New Year, Same Me

I think if I didn't have school or family, I would sleep most of the day, stay perpetually drunk, and do nothing but listen to music and write. I'd finally have the time to write book after book of horrible angst which I keep insisting qualifies as poetry. If I even stayed alive long enough. I had a conversation with my boss the other week about how she thought, minus family and school, I would still find something constructive to do with my time, because I'm just 'that sort of person.' This woman obviously doesn't know me at all. Not that I plan on doing anything to deprive myself of family or school. But I know me. I am, at my core, an alcoholic sloth.

This is the first year I've started in awhile that wasn't tinged with just a smidgen of optimism. I think that's because all my heroes and suddenly dying. Life is letting me know NO ONE IS SAFE. YOU ARE NOT SAFE. I CAN TAKE AWAY EVERYONE YOU LOVE, YOU BETTER WATCH YOURSELF. Bowie, though. That was like a punch in the gut. Really, though, it was just him and Alan Rickman dying within days of each other. They were the top two in my list of Older Men I'm in Love With. I'm afraid to list the others for fear of jinxing them.

Also new: I got an Amazon Echo recently. So now my house is always either full of badass music or my family screaming "ALEXA STOP" over and over.

Saint Jareth

Sick Sad World

I am sick and it is fucking with my thoughts. I've got a chest cold (is that the same thing as bronchitis? I dunno, I never go to the doctor anymore), I'm losing my voice, and I have a weird itchy and painful rash that started on my arm, and was told by several people that it looked like shingles, it was acting just like shingles, but is now on both arms, hands, and is creeping up my goddamn neck and I am convinced my body has just decided to slowly self-destruct. I am at work, giving less of a shit than normal. Pretty much zero shit. If I were to stay home, I would still have to deal with being alive, but without the perk of being paid for it, so I decided not to call in sick. I'm hoping that I'm contagious.

Guess what? I'm going to bitch about everything, so if you don't want to hear it, quit reading and fuck off. It's that Everything Is Shit time of year. Out come all of the Christmas decorations and my full-blown depression. Traffic, greed, shitty weather, packed stores, religious nonsense, annoying commercials, bad movies, and Elf on the Goddamn Shelf. Somewhere deep down, I do like Christmas...in my own way. I just don't feel like digging that deep at the moment. Fuck It.

So sweepy. Can't function.

Holy hell, it's almost holiday time. I'm dragging. No energy for it. Or for anything. The thought of having to do anything, be it work or homework or dishes or family stuff or everything that surrounds the holidays (oh, fuck, the tree, the shopping), the thought just exhausts me. Just the thought. I want to sleep through it all.

I think I'm closing in on the bottom of my roller coaster ride this year.

Windows 10, writr, and alcoholic beverages.

So I just updated to Windows 10 the other day. I can't really decide whether I like it better than Window 7 (I never had 8, so this is a bigger change for me than for others). I'm still trying to wrap my mind around everything. I poked around in the app store last night while I was at work, looking for journal apps. I found one called Writr that gives prompts to help get the words flowing. The first prompt that I actually found interesting enough to write something on was, "Describe your favorite alcoholic beverage." Simple enough. Yet not. I think I will post some (or all, I haven't decided) of the outcomes of said prompts here, since this really is my JOURNAL-journal.

Describe your favorite alcoholic beverage:

It's waiting for me after a trying day. I can't say I have one specific alcoholic drink that I can call my favorite, much in the same way I don't have a favorite song or favorite band. It is the right adult beverage at the right time. When I return home from work, it's the cold bottle of beer I pull from the fridge after changing into my pajamas. When it's game night with my family, it is a potent rum and coke that loosens the laughter from my belly. On vacation, it is whatever tropical pink or red relaxing concoction with a memorably unique name that strikes my fancy. Sometimes it's wine. It's not often wine, but there are those times that only a chilled glass (or bottle) of wine will do. Red or white, with pasta at dinner or while watching a sad or romantic French movie, reading the blurred English subtitles through my stupid blubbery tears. It's the Malibu Rum in my hot cocoa that warms me while watching a snowstorm. The whiskey that dulls my senses when I feel I could lose my mind completely to depression, slowly becoming inebriated while listening to The Smiths or Tom Waits and typing out poem after drunken poem, channeling what feels at the time to be my inner Bukowski (but which is revealed to be a thirty-something's equivalent to teen angst once I'm sober). I've got an intimate relationship with alcohol, and I'm sure I've got new favorites out there yet to pass my lips, just waiting for the perfect situation to introduce itself.

