An Hour

This woman, this large woman who wore white clothes that were themselves gigantic, like bedsheets, this woman had trouble sleeping. There were professional theories about why she had chronic insomnia but she believed it was because she wore too much white: it kept her nervous system amped so that she couldn't close her eyes without seeing white superimposed over her closed eyelids, and that was basically just a movie screen to her not-somnambulant mind. Despite herself she would watch the fragments of internal video that her brain projected there, and it was almost never important nor said anything deep. She'd lay there with her eyes closed watching her own kitchen fill up with the groceries she had forgotten that afternoon, or the gluey awkward conversation she'd had with her social worker the week before. It was all stuff from the past, but it was what her brain showed her and she had to watch.

Maybe the white clothes were an attempt at continuity: she wanted to make her internal eye and her external eyes see the same thing. She saw lots of white when she looked at herself in the mirror, which she did a lot and without apology. She was known amoung those who saw to her that she'd do that sort of thing when she was in a mood, which was all the time so why call it being "in a mood"? She'd do that sort of thing and it was called a "mood", because it created the mythology wherein she'd "get better" and then there wouldn't be any more "moods". The woman was a slave, then; or more likely she was an indentured servant to her "moods". Fuck that, she thought. But then she'd do something strange and wondered if the myth might be true and she was just moody rather than permanently altered by her long lack of sleep. The thought would then easily transmute into pictures of signets she'd seen swimming with their gorgeous parents in the nearby river. Those signets were cute, she thought. The change in her mindset was insubstantial, and during the hour when she could reflect on them she would realize that it was scary how boneless her thoughts were, how weak they seemed right before they disappeared and were replaced by cute animal pictures.

The woman was energetic for one thing: News Roundup with the BBC. She didn't know what any of those letters stood for, or where the they were normally found. The nurses would shift around, looking for trouble before it showed up, trying to suss out which stories were going to upset the population. They shouldn't have bothered, thought the woman; though sometimes it worked and everyone would remain placid during the program, so what did she know? She would stare at the screen and absorb it without understanding, just blinking at the screen when it showed some pictures of someone who'd just been maimed riding a new ride at an old amusement park or the sheet-bound prone bodies of ten civilians, killed by explosions during the latest fighting blah blah. She absorbed and paced, flapping her hands and keeping her eyes on the screen. She may have been heavy but all that pacing and flapping meant she had really shapely ankles and wrists. When News Roundup was over the woman would scuff back to her room and lie on her bed, tired through and through, down to the marrow in her bones.

The days went like that, and she didn't remember a distinct time when she was elsewhere, in a home instead of a Home. She had memories of people, and a room with a multi-colored bedspread that she didn't like the look of but recalled was very warm and excellent for cocooning. Her bedspread now was pinkish, sort of off-pink, the same as everyone's. At the place that had the colorful bedspread there was a father- she supposed he was a father- who was very kind and would get her warm washcloths for her head and make phone calls on her behalf; frequently she would overhear him almost-yelling at a person named Lilly:

"What am I supposed to do? Do you have some other plan? Did you figure something out that I didn't- did you make some calls or something? I can't force her to leave the house. Do you have some idea that you just thought of, Lilly, or is this another round of your bullshit?"

She figured out that he wasn't really asking, he was just shouting because he liked it. He would come back fresher and energized from those conversations, offering tea and asking if she'd like to move to the comfortable chair in the living room. The woman had no memory of the living room- it was all about the multicolored bedspread and the mattress beneath it, and the things right around the bed. There was a night stand and a desk. That was as clear as it got. She didn't even remember the transition from that place to her current place, which was fine. She was happy to have a memory of something and have that memory stay with her.

Once, after the BBC Roundup, she didn't feel tired. It was weird. She felt keyed up, if that was the  phrase- keyed up or keyed in or something, some analogy that required a key. It was unfamiliar. Nurse Amuje was in the TV room with them.

"Amuje, I'm not sure that was the best course of action," She said.

"What wasn't? Do you need a chair, honey?" Nurse Amuje was standing up for her, offering her seat, which was the best one in the room.

"No, I mean that farmer." Oh, that's what she meant- there'd been some story at the end of the program. "He shouldn't have gone to jail." The farmer man had shot some youth in the back after he'd broken into the farmer's house too many times.

"No, he should not have, I agree with you" said Amuje. She was holding out her hand, reaching for the woman's upper arm to guide her to her bedroom. "The poor man."

"But the poor boy, the poor youth" said the woman, and now she was beyond surprised: she was almost scared of what was going to come out of her mouth next. "The youth was running away. But the farmer shot him, and the boy died. The boy who was already getting out."

Amuje's arm went down and her eyes went up to meet the woman's. Her expression was surprised- they were both astonished in the TV room. The picture of a key entered the woman's mind again, this time entering a big old lock, something in brass."That farmer was scared to death. It was on his property, so..." Amuje trailed off and looked at the woman with some satisfaction, as if she'd said something final. The woman recognized it as the end argument, as far as the Nurse was concerned.

"Don't you think that's unbalanced? To assign blame, full blame, to one or the other side like that? Where were the police, for example? They should have watched the property, made some effort to find out when it was most likely to happen and then be there for the occasion? That would have avoided all kinds of hell for everyone."

"What happened to you? Let me look at your chart" Amuje said behind her- the charts were kept at the reception desk- "hold on!" But the woman was chasing her to the reception desk (chasing was perhaps the wrong word- they were just walking in the same direction, a few yards apart from each other,) trying to get in the salient point: "The farmer guy decided to become a vigilante when the youth ran away from him! He had the moment to think of what to do when the boy turned to vamoose, and he chose 'blow him away'! That's not right, that's why it's a, a- when you look at it like that, it's a complex issue!"

By now Amuje was burning through the pages of the woman's chart, but: nothing. There was nothing to explain how the woman might be behaving differently (mostly the Nurse was looking for medication changes.) Amuje looked up at her with a fearful set of eyes, and the woman stopped talking. They stood there for a moment, feeling awkward, frozen. Amuje cleared her throat.

"You should go rest, honey. You usually rest after the BBC." The Nurse said, keeping her arms at her sides in case there was to be more talking.

But no- no more talking. The woman felt drained all of a sudden: she didn't feel the draining, she just felt drained in less than an instant. She turned to shuffle down to her room, Nurse Amuje at her left and two paces behind her. The episode didn't repeat itself for a month, when there was another story about the farmer: it must have been a slow news day. The BBC took up the slack in their blank minutes by exploring the justice system, and how it was handling the farmer's appeal for a retrial. It wasn't handling it well, it turned out. There was evidence- or no, there was a lack of it- and the judge (who might have been drunk when the request was officially heard) said there would be no retrial. The woman jumped when she heard that as if she'd just received an unexpected electrical shock.

"Ooo-ww-hh!" she exclaimed. Heads turned. Those in the TV room looked at her with various levels of alarm. Nurse Amuje was there, eyes above the newspaper she held spread in front of her body. The Nurse was the most alarmed, though you couldn't tell from the eyes. The woman saw she had attention and launched:

"Don't you think we should band together- and I realize we're inmates here, I know our voices don't register loudly or as distinctly as your average tax payer's, which is saying something since the average taxpayer's voice might as well be the voice of that speck on the flower that Horton is holding up in that kid's book- but don't you think, fellow crazies, that we should make some sort of petition? That farmer isn't getting any kind of justice, he'll just be more dottering and more likely to shoot some retreating person in the back when he gets out of jail. Provided he survives the experience of being jailed, that is. And no common vandal can prepare themselves for an appearing-and-disappearing farmer with PTSD and a trigger finger, no matter how many times they've squatted in other abandoned farmhouses. It serves no one-"

Amuje the Nurse had been mute for this. It was crazy how you thought you knew a person- how you thought you knew a person's behaviour profile- and then they'd up and spout some social commentary right in the TV room.  She sat there, holding her newspaper like an idiot (not that anyone else was springing to action) for the woman's monologue. The others were getting agitated, standing or looking or walking up to the woman and then walking away like they would do when they were attracted to something. It was the beginning of a little swarm, Amuje thought. She had to disperse them.

"That's a great idea" Amuje said. She had no idea if it was a great idea or not. "We can do something like that- there's all kinds of, of causes that could use our, your voices. We could have a letter-writing party" she continued.

"Party?" said one of the others. There was a murmur that went around.

"We need to organize this, Amuje- we need more than some crepe-paper party, we need more than some juice in plastic cups and a bunch of form letters, or just one form letter with a bunch of scrawls littering the bottom of the page, unintelligible. We need to get our representative out here- who is our direct representative, the first rung in local government? What's the word for that?" The woman was bright-eyed almost as if she had a fever.

"The Alderman. Not a man but called Alderman," said someone.

"Right, can we get that? Him or her?" The woman asked, looking at Amuje, who was starting to panic. She slid up to the woman and put her practiced grip around the large upper arm she usually gripped- it seemed heavier, more substantive. Her upper arm seemed like it might fight that grip, for once.

Instead, the woman looked at her Nurse, her helper really, and the fight or vigor or whatever it was left her like a light turning off. She regained some of the slackness in her face, and then she began to sway just a bit.

