The View From The Couch

A few thoughts and anecdotes from my struggle for normalcy:

My therapist xeroxed a list of things to do when I was feeling irritable. Among the list of things she couldn’t come up with herself (watch a favorite show, go for a walk) was the suggestion:

“Fly a kite.”

…...

It might as well have said, “Fly a fucking kite” while shrugging and taking a drag off a cigarette.

Fuck you, xeroxed suggestion sheet.

The psychiatrist asked how I was doing on my break without medication, and I told him that I feel like killing myself at least once a day. He shrugged.

While talking about cognitive disruption, the therapist stopped and looked at me the most sincerely she ever had.

“Don’t should yourself.”

Near-swearing in a professional environment helps me cope with therapy.

I still get mortality warnings in the mail for a drug I stopped taking months ago.

Place You Always Go But Have Never Been

There are times when you are having a dream you are at a place you know, but your mind has generated a scene that is nothing at all like that place is in waking life. But somehow, your brain still convinces you that you are in that place, even if it never had a bathroom in the garage. You just accept it as it develops in your dream.  Twice in the same week, I had a very similar feeling in my waking life about places I have gone through a thousand times.

 I took an Uber to an event, and we drove along a section of town that I drive all the time but don't have the freedom to actually look around. It's like when you're having a dream about a place, but it isn't that place, but your brain is convincing you it's that place, except in this case, it really IS that place and it's horribly confusing but also kind of neat.  Not that it was a nice area or anything... Abandoned lots half-assedly paved with weeds poking through the empty foundations and such... And lots of BBQ joints crammed into building that were probably formerly dental offices. You might know the kind of place.

Then on a recent Monday, I was able to mosey into work a little later than usual. I merged onto a bit of interstate I go on at least twice a day, usually five days a week, sometimes more and sometimes less. It’s a segment that has been undergoing some manner of reconstruction every day I have drive in it in the past 2 3/4 years, so I have always had to be on my toes for out-of-towners who wouldn’t be anticipating the sudden shifting or disappearing of certain lanes. But that morning, I was able to look around a bit, as there wasn’t another car heading my way as far as the eye could see. For the first time in my entire life, I was able to notice the housing addition whose backyards ran almost right up to the highway. Some had fences, but some homes were just relying on faith and a slight downgrade to protect their living rooms from stray semis and drunk drivers. It struck me as very sad that some people have to buy homes like that, and that never in my life had I noticed them.

But then I guess I have to cut myself some slack since my car time isn't my time to observe extraneous details and feel feelings about them. It's my time for me to get from one place to another via controlled explosions, trying not to ram or be rammed by other motorists. And it doesn't help my powers of observation that I'm always blasting some music, something chaotic like "Is It Raining In Your Mouth" and mentally (or sometimes orally) screaming "FIVE SWEATY FINGERS ON MY DASHBOARD, FIVESWEATYFINGERSONMUHDASHBOARD, FIVE SWEATY FI-

FIVE- SWEAT- FING! GAH!!"

#FMLAIMD: Fuck My Life And Its Many Dicks

A few days ago, I had a bizarre run-in with a stranger. I was at a cheap big-box store I don’t usually go to because of how crowded and sad and dirty it is, and I was leaning on an empty shopping cart I had gotten from the front of the store where they keep about five thousand empty shopping carts. I was in an aisle full of large, heavy lamps because I intended to use my empty shopping cart to move a large, heavy lamp. My right buttock rested jauntily on the edge of the cart as I stood with my hip popped out, contemplating what heavy lamp I was going to pick up and put in my cart. It was probably a good thing that I pulled an additional couple of inches away from the cart to actually pick up one of those heavy lamps, because what happened next would have startled my buttock something terrible.

A fifty-something white man in a camouflage hunting coat stomped briskly over to my cart, slammed a boxed vacuum cleaner into it with an aggressive, rattling thud, scowled at me, and whipped the cart away from the skinny-teenager-looking girl who was standing next to it with a large lamp in her hands. His leathery wife gazed hilariously up at the ceiling, desperate to look like she hadn’t noticed anything as I squatted there with my lamp in my hands and cartoon question marks popping out of my head. He was long gone by the time my brain could come to terms with the fact that two grown human beings had just swept up to a smaller, younger, lamp-buying human and taken away the resource she had gathered for herself to move a lamp. A resource they could have walked one hundred paces to get while carrying a handy vac much more light and hollow than a large lamp.

