signposts

for imaginary kamikase suitors:

• I don't leave home without a Very Good Reason (fire, plague, no coffee, a break in the clouds)
• I don't like pubs (not a VGR then - see previous initiality) unless really cute, historical or spectacularly scenic
• I do enjoy eating out – tho' I’ll be REALLY out between courses – smoking (BBQ's are already there in every sense - but note previous note as well)
• I have no intentions of stopping – NDR (no discussion required)
• Any objection to cats being present at all times will meet sound of front door shutting - your good self on t'other side (even if at your place and you have no cats)
  
• The same goes for Grommit, residing on or around my pillows (he stays)
















• Stockings a turn-on? Tough (I have cowgirl boots)
• Thongs? Maybe when half a stone or so melts away (patience is a virtue – learn it!) but the right to deny thong-existence is eternally retained
• My contrariness should be tolerated with humorous goodwill but never ever used as evidence against me (there’s plenty else)
• any snoring (on either part) and it won’t be ME sleeping outside
  
• I like sleeping alone – cats and I need sprawl space ... er ... indoors - unless it's warm and starry - everything changes then
  
• I don't sleep naked unless it’s too hot (what if there was a burglar??) (nothing to do with wobbly bits at all!)
• My 'puter is off bounds – do not touch! No matter how much you say you can fix it, I won't believe you!

seroxat

So it’s news again (Panorama, BBC1) this time with a focus on youngsters. I was prescribed it many moons ago. How a youngster could "get" what this stuff does to you, given the lack (as i see it) of spiritual awareness offered by life today, is beyond me. With-held for years, teenage suicides connected to this drug are beginning to emerge now. Youth matters, of course it does, but hey, The Company tried it on adults first with limited results. Unprofitable results. Relied on older, tireder folk behaving differently than exuberant youth too.

Side effects of this drug are awful, i assure you. If i'd had any energy left when i started it, i might have left the planet due to its final kicks in my already minimal desire to live. I could say more, but i guess i won’t. I mean, tonight’s programme was saying “what about our youngsters” and who could detract from that?

The after effects of this drug still touch me - though not in any way i could legally prove, even if i wished. I was blessed with advice that would be scorned legally – “stop taking that NOW!” The speaker knew me well and what i could deal with. He knew me better than me in fact, since i went on the stuff because i thought i couldn’t take any more. But he was right. I went cold turkey because i trusted him, because he truly held my life in his palm and i was ok with that.

This is NOT what i could, should or would recommend to any who read this who are beyond my personal knowledge. Which is all of you. I can’t hold your lives in the palm of my hand. Of course others might say whatever effects linger are attributable to my own reckless and sudden cessation of Seroxat. Or just to me. Ha! I know what i know inside. Doctors prescribe it in good faith, so i’m not having a go at them either.

I would also say, unless you truly, like REALLY, know “who” you are and what you can deal with (er .. the originating causes?) don’t ever go cold turkey on this kind of thing. But, in my opinion, Seroxat is evil - at any age.

perfect sense

I heard it in a film - can't recall which, but I think Tom Hanks' character said it ...

"You can't just study events to find meaning - it's in the relationship between them."

*image: rochester astronomy.org

bad apple

Bruised and surface-broken,
skin remembers hands;
how shadows move, spread,
cloud-like in damp flesh,
sink to discolour core.

Make it weak.

Word-spores rise, fill black eyes,
sour sense to dust - juices
rot in plundered ripeness.
Even in the dark I hear them
disrespecting silence.

Especially in the dark.

Some people leave a nasty taste.

dear bad apple ...

I'd like to make this opportunity to not-thank you for the most un-enriching experience of my traumatic life. At least the psycho-ex who fathered my son (then stole him) had the gall to threaten me with death if I didn't acquiesce. You, on the other hand, preferred drip-feed, invasive humiliation and sheer temper to control me. Tame and train. I saw you work this on others, how could I have been so self-aggrandised to think I might effect you?

What I don't get is why you, or anyone, would want to control me in the first place? It's not like I'm a hugely demanding extravert character who takes, takes and takes. I'm gentle – no threat to even the most ravaged and ravaging of self-obsessed egos. Or so I thought. You, BA, are another example of my ability to find Mr. How Wrong Can I Be This Time.

Such is joy that while 3 years with you felt like a century of bitter indoctrination, I don't know if it’s 1 or 2 years since I seized the moment. Orchestrated your dumping me as safely as I could, on the back of a row you instigated. Of course I also paved the way for you to have the last word and rip me off. I so hoped that you'd be honourable; condescendingly righteous would have been understandable. Or even honest enough to say you were hurt and confused. You weren’t any of those. The vile child in you screamed vengeance. I was right, then, to reclaim freedom on what seemed like your terms. I had at least learned that much of you, from you. So enjoy the car. I’ll be picking up the pieces for a long time, as you know and relish, but they’re MY pieces.

Like Christmas tree needles that lurk in carpets for ages, occasionally stabbing paws and toes, your presence in my life started off promising "different" but became predatorial, mind-twisting attack. Your intelligence and humour "did it" for me in the early days. A conventional relationship's never been appealing and the nature of ours meant it was anything but that. Once I knew your inner plan, though, I became complicit in what can only be described as a toxic take-over.

Your tantrums, whenever I didn't see things your way, were spectacular. Increasingly vindictive and heartbreakingly dark. I saw your cruel needles tumble to my floor, stepped on them anyway. Shame on me. In the light of today (and most of last night when I couldn't sleep, knowing that what I'd originally written here belittled me) I was close to the core of it in first words. Yours was indeed a ravaged and ravaging ego. I was wrong about my not being a threat. You fought to keep what was yours and I was a rebellious acquisition. In some perverse way perhaps that makes you truer to yourself than I. The cosmic error of thinking you would, could, should change makes me disgustingly the same as you. So here I am, taking responsibility - not for your actions, for mine. I apologise wholeheartedly to you. I should have got out before I got in. I should have known better.

