Category: My Life Story

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Charleston, West Virginia Earth, Pink, Mothers, Love My Life Story Writings

Hillbillies

Now that I’m on my own I have been forced to assimilate more with the culture around me.

I’ve been wanting to write about hillbillies for a while but it isn’t easy. Because the culture exists on a different plane that I haven’t reached yet. It’s a long slow fall towards the center of the earth.

If I HAD to sum things up with a few symbols I’d choose beer, whiskey, marijuana, beans, potatoes, corn bread, cast iron, dune buggies, family, nature, guns and mason jars. Sound boring? Well it is. It’s a boredom that causes one part of yourself to die while another part opens up.

The best way I can describe it is this…. Imagine you have to spend the next 8 hours listening to your slowest, least talkative friend while sitting on the hillside in a forest. He is going to tell you the story of how he built his house, board by board, brick by brick. You are going to sit there and listen.

Behind you are 48 cans of beer. To your right is a gigantic pipe stuffed with marijuana. You are free to partake but you neither drink nor smoke.

The story begins. You try hard to focus. ‘This will be great. I’m learning something.’ you tell yourself. ‘Maybe one day I’ll want to build a house and this information will be useful.’ For the next forty minutes your brain strains, trying to extract nutrients from the story.

Then you reach a cracking point. A feeling of unbearable restlessness builds up inside you. You panic and reach for a beer.

As you drink the story continues. Nail, board, nail board. It’s as boring as fuck but the beer is starting to relax you. You sink down a little into the boredom. Nail beer, nail beer. Board. House. It’s boring. It’s boring. You will survive. You reach for another beer.

But another hour and you want to get the fuck out of there. Seriously? Oh my fucking God. You know what? Maybe you’ll try that marijuana. You smoke it and start to notice how the leaves sway with the story.

Your mind breaks up like clouds and the story washes all over you. Is he talking about a house or is it a parable for your life? You look at your friend. Was he always this insightful? You’ve known him for many years and only now you’re seeing him for the first time? You lie back on the ground and realize he’s lying there too. You briefly consider making love to him then remember you aren’t gay. The story continues.

Clouds nails boards. Clouds nails boards. The story is more boring than ever but the boredom becomes a brown flood washing over you. Your body is the house. Your friend is rebuilding it. You are rushing away in the brown waters. The past is sweeping over you and forgotten scenes from your life start returning to your mind. How did you forget so much? You’ve lived your life in a daze, haven’t you? Distracting yourself with mental puzzles that ultimately meant nothing.

And now you’re solid. Seeing the world with new eyes. You look at your friend and he seems more real than ever before. He is a potato and you are one too. It’s beautiful.

Another hour passes. Nail, board, hoard, woard. The panic arises again. I can’t take this! And then a thought… WE ARE FREE BEINGS!!!! “We don’t have to sit here Buddy!” you scream. “We are to free to go!” Light flashes in your friend’s eyes and he starts running to the nearby trail where his dune buggy is parked. You run behind him. Exhilaration. You climb in while he drives, going faster and faster than ever before. It feels like bliss until you crash and then you are flying.

When at last you come to, you realize your friend is lying on the ground beside you. He is still telling you the story of how he built his house. Nail, board. Nail, board. Your head hurts and so does your body. But it will be alright. You lie there and listen. It’s a pretty good story after all.

The End.

This is how life in West Virginia feels to an outsider anyway. I don’t know how it feels to insiders and probably never will since ‘Don’t ask don’t tell.’ along with ‘Keep it Nasty!’ are the two mottos of the region. I try to make sense of it all but this world is so dense, dark, compacted and gravitous I sometimes feel I’m being buried alive. I start to panic. Then I reach for my pipe.*

Hi!

But for reals its like I’m learning a new way of thinking. Less speed and more solid. I think its called patience. You just crack open a beer and observe while the people and things around you reveal their true nature.

* I don’t really have a pipe.

