Like Sands Through the Hourglass (Corny, But True)

I've just realized that I've not had contact with my mother since about the last week of May. Two months, and I feel just fine about this no-contact stuff. She phone-bombed me the first two or three weeks and still tries to call maybe once a week, and I still don't answer. I feel GOOD in this respect. I feel like I'm earning some of myself back. I don't have to have fakey conversations about shit that only matters to her, and I don't have to polish myself up to be an acceptable conversation receptacle. I'm not having to goody-goody up to her level to have a peaceful talk. I'm not whoring myself out for acceptance with her. This is like going a really long time being constipated, and now things are moving again (please note the apt reference to shit).

He Was a Diamond and Crazy as Hell

"Shine On You Crazy Diamond (I-V)"

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
You were caught on the crossfire of childhood and stardom,
blown on the steel breeze.
Come on you target for faraway laughter,
come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!
You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Threatened by shadows at night, and exposed in the light.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Well you wore out your welcome with random precision,
rode on the steel breeze.
Come on you raver, you seer of visions,
come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!

Written by Roger Waters, Richard Wright, and David Gilmour

I love this song mostly for its instrumentals, and when I paid attention to the lyrics it took on new meaning.

The Dreams and the Nightmares

The dreams lately have been really bad. I've always had very vivid, bloody, grotesque dreams, ever since I can remember, and I can remember early on, from about the age of three. I used to think they were signs that I was insane, but now I suppose they come directly from the source of my supposed insanity. Usually my mother and father are key figures in these dreams. Lately in the dreams I'm being forced to put my rotting father in his grave, and my mother is tagging along with me, speaking nonsense and being blank.

After I watched my father die, I lost some of my fears. Death was scary. I lied to my family members and told them he went peacefully, because why tell them how bad it was except to create more fears for them. The gasping, the gasping was really scary. The two nurses that were there with me and him at the end were very supportive and calm, and they helped me hold my shit together. In that moment of his death, though, I was a little girl and he was daddy. Maybe that was worse than the gasping.

I'm no longer scared of ghosts, though. The things that go bump in the night always terrified me when I was young, and now I can't really envision them scaring me more than watching my father die. The dreams are really bad, though. I try not to be scared of them, because how can I do anything but endure them? Sometimes, I wake up and feel like I'm walking in a fugue until the fog of the dream subsides. Is this what insanity is, to accept that when I close my eyes at night I will see terrible things?

Scratching the Surface and Causing an Eruption

I've been growing my hair out for about a year. It seems to like to grow alot, although it's unruly and wavy. Oddly, no gray hair that's noticeable to others. At one point, I felt like coloring it gray, because I felt like I had earned it.

I prefer my hair short, really, but I was getting a little bored, and I know my spouse likes how I look with my hair longer, so I thought I'd give it a try. Growing it out hasn't been as painful as it should have been. I did all the right things - trim it up every 5-6 weeks, keep it all neat and tidy. Now that it's chin-length, right where I thought I wanted it, now it's very difficult. Because every goddamn time I look in the mirror, I see the evil grandmother, and then I see my own mother. I look like people I hate to be reminded of. This is a kick in the head.

I tell the spouse last night that I think the hair is going to have to go and why. He looked a little sad, and he said, "I don't know why you think you look like her." He meant the evil grandmother, because I didn't say I saw my mother in the mirror then. I was upset that he doesn't get it and left the room before having a snit with a perfectly well-meant comment. But he never met the grandmother, and he doesn't really know. His family has its fucked-up aspects, but he has lovable parents and had lovable grandparents, and I just don't think he can imagine how I feel about this.

Now I wish I had made an appointment to get it cut and not given him a chance to put his two cents down. Now I'll feel guilty when I cut my hair, because he likes it, and I gave him another chance to verbalize that he doesn't understand why I don't want to keep it. I don't want him to feel like it's personal to him when I cut my hair. And now I'm really pissed because it's my head and my hair and I have to live with it. Even though he never gave me a guilt trip about the hair, even though I'm the one that made the choice to grow it out.

I am fucked up over goddamn hair.

You Don't Say

When I was a kid, maybe 7, 8, 9 years old or so, my father told me he had killed someone. He told me one evening when we were sitting together in the kitchen and neither my mother or my sister were in the room. He said it like he was confessing a deep, dark secret to an old drinking buddy.

All I could do was sit there and listen. I loved him a lot then. He said that he had shot somebody in another state but that I could never tell anyone because he was afraid that someone would come and hurt us. He intimated mob connections.

Some time later, I went to my mother and told her that my father had told me this. She just gave me a rather mean look, but she didn't seem to know what to say. Then, jealously, or maybe disbelievingly, "He's never told me that." She finally went on to aver that he shouldn't be saying things like that to me, and that was that as far as she was concerned. She didn't want to deal with shit like protecting her kids from being told these horrible things.