Sincerely not yours,

Me.

Theme song for this life: Anastacia's "sick and tired" though I prefer to call it "my love is on the line"

Thought for the day found on Blue Witch's blog: "circumstances do not make the man, they reveal him" (James Allen)

*images: Luis Royo

frazzled fonts

I'm having a REALLY bad blog day! All I want to do is gently tweak the fonts so they're as I really, really want them. So they look tidy, readable, maybe even consistent (yep, I aim high these days) Easy? Ha! Wrong! Paragraph by paragraph they unformat into whatever I don't want. The beast is fighting back ...er, not sure if the beast is blogger or me at the moment so don't push me for clarification, right? Sincere and embarrassed apologies if this place is, for now, a variegated mess. I can't even say how long it will take, or how long blood can boil before it mutates into something REALLY ugly with tentacles and huge fangs ... *wail*

So far I have dropped my tobacco on the floor three times and my purse once. Excrutiating, endless picking up of small stuff, now covered in cat fur. The net is slow so I guess I've broken that as well. No doubt it's the cosmos smirking at me (again) and a message about upsetting apple-carts and horses? *sigh*

There is much *ahem* negotiation (hides machete) to be done between myself and the slavering HTML demon ... and I'm currently not even on speaking terms with the sidebar! I may have to send today to its room ... *double-humph - grrrrrr!

update - where would you be without my news, eh? - think I've forced the font to do my bidding. You should have seen the state of that HTML beast when I'd finished with it. Mind you, it looked to me to be in a state to start with. Well, THAT'S shown it anyhow! Blogger's been crashing a lot ... yep, must have been me! Now, about the sidebar ... and those tentacles ... actually, I find D'Argo really, really attractive ... does that make me ... strange?

see : through

I’ve heard people say "I love you" with as much passion as they have later said "I hate you" - we say best what we don't mean, in every way. We do a good job, though, of describing something to do with what we don't know about ourselves. I don't know where truth resides and I don't think insincerity, dishonesty or downright deceit is at the heart of what falls out of most mouths. When it comes to the crunch, I just don't think we're very responsible for much of what we say, because we don't really understand what we're feeling or doing. Most don't care to find out, either; don't hear that what isn't said may be closer to "it". Or fear the consequences. A quick glossy lip-service to the unknown and let's "move on" before we actually have to look more closely at this, shall we? It's not that I'm saying every thought should be uttered no matter how hurtful. Not at all. I'm wondering if we even know what we truly feel sometimes when we deploy voices. Especially raised ones. I'm wondering if we would even think half the stuff that crashes around our minds if we knew ourselves more proactively.

A dear friend of mine rejected "spirituality" some years ago, deeply hurt by those who chose to think they were other than they actually were, especially men. She was also stifled by the lack of intellectual challenge around; the constant repetition of deluded tyranny. Every which way she turned enlightened fascists, high on their own abusive dogma, blocked her way and wore her down.

The nearest thing to truth came in the form of skeptical dialogue with those who denied anything and everything that did not have physical presence and evidence. She re-evaluated her life on the rather nasty evidence around her feet and sent it packing. Along with her old self. She became a scientist and is now doing an OU degree.

When Carrie first declared she was putting all her soul-journey books in the bin, I stopped talking about spirit stuff too. We were too close to a serious fall-out that neither of us wanted. It was like an invisible hand rested on my shoulder, urged me to just "hold peace for now, lady". In a bizarre twist of cosmic knicker-elastic we're actually able to talk better now than before about heart-stuff. Fall-out was averted and the follow-on is awesome. By stepping through, beyond, the persuasive control unquestioned emotions wield, Carrie and I can talk more openly about them. I've learned from her brave stand against misery. The hugest revelation is that what I feared would be an abandonment of her soul/higher self - and a rift between us - has actually served as a beautiful mediator.

It’s almost as if Carrie's denial of unseen forces has opened her up to them more than her excellence in massage, counseling and aromatherapy ever achieved. She's free to explore now that she can prove the chemical path every emotion takes, locate exactly which neurons are firing in the brain and where. She seems connected now to what was exclusive Mystery before; maybe she was trapped by the notion of that. Now she isn’t. Maybe I've been able to join her on a new kind of bridge too, not that I have the stamina these days - or the inclination - to name all the parts. Not that we agree on everything, either, but then who could; who would even want to?

We’re all trapped by so much. Anything can be a psychological prison and heart-breaker – love, passion, need, lifestyle, duty. It isn't even denial of any of those that whispers something close to truth. We know how much damage socio-personal irresponsibility can do. Conditioning sucks the life out of us. So maybe it's more about the willingness to step away from the core of what hurts and look again at a Moment with ruthless honesty. It's about having the guts to sacrifice the strongest beliefs that trick us into heartache yet seem so indispensable. It’s about the courage to question everything - no matter how sacred or profane it seems to be. Carrie did that. She has influenced and inspired me. Gullible fool that I am, Carrie has often helped me regain my way when I've been blinded and deluded by others - most of all by myself.

I must re-listen to that Tori Amos song “why do we crucify ourselves …”

I'm not sure where all that came from and I hope it doesn't sound like preaching. Whatever I know will be startling only for its teeny-tininess when that life-review comes round. Maybe it's just a celebrate Carrie day.

*image 2: Susan Seddon-Boulet * image 3: Jean-Paul Avisse