ruthlessly hearty vegetarian things with quinoa and rose rice and organic baby turnips and what have you, whatever I found at the farmer’s market on Saturday morning, and then he does all the washing-up. It seems to work okay. But I am seriously infatuated to the purple sticky rice with coconut cream, which I don’t know how to make by myself when it’s 7:30 pm and I’ve been either teaching or in class all day and I am both hungry and gibbering with mental fatigue.)
I am still crazy, but I don’t know how crazy, or if I should be on pills or off them. Honestly the last kind of pills seemed to make me craziest of all, so wired I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t do anything because I was just SO EXCITED ABOUT EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME. But that’s kind of how I am without pills too. Do I need pills or don’t I? I’ve never actually known.
So I discontinued those pills, thank you Dr. Rockabilly (dyed black hair, green and red dragon arm tattoos, Tennessee accent, motorcycle boots, scuffed jeans, maybe thirty? I thought Miss Bovary would have found him unbearably hot, as did almost every single woman on our unit) for giving them to me with such good intentions in mind. The d/c was the worst one I’ve ever gone through. (On my knees on the floor sobbing so hard Mandarin couldn’t even understand what I was saying on the phone, sucking wind, the Brujo standing in the doorway saying resolutely I don’t know what to do and me hearing this as that I should tell him, yelling I can’t tell you what to do, do whatever you need to do, hanging up on Mandarin because I could not handle having two conversations at once, him saying I just want you to know I’m not going to leave and then walking away to the kitchen, me being bewildered by this apparent contradiction in word and deed but unable to focus on it long enough to figure it out anyway, and then I called Mandarin back and finally managed to gasp HELP ME between heaves of sobs, and then she did).
Then in January Raeface drove me to see another new doctor (understanding that I just could not drive myself, and I will always adore her for that and other similar gestures, actually that one was maybe the least among them, the loan of her sofa at certain critical junctures from June 2009 onward has also been inestimably gracious), a pdoc randomly assigned to me by the social worker on the unit in January: an elderly Indian guy (but why is that important?) who lectured me (understandably, wisely) about nutrition, exercise, and meditation, as I sat there with my eyes filling with tears because I couldn’t stop thinking loudly but I just told you I can’t get myself to do those things, I can’t even shower right now, and then gave me many samples of these sprinkles. I took one dose, was dramatically ill in the department restroom, and haven’t taken it or any other pills since. Though in fact it probably wouldn’t have made me that sick again.
But do I need it? What does it mean, need? I might be a wee bit hypomanic, but I don’t know how to tell. Only that I am constantly writing stuff I shouldn’t be, instead of writing the stuff that needs writing (e.g. this instead of commenting on papers). But is that such a bad thing? I don’t know. Neither do you.
[boring insurance paragraph follows, for no good reason]
Medicare is about to refuse to pay for my DBT, which, HA HA! I finally found an amazing DBT therapist last year in December, almost three years after moving away from the last one; and my co-pay with Medicare is still $35 which means $140/month for DBT; but this therapist’s clinic doesn’t take Aetna, so I never even tried to bill Aetna, I just let the clinic bill Medicare. And I paid a mere $150 deductable (thank you, US government). But now Medicare sent me a scary letter, and is presumably going to say I should bill Aetna first. Even though out of network, Aetna is going to pay I think 20% of ten visits, so that’s what, like $200? But it doesn’t matter, Medicare just HAS TO HAVE THAT MONEY, just so there will be even more red tape in my life. And then I fear they may also say: Well, you should see some other therapist for which Aetna WILL pay, and then I will laugh derisively and say: Aha, but no, no that will never happen, and you can kiss my crizazy borderline and/or possibly bipolar undermedicated arse.
Which, what is borderline, or bipolar? No one knows, only that drugs don’t really help but DBT does with one, and drugs are indispensible with the other. That one goes away sometimes as one gets older and the other sometimes gets worse with every repeated cycling.
Mandarin and I talk about writing a book called something like Axis II Deferred and dealing with the stuff it seems no one wants to touch, even from a safe distance, with a long stick. So many writers “bravely” announce their struggles with mood disorders and addictions; but you don’t see any poets coming out and writing a memoir about being narcissists, even though, let’s face it, what percentage of poets do you think might in fact be diagnosable on that ugly second axis?
Anyway I happen to think that what went down at the end of November was my usual concatenation of what the Professoressa used to call the Triple Witching Hour: seasonal/premenstrual stuff + academic year/teaching/writing deadline stuff + romantic rejection of some flavor or another. When these three come together with a not-so-hot therapist whom I haven’t seen in a month anyway because of weird Medicare scheduling difficulties…whatever. I don’t even really want to talk about it. Just, I somehow spiralled down really fast this time, and hit the limits of my ability to be skillful when faced with shrieking inner demons, within about a 72-hour period. The speed of it was alarming.
This blog post doesn’t have an end. It’s nice that I can turn off comments. I read about all this stuff and some people say some really bloody smart things about it, but I still don’t have any answers. Only that it’s funny that my AlAnon sponsor fired me because although she “has bipolarism in her family” she thought she couldn’t deal with it in me. If it’s even in me. It’s strange not even to know what’s in you, when you’re you, and you would think you would know. That if anyone would, it would be you.
