The Occassional Dread of Being Awake

I'm having a hard time going to work recently. In part it's because me and my team have been getting hammered with criticism, relentlessly since last fall. That's bound to wear on a Bear.

Part of it is the weather. Blazing hot temps that peel the sticky hooks off my wall and drop my shit to the ground while I'm at work. I come home to stretched and torn latex paint, and my frame drum looking at me from the floor like, "What?"

Most of it, I fear, is the love thing. I don't gotta love thing. Or rather, I've got bad case of the fucked up blues. Lauren's birthday just passed. Not that I noticed. It's been (counting... on fingers first and then on the calendar)... years. Three apartments and two girlfriends ago. Three if you count the one month stint.

That's how I mark time. Ages of my life have names. The Heidi Period, when I went on tour one summer, following around the remnants of the Grateful Dead and driving my ass off. The Lou Period, which is a lot like college. The Lauren period, when I lived richly. The Gena Period, when everyone thought I was crazy, including me, and I loved her like crazy.

That's the recent one, the one I'm stuck on. She called me after she emailed, proving that she really "demanded" a response. The non-response was not acceptable. She tried to keep the crazy out of her voice, like she had done so well in the email, but I heard it. And I was even more sure of not responding. Then another email: "Why won't you respond?"

So I'll answer her here: Because I don't trust you. You know I care about you and you'll use that to the best of your abilities, which are vast. You know I still love you, and so seeing your face or hearing your full voice (not through the digitation of the phone) or (God forbid) touching your skin would be the end of my resolve. Because I miss you so much it keeps me on my knees and hiding in my house, even while I know what I really miss is just part of my imagination. It is the image you want to project that I was happy to buy into. But you can't keep up the charade. And the results when it crumbles is disasterous. And in the end I give everything away, and you consume the life of me.

And the truth is: I don't know how to not give everything away when I fall in love. That's what I do. And so later, when I come to, and we're moved in and everything is in it's perfect locked down place, I will need room to grow, and move, and change, and expand.

Mental Blocks, building with colors

I stop myself from writing here all the time. I think: That's not enough. Not meaty enough. Not long enough. Half the time I've got just a few more characters than 140, so it just seems like a Monster Tweet.

Alas, I create my own roadblocks. So. I hereby commit to stop fucking myself in the head and just let it go. Let it go so easily that I don't think about some schmuck reading it and shaking her head at my poor word choice or self-inflicted passive voice.

I promise to relay and relate every flinch and flicker... okay maybe not everyone but the ones I'm instantly motivated to share. Because, if I wait, I might change my mind.

Folks tell me they love the honesty, etc. That's because I don't think twice. Ima Jack Kerouac that shit. Pound it out and hit publish.

Fearless writing. So there.

Splitting Silently

What's weird is not talking. I have the urge to call, but I don't. I fear what the conversation will turn into. Conversations over the phone have, in the recent past, turned into shouting matches, which then turn into me trying to get away and eventually just hanging up. Hanging up, mid-speech. I've never hung up on anybody before, but I started here, and I found eventually that I couldn't stop.

One of many signs of things gone bad.

So yes, I'm sad and lonely, but that comes and goes, like weather I can't control. Sometimes I want nothing to do with the rest of humanity. And then I remember, I have a commitment to make things better, and that generally means I can't live in a cave.

What I do have is a nice cave, high in the house, with a window for my cat. She gets out sometimes to scout out the rest of the house, with an old black cat waiting to chase her back to home base. I have one place where I lay down every night. I have one set of keys in my pocket. This I like.

Facinating sadness, this one

It comes on like a sneeze
Of great length
Seizing my face up in an instant
The shame of it,
I think
Forehead in hand
Only a few tears eek out
But the sharpness of the pain is worth buckets
Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

Dear Help Desk, Please Put the Gun Down

It's probably unethical or something for me to work on Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday (observed). I came to work anyway, knowing that the office would be largely empty. I didn't know that the main source of my work-related consternation would be here, serving up shitty emails and sauntering into my office to blinkety-blink at me as they stuttered their discombombulated concerns.

I just want you to know that I just ate, so I should be less cranky, by a factor of at least five, and much less likely to begin to cry. But there's nothing really like a good frustrated cry.

Dear Help Desk, reads an email from a friend... someone I actually like and enjoy talking to... could you please change the wording of this fake official email that I keep getting from some spammer? Dear friend, I know it looks like it's our email system sending you email but we don't use the mailer-daemon for our email, so it's not us. And, yes, we've told you this at least four different times in five different ways, but I'll tell you again, patiently, because I like you. But I swear to G-d, if you ask me again about this crap I might just scream. P.S. You're still coming to the dinner-ish party I'm hosting, right?

Other topics, from people I really can't stand, or those who just annoy me intermittantly are:
"Why won't my computer knead and bake my bread for me? It is a computer after all. It can do anything, even if I have every application known to man open and running complex regression analyses."

"I've been having this recurring problem but I always call the emergency Help Desk phone number instead of documenting it in an email to Help Desk so that people can follow up on it. It gave me an error and I wrote it down, in crayon, on this napkin. I can't read this, can you?"

For the record, I disabled part of your email system because you abuse it so badly the rest of your programs won't work. And I refuse to even talk to you, even as you toddle around in my office on this quiet vacation-like day, when I was trying to get other stuff done that actually requires concentration.

Also, when I was working on your computer I took a screen shot of your desktop because you think that's where all your files should go. I share it with my co-workers and we laugh at you relentlessly because it is a great illustration of how far up your ass your head is.

(this image deleted, as requested)