volume control

Whew. Today was H A R D.

I sort of wish I had a volume control on today's emotions and thoughts and physical sensations...

I'm laughing a little bit as I type away here on the internet. When I first heard of Blogs I thought --There is NO WAY I would keep my journal on the internet. Crazy.

But I think I'm writing my daily journal entry online. Absurd. Why not just dig up a pen and get my Travel Journal and write in there? Because if I do that, I won't write the Blog. And if I write a Blog, I won't do my daily writing. So here goes. Lucky I can take it all down and put it somewhere else in a minute when I come to my senses.

I went to my counselor today. The man at the front desk called him and said, “Your 10:00 o’clock appointment is HERE.” He turned to me and said, “C says he’s ‘thrilled.’” It was nice to be met with such jubilation. I suppose some members of the staff there know of my circumstances, at least tangentially, so they appreciate what it must have taken for me to walk in the door at 10:00 o’clock in the morning. Cool. I was crying my therapeutic tears even before C entered the room and pulled up his chair for my fifty minutes of intense presence and witnessing of suffering. “I’m crying already,” I greeted him.

I went to the Poetry Center with S to pick up and drop off reels and disks of the digitized poetry readings he’s working on for them. S introduced me to R and BJ. I’d met them before, and even worked with BJ when I taught English Composition at the university and she helped me develop some lesson plans and a tour of the Poetry Center. I felt a little dismayed to hobble in there with my grandfather’s cane, wearing a shirt that I’d washed in a load with a blue pen (the pen won), tear-stained, snuffly and rosy from my counseling session. I feebly explained/made the excuse, “I haven’t been teaching for a while because I’m sick but I’ll be back with my classes whenever I get back to teaching…” I murmured of my classes’ nice responses to the tour and my own enthusiasm for what the Center provided to support my curriculum. I felt a little weird, not being dressed like a Teacher, to be Outed as a Sick Person in a place where I used to be a Real Person. I guess it was a Close Encounter of the Work kind. EEEK. Not ready for THAT yet.

I cried with exhaustion before we even got back to S’s place. I’d been too nauseated all morning to take my meds. Too long without pain pills and it’s hard to “break the pain cycle,” said one medical professional recently. I had to try to eat something so I wouldn’t puke. I stood over the kitchen sink drinking a vanilla Ensure.

“What’s this?” S moved a cookie sheet off the stove.

“I was going to put a frozen pizza in the oven but then I didn’t get that far,” I said, lamely.

“No, no, no,” He said. “Don’t do that to a pizza… no cookie sheet. Just a bare-assed pizza.”

I snorted with laughter and spit Ensure all over the sink. I don’t know if it was the accumulated challenges of the day, the fact that I’d just finally taken a morphine pill, sheer giddiness from exhaustion, or what, but S’s muttering about a “bare-assed pizza” broke the spell of tragedy and drama and a complete and whole-body belief that I Just Can’t Take It Anymore. I stepped back from The Edge.

Once I got started, I just kept rolling… from bare-assed pizza to the idea of snorting Ensure, to the reason I’m drinking Ensure in the first place… CL recently expressed concern about nutritional aspects of my medical crisis and recommended that I drink it. “Ensure: not just for geezers anymore.” Of course, she uses it to help boost her training for marathons. Yeah, MARATHONS. Real ones. The ones with a bunch of MILES involved and times that are measured with HOURS in them. The ones where you RUN. With your legs. Not the little “marathons” used metaphorically by a partner in my neurosurgeon’s office to describe my expected recovery period, or by me to describe the “training” exercises I do to prepare for taking a walk down the driveway to get my mail out of the box, or to actually take a shower by myself before making a meal and putting the dishes in the dishwasher before I have to lie down again. Sheesh. Anyway, I’m drinkin’ Ensure. That sent me on another peel of laughter, as I wiped the nutritionally-fortified goo out of my hair and began to take off my clothes to take the second shower of the day. Then the delicious pleasure of the hot water and soap kicked in. I sat on the sturdy shower chair I brought over to S’s house along with a collection of other handicap assistance devices, thoughts of which sent me off on another tear of giggles so that S peeked in at me with concern.

We talked about this burgeoning idea for a novel that I’ve been tossing around for a day or two now. S and I joked about a possible title. “That’s a good name for a novel, or an album,” he laughed. (No, I’m not going to reveal it here… it’s one of those Writing in Process things and to broadcast it would be bad luck or something. But you know what I’m talking about… insert your own running joke theme and you’ll get the picture better than you would if I told you the specific words around our magnificent idea.)

“Write it down in your lyrics journal,” I said. “Along with Bare-Assed Pizza. That’s a good name for something. Maybe that’s the pizza joint where the main characters in my book hatch their plot.” I described to S how suddenly I had a picture of the street, the pizza place, the four or five main characters and how they dressed… all of that playing out like meta-animation, where you see the colors filling in the lines in rapid succession and the whole imaginary world is laid out before you. “That’s so cool when that happens,” I finished.

He leaned over and scrawled some notes in his little book of inspiration. He hasn’t done it much lately, so I watched with some satisfaction. I’m a wanna-be muse for this sensitive, gentle, caring, humorous, sexy, talented musician.

“I’m on writing fire,” I told S when he asked if I was going to start working on his website. “I’ll work on your website when I’m done writing.” There is no way I’m going to squelch my desire to write today, not the way I feel right now. It has something to do with the Volume Control thing. I can’t for the life of me recall what was so damned important to write, though I think the fire started with the idea that I’d damn well better get Those Words down--and fast--or they would be gone. I don’t know if I got Those Words in yet; NOW the fire is sustained by the drug of the writing process.