The other day a friend pulled out his knife to carve an X on my to go box. What’s that? I asked. Rebel Flag, he said.
A man gave me this old tackle box when I admired it.
A friend of a friend gave me this warm shirt. People are very nice here if you can be accepted but that is a long and tricky process involving nuances I don’t understand. If you are a friend of a friend though you get a free visitors pass.
I ate Thanksgiving in a bikers bar. They had Turkey, stuffing, pie and all the works that you could enjoy for free. You don’t need to be rich or successful to matter here. Only humble, hard working, down to earth & preferably related. I’m none of those.
Slippers and I have been reunited. This has stopped the nighttime panics of hyperventilating with the need to tell her I love her. Her presence is grounding and she makes me feel more at home.

Categories
Charleston, West Virginia My Life Story On My Own Writings

The Heart Protector

Did you know your Heart has a friend who follows him through life with only one goal- to protect? This friend is called The Heart Protector.

When you get heart broken or betrayed The Heart Protector can sink into depression. Where did he go wrong? How did he let his friend down?

Maybe he learns something, makes sense of his mistakes & goes back to work.

Or maybe he’s not sure what he did wrong. He moves into a state of hyper vigilance to ensure this never happens again. He builds new walls thick and crusty. The Heart lives inside these walls & starts to be deprived of light.

The Heart Protector builds walls in many ways. He may become paranoid & carry a magnifying glass looking for tiny red flags. He may become cynical & tell himself Love doesn’t exist. He may even reach the point of believing that Knights & Unicorns never walked the earth.

He can make you critical. Pointing out flaws in anyone who gets close. He can make you queasy at the thought of one day walking hand and hand with someone wearing matching pajamas.

He gives you reasons to reject people before they reject you. He fills your legs with adrenaline and tells you to run. Run to the river and drown yourself. He has a million ways of protecting his friend.

Recently my Heart Protector has been too tight & its hard to sing. I can’t catch my breath. I don’t want to go out and see people. I do it anyway but a part of me stays inside. I don’t want to write songs because there’s nothing to say. And no one to hear me.

I don’t know what I am supposed to have learned from my experiences or what I did wrong. I don’t know how to not let the same thing happen again. The Heart Protector is in a state of confusion. What to do? What to do?

So like the genius I am I’ve been trying to learn songs to make other people like me. My friend Arthur plays Sweet Home Alabama with me and Country Roads take me home. We play a gig which requires carrying 500 pounds of equipment for miles with the help of a grocery cart, setting up, playing for two hours, taking it down & carrying it back home. We make about 3 dollars each. I’m a bit worried about survival.

I can only hope popularity will help me survive. I want to reflect the culture back to itself so people will like me. Confederate flags are popular here. So are guns, knives, dicks, motorcycles, alcohol, drugs and nature.

Downtown Charleston West Virginia
A West Virginia Birthday cake. Do you see those two round cakes above it? It turns out they were boob cakes and I ate a slice when offered having no idea what I was eating. I am still trying to come to terms with this.
The view from a West Virginia bar. If you combined this pic with one of a man driving 100 mph off a cliff in a motorized easy chair while high on mushrooms it would pretty much sum up the area.
Giving a redneck hello to a guy(?) in a bar. My Yankee friends always assume the people down here are close minded. They don’t understand they are weirder than fuck.
Burning a red candle in a desperate attempt to stave off the cold. The mug is resting on a tin of chewing tobacco.
I finally had to decorate my bedroom because it was feeling too much like a prison cell. The theme is Friends. I am now expecting Dinosaurs and Elephants to come into my life.
Categories
Charleston, West Virginia My Life Story On My Own Uncategorized Writings

Bracing Myself

Sometimes I think men are about changing the outer world while women are about changing on the inside to find the magic in what is.

I feel art is a feminine activity…. it lets people transform by seeing beauty in new things. To step outside the judgments which cage their perceptions. Art that simply caters to current tastes dulls the senses like being hooked up to a masturbation machine. Artists have to follow their own muse oblivious to the taste of the people.

