I'm feeling rather cozy in my velour pants and Roy's oversized sweatshirt as I sit in the room we are currently sharing and spend quality time with the six dogs who are coming in and out for little doses of affection. I am the only human in the house at the moment, and the solitude and stillness is appreciated. After making a visit to the hospital the other night, It's been determined that I have an advanced bladder infection. It explains what I thought were several isolated incidences of random illness. Now I have two days off, and I am taking advantage of the opportunity to rest and heal. Still, there is so much that I need to be doing, and my illness and fatigue are only getting in the way. It seems there is always something pressing and deadlines hanging over my head. It certainly doesn't make it any easier that I have to pee every ten minutes.
Last night I managed to drag myself out of the house to go to a party at my friend Magenta's house. Magenta is one of the most fantastic people I have come across in Roslyn, or anywhere. We met one night at the brick after I first came into town, and before my second trip to Ecuador. I had been out with my friend Brent earlier, and time had distorted, as it's known to do here. When he dropped me off at my house, I was sure it was nearly 2am. It felt like the end of the night, and I was appropriately ready for bed. However when I got home and discovered it was only 9:30 at night, I suddenly got a second wind and walked into town. When I got there, the place was relatively empty, as if I hadn't been the only one to experience the time shift.
Brent walks in and is surprised to see me there. "I thought you were going to bed?" I strike up a conversation while I'm ordering a drink, then, abruptly pause it to listen to the woman singing across the bar. She's singing Summer Time, the tune my Dad whistled everywhere he went. It's always been one of my favorites. In fact I sang it for my final exam in a voice class I took in college. She sings it perfectly, and I have to introduce myself. For the rest of the night, Magenta and I sang together. We left the bar and went to my house to sing for each other, read lyrics and listen to music. Then I left for Ecuador and didn't see her again for nearly a month.
My time in Roslyn has been short, but significant. Tomorrow after work I will drive to Ellensburg to get the keys for our new house. We'll have to go to Seattle this weekend and clear out my storage shed. We had to sell my truck to get the money for first/last and deposit, so we're not sure where we're going to get the money for gas to get there, or to rent a U-haul. My mom sent us a check to help…. I just hope it gets here by Saturday.
Now that we have managed to find a house that we can reasonable expect to afford, with a fenced yard for our pack I am starting to look forward to the changes that are rapidly approaching. Of course the move itself will be dreadful, and Roy and I will both have to work the following morning. In other words, we're not out of the woods yet, but by Valentines Day we should be all settled in. The radio station in Ellensburg is looking for a new DJ, and I'm hoping that I will be the one. The job would be perfect for me, and I perfect for it. I just realized that I'm almost as horny as I am hungry. I think I'm going to take my food stamps and go to the grocery store, since buying food at a restaurant is simply not an option at the moment. I'll take care of the other business later if Roy is up to it despite his cold.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
life after death cont.
With one move down, and another soon to come, I am again reminded of why I had the words "here" and "now" tattooed on my arms. At the time I had just moved in with my then lover Chrisopher Blue. It was January 2005, and it was my forth move since the previous April when I left my fiancé to reclaim my independence. After a five-year relationship with relative stability, I was again flung into the chaos I had once left behind. I often awoke not knowing where I was. I didn't know who was making sounds around me. Was I in the home that my fiancé and I had bought together? Had all of this been a dream? This disorientation gave me great anxiety. I began writing those two words on the inside of my wrists everyday to remind me that no matter where I had gone I was still here, and that there was no use dwelling on the past or worrying about the future. I am here and it is now.
Chrisopher went with me to get the tattoos. We went to our friend Ian who had done all of Chrisophers work. It felt like I was turning a new leaf. I was moving in with the man I loved after we had spent the holidays traveling by car up and down the California coast. He had been so afraid before to admit that he loved me, and now he had asked me to move into his apartment with him. Getting inked, I felt, was a perfect way to devote myself to this time I was living in… this time with him.
Of course that time passed and led to this one. Life with Chrisopher fluctuated regularly between ecstatic and miserable. We brought out the best and the worst of each other until the worst became unbearable. Chrisopher moved to California to live among the red woods, and I ran away to South America twice before settling down in the quiet mountain town of Roslyn.
