The Cerebral Mum

Okay, what follows is brain detritus with foul language, and no stylistic merit to justify it. Don’t read if you’ll be offended. Don’t read if you hold me in any esteem. But it is what it is. And I won’t apologise for it. Or justify it. Because whatever it is, it’s better off here on this blog than in my head. If I deleted, this blog would become a lie and I’m sick of feeling ashamed for whatever I am.

Sad facts. I hate not being happy. I hate feeling lonely and friendless and boring and nothing. Even if it isn’t true. I hate feeling it. I think that’s pathetic. It is pathetic. Not for anyone else who feels like this. I have sympathy for them.

No sympathy for me, please. No, no sympathy for me. I have none. I want none. I just don’t want to feel like this. It makes me angry. It makes me angry being pathetic. I’m smart, I’m not half bad to look at. I’ve got an education. I’m capable. It makes me angry being weak. Because weakness is repugnant. Weakness is the fear of rejection, the loss of respect. It’s people feeling sorry for you. That’s not the same as sympathy. It’s people moving away from lepers. I don’t have to experience that right now to know it’s true. That’s the way it is.

Reality without it’s face-on only does two things; it fascinates from a safe distance or makes people run like hell. Because people are big, fat, hairy-assed pieces of chicken shit. They’re liars and right now I wish I could say that I was just externalising my own state of mind, and I am, and I’m pissed at myself more than anything, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not a little bit of truth in there.

I love people, I do. I love them for all their flaws and faults. I do that because there is nothing else that can be done. But boy, are we all a fucked up bunch of pansy-assed hypocrites. You know what word I like? Honour. And loyalty. I like that word too. I’m sick to death of seeing so many people around me using and being used. I’m sick to death of how fucking small everybody is and I’m sick to death of everything I’ve done in my life so as not to offend them. Because, you know what - that makes me a big, fat, hairy-assed piece of chicken shit.

So what if I’m not liked. So what if I attract people like flies before they dash off to the next pile of shit. So what if I could never understand my visibility and tried to be what a million other people needed. So what if I was present, really present. What the fuck made me think that it was my responsibility to fix whatever anybody else’s fucked up reactions were? How did I absorb everybody else’s fucked up projections until I ended up here, with nothing left of my own.

I’m angry and crying and angry and crying. Because I should have known better. And I should have been aware of what I was doing to myself, and now there is nothing left of me to like. And I don’t even care how fucked up the rest of the world is and I don’t even care about the who-done-me-wrongs. I just care that I’ve let something outside of me mould my existence, grind my existence to fucking nothing.

When I used to be someone people would come to, rely on for help, for perspective, for philosophy, for unadulterated fucking acceptance and love. What fucking use to the world am I now? Really… What use?

That’s not hubris. Everyone is connected, everyone is useful. Everyone conscious is useful. When did I lose my fucking consciousness. When did I lose my fucking conscience.

So, after loosening up my written tongue, that’s what I had to say. I would have said more but there was a knock at my door and B’s twins were there offering me licorice and wanting me to go and meet their Nan. So I’ve been sitting in the garage next door with a wonderful lady and Big Sis and The Odd Couple, and surprisingly, talking about real things. Talked about the people in everyone’s lives; rape victims, manic-depressives, alcoholics. And B’s autistic brother, and what it was like raising an autistic child 30 years ago. How she wanted to commit suicide every day, how she wished every day the bus bringing him home just wouldn’t arrive. How much respect I have that she is comfortable saying those things, just matter-of-factly, never diminishing the love she has for him, the pride she has in him. She can talk about the excitement of the first time he looked through the window instead of at the glass at age seven, but she tells no lies about what it was like. She doesn’t conform to everyone else’s opinion, to society’s story of the self-sacrificing mother. Which she was, of course, and deserves respect for, but there is no getting around the fact that we don’t experience life in the way our patterned narratives make it seem.

I like her. I like people who are not phased by messy reality. I guess what I wrote before going next door was how angry it makes me that people are phased by messy reality. And I guess that isn’t a new theme here, even before I said the word depression. So now I feel like, fuck it all, I am who I am, whatever. But tomorrow I will wake up and I will be left alone in my messy brain, and the mess of my reality will have, again, no place in this world. I need to carve a space out for it, even if it is only in words. More importantly, I need to carve out a place for it in myself.

Because,the world is full of people experiencing big things, big traumas, big struggles, big joys. Things which always go unsaid, things repressed and reduced, always hidden beneath the Sunday-best face we’re are supposed to present to the world. Welcome to reality, where people suffering suffer all the more because it makes everyone uncomfortable, everyone exhausted.

That’s just not good enough for me.

Life is fucking huge. Make room for it.

The 18th assignment for 30 Poems in 3o Days: Joining the community.