UPDATE: DO NOT FUCK WITH WINDOWS 10, IT IS HORROR. 

PURE. FRUSTRATING. HORROR.

Drunk Epiphany

Sometimes I'm drunk and feel things that shouldn't be real. I'm okay with that.  I own a fragile human brain. Maybe it doesn't work the way it should. Maybe it does. I don't know what's real at the moment. I know I feel very good and feel things deeply. I know that once I read this sober, I will be bewildered and possibly embarrassed. Fuck sober Jenny. I know everything.  I'm completely powerless, but I know. I feel like I've tapped into some sort of collective consciousness. I don't want to sober up and laugh off my naivety.

vivid dreams
wake up
great morning
super imagination
relax
get bored
get irritated
sink down
hate everything
feel numb
fuck

NEW YEAR OPTIMISM

My world is so incredibly tiny. I normally stay within the same three towns, doing the same things, in the same places, with the same people. My mind is rarely forced to deal with new experiences. I don't know what to do about that. So I keep running on my wheel, in my cage, making half-assed plans for the day when I finally have the nerve to break out and explore. I don't know other people. I hardly know myself. I know my role, but that feels like a small part of a bigger picture. I'm untapped potential. I need to expand (not physically, I'm working on contracting in that regard).

It's January. I always get so optimistic this time of year. Like I will Change Everything. And I can, I totally have the power to change myself for the better. Eventually, it always feels like the top of the roller coaster. I am at a high point where I can see everything clearly. It's somewhere around the end of summer when I start to feel that this is just the same stupid loop every year and that I'll be climbing back up to that same high point every January, only to plummet into lows and be jerked around until it starts all over again. And then again. And then again.

I need to change my roller coaster. I want a new ride every year. I want more high points. I want water splashed on me and see wild animals and fire and lasers. Dammit.

Holiday Lull

Almost Christmas. I'm trying to feel it. I've got my shopping done, been listening to the songs, watching the movies, blah blah blah. It will go smoothly. And then it will be over. There will be much drinking involved to carry me through. And that is good.

I don't have any crisis at the moment. My fall classes are finished and I aced them all. Money is okay. Kids are alright (I said that in Roger Daltrey's voice). Work...well, it's always one part boring, one part alright, and two parts big fucking mess, so that's nothing new. It's like there's this big lull, a sigh, a pause. And I don't know what to do. It's too quiet.

I realize I've got to find something wrong with everything. When things are going the best, I'm bracing for the worst. The after-Christmas hangover is coming, and that will last at least a month or two. So it's time to enjoy THE FUCK out of this Christmas, dammit.

Nice night

Tonight's a little better. Bad time at work, but good night at home. I always regret drinking after the fact, but in moderate amounts, it feels as if it helps. I can relax and connect easier. We were just out looking at the stars. Things felt good and normal. Planning for Halloween. Being stupid and ridiculous. How things should always be. Yeah. I feel good tonight.

Apology

I've become a downer over the last decade, which is about the same amount of time I've maintained this blog. It seems the more "good" things that happen in my life, the more shitty my personality becomes. I can't pretend to understand why. And I'm sorry. My mind is a poisonous place as of late, no matter what happens, I'm an insufferable asshole, incapable of chilling out and enjoying anything. I drink too much. I'm lazy and boring and stupidly predictable. I either irritate, offend, or just push away anyone I've ever loved. Trust me, though. I'm trying to figure it out. I'm human. Hopefully I'll outgrow this phase of being horrible to everyone around me.

Independent film material, my life is not.

When I'm up by myself late at night, after a few drinks, sometimes I feel like I ought to have my own soundtrack. It would be instrumental, mostly sad piano music. More than that -- my life is a quiet, quirky, independent film. Starring me. All internal dialog. Segments of dreams, daydreams, me just standing in the middle of the kitchen, staring at the side of the refrigerator, looking lost. Long sighs. Really pretentious artsy shit.

Yes. I realize this would be a very boring film.

It would need a great soundtrack.

