chapter thirteen.

knock knock knock
who is there?
talk talk talk to me
eyes open, eyes closed
my ears can guess
plum, mom or dad,
or the squeaking duck
i recognize them when i hear them
when they speak to my ears
knock knock knock
who is there?
talk talk talk to me
eyes open, eyes closed
my ears can guess

i thought a silly song would start the week well. i spent the weekend in my head. well, in dreams partly. i recuperated from the stupid cold, and i let the boyfriend take care of me. he's a real mom sometimes, the kind of mom i didn't have but dreamed of, so i let him indulge in his strange smothering passions. i even let him clean up around here (i usually don't - let him, i mean). and i must admit it looks good and it makes me feel a whole lot better. i can maintain clean for extended periods, but it's getting back to it when i slip that is too much for me.

i dreamed about somebody calling my name (not john - ah! bowakawa poussé, poussé). i was outside somewhere, walking one way, it had a feeling of summer and of free music festival or street fair of some sort, with a crowd, but not so many people around me that i'd bolt. the crowd was more of an impression, an unseen given. i looked around, trying to see who had called me. a woman from my past. a blond tall skinny skinny woman with pink blotchy skin and a small spherical head. oh no. i walked away, or i tried to, or i switched dreams.

i do that. the night before, i had been dreaming i was on a stupidly long and narrow inflatable raft (think looooong), floating on the ocean, when a shark fin appeared and started to circle around me. at first i thought it was kind of fun, and then eventually i realized i could die there. and then dying became a reality, and it became very - very - clear to me that i did not want to die. it was a feeling much more urgent and much more black or white than what i feel when i think about death in my normal waking life. hell, sometimes i consider the possibilities, you know. but this stupid shark dream brought home the sense of panic and dread. so i panicked in the dream, but knowing it was a dream i decided to opt out of that death wish and i moved on, to another less intense dream. i guess it's the nightmares i had each night as a kid that helped me develop ways to cope with crazy dreams.

i hate thinking about that woman from my past, featured in last night's dream. i haven't seen her in years and yet for some reason i dream about her maybe twice a year. something unfinished? i don't know. i did never bash her skull in. i did end our "friendship" in writing. so what. she wrote back, said she understood. said that now that she was a mother, she knew infinite love, and so she could love me without need. well good for you, bitch. i had simply lost all respect for her. i mean i can be pretty easy going with people i love, i tend not to judge them, or at least not too harshly. but she had quit school to marry an illegal immigrant who barely spoke a language she understood, the first boy with whom she'd had sex, and she got pregnant. hence the marriage. well i thought that was a very stupid thing to do before even becoming an adult. no, actually, i thought those were several stupid things to do:

a, getting married so young; b, to an illegal immigrant; c, who doesn't speak your language; d, because you're pregnant; e, without ever having had an orgasm; f, without having had sex with anybody else; g, having that child; h, quitting school; i, moving in - with the illegal immigrant husband - with your father. well, whatever. she was my friend and i'd support her (stupid, stupid, stupid) decisions.

that was until i saw how things were going. when she had the baby i went to see her. not when she had the baby. a few months after. well she was already driving me nuts during pregnancy - she was one of those who needs to feel extremely special, so it's no music in the car that is too rock'n rolly, nothing with negative lyrics. you know, because it would affect the fetus. right. she'd freak if a cat got near her, because her nice new husband had brought with him thousands of years of superstition, and he would not allow his pregnant wife to be near a feline. because we all know how vicious cats are to unborn children and ballooning women. right. she was also the kind to express everything as if she was the first woman to ever be pregnant, and she needed to enlighten us mere mortals who knew not the joys of swelling feet and popping navel. it never stopped. it drove me nuts.

i have nothing against kids. i have something about psychotic parents and people who think they know better than everyone else and they have a mission to educate the masses. i especially had an issue with her after she had the baby. she lived in her room. barely ever went out. yeah, that's has to be healthy for the child. all those poeple who freak out, thinking of all the bad germs that will undoubtedly attack their fragile progeny if a face gets licked by a dog or a pink nose breathes in a tiny amount of exhaust fumes, are just raising weak pathetic larvae. she panicked when i took the baby in my arms because i had cat hair on me. oh my. yes. cat hair on baby, bad. very bad. could kill him. but then what else can i do, when i move the damn baby further from me, he starts wailing like crazy - you see, the little thing has never been alone, untouched, had never not heard the sound of another human heart! all day, he is held by his mommy, who is creating a dependant maladjusted child, the kind of adult who can never be alone but always needs company, a weak despicable leech. i'm not a monster. i don't mean that she should put the baby in a closet for a few hours a day to toughen him up. i'm just saying that he can't - can't! - spend his entire life stuck to another being, and that being born is all about being suddenly and forever separated from your mother, and that if you maintain constant contact after birth, you are depriving the child of the first drama he'll have to adjust to. we all fucking did it at some point, and it's unfair to the child to delay this and make things harder than they need to be.

