telefission

First things first: I got a job offer. But it’s in sales and requires three days unpaid training and house calls when I have neither car nor will to live. Said will can only disintegrate further from selling cutlery to complacent housewives after braving various buses and BART trains in unbearable footwear.

Second. I am walking a fine line between “Hey hey, A-OK!” and “I just want to die. Why won’t you let me die?” I’m one misstep away from falling between the cracks of ok-ness and plummeting into an interminable misery of mammoth proportions. Yesterday, as I was waiting to cross a busy intersection in front of a BART station, I actually considered stepping off the curb and letting a car hit me. In about fifty seconds flat, I had gone through all the pros and cons of getting hit and possibly killed by a car. The cons just barely outweighed the pros. The winning con? “Far too dramatic. Not my style.” Hence my need for pills.

These are the black and white facts of my situation: I have this room in West Oakland until August 15th. With the approach of that date comes the onslaught of homelessness. I am unemployed. I am looking for jobs, but floundering, because I’m not even sure where I’m going to be in a month. I have savings, but savings never last very long once your income screeches to a halt. Plus, that’s my fucking car fund. I was supposed to buy a car with that money!

If you have a job, for the love of all that is shiny and new, do not quit under any circumstances. We are in a revolting state of recession, and the job market becomes more putrid by the day. This year alone, young as it is, the East Bay has lost 9,200 jobs. I read it in the BART news. Which makes me think I should take that sales job. Which just makes me want to die even harder.

I’m coaching myself, with pep talks along the lines of, “Suck it the fuck up, you pussy.” Today I finally almost cried while scrubbing the bathroom floor, but when I felt my face start to get hot and my eyes start to brim, I snapped myself out of it. More accurately, I slapped myself out of it. It’s not the impending homelessness or the broke-assness or any of that. It’s just that crushing loneliness that comes to macerate you when your life becomes anemic.

job-hunting is probably the most imprisoning act i’ve ever partaken in. i’m hoping for an interview, but what am i going to say, really? and how do i explain my resume? “i usually work until it’s not fun anymore. then i quit and sit around for a week to a month practicing for karaoke and writing in my journal before looking for employment in a completely unrelated field. i hope you have a casual dress code.”

the last time i was job-hunting, the interview i went on before giving in to the siren call of the food service industry was horrifying. my interviewer actually said, “you’re kind of a free spirit, aren’t you?” to which i rolled my eyes. i can actually see the line in some interview etiquette book, forgotten on some library shelf; dusty, faded and clothbound. “one mustn’t roll one’s eyes at one’s hopefully future employer. ever, you fuckwit.”

so, yes. i’ve begun to forage for work. i brooded, i repined for several days, not precisely holed up in my hovel, but pretty damn near it, and i was reading random excerpts from sylvia plath’s journals and realized, “this bitch is dead. and you’re alive. you’re alive. you’re alive!” and i stormed out of the house and walked around touching all the trees until some guy started beckoning me over to his car, at which point i realized that four in the morning is a bad time to be out fondling greenery, got lost on my way home, and fell up the stairs to my front door.

it was, all in all, an anticlimactic revelation. but there are colors everywhere, and faces full of expressions i can never understand, and life, and living, and shawn and edith visiting in august.

i’m still sad, but i’m trying really hard not to sink down into this whole damned mess. so either i’m descending into dementia, or things are going to be fine. and while i kind of do just want to have a satisfyingly potent breakdown, it’s really not my style.

roxy + my ass, originally uploaded by treesick.

life is bad right now. i’ve moved into a shithole permanently flavored with kitty litter and dog fur. the cats are gone, along with the previous inhabitant of my room, but the dogs are here. chilling on “my” bed. that’s roxy, and a chunk of my ass.

the dogs listen to me about half the time. the other half, i just ignore them and pretend that whatever they are doing is what i meant for them to do.

i spend very little time grooming, as being in the bathroom makes me ill. although i suppose that if there’s any prime place to be physically sick, it’s the bathroom. nevertheless, i prefer to avoid spewing chunks by any means necessary. if that means leaving the house with misguided hair and one eye trapped shut, then so be it.

i’m emotional right now. i don’t know if it’s because i’m on my period or because these past few weeks have been so supremely shit-filled that i’ve become overloaded with stress and anxiety. i need pills, i need pills. PILLS. PILLLLSSS.

i am officially unfit to blog. i give up on this post.

i am tired of being a waitress. i’m tired of the way people speak to me when i have my apron on. i’m tired of having to smile and be cheerful to people who are completely inconsiderate and take liberties with no appreciation for those who work to accommodate them.

i had a group of fourteen christians come in today, and they had all the pretenses of politeness down pat. i’ve just deleted two paragraphs of shit they did that one shouldn’t do in a restaurant, because it’s pointless to detail them here. after they’d eaten, they wanted separate checks, so i was stuck at the register splitting their bill and counting out change as they came up one by one, telling me they wanted to pay. they all paid cash in small bills save for one, which is why i cannot understand why they couldn’t just combine their money and pay the bill in one go. i’m going to file this one under “idiot customers who needlessly create more work for everyone.”

this was the kicker: the one who did charge his meal tipped fifty cents and wrote on the credit card slip, “God Bless!”

are you fucking kidding me with that tripe? do you honestly think that just because you wrote that, some higher power is going to look upon me favorably? or that seeing something like that would make me want to drop to my knees in prayer or rush to the nearest church with confessions on my lips and hair afire for holy water? give me a goddamn break. i have known you christians. i grew up with you christians, and every christian i knew was hypocritical to the core. with standards as high as the bible sets, it’s impossible not to be.

