Preface: You'll need to have some spare time and be in the mood for some of my ramblings to commit to this.
I can now write again.
I've fallen and I wrote too much...
When I was 22 years old, there was a terrible hurricane that actually traveled way past the Gulf of Mexico, on to land, and held it's form as a hurricane waaaay up to Chattanooga, where I was living at the time on Lookout Mountain.
I always pushed us to areas that were beyond our reach, as a young couple, found a way to fill a job I usually convinced someone they desperately needed to create for me and hire me on the spot.
I have done that so many times in my life, in fact every job I ever held was not a position listed anywhere, but the result of me going somewhere I wanted to work and speaking to the owner.
I would turn, "We have no vacancies" into "When can you start?"
I was very tenacious, pretentious, energetic and a bit influential.
Some of my ex's would term it manipulative, but that is something done with ill intent, against the will of the subject.
What I did was persuade.
Yes, that is a suitable verb.
Anyway, this particular storm sounded like it had nearly blown our chalet down.
It turned out that we escaped the whole thing unscathed,
chalet intact.
It's not the norm for hurricanes to come that far up from the South.
I don't remember it's name, I could find it, but it's immaterial.
They usually result in a huge dissipation at landfall, and the further North they get, the more hilly the terrain, and after you hit North Alabama, North Georgia, you might have a few tornadoes tearing around Tornado Alley, but it's very rare for a big storm to hold it's stuff together that far up, and still be rockin like this one was.
The eye looked huge, but you could see the circle of black clouds all around, see the lightning in the perimetre, and I stood outside in the sun on the top of that mountain in the middle of a huge field and just took it in.
Approaching storms and wind always feel like something charged with energy that affects me in a very unique way.
It feels like what having some sort of power or uber-strength must
feel like.
The electricity combined with the wind power has always made me feel, I dunno, more delusional than usual, shall we say, in a highly accidentally rhyming sort of way.
I feel like I'm in an eye of a storm, but I don't have that strength and ability to levitate above it all. I lack trust in my ability to buffet the next wave of destruction.
I'm tired.
I was such a fighter for life and adventure and levity in that young girl, clawing her way to a life she wanted to create.
Sticking things out, doing what I knew was right at all costs and discomfort to myself. Suffering a passionate love that was never equaled in intensity after it had to be broken up.
There was a substitute, a place filler. Somewhere for me to direct the delusions of destiny and fate, and attempt to give something very wrong for me meaning that was written in the stars. I snapped out of that one quickly, but the first one lasted 16 years, and at the time of destruction, that was half of my life.
I had to get a long way away from home. It had to be inconvenient, expensive, damn near impossible to traverse. I did that. But I lost count of the number of journeys I made home, driving straight through 1200 miles, 22 hours or more of no stopping, except for petrol and the loo. Over the course of two years, I would make middle of the night trips across barren desert, 99 miles of it, to the barren desert of the Interstate between Laredo and San Antonio. Then, through dangerous stretches of Nowhere Texas. Then, by morning, when the first 900 miles was gone, cross an 18 mile bridge over a swamp between LaFayette and Baton Rouge. By the time I made New Orleans, I always felt like I was home. It's such a short trip compared to what I had behind me. That last bit of Louisiana, not going down into the Crescent, but keeping to the by-pass, ticks off quickly, Mississippi goes even faster, I spent half my childhood in Southern Mississippi and on the Gulf. Pine trees, sandy soil, flat land that by Meridian is getting hilly.
Then, Birmingham. I have done this route all the way across the country, but that was when I was driving professionally. It's different in a Volvo 960, or a top of the line Suburban with heated seats.
Birmingham, of course was home. Where all but our immediate family lived when I was growing up. We'd pushed out closer to Atlanta and I only had that much left to go, I'd call Mum again and update her. She would sit up by the phone these hours that she knew I was even out, alone, crossing close to the whole of the South.
Pregnant, for all but my second to last trip, when I finally went home before coming to England. I said I snapped out of this quickly, but only in comparison to the first.