The point is not to please nor to shock. But to deliver a fresh stream of water that people can choose to align their psyche with should they need it. The fresh input allows inner things to reconfigure and helps flush out the gunk.

It’s the same with thoughts. Fresh perspectives have value, even if you don’t happen to need that perspective at the moment. At least it will be there offering you a mental alternative should you ever get stuck in the future.

Whether songs are good or bad and perspectives right or wrong seems besides the point. They are crayons you can add to your crayon box just in case. A color you dislike now may appeal in the future.

I’m saying all this because I want to write about hillbillies and am bracing myself for the backlash. I have yet to recover my nerve from when people attacked me for writing about poor people. It doesn’t matter that I was praising poor people & pointing out that they might be fairies in disguise. In fact people seemed angry that I wasn’t describing the poor as miserable beings leading a pointless existence.

I internalized these attacks to where I became afraid to see my own experience of poverty in a magical light. I wish I could return to that lens though. It made me feel safe and uplifted.

But when autumn came I went into panic mode…. I must figure out how to make a living now or I’m going to die! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! And the more I panic the more I can’t think at all.

So I may just have to accept the possibility that I will end up living under a bridge getting stabbed to death by a mugger because so far no better plan has come to mind.

Maybe if I had the confidence to stay on my own wavelength rather than trying to be Tarzan the Dentist I could think more clearly. Maybe a possibility for how to survive would come to mind, maybe something I could actually do.

Cause the more I try to be a lumberjack the more my brain seizes and my body freezes and I can’t function at all.

All my life I’ve felt this guilt about not being a lumberjack, a gladiator, a professional boxer. I’m never hearty, tough, dirty and hard scrabble enough to please the people around me.

James was the first person to accept me as I was and that caused a lot of my psychological problems to clear up. I stopped needing to match the color of my ice cream to the color of my shoes. I could tolerate a wider range of colors, sounds and smells which let me function more normally.

But none of this happened because he was trying to change me. Its because he accepted me as I was. If I needed white ice cream topped with white sauce and white sprinkles he would help me find it until eventually I didn’t need it anymore. He always told me to trust myself and no matter how far out my preferences were he never tried to force me into conventional ways of being. Paradoxically this made me feel more at peace with conventions until I could see them as sources of comfort. Because I’d become comfortable with myself.

But now that I’m facing annihilation the panic returns that I must become someone else to survive. A gladiator. A lesbian. A mailman. A criminal. I must shut the fuck up and find something heavy to lift at once. Then I’ll be safe.

A baby walrus I found at a flea market. I listed him for sale on eBay like a damn slave. I am wondering if I can become a stuffed animals dealer.
A quilted bear I also found and listed.
A mustard package from biscuit world…. something about this color scheme really blew me away… it looks so warm and grounded yet also inviting adventure…. maybe these are the colors of the future?
I ate a plate of poison mushrooms, projectile vomited them over my whole apartment & ended up in the ER. They were jack o lantern mushrooms & I can only hope I gained some special jack o lantern powers from them.
A stone a man gave me. Is he a keeper?
Downtown Charleston WV. I like it. But I’m not certain if it likes me. I feel I don’t have any of the traits that are valued here, like being super tough and down to earth.

Categories
Charleston, West Virginia My Life Story On My Own Writings

The Violet Box

Having lost all roots I crave the feeling of security. A taste of home. Home is partially this sense of safety in our minds released by certain colors, smells, sounds and vibrations. Probably ones that remind you of whatever brought you peace in childhood.

For me it is violets, dandelions, buttercups, green grass, clouds and skies. Lace handkerchiefs and tea sets painted with flowers. Stories about bears, knights and frogs setting out on adventures. Candies in glass dishes and cookies with pictures pressed into them.

Safety is walking with my grandmother into a restaurant where we place matching orders for a fish sandwich and glass of chocolate milk. These are brought to us by a waiter in coattails with a sprig of parsley on the side. She gives me little gifts on these outings. A tiny diamond pressed into a golden shell. We discuss scented soaps and bubble baths. Then return to her house to look through her collection of porcelain dogs. She lets me choose one to keep.