You would think that.
The bad news is that I could only get my email inbox down to 111 messages, from the first of this year, and that some of these people are writing back multiple times, hellloooo, hello in there, where are you; and the bad news is also that I do things like write this instead of dealing with it/them. It’s a fancy kind of hiding under the duvet. It’s fancy but it still hurts.
The good news is something they can’t know, those people frustrated with my not putting comments on their papers or writing them letters of reference or reading their poems or calling them back or whatever else: I’m not dead. I’m also not throwing up in the ER, throwing up on the unit, dangling from a branch, floating in the Tartarus town lake, grimly drinking activated charcoal, bleeding, cut, scratched, bruised, sobbing, screaming, and/or dead. I mean, this is admittedly kind of a lame & impotent conclusion, per Desdemona; maybe like me saying angrily and AlAnonily to the Brujo (but only in my head): so is that all sobriety means? just that you’re not drinking? and otherwise you can get away with bloody murder?
And if he (in my head) got a chance to say anything back, he might say: On a bad day, yes, yes it is. It means no matter what else went horribly wrong, at least I didn’t drink.
That’s the good news.
The other good news is the Brujo just walked in the door with a dozen mauve-lavender roses and a box of those killer Trader Joe’s dark chocolate almonds? the ones dusted with cocoa and sea salt and turbinado sugar? those ones that Kimba sent me for Christmas which practically made my return to school possible and my mind habitable? so I’m posting this now and will proofread and add photos later.
And of course it’s so gleaming and silvery and naked that I want to dress it up in pretty colors! Like playing doll. Only, your doll cost $1,750, including AppleCare because you are TIRED of your expensive and relatively new FORMER computer dissolving into a big puddle of molten kernel-panicking PLASTIC.
Other practicalities will have to include a new keyboard and mouse, because within 24 hours I’ve already managed to pinch both ulnar nerve tunnels; woke up this morning with my arms asleep up to the shoulder. Yay technology! How you have shaped and altered our cyborg bodies, inextricably become part of us.
I mean, it isliver season. And I’ve been drinking this detox tea for springtime, and maybe that’s what’s making me want to rip phone books in half (as Herself used to say of, well, herself, when around mid-sesshin she started feeling the joriki—or maybe I used to say it—I do recollect her admitting, “I feel like I could put my arms around a huge tree and just pull it up! By the roots!” But maybe that was me too. I’m old, I can’t remember jack shit anymore).
Anyway, since I’m mentioning this tea which is maybe helping make me into worse of an asshole than I already am, let me at least show you the insanely pretty thing out of which I’m drinking it. Pictures fail to represent it, though.
This vessel was a decadent splurge on my part—I fought it for days, because of corporate evil Stbx plus made-in-China plus everything else, but dude, in the end how could I not, because OMG RARE PURPLE CLAY. Also it’s called “Gobelet Magique,” for chrissakes people what do you want from me.
Anyway I caved and bought it and it does keep my tea warm and it keeps me off the streets. That is, I suspect that in difficult moments, contemplating its beauty meditatively in the classroom keeps me from being unnecessarily viciously sarcastic with my more racist/sexist students (also I put the Third Step Prayer on a little card where I can see it and I take deep fucking breaths and grin a lot, unnaturally, disingenuously, like Tony Blair). Remind me sometime to tell you about the final project which one student submitted last semester, to which project my officemates and I now refer as “Big Bag O’ Racism,” and which we show to current students as an example of How to Not Get an A from Us. Hint: it has a feathered Plains Native “headdress” in it, made of dyed chicken feathers and construction paper. And the student who made it is Persian.
She’s lucky I was in the hospital and the department got someone else to grade my papers, otherwise I would have failed her overachieving Asian-American pre-med ass. As it was I think she got a B-minus. She’s a good kid; I just clearly didn’t teach her anything. Do they make a tea for that?
So I’ve just finished reading First Steps, an odd kind of historical compilation of various Al-Anon documents, which taken together, poorly annotated and referenced, nonetheless manage to give a very clear picture of the organization’s early days—mercifully the founding members decided not to call it “The AA Wives’ Auxiliary,” even though the unintentionally hilarious watercolor illustrations all depict them wearing white gloves and pearls and anxious smiles, like graduates of secretarial schools named for ladies, who now can’t decide whether they should ask the cook to make chilled aspic or deviled eggs for Sunday dinner.
For example, speaking of dissenting voices, the charming piece below. I wish I knew when and where it had originally appeared; I’ve tried to ballpark its provenance by studying the typeface of the reproduction, which explains why I’m so vague with the attribution. No matter. The issue is still, je t’assure, right there to be dealt with, if you have a problem with someone’s drinking or sobriety (as the preamble says).
Is this what it means to be restored to sanity? Somehow I can’t believe that it is. Yes, Jim’s home sober now, sometimes, but that’s the only difference. He’s hitting AA just as hard as he ever hit the bottle. And I’m worried. Before someone jumps up and says that I’m resentful, I’ll say it myself. Maybe I am. I think worried is a better word. I’m worried because I see him developing into a man with a one-track mind. I’m worrying because my children have no more father now than they ever had and, above all, I’m worried because I don’t know how to help.
