Tears, Santa Ana winds, headaches, heat, should have felt connected, weepy instead. I think that’s my Goodreads summary of the novel of Yesterday. Not in that order. It was a flummoxy day. It was a day of heat and dry and that pressure that the Santa Anas ride into my skull, whipping about and causing upset. These days, my hormones and the weather, the lack or addition of exercise, the time or not for meditation, these are the things that help me balance the teeter totter or fall to the ground, trip into a hole. I feel the wind catch and drop. The artist’s brain is fascinated, grabs the sketchbook, travels me here and there to the places on my schedule, puts me in the right places, but not the right moods. I talk, I pretend to be normal like you, try to chat and small talk.
Instead, I buy socks. I can’t listen to a talk on water filtration. I’m so far away from being able to be competent enough to hike far enough to need water filtration. What I need are socks. What I buy (with my 16% fucking discount) are socks. Socks for me. Socks for the boychild. And a doggie water bowl for Calli, so she doesn’t give me that sad-eyed look again when I try to persuade her to drink water from a plastic bag. Look, Calli…Jake does it. Jake is a desperate water slut. Yes, these are dogs of which I speak. Soon I will post the other two hikes from last Saturday. Maybe when the burying stops.
Last night was a clusterfuck. I did the normal social stuff. I did everything I was supposed to do. I am always doing the things I am supposed to do. I do them and they do no good, and I became unraveled on the way home. To be truthful, I was unraveling on the way out, and it was only the stifling presence of other people who kept all my brain parts from unwinding on the pavement in the wind. I waited until the drive home and then wept out all the pieces on Interstate 8, leaving them writhing on the asphalt between the lanes. Home was no better, and found girlchild sitting on the couch with me and the dog, trying to put me back together again.
I flailed. I didn’t exercise. I didn’t meditate. I did what any normal depressoid would do…I crawled into bed with my pain and my tears and I let them whale upon themselves while I dreamed fitfully, while the wind continued to thrash the trees above my head, to drop eucalypt leaves all over my yard, more crap for me to clear. More for my neighbors to decry. My pool guy. Hey, I pulled the damn dead baby possum out. You can’t bitch me out now.
Morning comes and it’s bright and the wind is still here and did I mention bright? Mornings are sometimes a shock to my system. I prefer to live in the dark, in the cool whisper of night.
Tonight there is another meeting, but the winds have died down. The traffic pulls at me though, as I sit in it, inching along towards friends who don’t ask too many questions. It’s better that way. Questions tend to stab at my eyeballs and I shut down or burst into tears. Wow. What a choice. I cried from Santee, no maybe La Mesa…all the way to Mira Mesa. Stopped it in the parking lot. Made it stop before I went in. Dragged my mopped-up self in and bought tea. Sat with friends and dropped it all on the table: stupid financial aid forms, goddamned State Franchise Tax Board, fucking asexual hammerhead sharks, the pile of crap that is literally wrapped around my neck right now, squeezing tight as I try to figure out how to handle each thing, one chunk at a time. Lots of chunks.
I swear. There is no peace.
There must be peace. I’ve seen it in a mountain meadow, wind rushing through and lighting the grass with dusky noise. I’ve seen it on the top of a rounded-rock peak, standing up tall and feeling the sky support me and birds swoop below my feet. I’ve seen it in my sketchbook. I’ve seen it in a pile of fabric, random prints slammed together by my brain. I’ve seen it in a good book, words reach up and wrap around like an author’s warm hug, a reminder of where my head could be.
Sigh. Some days it is So Bad. I try. I really do. I joke around, I tell stories, I goof off with my students, I interact with my kids, I make people laugh, I even make myself laugh. It is not enough. I get into the quiet space that is alone and all that protection, that distraction, it just sloughs off and I stand there, wrinkled, old, and lost…and that is what I cannot escape. That is the reality that is always underneath…and on days like yesterday and today, it weighs on you. It does not matter how smart I am, how long I ruminate on causes and hope and the past and the present and the future and the very moment that is right now. The mood right now…it is deep down low and slimy and rusty and held down by heavy rocks and choking me with that bad sulfur smell.
It is not a good mood.
Tonight I resolve to do better than last night, because it’s OK to have a bad night and realize it and try to revise it, revoke it, revolt it. I eat, I exercise, I meditate. I iron…
I lay fabrics out for the flesh tones, as if that will save the world. As if that will save me. As if it is not like lining up the fucking chairs on a sinking Titanic deck. I iron the damn things because it is all I know how to do at the moment. It is my life vest, my survival plan, my way out…
I’d like to say that ironing for 12 hours so far, and being up into the 900s, more than halfway through, almost to 1000…that it was enough to pull me through, and maybe it is…because I am still getting out of bed in the morning and taking showers (thank you, I know) and eating and exercising and attempting to look like a normal person. But it doesn’t feel like enough.
The frustrating part is that I don’t know how much of the moody crap is depression and how much is thyroid or iron levels or goddamned fucking blood sugar. It feels like I am a puppet being controlled by someone else…I can’t exert enough control on my self to feel like I can hold on to some level of content or even sanity. Some days it is like my brain is floating in space like a balloon and I keep trying to grab onto that fucking string, to pull it down, to fasten it to my head so it can’t escape, can’t wander off.
Useless. Tilting at windmills.
Which brings me to the music video featured on today’s post (making it sound like I am always featuring music videos, which is absolute bullshit). If you have made it this far through my crazyass poetic turbulence, then you have to watch this video, Dangerous by Big Data…
Because it made me laugh. Now that might make you worry even more, but this thing is so out there, it reminds me of Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill and the like. Yes, it’s an acquired taste, but sweetheart, I am a fucking acquired taste, so you should be able to deal. Plus you don’t have to like it.
Kathy Nida 