Security is sitting on the sofa with my mom as she reads me books. Animals in formal clothing risk everything for friendship. They set off across vast landscapes to chase dreams and fulfill noble ideals. She reads to me in the formal living room where everything is shiny, polish and floral. The piano sits to my left. He listens. Glen the koala bear sits on my lap. The stories go straight to his heart since he is an animal too. I am wearing clothes my mother made me and they are stitched with scenes of animals. The yellow sun is shining through the window.

Security is the heart shaped box painted with violets I kept on my dresser. Everyday I climb a chair to touch its smooth surface and then stroke the cactus who lives next to him. He grows inside a porcelain pot the shape of a cat. I talk to the cactus and fill him with a sense of love and self-worth to face the day ahead. I talk to everything around me to give them strength and encouragement. My animals, my dolls, my knights, my scented soaps. I touch them with my finger while explaining to them how special they are. How important their life is. I do this with plants, worms, and human babies as well. Sometimes it gets exhausting.

The other vibe from childhood was sports. Sports, sports, sports, competitive games & competition. Life was a competitive sport where victory was fleeting and humiliation eternal. I never resonated with this part.

But the female side was all about beauty. All my female relatives loved to decorate and shop for beautiful things. I did too. It filled me with a sense of awe. I spent a week contemplating if I should buy a tiny glass snake. I finally decided I should and took him home to place him on my Cherokee drum so he could dance while I played it. Glass, porcelain, and cotton are soothing to me. When things are clean, prim, old fashioned and expensive I feel safe.

Not that I live this way. But at least in my mind I can return to that porcelain heart box. Then a sense of optimism & power overtakes me. The world cannot change me.

Categories
Blue, Black, Silver, Water, Moons, Death & Ghosts Charleston, West Virginia My Life Story On My Own Writings

A Time To Be Blue

Summer is over. I feel so sad. It was beautiful, all the green and sun melting everything down. I gave myself those three months to live as an idiotic welfare queen while adjusting to single life. Summer is all about hearts and love. I wish it could last forever.

But now comes the fall. A time for brains and being serious. Its color will be blue. I’m afraid I won’t cut it in this crisp new world. Only 9 months until the women’s shelter stops paying for my home. I need good ideas to enter my brain, but they don’t.

I haven’t crisped yet. I’m trying but the sun is still hot and yellow, melting brains down and hearts feel like fire. The sky is so blue, the EBT cupcakes so delicious. Everything green and frothy. I want to roll in the grass like a pig.

The world is a green paradise but beneath it a dark soil of fear, pain and panic. I bat it down with stress gummies & cough syrup. I say “It is what it is” when disturbing thoughts enter. This locks them in a magical box. I can’t face life head on yet. I’m not safe.

And until I get smart I won’t be safe. I need to think clearly and formulate a plan. But life is a bowl of puzzles and I can’t solve one of them. The second I use my brain I start to cry. I feel like my initial goal of becoming a millionaire this fall is not going to happen.

So I’m choosing a smaller goal. To become a good communicator and learn how to clearly express my needs and desires. To express my will. Which is hard because I’m not always sure if I have one.

When you’re a wife, you don’t need a will. Being willess is almost an asset since it gives you increased flexibility like a body with no bones. But then fate dumps you on the streets and you are expected to have a will. A will as strong as any man’s. People don’t realize wills can’t pop up overnight like a forest.

The only time I am sure of my will is when I am hungry or in extreme pain. Cause I have the will to survive. But even then speaking up on behalf of myself feels like sticking my hand in a blender. I am terrified of displeasing the people around me. This isn’t the same as wanting people to like me. I’m willing to be hated to give the people what they want. Cause sometimes they want a bad guy. They would generally prefer to keep the good guy role for themselves.

Wanting to please & wanting to live up to social expectations are two different worlds. People are rarely in the mood to admire someone. More commonly they need someone to feel superior to. This is where I excel.

