A Note From the Management

After an online friend lamented the lack of boob shots that she felt my "18 and Over" warning promised, I thought I'd better explain.

Although this blog and the links provided are appropriate (and necessary) for some younger viewers/readers, I wanted to convey that some of the situations/events narrated within deal graphically with "R"-rated matter- sex, drugs, death, serious mental illness, and- occasionally- even POLITICS. (By their very nature most of my posts touch on something-or-other political, but it's the "Dear Obama"-type crap that merits a warning).

Speaking frankly, as I am often too apt to do, age is not a defining characteristic of my target readership. There are people in their 60's who may never have the stomach for my subject matter. Some of us never quite grow comfortable enough to chat casually about sex, there is certainly a large contingent of those lacking any sense of humor about mental illness, and there are more unfortunate souls walking the earth who cannot forgive themselves for their past transgressions, nor can they forgive their transgressors.

Those whose view of the sanctuary is terminally obstructed by visions of sin will have to seek truth elsewhere.

For the remainder, I invite you to debate/ suggest/ just check in and PAY ATTN TO ME as we all work towards becoming our own best selves. And stumble. And push on.

Le Krappste

God, I feel truly and completely decrepit. I've got a Ragin' Cajun UTI which, as the night has crept in, seems to be slithering its way up to take up full squatters' rights in my bladder and kidneys. I've felt nauseous all day, which somehow has failed to be relieved by any amount or matter of food I stuffed down my gullet (and kept!). And to top it all off I've got a lovely lingering headache which reemerges from the analgesic fog of APAP and/or ibuprophen every few hours.

It's really quite lovely.

I also have my longstanding tinea versicolor now possibly enhanced by a vaginal yeast infection.

And I'm supposed to be up and out of here to visit my little brother for the first time in a couple of months in just 4 hours? I really miss him. Maybe I can get authorization from my mother to go and take him out myself one weekend, instead.

Oh, yeah- I turned another year older yesterday, and I am really starting to show it.

The Moss is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Stump

Tomorrow I have an appointment with the shrink who's covering my new shrink at the formerly-off-limits OP Psychiatry Department of the "better" medical center in town. I like this guy- he treated me when I was on the psych ward (local) last week. He confirmed/ reaffirmed my diagnosis as M.D.D., discontinued my "mood stabilizers", and started me on an ass-kicking new anti-depressant. It seems to be working- almost too well. I was bordering on hypomanic this weekend. But I think I just need to adapt to it. Generally my initial response to anti-Ds (that go on to actually be effective) is a couple weeks of definitive activation syndrome.

I seriously need some Ativan. I promised myself that I would do my best to adhere to Doctors' Orders with this new opportunity. The doctors and other staff of this medical center actually have some experience with Eating Disorders, which has apparently eluded the shrinks at the county mental health center despite their many years of practice and (presumably) hundreds- no, make that thousands, of patients treated.

Dr. Covering New Guy offered to get me in to see a therapist who does EDs. I conceded. Most of my experience in therapy has been regressive and clumsy at best, downright traumatizing at the other end of the spectrum. Perhaps every 12th one was moderately helpful. It's hard to treat an eating disorder on the back of the Federal Poverty and Disability Insurance. It's simply not covered. So I definitely owe myself a trial with an actual referred therapist. It probably won't kill me.

It might even make me stronger. My side of the tree stump still looks greener, despite what I expected before going around it.

Something I meant to "publish" in January

Dead Tour:
April 12 Greensboro NC Greensboro Coliseum
April 14 Washington DC Verizon Center
April 15 Charlottesville VA John Paul Jones Arena
April 17 Albany NY Times Union Center
April 18 Worcester MA DCU Center
April 19 Worcester MA DCU Center
April 21 Buffalo NY HSBC Arena
April 22 Wilkes-Barre PA Wachovia Arena @
Casey Plaza
April 24 Uniondale NY Nassau Coliseum
April 25 New York NY Madison Square Garden
April 26 Hartford CT XL Center
April 28 E. Rutherford NJ IZOD Center
April 29 E. Rutherford NJ IZOD Center
May 1 Philadelphia PA Wachovia Spectrum
May 2 Philadelphia PA Wachovia Spectrum
May 5 Chicago IL All State Arena
May 7 Denver CO Pepsi Center
May 9 Los Angeles CA The Forum
May 10 Mountain View CA Shoreline Amphitheater

