30.Sep.2003
september is going out with a fury
--
So.
It's 4:07AM, Central Standard Time, on the last day of September.
A diary is designed to list one's everyday movements, and their fears, and their desires.
Today consisted of me emerging valiantly from a Seroquel-induced stupor from Sunday morning. I spent an inordinate amount of time applying milligram dosage versus body mass, in the hopes I had calculated correctly.
My brother woke me up by informing me our mother underwent another minor operation. It wasn't anything major. He picked me up the second before it became grisly afternoon. He, of course, had the very blood in his relational veins, named Terri, at his side.
I was in a bad mood. I have been in a bad mood since 96 hours ago. If you know me, you know this.
We drove wordlessly to Mercy Hospital. I could not lift my head from the floor of any room, be it the ICU or the floor of Terri's car.
In the ICU, our father greeted us, and he linked a smoky, emaciated arm around my ever-narrowing shoulder, and immediately, he asked, "What's wrong?"
You're caught in this scenario. You're caught as the Virgin Mary. You are caught being all that is righteous and true, and, despite your personal and your vocational life, you are forced to maintain a smile plastered to your face.
However, I fail in all areas of this. If I am suffering through anything, you can see it in my neurotic face. You can see it in my half-assed movements. You can see it from 1.5 miles before you. You know, even innately, that I am not in a good mood.
I couldn't lift my head from the floor of the CICU. I could not maintain honest eye-contact with anyone. I walked into a room where my mother, the woman who gave birth to me, the woman who launched me into a universe pregnant with schizophrenia-evoked images, memories, the mother I should hold everything against, the same mother now who has an insipid "emergency operation" every day, she was lying in a hospital bed with several tubes connected to various parts of her, and I simply could not lift my gaze from the same nurse-raped floor.
I have no logical explanation. I have no secure reasoning. I have no evidence backing me. I have nothing. I sucked on my bottom lip.
It wasn't until my mother herself asked me, "Babydoll, are you alright?"
That I lost it. There. In her hospital room. Years of subdued emotion. It came from me in choked sobs. I simply broke down right there before her, she, my mother, the woman who promised me light and God, the woman who spent most of her life vanquishing all of my fears while inadvertently instilling more, there it was that I lost it, and I sobbed. I simply just went down in front of my mother.
--
I always regret it. I am always apologizing for those bits of emotion. I always attempt to condense them to various bits of logic. I always wind up being short-changed.
--
Outside, it's raining. Oklahoma is welcoming October with muggy, open arms. The thunder is deep. A shock of lightning hits somewhere nondescript. The thunder bellows. Someone's car alarm goes off.
I light a cigarette. My father tells me, "This is the last of her operations. She's getting better. I talked to her surgeon today after they inserted the last pumps into her. She's getting better."
My father asks how I'm eating. He asks if I'm drinking. He gives me $25 I try to press back into his hand. He asks if my personal life is ok.
These are all movements toward complete independence. I explain to him what transpires in my personal life. I try to explain to him it's business as usual, a la Barry Adamson.
My personal life isn't anything colorful. I assume it's the same. Everyone goes through a break-up that becomes emotional and asinine, despite the break of distance. My current would be my third. He's a story on the back of a milk carton. He's a four-incher in the scheme of reality. He or any one of his comrades are reading this right now. He will SPAM me with e-mails or anonymously sign his name to my guestbook. A child hell-bent on taunting. It's like that kid who never has enough birthday presents.
My personal life also includes those who spend most of their time around me lamenting relational tales of woe. Sure. It happens to the rest of us, only, I have over one hundred stories of loss. Why I'm the designated dumping ground for the left-ventricle landslide, I have yet to figure out.
I tell my father, "It's ok. It's nothing a light slam wouldn't cure."
He chuckles.
Eventually, we go back inside.
I apologize to my mother. I run my hands over her forehead. Every part of her, I surmise, is cold. She tells me it's alright. I immediately suffer the ass. I suck my emotions through my front teeth.
--
I'm never the type to count losses and endeavor to outstrip others. Loss is simply loss. Who gives a fuck about years of association backing the loss? We are all the same color beneath all of our tragedies. That statement teeters dangerously on the border of a "We Are the World" chorus. My apologies.
I have two beers remaining.
I came home to a house that I have been cleaning and scrubbing, despite the teenagers running rampant through the dusty hall-ways. Despite vitality, I feel like an old hag.
--
I think about a few things when I upload entries. First, a diary exists as a release. Second, once you get caught up in the textual bullshit, you have no right to use your diary as an emotional release, sans direction, if that makes any sense.
I may be 5'3", but I'm prepared to take the onlooker on. This is my domain. I don't always toss a rat's ass to the literary gods of propriety. If I am enduring a ridiculously arduous time, I will write about it.
I will not, however, write about it as an 18-year-old college student who's bent over backwards about the fact Todd the Baker did not flash sex-eyes at them that day. Fuck you spoiled brats.
--
Musically, out of all of this, I met Todd(tm), the Lord over Music Box, a recording studio here in Oklahoma City. Despite the fact the most impassioned of my riffs spell out the last names of blights on humanity who use others as an excuse to sever ties to me, he will record all of me and all of my shrinking-skin-touched ballads. I should probably condense them.
And, despite all of this, I hope the very tall Todd hands his naked body over to me on a silver platter.
Because I have to tell you.
I am in one hell of a mood to fuck.
xo/ox,
--
time & machine