I’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember. Throwing myself under the bus to appease a hot spot in someone else’s psyche. If a friend needed to feel fast, I’d pretend to be slow. I’d lose contests on purpose so the other person could win. I’d perform horribly in plays so someone special in the audience could have the satisfaction of knowing I sucked. I don’t know why. Its just this feeling of terror that I can only be safe by giving people what they want.

I have my finger in the undercurrent of every dynamic. It makes me act strange because those undercurrents are intense. They are made up of things people don’t want to acknowledge. When you touch them they cause weird things to leap out of your mouth as though you are possessed. Like a touching a wire. But I need to release that underlying pressure to feel safe. If there is an undercurrent of anger I try to be the person it can be released upon. Then things feel safe again.

I don’t know how to stop doing this. So I’ll put that puzzle back in the bowl for now. And focus on the immediate task. To clearly express my needs and the desires to the extent that I am aware of them. Even when it seems certain to lead to pain and disaster. Perhaps as I express these bits of will, larger chunks of will will start drifting into my consciousness.

Every morning I’ll tell myself that as I speak up for myself, new doors open for me.

Two blue stones that I’ll keep in my pocket. I hope they teach me how to express myself.
Hillbilly diamonds found on a sidewalk. I hope they’ll make me rich.
Vines climb a barbed wire fence. I wish I could climb it too and reach those lights on the other side.

Mama I ain’t gonna lie. I gone done bad things.
Feeding bits of stick to ducks at night. Summer is so woozy. But you don’t see the bad part. I got here on a motorcycle. Somebody help me.


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Charleston, West Virginia men My Life Story Writings

Nice Guys

If I was a movie character I would be Rambo, no doubt.

The only way I can feel relaxed around men is when they are threatening to kill me.

Just today someone who had previously said he would curb stomp me then put me out of my misery with a bullet to the brain stem invited me for tacos.

I don’t enjoy being treated poorly but it makes me feel safe. I know what is expected of me. Compliance. In other contexts I don’t know how to function and start to panic. Like really panic.

First my kidneys seize up, then my brain shuts down. This isn’t good in social contexts because healthy people expect you to have a brain. They want you to be Captain of your Ship.

And I’m trying to rewire my brain into Captain Consciousness. But right now it freezes, scans for threats, monitors emotions & tries to glean the wills of other people so they can be followed. Cause it’s seized up in terror, especially around men and the nicer they are the worse the terror gets.

Nice guys feel like a dark fun house where the room is empty and silent and you don’t know which wall the clown is going to come busting through. The longer you have to wait, the worse the terror grows. Pins and needles until finally the clown pops to attack you. Now you can release a blood curdling scream and feel the pain of getting bludgeoned in the head, but regardless being attacked by a clown beats waiting to get attacked by one.

If I’m around a nice guy for extended periods of time, I become unable to move afterwards due to prolonged anxiety. First the kidneys seize, then the brains freeze, then the limbs. This state can last for hours or a day.

And its impossible to relax in his presence. Much less do the things expected of a modern woman like having a will and voice of your own. But these expectations are ridiculous. Can a man know what flavor of ice cream he wants while staring into the eyes of a cobra and trying to sway in just the right way to appease him? He wants whatever flavor the cobra wants because he is the cobra’s little bitch. Every human is a little bitch when they’re waiting for clowns to pop.

Nice guys feel like a tightrope stretched over the Grand Canyon. You know you’re going to make a misstep. Why not plunge to your death now and get it over with?

Missteps are certain because you don’t know the rules. They aren’t the rules you are used to, where doing & saying as little as possible is gold star behavior. Nice guys are fucking demanding. They want you to know your mind, express your mind, run your own business, be a cowgirl. Don’t take shit from no one, have a personality and know how to make your jeep jump like a frog.

Assholes only need you to not contradict them. Let them yell at you without defending yourself. Go into deep freeze mode so you can absorb quantities of anger without getting angry back. Blur out your brain so words wash over you like water. This is my skill set. But nice guys don’t value these skills. Good luck pleasing them.