"Can we have him? Or her?" the woman said again. Those who'd been milling around her began backing off, and it was easy to get her to her light-pink-clad bed and easy to let her just sink down onto it. The Nurse smiled as the woman did so. She was relieved. Amuje wasn't clear what was happening to the woman but the unfamiliar is the unfamiliar, and she was nervous on the woman's behalf. When it happened again- this time there was less call to action and more critique, because they'd been showing a televised debate between some MP's in England, and those well-dressed white people calling each other genteel names had given rise to some eloquent calling-out on the woman's part- but when it happened, Amuje realized that the woman was in a pattern. She pulled her down the corridor that time, asking the woman what she'd been thinking. She had meant to scold the woman, to get her to agree that she shouldn't be kicking any hornet's nests, but the answer was...well, it was baffling.

"It's my time to be smart." The woman looked at Amuje, full in the face and breathing deeply from the brisk hallway walking, and told her what was going on.

"It's my time to be smart. I have a limited time, I can be smart but it's a limited time, so I have to strike when it comes. Do you find that you have times of day, certain times, when you can answer the questions of the universe- at least your piece, your visible field of universe- better than others? It's more than a morning person versus night person division, it's that time when you can be most lucid-"

Amuje had stopped listening to the particulars, not least because it was confusing and used more words than was necessary, and just felt them wash over her. She was amazed. The woman was amazing her with her amazing words coming from her amazing, alarming mouth.

"So we'll surmise that you're an afternoon person, because you look like one-"

Amuje cut her off- she had to: "You can't know that. I don't look like anything more than any other thing." She was sure of herself here.

The woman had an answer: "No, no, one can tell by looking at a few other things- the brightness of an eye or the spring in a step, or the anger in a step come to think of it- but there's a way to tell how things are going inside another person's head based on external cues. Are you a morning person or an afternoon person?" and She waited for Amuje to speak this time.

"I am an evening person, you know it because I'm here for the second shift" Amuje said.  The Nurse looked shocked at the woman. The woman smiled brightly at Amuje. "I know because that was a smart answer. So, so, so- I have to be smart now when I can. Do you remember the story about the farmer who shot that young man in the back?" When Amuje said she did, the woman jumped in with "and the debate about the right thing to do, the sympathy for an overwhelmed and alone farmer who'd had enough with just anyone coming into his house while he slept or when he was sleeping, which is much worse in my mind because you go to sleep thinking there's a finite amount of people in your own house, that amount being one and that person being yourself, but you wake up with the gentle tinkling of household silver- whatever there was of it, maybe it was just regular flatware- but the tinkling of departing forks. And a shape. There's someone's back. You can shoot or you can watch, and frankly here's where the poor choice came in, yet everyone thinks he was right in pulling that trigger. What it doesn't do is talk about the surrounding issues, societal issues: mental health, and poverty because the young man in question was transient and poor, and-" the woman tapered off. Amuje had just listened- it was difficult not to, it was like watching a flower bloom right in front of you. But the woman stopped. She slackened again. "what was I saying?" she asked the Nurse.

"About society. Some issues that society has. We should be talking about it, you said." Amuje was interested in these things, it seemed. This surprised her. But the woman was looking around at her bedroom, shuffling to her bed and sinking down to mattress level, again. The Nurse tried to prompt her, but it was done. The woman looked at the Nurse from her spot on her bed.

"I can't remember what I was saying. I can't remember what it meant." And she closed her eyes. Amuje saw the eyeballs move under the woman's eyelids, back and forth in REM sleep. It was the wrong stage of sleep but at least it was sleep. The next day the Nurse remembered what the woman had said- about remembering and not remembering- and she brought in a camcorder, one that had been purchased for the home in an effort to document some working condition conflict. The presence of this tool changed management's style of scheduling, and they promised to change the substance of the scheduling "very soon." But the camcorder had done it's job. Amuje had charged the battery after she'd figured out how to do that. She'd been patient, she'd waited as long as it took for the little side light to turn green.

The nurse brought the tool into the room, and there was a change immediately: Those inclined to stand in an emergency stood, those inclined to burrow in an emergency reacted with big eyes peering out from their duvet-nests. The woman didn't notice, though, which suited Amuje. She started the contraption and pointed it at the woman, waiting for her to talk with impatience which was troubling even for her: she'd been so understanding about recharging batteries and outmoded technology; she'd been so willing to wait for it to respond to her, and she couldn't even wait for a disturbed, sleep-famished woman to start spouting philosophy! Or whatever it was. Amuje didn't know what it was the woman wanted, or was trying to communicate, or had stuck in her mind (part of her believed that the woman was trying to shake loose some grit of consciousness, something that wound around her brain when she was lying down, and that all she needed was to lose that tenacious thought and all would be well, the woman would sleep deeply and ultimately leave the home. Amuje thought about how much she'd be rewarded for her perception, but she didn't allow herself to make it more than it was- there would be a pat on the back, a word from management, a request to help others with her superior compassion, but no raise. To really hope for more money would be foolish.) In any case, there was standing or burrowing, and pacing from the woman who billowed her white robe behind her unconsciously. She paced and watched. Amuje kept the camcorder in her hand.

"I was thinking about that farmer. Were you thinking about him? Was anyone?" she started, and Amuje pressed record. "What we could use, really use in this country and probably everywhere, is a village-style collaborative justice. There could be some court that kept the peace in small increments, and the farmer could be confronted by the people who lost the youth that he killed. The parents? A girlfriend or a boyfriend, a best friend? I don't know who'd get to yell at him- a shrink could figure that out, provided you'd find one worth their Ph D's- and they'd need a psychologist there for the session or sessions, and the farmer would cry and the aggrieved could cry, and they could stay there as long as it took to figure out what punishment would be sufficient. You'd have to agree on it. They'd have to agree..." The woman tapered a bit, and Amuje worried there would be full stop. But the woman took a deep breath, indicated by her white robe opening around the chest, and continued: "The communal agreement would be the hardest part. We're so used to recrimination and the fantasy of revenge that actual justice, which requires detachment, is seen as being lenient rather than rational, but nothing will change without communal agreement. As it is now the boy is dead, the aggrieved never talk about it, and the farmer, the old farmer who was already alone, gets chucked into prison for a spell and if he lives he'll go back home ten times as frightened as he was. He'll go back home and acquire a gun, illegally if he must, and he'll be ten times more likely to shoot an intruder. We call that justice, for some reason..." again, the tapering; Amuje allowed the arm holding up the camcorder to slide downward a little. "But justice is something, something, something else- it's something other than that...i don't know what, i know...Amuje...is it ok that I'm calling you that?" said the woman, stopping.

"It's fine" said Amuje.

"I feel like my whole life is there but inaccessible. I had a whole life." the woman was whispering to Amuje now, not that it did any good: everywhere was accessible by sound as well as by sight in this building. The acoustics were state-of-the-art, which made Amuje think of woofers and sub-woofers, and she slid into public laughter, sideways and slowly. (There was just something about the word "woofer.") But the woman- her charge, for god's sake- was looking at the Nurse with some pleading in her eyes that was much different from the pleading looks the staff got from the patients who wanted more opoids. Amuje quieted. She didn't know what the woman wanted her to say, but she got quiet. "I had a whole life." The woman intoned again.

The Nurse answered her the way one answers those sorts of non-questions, but as she might speak to a friend rather than a patient at her work place. "You still have a life. It's a contained life, is all. But it's better than...than the...freedom that's so hard. The huge freedom, I mean. The demand that the Universe demands of everyone, which is to justify the use of the atoms that made you. Here you can concentrate, at least." Amuje said. She wasn't sure she was finished.

The woman looked at her for a number of long seconds, and Amuje used them to think. Did I really tell this troubled woman that her life is better than the outside because she can focus better? Do I really believe that it's better to focus than to be un-institutionalized? She was  astonished with herself, and suspicous, because she'd never entertained the idea that the patients lives could be preferable to the outside world. She thought she might just be patronizing her charge. If so, she was embarrassed- Amuje reserved embarrassment for herself, kept it just to the side so she could feel it fully when her placating way was revealed as fact.

The woman settled a bit in her bed, where the Nurse had led (followed, really) her. "I'm tired again. I'm so tired again. I'm so tired and that's where I lose myself- have you ever been in pain for a long time?" she asked. Amuje had to think, but the answer was no. She was surprised, again. Even her two children had been delivered in a tense rush, and she didn't remember those labors as painful, really. They were- they had to be, they were babies- but she remember the labor part of labor rather than the stretching, ripping part. "No" Amuje stated.

"I have. Long...times, long amounts of time...when I hurt. It makes you mean. That's why I'm here- I was mean for too long. But tired is different- you don't get a chance to be mean, you're just an idiot..." the woman slumped downward, resting finally. Her eyes were open, though. "Did you record that?"

Amuje looked at the camcorder, forgotten in her hand: she'd just forgotten it was there, it had just become an extension of her arm, like a second hand. She had lots of footage of her scrub-covered thigh, but there was sound, she thought. "I have sound" she said to the woman. Amuje hoped she had sound.

"Ok. I have to listen to it, tomo..." said the woman, who was asleep by the end of the sentence.