It really is like a drug, too. Add the satisfaction of words appearing beneath fingertips or at the end of a pen to the morphine and little caloric infusion and being clean and being in bed in my most comfy nighty and whew… I am HIGH. I feel GOOD now. I felt very, very bad for most of the day.

It’s not so bad when it’s good stuff that is on HIGH VOLUME, though it is still exhausting. I’m at the highest possible intensity because gratitude and the sheer extremity of contrary sensations is enough to launch every nerve ending, every thought synapse, every reaction and formulated ideation into Technicolor for me at the moment. THIS IS LIVING, boy howdy. I’m TURNED ON, and LOUD. I’m alive, and I feel it today.

I often feel the despair of inhabiting a region very near to the Cliffs of Giving Up. A good stiff wind from the direction of Pain, a fiercely curtailed telephone conversation with the Ex (who has been officially diagnosed by my counselor as having “narcissistic rage” because I’ve somehow wounded him so badly that his psyche is too injured to have any LOGICAL dealings with me in order to DO SOMETHING to help our six-year-old who adamantly maintains to his counselor at school that he wants to be DEAD), or any other massive stressor that breezes by the walls of this fragile shack of emotional shelter threatens to blow me over the Edge. And we can’t have that now, can we?

Today I told C that I want to take out a legal pad and write out a PLAN for how to deal with my life right now, and he said, “Okay, why don’t we do that? Here, I’ll write for you.” He grabbed my legal pad and a purple pen and wrote in block letters that filled up the entire legal sized page: TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOURSELF.

“Take the Scarlet O’Hara approach to all of this,” he urged. “Think about it tomorrow.” He is in unanimous agreement with everyone else I’ve discussed the situation with, whether he or they would put exactly like this or not: Fuck It.

Until I heal, until I can get strong enough to care for my own sorry self AND my children, I can’t do a thing about it. Let’s not even bring up any thoughts about keeping up the house and yard and pool, and certainly don’t think about earning money to pay all the medical bills and utility bills and mortgage. And don’t even think I’m anywhere near up to considering the idea of working to fulfill some higher purpose in addition to gathering money and putting the decimal points further along the string of numbers…

Driving back to S’s house this afternoon, we passed a lumbering Coca Cola truck. A few minutes later, we came to a point where the lanes merge. The big red truck roared up beside us. “He’s going to floor it to merge,” S said in irritated disbelief. “Why would you floor it to merge if you were driving a Coke truck?”

“Because you gotta get to the next stop on the delivery route, and you’re probably already running late, and your kid has Little League practice and if you’re not home on time your wife is going to have a hissy fit. You haven’t had sex in two months, and you’re a little frustrated because you’d really rather NOT be driving a Coke truck. You wanted to be an actor. This isn’t QUITE what you had in mind for your life.”

“Wow,” S said. “You and your fast talking…. I guess you have to be able to talk fast to be a good writer.”

“To be a good writer, you need to write,” I said. “Sometimes you need to NOT talk.”

I think there’s some relationship between the fast talking that can drive S crazy, and creativity/productivity, and the speed of thinking and the way ideas can get backed up in my brain if I don’t take my time to write. If I don’t get my writing fix, then I’ll start talking too much, too fast, and he won’t like it.

A little while ago he said, “It’s okay that you’re doing that.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked. “Something like, ‘Yeah, sure, sit there and type your blog or your journal… it doesn’t matter that you said you would write a web page for me weeks ago and it’s still not up, and I went to all that trouble this morning to go get your computer so you could work on the web page, but that’s okay… just do what you’re doing…’?”

He nodded, “Yeah, something like that.”

But first I have to take note of the conversation I had with C about Bill Maher (sp?) today… how C thinks he’s getting a little too arrogant and grandiose and how he didn’t handle hecklers very well the other day on his show… I had complained that Bill Maher said that while it’s a crime for a twenty-eight-year old male teacher to fondle or fuck a thirteen-year-old female student, it’s not so bad for a twenty-eight-year-old female teacher to have sex with young male students. To bring Michael Jackson and his alleged malfeasance into the mix, Maher said that for him, it would have been less traumatizing to have been gently masturbated by a pop star than it was to have been brutally punched and kicked by a gang of bullies. I heartily disagree with Bill Maher on that one. As much as I stand up and applaud when he goes off on Bush and his tragic antics, I would have to tell Bill to ask those young male students about how NOT hurtful that was when they’re about thirty-five. C agreed; he said that kind of talk is just perpetuating a myth. “Yes, ask them NOW what it has done to their lives.” Not to diminish the pain of being brutalized by bullies. It’s just that there isn’t really a scale on which to rank those sorts of horrible childhood experiences. It’s all bad. Mean people suck.

Of course I don’t get to do ANY of this justice. I’m too tired to read up on my issues, cite authority, or even develop my own ideas/assertions fully. For example, I don’t even know if this is the season for Little League. I’m not POSITIVE I spelled Bill Maher’s name correctly. There are way too many words in some of these sentences. This is definitely First Draft writing. But I’ll tell you what: I feel better. I got my writing fix. The volume is turned down sufficiently so that I can turn my concentration elsewhere. I can exhale, and close one computer application and open another one and not even shift my bodily position. Without much ado, maybe I can toss up a simple website, a little something to help S. Maybe I can make him smile, maybe take away a little bit of his stress, maybe make him feel that he hasn’t been wrong to believe that I might actually do what I said I would do. And that, my friends, will be a very nice, satisfying way to end my day. To actually accomplish something real will be very, very good.