Malaise

I actually had written most of a post about today, and how I'm trying not to give in so much to the anniversary blues...Unfortunately it turned into exactly that, and I'm just tired of it. I'm in...a "rut" doesn't describe it, really; it's more like "a Chicago-area main-street pothole in March after a full winter of freeze-thaw cycles and a bi-weekly parade of semi trucks." I hate that JP is gone, and I hate that I'm alone, and blah, blah, blah, haven't we been through all this before? I actually did spend the day trying to do stuff to improve my outlook a little; I did all the laundry--you would think one person wouldn't generate much laundry, but then again the person you're thinking of probably does her laundry more than once every six weeks or so--and I took apart my bedroom and vacuumed all the fluffy corners and dusted all the dusty stuff. My environment looks great; my attitude, not so much (though part of that has nothing to do with the anniversary and everything to do with The Godforsaken Itch. TGI has improved, yes--except for my back, and my shoulders, and behind my knees, and.... Finally today, I couldn't stand it anymore and called the allergist my doc referred me to; she said, and I quote, "No antihistamines for three days before your appointment, please." My appointment is Tuesday. Technically, I COULD take some tomorrow, but since I'm now out of Benadryl anyway, there doesn't seem to be much point. I hope I don't go completely insane by Tuesday morning--judging from today's scratch marks, it's a very real possibility.)

I'm tired of my rut, tired of my outlook, tired of my misery. I want to be happy. I want to feel normal--like I'm part of the human race for a change. I would like to have SOME hope that I could possibly attract a partner someday; that, maybe, most of all. I want to be able to look at all my wonderful options and all the great ideas I have, and actually FEEL something--excitement, hope, optimism, ANYTHING. Right now my life puts me to sleep, and I don't even know how to make that better. I know how fortunate I am, how blessed, how lucky--whatever you want to call it--but that knowledge doesn't really do me any good; sometimes, in fact, it makes it even worse. I've got all these things going for me, and I've been given so much...so why, again, am I so miserable?

Mostly I'm lonely, and tonight, at least, that makes sense. I can't believe it's thirteen years since I lost JP; it seems like a billion years, maybe, or maybe just a day or two. I'm amazed at how meaningless those thirteen years have been, how little I have to show for them--not materially, but emotionally. I try not to think about the next thirteen years, or the next. It scares me to think that this is really it--that the rest of my life is set up before me, no surprises--just more of the same. I don't think I could stand knowing that for certain.

Untitled

I'm having a bad night.

My work schedule has been shifted for the next couple of weeks, and so I'm downtown every evening til late. The city at night is different than the city in the daytime. During the day you know people are on business, or for the most part you can at least convince yourself of that. But very few people, especially on a Friday night, come downtown for any businesslike purpose. They come to hold hands and walk down Michigan Avenue, or take their kids to see plays, or go to bars and restaurants and there is nothing in the world like walking unnoticed through all those connected, happy people to make me realize how completely, crushingly insignificant and alone I am. Even here at work, there are pictures on all the walls of people who have done something with their lives, people who have made something of themselves--won Nobel prizes or gotten books upon books published or founded entire philosophies, and here's fat little old me in a t-shirt and jeans, walking through the hallways pushing a cart filled with paper to stuff in the printers. On a Friday night, in Chicago, at 38 years old.

I found a friend online tonight. I've mentioned him here before; he's from a long time ago and he was significant in pretty much everything that went on. He's in California now; I think he's living under another name, and if his MySpace is any indication I can sorta understand why. Now, as then, he's fucking gorgeous; unlike when I knew him, though, he's got (it seems) a lot of friends. A lot, a LOT of friends. On my MySpace page, I have seven friends; he has 958. I wonder what JP would say about that.

And here's the thing: when we were in school together he and I were just alike. We were both these smart, nerdy writer kids. We both had friends, mostly the same friends: nerdy writer kids, theater kids, math kids. Of all the people I went to high school with, I would have never imagined that mine would have been the life that would turn out like this. I always thought my life would have some...you know, LIVING in it.

This is not what I wanted. This is not who I wanted to be, where I wanted to be, what I wanted to be doing.

I really don't know where to turn anymore. All the things I tell myself to make it better, they've all stopped working. It gets harder and harder to hold back the...the what? Fear, maybe--despair, somewhat--complete fucking bewilderment at the wreckage of what started out so promising? Yeah, that too. There are people in my life who would offer me an easy answer to "how did I get here?"--people like my mom, who (and this is just a tangent) has had more to do with it than anyone else, including those who she feels are responsible for screwing up my life--but although I've made mistakes, THOSE are the things I've done that have made me feel MOST like a normal human being. It's times like this, when I'm doing all the "right" things and all it does is make me numb and make me hate myself, that I start hoping there's a new mistake around the corner. At least if there's a little drama, I know I'm alive...

