Liar
I’m a liar.
Just so we make that clear.
I need to eat some more food so that I get on the right bent. A belly full of peanuts and Diet Dr. Pepper doesn’t constitute positive nutrition. And consequently, I get snippy. But, I also get a bit truthful, which is one of the things I wanted to do this blog for. Just flat-out, balls to the wall, NO FOOLING. But it’s very difficult for a pathological liar to evince truth even if she knows exactly what it is. I like to think I’m still at the stage when I can point out my own truth if only to myself and if only to decide what the best costume for that truth is.
I’m not sure what I’m doing. I’m nervouser and nervouser. I am drawing the devil of loving someone nearer and nearer and I’m trying to do things to get it to happen and stay. And there is a whole vast internal landscape of shrieking goddesses and bludgeoned carcasses and rivers of blood that come into view when I think about making this nest available to anyone else. They laugh because this effort is not unknown, not a brave new start. It is an old dance, a biannual shuffle, a strain really that I perform to no applause and to no effect.
But what the old crones and the battlestars don’t know is that the reason there’s been no entreaty inward is because for all the masquerade, I haven’t been ready. I haven’t known how to get ready to accomodate, modulate myself for another person. A self I feel extreme shame over. There have been no invitations accepted because none have been proffered. The doors have been so barred that I can feel my heart gag for air against my clutching rib cage. Safety. Safety. The future is unknown and if the future shone its full light upon you, everything would be seen. All the pretense and the goddesses and the moonlit paths and labyrinths and bloodied gothic surrounds would be put to dust. There would be coffee, opinions, and expectations. I would not do well in the world where lies are not art. I do not do well when I try to walk in that world. I would be on the ultimate high wire. Faking to exist, to stay upright, pretending I know this path like everyone else knows this path…as sheer instinct.
So I have my agonizingly messy life. A universe of flotsam and jetsam strewn about, each bottle and unfolded shirt saying go away, the owner is not ready to entertain. Miss Otis Regrets. This is home. Being here is watching the undergrowth become overgrowth, watching myself collapse inward. Not writing because I might say something that makes my head uncomfortable, something less than the palatial monument to great writing would enshrine in the completely fictional confines of my gnawing, entropic mind. Not reading because I might read something that makes me realize that the dream of writing is not achievable by someone with such rusty, disturbed and anachronistic skills such as I have. Not doing any thing with the time I have carved out because that becomes a commitment to a personality, a place, a hope, and therefore, a threat to this life. Such as it is.
There’s this whole cancerous mass of self and I worship it. I worship it so hard that I scar people’s faces, I warp their words, I make lepers out of everyone who might venture a hello. They are the ones in the colony. Being in here is the only place to be safe.
It isn’t about being unwanted. It isn’t about being ugly, unsettling, unfit. It isn’t about being incapable of committing, of choosing, of finding anything outside of this poisoned Eden worthy of crossing into its miasmic, shardsand environs. It’s about a girl who once saw a pretty thing, walled herself in with it and when she heard footsteps, swallowed the key. Now it’s just her and the thing and whether or not she loves it anymore, whether or not there’s any other thing better or brighter or more deserving on the other side of that wall, this is what she has. And she can either worship it and call her misery worship, too. Or she has to stop telling lies and start asking for help. And nobody has any mercy for liars, not really.
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Dillweed
I think it’s a little clear to me.
Oh, there’s nothing like reality for making time change speeds. For making a body suddenly cold on the warmest day of the season, for making a body burn like it runs on napalm beneath the ministrations and oscillations of the most reliable of fans.
I don’t feel much like talking again. But I have this time and I don’t want to waste it. I waste so much. I should be scrubbing the bathtub. Work. I believe in work. I should be throwing things away instead of screaming my stupid head off at my keyboard skipping every other damn word.
A stupid head. That’s what I have.
I thought I was doing pretty good about laying shit out here, even shit that I was fairly uncomfortable about. Notwithstanding the fact that saying anything about myself that is true is rather discomfiting to me, I was trying. But today, the old embarrassment squick rises up again. I want to come off so much better than this.
And my sitting there numbly while our lovely nice guy was lovely and funny and shirtless and flirting with everyone in sight including the girl he’s apparently dating, the cute girl in costume handing out pamphlets, the 72 year old volunteer woman, the middle aged party moms and needless to say, said nary a word to me doesn’t make me look like much more than chopped liver. I was very, very numb as a result. I didn’t eat, or talk much, just put my head in my book and I know what you’re saying because I was hearing it in my head about friendship and being whatever and not giving a shit about things and just being with people like the palm reader advised, but I just couldn’t.
