Me party

That's right. I had one.

But now my gut's paying for it. I think there might've been gluten in the rinotta. Can't find my Librax.

Oh wait found it.

Me party still worth it.

Met with a new writing group today--total strangers, read the first chunk of my book out loud in a coffee shop to people I'd just met. For an introvert, that shit is like jumping in a pit full of ravenous hyenas, but I've got to get feedback on this beast before I can start querying. And this is how you do it. You talk to people in the real world. If you believe enough in what you're doing, then you swallow your fear and you deal with it. You just, fucking, do it. So I did it.

The writing group was good. Small. They have a good dynamic and they gave me thoughtful feedback. I suspect they will be the kind of people who will be able to tolerate my bipolar bullshit.

As I was reading, the character of Jerome took on an entirely different tone. Much more angry than he was in my head previously--the way his voice came out of my mouth and said his lines, I suddenly felt this humming inside him, this undercurrent I knew was there but hadn't found the shape of yet. I suddenly got him a lot more. Which is saying something, becuase the boy's been in my head for 16 years now. You'd think I'd know everything about him.

So glad I went. Brilliant writing from some of the other group members too. This could be just the thing.

Today's picture.

Credit

One of the most infuriating aspects of mental illness is the way it strips you of your ability to give yourself credit for living with a mental illness. If the disorder in your head were to manifest in your body instead, like say some day you couldn't get out of bed because a disease has made both your legs shrivel up into useless toothpicks, or maybe one day you wake up and your eyeballs are only functioning at 25%, or whatever--you'd have this very clear, distinct thing you have to live with, this cross to bear so to speak, that you'd be a lot less likely to blame yourself for. It wouldn't make you question whether the thing that's wrong even exists in the first place, or if everyone's this way and you're just handling it badly because of some fault in your personality.

But man, fucked-up brain chemicals are just as debilitating as having a body that doesn't function that well. And I want to give myself credit for living with them without breaking my life into pieces, but it is so hard to do that. Today I was walking out to my car to go pick up my kid and I had one of those moments I've had a million times in my life, when there's this insanely powerful surge of emotion that rips a hole through my brain like a tornado and leaves destruction and silence in its wake, and once it passed, I thought, well god damn. Normal people don't have to live with that, do they? Normal people can walk from the house to the car and not have to think hard about breathing because there is this whirlwind serotonin onslaught wreaking havoc with thoughts and impulses like there's no tomorrow. Normal people can just get right in the car and start driving without needing to sit there and slam their head into the steering wheel a few times first. For no apparent reason. It's not like I just found out I was fired or I heard my grandma died or whatever, nothing terrible just happened, but my body is suddenly acting like I've heard awful news when I haven't. There is no news. There is only strong, gnarly ghost emotion. Teeth and claws that don't exist.

And then of course I think, well obviously I've been thinking the wrong thoughts, that's why I have that surge rip through me like that. Like I've dug this canyon into my mind by thinking the same wrong thoughts, and it's unearthed some slathering beast. Like it's my fault. My fault that I can't keep a better lid on my crazy, even if I do all I can to not let it show that I feel like I don't have a lid on it. Whenever it starts showing, whenever I do something that makes me think, oops, people are gonna know that I'm a nutjob, I castigate myself for being weak. Letting it show is a weakness. I am weak if I let it show. I've got to turn down my personality. It's too damn loud. Too much.

But that's the crazy talking! It's just the crazy! AmIright?! Yeah. Now I just have to remember that, at the times when it's hardest to remember.

And, huh, there we are again.

Anybody got any brilliant tips for breaking the cycle of suck? Maybe I could get "It's not your fault" tattooed in reverse writing on my forehead so every time I look in a mirror I'm reminded.

Then again, I usually realize about halfway through my work day that I haven't bothered to look in a mirror yet to make sure I look normal. That whole "crazy" thing.

A look at last night through the lens of a hangover

This morning the office reeks of burnt plastic. Something's wrong with the HVAC. No work on my desk yet so I have a few minutes to write this.

Grand summation of my thoughts on waking this morning: I'm a fucking idiot.

I've turned over everything I can remember and I don't think I did anything too bad. Boss got involved in a long conversation, probably sports-related, with the guy I gave my coat to (sure regretted that this morning when I walked to the bus stop), so if I said anything too asinine, it was probably just around the beautiful girl who sits across from me. And I think she is used to my asininity by now. Oh shut up, I tell myself, shut up. I can't.

