May 10, 2002

Recitar! Mentra preso dal delirio

Yes, I perform. I perform for my friends, my family, everyone I know. Nobody knows who I truely am. Do I? Not really. I kind of find comfort in that. When someone doesn't like me, I say, they don't like that person. Thats not me. I'm different. Over come with delirium. Sometimes, other times with sadness, loneliness, weakness. I perform better under these circumstances it seems. I can leave my world, enter another. Not real though. Never real.

non so piu' quel che dico, e quel che faccio.

Out of control? Sometimes, all the time. I don't have a plan. My plan fell through. I have no idea what I'm doing or where I'm going. I have no idea what it is that I'm saying to people, or what I'm doing to people. All I see are relationships declining, friends drifting apart, no hope.

Eppur e' d'uopo... sforzati!

I must continue. I can not succumb to the dangers of myself. Often I have thought of suicide. Not often have I seriously attempted it. I must force myself. For myself to continue despite the pain, the misery, the lonliness. It can't be for much longer. It won't be for much longer. I won't allow it to be.

Bah! sei tu forse un uom?

No. I am no man. I am less than a man. I am as far away from being a man as I am from anything else. I am nothing. I do not grow, do not develope, do not change. I am static. I will always be the loser that I am now.

Tu se' Pagliaccio!

I am less than a clown. Less than what people laugh at. I am in many areas similar, I must confess. I am here for people to laugh at. For people to feel better about themselves. I am the object of laughter. Why is that so bad? Have I not here found a purpose of life? Is that why I am upset? Because I have found a purpose? Or is purpose one of those things that you can not know, or at least, not meant to know.

Vesti la giubba e la faccia infarina

My costume is happiness. My mask is laughter. No one will know the pain, no one will know the unhappiness. They will see what I want them to see, what THEY want to see. This is what I do. There is nothing wrong with it. We all wear masks, all wear costumes. Perhaps the moment I die, I will strip myself naked. Reveal who I really am. Perhaps. But until then, I will keep wearing my costume, and I will keep laughing.

La gente paga e rider vuole qua

That is why people hang around with me. To laugh. Are they doing it with me? At me? Does it matter. As long as they laugh I have fulfilled my duty, my job, my purpose. I can not disappoint. I must make them laugh. They will think I am funny, and they will like me. They WILL like me.

E se Arlechin t'invola, Columbina

I have no person in my life. No one. I thought I found someone. I was wrong. So terribly wrong. But I guess her and my friend aren't so wrong. Whatever happens, I hope that she is happy. I hope she finds someone, be it my friend, or someone else, that will treat her like she deserves. Someone who can do all the things that I long to do, but can't. And all the things that she needs that I can not provide. I hope to dear God that she finds someone like this and I hope I never have to stand by and say that I'm happy for her. Eventhough I will be.

ridi Pagliaccio e ognun applaudira!!

I will laugh. They will laugh. Everyone will be happy. I will be happy, or will I? The first step to being happy is acting happy. Why can I not go to the next step? Why am I stuck? They will applaud. Oh yes they will. Their laughter will be my applause. Their invitations will be my encore. They will be satisfied by my performance. No one will ever know the truth. I am so good at what I do. So good at pretending. So good, that I forget who I am when I am not pretending.

Tramuta in lazzi lo spasmo ed il pianto;

I will use my misery and pain to make laughter. I will use my life to be-little. I will turn my inner-most tears into laughter. This is the way I must proceed. This is the only way I can live. Besides, what good are all these emotions? This way, they can find an outlet. A creative and productive outlet. One that will enlighten many people's days, enrich them. They will see how painful I am, and they will be happy at what they have. Truely it is more than I can ever imagine.

In una smorfia il singhiozzo e'l dolor... Ah!

This is the hardest thing to do. To smile despite the way I am feeling. To laugh at my life, even though the pain piercies me. I fail sometimes, and people see. They see for a moment my real pain. And they withdraw. I have failed. I do not fail often, but when I do, I fall even deeper into despair. I can not fail anymore. I must succeed. I must smile.

Ridi Pagliacco, sul tuo amore infranto!

Laugh. Laugh. At whatever I can, at my broken heart, my shattered dreams, my unrealized potential. Laugh at that. Why can I not laugh at that? Why?

Ridi del duol che t'avvelena il cor!

Laugh! At the pain that poisons my heart. Laugh and be happy. That is my only choice. The only path left open. Why is it so hard? Why can I not do it? Why do I still hurt?

Things have been rolling up like pieces of string, into a furious ball.

One is the customer service rep who calls me Christina, Christian and Christie all in the space of one phone call. Then tries to sell me roadside service for a phone that doesn't (and apparently won't) work. Who the fuck are these people, I grumble for two days solid, knots forming from muscles I did not know I had.

There is S. not showing up for our comibnation booze date photo shoot. There are the two papers I refused to write this week. There is and is and is. I feel my adolescence has returned with a vengeance. My instinct is to lean into this terrible mood and let it get worse. To ride it like a fabulous wave.