It Shouldn't Be Funny

I have a sleep disorder. It goes with the chronic illness territory. The older I get the more I hear that it's a sign or symptom or side-effect of...being alive, basically. Pretty much anything gets you some mangled sleep, in the form of Narcolepsy (falling asleep in front of DEA agents) and Central Sleep Apnea (sleeping while on mass transit) and Circadian Rhythm Disruption Disorder (which has something to do with birds. Maybe they roost on you just when you're drifting off. That's just a guess: I'm no clinician.)

In any case, there you are, lucky you- you have a sleep disorder, primary or secondary to something else that's wrong. So you're sleepy all the damn time. And you get sleepy during the worst, the absolute worst, times, such as when you're behind the wheel, driving to the biggest town in the area because you can't walk to the optician who is fifteen miles away, and also when you're having sex. It makes no sense because there you are, in the moment, driving whilst singing along to your Queen's Greatest Hits. Your teenage daughter is next to you, not listening with purpose in that special way that teenagers have, as if their Sarcasm Force creates a bubble around them and sounds bounce away, intimidated. Then your eyes start to close- they just close, slowly, your eyelids falling rather than drifting downward. It's horrifying. You swerve just to wake yourself up, just to shake a little fear into your own head, which is something you'd never expected to have to do: being in control of that many pounds of rolling metal and plastic was scary enough, especially when you factor in all the other people in charge of their own rolling, rattling sarcophoguses. (Sarcophogi? Sarcaphogium?) You may be "a little tired," but those people are maniacs! The remaining drive is fraught, slow, and very obnoxious: by the time you finally pull over, there are 37 people behind you because you were going seventeen miles an hour and they couldn't pass because there was always a tractor in the other lane. Always. You just wave to them, one by one, smiling through a closed mouth because every one who passes you has their finger sticking up. Sometimes they showed two.

I've done some research about how to deal with Excessive Daytime Sleepiness, as it's called, and it always comes down to this: I should simply Get More Sleep at Night!! I can't really fathom how advice this stupid can be perpetrated across the interwebs, but then again this is the same mode of communication that allows terrible video of neighborhood dumbasses raping local girls to play over and over until enough people use the hashtag #ComeOnWithTheRapeVideoIMeanCantWeJustConvictThoseShitheadsAlready, and it gets taken off. Until the next one. So I shouldn't be surprised, is my point. But continuing on, these l'il reports and whatnot always shovel out the same bullet points, to whit:

*Are You Getting Enough Exercise?  Listen, I walk a few miles every day, and that's on a light day- other days I walk lots of miles and/or swim some laps. This is no guarantee; yet the l'il report treats the exhortation as if it were made of some gold-like substance that leaps from your notebook's page directly into your eyeballs and come bedtime, you'll snuggle down into your own magic sleep cuccoon and in 8 hours you'll be as well-rested as a mountain bear in April...as long as I get nice and sweaty first.

Except it doesn't work.

* Are You Taking One Weensy Little 20-Minute Nap Sometime Before Noon and then Not Napping At All?  When you have some serious sleep disorder issues, the whole nap question becomes almost academic: there's no way you CAN'T nap. All I have to do is be in some daily situation where things slow a little, like 4:30.  That's a pretty low-key time of day, generally. Everyone needs a nice sit-down and cup of something warm come the late afternoon, and yet I need to stamp around and yell and generally act like a private in boot camp at 4:30 AM, ordered by my own self to GET UP, MAGGOT and DO FIFTY THOUSAND PUSH-UPS RIGHT NOW OR I'LL BE SCRUBBING THE KITCHEN FLOOR WITH MY OWN UGLY FACE. I mean this literally. I've been known to lie down on the kitchen floor- just for a second, I just need a tiny rest- and wake up twenty minutes later with the drool on my face bonded with the muddy paw prints and general ick on the floor. I really wish that the l'il reports would stop referring to Naptime as if it were entirely voluntary!

*Are You Getting Enough Sunlight?

.....What?

I Live in England, so the short answer is: No. Not really, and thanks for mentioning it. Unless it's summer, in which case the answer is Yes. Far too much of it, and thanks for mentioning it. This bit of advice is just cruel: if I could get enough sunlight, I'd be getting it, motherfucker. It's a taunt, and it's also insulting, as if I'm just too box-of-hair stupid to figure out that going outside occasionally is good for you and if you don't do it you might not feel great. It's also generic, because it's the same tidbit that gets sprayed around when you're foolish enough to ask the WWW why you're sad, or fat, or homeless. I don't know for a fact that the homeless are instructed to make sure they get 20 minutes of quality sunshine daily, but I'd be very willing to bet on it. I can just see the homeless person in question, sitting in front of the library's computer that they've been waiting for for five hours, typing in a search for local housing council contact information and getting a hit reading "20minutes (or more!) A Day of Vitamin D-Rich Sunshine can Allay Your Habitation Quandary!"

*Stop Worrying!

.....What??

Ok, it's a legitimate point. You just lay there and worry about sleeping, which makes you less likely to sleep. But to tell someone to stop worrying is like telling your teenager to stop thinking about sex, or your five-year-old to not concern themselves with the fanged, five-legged monster under their bed and just close their eyes. Plus- and this is less tangible, but it's true for me and therefore true for everyone, of course- we wants it. We wants our precious worry, petss. It makes us happy to let our little minds go in circles and to think up riddles for nasty landlordses when asked where our rents is, precious; and we wants to build up a rant in our skulls for the nass-ty SUV driver lady at the school drop-off who takes up two lanes on morningses, making everyone late, preciouss...I really think there's an addictive quality to worrying and that our current first-world culture places value on fretting about forty-eight things at once. Telling an insomniac to stop worrying is just more grist for the mill: you can easily fret about why you can't stop fretting. I've done it. It's one of my Top Five Bullshit Things to Think About Instead of Sleep, in fact. A normal night inside my head goes very much like this:

  ----ok i can sleep, i'm pretty sure that's sleepiness right there when my arm sort of jumped by itself a little, which is weird, i get the discharge of nervous energy stuff but what has that got to do with my left arm, ok the arm doesn't matter, i can just unwind now, whatever that is- it always made me think of water swirling down the drain, similar to unwinding but not similar enough, you know? Why can't i just think of things that unwind, why does my brain come up with inadequate similes, it might as well be dementia--oh god i may have early onset dementia--i'll have to make an appointment tomorrow, and also i need to stop worrying. They have mri's now that can take down the actual contents of your breakfast if you're even in the room with them so i'll get that somehow even though there's no one i know or can trust, crap i must be the worst friend, just the crappiest person to be around- i have to stop worrying. no one's getting an mri while i'm here in bed making up stupid things to be freaked about, in fact the stuff that i'm making up is really lame and very derivative of something, but i'm too tired to think of what-- some southern alt-punk band, i think- and i can't remember what it is and i have to STOP WORRYING, christ almighty- can't wait to see god when i'm dead so we can hash out this whole no-sleeping policy-----------------------wait that was good, that was sleeping i think, i was getting pictures like dreams but not dreams because i can hear the squirrels in the roof while i'm lying here but my point was that there were pictures. there was some celebrity, someone cute, second teir- jason bateman?- holding up an animated raccoon and talking about his next project, and i was going to say something about how that would be a bad idea, jason, you should really concentrate on smaller independent pictures with something legitimate to say about raccoons instead, it would give your career some much needed gravitas--. am i sleeping yet? was that sleeping? shit it was not sleeping it's just lazy advising to someone i don't actually know. god i'm getting weirder as i lay here- is that possible? it must be possible. ok i have to just LET IT GO now....now...now...ugh, 

etc.

I don't know the answer for my sleep problem, other than take the bus more (don't worry, I will.) The only thing I can think of that this may help is my prospects as a film producer: that pointer for Mr. Bateman sounds like it should be worth something, don't you think? Hollywood, here I come- after a rest. A nice, restorative rest.

Dogs aren't the best company

Seriously, they aren't.

I realize that's counter to both culture and my actual life, which includes dogs. Dogs who, without fail, are cute. I have a Boston Terrier who is named after a character in a Shakespearean tragedy, and I have a larger dog who is a festive mix of collie, greyhound, and lurcher. They are cute both together and individually which you would think might make them ideal scenery, draped around the furniture and across the floor with perhaps some brightly-colored toy from Ikea meant for a toddler. Yes, my dogs are the dogs of fashion and wouldn't bat an eyelash at having to go without their underthings in a Jordache magazine ad- but my god, sometimes I can't stand them.

I spend far too much time with them, is my guess. I'm home most of the day and that requires a certain amount of attention to dogs- all dogs would be perfectly content to sleep on someone's favorite something (doesn't matter what it is, as long as it will retain Dog Smell after they've woken up and moved on) but if you're in the house all that is right out. Now it's suddenly, and extensively, Dog Time. To wit:

Big Dog: Love you. I love you so much. Please give me your face.

Me: Oh, look how sweet you are. Oh, you want to give me a kiss? (Begins to bend down)

Big Dog: Love! (Puts entire mouth around my face. I don't move, because of teeth.) Love! (sticks tongue up my nose with vigor.)