And when you add to this the fact that the whole nice guy thing is probably an act and a woman eating lizard is going to bust out of his skin at any moment, you can see why they jack up my anxiety.

However, I am actively training my brain to be more positive. To believe in good things & seek them out. Because we won’t know how magical life is unless we look for magic & that all starts with believing. Or at least being open.

Yes, yes, my kidneys say, but also listen to this rhyme I just wrote!

What is a man but a clown in the dark?
Who clown clubs your head then jerks off in a park?

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Charleston, West Virginia My Life Story On My Own Uncategorized Writings

Sausage Links, Chains & Patties

Sometimes it is hard to write songs or even blog posts because I lose myself so easily and then I’m not on the right wavelength to tap the muse I want to tap.

And I know why. Because I have certain traits that aren’t socially acceptable, but when I detach from these traits I lose myself and have nothing to say.

There is a pressure to be everything at once but you can’t be. You have to pick your poison and then align with those people who can accept you as you are.

I have certain traits that are socially unacceptable- such as talking about dicks too much- but these traits are actually to cover up a set of traits even more socially unacceptable.

I read in a book once that everyone has a fake personality designed to cover their true weaknesses and this is definitely true for me. The bold act meek & the meek act bold.

Supposedly though, if you drop your compensating mask & allow your true self to shine through you will get much luckier. That is what I read in the book. But in my case it is easier said than done since my true self is a clear blob. How can I express that?

Anyway, let’s talk about sausages. They are my safe place.

What is a sausage?

A dick?

A man?

To me, a sausage is a paradise. The feeling of a moment stretching out in all directions. That bubble of eternity is one link on the sausage chain.

Or sometimes a sausage is a world set apart from other worlds. You are in the ocean and everything is blue, the ocean and the sky, like a blue pearl. That pearl is one link on the sausage chain.

I used to think women contained worlds and men lived inside them. But now I’m wondering if it is the reverse and all realities are created inside men’s dicks plus the dicks of giant men who live in the sky.

Men seem like magical beings to me, for better or worse.

They can change your sense of yourself until you are certain you are a worm.

Or they can lift you out of this world altogether into a link of the sausage chain you have never seen before.

Either way, don’t panic. There is a new link behind every bend and the chain goes on forever.

A cloud? Or a man disguised as a cloud? Men will take the form of whatever you want to see until you chomp the bait.
Mushrooms continue to grow in front of the house where I used to live. James had the locks changed so I can’t see my dogs anymore. Thinking about this hurts too much so I think about sausages instead.

Before changing the locks he started putting weird signs on the door every day when it was my time to see them.
He was allowed to choose anytime for me to see them. 1 hour 3x a week. But no matter what time, it would never be good.
I hope they know I have not forgotten them.

On a happy note- an EBT dinner. I can have all the food I want now, although fresh fruits & vegetables are hard to come by.
A tip jar. I’ve started playing music by myself since I broke up with my bass player. He thought he should be able to dicktate which songs I was and wasn’t allowed to play even in his absence. This seemed to me like an overreach. I miss the deep watery sounds of the bass though. And having someone who could drive and set up equipment.
Meat sent these to boost my confidence. Dust of Slut, Essence of Testicles, Lez Vibes & Self-Doubt Eliminator. But I find Essence of Testicles works for almost every situation. I’ve always been a huge believer in dick and ball magic.
I did a gofundme to raise 11 dollars so I could buy this poster. I don’t know why it speaks to me. And I don’t know if I should hang it in the kitchen as a welcome or the bedroom as a warning. To myself. To never trust in no one else. Except it takes trust to reach paradise.
Fur sausage. My doggies inhabit their own link of Sausage Time. We will find a way to see each other again.
A bouquet for the poor.
Clouds above the Lettuce Patch for the Poor, plus a ball. But the lettuces have grown tall and thin and don’t seem edible anymore.
Categories
Charleston, West Virginia My Life Story On My Own Uncategorized Writings

No Home

I shouldn’t be sad. I’m having the “You have no place in this world to call home” transit and everything is happening as God intended but still….

