Taste of rot in my mouth. Spicy curry and beam&coke from a can. The local on the corner closes at 11 but the liquor shop where you can buy single serves is open until midnight. There\’s no open bottle law here. And the point is?
This is me on a deadline, despising the way my brain latches onto a task and refuses to let go. Like a grumpy dog that takes forever to get off its ass — comeonboy, comeon, grabthestick — then when I finally do, I\’m off and running and damned if I\’ll put it down, because if I drop it, or even if I stash it somewhere to come back to it in a few minutes, I completely forget where I put it. That starting point. How to get back to there. Like pulling teeth from someone with lockjaw. Too many similes, too many metaphors, not enough clear and concise trains of thought.
Tease and taunt me to pick up the stick again. Idohnwanna. Ihmahkesmahbrainhurt. I forget where I am, who I am, what time it is. I lose myself inside my head. I forget to pee, I just ignore it. I forget to eat and drink water — ignore those, too. And most of all — even worst of all, I ignore the pain. I ignore doctor\’s orders to not sit in one position for an hour. I sit in unergonomic positions. I slouch. I hunch. I squirrel. I end up in a ball. And I don\’t notice until I reach the end of whatever I was on, or until someone comes home, or until my mind reaches a breaking point. Then it comes on. The stiffness in the hands. The inability to move the neck or straighten the back. Screaming upon realizing the knee has once again locked into position, the kneecap out of its socket. Arms and knees and back and everything sore and cold and tingling. It only takes a couple of hours now. Two, three at most. Back at the height of the mess, it would be sometimes be 12 hours or more before I would fall off my chair. 36 hour stretches of tiny mouse strokes and no sleep. My brain thrived while my body died.
I try to not get sucked in. That is impossible. Doing any work which actually involves concentration — the fun work, the interesting work, the non-menial labor of answering generic \”this is how you set up your email account\” support e-mails\” — means my mind gets turned into the machine. Whatever it is that happens, happens. And apparently, it looks scary. I didn\’t know this until recently. All I knew was that I found it nigh near impossible to reach that state — and hence what I consider to get any real work done — when people are talking to me, or are around me. recently mentioned that she can only work with silence or white noise, and I think that describes it perfectly. I think that\’s normal. According to Dr Maude, though, whatever it is I do, it ain\’t normal, and it\’s fucking scary.
When I get sick in the day to day — walking around, lifting, driving, sitting on my ass, or whatever — I know I glaze over because I\’m concentrating on being in pain and not blubbering like a baby. \”Just make it to the end of this block, you can do it, just ten more steps, it\’s not that far, suck it up, come on, there we go now! That wasn\’t so bad! Okay! No need to hail a cab! Now just keep it for another three miles…\” I stop talking to people, and if they speak to me, if I notice, I get… well, annoyed isn\’t the word — rabid may be more appropriate. \”Don\’t bother me. Don\’t ask me how I\’m doing. How do you think I\’m doing? How\’s it look? Fuck off.\” I know how I physically look from modeling; toward the end of some of the day at some of my photoshoots, I I would be in so much pain and hiding it from the photographers — everything would just go \”inside.\” For some reason, a lot of photographers really dig those shots — \”oh, you look so intense!\” Oh, fuck off!
Apparently, I get the exact same glazed over, internalized look when I\’m lost in my work. My eyes gloss over, I lose all the color in my face, I start to sway back and forth, my hands start shaking more than usual, and my lazy eye goes all off into the corner. (Hearsay courtesy of one Dr. Maude.) Twice this past weekend I made the mistake of working on a client\’s site while Dr Maude was working on his grant. As he was absorbed, I managed to lose myself and concentrate… only to suddenly be pulled back out by a \”Are you okay?\” \”Um…. yeah. Why?\” \”Just checking.\” Several hours later… \”Cass… Cass… are you sick?\” \”No. Why?\” \”You look like you always do when you get sick.\” etc. Fuck.
I suppose this explains why when I was working at a computer in an office environment, no one in the office would talk to me. In fact, the more often my job involved actual thinking, the less likely I was to have anyone at the job actually be social with me. Apparently, I\’m one scary motherfucker when my brain gets sucked in. Which is why I have figured out there is only one place left for me in this world — academia. Where everyone is a scary motherfucker.
This wasn\’t supposed to end funny, but I\’m tired.
When I get back from the States I\’ve got one surgery scheduled, maybe two more, depending on how things go. A LEEP on my cervix, and still working on the hysterectomy. Just take it all out. Out! It doesn\’t work, it never has, take it out! And then there\’s the pesky problem of the back, which I do NOT want to have surgery on. Success rates are so low, and surgery patients tend to need multiple surgeries throughout their lives to keep repairing the work. However — funny thing is — my healthcare Stateside doesn\’t cover preventive or healing (chiropractic, physio, etc.), just rebuilding. And if you rebuild without structure… well, you just fall back down. My dad\’s mom is headed back into the hospital next month for something like her third back surgery. Damn right I\’m wary.
Once back on the other side, I\’m due for another round of psych testing. Seems my round in April 2001 is too old to qualify me for special services on school campuses in 2006. Gotta do it all again. Ink blots, ISMs, IQs, and the whole damn lot of $2000 worth of \”professional psychiatric testing.\” Apparently schools require a professional opinion about how I can\’t use numbers beyond an eighth grade level, how my vocabulary is well past a grad school education, how I reverse letters when I hand write, and how my fingers turn purple when I use a pen or pencil for more than a half an hour at a time. It takes a genius to make a breakthrough and a degree to state the obvious. Bureaucracy is bollocks. We\’re all gonna buy the farm some day, anyway. Unless Pearson is right, that is.
Current brain farts: Neuroethics. Hypergraphia. Biopiracy. Apoptosis. On not being able to sleep. On how much I hate that stuffy old dead white man named Sigmund Freud and why us younguns like his grandson, Lucien. That client\’s site I am two hours from finishing. Extreme Beauty. Wikiwiki. Drupal. All those things my brain wants to do but my body should be sleeping. Why is it, all day long, my brain drags while my body is alert? And at night, the reverse? And why am I feeling too lazy to drop some URIs in? An interesting new penis disease I just learned about, Peyronie\’s Disease, at least deserves a link.
Information overload imminent. Must learn to switch off more and enjoy life. But learning is what I enjoy! Reading! Learning! Mind fucks! Kill the body, save the mind — this body is useless and falling apart and is beyond saving. Aaaaaaahhhhh…
If you made it this far, you deserve a reward. Let me know if you did, because the rewards are genuine, and you will receive them via post in approx. 4-6 weeks depending on your global locale. (World mail slow for those of us who can\’t afford to go Poop.)
If anyone asks, I blame it all on the speed I got the doctor to prescribe me. Now I\’m off to take my depressants. I LOVE MODERN CHEMISTRY.