I was really incapable of not minding. But, I did was any sangfroid type of girl does in these situations. I introduced myself to this new girl. The new cute girl who was invited to ride the tractor specifically because she was a cute girl – a situation which perhaps invites more questions than I care to answer – something which no one has ever requested I do. I smiled and turned around and shook her hand. All the while feeling like a complete imbecile with these tumultuous emotions of being irritated by his exact unrightness for me and his randomly asinine behavior being thrown in my face right after the gut punch of suddenly wanting him wildly and followed by the brick wall of it was never going to happen anyway.
It becomes insanely petty and silly when you write it down, though….it doesn’t become petty or silly enough for me to let it go. Not yet.
I felt like a heel. Like Cinderella, pre-fairy godmother, invisible and meant to work. Meant for work. Completely de-sexualized with my got up an hour early face and my little summer outfit and my fake lashes and my positive attitude. Like nobody would even look at me like that, I felt like a fucking eunuch. Except of course, for Mr. Creepy and his compliments. I would really rather not be spoken to at all if I was given the choice.
The Great Plan really didn’t go so great today. I came home and judiciously ate a few bad things and then tried to plot a better course, something more helpful than redirecting my bruised ego into something physically negative. I want to go to this fancy-dress party in September and make people faint clean away, I want to get to wear what I like and feel like I’m not…nothing. I want to float in Cinderella, post extreme makeover, post all the calluses pumiced away, post the drudgery that kills one soul. It’s a lot to fucking ask, I know, but it’s a goal. It’s supposed to be lofty. I want to be slender and still and glowing. I want to be unforgettable.
Because maybe then I’ll be able to forget today.
Lace Up Your Bodice
So today was Renaissance Faire day. It was a day of many splendours including getting a new overskirt I was not intending on getting, watching grown men tell horrible and delightfully horrible dirty jokes as they prepare to joust, traipsing around in the heat, people watching, eating a dry ham and cheese sandwich on the ground outside the festival because we weren’t about to pay those prices for food.
I love ren faires and have since forever. These are my people and even though it’s boiling hot and dusty and I sometimes feel silly and like this isn’t a worthwhile thing to do with my rare Sunday afternoon that isn’t booked up with projects, it’s always a bit of a challenging homecoming right up untiil we have to leave and then, I’m never ready to go.
But I did have a purpose (and not an upropsoe as my keyboard wants to say) for the day. I wanted to have either my cards or my palm read. I’ve been to a bunch of different ones, but today, we kinda lucked out. The very good tarot/palm reader was a nice, older man with soft hands and intense eyes. My sister cried quite a bit as he gave her a reading. I offered to pay for it because the way this works for me is that it’s never what I want it to be – it’s never I see a nice young man coming into your life and he’s gonna turn up tomorrow and he’ll be a wonderful positive influence – instead, it’s challenges and having to assert myself and sort myself out and give myself value. Which I tapdance around as an issue. Which I hate as an issue. But it ends up being rather cathartic and calming and I wanted that for her.
Didn’t really end up that way, though. Mostly, he felt that the job she has now, a job that’s taken a long time to come together is not right for her. That there’s unhealthy, hidden stuff going on and they’re using her. She was just telling me how she’s got to do all of this stuff she didn’t intend to do as far as selling things and soliciting sales instead of just being in the office and running that. And that clearly got under her skin.
I worry if I’m being too transparent again. We’ll, we’ll just leave it at that my sister should leave her job and go back to school. I should be sure I’m being properly compensated at my job and I should work on being friends with men and not trying to work out when I can best find time to fall madly in love. He talked a lot about plans and my emotional reserves and my reserved emotions. It was quite a lot of stuff dredged up for twenty bucks.
We left there and it started becoming overcast and gray and the air cooled down almost immediately and I could breathe in my bodice and I felt pretty darn okay right then. It went away in a big, over-humid flash as we drove the hour home.
Adelaide
Oh, day of minor disappointments, how I wish to utterly forget you.
I did my part. I was cute. I had my painted nails. I had my side ponytail. I had my peasant top. I was be-neckaced and all my stars were aligned. Nothing.