it was too stuffy in there, i had to get out. hearing her talk about her life, lived in that one room, the things she did - because she lived with her hubbie, her daddy (gee, i wonder where the unresolved parental attachment issues came from?), her two much younger brothers and her baby, she was the cook, the maid, the mother. and she lived cooped up with her men, and she tried to bring others in, to come see her so she could spread her motherhood gospel - which is not that easy when you suddenly lead a reclusive life. it made me sick. i could just imagine the husband's family arriving next year, the second and third children she would spawn, the life ruined, and for what. to breed?

to breed or not to breed, that is indeed the question. i was never dumb enough (now i'm judging - deal with it) to want a child at an early age. well i toyed with the idea for a few days, yes, but an abortion took care of that, and i never looked back. i really question what anyone can give a child when they have them too young. i question what you can teach when you're still in your teens. oh i know some teen moms make it, and are wonderful moms and manage to do it all. kudos. but if they're such great moms, i think they would have been even more extraordinary given a few more years of pre-spawning life.

i've never been sure whether to have children or not. i've never been certain which was better for me. i'm terrified of my genes. cyclical violence, cyclical craziness. i'm afraid of me with a child. at the same time, it might just work, i might just calm down and quiet out and be a tender affectionate mom. or perhaps i could just be an ordinary mom, since the boyfriend would make such a good dad. he doesn't know what he wants either. sometimes we talk about it and we imagine how our lives would change, and it's like two teenagers imagining their future together on their first date and finding names for babies they'll never have together. i'd have to give up a lot. too much probably. and really, when we get down to it, we enjoy being alone together. we enjoy having sex at all hours, and we enjoy not having to plan for another being, and we enjoy simply being together. and a baby, a child... well, they're nice and all, but they drain you, and it'll be years until their conversation is worth anything, and it always has to be about them, them, them, and i'm quite happy having things be about me, me, me. i'm just not ready to give up my own centerness, my right to get up and go, and my privacy, and my body as a personal pleasure center. so, kids, well, maybe. some day.

it's quite an issue. pressures coming from all sides. reaching thirty without a child, must be something wrong with me (there is). everyone asks. like it's any of their business. like it doesn't make more sense to err on the side of caution in that very personal debate, instead of popping out the child only to look at his face and think "uh-oh, i just made a big mistake". so many people out there who should never have been parents (mine strike me as the perfect example), so many people who fucked up and are at a loss, or think they're so right when they're so wrong. i don't understand why it's the un-childrened that get the grief and not the neglectful bastards.

speaking of births. i did a rebirth once. can't say it turned me into a babbling babe. it was part of a whole new age type weekend, bringing together twenty strangers and making them do exercises and listen to speeches for hours on end, without enough time to eat or sleep properly, without enough time or hot water for us all to take a hot shower - no wonder we were all very receptive. what a bunch of horse shit. oh, did i mention the chanting? there was lots of chanting. why not. might as well sing, when you're about to join a cult. well, i'm making that up. somewhat. it was not a cult, there was no talk of gurus or a savior. if there had been, i would have been out the door, fast or not, money back or not. it was a "seminar" hosted by a couple. oh they looked so healthy oh they seemed so sane. in private (i wasn't supposed to know them or see them in private...) though, they were harsh and hypocritical with one another, whispering their anger rather than shouting it: my love, you're really getting on my nerves. sweetie, shove it. very healthy indeed. but in front of their paying customers, they were all smiles and a halo of love radiated from them, and they looked like middle-aged people who fucked their brains out day in day out, and who had gorgeous smiling children, and had found the one true path to happiness. so why not, for a few hundred dollars and a weekend of your time, find out their love and life secret, and improve your life with their teachings? why not indeed.