Mostly blurs. Hysterics on the couch at the first bar, I don't remember why. Laughing so hard I couldn't sit up straight. Fireballs that went down way too easy. I was going to stop after one, I'm pretty sure, but somehow they kept appearing in front of me, and down they went. Texted M, said I was going out for a beer after work with my department. He said OK. Then my phone went off again at like 10:45, him asking whether I was going to bother to come home. I was sitting in front of a fire outside then, I remember, I think at the place that used to have a bull. A mechanical bull. A half-empty pack of cigarettes on the table in front of me. I still smell it in me, even after a long hot shower this morning. Brushed my teeth twice and the sour taste of mistakes won't go away. I just remembered I took all the cash out of my wallet and left it on the table by the fire. I think it was all singles but I don't know. Hope so. Found a receipt in my pocket that says I gave the cashier $70 for the cigarettes and lighter. That can't be right.

But hey, the circus of stupidity drowned the akathisia. It hasn't bubbled back up yet.

The beautiful girl drove me home. She played this song in the car, all spheres and intersections and light. It was lovely. I loved her then, loved that she said this was her favorite song. The spherical, empty shapes of it made me think about how we all carry these huge spaces inside us that no one else can fathom, and that one of the few ways we can see inside someone else is to look at the things that are their favorites. This favorite song made me understand her brain.

Or maybe I was just too doped up on her beauty. 

I looked at my kid when I got home. Asleep on the top bunk. Then to bed. At least she has one non-fucked-up parent. I try to keep it from her. I do. I try hard, hard, hard to keep it from her. I keep it away from her. No mistakes when I'm with her. That's the goal.

M put his hand on my side sometime. I rolled out of the bed onto the floor. I thought I was going to throw up from the feel of his hand on my skin. I crawled into the bathroom and sat on the floor for a long time. I sipped water. The sourness, sour sour sour, in my mouth. All that smoke. All those shots, all those beers. What was I thinking.

Then dreams. A continuation of happy "hour." Ha. Oh there was sometime last night when I felt so buoyant, so bubbled up and I knew I was wasting happiness, sucking it out of some other time when it was real, burning it with liquor until it evaporated into nothingness. Also though I had a hard time walking, the group was ahead of me and I looked down at my feet crossing over the paving stones and I thought, slow down, oh Jesus slow down. Herculean effort involved in staying upright and keeping my feet going.

In one of the dreams a beautiful naked man was our waiter. But he was mutilated. Ruined. He didn't seem to care, but I knew he was burning it out of himself whenever he wasn't working. I don't know how I knew. Dreams.  Who knows.

I think I was still drunk when I woke up this morning. My brain is dulled. My senses are flat. My ears ring. But other than that I seem to have all my pieces. M and the kid still asleep. Keep it hidden.

And that concludes this morning's wallowing in the land of self-castigation. Up and forward.

Today's picture.

Food food oh lord the food

Epic, Michael Phelps-level calorie consumption today.

The light I shine

Wrapping up the YA MS. The ending is hard to write. I love these kids so much. They're all pieces of me, they're all places I've been and things I've learned that I've had to unlearn and relearn and do over and fix. 

But what is pain for if you can't turn it into art later? What good is the experience of living through hell if you can't use what you know to shine a light on the path and help someone else through?

I fear it goes too far, and I fear it doesn't go far enough. I fear I'm not far enough through it now to shine the light. The pain writes itself. The light, I have to think hard about. I have to concentrate on the light. It's like therapy. You can bitch and moan all you want, but if you're not motivated to solve your own problems, it's useless. 

Writing is therapy. Writing is hard work. Writing is real and worth it and one of the main reasons I get out of bed in the morning. Writing is a giant welcome basket to throw a huge wadded-up ball of hypomania into. It's like working out, it's like puking, it's a bloodletting that tethers me back to the real world by letting me out of it to breathe for a while.

The prologue. 

            Around 8 p.m. on a sweltering Tuesday in June, Jerome climbed out of the back seat of a rusty yellow hatchback with party plates, said goodbye to Randy and Joe, and walked up the driveway to his house. The car pulled away. Its muffler failed to muffle the engine noise.

His dad was the only one home, dozing in front of the TV with a half-empty bottle of vodka. Jerome went upstairs to his room and opened his laptop to check his email for the first time in a week.

The only people who ever sent him anything were his mom, his twin sister Angie, and his grandma in Florida forwarding chains of junk, so it was odd that there were two messages from an address he didn’t recognize, sent six days ago. He clicked the first one. The body of the email said, “I wonder if you ever think about me.” No signature. He clicked delete. The second one, sent five minutes later, said, “I’m thinking about you right now. I’ll be in town soon for an assignment back at the main office. I want to see you.” A picture was pasted under the words.

            Jerome stared at the screen for a few seconds. Then he deleted the second email, cleaned out the trash folder, and deleted his email account. He logged on to Facebook and untagged every photo of himself, then deleted his profile. He shut down the laptop. The black, empty screen reflected his face. He slammed the screen closed and shoved the laptop off the back of the desk. It hit a few of the tacked-up drawings on the bulletin board and took them down with it before getting jammed between the desk and the wall.