Little Dog: Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Heyheyheyheyheyhey! (Pause.) SERIOUSLY, HEY! HEY! HEY!

Me: Little Dog, shut the hell up.

Little Dog: What? Were you talking to me? I have to protect the- (suddenly looks out window, one ear cocked upward.)  HEY MOTHERFUCKER! YEAH, I SEE YOU OVER THERE! OR AT LEAST HEAR YOU! I WILL SO KILL YOU AND THEN MY BIG FRIEND HERE WILL LICK THE INSIDE OF YOUR NOSE FOR YOU! MAYBE I'LL LET HIM DO THAT FIRST! HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY!!

Me: THERE'S NO ONE OUT THERE. There's no one, Little Dog. I repeat: shut the hell up. Damn.

Big Dog: He can't shut up because we're barking now! WOOOO! I love barking time! It goes great with chasing time! (chases Little Dog.)

Little Dog: Get off me you gigantic freak creature! Ohmygodohmygodohmygod get off me giant dog! I refuse to worship you! You are a barking, eating three-seater sofa! GET OFF ME OR I WILL RIP YOUR EYEBALLS OUT OF YOUR HUMONGOUS REPTILE HEAD! HEYHEYHEY THAT'S MY NECK- YOU WILL PAY FOR THIS-

At that point I decide to risk the damage to my kneecaps and wade in to separate them. It's not peaceful, and I wonder how anyone who has dogs gets anything done; I certainly can't. My most tranquil activity for the day is Salad Time. I make salad and my dogs sit patiently at my feet, almost a hundred percent barkless, waiting for me to throw them little pieces of raw vegetables. When I first began doing this, the dogs were confused, especially the Little One.

Me: Here, Little Dog! (throws piece of carrot to him, he snatches it by chomping it out of midair as if it were an attack canary.)

Little Dog: Yeah! (chews carrot, becomes concerned.) Hey! This is something that's not meat- there's no meat on this anywhere- What the hell, woman?! (spits carrot molecules all over kitchen floor section.)

Big Dog: Me me me me mememe I waaaaantt it can I haaaaave it? Can I have it can I have it can I have it- (I slip him a piece of carrot, he chews; after watching Little Dog's behavior he decides it's best if he spits molecules of carrot around his section.) Look, I made them too. I made them! I made them! I'd like to sing about the bits I made- RweeeeeOOOOOOOOOOOrrrrrrrrrrrrraoowwwrrr!

Little Dog: (looks at Big Dog with contempt.)

But little by little, the dogs have learned that it's OK to swallow the things I flick at them from the cutting board. I had no intention of training them to like salad but they have decided to like cucumber and carrot and snap pea pieces, mostly because that means I keep throwing things at them. It's a kind of attention, which everyone knows is better than no attention; and so I keep doing it, which makes me abusive. I'm an abusive dog owner, forcing my dogs to pluck (or in Big Dog's case, lick) vegetable chunks from the air for my enjoyment. Perhaps I'm not being fair to myself: they sit there, looking at me with their cute eyes and their accidentally matching pelts, and I start throwing salad at them instead of cookbooks or Dutch ovens. We've met each other halfway.

In the meantime, there's always old age to look forward to. There will be far too much napping and pudding-slurping to worry about noises from outside the building or just the living room, for that matter. To be frank, I don't really care which one of us gets there first, the dogs or me: I just plan to enjoy it.

The Consequence of Being Good

|Norma had spent her entire life being good, or trying to be good. She was a volunteer at a basket-full of charities, some more seriously than others. She tended to be more attracted to charities that didn't mean much to people, like helping to clean coastal rock formations of the collected bird poo and beer cans that built during the year; no one really warmed to that when she mentioned it. Another one was scanning pictures of unidentified seeds for a local county college. The seed pictures would go into an archive of seed pictures, never to be seen again but for the teacher who had received the grant that paid for the time spent scanning the seeds. He would smile at her in a more real way, but it was a distracted smile and he was the only one doing it.

Her reason for volunteering so much was unclear. She had money so she didn't need to work. She'd inherited her parents sizable retirement funds when they both died in a car crash the same year she graduated from college. Just when she was to be shooed out into the world, expensive piece of paper in hand and higher-than-was-realistic expectations in her head, she was given all  the time in the world to grieve. She was told to take all the time in the world, in fact, by just about everyone she met, even those she had barely any knowledge of, like the recycling guy who came every two weeks to pick up her empty wine bottles and stacked newspapers.

"You're so young, it's a pity. It's always a pity when it happens, it always is. Just take as long as you need, sweetheart." He was standing there in her driveway, holding her emptied bin in his gloved hand, looking at her face with a generic tenderness. After a time she thanked him.

A year later she hadn't looked for work but had instead found a boyfriend, who became a husband. He was nice. He died after their two year anniversary from a brain aneurism, a small explosion in his head that was about as big a shock as Norma could imagine. He had taken out a life insurance policy for no reason other than it was very cheap, given his age and health. And because he was nice. So, again, Norma was told to grieve, was given permission to take all the time she could possibly want and then some (the woman who ran the support group for young widows and widowers told her that: "You should take all the time you want, then take more time. Take as much time as you can get." She said it like it was a refund of sorts, and it might be taken away or run out at some point.) The amount of money she had, what with her parent's retirement money, made it reasonable for Norma to never work.

Her reasons for volunteering were mucky, or too sharp, or messy or messed-up, or wavy like heat waves coming off of hot asphalt on the horizon...that was how she described it to herself when she thought about it in the shower or buying some groceries, when she was doing her daily chores and didn't want to derail and end up staring at her middle, actually gazing at her navel. She'd done that far too many times. So she brushed off her need to examine the unexamined altruism. When she was almost asleep, though, her denied consciousness would tell her why she was doing it in pictures: there were dreams, light dreams that came on in the beginning or at the end of sleep, that were about becoming an amorphous cloud or a sheep that is stuck in briars, or being chewing gum. The chewing gum one was just funny, but the cloud and the sheep meant something about something. Norma tried not to think of losing herself, losing bits of herself to thorns or breezes, and it mostly worked. She just volunteered at more places, and that made her tired which made her forget about the whole stupid  kittenish game her mind would play with her.

This went on for years. She dated, she took up ice skating and never gave it up. She had a breast cancer scare that turned out to be nothing. She donated her time and not inconsiderate soup- or cookie-making skills to homes or parties or sales. She made friends. She had many friends, most of them older than she and all but one of them was a shut-in. This was just how it worked out, there was no one to blame for her circle of pathologically shy friends unless you wanted to count the friends themselves, which she did not. Three of her housebound friends were on some charity's roster of people to visit, but the other four were not. Norma visited the four non-roster friends as if they were part of a job anyway- that way she was being fair, she felt. She always brought something of hers along to each one of them, usually part of a batch of something she'd baked- she was never empty-handed. Never.

After a while- a good long while- she became less. She was less of herself, somehow, though in the physical realm she was more (she had her own buttery fingers to blame for that if she'd thought of it. She didn't.) Despite her larger size, and despite her muscles that were strong beneath the extra padding because of her regular ice-skating, she was diminishing somehow. She was harder to get going- she had to jolly and wheedle and boss herself out of the house sometimes, as if she were her own sleep-deprived teenager. While at her job/visits, she would occasionally stare into space while her friend talked about the view outside that day or their nephew who was going to call but then didn't . She fell asleep at her oldest friend's house, sitting on the sofa and snoring delicately while her mouth hung open and her friend sat and watched her. It was a weird thing to do- both the sleeping and the staring- and when Norma woke up after about twenty minutes, she nearly broke her neck apologizing;  Beth Anne did the same.
-
"I'm so so so sorry-" began Norma but Beth Anne cut her off at the pass.

"No more sorry than I am, love; I shouldn't have thrown that grape in your mouth. That was so terrible, I don't know what possessed me." Beth Anne looked down while she said this: they both knew what had possessed her. She was in self-imposed isolation because she had profound impulse control issues, and couldn't trust herself to not run out into traffic or worse, such as what had just happened (in Beth Anne's mind, the grape was worse than the traffic-dashing.)

"I don't know where-" Norma began, then stopped. She was about to finish with "- I'm going" but that's not what she meant. She meant she didn't know where the bits of her were going- she hadn't explained about the bits, the wisps of self that she couldn't account for. "I don't know what's wrong with me." She thought that was close enough.

Beth Anne thought she knew- she said she'd seen it before, that it happened to people who came around. After a while they simply evaporated, she explained. It was a slow process. Beth Anne counselled Norma to lighten her schedule, to drop a few roster friends or to bake less (there was more than one reason to deny themselves some of Norma's cookies, she said, smiling ruefully at her own commendable lap.)