I did the rebound thing with a twist, I left and went to Mexico, dragging this poor, scared creature along with me into a foreign land, language, and culture. He had no knowledge of what he was getting into. He was absolutely horrified by my sheer force of will, certainty that everything would be fine, and unfailing ability to make it all happen exactly how I said I would.But, I think what scared him the most was my complete confidence and absence of fear.
(IT WAS NAIVETY, allow me to loudly insert here on my past participle)
I was a do what I set out to do or die trying, kind of balls to the wall youngster. Way past the point of the accurate definition of youngster.
It seemed the older I got, the more I eased up. The less intense and more youthful I became. I was definitely "better" at the drama of playing me. Held the reigns less tightly and even took my heels out of the sides of the beast I was riding.
Then, when that series ended, I took a brief hiatus at home to reconnect with myself, and found the exact same restless heart beating in my chest, murmuring away to itself all the way. Even now, I can feel it when I lie down on my left. NOTHING bothers me worse these days than the feeling of my heart beating. I have to switch sides, even if I moved because I'd gone numb, I flip right back because I cannot BEAR feeling that irregular thump. The doctors call it an innocent murmur, but it feels pretty killer to me.
It's gotten worse since I've been in England. It went unnoticed in Mexico. Tha, thump, thump. Tha, thump, thump. Isn't the rhythm supposed to be a steady thump thump _ thump thump. We learn that
pattern in the womb. Vox Prima.
I am on holiday from my medication, I must admit to not having a great deal of the discomfort for which it is prescribed, but I am having a tonne of flu-like symptoms, stretching, watery eyes, sleeplessness, or long periods of sleep. bone marrow aching sort of bullshit. I do this to keep tolerance and dependency at a minimum, but, it seems, this time, I have over-extended my toxicity. Can't quit yawning. This is mild compared to the real deal detox, which is precisely why I suffer these holidays from meds. It keeps the final detox from knocking you flat on your face for three months, and withering a tall, big boned chick into what appears to be an Auschwitz survivor.
I remember looking at myself in the shower at 5'10", 127 lbs, and thinking, every anorexic ballerina at art school would be SO jealous of me. I looked so sick, my own Mother and ex-husband didn't recognize me when they came to get me from Mexico in those very, very early days down there.
I'm dead skinny at 155. A size 6 at 165, so this was just too low a weight for me. But, I literally couldn't eat a thing for so long. But that was after half a lifetime of chronic pain management. When the surgery was over, the thing about to kill me at 31 was out and the film of the surgery and the report on it were off to the American Journal of Medicine. (The surgeon did $6,000.00 of procedures on me and didn't ever send me the first bill. He got to publish on it. Board of Directors of the Fellows of American College of Surgeons, here he comes, sort of thing, I guess the money wasn't terribly important)
I was a bit of a legend at the hospital, because I'd been ill so much and when the mystery was finally solved, and it was such a massive gallbladder, in such horrific condition, everybody who had treated me, at the hospital where my second son and I were born in the same room,
it was one of these ripple effects of WOW! that shot through all my close friends at the hospital. Way to go on surviving that monster! After a year of my remaining displaced organs moving back to where they would have normally fitted, which feels SUPER weird, by the way, I dropped pain management because the pain was gone.
I knew just stopping it all cold from such heights was probably dangerous, but I meant to do it, as fast as it could humanly be done and I just gritted my teeth and quit going to the docs for the prescriptions. It just so happened we were living with the doctor that diagnosed me at the time I decided to descend into the abyss. He was a close friend and neighbour before I took up with his "closest" friend. We had been living in the big Victorian behind my old house of 14 years. He had bought it but was only there when he wasn't scheduled in New Orleans. We moved down to the French Quarter with him, but then I found there were few pain management clinics even open right in the aftermath of Katrina. It just seemed like the perfect time.
Only chaos precipitates genesis in my world.
Life spins out of the most unlikely circumstances.