I wonder who I would be if I didn't have to answer to anyone but myself.

Huh,

Of all the things that I wouldn't have thought would help my state of mind nearly as much as it did: Tim called tonight. Didn't want anything, really; just to say hi, to keep in touch, to chat. He and Squeaky are still together, still living with her dad; they actually seem to be really good for each other. I told him how surprised I was; how in the beginning I thought one or both of them was completely insane to be together; and how honestly glad I am to have been wrong about that.

I knew my opinion of them would improve once I was living on my own; now that we're not piled on top of each other like overgrown puppies in a too-small basket, we can get along and not constantly be snapping at each other. It's nice to be in a situation where we can be friends again. I hate to admit it, but I kinda missed Tim. (Squeaky, not so much, but I still consider her a friend; not necessarily a friend I'd like to spend a lot of time with, but someone who, if she was in trouble, I'd be glad to help....as long as it didn't involve, you know, actually LIVING with her for any length of time.)

Tim said he might stop by on Monday, which is fine with me; fine if he does, fine if he doesn't. But hearing from him, talking to him for an hour about nothing of great consequence...it felt good.

In other news, my oldest friend Debbi (of Debbi and Cowgirl fame, of Girls' Nights Out (now sadly abandoned, for lack of transportation and horribly conflicting job schedules), bought a house. Today was her moving-in day, and THIS is when not having a vehicle becomes a real annoyance; I would have GLADLY helped her pack and move and all the rest, but the whole transportation issue (she's moving from one completely-inaccessible area of a highly-underserved-by-public-transit south suburb, to a nearly-as-bad-but-there's-at-least-a-Metra-station-down-the-street area of another underserved south suburb) makes the whole plan fraught with difficulty. I wanted to go out there last Sunday to help her pack, but neither the necessary buses nor the required trains--the only way to get from here to there--run on Sundays. At least where she's moving TO, everything runs on Sundays--albeit on a monstrous, every-two-hours schedule. I could reserve an iGo car, but that's a little bit of a strain on the already-strained budget this month. It really sucks not to be able to see your friends because of transportation. The plus to all this, though, is that by the time I get a chance to see her and her new place, I'll have had the chance to finish her housewarming gift; I'm going to quilt her a set of placemats, and also have some drawings framed. (To explain the drawings would require an entire blog post all its own, but I will attempt to summarize: About twelve years ago, during the winter after JP's death, when Debbi and Cowgirl pretty much kept my spirits up as much as possible, Debbi got tonsillitis. There was a brief period when the doctors were talking about having them removed, and during this time, the three of us created a whole storyline about Debbi's tonsils and what they would do once they were "out". This culminated in a series of three cartoons, which could have been a much longer series, in which the tonsils packed their bags, left a note, and escaped through Debbi's mouth while she slept. Somewhere in the series, they were also chased behind the refrigerator by a gerbil, which...okay, look. Haven't I TOLD you people I have a strange, vivid, and intensely bizarre imagination? I think I've mentioned it. Anyway, The Adventures of Debbi's Tonsils turned up in a box of memorabilia which I was sorting through a week or so ago, and when I mentioned it to Debbi on the phone, her reaction was such that I knew I was going to need to get them framed and give them to her as a housewarming present.)

I'm a little jealous, I'll admit. But only a tiny, tiny bit; mostly, I'm just really happy for Debbi. She deserves a cute little place of her own; she's spent the last ten years in a third-floor walkup apartment in a building full of noisy families and neglectful landlords, and from what she says, the house is adorable. I can't wait to see it.

All this stuff, and my reactions to it, make me think I know what's happening, or at least SOME of what's happening, to make me so depressed; plain and simply, I'm lonely. That's hard for me to admit; I'm a fan of solitude, and usually very good at being my own company, but I think I've pushed it a little too far this time. Part of it is that I have a very hard time making friends--bluntly, I don't have the slightest idea how to do it--and part of it is that I am carrying so much guilt about friendships from the past. I think of all the people who I've lost touch with, and it really brings me down. Walking to work today, I told myself: I've got to let go of some of that guilt. Yes, I made mistakes; there were people I should have called or written to; people to whom I should have been a better friend. There are people who I lost because I was a drug addict; and people I lost because I was depressed and self-absorbed; and people I lost because I was with one man or another, to the exclusion of all else. There are some people I've lost and I don't even know why. All that is very hard to live with, especially for someone who can't seem to forgive her own mistakes; to think that I'm alone largely because of the many things I've done wrong...well, that's a heavy weight to carry. But it's true; in many of the friendships I've lost, I've been the responsible party. And now I seem to have lost the ability to make friends, to let anybody get close enough to decide whether or not they like me. I keep people at arm's length, because I assume nobody would want to be any closer than arms-length to me to begin with. I'm sure it comes off all wrong, but I'm not sure how to be any different; not completely sure I want to be different, really. It's a hell of a quandary.

