Physiology and Bullshit

My son had reconstructive surgery on his knee three months ago.  It was grueling.  He was the starting quarterback for his high school for exactly one day.  (Three quarters, to be precise.)  And then the torn ACL,torn MCL, and torn miniscus.  Tears.  Surgery.  Hydrocodone.  Crutches.  Rehab.  All he wants is to play football.  He's ready to go win back that spot as starting quarterback for his senior year - doing everything his orthopedic surgeon told him to do, every day ... all day.

Today was his three-month checkup.  Today was supposed to be the day he was able to run without reservation.  God, he was stoked.  Since this (last?) appointment was during the school day, I didn't go with him.  I went to every other appointment with him.  This one was supposed to be just a check-check.  Nope.  Life is never that easy, is it?   His knee is ... lax.  Whatever the fuck that means, I don't know.   The doctor didn't like the way his tendon moved - the tendon that same doctor performed surgery on for three hours.  So, now .. well, the doctor isn't sure.

Did he fall?  Is the tendon not attached properly?  We probably need another ($1500) MRI.  If the doctor doesn't like what he sees, we do the whole surgery again.  Again.

Again.

I would do anything to take this away from my son.  His pain is worse than any pain I feel.  I just want him to live his life on his own terms, especially after so much work.  But you know what?  Life never works like that.  Nothing can ever be easy.  Paying $15,000 for a surgery isn't enough.  We need two of them.  Are you fucking kidding me??

I give up.  Doing good or trying to be good or whatever is useless.  Bad shit happens every day all the time.  Whoever said life is good was naive and delusional.  For every moment of happiness, there are a thousand moments of pain.

It's Not Him, It's Me

I've come to the (nearly unbearable) conclusion that as much as I detest my marriage, my husband is a nicer person than me.  I hate him, and he tolerates me.  By simple logic, that fact dictates that he is a better human being.  I don't want to tolerate him, and I can't get the animosity I feel towards him out of my brain.  When I see him or look at him, I feel ... anger.  He may or may not feel the same things, but he is much better at hiding it than me.  So (according to the dictates of social mores) he wins.  I am always the hater, and he is always the victim.

Shit.  Shit.  Shit.

I wish I could do that thing that most people are able to do, which is to fake my way through troublesome situations.  I can do it only as long as the situation has an end in sight, and since this one does not, I cannot fabricate my way through it.  This is the only life I have, after all.  I wonder if, in caring so much about everything, I have created a situation wherein I have to cut out those things (and people) which cause me grief.  It's what I've always done, but I am unable to extricate myself from this particular situation.  I think that's the crux.  I feel too much of everything, all the time.  I am on sensory, emotional overload.

Shit.  Shit.  Shit.

Blame It on the ADD

I’ve written novels – dozens of them –

Full of beautiful, flawed, rich characters struggling with life.

They all build beautifully to a denouement and then ebb,

Leaving possibility and potential, and sometimes death, in their wake. 

I am Fitzgerald and Foer, Roth and Hemingway.

I’ve written songs.  Songs so powerful and deep that they linger in the air long after the final note.

Guitar in hand, I play the chords and sing from the recesses of my soul.

I play in packed stadiums with 20,000 people singing my lyrics back to me,

And I drink in the adulation of my fans, humbled.

I am Pearl Jam at Alpine Valley and Florence at The Hollywood Bowl.

And poems, hundreds of them - each line a story unto itself.

The cadence and meter and imagery dance off the page

In a maelstrom of beauty.

My metaphors create life, and my punctuation can destroy it.

I am cummings and Whitman, Eliot and Sexton.

My movies stun audiences and win awards,

Because they show the human condition in both its depraved and glorious moments.

When I climb the stairs to the stage and receive my awards

I thank my children for inspiring me to be the best possible version of myself.

I am the next Martin Scorsese.

Most artists would be overwhelmed by my blizzard of creativity,

But not me.

You see, I don’t have to be overwhelmed by things that only exist in my head.

Blame it on the ADD.

I am no one. 

Homeland Security

Only a believer could love this house

Could believe that this creaky old thing might become a home

Could look into the empty spots and see a future fire burning, a future meal cooking, a future family.

I saw those things here – I imagined them true.

I bought appliances and furniture and knickknacks.

I created a family and put them here with me.

All of those things, of course, require protection from the elements

So I tucked smoke alarms and fire extinguishers and CO detectors among my things -

An emergency system to warn against harm.

But there was no warning system for the other toxins that creep into a home:

Subtle anger that blooms into rage and then settles into apathy in the corners.

Those things appear quietly, insidiously.