Phish Tour:
6.04.09 Nikon at Jones Beach Theater, Wantagh, NY
6.05.09 Nikon at Jones Beach Theater, Wantagh, NY
6.06.09 Comcast Center, Mansfield, MA
6.07.09 Susquehanna Bank Center, Camden, NJ
6.09.09 Asheville Civic Center, Asheville, NC
6.16.09 Fox Theatre, St. Louis, MO
6.18.09 Post Gazette Pavilion, Burgettstown, PA
6.19.09 Verizon Wireless Music Center, Noblesville, IN
6.20.09 Alpine Valley Music Theater, East Troy, WI
6.21.09 Alpine Valley Music Theater, East Troy, WI
Fuck this. I did a really short "Phish tour", from FW or Austin (whichever is wester) to NOLA primarily for company on the drive home to FL in 95. And yeah, I vended. But I didn't go around asking for free tickets, I honestly couldn't (still can't) name a single song of there's. Here is the sum total of my knowledge of the band Phish:Trey Anastasio

So maybe I'll find a renfest to crash for a month orhmmmmmm maybe I could go visit a friend who lives in California but of course I couldn't be so forward as to straight out and say it. So she'll clearly have to learn of my plans through this blog.

July- Kick back in Wyoming with several thousand of my closest pals see how long we can survive both a) living on dried pulses, and b) the comingling of general Eau de 2 week Ripe Hippie with the natural conclusion of massive bean ingestion by thousands of humans.

Magically liquidize all my books and other bulky, pseudo-valuable crap in a single flash of brilliance, so that I don't manage to while away the money that I've saved/earned the previous few months by not paying and selling Handmade Fairtrade 100% Bolivian Sticky Dank Nothing on a Stick.

Renew my passport.
Move back to Moscow and teach Yoga and English.

Maybe I should leave a space for yoga lessons in there somwhere? Maybe I can move in with some nice asexual diggers who will tolerate my lack of money and the red x lit up on my vagina as long as I fed them well. I have found historically (from a youth spent as "her ugly friend")that that ability to hold your cool/liquor/ "non-liquor"/ tears, etc. while at once serving homemade lasagna from a casserole nestled between 15 y. o. hips and DD breads while exclaming that you're "so glad you finally got to make this- you've been on the rag all week and craving it" generally leaves them too dumbfounded to do anything but pass you the bong.

Then again, who knows- maybe I'll want to have sex with a 67 y.o. geezer perpetually adorned in a loincloth on the packed-earth floor of his gedesic home. Such things are prone to happen when I quit my frigidity happy/sleepy/crazy/nervy/spazzy pills.


Good god I've got so much beading and macrame and patchwork to be done.

Poll!

Please participate. I don't think I can make leaving feedback any easier than clicking a radio button. (Feel free to complicate it yourself, though, by clearing your cache to vote multiple times.)

Please Don't Donate for Christmas

Everybody wants to volunteer at a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving or Christmas. These are the two times a year when everyone feels generous (perhaps to their own detriment) and larger-than-average donations of food, clothing, money, and household items come rolling in. *However*, it's important to note that U.S Thanksgiving and Christmas span scarcely one month each year. Poverty spans the entire twelve months.

Please don't get me wrong, we appreciate everything you give. (Okay, TBH I don't appreciate the ground turkey, the ubiquitous beef stew, and the 7,000 extra jars of peanut butter I've amassed. Or the canned beets)

But do you want to know on which days it's *really* cool to get some unexpected treat amongst the government commodities?

National Nothing Day (1/16)
Tuesday, the 14th.
Groundhog Day (2/2/)
Mardi Gras
International Women's Day (3/8)
Spring Equinox.
Gay Pride Day (6/29- additively, Nat'l Coming Out Day 10/11)
Bastilles Day (7/14)
Rat Catchers' Day (7/22)
Roseanne's Birthday (8/10)
Hobbit Day (9/22)
Rosh Hashanah
(the dubiously named Canadian) Persons Day (10/14)
Friday the 13th,
Saturdays in any month the letters "R" or "U"

Would-be to-do list

Sweep bathroom and kitchen at old apt, with use of force when necessary. (I pancreas a well-made scrubbrush. Pick up rubbish from carpeted areas by hands, catch the detritus with the bissell. Mop kitchen & bathroom floors. Scrub entirety of bathroom, floor, walls, commmode, underneath those places most people are lucky enough never to even acknowledge, let alone repeatedly apply caustic chemicals and liberal elbow grease to tamp down the level of nasty stench.

