24 September 2011

Being Fully Human



Theodore Roosevelt once said:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

My sentiments exactly.

We all have a past. We all have things we have done, said, been--that we would have liked to be different. Yet, that is part of the human experience. Part of being fully human includes getting your hands dirty. We know and appreciate joy because we have experienced sorrow; we know and appreciate love because we have been familiar with fear and envy. We do not grow as humans until we live fully in the human experience, in all its wonder and agony and beauty and ugliness.
We cross paths with perhaps thousands of people in a lifetime, and who is to say how many of them are there to learn their own lessons by knowing you, or you, them? We can say that a person inflicted pain on us, or was our nemesis, wronged us, or in some way did us damage, yet perhaps this is the only way we could have learned what we needed to learn. We can indeed thank these people in our minds and hearts for bringing us valuable lessons (i.e., everyone can be a teacher) even though this is often hard to do, because if we blame someone else, we don't have to take responsibility for ourselves. 

It's a real challenge to be okay when your past rears its head via the opinions from those who were alongside you during the journey; those who saw the dark side of your soul, the ones who might have felt the sting of your lessons, the pain of your anger or angst or confusion. It then becomes about forgiving yourself; and yet, why would we need to forgive something that is intrinsically part of the process and indeed the very reason we are here? While there is a precarious balance between personal accountability and accepting the inevitability of human foibles, this balance can be had, and is one we should strive for.

I have done so, and continue to do so, even amid my own frustration, confusion and misinterpretations. I am not the same person i was 10 years ago. If i was, it would indicate that i am not evolving. And i find that concept not only unacceptable but repulsive. 

I am not merely a human being, but a human, BEING.

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Coffee Skin

My coffee has a skin again.

I keep my mug on an old coffeemaker masquerading as a hot plate because I like my coffee to remain highly warm while I sip it
throughout my morning. And afternoon. And sometimes evening...depending on when i get up. Which is always a malleable enterprise for those with Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. I also have Coining Of Nomenclature Syndrome (C.O.N.S.), except this time I'm not guilty of it. DSPS really exists. Although when i first saw the abbreviation, i thought it stood for -Dating & Sex Postal Service --this is how i intend to find my next girlfriend. When you are at home as much as i am, that's your only hope of seeing another human being. When she absolutely, positively, has to stay here overnight.
Where was I?

Oh, yeah. Skin.

If my coffee cup stays on the hot plate
too long, (as it should, since i am a serious writer who spends many hours slaving away at my clickety clacking)....then it inevitably gets a skin on it. Then I have to take a piece of coffee filter and dig the skin out before I refill.

If I were to visit a coffee shop and say "Give me a hazelnut with skin."

They would say "Skim milk?"


"No," I'd say. "Not SKIM. . ..SKIN."

They would, rightfully so, put me in the crazy category. Been there before, so it wouldn't be a stretch. I can do crazy very well, thank you.


I thought about trying to put something on top of that skin one time, to see how strong it was. . ..a paper clip, maybe. . ..wonder if it would sink, or ride there? Then I could drink, while staring at a buoyant paper clip. There would be no reason for this, other than my own twisted and absurd entertainment.

I refuse to let myself get bored.

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23 September 2011

Mother-Guilt Archetype & Family Obligations


Most of us are familiar with the Mother Archetypes in our society--one of which is the passive-aggressive mother who tries to make you feel guilty for living your own life because it doesn't coincide with what she wants or needs. As exemplified by messages like "I had to go to the doctor yesterday...in case you care..."

A friend of mine is dealing with this sort of mother, who has a long track record of showing little or no concern for her daughter's happiness, nor at all appreciative of her daughter's wonderful
qualities. Her only contribution to the mother-daughter relationship is criticizing, dismissing, minimizing her daughter's feelings, wishes or challenges. 

Recently my friend was victimized by her mother's guilt trips about not "coming home" enough (out of state), and that it was somehow a mistake to move so far away from family. The point that seems to be missed by overbearing, passive aggressive, self-absorbed mothers like this, is that if your daughter feels like she has to move to ANOTHER STATE to get away from you and be happy, there's an issue that isn't about your daughter's poor choices.