There were warning signs, certainly; little lights that went off – alarms that sounded.

But those alarms weren’t connected to an outlet or a battery, and we didn’t hear them soon enough.

And so the home turned back into a house and burned to the ground. 

Communication Breakdown

A new low today.

As I've written (ad nauseum ...), my husband I do not communicate.  He wants to stare at a tv and occasionally made chitchat about football, basketball, hockey, curling (fuck, I don't know), and I want to talk about things which are my reality (not other peoples').  I lose every day.  If I try to talk about house maintenance or love or the future, I am being confrontational and mean.  So ... whatever.

But today, we drove to my child's basketball game together, and the minute he got in my car (because I always have to drive for some reason), he put in his ear plugs and watched a Liverpool soccer game on his phone.

Fuck you, sir.

America the (Used-To-Be?) Beautiful

Every day in the pages of American periodicals, we hear the same story:  conflict.  The conflict in America is laughable compared to the bloody, ceaseless, devastating carnage in other countries.  I don't want to diminish the pain and suffering of Americans, because I know it's all to real and painful, but we do not have mass graves filled with freshly murdered bodies lying in either our inner cities or our suburbs.  We do not occasionally encounter hordes of armed teenagers ready to shoot us because of their allegiance to a rebel group.  We do not live in constant fear of open-air bombings tearing apart farmer's markets or shopping malls.

And yet ...

We Americans complain incessantly.  About everything.

Our government, too, complains about everything.  Our elected officials, whose jobs are pretty cushy and pay very well (a paycheck which lasts forever, by the way), bitch about everything the current administration is doing.  I'm not just talking about Obama; I'm talking about every president, no matter what he's currently doing.  Health care for all?  Socialism!  Anti-drug laws?  Personal Infringement!  Immigration reform?  Hippie Liberalism!  Ending foreign wars?  Cowardice!

It's all bullshit.  People can point to Iraq and its current state of chaos and blame the president for pulling out of that country, but who in their right might would stay in such a vortex of suckage?  Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Central African Republic ... America can't fix everyone's problems.  America (and it's elected officials) are too busy trying to keep their disgustingly profitable jobs (apparently by creating traffic jams, Chris Christie staffers...) to actually DO their jobs.  And I'm sorry military hawks, but just because American blood was spilled in Iraq, we don't need to "finish the job" over there, or even "go back to help".  American people are suffering from gross, financial inequality.  Maybe we ought to spend some of that egregious military budget on improving the infrastructure of our own country.  Maybe, just maybe, self-sufficiency is how nations become great.  Maybe, just maybe, all we have to do is look at the continent of Africa to see how great foreign intervention is:  Hacked up, carved up territories wherein people murder one another, and innocent people fear not only their governments, but each other.

America is TOO BIG.  We total something like 370 million people now, and we have reached critical mass.  We will never agree.  Kurt Vonnegut had it right when he predicted the "Balkanized States of America" in Slaughterhouse Five.  America cannot afford all its vainglorious habits, thus the average American citizen has to pain for that governmental pomposity.  Socialism is only a bad word in the the American lexicon.  Why?  Because America is a nation which has gravitated to be a nation of, for, and by The Rich.  The rest of us are screwed.  We will work ourselves into the grave to pay for the things which we have been told we need, ignoring the idea of freedom upon which this amazing country was founded.

I, for one, am ready to reclaim those rights bestowed upon me by our Founding Fathers.  Or ... I'll pray for the zombie apocalypse.  I'm not sure what to wish for at this point.  Our country is going down the toilet because of ideological differences which are vapid, at best.  We disagree just to disagree.  We disagree to have cocktail conversations.  We disagree to get reelected (or get elected in the first place).  And all that disagreement gets us nowhere.

Come on, America.  We're better than this.

'Merica

I don't know if a person could be more existentially disturbed than by watching television in America today.  What the fuck is going on up in here?  ADD theater, all day, every day.  I made the mistake of channel surfing, and ... oh my god.  We are a bunch of fucking idiots.  I include myself, because I was just part and parcel to that shitfest.

Learn Something

Here's the new educational plan:  everyone should take their heads out of their asses.

The problem, it seems, is not education, per se, but people.  You see, people are stupid.  They act like herd animals and they care primarily about material things and they put themselves first in nearly every situation.  Are some people altruistic?  Yes, of course.  They are few and far between, and they don't always act altruistically.  What's left the rest of the time?  Selfishness, narcissism, and vainglory.  (Sigh.)  I want to love people; it's just that they don't usually give me reason to.

