All my siblings have mental health hurdles, but one of them has a worser case than the rest of us.
This led to me being suddenly disinvited from an anticipated luxurious staycation around the same time as the first dead birthday of a friend.
I’m kind of proud of that sentence, although it’s for me, and not for you.
I feel like putrid, maggoty garbage about the canceled plans, and my friend’s first dead birthday.
Or maybe I feel like putrid, maggoty garbage because I’m moody by nature, or maybe because it’s a hard time to be a human being, even one in a relative first world paradise, what with the mental clusterfuck of capitalism on a public servant and so forth and so on.
I was supposed to have lunch with my family, which felt fraught, but I arrived too early. When I asked where everyone was, and realized I was early, l pulled my car back on the interstate and returned to my safe home county where I won’t get pulled over for my expired tags. (Money is not great now.)
I screamed all the way, on the interstate, about my sibling who hurt me, about everyone who’s hurt me, and how wronged I’ve been by– everything.
That was good. If it’s good to cry in a car, it’s great to scream your head off. On the interstate, anyway. In town you have to worry about scaring people.
As I get older, stress injected in me turns solid immediately, is neutralized, and it takes a week or more for my body to notice it needs to leave.
It’s great to have people surround you at the moment of bad shit hitting, but it’s awkward when the pain and rage flare a week later.
I’m a teacher. I have trained myself (partly to my help, partly to my detriment) to freeze my emotions. All that matters is doing the right thing.
(Aside, I think “right” and “wrong” are on the way back, to the terror of godless liberals, and the terror of the fanatical right, for their own reasons. I’m a bit hopeful about it.)
Let’s say, if a dangerous man tried to take over the world and you showed up and worked to stop him, and then four years later, he’s worse than ever, and millions of people are not convinced he’s trying to destroy us, and now you can’t do anything but try to puzzle out how to emotionally process him being reelected.
Levity: remember on “Sex & The City” when that post-it break up says, “I can’t.”
I can’t!
That’s a nice bit of writing, “Sex.”
Equally gutless and relatable.
I went to get coffee as my rage adrenaline ebbed, and the woman I ordered from did not make eye contact at any point and I’m a little worried about her.
I accidentally went to get coffee at the same place I got coffee the day I learned my friend had died. Which is weird. I rarely come here.
I was here for an event at that time, so conversation was about happy things and happy people, and I had the knowledge of my friend’s death stuck in my cheek like a lozenge for a secret sore throat.
He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, you thought he would be dead, now he is dead.
Last night I listened to music we had both loved and thought I had not been intimate with anyone with music for a long time. How with this friend, we would be quiet and experience music and it was an intense intimacy. What the music was doesn’t matter but the music was opera or Radiohead, just to give you that detail that makes you feel like I am a real person.
Wink.
I mean, I did sleep with him, but the other 99 out of 100 times I didn’t.
The intimacy of being with a writer whose work you are mirroring emotionally, even physically. Such an intense not being alone that I can only describe it in what it’s not, not being alone.
And the intimacy of being with a painting that is so beautiful to you that you feel like humans are okay and there is something more than wondering about paying bills and paying them or not paying them or forgetting or remembering to move the wet clothes to the dryer before they sour or having a particular number in your savings account (as I recall, full disclosure my current number is zero).
The intimacy of friends opening a random emotional door that they just haven’t opened before and everyone’s like, huh.
The intimacy of siblings, who are living your life, just under a different set of rules and a different playing piece and another haircut, who know you the way, let’s face it, no one else could.
I’ve read that after 50 one’s happiness begins to increase.
My friend just had his first dead birthday, his 49th.
Whoops!
I started reading “Cat’s Cradle” again, thinking I might teach it next year. And immediately any loneliness left me, as Vonnegut is all the force I need to remind me being a good person is important and meaningless and beautiful.
Someone decided to redecorate this place with cobalt blue glass accessories, the accessory of choice for my 14-year-old self’s bedroom. I feel some type of way about that.
Vonnegut is also into using numbers in a dumb way. “Hocus Pocus” has a lot of dumb math to make a point about how dumb so many things are. (I’m also proud of that sentence, which is rude.) “Hocus Pocus” is a book I gave my one of my siblings, when sibling was at a tender age, and I did that right.
In one of his books, Vonnegut writes about people being “negative five years old” five years before they are born. So I guess my dead friend is plus one?
I was often his plus one at events.
The barista has had a colleague arrive, and I hear her voice in a totally different key, and see behind a potted plant her colleague bopping to “What a Man.”
She’s fine.
It’s just that she can’t with customers.
That’s fine.
Going On 