The Internet is Killing Me, The Sunshine is Trying to Save Me, It's All Very Complicated

Today was 80 degrees. This was a big deal to some people, who lived in this farcical little post industrial city, which had been trying to function, despite the cold and the wind trying to blow it down every day for the last six months. I had forgotten what it was like to not be cold. I too had rejoiced at every little 45 degree break that winter sometimes throws at you, but the thing that hadn't changed was me sitting in my still running car, after driving home late at night, not wanting to leave because the car was warm. At one point, 3am in the morning, having refused to wear a coat that night because goddamn coats damn them to hell, I remember having the thought that maybe I would never be warm again, because I was no longer capable of being warm. My nerves had deadened, and I wouldn't recognize being hot, if it ever came again, which it wasn't going to. Desperation leading to acceptance leading to death.

But then the strawberries came back.

We walked around the park, and it was full of people. Not attractive people. Not rich or successful people who liked their jobs and had found the love of their lives, or any kind of affective shit like that. Just the people of Cleveland who couldn't stand it anymore, who didn't give a fuck about what they wore out of the house, just as long as they could actually get out of the house. They were fishing in a river that was too cold for fish, and breaking in the grills, and following their dogs and children around, who were all slightly dazed as if they had just broken out of the egg and were seeing the sun for the first time. Some of those kids and dogs were pretty young, so that may have actually been the case. New things.

So we walked around the river, and got around to the other side, away from the crowd. We did the first careful climb of the year down a muddy steep hill heel to heel, little slide here and little stumble there. As our reward, there were flowers and clover and sprouting things, which, fucking A, is pretty amazing. Is pretty miraculous every time it happens, even though it's happened 31 times for me now. Then we wandered back to the group, and ate food outside, and sat, dazed ourselves, in the heat and light. Urban lizards, and I got reacquainted with that sweat that comes not from exertion but just from above, like the sun's version of rain. I felt my skin burning, the old worn out cells that had done such a good job protecting me from the cold and ice, and now they are going to sizzle up like tiny little Phoenixes each and every one of them. That's their reward.

Later, as the sun drifted down, I drove home and started throwing things away, just everything I could come up with any reason to throw away at all. What I really want is an entirely empty place, where I can just sit in the middle of the floor and do nothing. I cleaned up the back porch, where I had forgotten a carpet I left out there over the winter, and it had rotted to pieces. It fell apart in my hands as I tried to stuff it into bags. There were large plastic looking brown folds of mushrooms all over it. I stuck both of the cats on the porch when I was done. Eddy was all about it, probably cause she's as sick as I am of living and breathing and sleeping in her hair. Nina was a little freaked out, which is fine with me cause I'm sure one of these days she's going to end up on the roof, once she figures it out. Stray cats always hate being put out of doors again, like I'm just going to change my mind about keeping them and never let them back in again, where the food is. Abandonment complexes. I haven't done it yet, even though the fucking garbage bag with the cat litter broke TWICE on the way to the curb, despite being triple bagged. I still have cat litter in the hallway outside my door, which I will vacuum tomorrow, and litter in the front yard by the sidewalk which I am honestly just going to leave there until it rains and hides it. Tonight it was more important to just get the shit out of my house. I put out 12 garbage bags of stuff, and still didn't go through my clothes.


Then I watched Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by myself, and spent way too much time on Twitter and Facebook in this odd head space. That's sort of like smoking an entire pack of cigarettes in one go, you come down and vow to give it up completely, never do it again. Especially when you're watching a movie like that, a movie that will remind you of every demon you have ever seen in the mirror. You will catalog them, and then feel even worse because you know when you inevitably go crazy, HI: Historical Inevitability, you will not be hot like Elizabeth Taylor, you will instead just be the wild haired wide hipped middle aged drunk woman, rejecting reality out of a misplaced sense of safety and security in love which will be your punishment. Ending up with a guy just like you, who tears people open and rips them to shreds to see how they work, and between the two of you there will be so much blood. I emailed Don "It wasn't my parents that soured me on marriage, it was this movie."

Watching that and going through all my stuff and things and stuff and junk, made me realize how much there is I don't get to say to people, because they are what? Dark thoughts? Mean thoughts? Crazy sounding? A friend asked me yesterday if I just spent all my time getting fucked up and posting on facebook, and I was like, "dude, I'm not usually fucked up." Dude, wait till you see me actually fucked up, like bleeding and maudlin and desperate. Then my words escape me in waves. But you can't be honest on the internet. You're not supposed to, because it's just like the outside world. No sweety, instead you are supposed to be writing that shit down into actual stories. Remember, that thing you love to do and also hate? That doesn't involve dissecting each thought for mass consumption, separated from it's context? You know, I don't really miss having a boyfriend most of the time, but there's that thing you can do with someone you fight with and fuck with, which is telling them everything. However sometimes, when you're me, you actually tell them everything, the way you see it and try to communicate the entirety of your world, and it's a massive failure. Usually the parts that apply to them. Oops. I wonder sometimes if I write just to keep throwing myself out there into the void, hoping someone else gets it one day. Not just the pictures and the pithy diary entries, but the enormity of it all. Like, this is me! I'm shouting! Somebody love me for realsies! Be somebody I can love too! Be dirty and weird and enormous! Martha's a romantic at heart. Wild broken Martha.

Mostly I'm just whispering things to myself and writing memos on my phone I can't use till later because someone will recognize themselves in it. I have some good memos though. You have all been stars lately. Please don't mistake my holes and rips as having anything to do with my love for you, oh general life and face of the universe whose name I probably forgot at least twice. That lives strong and quarantined in the seat of my soul.