This friend of mine is currently worried about her grandmother's health, and that she might not be around much longer. And she's anticipating the issue of her grandmother dying, and then knowing she simply cannot afford the trip back to her family's state. She had just made one recently to deal with other dramas in the family and can't do it again anytime soon. She'd probably have to take a week off from work again, like she did when her grandfather died, and she can't ask for more time off for awhile without endangering her job and her financial status. She was already making up the time she missed to go home recently, by working late almost every day. So she anticipates the guilt-trips and emotional blackmail that will certainly follow, should her grandmother pass away anytime soon. 


I could see that the situation could use some reframing.

So I told my friend that we now live in a different world than the generation of her mother. People are moving around more and the economy is in the toilet and everyone is struggling. The point is, you can only do what you can do, and the guilt trips from her mother are about her mother's issues, not anything my friend is doing wrong.

I said that people nowadays miss things like funerals and weddings and hospital visits, because life is hard, finances are strained, and we're all generally scattered and not living near our parents and other relatives.

And the deeper issue here is that whether or not you believe in souls, it's about that person who died, and your relationship with them--not your relationship with everyone else. If they do have a soul and there is some higher existence after the death of the body, then they would not have petty human emotions anyway, would know you love them and wanted to be with them to say goodbye or honor them at a memorial or funeral if you could. And they would feel your love for them no matter where you were geographically. So the guilt-trip aspect puts limits on the limitless nature of something like that.

Contrarily, if you don't believe in the soul and any form of life after death, then it's that the person has died and is completely unaware of anything anyone does and so it's a moot point.

So the feelings of the other people about what you are and are not doing to honor a loved one who has died, is THEIR ISSUE and has little to do with who you are, or what you're responsible for. All in all her mother's arguments against my friend's decisions and her choice of where she calls home is about what her mother wants and needs and has nothing to do with what her daughter wants and needs, so ultimately, it's all about being selfish and not about being loving or supportive. Thus, it's her mother's issue and my friend doesn't have to get sucked into that void.



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Excerpt from Achilles Forjan

5.0 out of 5 stars Another great book by Kelli Jae Baeli!, January 31, 2010
By Tanya Gotcher
This review is from: Achilles Forjan (Paperback)

"This is the third of Ms. Baeli's books I've read and I plan to read more of them. She is an absolute MASTER of characterization! After I read her books, I catch myself wondering about the characters as if they were real people. And, no, this is not a sign I need to be in a mental ward somewhere; rather, it is a testament to how authentic her characters are. This authenticity extends to her plots as well. I can especially speak to the authenticity of the plot and characters in this particular book because I work in the emergency services field myself. This book in it's entirety, down to the smallest of details, is real enough to be based on people whom I know and work with daily.

One final big plus!... more often than not, I can guess "who done it" before the ending of a murder mystery and that just ruins the whole book for me. I also view it as a weakness in the writer's talent. However, not so in this gem of a psycho-thriller/murder mystery! I was totally and happily surprised! Reading this one was time well spent!"

Ashleigh knew it was him. His gruff, slurring baritone voice. His fat fist against the door. He'd be waking the neighbors, and they'd be calling the cops. She was still too weak from her trip to the emergency room three days ago, and didn't have the strength to deal with this. She stayed with Jeremy because it was easier than staying with Leonard Huff. Safer.
Jeremy had offered Ashleigh a ride home from work seven months ago, and she had told him she didn't want to go back to her father's house. He suggested they go to his apartment and get high instead, and she agreed. It wasn't long before Ashleigh was spending the night at Jeremy's Southside apartment. The choice between a sweet guy who provided a good high, and a raving, nasty, controlling drunk, was an easy one.
She didn't even call him 'Dad' anymore, but 'Leonard.' His all-nighters and recently, his affiliation with a group of bikers, was a pain in the ass; and although she had vivid memories of his hands on her when she was a little girl, he had stopped pursuing her for his need to touch innocence.
This didn't stop his biker-buddies from crossing the line, though. At a nubile eighteen, she was now a young woman, and considered ripe for the picking. When one of the leather-clad animals came by the house and put his hands on her tits, she packed her stuff and went to Jeremy's. That's when she decided that Jeremy had his flaws, but at least he wasn't violent. He'd never hit her, even when she'd smoked the last of their weed. If she kept him smoking, she could pretty much do what she wanted. He didn't make much money as a night shift stocker at Handy's Grocery, but she didn't make much as a cashier there, either. She didn't really do without anything, and the rent was only $350 a month. A few days ago, Jeremy got extra pot from his dealer so they could make a little cash, because Ashleigh needed time off to recuperate from her fall down the stairs.
With the pounding outside growing louder, she snatched the door open and Leonard Huff barreled in, headed straight for Jeremy, who was finishing the removal of marijuana seeds from the marred glass coffee table, sweeping them onto a metal serving tray and shoving it under the ratty Goodwill sofa.
She put herself between the two men, hoping to prevent anything that might have cops snooping around. The last thing she needed was to go to jail for possession.
Leonard Huff pushed her out of the way, and she fell into the glass top of the coffee table.