I set the lamp down at the end of a tissue display near the store entrance and went to gather myself another empty cart. Even though all I wanted to do was go home and spoon the lamp I had endured such confusion to get, I still had to get groceries in this huge, overwhelming store I had not been in for months and which apparently had gone through so much reorganization that I found my spirit animal while looking for a can of spicy Pringles. Tired from a long day, abuse by strangers and the enlightenment of having just completed a spirit quest in a Walmart, I then got in the one line with a screwed up card-reader and the only cashier in the world lazy enough to not try any of her training and instead subject everyone to wait in line for a manager for fifteen unnecessary minutes. An older woman in line behind me was intrigued by my lamp and wanted to talk with me about it excitedly, and I did my best to be friendly and bubbly like I want to be perceived. Of course she had to ask how much my lamp was, and when I told her, she seemed to scoff and turned to whisper what I had just said to her family. I assumed by her whispering that she disapproved of me and my highfaluting lamp.

Anyway, after I got home and had time to chill out and put away my hard-won groceries, I texted about the Hunting Coat Cart Wrangler to one of my guy friends who is usually good for a chuckle after such incidents. When I told him about the Jackoff Bandit, his response was something along the lines of “These things only happen to you.” Many months back he used to jokingly call my run-ins with sexual harassers and idiot men “hot girl problems,” but apparently over time it became clear that it is a much more specific issue. An issue quite specific to me. He said something like this again, only I think he abbreviated it even further to “only you”.  To which I said:

“fuck my life and its many dicks”

He responded:

“FMLAIMD”

I decided this acronym needed writing about, and was reminded again today when I was contacted by a woman who had recently broken up with an ex of mine. She wanted to know if his harassment got violent, since I still occasionally get eerie calls and texts from him a couple of years after the fact. And again, I thought of the times he would call and how it made me feel very much like saying “FMLAIMD”.

As someone who tries to be an eternal optimist, I want to break down why I am endorsing this phrase.  If I may:

“Fuck my life.” Those are some strong fucking words, particularly since they start with “fuck,” that hardest of the hard swears. But in a world where tragedy makes me hear a mental recording of Louis CK saying, “Do I even want to be alive any more?” it feels like a comedic hyperbole, void of suicidal implications or true despair. It’s like repeatedly trying to do a simple task and failing, but punctuating the last failure with an arm-flapping gesture and an unwarranted hard swear. It’s no longer an issue, it’s now a slapstick bit.

“and its many dicks.” Okay, as a grammar stickler, it’s going to drive me crazy when this catches on and people will inevitably try to spell it as “it’s many dicks”. No. I T S with no apostrophe is possessive, and for better or for worse, my life owns those dicks in this phrase. My life is not dicks, it has dicks about it. There is much more to my life than dicks, quite luckily, but the dicks are certainly there. And while I have been trying really hard to eliminate gender-based swears from my vocabulary, “dick” is just too good a word for what it is. In this case, a jerk. A special brand of jerk that just screws everybody. It’s like the difference between “guys” and “men”; all guys are men, but not all men are guys. All dicks have penises, but not all penis-wielders are dicks. Dick is a crude slang word, not an organ on a sacred body. I have many wonderful men in my life, and they are not dicks. But if they want to call their penises dicks, such is their prerogative. 

So I’m inviting you to rally around FMLAIMD. May it remind us all not be dicks, so as not to bog each other down with endless dickery. Let us remember that dicks come in all shapes and sized, and many don’t even have dicks. Let us not discriminate and know that even we ourselves are often the dick, and that we can have much higher aspirations and be more to each other than just another of the many dicks Fing up one’s life.

Sorry, I just couldn’t handle publishing that much swearing. Here: puppy. I think that balanced some of that out.

Things I Learned Purging Photos

Today I received my new MacBook in the mail, so before I even THINK of syncing my devices together, I thought it prudent to go through purging all the photos I had collected on my iPad over the last couple of years. I knew it was going to be uncomfortable, but… man, I date a lot of guys and save a lot of stupid pictures. Apparently I can add “screen shots of unknown context” and “hot girls with really short hair” to my list of favorite hoarding items. Anyway, there are some general concepts that seemed recurring during my Embarrassing Photo Hunt, and some of them felt weirdly poignant. Here are some things I learned while cleaning out my photo albums….

