Dude, where's my journal?

In the unlikely case that someone were to stumble on this and wonder why I claim to have such a love for self-absorbed writing but have been so quiet lately -

You can find me and my NSFW language self here at the Livejournal link below. (Yes, I still use Livejournal. Dude, I was there in 2004 - IT WAS COOL THEN, I PROMISE!) No guarantee of deep thoughts, pretty words, or things that are not inane and banal, since it's the online equivalent of the marbled composition notebooks I wrote about my teenage crushes in.

(Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm 32. I know this. But hey - TEENAGE CRUSHES! Does still having a crush on Britney Spears count?)

 http://quirkytizzy.livejournal.com/

I fear little in the end except myself

"There is one thing a hero and a coward have in common. That is fear." - Unknown

There are many times I can say others have scared me, or that I have been in situations where external conditions were frightening. As a runaway teen, those experiences were not infrequent. But in the end, the most terrifying thing I have ever faced is myself.

Cliche, no? But true. The life-long lesson of learning how not to self-sabatoge, how not to hurt myself, and how to make the effort, every day, simply to get up and get moving has been more difficult than I can articulate. There are wonderous things I have learned through this. Survival is not something that concerns me - I know I will always find a way to make it. I will not be on the street. I will not be without food. I will not be alone and without resources. I have utter confidence in that, it is not even a question.

But it is not belief in God or love or strength that I know these things from, it is simply lived experience. It is in those moments I am not afraid because I know who I am. And I am, at my core, someone who has never died, who has faltered and stumbled and come crashing down, breaking all limbs in my spirit, but have continued to limp forward. Life hurts, but the only alternative is suicide. That is not an option.

And so what else is there to do but keep living?

To my occasional surprise, those are the moments when other people are also not afraid, but they sometimes lend that strength to God, to their family, to some other outside source. I want to shake these people and tell them that their ability to keep going is thiers. It is proven by their efforts.

Don't give the credit away. Don't minimize your efforts. You are strong. You will survive. You know this. Keep knowing it.

And yet there are the moments where I fear survival is all I am capable of. Yes, there is strength in coming back from the brink of utter destitution multiple times, but am I able to find a life several miles away from the edge of the cliff, not simply skirting its edges? Yes, the knowledge of where every food bank in any given city I've lived in is useful, but am I able to make enough money to reliably feed myself? I write beautifully, but am I disciplined enough to make it count for something other than scrawls on a dying website?

I do not always know. Maybe survival itself gets in the way. Maslow's Heirachy and all that. I can look at myself and feel compassion for the struggles. But often I look at myself and wonder if I am simply not capable.

I always say nothing happens in a vacuum. All things are brought round to you through others. This is true. But if others are a part of the equation, then so is the self.

If knowing is half the battle.....then what does one do with the other half?????

That is the question that frightens me the most. It is a question in which the answer lies soley in myself. There is no study guide. There are no Spark Notes. Only I can answer it.

And sometimes I fear I will never have the answer at all.

Why I nap

I nap. A lot. Every day that I can. People think I'm monstrously lazy or ill-disciplined.

Then I tell them about my dreams.

Last night, I was in a warehouse. There were guards stationed at every entrance. They had guns. Knives. Some of the knives were a rusty crimson. Blood. Old blood that had dried to a permanent stain on the metal. They were silent, frightening, and would kill us.

Us consisted of myself and about fifteen other girls in this warehouse. Most of them were chained to the walls in discolored cuffs, bruised, bleeding. Blonde hair was matted brown from bloody cuts along the skull. Brown hair was painted black from months of not being allowed to wash it. They were as silent as the guards. Opening their mouths would only get them bashed in the head and tossed outside along with the other corpses stacked up like firewood along the warehouse walls. They were chattel and they knew it.

I was not chained. I was alone in a room that dripped filthy water from a cracked corrugated roof. The concrete floor was bare and sticky with mold. It was cold and I had no shoes. I knew there was a guard outside this room. That scared me. What scared me more was the corpse a young girl in the room. She was lying on a slab of broken concrete in the corner and wrapped in muddy gauze. I could see her hair - at one point, it had been blonde. Now it was gray with dust and decay.

