Small Steps Forward

there is a woman at the shelter where i’m staying who is working on building her business. and she’s a complete dyke. a butch. one of those lesbians who never wear dresses. and if her shoe has a heel, it also has a steel toe. anyway. i was thoroughly enjoying talking with her. in the shelters, there are lots of people simply rusting on the vine. it can take a lot to build and maintain an “i can” philosophy in the midst of legions of people chanting “i can’t because…”. the nice thing about talking with her was that she had that get-up-and-go attitude. the negative thing about talking with her was her lack of respect.

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I’ve escaped. I read this interesting book sometime ago — “Kindred” by Octavia Butler — in which this woman travels, involuntarily, back and forth through time. For some reason, she keeps dropping in on this plantation family, suddenly appearing and disappearing from their lives. A family already dysfunctional, her last visit is a culmination, a harvesting of seeds already planted. And on her trip back, she leaves part of herself behind. Literally.

I give myself congratulations on escaping that hellish roommate situation, but something was lost in the struggle.

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i think i’ve found the way out. i could be wrong, but i think i have the secret.

i’ve been thinking about it, puzzling over it for years…

waiting and waiting

someone told me a story once. a woman she knew was talking about the importance of training men. this woman had a date with a guy and the guy was late. it might have been 5 minutes or 10 or 15. it was no more than 15, and i think it was 5. after 5 or 15 minutes of waiting for the guy, the woman went home. the guy called later and asked what happened, and the woman said “you weren’t there.” it took, from what i remember of the story, no more than 3 times of this and the guy was either on time after that.

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i don’t know if you’ve ever really experienced anger. i mean, everyone gets angry, but i remember talking with someone i knew about my anger and she was pooh-poohing the whole idea that i was any angrier than anyone else. except i said something about getting homicidal and she said something like “yeah, sure, everybody feels that,” but in that tone that psychiatrists use when they want to make you feel normal. and the furrowed look on her face told me that maybe she had actually heard me instead of hearing what she wanted to refute. she worked on a nut ward, so i think something about the way i said it resonated in a way that she had some experience with.

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i always say i don’t have time to blog, but when life starts getting fucking insane (and even when it’s normal), it really helps to unpack the shit going on to see where the shatterpoint lies.

i’m looking at this craziness, knowing that i’m responsible for it, and wondering where the crux is. what is it that i need to change in order to step away from this situation without stepping into another similar piece of shit.

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I remember one of my first roommate situations. I was on time for an interview with the guy renting the room, and the place was a pigsty. There were dirty towels on floor, dirty dishes in the sink, and the place had the look of seeped-in grime. Naively, I asked “The place is usually cleaner than this?” Oh yes, he assured me, and even though there were four roommates, there was plenty of room in the slightly-smaller-than-full-sized fridge.

After I moved in, I found out there was a huge ice block in the fridge because the thing hadn’t been defrosted in forever. Despite the fact that the fridge had a hard time keeping anything cold, real estate within was fiercely contested. And, of course, as you roommate veterans know, the place was a pigsty.

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I’m the wrong kind of oddball. I always figured, due to my incredibly dysfunctional childhood, that I belonged with the other outcasts, and so I naturally gravitated to them in any given situation. But I keep finding out that I don’t fit there either. I always assumed that the outsiders would be working to work through and overcome their situation. I’m almost convinced that the exact opposite is true: that most of them aren’t.

I’m the kind of oddball that when told it’s impossible, looks for a way to achieve it. I’m beginning to realize that most people don’t operate this way. I always assumed that of course outsiders would be looking for options in “impossible” and it’s beginning to dawn on me that, again, this is actually rarely the case.

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I knew a black person once who had absolutely no problems or qualms about using a bathroom plunger in her kitchen sink. She was a crackhead.

I know a white person who has absolutely no problems or qualms about using a bathroom plunger in his kitchen sink. He is clean and sober.

What’s wrong with this picture?

I’m listening to the unabridged audio of “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand.

This is what baptism should feel like.

I was in the worst living situation. I was in the land of ten thousand roaches, and infinite chiggers. And I was looking around, like a driven maniac, desperately casting about for any other living situation. Actually, not any other situation. I knew how easily one could allow desperation to take hold, then jump with fine-tuned precision and easy grace from the frying pan straight into the fire. So I was being selective, but very, very, very motivated.

And I was finding nothing! Nothing at all. I couldn’t believe it. A scant two weeks prior, there had been a dearth of apartments, roommate situations, and rooms to let everywhere, and now it was quieter than downtown Sandusky, Ohio after 9pm. Nothing in my price range, nothing in the neighborhoods I was seeking to live in… Nada.

Sigh.

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