After a year or two passed, he told me a different version of the story, or perhaps it was a completely different story. Because I was used to his word being law, I never mentioned anything to him about his prior version. To question him was unheard of because then I would be awful, a terrible little girl to whom he would say, apparently devastated, "Don't you believe your Daddy?"

This new version had him as a truck driver in another, vague, state. A man crawled up on his truck when he was in a parking lot and opened the door and said to him, "You know what I want." My father told me he shot him in the head and he fell off the truck into a ditch, and then apparently my father left the scene. I could never tell anyone because, "Daddy would get in lots of trouble."

As time went on, about three decades down the road, I came to the realization that my father was a pathological liar. The bastard would lie for sheer sport. For most of my life, I believed he had done these terrible things. Perhaps he did. He never gave me any indication of where these things had allegedly taken place. I have come to believe that probably these things he told me were lies like the rest of his lies, and I questioned why a grown man would put any child, let alone the little girl he pretended to love, through the belief of and worry about such information.

Maybe if I had any sort of concrete information, any sort of time frame or whereabouts, I could contact law enforcement to let them know what he had told me. But, what, I go to them and say, "My father, who is now dead, told me something 25 years ago about something bad he did. I'm not really sure it's true. No, I don't know where. No, I don't know who he did it to. He lied alot, almost daily, really. Do you feel like a wild goose chase?" But without information law enforcement would need, I am powerless. What if that fucker really did do those things? If that information could go toward serving a greater purpose, like solving something as yet unsolved, I would love to try, to contact law enforcement, to, if nothing else, prove to myself yet again what a miserable liar he was, and that would be the best case scenario.

By the bye, reading Q1605's blog helped me purge, vomit this information into this venue. It is a sickness I need to rid myself of, this fucking memory that I am helpless to use to any positive purpose. Thanks Q.

Aloneness is Goodness

Got a rare Day Away today. It wasn't really all that away, but far enough that I didn't have to worry if the spouse was going to achieve something today, or if the big kid was going to come and tell me that he's hearing voices, or if the little one was going to get grouchy because we're not doing the very thing he's got on his list.

Shame on me for bitching about the good part of my life, but here, relatively anonymously, I feel freer to do so.

We've got alot of projects going at home, most of which have been started and abandoned by the spouse. I am without knowledge on how to proceed with them, or I'd get the shit done. We've got a bathroom that's got a squishy floor because I didn't take the reins and have the toilet re-seated by someone, cuz that's something the spouse said he could do/would do. We've got gutters falling down and a nasty soffit because I arranged to get them fixed and my spouse bitched about how they wouldn't do the soffit the way he wanted it, so I acceded to his wish to do it himself. Has this happened yet? Three guesses, and the first two don't count. We have back yard with a pile of sand in a staked-out space for a patio. There's not enough sand to cover the area (if it were spread out, which it's not). The area has been staked for probably two months. Not a shitting thing has happened with it. This pile of sand, though I haven't picked through it because it pisses me fucking off every time I look at it, is probably a litterbox for multiple area cats/raccoons.

In every other respect, my spouse is a good person. Not a cheater, not a beater, has a job, good dad, easy to talk to. But he's so goddamn lazy. And every time I try to get shit (by shit, I mean big shit) done, he freaks out because he has an aversion to getting shit done.

Gah. Fuck it. I'm having a vodka tonic.

Tired

I'm tired of being so angry, yet I seem helpless to stop myself. I've tried meditation, counseling, aromatherapy, acupuncture, medication, readings from the Dalai Lama, religious research, physical activity, extra sleep, less sleep, alcohol, spiritual journeying, shopping therapy, reflexology, seclusion, speaking my mind, zipping my lips, hugging on animals, hanging out with positive influences, gratitudinous thinking, supportive brassieres, reading, writing, avoiding arithmetic. Please help me think of something new to try. I don't know if I'm asking you or a god-like figure that may or may not exist. I'm exhausted. Maybe shock therapy?

Take No For An Answer

You know, I do admire people with gumption and tenacity right up until they prove their lack of respect for the boundaries of others. Sometimes I think it's because they're not all that smart and lack the ability to tell when they've crossed the line. Those are head-shakers, but they're easier to forgive than the smart ones who just don't give a shit about who they might be inconveniencing with their impossible requests and subsequent bitch-fits.

Really, I do hope that being a rude prick is going to become so overblown that it falls out of favor with the group that feels it's their right to get what they want no matter the situation. By all means, state your case as succinctly as possible, and state what you hope the outcome will be. If you can be accommodated, then we are all happy. If you cannot be accommodated, get over it or die mad.