“God Bless!” just means “i’m a hypocrite!” to me. do you know what a blessing is? a blessing is a 15% tip to say, “i’m sorry we were all such assholes. thank you for serving us today.”

wait. my bad. that’s not a blessing; that’s just decency.

i keep trying to watch this movie i haven’t been following the plot at all i just keep thinking, thinking, sticking things in my mouth: pens, fingers, the chappedness of my lips. piddling, fiddling, shabby, unwise. those are the thoughts i think.

the nights are all too quiet and the days are much too soft. i’ve jumped from between that rock and hard place and landed in a marsh. no matter how high i lift my feet, i can’t seem to advance at all. my arms, growing darker and more restless by the day, flail and flail and fail.

if i strain my ears a little, i can hear the morning come. the feet in sedans pressing onward, ho, and the gravel-packed wheels spinning this way, then that way, then three ways at once. i track all directions with lines in my head; some mornings it’s all i can hear. cars, dragging moans, coughing shit into air. zipping or dripping, it’s all the same. all abortive sighs in my ear.

wheels of all shapes, i beseech thee: barrow me away.

“your eyes look smaller and your face is pale.” that’s what the sun does to me, i says. even at night i can hear it shriek, “i’ll be back for more of you tomorrow!”

tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow again. inertia strips them all from in front of my face, leaving yesterdays to be lived over again with less flesh to cushion my falls. and still i bury my face in my arms, smothering myself asleep. sleep for tomorrow, sleep to divert, sleep to exhaust your dreams so they won’t haunt all the hours you think. but i haven’t had sizable sleeps in days. harrow me away.

after getting caught hanging dark sheets over windows, i was caught scribbling papers black. when questioned at length about my mental health, i said only that this was my response to writer’s block. and i am, at the moment. blocked. (i don’t understand why bad things keep happening to me when i’m only mildly vile. i don’t deserve all of this atrocious weather and horrifying blanks of mind. which, if there’s poetry present in my life, correlate satisfyingly well. the sun has obviously melted my brain; i can actually feel the faux hydration trickling down behind my ears. mocking me. mocking us all. as we slip away into histrionics, never to employ logic again.)

i babysat unexpectedly today, which was a pleasant enough surprise. we made biscuits and gravy for breakfast, sullying the recipe with english muffins, soy milk and imitation meat. then bibimbap for lunch. in between, we made popsicles, played piano and colored. interesting compositions, all. i asked if they wanted to go to the park, but they looked at me in twin portraits of alarm. my kinds of kids, those.

i’m finding it hard to smile these days, but i’m drunk most nights and spend mornings in books to steer my mind out of my life. i got another library card, so you can imagine the damage i’ve been doing.

in between drunk and drowned, i broaden my political lexicon. i, for one, would have loved to see such vulgar impudence in a first minister. the quality of the article is flagrantly low, but i guess that’s not mine to decide. suddenly this reminds me that it’s the fourth, the popping torch of july.

happy birthday, dad.

somehow i’m best at boggle when drunk. i discovered this while playing boggle drunk. and also crippled. so perhaps it’s disability that unleashes my word wit. although that makes little sense. somewhere in the middle of this, i got really, really high.

i’m thinking of going back on medication. andrew, whose bride-to-be called me a whore, asked, “is it really that bad?” it’s bad, i thought. it’s getting worse. i’m crazier than i’ve been in a while.

well, shit if i hadn’t been aching to dance. shit if i didn’t let loose.

and fuckshitdamn if i didn’t done had myself a jolly fucking damn good time.

to summarize my life atm (and i don’t mean ass-to-mouth), any wrinkles that show within ten years from now, i’ll be blaming on this week. and it’s only fucking wednesday. it’s only shitsucking wednesday, fools. and where’s my phone godDAMMIT.

i should really stop losing that shit.

life is a shitstorm of petty disappointments, which leave in their wakes a disillusionment that spans generations long. with piddling highs, and lengthened lows, and bruises to be found mornings after.

piss piss i cut myself some hot pants tonight. i am not really sure why. but they’re awfully cute; i checked myself out for like five minutes* in the mirror when i tried them on.

*this does not seem like very long, but i avoid mirrors like they’re the fascisti.

my hair is so goddamn long.

my cousin failed high school chemistry. his father–my uncle–asked me what he should do. i drew my knees to my chest, flat on my back on my bed, and extended them again, spread into floating v formation. when my stomach started to burn, i turned my head away from the ceiling and said, “it’s not a big deal. what’s he like these days?”

“he wants a car.”

“that’s all?”

“that’s all he wants.”

i got fingerprints on my ex’s car a lot, before he was my ex. once, he got mad and yelled at me, so i licked my hand and smeared it on his windshield. that was all i could think of when he finally said, “this isn’t going anywhere good.”

“i guess that’s all i need to hear,” i said. craning my neck for the ceiling. but all i could see was his face through the glass, his blurry frown through my finger gaps. i was afraid, at the time, to lift my hand away. to see his reaction to the rape of his car. to see someone smudging my prints from his skin, with flesh slicked in warm saliva.

“it’s ok,” i said, “it’s not a big deal. anymore.” when he apologized long months later. my voice was strained from my upturned face, my eyes and mouth dry from staying open.

“that’s all i wanted to say,” he said.

“that’s all?” i asked.

“that’s it.”

so i stared up at the white ceiling.