He was robbed, the Jeep was broken into and the sat-nav stolen. Everybody pretty much traveled with a gun of some description. Ours were a .38, which I carried, and his was a shotgun, 18" and legal. I did a month of hell there in New Orleans, only taking the occasional shot of phenergan for the vomiting and to help me sleep.
I'd go to his bag, where I could have relieved my suffering quite readily, but I hate needles so badly, I wouldn't let any one do anything for me but the phenergan fire shot in the glute-side of the hip. It's one of the most painful intra-muscular injections given. We moved to the apartment in the swamps for part deux , and back to the Victorian for the third month, which essentially played out in a finally vertical rather than horizontal or bathroom bowing manner. This is when I started to arch static bolts reaching for the car door, after walking across wet grass with rubber soled shoes. Not the usual static generating conditions. I was coming ON and felt every hair on my body standing up, chills up and down my spine with all the sensations I was experiencing. I had been deaf, blind, and muted for so long and my system went on-line with a snap, crackle and lots of POP! It was such an amazing feeling. Like, having some sort of power over something huge and terrible. I continued to feel odd and off, but I was upright, mobile and crystal clean. The cleanest I'd been.
This is where that invincibility of taking off to Mexico like a dumbarse came from. I was Johnny Big Balls, look what I quit, cold turkey. I'm so f***in' rad!
PFFT!
I was a shell of a human. I had to fill my pockets with rocks to keep my doctor from freaking out when
I stepped on the scales. I knew I would get the weight back in due time, I had just gone through the equivalent of a very long, hard core virus.
I quit dilaudid, very high dose, for our opiate naive readers, that's pharmaceutical heroin, for all intents and purposes, about 16 2 mg xanax a day, 4 four times a day,
600 mg Morphine Sulphate instant release, and Effexor XR, 300 mg in a divided dose. I was afraid if I kept on like that, with the pain gone, I would end up dead.
See, when you're in the sort of pain that was causing me, for an extended period of time, i.e., I was born that way, came out screaming and still haven't shut up! The receptors that recreational users form that normally renders them dependent for life on something, makes the human brain crave opiates, those apparently didn't form in my case, and the drugs were going to mask all that pain. The surgeon actually upped my dosage when he saw the scan. He told me he'd seen big huge grown men drawn up in a fetal position, sobbing, and screaming with gallbladders and stones about 1/16th of the size of mine. He'd never seen the likes and said he was humbled by the fact that I could stand there, upright, and talk to him. He teared up and said, "I PROMISE you, I am going to make you feel normal and healthy for the first time in your life." My Mom cried. I was chuffed to f***, (Northwest for thrilled to bits)
I had validation.
I TOLD them I was hurting!!!!!
Psychosomatic my Aunt's Fanny! (and I don't mean that in American terminology, I am being very crass, so I won't translate, this was just the hugest thing in my life, the thorn in my side, the bane of my existence. The thing I had to get up and over daily for 31 years.
I was a bitch. But, not as much of one as I should have been. I just have a mad tolerance for pain because I never knew the difference.
It was a bit of an issue causer as well you can imagine.
Undiagnosed, general abdominal pain.
Can't find a thing wrong, looking in all the wrong places.
It was everything but what it turned out to be at one time or another through all that bullshit.
I seem to be therapy writing. Definitely cured the writer's block, this looks like a bleedin book!
Sorry.
So, anyway, touchy subject for me clearly, I have launched into diatribe and I was just going to write about that storm and the kind of metaphor for my life that it holds in my mind when I reflect. It didn't at the time, of course, because all was yet to be revealed.
But, I wouldn't have written anything but the general, non-specifics about something fairly mundane unless, you know the rest of the story.....
Christopher Hitchens!
There's even a video post script!
I googled "in the eye of the storm" to make sure I hadn't
plagiarized, or taken on loan, the title subconsciously and I found this Steampunk vid that the imagery fits my frame of mind so perfectly, I had to put it in. I've never heard this artist before, but the film was so spot on symbolically, even though the music leaves a lot to be desired for me, it's kinda cool, in it's own low key way.