Something I have. That I can label and everything.

Since I was little, my mind has assigned genders and distinct personalities to all letters and numbers. They were sadly made up of mostly males, but a lot of those males had varying degrees of masculinity. The only female letters were (well, are, as I still see things this way) K, P, Q, U, V, X, and Y. Female numbers are 4, 6, and 9.

I also saw numbers as young or old. For example, 1 was a mischevious baby boy, 2 was a tidy British schoolboy of about 8 years old. Each consecutive number was a little older, with 9 being a woman of a motherly age, maybe in her 40's. 9's personality was similar to Morticia Addams. I'm not even going to go into the personalities of the letters, but they all have them. Every last one. All unique.

I only now, this very morning, decided to google this phenomenon to see if this was a thing that other people did. And voila! It appears that I have ordinal linguistic personification, which is a form of synesthesia. This is actually a thing. I have this thing in common with other humans. I don't feel completely unbalanced now. This is a perfectly ordinary and accepted form of crazy.

BOOM! I can go back to bed now.

Labor Day

I tried to get to bed at a normal person's bedtime tonight, but I could not ignore my body's insatiable need for dessert, pumpkin beer, and the internets. And the desire to drift over to the piano every half hour or so and play for the rapt audience in my head. Shit. It's 2:26 in the A M. I don't even understand why I can't cooperate with myself.

My family members always seem to die on holidays. My PawPaw died on Independence Day when I was 16. My aunt died on Christmas Eve. Nanny died on Columbus Day. I get nervous when a holiday approaches. I think if I had to pick a holiday to die on, it would be April Fools. Anyway, today is a holiday. Labor Day.

I bring this up because...

My grandpa died this morning. I hadn't been terribly close to him, my dad's side of the family have never lived close enough to me to establish a strong bond. I'm not devastated, as he was 91 and I had known that his health was failing fast. The whole family seemed prepared for it. I haven't cried yet, so of course that makes me feel like a monster. I cry for no reason on the drive home from Walmart, for fuck's sake, why can't I cry in a relevant situation?

I know this will definitely fall under the category of TOO SOON, and would also not have been found humorous by my late grandpa, but...yeah, I think it's pretty damn funny. So. My grandparents had given my parents a hinged double photo frame years ago. On one side is a photo of my grandma, on the other side is my grandpa's picture. It's the sort of frame that has a voice recorder built in so that you can record and save a message. There is a button on each side, and a message for my parents from each of my grandparents. I honesty can't remember what grandma recorded, but when you press the button under grandpa's photo, his voice says, "If I could get out of here, I'd join you for a cup of coffee!" Would that not be PERFECT on his tombstone? Yeah? Huh?

*silence*

*crickets chirping*

I figure, if I can't cry, I'll try and laugh instead.

Time passes.

It is now 4 in the A M. Charlie's alarm will go off in about 15 minutes for him to get up for work, and I will be sneaking into bed, trying to play off that I had been there the whole time. But, yeah, he never buys that. Damn you, brain. Damn you, internets. Good night.

Some shit that I'm thinking that I decided to write down. As usual.

It's too fucking hard to think. I get up KNOWING I need to work on my homework (which, for the first week, is ridiculously simple), but I don't want to do anything. I want to hide in bed and pretend none of it exists. I can't do this. I mean, I CAN do the schoolwork, what I can't do is blow it off and fuck up my very decent GPA because I'm a fragile minded little asshole. I've been away from it too long. I thought taking a week off from work would help me ease back in to school, but it just gives me an excuse to sleep through the time I'm supposed to be doing my schoolwork. Maybe I should have gone with in-person classes this time. I dunno. I'm going to force myself to stay up after the kids go to school tomorrow morning, go for a walk and get my brain working. My brain wants to dwell on stupid stuff I have no control over instead of focusing on what is SUPPOSED to be important to me. I have no willpower. I feel lost. Blah blah blah, don't you think I know how pathetic and self-centered I sound? Fuck off, I'll figure it out. Hopefully.