He lay on the bed and folded his hands over his stomach, staring at the fading daylight on the ceiling until the bluish hues of dusk turned over to the ugly orange glow of the streetlight.

            Sometime around midnight, he sucked in his breath and lurched out of bed. One foot caught on the other on his way out of the room, but it was too late to stop his forward momentum. His face hit the doorframe with all his weight behind it. He pressed his palm into the gash on his cheek and stumbled into the bathroom and threw up everything he’d eaten at the movie theater with his friends earlier.

Six hours later, when gray daylight began to seep into the window, he opened the bathroom door. He glanced down the hallway at Angie’s bedroom door. It was closed. He crossed the hall to his room and stuffed some clothes, his phone, and his sketchbook and pencils into a backpack, grabbed his skateboard, and left the house.

            No one in his family heard from him for two weeks.

I love how when

I'm up I carry this supposition that everything in my head has value and is worth recording. So much that I carry a notebook everywhere and scribble my thoughts in it so they don't get lost in the constant flood of new ideas.

"The Kingdom of Childhood" by Rebecca Coleman

I don't imagine I'll post too many book reviews, but I just finished reading this novel and wanted to get my thoughts about it down since it whacked my gong with a heavy hammer.

“The Kingdom of Childhood” is brutal and real. A number of times on my trip through the book I had to take a breather and emotionally withdraw from the characters, because with a plotline like this, you know it’s not going to end well—and the more you care, the more it will hurt. The story is simple: 40-something lonely kindergarten teacher (Judy) seduces, or is seduced by, 16-year-old good-looking, likable high school kid (Zach) who happens to be friends with her son; all of this takes place at a K-12 Waldorf school. Then it all goes inevitably wrong, because it’s literary fiction; if it doesn’t, it’s soft-core MILF porn.

So why get invested in a dark and doomed storyline, in characters who are playing out their mistakes to the hilt like a train wreck in slow-mo? The answer is in the writing. This book is masterfully created, from the plot itself down the nitty-gritty of the individual sentences. I never stumbled once on an awkward bit of dialogue, or on a character description that I couldn’t envision. No overuse of adverbs, no stumbling passive tense. The subtleties sucked me in just as much as the overall story arc. There’s a particularly heartbreaking scene that sums up a lot: Zach, while trying to hide his crumbling mental state, eats a cookie at a school fundraising carnival. The cookie turns out to have been made by Judy. Not long after he eats it, he leaves the carnival and throws up in the parking lot behind the dumpster. Judy finds him, apologizes for upsetting him, and gives him a blow job he can’t bring himself to turn down. Who’s to blame here?

The cookie is, of course, a metaphor, as is the kids’ playhouse Zach builds to be raffled off at the school Christmas bazaar: inside it is where the first intimate scene between Zach and Judy takes place. The Kingdom of Childhood, desecrated by lust and mistakes.

Judy makes an error in judgment that most of us are guilty of: She mistakes a thing she wants for a thing she needs. But she carries it too far when she victimizes a person hovering at the line between childhood and young adulthood; she yanks him, half-willing, into the deep end before he quite knows how to swim, and he’s forced to either learn to keep his head above water at the expense of his self-respect, or to sink. She tells him time and again, as abusers do, that the ball is in his court, that he calls the shots. He believes her because he isn’t experienced enough to determine where he’s culpable and where he isn’t, and because he can’t stop himself from taking what she offers—he’s sixteen and flooded with hormones, Judy is there, he can’t turn it down even though he knows how wrong it is and that she doesn’t care about him, only about what he can give her/what she can take from him.

I didn’t care much about Judy. I couldn’t sympathize with her, even after seeing her suffer as a child and knowing what her current life is like: cold husband, distant children, recently dead best friend. Her life is full of holes she can’t plug up. I get that. Zach’s crisis is the one that made the story worth reading. The tug and pull between his developing moral compass and his willingness to do things he hates himself for is the stuff of a good bildungsroman. Where will he end up? You hope for him. You fear for him. You kinda wanna kill Judy.

From Judy:

I should have affirmed that it was [a no]. I knew the full litany of what he did not want to do, and this was where it began. If there had remained any possibility that life could throw a cup of cold water in my face and reverse the course of things, it would have been that moment, that question.

Instead, I climbed into the back of the car [with Zach].

And it was at that moment that I stopped being a woman who had made a series of exceedingly bad judgment calls, and became a child molester.

Later, from Zach:

“My problem is I don’t know how to get myself to stop.” He laughed humorlessly. “I don’t know how to make myself stop wanting to be raped.”

To string up tension like that and run a bow of words over it and make beautiful music that breaks your heart is the work of a gifted artist.