I can now write again.
I've fallen and I wrote too much...
When I was 22 years old, there was a terrible hurricane that actually traveled way past the Gulf of Mexico, on to land, and held it's form as a hurricane waaaay up to Chattanooga, where I was living at the time on Lookout Mountain.
I always pushed us to areas that were beyond our reach, as a young couple, found a way to fill a job I usually convinced someone they desperately needed to create for me and hire me on the spot.
I have done that so many times in my life, in fact every job I ever held was not a position listed anywhere, but the result of me going somewhere I wanted to work and speaking to the owner.
I would turn, "We have no vacancies" into "When can you start?"
I was very tenacious, pretentious, energetic and a bit influential.
Some of my ex's would term it manipulative, but that is something done with ill intent, against the will of the subject.
What I did was persuade.
Yes, that is a suitable verb.
Anyway, this particular storm sounded like it had nearly blown our chalet down.
It turned out that we escaped the whole thing unscathed,
chalet intact.
It's not the norm for hurricanes to come that far up from the South.
I don't remember it's name, I could find it, but it's immaterial.
They usually result in a huge dissipation at landfall, and the further North they get, the more hilly the terrain, and after you hit North Alabama, North Georgia, you might have a few tornadoes tearing around Tornado Alley, but it's very rare for a big storm to hold it's stuff together that far up, and still be rockin like this one was.
The eye looked huge, but you could see the circle of black clouds all around, see the lightning in the perimetre, and I stood outside in the sun on the top of that mountain in the middle of a huge field and just took it in.
Approaching storms and wind always feel like something charged with energy that affects me in a very unique way.
It feels like what having some sort of power or uber-strength must
feel like.
The electricity combined with the wind power has always made me feel, I dunno, more delusional than usual, shall we say, in a highly accidentally rhyming sort of way.
I feel like I'm in an eye of a storm, but I don't have that strength and ability to levitate above it all. I lack trust in my ability to buffet the next wave of destruction.
I'm tired.
I was such a fighter for life and adventure and levity in that young girl, clawing her way to a life she wanted to create.
Sticking things out, doing what I knew was right at all costs and discomfort to myself. Suffering a passionate love that was never equaled in intensity after it had to be broken up.
There was a substitute, a place filler. Somewhere for me to direct the delusions of destiny and fate, and attempt to give something very wrong for me meaning that was written in the stars. I snapped out of that one quickly, but the first one lasted 16 years, and at the time of destruction, that was half of my life.
I had to get a long way away from home. It had to be inconvenient, expensive, damn near impossible to traverse. I did that. But I lost count of the number of journeys I made home, driving straight through 1200 miles, 22 hours or more of no stopping, except for petrol and the loo. Over the course of two years, I would make middle of the night trips across barren desert, 99 miles of it, to the barren desert of the Interstate between Laredo and San Antonio. Then, through dangerous stretches of Nowhere Texas. Then, by morning, when the first 900 miles was gone, cross an 18 mile bridge over a swamp between LaFayette and Baton Rouge. By the time I made New Orleans, I always felt like I was home. It's such a short trip compared to what I had behind me. That last bit of Louisiana, not going down into the Crescent, but keeping to the by-pass, ticks off quickly, Mississippi goes even faster, I spent half my childhood in Southern Mississippi and on the Gulf. Pine trees, sandy soil, flat land that by Meridian is getting hilly.
Then, Birmingham. I have done this route all the way across the country, but that was when I was driving professionally. It's different in a Volvo 960, or a top of the line Suburban with heated seats.
Birmingham, of course was home. Where all but our immediate family lived when I was growing up. We'd pushed out closer to Atlanta and I only had that much left to go, I'd call Mum again and update her. She would sit up by the phone these hours that she knew I was even out, alone, crossing close to the whole of the South.
Pregnant, for all but my second to last trip, when I finally went home before coming to England. I said I snapped out of this quickly, but only in comparison to the first.