Ordinary Do-Nothings

I can't seem to start today. I haven't strayed too far from bed. I got a Bukowski poem book for my birthday and now I'm buried in that, then I lie around. I had terrible and strange dreams last night and this morning. I'm still colored by those a little, I guess. It's hard to take ordinary life seriously. I have classes that started online yesterday that I haven't done anything for. I can't function today. Yesterday was good. Like a muted good. My family was here celebrating my birthday. I was so tired, but everything was still nice. I've got time off work now, so it's too easy to just space out and not do anything. I just want to lie around and live in my head.

Just woke up

I'm totally wasting valuable time sitting around in bed, propped up on my elbows, Facebooking until my pinkies go numb. It's after noon. Kids are in school. Charlie's at work. I got the kids on the bus this morning, ate a donut and went back to bed. I'm a lazy turd.

I start classes Monday. I took a huge break from school, but now it's time to pick back up with it. Or else my family will assume I've given up (not that I haven't thought about doing that), in which case they will pester the fuck out of me.

I really have nothing more to say.

Melancholia

Paired with intoxication and piano, melancholia can be both beautiful and horrible at the same goddamn time. Tell me how that's even fucking possible.

Possibly the rum is disguising the shit I'm feeling as art? Probably.

FuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckFUCK.

I'm awake when I shouldn't be. I have to take the kids to the dentist in the morning and then work in the evening. It's 3:30am. All I'm doing is reading news articles, taking online quizzes to see what mental disorder I might have (tonight it's BPD), listening to sad piano music and feeling mopey. I'm afraid of having another of those Supernightmares tonight. It wasn't horror movie terrifying. It played off my emotions. I was a disaster this morning. I ached in my chest. My heart had taken a beating (no pun intended) all fucking night.

I feel stupid and fragile. I'd like to just not give a fuck. I'd like to sleep soundly and wake up normal. I want the dreams back that used to play out happy fantasies.

On another note, I found out this evening that my grandpa is dying. Probably quite soon. I haven't seen him in something like 12 years. It makes me feel shitty.

Nightmare

I'm lying in bed, fresh from sleep, already feeling low. My dreams from last night and this morning all seemed to play out my worst fears. Not death or spiders or clowns. None of these compare to rejection. Humiliation. Loneliness. Why does my brain have to be so terribly cruel? It's a sick joke, to do this to me when it knows how much I look forward to the relief of sleep, where I can dream and temporary let go of all this crippling insecurity.

I'm not even going to post these dreams, because hell, they're much too embarrassing. The problem is, now that I'm awake, my mind is trying to convince me that the underlying theme of the nightmares are true for my waking life. All along, it's been telling me that no one really cares about me and I've been trying so hard to ignore it. But to have an entire dream, what feels like the equivalent of a three hour long movie, dedicated to showing me that I'm worthless, and that the people I care about don't give a shit about me or my stupid little feelings (it gave many examples, worst case scenario of this)... it's hard not to give my asshole brain the benefit of the doubt.

I'm groggy and torn apart when I'm supposed to be fresh and ready for a new day.

Fuck. Me.

Happy time. Instance #1.

It was late evening, winter, so all was dark. 1993 probably. Richland, WA. I was with Mandy, Leah, and (I think) Colleen. We were at the Uptown Mall, which was a strip mall, and we were all slowly trickling out of an antique store. I was first out, sitting on the curb out front in the cold, waiting for the others to make their purchases. I wore a long black puffy coat (no, not for stealing anything). My pockets were filled with CDs for my Discman. I was always wearing headphones. It was also shortly after I started smoking cigarettes, and I had a Camel Wide dangling "sexily" from my awkward mouth. I felt amazingly cool.

In those days, for reasons I have long since forgotten, I wanted to be called Robin, although I was instead dubbed "Roy," which has stuck with me to this day. We were all young and ready to reinvent ourselves, and then the next week we would re-reinvent ourselves. Because we still could.

We were waiting for one of our mothers (not mine) to come pick us all up and cart us to one of our houses (also not mine) where we would babble to each other and listen to records. None of us drove yet, as were all Freshmen in high school. Sitting on that curb, smoking, waiting for my favorite people in the world to join me, after sifting through vintage toys, books, and records and deciding not be buy anything (because I probably had no money)...I felt perfect. It was one of those rare moments in my life where I felt no worry, just love and contentment. All was right. I was with the few people in the world who understood me.

And I'm pretty sure I had an entire boxed set of Journey CDs stuffed in my coat.