She was dead. She had been dead for some time. Days. Weeks. Maybe years. I don't know. Her name was Hannah and she was special. That's why she was still around.

Hannah had been special to the man who kept us all here. I'm not sure what she was to him. Some kind of talisman, perhaps, or a lover. She had died. And he had put me in a room with her to see if I could be like her.

I kept along the wall. I didn't go near her. I didn't want to know if we were anything alike. I knew eventually it wouldn't matter anyways. The man would come and haul me out of the room and whatever happened after that, I wouldn't be able to stop him.

Dreams are strange like this - they shift from one place to another without explanation, but you know that you have not moved into some other dream. I found myself running through a crowd, desperate, more desperate than anything I had ever felt before. I had somehow managed to escape. I'd fled and there was a park. It was afternoon, sunny, and the park was very busy.

Safety, I thought. Safety in numbers. That's all I could think about. I ran. I ran straight into the crowd and I kept running.

And  they were following me. Men dressed in cameo black and brown, holding massive rifles and machine guns, knocking over women and children in the crowd, screeching along sidewalks and shouting into walkie-talkies. The man wanted me back and he had sent his guards to bring me back.

I wasn't worried the guards would kill me. He wanted me back at the warehouse. And whatever he had waiting for me back at the warehouse was going to be far, far worse than death. I kept running. I rounded the corner of a stone fountain in the park and slipped - just for a second - on the wet pavement.

That was all they needed. They grabbed the man who had been in front of me. Once the bystander had been dragged into the fountain, then two guards seized my shoulders and forced me to my knees. They wouldn't shoot me. But I knew I wouldn't be able to get up. So I cringed under hands like stone, waiting.

And this is the part of the dream that really scared me. When I rolled over at 5 AM, whimpering, wanting to cry, not being able to, this is what I had echoing in my ears.

The punishment for my escape wasn't going to be physical. Not for me. The punishment for my escape was to watch and listen to an innocent man's slaughter. I didn't know what was happening at first. The man and the guards struggled in the water, just long enough for a knife to flash out into the sunlight and sink like butter into the man's stomach.

Another knife. Another stab. The fountain turned red. And then the sound of tearing flesh. The wet, ripping sound like paper being shredding except it was this man's entire body being ripped apart by the guard's hands.

And I could hear it. The sound of pieces of a body being forced apart, limb and ligature being twisted off by sheer force....The man screamed. He kept screaming. I could hear him dying, being ripped to shreds, and all around me, were his screams. The screams of his family, being held back by another set of guards. I closed my eyes.

That's when I began screaming. If I screamed loud enough, I wouldn't be able to hear those screaming around me. I wanted to bury the sound of a human being rent to pieces. I wanted to somehow find something else, anything else, to listen to.

I screamed. And it did nothing to drown out the sounds. I heard everything. I kept hearing everything, every slash, every shout, every snap, everything.

Eventually the man stopped screaming. His vocal chords were flung along with pieces of his throat on the stone steps of the fountain. The two guards who had held me down yanked me to my feet. They didn't have to say a word. They didn't even have to restrain me.

I walked with them back to the warehouse. I knew that the cost of my insolence had been this innocent man's life. The guards had not killed him. The captor back at the warehouse, who had given the order, had not killed him.

I'd killed him. My actions, my terror, was what led to his death and his dismemberment. The horror of what his family would be picking out of the stone for weeks was my fault. I had done this. Had I not left, that man would still be alive. I HAD left and he was dead. I knew this.

I don't know who Hannah was or why I was supposed to be like her. All I know is that I went back to that room with the black, cold floor and I sat there, looking at her. Whenever the man came to get me, I would do whatever he said. I wouldn't fight. Maybe Hannah had tried to fight back.

I knew better than to try that ever again.

This is not an unusual dream for me. An unfortunate combination of a troubled history full of childhood abuse and misfiring neurons in my skull pull out these images time and time again. I wake up screaming from nightmares on average of twice a week.