I did the rebound thing with a twist, I left and went to Mexico, dragging this poor, scared creature along with me into a foreign land, language, and culture. He had no knowledge of what he was getting into. He was absolutely horrified by my sheer force of will, certainty that everything would be fine, and unfailing ability to make it all happen exactly how I said I would.But, I think what scared him the most was my complete confidence and absence of fear.
(IT WAS NAIVETY, allow me to loudly insert here on my past participle)
I was a do what I set out to do or die trying, kind of balls to the wall youngster. Way past the point of the accurate definition of youngster.
It seemed the older I got, the more I eased up. The less intense and more youthful I became. I was definitely "better" at the drama of playing me. Held the reigns less tightly and even took my heels out of the sides of the beast I was riding.
Then, when that series ended, I took a brief hiatus at home to reconnect with myself, and found the exact same restless heart beating in my chest, murmuring away to itself all the way. Even now, I can feel it when I lie down on my left. NOTHING bothers me worse these days than the feeling of my heart beating. I have to switch sides, even if I moved because I'd gone numb, I flip right back because I cannot BEAR feeling that irregular thump. The doctors call it an innocent murmur, but it feels pretty killer to me.
It's gotten worse since I've been in England. It went unnoticed in Mexico. Tha, thump, thump. Tha, thump, thump. Isn't the rhythm supposed to be a steady thump thump _ thump thump. We learn that
pattern in the womb. Vox Prima.
I am on holiday from my medication, I must admit to not having a great deal of the discomfort for which it is prescribed, but I am having a tonne of flu-like symptoms, stretching, watery eyes, sleeplessness, or long periods of sleep. bone marrow aching sort of bullshit. I do this to keep tolerance and dependency at a minimum, but, it seems, this time, I have over-extended my toxicity. Can't quit yawning. This is mild compared to the real deal detox, which is precisely why I suffer these holidays from meds. It keeps the final detox from knocking you flat on your face for three months, and withering a tall, big boned chick into what appears to be an Auschwitz survivor.
I remember looking at myself in the shower at 5'10", 127 lbs, and thinking, every anorexic ballerina at art school would be SO jealous of me. I looked so sick, my own Mother and ex-husband didn't recognize me when they came to get me from Mexico in those very, very early days down there.
I'm dead skinny at 155. A size 6 at 165, so this was just too low a weight for me. But, I literally couldn't eat a thing for so long. But that was after half a lifetime of chronic pain management. When the surgery was over, the thing about to kill me at 31 was out and the film of the surgery and the report on it were off to the American Journal of Medicine. (The surgeon did $6,000.00 of procedures on me and didn't ever send me the first bill. He got to publish on it. Board of Directors of the Fellows of American College of Surgeons, here he comes, sort of thing, I guess the money wasn't terribly important)
I was a bit of a legend at the hospital, because I'd been ill so much and when the mystery was finally solved, and it was such a massive gallbladder, in such horrific condition, everybody who had treated me, at the hospital where my second son and I were born in the same room,
it was one of these ripple effects of WOW! that shot through all my close friends at the hospital. Way to go on surviving that monster! After a year of my remaining displaced organs moving back to where they would have normally fitted, which feels SUPER weird, by the way, I dropped pain management because the pain was gone.
I knew just stopping it all cold from such heights was probably dangerous, but I meant to do it, as fast as it could humanly be done and I just gritted my teeth and quit going to the docs for the prescriptions. It just so happened we were living with the doctor that diagnosed me at the time I decided to descend into the abyss. He was a close friend and neighbour before I took up with his "closest" friend. We had been living in the big Victorian behind my old house of 14 years. He had bought it but was only there when he wasn't scheduled in New Orleans. We moved down to the French Quarter with him, but then I found there were few pain management clinics even open right in the aftermath of Katrina. It just seemed like the perfect time.
Only chaos precipitates genesis in my world.
Life spins out of the most unlikely circumstances.