Norma thought that was a terrible idea. She couldn't give up the rounds: those were her friends, they were friends now, despite their original entry into her life as names on a list. She looked up different recipes to make: meringues, and muffins made with low-fat yogurt and applesauce for sugar. They were good, and Beth Anne relaxed some and her other friends didn't notice or if they did they didn't say anything, just thanked her. She was with a friend (a roster name, though no one was counting any more) when Norma felt the first scrap of her physical self fall or slough off (she could never be sure: it was a judgement call, and the difference between a falling or a sloughing was so fine she would vacillate between those descriptives when she did try to really describe it. It probably goes without saying that she only tried describing the event to herself. )

It was a fingernail.  A whole one- a whole pinky nail, from her left hand. It dropped rather than drifted to the ground just outside her friend's door as she was leaving. There was no blood as there had been no banging or catching: it was just her fingernail, falling. The bed was pink and very sensitive all of a sudden, feeling the mild breeze as no regular skin could feel, but otherwise it was fine. There had been a little tug, and Norma looked down, and...fingernail. It should have been gross. Instead it was alarming, and she felt another bit of herself loosen and drift:

"Fuck a duck." Norma slipped some fingers atop her lips as if that would take it back. No one had heard her, thank goodness. Cursing- profanity, she thought of it as profanity though she didn't go to church and didn't know what generally constituted the profane- wasn't something Norma ever did. She had the vocabulary, but she didn't use it. She judged those who did as being a little weak or careless; those users of profanity in the everyday were basically children and therefore prone to impetuousness, she felt. So the vocabulary lurked, placid in her brain, never too close to the front of it. She couldn't remember the last time she had cursed, or if she ever had.

Norma picked up her fingernail and dropped it in the next bin she saw. She decided, with a patted-down firmness, that she wouldn't curse again. She got home and eventually went to bed, then got up and made something else to eat and brought it to the home of the woman who was organizing a charity sale for something, some sport-thing. A charity bake sale to raise funds for some new pool equipment, so that disabled people could get into the pool more easily...a motorized lift-seat for the pool, that was it. Norma repeated that fact to herself five times before she got to the house of the woman, but it never came up. She handed the cake over, smiling, already thinking about an alternate route home due to road closures she'd encountered on the ride over, and as the woman took her cake there was another tug. Same finger- the nail-free finger, the left pinky. A big tug, it turned out, because the woman had clasped it along with Norma's cake and when the exchange was made the finger came off of Norma's hand.

Norma looked where the tug had been, the pull or tearing or whatever it had been, and saw the stump. There was some blood- enough to cover the area, enough to convey that there had been flesh and it had been damaged- but really, it was no worse than a skinned knee. She looked at the organizer woman and felt tugging from her brain, or in her brain, right behind the forehead.

"Fucking ass hellish butt-luck, lady. Just the finger-stealing bitch time, eh?"

The organizer woman looked at Norma and looked down at the finger. "Are you all right?" she asked, with an expression that mostly said she didn't want to know the answer. She held the finger out to Norma, as if it were a tissue Norma needed just then. Norma took it gently, mortified: she'd lost her finger. She'd lost words that she didn't necessarily count among the words she knew. They had tugged off of her. Norma left without answering, which given the situation wasn't even that rude.

The week continued like that. There were pieces of Norma falling everywhere: there were more fingers, and there were the fingernails before them like white flags; there were toenails that she alone saw with horror; there were a few weird chunks of hair. Her temples were pocked with white scalp, shiny as if she'd been shaved for surgery. And the words, which were so much worse to Norma: terrible droppings of crass syllables, laden with meaning and intended to shock, she realized. The words were meant to call attention to her calamity. She couldn't abide it but she couldn't make it stop. Some of the things she'd said that other people heard (or overheard):

"Some cuntly piece of shitside work right here" when her other pinky came off, in front of a man who was taking her money for the milk she was buying.

"Balls and dicks and a pretty gash, that's some fucking horsegut" to one of her roster-friends, who was taking the cake plate from her when her first chunk of hair fell out.

"Fuckity fuckity fuckity fuck-bait with a fuck on the side" to her doctor, who managed to get her right pinky to fall into his hand just by gently holding it in a pincer grip.

This doctor sighed. There was very little to do, since there was no blood and no pain and no damage to any major body area. There was a lot of wait-and-seeing advice circling the room, and some more sighing and a rake of a hand in the rumple of hair.

"Is this shit bonafide? Are you licking my clit, that's all you fucking have to say you shitwad?" said Norma. She'd felt the tug before this came from her mouth, but along with the mortification there was a feeling of lightness. There was a springy focus in her mind after she said that. It was the best feeling she'd had in a week and a half.

"Uh." said the doctor. "Well...uh." He raked the hand through the hair again. "Sorry, I just don't know. Normally there's some sign of trauma, some regular sign like damage to the skin and there's bone and there's the tendon, just..." His volume slipped down, then off. He shrugged, then said he was ordering lots of tests- "Just lots of them" he'd said- and sent her with instructions to wait and see. He asked the receptionist to make an appointment for Norma for the following week ("So that's what you have to do to get an appointment in less than two months! Hoopty-fuckin-do!" Norma said, which, relative to the other things she'd been saying, was only mildly perturbing. "Ha ha" said the receptionist, who was looking for an obscure phone number that Norma was to call if there were anything else that she shed before the appointment.)  Norma went home, with one less digit and one more piece of business card in her purse.

Norma thought at home. There were so many words, so many, and so few of them were nasty little pieces; yet those were the words that flew around her skull like CGI ghosts in a horror movie, threatening (no, promising) to gout onto her tongue so that she might spit them out at some horrible moment soon, soon. And the prospect was not bad but dire, because the thing was she wanted them out! She wanted them free, she wanted to say those words and others as if she were saying "what a delightful cheesecake, not too heavy, I must get the recipe"! She could only hope to contain the potential social mayhem by containing the agent of volatility. Norma altered her schedule- it was the only way.

She went to work first thing the next morning, calling everyone on her visitation schedule, roster or no, and telling them that she'd only be coming in every third week (it seemed like a reasonable assumption that she'd be able to hold the words in if she only needed to every third week.)  She made sure she was home at 2:00 every day, and drew the curtains gently but firmly so that she could nap. She took the nap. None of it was as big a help as she needed it to be. She looked forward to seeing the doctor, since it was something to look forward to.

The day came: an appointment with a doctor, some other doctor who knew what they were doing. She wasn't told that the new doctor was more competent. Norma assumed this because it was a reasonable thing to assume: she pictured someone with a tool belt over their white jacket, holding her pinky- which was labeled and telling in it's scientist's jar- and squinting. It was the knowledgeable squint that made the fantasy seem more than what was happening. Norma felt her head was liquid inside, all of the words she had known were moving about like eels and making her giddy. She knew enough to dread what was coming, but she also couldn't help the pull of the unthinkable words that she was thinking. She smiled on her way to the office.

The doctor- or rather the Doctor- did a great deal of verbalizing herself. "We don't understand the pathology yet, Norma, but that's not because we can't understand it; it's really because we haven't identified which system we should be concentrating on yet. There's the obvious ones, like the mechanical systems of muscle, tendon, bone. There's also the CNS, and your endocrine systems, which would normally have no significance in your shedding-" and blah blah blah.

"Blah blah blah" Norma said. She beamed right after she said it, despite being very embarassed.

"It is a lot of talking I'm doing, I know. You'd be amazed how much doctoring comes down to just talking. Or not talking." The  doctor was testing the reflexes in her hand. Norma looked at her bent head, knocking her knees with one of those little dopey hammers. She was a dark-haired woman and she was using one of those hammers on Norma's knee, so she said something.

"You're a fucking Kike, right? Am I right? A Kike? I'm not sure what a Kike is. I was thinking while you were talking that you could teach me about jewishness. I could pay you for your fuckin' trouble, I know the Heebs like their gold" Norma said.

There was a hush that descended, and it was so deep it seemed that the patients in the other rooms with their doctors had heard the insults and were quiet so they didn't get blamed for anything.  Norma COULD NOT BELIEVE she'd just said that, yet there it was: the wide-eyed stare from the Doctor, her eyes like giant coins on her face, and the silence. The words themselves were practically visible, swishing around in lazy circles above their heads. Norma thought to giggle- it was what she wanted to do- and immediately clenched every muscle she could isolate so that she didn't. Except, holy crap, there was more-

"Anyway, you don't look like a Kike unless you're a Kraut Kike, which is funny if you think about it. It's hilarious, am I right? I'm saying that you don't look like a regular Jew, you look like one of the Jews that Hitler might have missed because your eyes are blue and you didn't go to temple much. So your name didn't appear on any lists, and you lied and gave away families that you knew from years back so that you would appear a Kraut to the captains that mattered. Like that. You look like a Nazi Jew is what I'm saying." Norma literally could not stop the words coming out of her mouth: she tried to lift her hand up to clap it against her awful traitor of a mouth. The hand, a part of her body that obeyed her every command except the implicit one that normally kept the fingers attached, wouldn't budge past her sternum. She sat there spouting hateful Nazi-centric bits with her hands fluttering around her chest, neither getting to her mouth to stop the abuse. She was giddy enough to worry that she might faint.