“Include the words “formal” and “casual” at some point in your poem.”

He introduces us…

Now at the bar,
while he greets friends and fellow artists,
you make a casual inquiry
into my formal education,
into how I make my living,
and my face shutters
as yours did
when you saw me walking toward you
on the candled city street
and he said hello
and your grip tightened
on his arm.

I know your kind
but I recite
a hollow resume for you
while you resent me for the flower
in my hair.

And you have no more conversation,
so I turn my attention
to the stranger at my left
while you stare at
anaglypta on the walls.

Later, at the table,
with your pretended inattention,
with your eyes drifting, seeing nothing,
with your nothingness to say,
you sit, say nothing,
while all his people, strangers,
discuss art and film and music
until his name is called
and he accepts his award
and then returns and your grip tightens
on his arm.

I know your kind
but I, polite,
try to include you in our talk
while you resent me for the flower
in my hair.

This still reads as a little juvenile to me. It is too direct, I think, relying on explicit statements rather than letting the feelings come out through imagery. It also needs some makor editing. I shall sit on it a while and see what I can do with it.

In the meantime, I might perhaps write a post about “her kind”.

I have no idea who I am. I am in stasis. I interact with few people. I am not working. I do not see my friends. They are ghosts. They live in the world I used to belong to. The only human contact I have apart from my son is Big Sis whom I am both too close to and a world apart from.

Of course, I see other people. I pay the check-out clerk for my groceries. I say, Have a nice day. I speak to the Maternal & Child Health nurse as she weighs Caspar and checks his head circumference. I watch the audiologist as she moves the dials and records Caspar’s reactions on a photocopied form. I ask for a locker key at the front desk when I go to the gym. I say, Thank you.

But these people are nobody.

Because I am nobody.

I blame the suburbs, but it is I who is to blame. I am a snob.

I was always a snob. I liked large things. I liked words which could be capitalised. Truth, Beauty, Art. The people I loathed were those who went to the opera so they could say, “Last night I went to the opera”, those whose tastes were formed by magazine and newspaper reviews: What’s hot? What’s not?

I liked the way the world flooded my mind, rushing through it like a braided river, sometimes of water, sometimes of blood. Everything moved me. Everything was made of words.

When I read Henry Miller I would salivate. Even the bed lice and the pissoirs would make me salivate. Miller said:

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. _{Tropic of Capricorn}

And I was.

I am no longer. I do not want to be aware of the minutiae of life. I reject it. I am self-destructive. I can no longer even feel the Nausea.

I want to feel ill again at the sight of my hand. I want life to be large again. I want to be that girl again, who, when she walked down the street, felt so huge that shop windows would explode and cars would burst into flames. Years ago, in my novel, I wrote:

...I have been trapped here in this silent inertia by my desire to drive earth’s gears into reverse and nothing – nothing! – can be unmade in this world of time. It will not devolve for me.

Writing is prescient.

There is nothing I can do except write until I am true again.

In my reading yesterday I came across guest blogger, Edrei Zahari (Kamigoroshi), at Lorelle on Wordpress and his article Bringing Personal Blogging To Light. I liked what he had to say, and the way he said it, so I wandered over to his blog, Footsteps in the Mirror to read more.

What I discovered at Footsteps was that Kamigoroshi had brains for lunch.

There, on the page, was this luscious close-up: One tiny lamb’s brain in a pool of creamy sauce with a golden crust broken open to expose all that glorious succulence inside. It made my mouth water.

And it made me wonder, yet again, about people who are squeamish when it comes to food.

There are some things in this world that I cannot wrap my head around. There are some things that simply do not compute. I acknowledge the truth of their existence, but their existence is more baffling to me than the question, “Why are we here?”

What is it that makes a pig’s trotter repugnant to someone tucking in to a bacon double cheeseburger?

Why can’t a person who loves fish eat it when it’s “looking at them”?

Now vegetarianism, I get. It has an internal logic. It’s coherent. Not liking a particular food, I get. Genetics play a role in the configuration of our taste receptors, and the types of food favoured by our cultures influence us even in utero. But “not liking” a food you’ve never tasted? That, I do not get.

In fact, it gets my goat.

Ignoring the fact that what people don’t eat has no bearing on my life, picky eaters are not, in general, my sort of people. They’re simply perverse. To explain why fully I would have to rewrite Being and Nothingness but let’s just say I consider it an act of Bad Faith.

Besides, they’re exceedingly tedious to dine with.

Luckily for my obscure, particular prejudice, Caspar eats everything put in front of him. Whether it’s herrings in mustard sauce for breakfast or a fingerful of salmon roe when I’ve grabbed some Japanese take-away, he’ll always try it. And if it surprises him, he’ll try it again.

I really didn’t think that someone nine months old would try wasabi twice.

But here’s hoping he stays this way.