So the only thing I'm sure I can do is try to keep the friends I have, try not to piss off anyone else who cares enough to still be around, and hope that maybe I'll figure all this stuff out, sooner instead of later....and try not to miss the people who I drove away. That, more than anything, is the part that sucks.

Well.

I was in the process of writing a very bitchy post--I've had a very bitch-inspiring few days, the past two particularly--when my mom called.

I don't know if I've mentioned it, but my mom is a very, very devout church-goer. I mean, she goes to church EVERY...SINGLE...DAY. If she misses a day, it's generally because she's hospitalized, the car's broken down, or the house is buried under eighteen feet of snow.

And of course, today being Sunday, she was going to Mass anyway; however, she went to a different church than usual. She had stopped going to the church I grew up in several years ago because she disagreed with the pastor about...everything, pretty much...and started attending a church about a mile away; but today she went to the old church, because there was a Mass in honor of her friend who died last year.

She's telling me the story of something that happened during the service that upset her, when she mentions that the Mass was being held for two people: her friend, and "Tim Thomas" (obviously a pseudonym). Well, that just happens to be the name of a guy I went to grammar school with, and it's a fairly uncommon name. So I said "Not Tim Thomas, the one I went to school with?"

"Yeah," said Mom, "he died. He had cancer, you know." I HAD known--but when I'd seen him a couple years back at the reunion, he looked okay. Not great--none of the guys looked great!--but healthy.

The thing is, he had been probably my first true heartbreak, way back in fifth grade. I had a huge crush on him, and he'd chosen one of the popular girls to "ask out" (whatever possible meaning that could have had for two ten-year-olds back in 1981; we were pretty innocent then, even the "fast" girls. If I had a ten-year-old daughter NOW who said she was "going out" with a little boy, I'd seriously consider discussing safe sex.) I remember spending Valentines' Day 1981 in a deep despair, having learned this news at a Girl Scout party the night before.

And we all grew up; I'm sure that little girl who I envied so much has had her traumas too. I don't know what became of her; contrary to my direst fears, they didn't grow up, get married, and live happily ever after.

After my mom told me that he had died, I did a search for his name in Google; I found out that he'd died back in the fall, and that he left behind a wife and a small child...a little girl, who's autistic.

I didn't feel so much like writing that bitchy post, after that.

Sometimes I Forget

I found myself, tonight, listening to my music again. Music, which to me used to be as crucial for life as water and oxygen, is a rare indulgence anymore; too much has happened since then. When the things you love are used against you, used as weapons to cut you down and make you doubt yourself, it's sometimes hard to love them again even after the one who wielded them as weapons is long gone; CR has been out of my life for six years this spring, and yet weeks sometimes go by where I don't turn on the radio, or click on Windows Media, or pop in my earbuds. What makes that more of a sin to me is this: music was one of my deepest connections with JP, and one of my most superficial commonalities with CR. Where CR inflicted music on me, JP and I communed through music, on a level beyond anything CR would ever have been able to comprehend. In bludgeoning me with his views, CR stole from me one of the things I could least afford to lose: yet another connection to JP and what we had together.

Tonight, though, there was nothing on TV, and so while I did some Wikipedia-ing and priced out shelving for my hallway closet, I clicked on one of my playlists and listened.

In the constant psychic effort to fend off things I can't handle, not to think about things I don't have the energy to think about clearly, I find that I've fenced out a lot of good memories as well. All of them, really; the good memories were really all there was. (Firefly remembers things differently, I know; she tells me of phone calls near the end, in the weeks before JP's death, where I spoke of arguments, of things not going well. I remember one argument clearly; I remember a sense of growing stress, but as I remember it, the stress was about the situation and not about the relationship. We were both scared, was the long and short of it.) Listening to some of the songs I've managed to find at last--some online, some on eBay, here and there and everywhere--I remember moments I've choked back down for years; I find myself sitting here and thinking This...THIS is why I'm not looking anymore. This is why I'm okay with being alone--because there isn't anyone who would understand exactly what's so wonderful about these songs. In almost thirteen years I haven't found another man who would listen to, say, "Silence" by Delerium, and find it sexy. JP would have understood immediately; that's one of the songs I regret he never got to hear.

