January 23

Made it through another year without my mother.

Aside from some truly weird and morbid dreams about her corpse showing up in various disturbing places (and sometimes in various disturbing pieces), the second year wasn't so bad. Definitely better than the first one was, by a longshot. That first year kinda sucked monkey dicks, and I'd heard that the second could be even worse. But nah, it's just getting better.

I am very glad to be getting some peace. Her death coming after a decades-long slow motion suicide plunge might have made things easier--I was already braced for it when it came. The years of dreading the inevitable end were much worse than the real thing. At least now I'm free of the waiting, and she's free of the everything else that sucked for her.

Last night I had another tower nightmare. I have these a lot, and I hate them. Usually they involve having to go to the top of a very high building, against my better judgment, then trying to get back down again when the building begins to sway and distort and fall over. Ever since I started having them, the leaning tower of Pisa gives me cold chills.

Sometimes in these dreams, I'm clinging to rickety fire stairs outside the building. Other times I'm inside, lost on the 78th floor. Occasionally I try to take an elevator only to plunge to the bottom with that horrible sinking sensation in my belly, or I get hauled back to the top and have to get out and start all over again. Last night's was one of the latter.

If you're really into dream interpretation from a Freudian standpoint, I gues you could blame this theme on a repressed fear of teh cock, but it's not. I'm just very afraid of tall buildings. Five stories or more makes me very uncomfortable, but I can handle it. 10 or more means I will try not to go inside. Fifty or more stories and I need to drink alcohol to stop the panic, even if my room's only on the 25th. Conventions in big cities always fuck me up because of this. You just know that sucker is going to come down right on top of you. If you're, you know, me.

Meanwhile in real life, functionality is restored to my brain. Life goes well. I'm currently tired as fuck from the day's errands, but it's a good tired. An honest tired, earned with productivity and sweat. I'll spend tomorrow working on the comic so I can update on or before Monday.

Ah, Monday. A nice arbitrary day for a nice arbitrary change of schedule. You may have noticed that Saturdays appear to be cursed lately. Oh wait, that's just me sucking. Ho ho.

My Hamster Wheel Heart

I'm feeling lonely and abandoned, and Mom is getting more dead with every passing day. (There's your spoiler. Now you don't have to read the rest of this entry! You can just skip on down to the final paragraph).

Sometimes I feel like it's gonna crush me if I don't keep moving. I don't have anyone I can talk to, so I keep finding new things to distract myself with, and that keeps on being just barely enough.

I wish I knew how real people dealt with major life crises. I'm not doing so hot, from a purely practical standpoint. Emotionally I'm recovering, but there's this whole 'real world' where things seem like they're fucked beyond my ability to fix them.

I've got an unpaid YMCA bill because I forgot my membership when Mom got sick. Do I call and tell them what happened? No. I don't want to be on the phone anymore. The phone is a place where terrible things happen far away and can't be taken back, and I don't want to tell a stranger what happened to my mother and hear the words coming out like some kind of cheap excuse for why I didn't pay my dues. So the bill's gone to collections and my credit's fucked even more.

I've still got that bank snafu that's been going for months. I'm on Mom's Wells Fargo account, and they might have ME on the hook for her credit payments now, but do I call them and tell them she's dead? No. I can't seem to handle even that.

The emails been building up for months. My brother is leaving angry messages on my phone about the bank thing and whatever else is going wrong. Do I answer them or call him back? No. I don't want to know what else has fallen apart.

It sounds like such a bloodless and lazy way to dodge responsibility, but that's only because I can't put into words the unbelievable enormity of the helplesness and inertia and that's been with me for months. I've been overwhelmed by emotional extremes from every direction and now all I want is to be left alone. I don't know why I can't fix this. I'm good at doing so many things, why can't I handle a few simple phone calls?

This winter, not two months after Mom died, my best friend since the age of 12 dumped me. These were two kinds of loss I'd never had to deal with before, and suddenly they both were happening at once. It was like being smashed between two Mack trucks headed in opposite directions at high speed.

To put it mildly, the timing sucked. Rain got me through the whining and hysteria. Mostly we watched movies and drank bizarre alcohol. And then, having ignored the real world for months at a time, I found that I was starting to feel a little bit less like dying.

And then Rain moved out.

She'd been intending to go for months and months, but needed to save up the money. I had made my peace with her leaving way back in the fall, before everything turned to shit. But now she was packing up her stuff in the aftermath of two other people leaving me, and bad things always happen in threes.

I was also chock full of self-pity because I felt like I wasn't outgoing or social or interesting enough to make her choose me instead of the many awesome and hip friends who were waiting for her in Asheville. But when she moved and didn't die or stop talking to me, I calmed down again. Sort of.

Fast forward to late June: I'm still standing in the wreckage of all the things that fell apart in my absence. Want to know my shameful secret? I barely care about what a mess I've made. It's like it's all happening to someone else. Maybe this is my brain's way of coping with everything--depersonalize and screw the consequences. I dunno. I'm not a shrink.

I do know that if it's not immediately connected to getting me from one day to the next, I don't want to hear about it. I'm obsessing over soft and comfortable clothing. I'm taking long leisurely walks by the lakeside. I'm hanging out on the internet reading stupid drama that people actually think is important. I'm reading books again, something I haven't found time for in years.

I'm getting by. I'm even happy, most of the time. But then I'll see some kid losing his mom in a comic book or remember something Mom said and start to cry, and that kind of fucks it all up for a while.

But it's not so bad, as isolated depression goes. At least I never have to look forward to losing my Mom again, wondering if the next phone call will be the one letting me know she's died in her sleep. No more standing over her at night, listening to her breathing, afraid that she might stop if I leave the room.

No more wondering just how much misery I can stand--I finally know. Anything you throw at me. I won't land on my feet, and a judge surely wouldn't award me points for style, but I fucking dare you to try and stop me getting up again.

Here endeth the ruminations. I hope you guys liked reading it as much as I enjoyed wading through all that pent-up negativity yet again! It was a blast! :)



On the happy side, I spent 4 hours clambering around the Lilydale hillside and riverbank. I took pictures, collected dead dragonflies, ate homemade chicken onigiri, and stuffed various marine fossils into my pack. Turns out, I do all right on my own.

Hey, it's a start.