2

Roy peered in the window, and saw the boy hovering near the kitchen, saw the girl sitting on the chair with blood on her arm. With one last glance at the street, hoping to see the police cruiser, he knocked on the door. "EMS!" he called.
Jeremy opened the door, and Roy stepped in first, carrying his jump bag fully stocked with an intubation roll, already assessing the damage to Jeremy's face. Amy came along behind him, trying not to look at Jeremy; all she could see now was him beating off to kiddie porn.
Ashleigh was sitting on the chair across from Huff, still in a robe and on medication from her recent trip to the hospital. Now, she had one hand pressed to her bleeding elbow. Amy knew the girl would need sutures. Ashleigh looked up at her with a mixture of embarrassment and relief. Embarrassment, that the nice female paramedic she had poured her heart out to was coming to the rescue again; and relief, that somehow everything would be taken care of and some semblance of normalcy would return.
Even before the staircase fall at the apartment a few days ago, Amy and Roy had been to the Huff house to patch up Mrs. Huff when Leonard directed his anger at her. Police had escorted her to the Battered Women's Shelter that night, and it was unclear whether or not she was still residing there.
Perhaps it was why Leonard Huff was at the apartment now. His anger needed a target, and he couldn't get to his wife. He had pounded his beefy fist into the young man's face and made a real mess of the living room of their tiny apartment. He was at the end of a nasty binge, having burned up the fuel of whiskey, and was sitting on the sofa nearing a nap. Amy stepped over the fallen ashtray and remnants of potato chips dotting the floor, and sent up a prayer that he would not find any reserve tank in his body before they got the job done, or at least not until the cops arrived to stand sentry.
The ashtray, along with two smoldering cigarettes, lay on the dirt-colored carpet, amid shards of glass. Amy picked them up and tossed them in the tray to be safe.
Roy saw that Jeremy was lucky not to have a broken nose. He might get away with some butterfly bandages on the cut above his eye, but the rest of his injuries were the usual contusions when a fist contacts the skin. He had the young man sit at the kitchen table while he set to work on him.
As the two medics donned surgical gloves to cleanse wounds and apply compresses, Huff muttered expletives and warned Jeremy that he was not even close to being finished with him. "She'll never be clean again," he said. "You made her dirty."
"You're not worried about me, Leonard," Ashleigh hissed. "Look what you did to my arm!" She held up the lacerated elbow, causing Amy to drop the gauze roll and forcing her to gather it and start winding it around again.
Huff lit a cigarette awkwardly and let it dangle precariously from his inebriated lips. "You brought that on yourself, little girl," he said around the cigarette. "You need to learn when to stay the hell outa the way."
Jeremy leaned away from Roy's cotton swab and snarled at Huff, "You're fuckin' going to jail."
"Oh yeah? What for?"
"Assault and battery. You're a sorry-ass excuse for a father. It's a good thing Ashleigh met me."
"Wors' thing ever happened to her." The glowing ash fell off Huff's cigarette and landed on his blue shirt, stained with sweat and booze. A wet spot doused the cherry, making a sizzing sound. Amy was afraid he would burst into flames.
"You're goin' to jail, you sorry piece a shit!"
"Be still—" Roy reprimanded, pressing the last butterfly bandage on the boy's head, anxious for he and Amy to get out of there.
"You're goin' to jail," Jeremy repeated.
Amy wanted to scream, You belong in jail, too, you sick pedophile! She knew she'd have to bite her tongue until they finished the call. This situation had become too personalized to her, now that Ashleigh had spilled her guts. She didn't want that kind of investment in her patients. It was hard enough without that.
Huff tried to push himself up, but rocked back, and had to scoot to the edge of the sofa before he could manage to stand. "I ain't goin' to jail if I ain't here when the cops get here—"
"Sit down," Roy ordered him in his best authoritative tone.
Huff paused, considering him, then staggered over. Roy got up to prepare for evasive action, when Huff took the cigarette from his mouth and threw it at Roy.
Roy held up a warning finger. "Now you just behave yourself. You've caused enough trouble."
"You ain't seen trouble yet, boy." Huff lurched forward and pushed Roy aside, reaching for Jeremy, who bear-crawled away, scattering the top-most contents of Roy's jump bag. Angry that the young man had scampered out of reach, Huff grabbed Roy again.
Amy tapped on the big man's shoulder, and he turned around unsteadily. "Could you do me a favor, sir?"
Frowning, he swayed slightly. "What?"