There was that silence again. The Doctor stared at her again, and the whole building was hushed while it waited for her response to the vitriol. She opened her mouth and said "Give me your foot." She held out her hand for it and waited. Norma didn't know what to do other than give her her heel. She put her left foot in the Doctor's hand, expecting the scalpel, expecting the scapula, exultant in her fear of what was to happen, which she was sure would involve vivisection. She expected it so hard that it became wanting it, but again, the surprises: this alleged Nazi Jew just held her foot and gently pulled on each toe in turn. Of the four that were left she got two. The doctor put her foot back down on the floor, so gently, and held Norma's toes in her own palm, playing with them, switching them back and forth like they were Ben-Wa balls. Norma felt nakeder than before even though technically she was less naked.

"Are the outbursts part of what's going on? Do you feel upset or overwhelmed when you talk?"

Norma stared at the toes in the doctor's hands going around in little circles. "What the fuckity fuck do you think, assdick? Am I the only one here who can extrapolate that shit?" Norma felt herself shift away from the whole conversation. She listened to herself insult and berate the doctor at every question and at every blank spot in the talking, and it was not pleasant but at the same time it was. It was ever so pleasant. Norma spent the remaining time listening to herself with gleeful horror and then was sent home with her toes in a small plastic bag that was just the right size, as if purpose-built for two human toes. When she got home she sat down with a cup of tea. She took a deep breath and spoke, deliberately:

"Holy fuck-damn shitty ass cunt, cuntly gash dick-ass hole runny gummed up pissing cum-mouth. Fucking fuckity shit damn fornicating curly headed cunt-hats, with some puny soft pus-filled dick-shits. Merry fucking cunt hell, with a ho ho ho and a nasty tit-job that's all fucked to hell with yours truly the most fucked of all the fucking hellish bitchy shit-stains every to fart her way through some bullshit life with not the least fucking clue about how to fuck this shit when it shitstorms around in a helatious fuck-fire and can't suck the tits off anything, not even her own stupid cunt-ass self."

Norma looked at herself in a mirror after this- she looked carefully. Nothing appeared any different. She pulled a small handful of hair, quick and hard, and it fell off into her hand. The diatribe of nasty words had done nothing- if anything she could feel them swirling around in there, more of the same, ready for someone to pull a bit of her away or just for someone else to be present. After a solid hour of this, she put the mirror down and headed to bed.

The next day she got up and brushed her teeth, then put a scarf around her head to hide the now-remarkable loss of hairline. She drove to Beth Anne's and rang the bell.

"Hiya." Beth Anne was still in her pyjamas. Norma had brought hers along, hoping for an invite. "You're not supposed to come today- you were just here the other day. Day before yesterday."

Norma smiled, and felt the words shiver in her skull. "Hey Beth-Anne, do you have a problem with cursing?" she said.

Beth Anne smiled. "Fuck no" she said. Norma smiled back. It felt like the first time she'd smiled- or rather it felt like the first time she had felt like smiling since her pinky nail had fallen floorward.

It's Better Than the Alternative

When my father was still alive, still very alive despite having prostate cancer that had, at long last, moved into his bones, he was mildly explosive with his insights: he would have a lot to say, and it would come out of him in a minor torrent. Usually they were about his life. After one particularly harrowing visit with his oncologist who had given him some really high numbers relating to some really lousy test results, he walked up to me in my condominium and told me that being with Mom was amazing. "What a ride" he'd said about his life with her (and since he was from a different time and place when he aquired his slang, it meant that it had been an adventure to be married to her. The possibility that he might be using some double entendre about his wife to his child never occured to him.)

"Dad, you're not dead yet! Stop talking like that" I said, or something like it. I had the self-awareness to say it gently, at least, but when I think of it I wince at the selfishness of my poor stupid younger self, trying to get away from those implications. As if it were about me. Fortunately, Dad would not be put off: he was trying to talk about my mother, his wife of many years, his soul mate. He talked about how she wouldn't have much truck with romance and flowery talk, how she didn't care at all about how she looked, not really, but how much he saw her beauty anyway. It was a pretty fantastic moment, and I'd gladly lose a limb to have him around to tell me- for too long, of course, because he was an old dude and that's what old dudes do- but I'd happily sit there, minus an arm or leg, massaging the place where it used to be and listening to him go on about my mother.

This is something that he would say a lot during that last two or three years: he'd tell me his latest PSA count (Prostate Specific Antogen) was over 1,000. "What?" I'd always say. "How are you still standing?" And he'd explain that he'd just go on, or try a new medication, or sleep during the day. "Besides, it's better than the alternative." This was his sum-up: all of that was still better than being dead. And lately that sentiment has been seeping into all sorts of situations, just like I was the heroine of a long-standing situation comedy and that sentiment was my precocious niece who'd dressed as a boy and gotten herself locked in the linen cabinet right by the master bedroom in the haunted hotel we're staying in....Yeah, like that. Pretty much.

I'm prone to anxiety (well, "prone to" might be a bit of misrepresentation- it's more like I'm "forced to experience" anxiety.) Anything can become fraught when you're afraid of doing things wrong, such as making phone calls to someone who answers phones for your dentist or shopping for garden supplies. I was in a garden center yeseterday, a big one that also sells shoes and coffees and hot tubs, and it was a miracle that I made it out alive- I start to sputter and wander ineffectively when I'm around that much vegetative choice. My mother was an excellent gardener, and I want to be a gardener at least, so I go to garden centers. I leave after an hour and a half of rambling around, usually empty handed or perhaps with another toy for my dogs, who need toys just like I need additonal fat stores. I can't handle the choice, I can't handle the responsibility, I don't know when to put a cloche on a tomato plant. The spirit of the The Gardeer tsk's me under her breath, which should prove to me that it's not really my mother it's that unwanted precocious niece, wreaking her havoc. It's what anxiety does.

And just lately that saying has come to me, like the incongruously helpful concierge in my personal sitcom, reminding me in a steady and calming voice that being out and choosing something is better than the alternative. In that circumstance, the alternative is staying at home to feel un-challenged, un-stimulated, and therefore not moving forward. Not trying anything new, or just not trying at all. I'd never have thought of myself this way: as someone who is in any danger of stagnation, as someone who has a clear path to the non-stop panic of the shut-in or partial shut-in. In my twenties I was clear about my priorities, and when I thought about the dangers of staying alive they would be images of staying up too late and messing up my skin, or not meeting the right person to marry. I thought about being famous and the perils of becoming famous- which to my mind were non-issues, and so I barely thought about them.

But that disregard was way before the stupid realities of continuing to breathe here on Earth poked their stupid heads in my glorious imaginings (seriously: fame? What for?) It was certainly before I did find the right person to marry, and have a child with him, and  go to the doctor to find out what was the deal with all the pain all the time and all the sleeplessness. It was before the diagnosis of a lifetime of said pain, sorry about that, and it was before the death of three people I loved, two of whom were my parents. My beautiful, frustrating, idiosyncratic, hopeful parents are gone. I have to be my own parent now, in addition to being a parent to a beautiful, idiosyncratic, demanding, special needs child. So it's no fucking wonder, really, that it's hard to make a move now, since making moves can make things change, and change has been a very bad neighbor of mine for the past thirteen years...but: when I'm scared of whatever it is- buying the wrong plant, for example- I'm remembering that buying the wrong plant is better than the alternative.

I could be the shut-in or partial shut-in, I suppose; however, I have better things to do. There's travel to plan and fruit to forage in the summer, and subsequently there's jam to make. There are plants to buy and then kill, or not (hopefully not.) There's home to go to and home to visit. There's languages to learn how to speak, in support of the travel that needs to happen. Did I mention my husband? He has amazing laugh lines, and I have to watch them open and close when he's just seen or heard something really funny. As he gets older they get better. So: there are a great many reasons to fight the squeezy hand of worry, and the fighting is in itself much, much better than the alternative.

History of Touches

Benhie stood in the line, and it didn't have the usual people in in because she wasn't on her usual schedule: she had a late meeting at work the following day, and so she wouldn't be able to make her usual post-work grieving. So today instead, and it was only Day 4, mid-week, instead of Day 5, which she didn't suppose would make any difference, except that she was wrong.

The usual people in her queue were a mom with her four-year-old, who could have been in Childing but wasn't and so had to spend all of her time joshing the youngster into quiet (it was a personal choice to spend your time joshing youngsters or not- Benhie saw no sense in doing it while you were queuing to grieve, but to each their own;) There was a man who had what appeared to be the exact same copy of his word puzzle every week, a giant one that he had to lay out on the floor like a map and shuffle forward every time the line moved; there was another woman who looked remarkably like her- mid-forties, light brown hair, purple contacts, very big handbag. Today's line had a father with a teenager, and it was obvious that the father was showing his son the task ahead, or he intended to when it was his turn. There was another mother who had two infants with her, the maximum for birthing or minding in their country (the places that didn't enforce a strict population control were considered little better- no, worse!- than penal colonies) and there was another woman who should have looked like her, given the age and the time of day, but didn't. Still, everyone was there for a grieving and because of that there was a parallel feeling from her Day 5 line to this Day 4 line. Benhie looked at eyes as they met hers and smiled a bit and watched the bit of smile she got from the others. It was familiar as it could be.