There is no place in this world to call home.

The weird part is in the absence of any home how much my life has expanded.

I just got ‘home’ from performing on two different stages and walking around downtown by myself at night. Walking thru sketchy areas at night has become a slight addiction. Why do they say you’re not supposed to do that? So far I haven’t found out.

But I wonder if this growth is leading anywhere or if life will be a never ending series of random events and people. I should be patient since it’s only been a month and a half since I moved out and the first month was spent trying not to die of heartbreak.

It’s just that there is no one to tell anything to. Not that there really was before since James didn’t like me to talk. But even writing in journals to yourself feels different when you are part of a home and a family. I can’t really write in journals anymore because I’m too unsettled and at the same time have more happiness than ever before.

If happiness means a high and fluttery feeling.

But I also had happiness in my old life when I would cry in bed everyday. It was a different kind of happiness though, like the way you feel in a soft pink egg. Even in sadness there was a feeling of peace.

Our spirit is made of fire and air. It propels us outwards & forwards, towards people and the future. Our soul is made of water and earth, a soft gooey dough that absorbs all experiences. Happy or sad, all experiences become meaningful when they encounter the soul’s soft body.

In my old life my spirit was trapped. Now it’s free. Yet my soul is nowhere to be found. Friends are not family. You can’t cry around them and if you do it’s some big fucking deal where you have to apologize afterwards. You can’t share the minutia of life that is the soul’s food. You can’t gorge on donuts and sink into a coma. You have to be on and up. Fire & air.

And I’m grateful for the newness. But it’s hard to settle down. I dance all the time. Sometimes I run rather than walk. Without a soul, you have so much energy.

But this is my predestined time of wandering the earth like a spirit. I need to make the best of my “There is no place for you to call home” transit and have faith that life will eventually congeal.

I used my EBT card to buy Twinkies. They are good but more spirit than soul, unlike fresh baked pastries.
An egg pauses for his moment in the limelight.
He had his portrait painted too.

In astrology, the sun is your spirit and the moon is your soul. My moon lives in the house of marriage so getting unmarried was disruptive soul-wise. However, there is a little trick with this placement where it can also mean having an emotional relationship with The Public, a gooey blob of unknown minds.

So in the absence of a James, I started sharing minutia from my life on facebook. Which caused people to attack me for being an attention seeking whore. But I blocked them for being stupid. Because it isn’t attention the moon craves. It’s ooey gooey connection.

I had to take a picture of myself with a guitar for some gigs.
This picture sums up my previous life. There was a lot of crying but damn…. doesn’t that bed look firm and plump? I miss it.

It’s not so much circumstances that are bugging me out as the questions… is love real, is home real, is anything real? What is there in life that weighs more than paper? I thought I would have a family in eternity. I even thought my house would be with me in heaven. When I was painting its walls, I felt I was building something permanent.

Oops.

Categories
Charleston, West Virginia My Life Story On My Own Writings

Air Every Where

When I was moving out on my own what I wanted most of all was for my new life to be airy.

When I was married life was not airy at all. My husband did not like to interact with me. But I wasn’t supposed to interact with anyone else either. He said if I left the house I would get murdered so I stayed at home. Receiving a message from someone or just a random email was the highlight of my week. There were pros and cons to this sort of life.

But now, my life is nothing but messages from strangers. Two hundred a day. What is it called when winds rip people apart until they die with bits of them flying everywhere? That is what’s happening to me.

There are ebay messages, herbal messages, music messages, lawyer messages, messages about wizzles and fizzles, messages from men, messages from women.

Two hundred messages a day and I’m making two hundred dollars a month. This seems off somehow.