at some point during the weekend, i got a bad headache. a migraine actually, although at the time i didn't know that i actually had migraines, and i called them "my really bad headaches". the man-guru who was not a guru said he could help. he put one hand on the nape of my neck, and the other on my forehead. he was standing up, facing me. and he pressed with his hands. the idea was that he would extract all the bad energy - which was obviously causing the headache (i love sharing that theory with fellow migraine sufferers, even though sometimes the laughter it provokes is counter-productive), and then release it back to the ground. or under the ground actually, by shaking his hands (which by then would contain the bad energy, if you're following) and thinking "i am sending all this bad energy underground". well he was squeezing and squishing my head and that hurt more than the headache had up until then. and he squeezed and squished for a few minutes, until i thought i would collapse. then he let go, shook his hands to send the evil energy away (it always scared me when people did that "sending the energy underground" thing, because if we're to believe that, then isn't hole-digging a very, very bad idea? you'd just be there digging a hole for some good reason, and all of a sudden you'd feel sick and depressed - shit, you've hit a pocket of bad energy that someone sent down here with a shake of the hands and not another thought for you, poor fool!). well when he let go, the pain was gone. in fact, i could barely feel my head. great, i thought, and i thanked the guru who is not a guru and i sat back down. it was a miracle! yup. a two-minute miracle. because two minutes later, the pressure he had created was gone, and the underlying pain that had never gone away was back. and that's how the whole weekend worked, really, by putting more pressure on pressure points, and then releasing the added pressure, to make you think everything was all better. fucking new agers.

i don't remember much of the rebirth thing. it was something like a bad sexual encounter, when the guy does absolutely nothing for you and he goes on and on and you wonder why you're even there but it's a bit late to get out of it now so you try to give him a few hints by throwing your hips this way or that, by lifting yourself, by presenting your neck of lips or breasts, but either he's dense or he tries and fails miserably, but nothing is happening, nothing is ever going to happen, and eventually you'll have to face the facts and tell him to fuck off or be a nice girl and simply fake an orgasm. well i faked a rebirth. not that i pretended i had seen the instant of my birth or anything - that would have been giving them way too much, and i didn't want my picture to end up on some stupid brochure. some people did, i assume. unless they really saw the face of the doctor who was in charge of their delivery decades earlier. hey - good for them, i guess. but i'm skeptical. it all involved a lot of screaming, a lot of crying, people around you while you're lying on the floor, people caressing you, people pushing you. i kicked a few of them. you know... in the spur of the moment. a-hem. whatever. i wanted out of there quite badly, except of course that's not how it works. now everybody gather in a circle for the mid-afternoon chant, followed by a sharing ceremony, during which we will each in turn list three things we are grateful for from the rebirth ceremony, and one thing to do different next time. next time? i almost choked. fuck off, once of that shit was enough. but most around me had humid eyes and a pathetic smile, and boy did they look enlightened. if baby sheep can look enlightened. they sure are cute though. dangerously cute, when they encounter someone who can read the "easily manipulable" and "quite gullible thank you" labels. there were two follow up evenings. and guess what, they encouraged seminar members to invite family and friends, to bring them in the circle of sharing and show them all that they have been missing and could welcome into their life, if only they signed a teeny tiny cheque. or two.

sometimes i wish i had more cynicism, or less conscience, and i too could part the proverbial fool and his money. people will believe anything if they’ve paid to hear it (if they’d paid to listen to bullshit, it would be too sad…). then i realize that i don't have that kind of energy. and i think karma would run up to me and bite me in the ass. hard. and i don't need that. better to keep living my meaningless life that to provide false meaning to others. better not to get involved with that many strangers. i don't have a guru fiber in me anyway.

i've been told i'm a bridge burner. that i'm mean. that i don't know when to shut up. other things not as nice. people like the blond skinny bad mom up there, who come back in my life and think they've recognized themselves and accuse me of being a bitch. why? because i say what i think? well you poor things. it's true i burn bridges. i've not quite ever regretted it though. i'm nice, contrary to what those people think. i'm nice until i'm not anymore. is that so strange? once my limit has been passed, true, i have no turning back. i'm not smooth like i'm told people need to be to live in society. i'm too honest for that. at least that's what i call it. too abrupt. rough around the edges, they say. and we're all right. living well in sociaety was never my goal anyway. perhaps that is at the core of the issue? well why don't i just sign a big fat cheque to a shrink to find out? right. i only have issues because others say i do. when i'm me, i'm ok.