Education:  (again)  go ... Germany is teaching religious tolerance towards Muslims in some of its public schools.  Why, you ask, would a public school system need to teach religious tolerance to little children?  Because their parents don't.   People in general are under the (mistaken) impression that everything they think is correct, simply because it's in their head.

It's quite possible, fellow humans, to be ... wrong.  Most of us are wrong, quite frequently, in fact.  And just because we have held an assumption or a belief for as long as we can remember does not make that idea correct.  It simply makes that idea familiar and thus comfortable.

People need to get out of their comfort zones more often.  (Myself included.)   The world is an enormous place, and most people are not like you.  Or like me.  Because everyone is different.  That should be a good thing.  Embrace it.

Interruptions and Thought Abuse

I will never be a writer.  Never.  I can’t get other fucking people away from me long enough to write anything meaningful.  I try to cajole them simply to get the hell out of my space.  GET THE FUCK AWAY!  But they won’t.  They won’t leave me alone.  I cannot be alone inside of my own home or inside of my own head.  They fucking pester and talk and whine and INTERRUPT until I am so fucking annoyed and irritated and off-track that I have no hope of ever writing anything coherent or decisive or original or devoted or creative.  All I want is for them to fuck off and leave me to my own senses.  LEAVE ME ALONE.  Let me hide in my bunker and write.  Let me tap into the part of my soul that needs expression.  Let me write something meaningful. 

They don’t know how to go away.  They don’t understand how important it is for me to be alone in my own head.  They don’t care.  They want.  They.  Want.  Everybody just wants shit from other people.  They don’t stop to consider the emotional (and physical) toll it takes on the people from whom they want.  I suppose I shouldn’t have made my specific life choices if I didn’t subconsciously want people to need me, but … come on.  There is a time and a place for codependency, and every, single day is not it. 

I want to be able to enjoy a cocktail and a cigarette, alone.   Without looks and commentary and judgment about how this stupid fucking cigarette is going to kill me.   You know what’s going to kill me?  The fact that people won’t get the fuck out of my space and let me be who I am.  I shouldn’t have to feel guilty for being who I am, and yet society has done a great job of ruining fun for the sake of fun.  Or maybe it’s just the way my brain is wired:  I forgot how to just be myself during the process of “growing up” and “becoming responsible”.  (Both of which are overrated, by the way.)

I would just like to bathe in my own thoughts without interruption, and then periodically write those thoughts down in an uninterrupted stream of words which might eventually amount to something.   People used to have the ability to entertain themselves; I think it’s a lost and forgotten art. 

Flash Drives Only Work When Inserted

I just spent the last four days gutting and rearranging and otherwise editing one of my previous novels.  I sit down at my computer to pull up the text, and … I don’t have it.  It’s not saved on my computer or either of my two writing flash drives.  This is clearly a sign that I should not, in fact, try to be a writer.  There is no way in hell that I’m retyping that whole book again.  I ran out of firewood last night; maybe I should just use all this paper to light a fire.  While I’m at it, I’ll throw in all the random blog posts from the past couple of years, my notes, and all of my school curriculum.  A funeral pyre seems like the only rational plan for a person who tries to be something they’re not.

The next logical step in my lifelong quest to figure out what I should do with my hours and days and months and years obviously begins with an application to Whole Foods. 

I can’t be a J.D. Salinger.  I can’t build a bunker in my backyard and retreat to it for week-long stretches, ignoring my family.  I don’t have World War II haunting and inspiring me to write inspiringly sad fiction about the state of mankind.  I also don’t have the attention span or the fortitude to create another entirely different family (The Glass clan) with whom I share more in common than my own family.  (I’m also not tall enough.)

I can’t be Ernest Hemingway.  My prose isn’t tight enough, and I tend to ramble on about things which would be better left unsaid.  Hemingway also had a World War about which to reminisce and recount.  I can’t take off to Europe to expatriate myself and sit in a café all day writing about the people who come and go.  (Neither do I have his capacity to consume liquor and alienate my family.)  (And I also can’t grow a fatherly beard.)

I can’t even be that chick who wrote the 50 Shades trilogy.   Could I write some cheesy, shitty, stupid, cliché about S&M?  Probably.  But I would never forgive myself.  My standards are higher than my ability to write.  (I probably couldn’t write her shitty prose either; who am I kidding?)

When I read Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, I thought I should never write again, simple because I can never make magic like that happen in someone’s head.  I’m not creative enough to personify death and make readers feel sorry for him.  All I can do is whine about not saving a manuscript that wasn’t very good in the first place. 

If only I could tap into that place in my head where the original novels and movies stream constantly.  It’s there, because I see the scenes constantly.  I just can’t get them here on this damn screen.