Then I am trying to breathe it all out in the bath tub, and doing fairly well, when I recall the press release S. set down on my desk this afternoon. A 71-year-old man is getting busted for furnishing booze to minors and in the process, they find a 13-year-old boy and 200 tapes of porn, much of it homemade.

Law enforcement types can only say so much on the record but we know it only gets worse.

In the tub my stomach twists, tighter when I try to push it to the back of my head, when I say to myself, You are not to take these things home with you. OK.

For x number of families do not have the luxury of not taking it home; it has followed them through the door. X number of families do not have the luxury of pushing this into the back of their heads.

For a minute or so, I entertain quitting a second time. My reasons this time would rhyme with my reasons last time.

And that is the point of my long-overdue unraveling. Thank fucking God. My tear ducts in fact work. It's not so much to you, perhaps better fit for my notebook, but it might be something; I don't know.

I've been sleeping and complaining; by and by, eating; even more scarcely, studying.

Sometimes I think our lives are made of moments like that one in the bath tub, and the rest is merely glue. It is optimism searching us out like a flashlight. It is somebody saying (which somebody did), Keep your conscience and you will be OK. Breathe; there is literally nothing else you can do. But breathing in the face of so much stomach-twisting, teeth gritting, evil forces is more than it seems. Good God.

Fourteen more days.

Fourteen more days, and I'm out - out of high school, out of my little town of South Park. Seventeen years, and yet it still doesn't make sense.

But tonight, nothing makes sense.

I'm at a horrible in-between stage. Not quite a college girl, but I feel as though I've severed all my ties with high school. What is my hair doing? I should have left it long. This shirt doesn't look right, I look frumpy.

Why can't I walk down the hallway without comparing?

Kelly, I thought I was supposed to be better!

The screams just keep getting louder...

I ate pizza tonight, and I'm not mad. Nor do I feel guilty. Just, hopeless.

"You're at a normal weight, Lisa.
But you're certainly not in remission."

Well it seems that I've got some nodes I am prepared to unleash on E2. I've been so intimidated with the noding scene. After the Boston gathering I started to remember how much I had become a part of E2 and the people.

I want to be apart of the people again, and if that means I have to raise my standards for node-writing, than so be it. This is why I haven't noded much recently. So much seems to be riding on a node after I sumbit (intentional misspelling) it. But there's no since in bitching about it. I've just got to get off my lazy ass and research my nodes better. That's my plan of attack, any way.

Any who..that's all I have to say about that right now..

I added this writeup on here because it was nuked after I first posted it for noding about noding. I thought it deserved a place somewhere, so here it is:

So much pressure..

I almost regret doing it sometimes. But then I fix myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and move on.

I mean, most of the writeups I downvote deserve it in the first place, but after reading the node, I think about the person who wrote that. They are probably hoping to improve their XP and boost their miniscule self esteem.

And here I am, placing my mouse over the bullet that resides next to the predominantly symbolistic minus sign that is and forever shall be the downvote.

I hover it ambiguously for a second.

*Think*

"I can't hurt this poor soul. This writeup really could have been written better ... and perhaps the future of this person's life could be thrown into upheavel as soon as they receive the notice that their XP has been defiled directly by my actions."

I could message you and let you know that there's something wrong, but that would require me to waste precious moments that could be spent reading other nodes.

*Whisper*

"Sorry.."

The instant later my mind sends the impulse to my index finger that the rounded surface directly below it needs to be depressed with a gentle amount of force.

But the physical force required to make it happen is laughable. It took more work, mentally, to decide that it needed to happen.

*CLICK*

And so it is. The downvote is in place. The fate of the user has been set in stone. And I am to blame for my portion of the damage.

I really am sorry.

But remember, you are always welcome to try again.

An elegy:

Today is a day of mourning. Today is the end of something. An era, a lifetime, my childhood. I don't know.

Today my car is dead.

Okay, all the melodrama aside today was the day of decision. Its been dead for a while, sitting in its vegetable state in the lot of the auto shop. Waiting.

What does a dead car wait for? It waits for you to make a decision. It waits for you to admit that you really can't afford that $800. It waits for you to give up hope in it. It waits for you to reject its plea for help, its ploy for attention. I have turned my back on the drowning man.

So what does a car matter so much? I hardly even used it when it was around. It wasn't for lack of appreciation though, it was a difference in lifestyle. The car took me to my parent's house, and brought me home again. This was a vital function. It held an important place in my daily life. The honored position of transport.

But much, much more importantly, this car had a title, and a history:

---

The year was 1986. A young couple, Judy and Bob Soule had just recently completed the third addition to their burgeoning young family: Erica, who would remain the youngest member of the family. After the completion of their second addition, Bethany, five years before, the couple had moved their clan into a larger house, leaving plenty of living space for Erica upon her arrival. This was one child of the 80's who would not be raised in a dresser drawer.