I have tried: medication, meditation, lucid dreaming, writing them down, not writing them down, analyzing them, trying to forget them, sleeping in silence, sleeping with white noise, sleeping with stuffed animals, without stuffed animals, watching kitty videos before bed, countless other tricks....to no avail. Not in 32 years. They come as they will and they will always come as they will.

Sometimes the dreams are sad and beautiful, which I will take over "terrifying and horrifying" any day. Once I dreamed of a world in which powerful sorcerers were stealing memories, and I was in contact with the last woman who knew herself. She knew she'd forget everything that was important to her, so she'd send me pictures of her family, trinkets her children would make her. She needed someone else to know what was important to her, so somewhere out there, someone would know who she was.

The dream ended when I received a letter asking me to stop writing her, for she no longer knew who I was nor why we had been writing. I stared off into a dying sunset, holding the pieces of a woman who didn't even know she existed.

Those dreams are very sad. But they do not wake me up. The dream last night did. The ones with blood always do. And there are always dreams with blood.

I nap during the day. The dreams never come in the sunlight. Why, I don't know. They just don't. So I nap.

It's not like I'm getting good sleep at night.

Warlords and Writer's Block

If I were at home, this would be a day where I'd open the Livejournal window (well, really the Dreamwidth window, which crossposts to Livejournal, because Livejournal is a senile and dying animal with bad coding) and wind up staring at the screen and smoking more than writing. I always open the posting window even if I know I have nothing to say. It is a ritual and it must be maintained, if only in name.

Seriously, I ain't got nothing. (Double negative? Meh. I say DOUBLE AWESOME!) Or if I did want to write, I'd write about how I don't want to write anything. Writing on demand is a special kind of hellacious child to wrangle. It cries and stamps its feet and goes all limp and noodley whenever you try to pick it up to bodily haul it off the playground. It holds its breath and passes out and hits a table on the way down and all you want to do is sell it off to some passing war-lord who might have a use for whiny child-labor.

(This is part of why I don't want children.)

But we're not talking about kids. We're talking about writing. About how sometimes you just can't make it do what you want to, and sometimes you don't care that you can't make it do what you want to, because you don't even KNOW what you want it to do. You just want it to leave you alone. To stop following you into the bathroom pestering you for ice cream and bedtime stories. To stop filling your head with disembodied phrases that might, possibly, make a decent poem if it gave you anything else, to which of course it never does. You just want to put your hands over your ears and go "LA LA LA CAN'T HEAR YOU!" but that doesn't do any good because the voice is inside your head.

Writing is a bad lover. She cooes over you with small gifts of affection before kicking your ass out of bed because the roses you got her were yellow, not red. Writing is reading the best book you've ever read in your WHOLE LIFE only to find out that the last chapter was ripped out by some malicious book-ripping fairy. Writing is watching the coolest, most complex and intriguing movie you've ever seen only to have the last two minutes be the main character's waking up and going "It was a dream!"

And maybe more than anything, writing is coming up with bad metaphors, over and over again, to come up with absolutely nothing. Your frustration doesn't even come off as interesting. It just comes off as run-of-the-mill and indulgent. Writing isn't going to get you laid. It's not going to buy food for you or run a hot bath for you or make your no-good-cheating-husband love you.

It's so goddamn useless in the long run.

And it's still the only thing I've got. So I write. I write and sometimes I hate that I write because I hate that it's the only thing I know how to do when I don't know what else to do. Sometimes I think I would rage-burn everything I've ever written in my entire life, but that'd do no good because hey, this is the internet and everything lives forever here.

So I write. I just fucking write. Not because I'm good at it. Not because I want to. I write because it's what I do.

Warlords have no use for blogs, anyways. Pity.

No rest for the wicked -

Or for an apartment building when the fire alarm goes off at 12:30 AM.

It's a place full of tricksters and dumbasses who like to smoke in the hallway, so unless there's smoke or funny smells, we all just stay in. Call the fire department of course, in case of actual fire and/or to get them out here quickly to shut it off.