My friend made a match.com account as me which I think is hilarious. She pretends to be me and then forwards people she likes to the real me. I like the part where she interacts with them better. I’m too mentally overwhelmed to respond to anyone. Even the people I meet I can hardly remember their names and faces. Hi it’s Chris! Oh yeah, Chris, of course. You build houses. No, I’m the Chris that flies planes. Busy girl.

But I’m not a busy girl. I’m a girl whose brain is being electrocuted with random inputs from all directions. Meanwhile there is nothing solid in my life. I want to visit my dogs again. But if I get arrested there will be no one to bail me out.

Ten thousand winds but nothing solid. No feeling either. The other day I walked by a man who was on the floor with a hurt foot. “Don’t worry, I’m a doctor.” I said “Oh are you really?” he asked in a relieved voice. “No, I’m joking.” I said with a laugh. Two minutes later reality hits and I realize I sounded like a total psychopath. This will be another black mark added to my reputation of cruelty and violence. But I’m not a psychopath. Everything is just so airy it starts to seem unreal. So many words. So many people. No way to assemble my bookcase because my wrist still doesn’t work from the last time James squirted me over with dishsoap and pushed me into a wall.

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Charleston, West Virginia My Life Story On My Own Writings

Physical Violence

Physical Violence is the elephant in my mind. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel or think about it so I don’t. 

The first time James got violent I was asking him questions. Specifically questions about his pro-gun stance. While I mostly shared his views, some of his arguments didn’t make sense to me. He had just gotten news of a financial defeat so I should have stayed silent. But at the time I wasn’t good at shutting the fuck up. Eventually I learned, but it didn’t really help.

So he got upset and left the room. I followed him. I was extremely clingy. Later I learned not to be clingy but that didn’t help either. He told me to Go Away and I said No. He said if I didn’t leave he’d fucking crush me and I said go ahead.

Then he pushed me really hard like… I don’t think I understood how strong men are until that moment. I thought they were more or less like me. But it was supernatural. I don’t know what happened except that I ended up on some stairs with my arm cut open from wrist to elbow cause it got caught on the metal door latch.

I guess I was in shock & crying hysterically. James was like a god to me. At the time it seemed like hurting your wife was horrifically wrong. Now it doesn’t seem so wrong to me. But at first it was shocking and I was crying hysterically.

James told me I had to stop crying but I didn’t. He dragged me across the floor and sat on top of me with hands around my neck looking at me with this crazy look in his eyes. I thought he was going to kill me. I was screaming hoping the neighbors would hear me. I screamed for Slippers and she came. Then James got off of me. Later on though Slippers would just run and hide.

Afterwards was even more confusing. Writing about the incident now, I feel like I am a baby for even whining about it but at the time it felt earth shattering. Like I’d entered a new reality and the world as I knew it no longer existed. I thought James would be sorry but he wasn’t. He didn’t seem to think it was a big deal that my whole arm had turned yellow from bruising. If I tried to bring it up what had happened he would say “Well why did you say this? Why did you say that? What did you say 5 sentences before that? You don’t remember? If you can’t even remember then how can we talk about it? What angle were you standing at? What socks were you wearing 3 days earlier? These facts are important.” 

There was no remorse just an endless string of questions about details surrounding the day that I couldn’t remember and when I would get frustrated with those questions he said he needed those details to make sense of things. The problem wasn’t him pushing me, it was all these little things I’d said and done which made him push me.

And the following years were all about that. Don’t use this word, use that word. This phrasing is the problem. Stating things as a question is the problem. I would read more and more books about how mens’ minds worked and try to change my tone, my phrasing, my facial expression. None of it helped but I always felt I was on the cusp of knowing what he needed and being able to give it to him.

Later on, maybe 4 or so years later, cheating came into play too. Cheating is the vocalist. It grabs all your attention. Violence is more like bass and drums. It hits you in the reptile centers. That is why I don’t know how to process it or even if it merits processing.

The first time it happened I thought it was a really big deal. Over time it became more commonplace to where I feel like a petty little bitch for writing about it. I don’t know if it matters or not. Why would it matter? People hurt all the time.