What the couple did not have was an adequate vehicle for transporting their family; their banana yellow subaru station wagon didn't even have a 5th seatbelt. They knew that to be able to roadtrip and grocery shop comfortably, they would need to plan on the contingency of the entire family needing to be in the vehicle at once. And so they began looking at vans to purchase.

A number of minivan and conversion van type options were considered. Among those manufactories that the couple considered doing their business with was the german car company, Volkswagon. They were pretty loyal to Volkswagon, having owned a camper bus (known as Abby) and a number of different Beetles in the past, as they were ass cheap cars, which was all they could afford. They eventually settled on a dark blue '87 Volkswagon Vanagon, with a silver strip around the middle.

---

now I'll let you all in on a little secret: those were my parents. It was not the first new car they had bought, but it was the first nice one; it had power steering, air conditioning, and the back folded down into a bed. When they bought that van I was 5 years old. I could easily walk around in it, I'm not even sure I could touch the ceiling when standing on the floor. And I was pissed that this was the van my parents had picked because I couldn't see out the windows.

I grew up in that car, and I am a sentimental person. We went camping at least once a year. I think we drove across the country in it once for every year it was alive. If not more. This is a car you could live out of. This was a car that you love. Passionately.

I practically lost my virginity in that car (it had curtains: my mother made them. I took them too when I had to clean all my things out of it). I taught at least 4 people how to drive a stick in that car. I took my first (non-familial) road trips in that car. I have slept, eaten, read, cried in that car. That car has moved me 5 times.

And now it is sitting in an auto lot in Lansing. I hope its not too lonely.

RIP

the Big Blue Wet Thing

I've come to the conclusion that depression is more than a disease of the mind. It is a crisis of identity.

Those who are depressive will probably know what I mean by this. I've come to realize that I see myself through depression, as depression, my identity is depression. That's all I know. That's why treatment doesn't really work, because you can't let go of depression when it's how you see yourself and it's all that's holding you together.

I once wrote here about the first warning signs that a girl I knew was seriously mentally ill. Warning confirmed, and thankfully I dodged that bullet.

The day was boring, no jobs posted. Frankie mentioned at Albert Herring was in town and wanted me to meet up. She was too busy to organise it, and I had a prior engagement to see the IMAX Space Station movie with friends so I said no to Albert Herring.

Later my friends replied that the had misread the film schedule, and the movie was only showing on Saturday. We did see it then, and it was great space propaganda.

I left the contractor’s centre in Hammersmith in the afternoon, heading for Stratford with time to shop. While trying to work my way around a tube train outage on the Jubilee line caused by a fire at Canning town, and thanking my lucky stars that West Ham, where I am based, is served by two lines, I got an SMS from Frankie. We agreed to meet later, but she wanted me there in an hour’s time. No way. It took me more than an hour to shop, go, home, eat, wash and change, hampered by the absence of the most convenient tube train line.

Then I set out for Waterloo, there to meet Frankie and Albert Herring around 7pm.

Lurking under the specified pot plant, I espied some beings that looked familiar from photos, and rapidly put names to faces: Oolong, Albert Herring and Frankie. Then learned a new set of names for them.

We headed for South Bank, drank and talked while Albert Herring’s little friend racked up the distance on Frankie’s distance-measuring wheel thing.

Then walked across the river, and back home by a devious route to avoid the still-inoperable jubilee line.

These are the first noders that I have met face-to-face, and they are surprisingly human.

And I now have achieved level six. Finally.

*clink*...*clink*...*clink*
"What's that?"
...
"Shit."

I was standing over the top tube of my Bridgestone, pondering the disturbing facts at the base of the Immortal Tree¹. Chris came rolling up with this odd clinking coming from his rear wheel. It took just a little investigation that he had broken another spoke (the first being just a few days previous, and cost us a day of travel while I ran around Crescent City looking for a bike shop that was open and could fix the damn wheel). I wrestled with the wheel for half an hour or so, until I realized that like the last broken spoke, I'd need a freewheel tool to get the spoke in place. I tweaked the wheel into a vague sort of truth and we got on the road, slowly.

It was sort of a long day anyway, and so it started to get a little late. We were on the Avenue of the Giants, a spur off of Highway 101 that winds through a old growth redwood forest. In the daytime, the trees are amazing -- massive living things, older than one can comfortably conceptualize, lording over an area that seems to be quieter than younger forests.

In the dusk, they become something different. Instead of seeming huge, they become "normal", and two humans rolling through on bicycles become the aliens. I felt like a rat scurrying under the legs of dinosaurs. The forest filled with a mist, turned gray-green, and seemed to slide back to the Jurassic. It was erie, scary, amazing, humbling, exhilirating....

If you ever ride through the redwoods, do it at dusk. It's worth a broken spoke.

---

1:"This tree survived: The flood of ... A lightning strike ... The fire of ... A woodcutter's axe.... If it were cut down, it would produce ... board feet of wood, enough to build several homes!" Why is it disturbing to me to extoll the tree's longevity then talk about what we could get out of it if we chopped it down tomorrow?