So I'll hit all the "bulimic arterial spatter" points as well, out of courtesy. You know what I'm talking about- those sprays that inadvertantly wind up 8 feet up on the wall behind you. And who hasn't experienced a rousing game of "what's that stuff stuck to the ceiling, and how on Earth did it get there?"

I need to absolutely sterilize this new place, though. I grow accustomed to the rank odor of cat piss after spending an hour or so back home, but the stench is magnified a gugelplex entering the bathroom.

I'm also meant to change my address with the post office, SSA, HFS, and- oh! unpack my own shit. God forbid. And I've decided, on my second night here, that my top household decoration priority will be drapes. Stringing up networks of scarves from Russia and the Far and Middle East has a certain kitschy charm, but it doesn't make it nighttime indoors whenever I need it to be. Further, the uneven nature of using random cloths (even if some are quite large) as window coverings is that they never*quite* fit, leaving totally unjest individual rays to hit exactly one third of the face.

More importantly, I think, is that such curtains leave such a wide opportunity for nosy sniveling snitching peepers. Mom's coming up this weekend, my freedom depending, and I would love toenable her shopping complex. (It's generally quite tempered by my stereotypical late-20th century American Jew genes.) If I had anything to contribute, I could almost say that we balance each other out. In actuality, we haven;t down much "recreational shopping" (yes, drs. do this) since I lost my TAship in 2003. And I guess I'm not as much fun to shop for, when my response to every item proferrred is "and what exactly does one do with that?"
I don't need five new pairs of shoes at a time

I will write more on how much I love my new neighbors later, but for the time being I think I'd better do my TaeBoe before another crisis comes up.

We Interrupt this Miserable Life To Bring You Barely 21

In the event that you had forgotten, this is what the weekend used be for.

Beer and bongs and board games near xmas break 96 from UF . I didn't really need to be on acid. But not everyone does coke, right? Only so many people can possibly work in the restaurant business. . .

Right, um. As you were.

meme from LJ Dear Santa

the Great Pumpkin, amazon Abraham, Santa Claus Concrete intangibles: A sign that MY ENORMOUS WHITE FLAG HAS BEEN SPOTTED BY the only omniscient Jewish Carpenter I believe in. An evening/possibly an entire day(?) out with family parameters not limited by an eating disorder. 4 nights of sleep; 4 days of relative emotional/physical stability; and the complimentary self-care & "other tasks" maintenance. Permanent- preferably total and immediate- acquisition of the skills I need to make this 4-day show into a voluntary life, one with actual purpose. I want a DBT skills tool kit neurochip in my stocking. An endless stash of sugarfree, nutritionless popsicles, fudgesicles, and low-sodium V-8 would be nice, but I'd settle for a stocked freezer at my mother's house, followed by a mysterious string of half-prices sales in the supermarkets on my circuit. And to keep my 2nd lower right incisor, which I can tell is trying to erode away. Cliffnotes for the ADD'ed or those who just wish they were: I want my sister back, and I would like to act like a minimally normal human being during my holiday visit to my mother. I have would like, to relearn tolive. Not like a "normal person", but like pretty much anyone, briefly, who has no issues with ADLs. For better or worse, what I wish most is actually engaged in the world-with sustaining reasons to live. The unfortunate thing is that I have to do all this "internal tinkering" nonsense until I can (I'm guessing) perform acts of self-stewardship as automatically as is deemed necessary to stay safe and healthy. I wish that it were evident to those who don't struggle; yes, entropy is easy, but digging out is inconceivable. The stench alone from the justification of week after week (it's too cold to get in the shower/ I don't have any clean clothes/underwear/socks//My linens are dirty and I haven't any to replace them- what's the point of putting a freshly washed head amongst 6 months of grime//I *miht* work out later) The latter was the true start, but I don't run anymore. There's no excuse not to shower. On the road/in the woods/ in the summertime in Moscow- I made due. Before the disintigration I believe 10 days had been my record, and this was not disqualified for intermittent lakeswims. Mine is definitely a water sparing history, mind you. But even as a stinky hippie I was conscientious enough of my own comfort to invade the local health food store with the single bathroom each morning and attend a few choice hygiene issues as needed (while iserting cotact lenses, no less.), Unlike. . . say as a deeply neurotic depressive bulimic, who managed to avoid both toothbrushing and any notanle change of clohing for days on end. Until some items became so clearly covered in food (much longer tolerence) or vomit (could take a visit to the outside world without changing to note) that a change was merely easier than keeping track of towels or having napkins on hand. But even as the outer clothing would molt, the underclothes would remain because (see beginning of cycle).
Of course itching sets in, eventually. . . and while I fully believe the odor of a single note can be covered by generous doses of an essential oil (hippie bath- "patchouli") I don't think much can be don't for the multiple odors of vomit, sweat, and byproducts of decaying flesh from the kidneys as well as the mouth, with added notes of waste products possible if diuretics/ laxatives are used excessively , or even when strength and response time lags, as it does in any severely impaired person. Depending on the state of mind, the person may not bother changing the soiled pants even after such an an episode. Unless he was stirred to shower beforehand, little short of total saturation through two layers will call for major action.