The tattoos on my arms represent an ideal that I hold logically, but have difficulty obtaining. They function as a reminder…. a reminder that now in the throws of winter I only see in the shower. In fact, as I think about it, my other tattoos are also concepts that I understand and yet cannot accept. The very first one came about on the day after my 18th birthday. The night before I had bought a pack of cigarettes, visited a porn shop, and done almost anything I could think of that had been illegal for me to do before. Then I went to go see Bob Dylan at the Kiva Auditorium and smoked a joint on stage with him while looking down in the crowd at my high school English teacher.
I went with my friend Kevin (aka Kaos) to the Route 66 fine line tattoo parlor because he said he knew the owner and could get me a deal. The artist working that day was an attractive young man whose face lit-up when he saw me. "I know you…. you're that girl that smoked me out last night at the Dylan concert." For twenty dollars he tattooed a black sun with eight distinctive rays on my back. I had chosen this symbol because it represented chaos. Since I moved out of my parent's house at 16, my life had been chaotic. I had studied chaos theory and felt it was time to embrace its force over all things. Still accepting the results of chaos on my life proved difficult. I continued to live it, create it, and despise it.
My second tattoo was a tribute to my dead father. In his life, he had worked many jobs, and was once given the nickname "Rood Dog" by a group of construction men he had worked with at Intel in Rio Rancho New Mexico. The name stuck, and when my father took work over seas, he addressed all his letters to me "to Littlepaw" and signed his name using a paw-print. I had the paw print placed on my right ankle to honor his life, and my connection to him. Despite the tattoo, accepting my fathers death proved to be as if not more difficult that embracing chaos or living in the present moment.
It seems there are so many things my mind can conceive of that I can't seem to actualize in my life. My mind is a factory of thoughts and ideas that are being produced 24 hours a day. When I am awake I stare off into the distance to hear my thoughts. In sleep they surface in bizarre and complicated dreamscapes. It is never quite. There is never peace. I still wake up wondering where I am and which portions of my life have been a dream. There is nothing I can fully accept as fact. There is nothing that is impossible. All that is real is chaos and loss, and I am trapped in its past and afraid for its future.
Sometimes I feel it is my frustrated ambitions that make me crazy. It is the ideas that I never found the energy to pursue that fill my dreams, and the exhaustion that kept me from them that haunts my waking life. Perhaps, in a body that were not as wrecked as mine has become, my busy mind could be satisfied with manic spells of great productivity. However, chronic pain has skewed my bi-polar disorder to favor depression over mania for pure lack of energy. When the mania does surface, it usually results in nothing more than a sleepless night and a rapid pulse. I wonder how I will achieve greatness with all the obstacles I have collected to carry with me. I wonder if it is possible that I will be healthy again in my lifetime.
I am sitting across form the food court in the student union building at Central Washington University. With my own belly full of noodles and sweet and sour chicken, I watch as students choose from the five varieties of grease delivery systems posing as food. Once a week I sit here for approximately two and a half hours while Roy goes to his class on renewable energy. I could stay home if I wanted, but I like to take the opportunity to read, and write, and be alone in public. I prefer to sit upstairs where there are comfy chairs and couches, but this evening I was forced out by the horrible music emanating from the "Campus Crusade for Christ" that is going on in the ball room.
I have to wonder why they chose the word "Crusade" for their event. Are they not aware of how bloody and (pardon the expression) god-awful the crusades were for the victims it claimed? Could they possibly be implying that were it not illegal they would hunt and kill every person on this campus whose way of seeing the world differs from their own? Do they think that Jesus Christ would be honored to have such horrors committed in his name?
I'm currently in the process of applying for graduate school here at CWU. Having graduated from UW in Seattle, I can hide my sense of superiority from everyone but myself. I am months away from beginning school here, and I am already board with the campus and its relatively homogeneous student population. I hope that as a grad student, I will be too busy to be annoyed by this place. I hope that my classmates will be as separate from these loud obnoxious undergrads as I feel right now. I hope that among the truck stops and cow-patties of Ellensburg I will somehow find an intellectual community that will satisfy my yearning for educational stimulation. I grow weary of writing, and decide to return to the novel I am reading: "Skinny Legs and All" by Tom Robbins.
Chrisopher went with me to get the tattoos. We went to our friend Ian who had done all of Chrisophers work. It felt like I was turning a new leaf. I was moving in with the man I loved after we had spent the holidays traveling by car up and down the California coast. He had been so afraid before to admit that he loved me, and now he had asked me to move into his apartment with him. Getting inked, I felt, was a perfect way to devote myself to this time I was living in… this time with him.