He was robbed, the Jeep was broken into and the sat-nav stolen. Everybody pretty much traveled with a gun of some description. Ours were a .38, which I carried, and his was a shotgun, 18" and legal. I did a month of hell there in New Orleans, only taking the occasional shot of phenergan for the vomiting and to help me sleep.
I'd go to his bag, where I could have relieved my suffering quite readily, but I hate needles so badly, I wouldn't let any one do anything for me but the phenergan fire shot in the glute-side of the hip. It's one of the most painful intra-muscular injections given. We moved to the apartment in the swamps for part deux , and back to the Victorian for the third month, which essentially played out in a finally vertical rather than horizontal or bathroom bowing manner. This is when I started to arch static bolts reaching for the car door, after walking across wet grass with rubber soled shoes. Not the usual static generating conditions. I was coming ON and felt every hair on my body standing up, chills up and down my spine with all the sensations I was experiencing. I had been deaf, blind, and muted for so long and my system went on-line with a snap, crackle and lots of POP! It was such an amazing feeling. Like, having some sort of power over something huge and terrible. I continued to feel odd and off, but I was upright, mobile and crystal clean. The cleanest I'd been.
This is where that invincibility of taking off to Mexico like a dumbarse came from. I was Johnny Big Balls, look what I quit, cold turkey. I'm so f***in' rad!
PFFT!
I was a shell of a human. I had to fill my pockets with rocks to keep my doctor from freaking out when
I stepped on the scales. I knew I would get the weight back in due time, I had just gone through the equivalent of a very long, hard core virus.
I quit dilaudid, very high dose, for our opiate naive readers, that's pharmaceutical heroin, for all intents and purposes, about 16 2 mg xanax a day, 4 four times a day,
600 mg Morphine Sulphate instant release, and Effexor XR, 300 mg in a divided dose. I was afraid if I kept on like that, with the pain gone, I would end up dead.
See, when you're in the sort of pain that was causing me, for an extended period of time, i.e., I was born that way, came out screaming and still haven't shut up! The receptors that recreational users form that normally renders them dependent for life on something, makes the human brain crave opiates, those apparently didn't form in my case, and the drugs were going to mask all that pain. The surgeon actually upped my dosage when he saw the scan. He told me he'd seen big huge grown men drawn up in a fetal position, sobbing, and screaming with gallbladders and stones about 1/16th of the size of mine. He'd never seen the likes and said he was humbled by the fact that I could stand there, upright, and talk to him. He teared up and said, "I PROMISE you, I am going to make you feel normal and healthy for the first time in your life." My Mom cried. I was chuffed to f***, (Northwest for thrilled to bits)
I had validation.
I TOLD them I was hurting!!!!!
Psychosomatic my Aunt's Fanny! (and I don't mean that in American terminology, I am being very crass, so I won't translate, this was just the hugest thing in my life, the thorn in my side, the bane of my existence. The thing I had to get up and over daily for 31 years.
I was a bitch. But, not as much of one as I should have been. I just have a mad tolerance for pain because I never knew the difference.
It was a bit of an issue causer as well you can imagine.
Undiagnosed, general abdominal pain.
Can't find a thing wrong, looking in all the wrong places.
It was everything but what it turned out to be at one time or another through all that bullshit.
I seem to be therapy writing. Definitely cured the writer's block, this looks like a bleedin book!
Sorry.
So, anyway, touchy subject for me clearly, I have launched into diatribe and I was just going to write about that storm and the kind of metaphor for my life that it holds in my mind when I reflect. It didn't at the time, of course, because all was yet to be revealed.
But, I wouldn't have written anything but the general, non-specifics about something fairly mundane unless, you know the rest of the story.....
Christopher Hitchens!
There's even a video post script!
I googled "in the eye of the storm" to make sure I hadn't
plagiarized, or taken on loan, the title subconsciously and I found this Steampunk vid that the imagery fits my frame of mind so perfectly, I had to put it in. I've never heard this artist before, but the film was so spot on symbolically, even though the music leaves a lot to be desired for me, it's kinda cool, in it's own low key way.