It's dark now, the wind is picking up in the trees, and I want the rain to come. I want to go to sleep tonight with no covers on, and wake up cold with all of the windows open and the rain blowing in and the sunburn on my skin. And tomorrow (today) is going to be wonderful.

Floods

At any given second, someone is thinking about you. Whether its a friend, a family, someone walking by you in the store or driving past you in a car, or just processing the endless chain of paperwork or databases containing your name that exists everywhere in the world all at once. You are always on someone's mind. Almost as if what keeps us together as identities is this complex network of impressing ourselves on every neuron we come across, and if suddenly it were all to blink out, just snap shut like the clasp on a clutch, then you would be gone. I think sometimes we really do think that, that this new connectivity which has entered our history has changed us, chemically emotionally physically, and now there is a fear. There's always a fear. But now there's like, a new fear. Unrelated to sin or cornflakes or moths or gas masks. Something different, which is waiting, like a snake, to be named.




Another thing that bothers me is this inability to talk about bad emotions. Sure, we all bitch and moan about our work days, and sometimes something really bad happens, and we tell our online worlds "my dad died" or "I lost my house" or "there was a car accident." But that's it. It wouldn't do to have more than two posts in a row about it, and really, you can't mention it more than once, or suddenly you are just the one who's "really only ever talking about that, you know, thing."

I guess that's not confined to the internet. I guess that's a thing that happens in real life too, the inability to really be honest about the chain gang of thoughts beating around your skull with pick axes into the soft coal veins of your stability as a person. I wonder about the darkest places of my friends. Even the ones, no especially the ones I've known forever. I mean, really, who's seen me cry? I cried a lot last year, and I think maybe two people that knew me actually physically saw it. Besides my family, but that's the thing about family, you can cry at the drop of a hat with them.



But maybe the thing that stop us from going really deep into the worst parts online is that you know as soon as you say anything dark, obviously unhealthy, or even just particularly melancholy, you're going to get a barrage of comments about hanging in there, or it's not so bad or THIS IS A LEARNING EXPERIENCE. Yes, I know it's a learning experience. That's why I'm thinking about it. And the immediate assumption that this is AN EVENT. There is this THING that has happened that has you thinking this way, and you just need to get over this THING. An expectation that of course all you need is support and sympathy and you will be fine.

But nothing's wrong. There is no event. If you are thinking about something, anything, all the time, if you are constantly creating fake conversations in your head between scenarios that don't exist, and with every interaction you are imagining the equal and opposite reactions, all the unique ways a situation could go, then Jesus, of course you are going to think about the dark things too. It doesn't do to pretend you don't have dark things. Really dark things. If you tell me you don't, you are either a liar or traumatized or stupid.




I have an excess of imagination. It's not a good thing or a bad thing. No, actually, it's a little bit of a bad thing. It's just the way I function. I talk to myself. I have conversations with people over and over again that will never see daylight or candlelight or streetlight or dome light. It's an ever changing mess in my head of miscellaneous story arcs. It sucks. It's hard to accept things the way they are sometimes, when you have already scripted how they could be, and actually, properly edited, should be. When you can see how they might be. And then you can't even use most of the pretend conversations and put them down properly, because your friends will think you are weird and/or maybe misinterpreted things. If you and I have had a conversation, I have probably had that conversation again in my head at least three different ways, all leading to different outcomes and then different actions the next day and so on and so forth, entirely new universes that have been sprung into existence by two separate lines or two steps to the right. I don't necessarily want things to be different, the potentials just exist already, I didn't put them there. It happens automatically, and it starts the minute I'm alone. Have you ever called me late at night, just randomly about something, and noticed how spacey I sound? It's probably cause I've been talking to myself for the last hour.

I probably need to learn how to hide stories better. Disguise them. It's like photoshopping pictures though. The originals always look better than the fucked with ones.



What I talked to myself about yesterday, after driving around the southern western valleys looking at flooded creeks and melting hillsides, was about disappearing. Just somehow figuring out how to get everyone in the world to stop thinking about or reading or seeing me. But like, not gradually, all at once. In a really quick blink. I think it might be impossible. I don't think even if you tried, you could erase all evidence of me, I think I'm spread too thin in random places, some mark of me would remain. An insignificant mark, but a rub nonetheless. A trace of paperwork in some creditor's office. So that's got to be somewhat comforting to those people who need heaven, the thought that, at least among a certain social economic class, there is no more "gone." In this moment though, I stood right next to the river bank and it was actually scary, to be next to the roaring flood all mud colored and snow cold, and I thought it would be really cool to disappear completely and see what happened if I talked to no one ever again. In what particular and unique way would I go crazy? I hope we've all thought about this at some point, because it would be weird to be as old as you are and not pondered it. It's a secret of course, what horrible points of my nature would lead to my mental demise. But I've got at least two candidates. I just can't tell you, because what if someday someone kidnaps me, and they've read this, and then they know the exact ways to torture me? You never know, I might be worth kidnapping some day.

And I also thought about being alone, not because it's a problem but because it's a fact. I'm not supposed to talk about that, because it's unhealthy and not productive and not attractive or interesting. Really though, what's the point of saying anything about it until I've figured out the new angle? It's not inherently boring, to read about loneliness, dozens of very good writers have have tackled it quite well. But that was the trick see. Everyone wants to talk about how lonely they are, but only those who have something new to say about it, or some new way to frame it, succeed in getting people to listen.

No really

What are you doing? Unless you are fucking, you're wasting your time. And you shouldn't be on the computer. Also, maybe you should be doing that outside too.

I have a lot of these pictures. This could go on for days.