And it's not me, I don't think; I don't believe I'm taking an extraordinarily-pessimistic view of things. It's not that I just haven't FOUND that man; it's that I truly believe that he DOES NOT EXIST. He did, once. I know this for a fact, and I don't just mean JP. There were a lot of guys like JP, to a greater or (mostly) lesser degree. But that was back in 1990, 1992, 1995. By 1997 they were an endangered species; by 2000 they were extinct, completely. They were married, the good ones, the ones who hadn't skated close enough to the edge to be sucked down; the other ones were lost, or fighting their way out of some dream-world, struggling back out into reality, blinking at the sunlight. When they emerged they found what I found: scorched earth. Limp Bizkit, Starbucks, Howard Stern, Jackass. Kid Rock and Korn and the jock-ocracy resurgent, Rush Limbaugh and woman-hating and gay-bashing, Fox "News" and millions of SUV's on every block, and 24-hour-a-day celebrity scandals crawling across the bottom of every screen for miles around.

I can only wonder, sometimes, at whatever force managed to keep me sober. Those years were a horror-show for anyone who remembered when it was okay for men to feel; when you could turn on a rock station and hear a woman's voice singing; when it really, really wasn't acceptable to spew hate as though it were spray-paint. The wonder is that I didn't crawl back into my warm heroin blankets and refuse to emerge forever. The only answer I have to offer is, I didn't realize exactly how bad it was. I knew it was bad; I just thought it would get better, is all.

It has, a little--but only a little. I'm not decrying every tiny little change that's taken place since 1994; I'm not even claiming that I was impervious to change myself. I listen to songs now, the lyrics of which would have sent me into screeching horrors back in my days with JP; which probably would have sent JP off the edge too, come to think of it. (Sometimes I think about some things I know of JP's past, how he'd been treated by females through his life, and I wonder in some dark heretical corner of my mind if maybe HE would have become part of this nightmare, eventually; if maybe the things that were done and said to him by women might not have driven him to the place where it was all right to call women "bitches" and "hos". I like to think not; mostly I think not. I wonder who this world would have made him, sometimes.) And there are good things too; blogs, for example. JP would have adored blogs; when he died, the world was just starting to grasp the opportunities of the Internet, although it really wasn't "The Internet" per se, back then--it was just a little bunch of dial-up, pay-by-the-hour online services, but I found them fascinating, and he was caught up in my enthusiasm. The thought of being able to find music from tiny obscure bands and listen to it on the computer...oh, that would have been JP's idea of heaven, and if one of those bands had been HIS?

But I think he would have been discouraged, as I am; the hate outweighs the hope, and the ways in which some of the pendulums have swung backwards would have saddened him, I know. The current political climate, especially here in Chicago, would have sickened him; what passes for intelligent discourse would have horrified him. I don't think he would have been a very happy man, had he lived, and that alone makes me very sad--that thought that maybe he was better off, the way things happened.

I spend a lot of time thinking about things like that, when I think of JP, because those are the kinds of things I can bear to think about. Those are the safe thoughts, the ones that won't make me cry, at least not on a good day. But there are the other thoughts, too, the ones that come upon me when I least expect it, or when I'm listening to music; when a song comes with a crystal-clear memory attached, and I'm forced to think about some moment I'll never have again. Or a reminder of what might have been--not the pessimist's version I've drawn to comfort myself, but the best-case scenario, the kind of thing we dreamed for ourselves a thousand times a day, when we were together; or sometimes just an acknowledgement, the kind you can't do anything with or anything about, the kind I've forced back for what feels like forever: ...god, that man was special.

And I Thought Saturday Night Was Weird.

I am linking to this comment because it is easily the most fuxxored-up thing I have ever, ever, ever seen. And it comes from California. (Ooh. Shocker.)

:::shaking head:::

These people live among us. And people wonder why I have no fear of death.

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In other news, as of today, I am officially No Longer A Homeowner.

I don't know exactly what comes next--from everything I've read, they can't put me out in the street for at least a little while--and so I'm not fretting myself about it. Seething, yes, because this didn't have to happen and it could have been stopped and the person who could have stopped it chose instead to use money as a source of control, all the while claiming it was "for the best"--yeah, for HER best--but I'm not worrying.

It's only a house. My life doesn't go with it. I am losing walls, a roof, and a floor.

I've lost many, many harder things before.

But this loss didn't have to happen. That's what galls me. That may be petty and childish, but in my heart of hearts I know WHY my mother made the decision she made, and it had nothing to do with any of her stated concerns, and everything to do with the statement I've heard at least a thousand times in the three years and ten months I've owned this building: "I wish you didn't live in That Neighborhood." THAT's what it was about, plain and simple, and I know this all the way down to my bones.

THAT's why I'm angry.