Of course that time passed and led to this one. Life with Chrisopher fluctuated regularly between ecstatic and miserable. We brought out the best and the worst of each other until the worst became unbearable. Chrisopher moved to California to live among the red woods, and I ran away to South America twice before settling down in the quiet mountain town of Roslyn.
The tattoos on my arms represent an ideal that I hold logically, but have difficulty obtaining. They function as a reminder…. a reminder that now in the throws of winter I only see in the shower. In fact, as I think about it, my other tattoos are also concepts that I understand and yet cannot accept. The very first one came about on the day after my 18th birthday. The night before I had bought a pack of cigarettes, visited a porn shop, and done almost anything I could think of that had been illegal for me to do before. Then I went to go see Bob Dylan at the Kiva Auditorium and smoked a joint on stage with him while looking down in the crowd at my high school English teacher.
I went with my friend Kevin (aka Kaos) to the Route 66 fine line tattoo parlor because he said he knew the owner and could get me a deal. The artist working that day was an attractive young man whose face lit-up when he saw me. "I know you…. you're that girl that smoked me out last night at the Dylan concert." For twenty dollars he tattooed a black sun with eight distinctive rays on my back. I had chosen this symbol because it represented chaos. Since I moved out of my parent's house at 16, my life had been chaotic. I had studied chaos theory and felt it was time to embrace its force over all things. Still accepting the results of chaos on my life proved difficult. I continued to live it, create it, and despise it.
My second tattoo was a tribute to my dead father. In his life, he had worked many jobs, and was once given the nickname "Rood Dog" by a group of construction men he had worked with at Intel in Rio Rancho New Mexico. The name stuck, and when my father took work over seas, he addressed all his letters to me "to Littlepaw" and signed his name using a paw-print. I had the paw print placed on my right ankle to honor his life, and my connection to him. Despite the tattoo, accepting my fathers death proved to be as if not more difficult that embracing chaos or living in the present moment.
It seems there are so many things my mind can conceive of that I can't seem to actualize in my life. My mind is a factory of thoughts and ideas that are being produced 24 hours a day. When I am awake I stare off into the distance to hear my thoughts. In sleep they surface in bizarre and complicated dreamscapes. It is never quite. There is never peace. I still wake up wondering where I am and which portions of my life have been a dream. There is nothing I can fully accept as fact. There is nothing that is impossible. All that is real is chaos and loss, and I am trapped in its past and afraid for its future.
Sometimes I feel it is my frustrated ambitions that make me crazy. It is the ideas that I never found the energy to pursue that fill my dreams, and the exhaustion that kept me from them that haunts my waking life. Perhaps, in a body that were not as wrecked as mine has become, my busy mind could be satisfied with manic spells of great productivity. However, chronic pain has skewed my bi-polar disorder to favor depression over mania for pure lack of energy. When the mania does surface, it usually results in nothing more than a sleepless night and a rapid pulse. I wonder how I will achieve greatness with all the obstacles I have collected to carry with me. I wonder if it is possible that I will be healthy again in my lifetime.
I am sitting across form the food court in the student union building at Central Washington University. With my own belly full of noodles and sweet and sour chicken, I watch as students choose from the five varieties of grease delivery systems posing as food. Once a week I sit here for approximately two and a half hours while Roy goes to his class on renewable energy. I could stay home if I wanted, but I like to take the opportunity to read, and write, and be alone in public. I prefer to sit upstairs where there are comfy chairs and couches, but this evening I was forced out by the horrible music emanating from the "Campus Crusade for Christ" that is going on in the ball room.
I have to wonder why they chose the word "Crusade" for their event. Are they not aware of how bloody and (pardon the expression) god-awful the crusades were for the victims it claimed? Could they possibly be implying that were it not illegal they would hunt and kill every person on this campus whose way of seeing the world differs from their own? Do they think that Jesus Christ would be honored to have such horrors committed in his name?
I'm currently in the process of applying for graduate school here at CWU. Having graduated from UW in Seattle, I can hide my sense of superiority from everyone but myself. I am months away from beginning school here, and I am already board with the campus and its relatively homogeneous student population. I hope that as a grad student, I will be too busy to be annoyed by this place. I hope that my classmates will be as separate from these loud obnoxious undergrads as I feel right now. I hope that among the truck stops and cow-patties of Ellensburg I will somehow find an intellectual community that will satisfy my yearning for educational stimulation. I grow weary of writing, and decide to return to the novel I am reading: "Skinny Legs and All" by Tom Robbins.
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