"Your hand looks terrible. Could you go over to the sofa and sit down so I can take a look at it? It looks like it hurts."
Still holding Roy's shirt at the shoulder, he looked at his free right hand. His knuckles were red. "Yeah. My hand needs some nursin'." He released Roy and went to the sofa, sitting and holding his hand out to her.
Roy blinked rapidly like some cartoon character, and Amy tried not to smile. There was little she could do for the sore knuckles, but she made a production of wrapping gauze around them, hoping to stall long enough for their cop friends to arrive.
Roy kept a close eye on Huff as he gathered the items that had been knocked out of his bag.
Finally, the police arrived. Sergeant Kenneth Branch and his Rookie, Jimmy Tackett assessed the situation quickly. They were also familiar with this family and their various degrees of in-fighting.
A glint of morning sunlight reflected off Branch's bald head. Before taking a razor to his hair after losing a bet, Kenneth Branch never fully appreciated the creative genius of eyebrows. They were crucial to keeping sweat out of the eyes, and in his line of work, vision was sometimes the only thing between you and a bullet. He even fancied the idea of God as a bald entity. A tall, muscular man with thick arms and legs, Branch was intimidating; a comfort to have around if you needed help, and a frightening presence if you were in trouble with the law.
Tackett was short and boyish-looking, and ripe for a bullet from some street thug. Tackett's best chance for survival was to be partnered with Branch. The contrast of the two was almost comical. Like Batman and Robin. Not much older than Jeremy, Tackett was the mirror image of the young man cowering in the kitchen, with slight alterations based on the application of free will. Two young men who took different paths. It only takes one wrong turn to create that kind of polarity.
"What can we do to help out, here, folks?" Branch asked.
Huff was suddenly aware of where the new voice came from, and got up, knocking Amy back to her rump on the floor. He gestured angrily, the end of the gauze around his knuckles dangling in the air. "Don't nobody touch me, goddammit." He gestured at Ashleigh. "Come on over here, girl. I'm taking you home."
"Now hang on—don't I know you? What's your name, sir?"
The big man turned around, his comb-over flailing upright. "Name's Huff. I come to take my little girl home!"
"I'm not goin' anywhere with you!" Ashleigh shouted.
Jeremy moved over to Ashleigh in a show of support, and she moved away, almost imperceptibly.
Branch met Ashleigh's eyes. "Is he here with your permission?"
"Well I didn't know he was gonna try to kill Jeremy!"
To Jeremy: "Do you intend to press charges?"
"Hell yes."
Tackett asked Ashleigh for her ID. He turned to Branch. "She's eighteen."
Branch held up both his hands to Huff. "Now, Mr. Huff, your daughter is at the age of consent, so you can't force her to—"
"I don' care what consent she is, she's comin' home!"
The sergeant swiveled his right hip so that his firearm was out of the man's reach, and planted his feet as if he was about to perform a Jackie Chan movement. "Mr. Huff, let's do this the easy way, okay? Please turn around and put your hands behind your back."
He shook his head. "Nope. I ain't goin'."
"Sir, I'm not asking you. I'm telling you. Turn around and—"
Huff swung an arm at Branch, but he leaned back and the blow missed. Branch snatched the wrist and twisted it behind Huff's back as he spun him, pushing him toward the sofa. Tackett was beside his partner and in a few swift seconds, they had his face in the cushions, and were handcuffing him.
Officer Branch had just celebrated 10 years on the force; nine of them in New York, and had transferred to the Burlington P.D. to hedge his bets. He considered himself lucky: lucky to have lived. That luck was now bolstered by the low rate of violent crime in Vermont. Still, Branch was looking forward to his training as a Detective. He intended to spend the last ten years on the force wearing his own clothes, and sitting at a desk rather than in a squad car.
"Am I under arrest?" Huff bellowed into the smelly foam.
"Yes you are, sir. Drunk and disorderly, assault and battery, attempted assault of a police officer, for now. You have the right to remain silent—"
"I ain't gonna be silent!" he shouted.
Branch continued to Mirandize him as he and Tackett half-dragged, half-led him to the door, the drunk man's flailings managing to knock Amy off balance and onto her rump again.
As Tackett returned with the forms for Jeremy and Ashleigh to fill out, Roy pulled off his surgical gloves and tossed them in a Ziploc bag for later disposal. Moving over to Amy, he looked down at his partner, who was still seated on the floor. He plucked a jerky strip from a pen protector in his breast pocket and popped the end in his mouth. "No sitting down on the job, Spenser," he cracked.