Elsewise, pull out the cat carriers, grimly anticipate wrangling four panicked and screaming cats into the cars two floors down in the parking lot.

And the possibility - or likelihood - of being a total zombie in class today. At least I don't have anything else to do today.

This is the sucky part of community living. For better or worse, we're all stuck with each other's stupidity. And sometimes, that means the shared misery of blaring fire alarms.

Wizard of Oz is fantasty - but you could argue the second one is more science fiction

Sadly, I am not any further in The Wizard of Oz than I was previously. This week saw a return to reading other long-neglected books that I'd stacked up under my bedside table. One of them was "Mass Effect Revelation", a written prequel series to the game, was my favorite. The books get a lot of flack from others, but I found the pacing engaging, the new characters fresh, and the older ones you know from the games receiving good backstory.

The older I get, the more science fiction I find myself reading. I used to be a straight fantasty/wizards/elves kinda gal. But science fiction holds a lot more promise to me these days as I see our technology matching up with books that were written thirty years ago.

It's sort of like a backwards form of prediction, reading those things and seeing how close those writers were to guessing what we would have NOW. I remember when I was twelve reading the role-playing core book of "Shadowrun", a futuristic, cyberpunk game, and being astounded at the idea of having handheld devices that allowed you to store information, call people, and solve complex problems. (Or Penny's book from Inspector Gadget, for example.) We have all that now. All that and more. I remember at 15 falling madly in love with William Gibson's "Neuromancer" and yearning for the day when we would be able to "jack into" this computer based reality.

And here we are, with all of that, so widespread is the technology that we are teaching our gradeschooler's how to use it. It is awing to me.

Although, to show how far we've not come....why in the hell are most academic centers still using Internet Explorer? It's on par with AOL, Geocities, Hotmail, and Myspace. In other words, it is a creature that has long ago lumbered off to die and we should let it do so. Prodding the ancient, slow, decript, and no longer user-friendly programs to do what they no longer can quite handle seems wasteful and short-sighted.

My father still uses AOL. Then again, he just finally bought a cellphone with a long distance plan. Previously he'd used a cell phone that only made local calls, charged for sending and recieving texts, and charged a higher monthly bill than any other national carrier with far more lenient data plans.

Someday I'll get him to switch to a Gmail account.

We'll have to take it slow from there, though. I think Google Chrome would probably make his head explode.

My parking garage

10/15/10

Upon having watched "The Social Network":

It's prompting quite a bit of discussion on the issue of privacy, and it reminds me of conversations I've had with people concerning this journal. ”You mean you write about your most personal thoughts and feelings? On the internet? WhereANYBODY could find and read it?”

Yeah, I say, I do. Because who, exactly, is going to find this particular journal? The community of Livejournal (which is already sympathetic to the culture of journaling), and the random passer-by stumbling onto a cached Google link. That's who is going to find this. Are these people going to ruin my life, invade my privacy, bother my little world with their presence? No. 

The internet is a big, big place and the chances of my tiny little blog finding any sort notoriety on a mass level is minuscule. And even the individual people that could, possibly, find this blog and be problematic in my life aren't really a concern, because the size of the internet makes it difficult to find this journal anyways. Do I particularly care if random strangers see this? No. Why should I? The random stranger isn't going to care about what I'm writing here because they are a random stranger. They have no connection to me and I no connection to them.

Say what you want about the human condition, but the core component of human interaction on any personal level requires some kind of investment into what they are saying. The masses of internet users have no such investment in me, and I wouldn't be so arrogant to think they would.

It's a bit like the old “how to hide a stolen car” argument. Does one put a stolen car in a backyard or squirrel it away in some remote place where, thanks to being the only car around in miles, it's going to stick out like a sore thumb? No. You put the damn car in a parking garage where there are hundreds and hundreds of other cars. You put the car in a place where one car won't make a difference, won't stand out, and won't attract any attention.

This journal is my car.

The internet is my parking garage.