So. A dose of essential oil to the pits upon realizing that one will be forced to exit one's enclave does not disguise this. Perhaps if the drops had been scattered about the body, on a daily basis, over the weeks, it would have sufficed. Maybe if one were in the habit of looking into a mirror, one would notice half digested food remnants stuck to one's chin. Or if one were in the habit of washing one's hair, surely the vomit would have been brushed away by the running water. But at this point 5 days ago seems "recent"- you don't see the dullness in your hair. What gets you in to the shower is the huge patches of (?) skin (?) that have begun the form and flake off all the areas of hair on your body. When it was merely constant peeling of your hands and toes, your own alternately rising and disappearing unwashed stew (sweat is scarcely noted, only actual tangible pieces of vomit male an impression and are usually, albeit belatedly, manually removed, you won't likely notice your own breath - unless you have a sinus infection- and perineal odors are compounded/contained by the clothing that contains the offensive materials, meaning you only get a whiff when you've got your pants off. But the itching will eventually become unbearable, the flaked off "skin" matting your hair and turning you from a merely lazy dirty person into a disgusting dirty person. Because going out in public with vomit on your arm in jeans you'd yet to launder after not quite making it in time for a wee is not disgusting. At any rate, it is hard, especially once you'e accumulated a certain quantity of laundry- you might have been on top of it from the beginning with adequate facilities (you've no money, there's no laundry in the building, you've no detergent). It's down to figuring out what's *least* odiforous, and balancing this with maximum stain-free area. Just for the public- the ones that need to be moderately impressed with your functionality i.e. doctors, therapists, case managers, parole officers, presumably. . . potential employers. These are the same people who merit Dedicated Shower Days. If you've been in the shower within the past week, honestly- you're doing prety good. Probably- that is, I don't know what endocrinological issues you might have. But if you're getting in there frequently enough to keep the pipes from from rusting_much_ you're probably not walking around looking like a psychopathic slob most of the time. It should be noted that the genpop apparently showers every single day, as a rule of thumb, and that most people apparently can't go more than 3 or 4 days without vidually appearing "unwashed." I believe it's the hair, more than anything. Some people actually claim they find they're hair unacceptable greasy after skipping just one day, whip seems a bit excessive. However, be aware- whether you can see it or not, if it's been more than a couple of days- or if you don't remember when the last one was, exactly- you need for appointments.

Opa, right now I want a shower. But first I want to go to the food pantry. Thanks St. Rod Blagojevich.

M*A*S*H

Suicide is selfish.
But is it really any more selfish than refusing to pick up the phone when you see my number? Deleting my e-mails? Pointedly ignoring my pleas for chaperon when I am stuck alone with my hopelessness? Well, yes, it probably is. . .however-

Suicide is painless.
"Whatif I'd answered the phone/ whatif I'd returned that note/ whatif I'd stuck by her and offered that support" may crawl in and out of your head for the rest of your life, but that will be your pain. Lift a pinky to show me that the pain my death will cause you is greater than the pain my life is causing me, and I might consider extending the deadline. Until then- call me selfish, self-involved, self-centered, centrifugal, whatever you like. But if you can't bother to pick up the fucking phone and call me, then (I'll repeat- you are out of the question)- suicide is painless.