=================
Achilles Forjan can be had at a discount over the Amazon price, directly from my site.

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15 September 2011

Creativity, Intelligence & Depressive Realism

 From a Facebook post i made, a thought-provoking subject emerged.

Jae Baeli : “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” – Ernest Hemingway

Tina Harada likes this.


Amanda Gulledge
I frowned when I read that so I would feel more intelligent.

Candace Lynn Breaux
Is that why I am unhappy so much of the time? LOL


Jae Baeli
LOL. Amanda--you crack me up.Candy--probably, yes.


Victoria Bard
love it...so true!

Sandi Partee
hmmm...so does that mean I'm not intelligent? Cause I'm happy as a lark! LOL!


I understand Sandi's reply was meant lightly, but let me just address the topic of Intelligence and Happiness...

I don't think the two are mutually exclusive, no. There are types of intelligence and there are always variables that affect outcomes. So I would say the quote is a rule of thumb, not an absolute. There is enough data to suggest trending toward intelligent people being unhappy. It has to do with logic, pragmatism, conceptual relativism and other concepts both in and out of the purview of philosophy and philosophical thought. In the most common, if not colloquial sense, though, unhappy intelligent people are more fact-based in their ideation. There is, as such, a condition known as Depressive Realism, where seeking the truth of things--including ugly things--can cause hopefulness and positivity to wane when it becomes apparent that survival is indeed hard, people are indeed cruel and evil, and life is indeed unfair. It's about rejecting the cognitive dissonance of optimism in the face of negative data.1

The human brain understands the world through patterns. When a new experience appears, the brain wants to match it with a previous experience in order to understand it. Paradoxically, that's why there is a pervasive belief in society that creative and/or intelligent people are at least partially mentally ill. The pattern does, indeed, exist. But it can just as easily be based on a chicken-or-the-egg paradigm as any other. Does creativity come first, and then depression? Do depression-oriented people seek creative expression? Do intelligent people tend toward a need for creative expression? Clearly, creative people need expression of that creative impulse, they are compelled to communicate it. They also crave freedom and the leeway to think out of the box. Business people with regular white collar jobs, tend toward logic and pragmatism, and have to punch a clock and strive to fit in. This flies in the face of a creative psyche, and so more creative people are drawn to artistic endeavor than more sterile, clinical, restrictive lifestyles in the mainstream. So it might not be that artists are depressed, so much as depressed people fare better in the arts.  