She moved, slowly but inevitably, to the front, and when it was her turn she walked to the booth with the lit-up number above it. It was her favorite booth, because the robot who'd be serving her was new and in great shape, so she wouldn't have to enunciate to make herself understandable to aging sensors and she wouldn't have to touch one of its' long, many-jointed arms when they got stuck moving one of her slabs. She breathed in the booth, taking in the sad air of everyone who'd gone before her that day- to Benhie, the air in a grieving booth was always sadder than regular air, even though it was reclaimed by the same ventilator as in the vestibule or the hallways. Sad air, she thought as she put in her memory request: it tangs. It smells sour like milk and long-ago burned meals. It was a description that she never told anyone, not even the Talkee that she was mandated to see bi-weekly, for her continued well being. Being a bi-weekly was pretty acceptable. It was hard when it was three times per week: once they learned of it, most people couldn't look her in the eye.

Her memory came up. It was on a screen and it was projected, too, so that she was watching the video of her departed partner while she stood inside the image. Guy was shirtless in bed, but had his pyjama pants on, because this memory wasn't from their beginning. Benhie smelled the sheets around her and she felt instantly exhausted, as she had been on that night. It was a fighting night. She wondered why, of all her bad Guy memories, she'd picked this one: it was just a non-descript repeating argument, the kind that tired you immensely but that you couldn't quantify the next day. She supposed she was a fucking masochist. Anyway, anyway...Guy was talking, and he was exhausted too- there were crusts around his eyes and his hair was shiny on one side where he'd pulled his hand through it, over and over, in frustration.

"I don't know how many times we have to talk about it. I have to- we need to synchronise our feelings-" He said this disjointedly. Poor Guy, she thought.

"I don't think it's possible to do that. I don't think people can synchronise- that's really the thing you're holding out for? Don't you think that's not possible?" Benhie wasn't sure she felt one way or another about it, she remembered: she was just arguing the point to keep his attention.

"You've read the same things I have, you've seen the same Talkee- I didn't think that was a great thing, a great idea I mean, but we did that. I can't not talk to you when..." He sighed, he pulled his hand through his hair. It was the right side, she noticed. Out of nowhere there was this vertiginous feeling of being in the middle of every night like this with Guy, as if she'd requested every slab of nighttime memories she had all at once.

The air was still spoiled milk, but there was sweat from the unclean sheets and a tang of red wine and the smell of vapor liquid, because she had taken up vaping out of desperation during the end of things- she needed it for her hands, she told herself. She needed to hold something while she had these ridiculous conversations with him, these threads of thought that became the kind of snakes that ate their own tails. There were sounds of night in their bedroom, thickened by the layering of memory so that birds became flocks and cars became trains, practically. The conversations themselves became dense snatches of repeated phrases, "You can't open-" and "I want you to but every-" and "Well that's something I don't know, again-". There were others. Benhie felt her hand clench her vaping wand too  hard, and the shirt she was folding too fiercely, and her own hair because she'd tried Guy's method of running her hands through it. She felt all that at once, and it was, predictably, too much.

She moaned first. It seemed the right thing to do it felt right, so she moaned some more. Hologram Guy went on saying something about her appointments because he'd always believed that the answer to any ennui was to talk at your Talkee, and he said it many times at once in the booth. The walls practically tremored with his views on her stubbornness. She got angry, just angry, with nothing to bring her anger too ("Your Talkee" said Guy, in multiples, as if the hologrammed men had been listening to her thoughts) and no living person to witness it. She was so mad, and just hummed with fury (literally: she'd moved on from moaning) which grew to hissing which grew to a shout, and she turned inside the projected Guys in her air, from the smells and the confusion and the alarming sensation of touching more than two things at once, as if she had tentacles. She tried to stomp out but was stopped by the door, which locked from the inside when you closed it. She felt how unfair it was to be overwhelmed like this and then be disallowed the ability to stomp out of the space, and how it was the most unfair part of the whole experience.

The line people had changed, gotten their own grieving booths. Now there was an older woman who stood straight as a stick, and a couple who both had glassy, uncaring eyes, and someone young, probably not yet out of Choose school. They looked at her almost sympathetically, as if they thought they should be apologizing for something. She wanted to stomp but felt that would be rude, so she walked back out to the street and to her apartment. When she got there, she stomped all around her studio, marking the floor in one spot and making a racket- sometimes humming, sometimes not- until her downstairs neighbor came to her door to ask her to stop. When he went away mollified, she sat and the anger drained from her. She tried the CogThink that her Talkee had taught her: she told herself it was just a glitch, she replayed the session in her head and modified the effect (just a little- that was the trick to it, you only changed how things had happened just a bit, to keep it "authentique" as her Talkee smilingly put it.) She breathed the non-sad air. It was a good thing that she'd just changed the scent cartridge in her ventilator- her studio air smelled like coconuts, or what she assumed were coconuts since she'd never smelled a real coconut. It was calming.

Her next grieving session was her regular day the following week, Day 5. It had been too long since that terrible glitchy session on Day 4 of the following week, and her Not-Boss at work had noticed a fall in her productivity. Benhie hadn't noticed, which was the most alarming thing about it: she was a real fan of productivity, she was at the assemblies right in the front row mouthing the slogans and catchphrases ("We're all part of the Hive" was one, though no one knew what a hive was anymore; also "Can you yes you can can you yes you can can you yes you can can you YES WE CAN" with clapping.) She normally felt that anything that increased productivity, on an individual or a group scale, was ultimately a good thing. It was the reason for the Grieving and the Talkees in the first place: when you managed your SAD! (for Start Altering Despondency!,) you became the most efficient version of yourself possible.

Except since her breakup with Guy, she'd felt less that way. Except that when she was being honest with herself, which she was doing more and more lately (unintentionally, but there it was,) she had lost sight of productivity as a golden mean since before she broke up with Guy. It was the reason she'd been made a tri-weekly Talker.

The line was as it should have been, with all the regulars. The woman who looked so much like Benhie had changed her hair. It was a different color, but not different enough to erase the likeness between them. Benhie smiled brightly at the woman, who smiled back in the practiced way. Benhie was in a good mind for this session. 8 days was too long to wait for your turn to have negative emotions. She'd picked a memory slab that had something good for her, she hoped. It was the slab with the "I love you's" and the face touches and the waking in the middle of the night just to make love. She intended to shed a tear, wipe it with a new handkerchief she'd brought for the occasion, and go back to herself. She was looking forward to the after.

The sad air was the same, and she handed over the slab with some enthusiasm. She felt hungry for it, and the memory was going to be a steak to her, full of fortifiers. The arm took her slab and popped it in: Guy was there, naked under the covers, smiling. Guy was all around her, smiling. She smiled back. Then, just in that nice pre-crying moment, Guy was everywhere at once: naked, half-naked, clothed, packed even. For some reason the glitch from last week had reproduced asexually, and now she was faced with all of the crying of Guy and all the loving of Guy at the same time. The sheet smell was asphyxiating. Guys hair was shined and not-shined from his hand going through it on the right side, or not. She was in the center of every memory at once, every stupid fight and stupider fit of giggles, she heard Guy's voice talk about her beautiful mouth and her lack of laundry skills and how stubborn she was, and how he was done. He said it like that: "I'm done." She felt the derision for the phrase- he's done, he's like a meatburger that way- and she felt the melting edges of herself when he mentioned her mouth.

Benhie screamed and ran at the robot. It was a robot arm, really, since there wasn't any other piece of a robot in the booth, and she ran at it, her handkerchief still tucked in her fist. She shoved at it and it rolled away, designed for this, indulgent even. So she picked up the chair that was provided in every booth and brought it over her head, much higher than she would have guessed she could, and brought it down on the thing. That helped: there was a nasty clang, so she kept doing it until the robot arm, not designed for this, snapped at one of its' fragile joints and the front piece of it fell to the ground. Benhie put the chair down and sat on it. She was exhausted! The memories that she'd not requested swam around in her head, and despite the fact that the holograms weren't there any more she lived in a miasma of her previous couplehood for twenty minutes. She just sat and breathed while it went away. She wasn't thinking of anything. It was a tremendous relief.

When she left the Grieving both, the line with her usual people had already been served and were in their boxes or gone. Benhie slinked past the current liners. If anyone was looking at her strangely she didn't notice. She went straight to her apartment and thought about things...truthfully she thought about Things, such as why she was not charmed by her own drive for efficiency any more and why Guy hadn't just come out and said what needed to be said. She might have saved herself so much trouble, and they might have stayed together, though she doubted it. He was GAtoGA (Going Along to Get Along) and that right there was the crux of their problem. She Thought more. She was not going to be a production slave any more, not because she was opposed to the idea but because she knew that if she went into another Grieving booth, she would go fully mad. Everything could work perfectly but now she had another memory to Down/Up, but it was a memory of every other memory. She had broken the robot arm but she hadn't broken anything else. She didn't feel like confessing; she didn't feel like making the appointment with another piece of robot (the head, she supposed) to record what had happened, sitting very still for twenty minutes while the sheet of light crossed and re-crossed her eyes, making another slab for her. She didn't feel like having an Apology Event at work, despite the fact that she'd be "encouraged" to bring cake, which meant that she could choose the flavor. She felt like...running. Running? She wasn't sure what that meant exactly, but she thought it meant leaving and staying gone somehow.