Got nothing but a minor sunburn, a bag of sweet corn, and some sweaty, nigh on post-coital looking eye makeup to show for it. Nobody worth any notice showed up. I got a lot of looming creepy guys, but what else is new? No monotone, no nice guys, no prospects. This whole falling in love aspect of the Great Plan is apparently no easy checkmark.
I have nothing, I suppose, to do about it but resign myself to try again next week. Maybe if I just go and sit after 17 weeks some rock will be overturned and out will pop eligible bachelor hooray and hoorah.
If I sound cynical and irritable and heat-stroked, you are a winner. Please collect your prize at the door.
Tomorrow doesn’t look good, either. Gotta just let it go. I have a certain degree of nausea and my keyboard is on a slight delay so I think twice or five times as fast as I type. Funny how bothersome that is.
I wish I had something better to say. Can I blamen not getting in my full 500 words on my incredibly shitty keyboard? Os tahat faire to…
Okay, refreshed the browser and we are back in business. I wonder if this absence of vague description is bothering me, too. I can wax poetic for miles, but we’re just talking facts of the day right now. Seems like the truth is a big old drag. Who wants to read about mediocrity and getting by and okayness, anyway? Who wants to read about someone who has risks that are on this sub-level. These risk-free risks that spur me on.
So I want to cheat and paste in an excerpt from my old way of blogging, my nothing said but my heart bled type of page. I feel shitty about this but my hands hurt and I just am over it tonight. I’m missing my heart being in it. I’m missing not having to level with you about the fact that I’m not loved, not focused, not trying, not smart, not fixing the problem. I’m not facing the page. I’m running from it and its protective hand. I apologize, but what better answer is there out there but the faking it and the making it? Give up and go home?
I might have let the brownies burn. Hmm.
The hospice man died yesterday after I left early for the day. And that, apparently, is that. He is past-tense. Like so much trouble and so much misfortune washed away by a good sleep. Now starts the behavior of the griever, the decisions about what is acceptable for the family to do and how they can be. The service won’t be for weeks, after he is cremated and his event, the event he lived for, somehow proceeds without him.
There’s that.
The Great Plan
Whatever it is, the Great Plan has to have some groundrules to be followed. Otherwise, I don’t think I can be held to much account for following it. I’ve been trying to think about it today, loosely, because I know that the Great Plan is wildly disparate. It can mean everything and in so doing choke itself on its own tail. It can mean nothing and literally mean nothing.
I have this piece of amber that several years ago I invested something into. I invested in this pseudo-magical-kitchen-witchery-need-to-do-something piece of amber what little I knew about what I hoped for in terms of someone coming into my life. I don’t know what I believe in, but I think that there’s something in a person’s will, in their hopes, and in their fears that can become a kind of energy, a magic that can alter what does and doesn’t happen for them. I don’t mean The Craft, I just mean….I put enough into it that I couldn’t wear it as the necklace it was meant to be. I couldn’t even bring myself to put it on because of the possibility that it could work. That it could honestly bring me someone who could be kind, and funny, and liberal and true and like bad movies and be in the right spot in terms of overcoming all my massive insecurities and troubles and then, I’d be in the terrible fix of having no good reason to rebuff him.
This was an issue because of the after. The dangerous after. An after I had no clear visioning process for. An after that could leave me really messed up or an after that I could tramp through with my army boots and destroy even just by accident. Commitment issues, sure, why not. It felt like a forever that would impact everything. That if it was the answer to everything it would stop the search, stop the wanting, stop the status quo.
So, I have this piece of amber. It’s been through the washing machine. It’s been in an out of pockets and purses, under pillows, everywhere but around my neck – hanging there, announcing that I might have some hope, some want, some sincere desire. I’m thinking about wearing it now until I do. Or until he arrives.
I know there’s the basic argument that love arrives when you least expect it, when you’re out Great Planning something else. But I’ve been doing other things for as long as I can remember, with intermittent splashes of maybe! and a boatload of depressingly unacceptable even to someone with no real standards to speak of, and nothing obvious has ever snuck into my ken.
So, one piece of the Great Plan, might be this. Wearing this necklace for whatever it means or doesn’t mean, whatever it brings or doesn’t, because I’m trying to let down these Great Walls. I had a whole Great Barrier Reef joke that didn’t quite work. But, I hope you get some of this drift.
It’s the color and shape of a honey tear.