The newest research in this regard points to this connection being myth. However, perhaps it is a question of semantics. Which type of intelligence are we referring to? Creative intelligence? Spatial intelligence? Emotional intelligence? Since there are also a great number of divisions in the intellectual paradigm, it becomes a bit convoluted when making an emphatic statement one way or another. For instance, historically, we have known that prolific and gifted writers, artists and musicians have a tendency to self-destruct, either through escapism behaviors like drug use and alcoholism, or, tragically, through suicide. (And this is rather frightening, considering I am an artist, writer, and singer-songwriter. But i think i dodged that bullet pretty well). Many have sought these counter-productive coping mechanisms due to some aspect of being overwhelmed. Whether the "overwhelmedness" is due to the aspects of creative processes, or the realism that reveals ugly truths, is debatable. I think if you have a combination of realism and sensitivity, which usually goes hand in hand with highly creative individuals, you have a Molotov Cocktail of potential destruction. If you know how ugly things are, how unfair, and you are also very sensitive, this can lead to the inability to cope in a healthy way. The burden becomes too great.


Additionally, creative individuals are often alone, since acts of creation generally take place in isolation, so loneliness is a feature within the social psychology of the paradigm. And new research published in the online journal Genome Biology has shown that loneliness can actually make you ill.2  In research of 20,000 genes of both lonely and nonlonely people, the chronically lonely individuals showed 209 changes that resulted in immune changes, inflammation and adversely affected response to infection.

In relation to intelligence, it can be surmised that individuals with high IQ experience a type of ostracization from society, in that they don't feel like a "normal" person. This can lead to depression, since feeling different and misunderstood can become a divisive aspect between an intelligent person and the less intelligent majority. Intelligent people also ruminate more, and analyze information more, so that it becomes easy to impose feelings of isolation on every situation and interaction. If you combine the conditions of being both highly intelligent and highly creative, the potion becomes a catalyst for depression on a larger scale.


Critics of this correlation among intelligence, creativity and depression will say that studies done  have been largely retroactive in that they diagnose well-known creative people of antiquity after the fact. And yet, we understand so much more about symptomatology in the psychological vein than we did when those creative and intelligent people were alive. There is some merit in applying new understanding to the previously misunderstood.


While there are exceptions to the rule, such as intelligent creative people who ARE happy, this condition is ameliorated, in my understanding, by some other coping mechanism; usually, in the form of some voluntary belief system that allows the creative and intelligent individual to ignore the farther reaches of edification--those that would suggest more reason for unhappiness. As a coping mechanism, this is usually very effective, though it could not be characterized as completely entrenched in stark reality. Thus, the individuals who can live behind the cloak of voluntary self-deception are at once more capable of maintaining contentedness. And often, their ability to do so is predicated on the lack of biochemical imbalance that makes positive mindset difficult if not impossible. Yet, there will always be those who cannot accept this postulate, simply because they are not able to experience it. Those who do experience it, will be the ones who have to accept the melancholy that comes with the package: intelligence, creativity, and the propensity, genetic or otherwise, for depression. These individuals might also be unable to reach that rose-colored-glasses posture, no matter how much they would prefer it to be otherwise. This is the quagmire of what is commonly termed Intellectual Honesty. The truth hurts, and some individuals will always be able to choose that mitigation over the often harsh verities of existence.
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1this concept is addressed partly in one of my current books "Supernatural Hypocrisy: The Cognitive Dissonance of a God Cosmology" Videos on that blog.
2 http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jan/why-loneliness-is-bad-for-you

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13 September 2011

Plaque Brain

I often have trouble remembering my dreams, even though i wish fervently that this was not so. Dreams are an incredible resource for a creative person, and this NO ACCESS thing makes me think that the Powers That Be are protecting me from some screaming ugly...

At any rate, when i do recall a dream, i like to write it down...if it's interesting...
so...

I was having exploratory brain surgery. Skull open, i had a metal halo contraption around my
head. Two of the docs were in there--or orderlies, maybe...they were acting crazy, looking at my exposed gray matter. One of them even kissed me, laughing that I wouldn't remember and I was frightened of what else they might do. I couldn't defend myself in any way and could not speak--Like the surgeons had pressed a pause button on my language center.