Her apartment was a fine place but she had to leave it and she did, taking only a few things that she thought she would really need, such as underwear and money and anything that could be categorized as a snack. She'd just gotten her weekly delivery of groceries so the bag she was using was full of snacks, thank goodness. Benhie looked around, unsure of herself again, but when she thought it out it was the best option for her. It was the option with the least amount of Grieving in it. She went to a Lodge that was right down the street from her and stayed there for two days, nibbling on her snacks, getting off the bed to stretch and walk around the room but otherwise staying put. The TV was on the whole time, including when she slept which was an example of terrible Sleepytime Nopes that she normally abhorred. She was a stickler for Sleepytime Yups and shunned the Nopes, but this was an exception.

On the second day she was rewarded (if that's what you can call it) by the news playing something about her: there was an entreaty for her return. "She's just so Productive normally, and we miss that at work. Benhie, if you're watching this, please come back. The arm at the Grieving center can be paid for- " she blushed when her Not Boss said this, it was the truth for anyone viewing to deconstruct as they liked- "but you have to come back, we all miss you. It's not as terrible as it sounds." Her Not Boss finished with a beautiful smile for someone, but Benhie didn't think it was for her. None of that was very terrifying, but it wasn't soothing and it didn't change her motivation one bit. She had no doubt that she could pay for the arm and go back to being the one who got a Well Done Hoversticker above her head every Day 6 for all of her colleagues to see, but she wasn't done with whatever she was doing yet. She moved to another Lodge and stayed there for three days.

It was confusing: what did she want? This was the question she asked herself every day she was holed away, and every time she saw the begging for her return on the television that she was fully addicted to now. There were people besides her Not Boss asking her to come back, people from work and her sister, whom she hadn't seen in many Ages, who looked pleased at the attention. No one said anything that changed her mind, though she always watched with as open a heart as she could manage. What did she want? She moved around, she used the Lodges that were the least expensive since she knew her money wouldn't last, she bought food out of machines in the lobbies of the Lodges or little stores that were right up the block. She knew she'd have to change something permenantly but she didn't know what it was, and she was beginning to resent her mind for taking her on this pointless walkabout.

At Lodge #4 she was thinking it while she was sitting on the pot, and the small bit of glass shelving that was above her head, big enough to hold two hand towels and one washcloth but nothing else, came unscrewed or unmoored or unconnected to the wall and fell on her, nicking her neck and then clattering to the side, whole. It was a shock: she'd been so deep in contemplation, and who checks the screws on an above-head shelf every time they sit? So it was a shock, like getting hit in the back of the head with a sports ball you didn't see coming, and Benhie burst into tears. The crying felt so immediately good, like having an orgasm or finally emptying your bladder or reaching the perfect point of fullness in your belly, that she smiled while she did it.

Thank You she thought to no one.




                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Perpetual Dissatisfaction as a Lifestyle Choice

There was a point in time when I thought I knew what I was going to do with the rest of my life. The Acting: oh, how much was I in love? So much so that I was willing, eager, to look forward to the Oscars every year, the Actor's Roshashana, notebook in hand so that I might make lists about vulgarities such as which character actor was being ignored for the Best Supporting award over some Hollywood newbie and what awkwardly glamorous updo worked best on a long face (I have a long face. Gathering data about hairstyles is important when you're twenty and In Love.) I was going to be Helen Mirren- no offense intended, Helen (Dame Mirren and I are old friends [clearly that is a lie.]) I was going to be big, a Big Stah, so that I could work with the other Big Stahs that made my heart flutter when I watched their hearts flutter onscreen. It was sympathy fluttering: we were all a-flutter, and I was convinced to my marrow that this was because I was destined to become one of Them, contorting my face in just the right way for the close-ups, stomping my foot on the boards during breaks in filming future classics like Out of Africa Two: Showers Save Water, doing interviews for magazines. Because magazines featured in my dreaming, because I'm old.

Well, I'm old enough. For what, you ask? That's an excellent question, and I'm glad you asked!...what I seem to be really good at- in such a way that I barely recognize I'm doing it- is being dissatisfied. I live in England so I'm in some good company: 60 million of we Brits (or Non-British Residents, or Immigrant Scum according to EUKIP, Great Britain's counter to America's Tea Party, whom I would call a bunch of twats if it weren't an insult to vaginas) enjoy nothing more than a good bout of complaining. Besides everything being too expensive and the world being run by a bunch of lying beaurocrats who are in danger of being overthrown by a bunch of crazed "God is our Cannon" despots, I personally have a good deal to complain about. Blah blah pain blah acting gone, blah paperwork blah blah Fibrofog which is just like chemofog or fiftieth-hangover-in-a-rowfog blah homesick. I periodically try to cut through all the blah by finding some direction, something that will be simple enough so that I can get my marmalade-thick thoughts around it and will be flexible so that when I'm done tending to my special needs genius child and my special needs genius husband and my ADHD young dog and my aggressive shithead old dog I can whiz through it. But whiz through what? There are so many things to consider!

I could:

- become a librarian. I'd be surrounded by books all the friggin' time, and I love to read! Reading is awesome, so awesome that's it's fundamental (TM)!...Except: to get hired you have to get a masters in Library Science, and then you'd be making some ridiculous pittance so that you could travel around in a non-company car (meaning Your Own, or perhaps Some Bus, and good luck with that) to different underfunded libraries so that you can do their paperwork. And the student loans would affect you and your child and your children's children, on to the seventh generation (maybe THAT is what Sitting Bull was talking about: he saw the future of student financing and was trying to warn us. It wasn't about the environment at all! Or maybe it was! Either way, we really screwed the pooch on that one.)

-teach Acting. Being honest here- and not in a shithead sort of way- I was good at acting. There are people who said I was great at it, and the fact that they were my paid teachers had nothing to do with how their opinions were formed. So it would be gratifying to pass along my sacred knowledge, to teach the youngsters what it means to compare pictures of your own face with others pictures of their own faces FOR HOURS, and to create endless and meaningless Improv games where everyone has to learn how to wander around the room like seaweed. Hey, someone did that to me, so it's just PAYBACK...Ok, I think I see the problem here.

-go to School, to Learn Stuff. Learning is amazing and really the reason we're all here on the planet; the fact that the majority of us in the developed world choose to learn about Kim and Kanye's Million-Dollar Malibu Barbie Dream Brothel with Hydrolic-Lift Rotating Champagne Room for their l'il baby is not the point: there are those who learn well, who learn how to speak French or Mardarin, who learn how to chop wood and install solar arrays and molecular biology so that they can stop the seven-strains-from-now virus that causes Ebola Extreme (although I just can't imagine Ebola any extremer. Also I don't want to. Just show me where to donate, OK? Then let me get back to what Anne Hathaway isn't eating this year.) And, and, and- in theory, I could be one of those Learners, the kind that might do some good with the knowledge. But:...well, the obvious thing is that it costs money, and I hate that. The other is, I suppose, self-doubt. What would I study? French? Mandarin? Psychology, which would be fascinating? And what the hell would I do with a degree when I was done- get a job? Please. People whose undying aspiration was to counsel disturbed French-speaking Chinese nationals, and who studied with fervor and discipline, cannot get a job slinging hash. Or ludes. Nothing, with the exception of crystal meth, and we all know where that leads because we've all seen Breaking Bad. Yikes. Besides, I believe I also have ADHD. And Marfan Syndrome, a deficiency of the connective tissues, which I already have but Marfan is that to the second degree and is therefore somehow that much more interesting. Plus POTS, which stands for PostCradial Orthopeodic Tum-Tum Systemcism, also a problem with the connective tissues but more localized to the left and sometimes right hemerfemurs. I have way too much to learn about my weird body and why it might or might not do a thing, thank you very much.

-Raise Money for Charity. This is a big thing in England- BIG. If you're not raising money for charity, some charity, even something as silly as The Northwest Canine Feel-Goodery Faction (money to help get underprivileged dogs aromatherapy massages) or as banal as HanddOip! (Buckinghamshire's program to provide esteem-raising workshops in handshaking for homeless persons,) then you are effectively a Wanker, no matter how much good you do in your actual life. Don't get me wrong, I am all for some fund-raising and have done a bit of it myself in the past, but the Brits are just bonkers about it. If some news weather presenter isn't daily killing herself a little bit by running so long and kayaking so hard that she pees out a fraction of her own liver, then the People of Great Britain just don't feel as good about themselves. They are ashamed, because being ashamed of themselves is something they do quite well (I expect that comes with having once been a gigantic Empire and subsequently having learned that in becoming said Empire you were quite a bunch of assholes. Not that, as an American, I'd have any idea what that felt like.)

Snarkiness aside, I have to say that the national mania for funraising is pretty cool. It may even provide some direction for me, finally and hoo-frickin'-ray! To that end I might as well announce that I intend to have a fund-raiser of my very own, inspired by my Aunt Julie (who is in much the same sort of situation I am in, physically, and who came up with the idea) and by my lack of athletic ability (self-explanatory.) On the weekend May 31st I'm going to have a one-woman Read-a-Thon, in honor of my parents, Clem and Kathy Biddle. The money raised will go to the McMillan Cancer Group. There, I said it.

Now to load up on some books!