Do Not Flip the Bird to the Camera. It might turn out a great photo, and then you will find yourself having to decide if sharing a great picture of yourself is worth looking like a total A-hole.

Take Time to Enjoy Being Single. When you inevitably delete every photo with an ex in it, you might find entire events and even YEARS of your life disappearing after the breakup.

Take Lots of Pictures of Pets. Nobody will thumb-up your glamour selfies and sappy Instagrams with above-mentioned exes, but they will certainly appreciate a dog in a chair. Also, you will greatly value these pictures much longer than all those exes and selfies you’re deleting in shame.

Screenshots Are a Great Placebo. “I will totally remember this by taking a picture of how it looks on a computer screen.” *three years later* “Why do I have a photo of the bottom right quadrant of a Skype conversation?” *delete* SO much brain-memory space saved!

Delete Haircut Inspiration after the Appointment. Seriously, you look like a serial killer stalking ginger women with rockin’ sidecuts.

The Best “Sexy” Photos are Ones Where You Don’t Know if They’re You or Not. At least you won’t be incriminated in this way if you ever run for office.

There Is Such a Thing as Too Much Filter. When editing a photo, it’s not a bad practice to save progressively altered versions and give it some time before going back and picking one to send out into cyberspace. Of course, this still means more photos to clean up later. This process just reinforces lessons in restraint.

No Filter Will Replace Eyeliner. The joke about black eyeliner being “hotness in stick form” comes from a very real place. You can bump up the contrast all you want, your little squirrel eyes will be just as disappeared.

Your Pictures Can Outlive a Phase. And You. Make sure the face you are plastering all over Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram is the face that you want to have looked up well after you can’t be looked up, and also is the best representation of that time you wore your hair that way for the Skrillex show.

Topless Young Christopher Walken Completes any Photo Collection.

I Believe In Jebus

“Flanders, how do you stay so happy—and don’t say Jesus!”

- Homer Simpson in "I Won't be Home for Christmas"

This last year has been a fragile one for me. All events have been objectively good, but whether inflicted by medication or buried emotional trauma, it has been a difficult one. There was a point at which some friends and I were discussing our faith, or for some of us, what was left of it.

"Is that supposed to be enough? Just that Jesus came back is really supposed to be sufficient to put up with life?" I realize how much some of us were sounding like ungrateful children. Perhaps we are.

Months later, and only a few days ago, I started crying uncontrollably during the singing of "Because He Lives". Of course, my tears dried up during that verse that comes out of nowhere gushing about babies, but came back for the chorus and the bit about the victory in dying.

But seriously, if dying is going to be so great, what is there to hold a Christian to the earth? There's a lot of doctrine about propagating the species and sharing the word of The Lord, but spending my life pregnant and then telling my offspring that the life I gave them is just awful until they die doesn't seem appealing to me.

Something I realized just today is that I have been cherishing the words of Dostoyevsky in my heart even more than the things I feel I was taught in church. Specifically:

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”

There are even more powerful declarations of hope and victory given by Jesus himself, but it is hard for me to access those sometimes. It's hard for me to remember the words of hope from a being who so many use as a weapon against those they choose to hate. To too many, it seems like Jesus came not to save the world, but to condemn it. Because my pastor has yet to promise hell to anybody in any of his sermons, I bet there are many who would condemn him to it. Why WOULD a sinner want to hear from another sinner how somebody else's god will destroy their very soul (unless, of course, they unconditionally abandon all life experience to share all the beliefs of the messenger in this scenario)?

Children ask their parents if a certain person is going to hell, and the parents feel authorized to answer "yes" or "no" (for family members it's "yes"; celebrities, "no"). I knew the story of the sisters who raped their drunk father in the Old Testament before I knew male and female had different genitals, or the word "genitals", or the concept that gender was tied to anything other than hair length. [Sidebar: that version of myself would be shocked at my hair now; would I think I had gotten a sex change?] It feels like more than anything, "The Church" wanted to push me out, to keep membership only to those with the greatest sense of entitlement.

I believe in the cleansing power of Jesus. Not because of anything "The Church" ever did for me, but because of something I feel inside myself. I came back to church not because of anything anybody in "The Church" did, but because that feeling inside me knew it was time. And I think that feeling is Jesus, or God, or whatever you choose to call it. I've made it this far, and it would be an insult to the misery I survived in my youth to give up any time after. So yes, that is sufficient.