Then the surgeons are in the room again, and are conferring; Like they've already looked and left the room and come back. They know what is wrong with my brain but will have to do another procedure. They are to take me to another O.R. for some reason. I want to know what it means, and am scared that it might be serious or dangerous. I can't understand what they are saying.

Then I am being guided down the hallway to the other procedure, except instead of being on a gurney, I am walking. They say they want to be sure I can walk so they know everything is functioning before the next procedure. But I feel so odd. . . people in the corridors are staring and I feel so exposed--I mean literally-- here's my brain perched inside the open resevoir of my skull...

I pass a little kid in the hallway who is playing with an object--a toy of some kind--and his mother grabs him and pulls him away from me; he throws the toy, and it lands in my brain. I hope the surgeons see it and remove it.

In the O.R, back on the table again, they begin scraping my brain. Seems it has got a film of something on it; this growth that has been suppressing my brain function. Like, Plaque-brain. This is the thing that is causing my cognitive dysfunction.

As the surgeons scrape the gray matter, I begin to have memories, and then I am overwhelmed with memories and knowledge. All the things I learned over the years that I never had access to. But it's too much, and they have to give me some sort of neuro-blocking agent to suppress it until I can handle it. It has to be allowed to filter in gradually so I won't have a mental breakdown. But I know that I feel so smart, and I am excited that I am remembering all those things. I finally have answers. I finally can stop saying 'I don't know.' I can go through my set list without a single mistake, and I can do it all visually in my head. I can remember my childhood, I can recall conversations verbatim, I can handle doing math, my checkbook, my finances; I can recall even the most esoteric of details gathered throughout my life; volumes of trivia; reams of textbook content; I can recite the titles of hundreds of books I've read. It's like that life-review thing that i believe happens when you die; where you see everything in your life and suddenly have a keen and all-encompassing understanding...But i also remember all the bad things and all the details. It's painful.

Yet, I realize that some things have been altered by my memory before--some things seem clear to me now that were muddled before. And although it can be overwhelming and unpleasant, it's worth the trade-off to me. I finally feel whole. I finally feel I have reached my potential and anything is possible. I discover that it isn't common to have this much brain power after that surgery, and they tell me that it must indicate that I was some sort of genius all along, but never knew because of this condition.

Then, my best friend, LS comes to the hospital and brings me a T-shirt that reads::"I know."

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11 September 2011

Alien Tummy Tuck


Just checking my hair. No apparent reason, just throwing a passing glance in the mirror on my way to turn on the shower, and saw some little blemish on my face. Closer inspection revealed nothing of consequence. But then i looked closer in the looking glass...(Alice never had a trip like that through the looking glass) closer...until i could see the pores on my skin, touch the bags under my eyes and saw how loose the skin was....my skin had become loose somewhere along the way. Not the skin of my 20's,or even 30's, but the skin of someone growing older... someone who could hear the mortal ticking of the clock...The puffy skin of my eyes was tight enough... if i got rid of the puffiness, it would just be another patch of loose skin.
Then i started wishing i was not 41. that i could invert the age or something. But that would make me 14, and i'm not sure i'd want to be 14 again. When i was 14, I lived in a big blue split level house in the country, and the windows in my room were ground level. There, i used to spend hours writing in my journal, and playing with my Johnny West collection, and hiding in a cubbyhole under the stairs, the entrance of which was under the shelf that served as a desk in my room. That was like my little sanctuary.

During that time, i also saw a UFO from the backyard, and managed to get a picture of it, but no one believed me. That photo is in storage somewhere.

I have forgotten most of the details of that time in my childhood. Various therapists over the years have been convinced I'm blocking some trauma; some child abuse. My parents were way too apathetic to be abusive. Theirs was a sin of omission.

Maybe what i was blocking was that i was an abductee. I have that photo to prove there was opportunity...maybe I was TAKEN. Maybe i could get those aliens to abduct me again, and forego the anal probe and just do a tummy tuck to tighten all this loose skin i have.

I watch the skies, ever hopeful.

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