i've been told i'm too sensitive. i don't understand that. i don't understand how my built-in sensitivity can be considered too much. i've always had the attitude that if i'm different, maybe (not maybe, i just know it!) i'm not wrong: maybe (again...) the whole world is wrong and i'm right. and i have no qualms totally believing that. i don't see why everyone else would hold the truth and i would not. i know my truths much better than anybody else, for one thing. good luck convincing me i'm wrong on that one. good freaking luck. but here's a hint: never discuss that kind of theory with someone in a white blouse. oh no. they'll smile their little knowing smile and try to make you talk some more, so you can get stuck in your own theories and they take notes and they look at you from the side and they smile again and say "really?". then they attempt to make you see their point of view, to explain, as if you were an idiot, the meaning of the word consensus, and what it means to live in society and why there are rules and why we all collectively must trust the rules and agree to obey them, that in fact there is an unwritten contract between sociaety and all its members, and that when a child is born, he enters into that contract and with proper socialization he or she will come to intuitively believe in this pact and to respect it unquestionningly, and that is good because it helps man find happiness. well i say fuck all that, i say question everything, i say let's ask the basic questions again and see if we can't find different answers, because clearly whatever you guys have all agreed on doesn't work for me, so what can we do about that, fuckers?

then the white blouse will ask about your childhood, to find out what went wrong there, and they say "tell me about your mother" and every time they do, i think of leon, the replicant, and i too want to blow them up, except of course i don't usually carry a machine gun with me. but every time the question comes, i wish i did. i refuse to answer questions about my childhood unless i'm heavily drugged - either that'll make me say the truth, and that's all right because i'll deny everything later, or it'll make me go on and on about various ficticious facts. i have a few imaginary childhoods. it's a survival skill i developped. i've built elaborate fantasies. in one, i'm the daughter of a widower gardener, who works for a rich family, and we live in a little pavilion in the park. that one comes from nineteenth century novels i couldn't get enough of at some point. in another, i'm a skateboard champion and my parents take me all over the country to competitions. i even forged a few newspaper articles for that one. nothing too overt like a front page, but a few pictures and a few "local girl triumphs over older boys" and the like. i have another fake childhood in which i am mute until puberty and at first everybody thinks i'm deaf too, and doctors think it might be autism. at puberty i began to speak as if nothing had ever been strange. the shrinks don't usually believe those sotries and the other i make up. but that's fine - they were not imagined to be believed but to take me away from my own shit. and as such they have been very efficient.

"tell me about your childhood". what a fucking intimate question! do i go around asking people to tell me about their vagina, to tell me about their penis, their rectum? i don't see much of a difference. except they get framed diplomas to hang on their walls and i would get slapped. at least i won't pay to be slapped.

some days i could eat olives all day, without stopping. well, no, i tend to stop to drink beer on those days. olives and beer. the perfect mix. i live green queen olives, with the pith. hmmmm, olives. can you tell i'm craving them right now? perhaps i'll call the boyfriend and invite him for an olives and beer evening. sometimes he says i'm crazy (that's a lie - he would never say that to me. but he says quirky and funny, and that's ok), and sometimes he laughs and says yes. i hope it's one of those times. i could actually use the company tonight.

you know what happened to the skinny skinny girl who married too young? other than appearing in recurrent dreams of mine, i mean? a couple of months ago she died. the boyfriend saw it in the paper and he read the article to me and then when they gave her husband's name i gasped, and i asked him to find her name, not his, hers, and yup, there you go, she was dead. barely older than me, too. it seems she was taken by a health craze, and she went on the atkins diet. except she was already a vegetarian, and that left her with very few choices. she ate the cheese and the cream and the salad and the allowed vegetables. she took a bunch of supplements, though not all the right ones apparently because some only were available in gel caps, and if you don't know this you should, the gelatin of gel caps and a lot of candy is made from animal connective tissue, and she wouldn't take them. she also started a drastic cardio workout plan, and she already had respiratory problem and not one ounce of fat, and it took only a few weeks for he heart to give out. i think it was suicide by atkins. but what do i know.

i thought about going to the funeral. i'm not sure why, seeing as i usually avoid those things like the plague (actually, i avoid the plague by living in this century, not by anything specific that i am aware of, but anyway), even when i get told that i should go (it's not quite something that occurs to me - i mean if the person is dead, they're dead, and what do they care whether i attend a stupid boring service or not?). i think i just wanted to amke sure she was dead. and i was vaguely curious to see if the boys had turned out as warped as i expected them to. then i remembered something about her illegal immigrant of a husband (who had probably learned the language in the last few years, but had also probably imported a large extended family). he's a compulsive noise person. he plays with pens, clicking them on and off for minutes and minutes. i once saw him play with a zippo lighter for half an hour (after which i took the lighter away - well, i grabbed it. more precisely, i screamed, grabbed the lighter from his hand and threw it out the window - we were on the sixth floor). click, click. click, click. click, click. click, click. i can't take it. just thinking about it i work myself up. he hums, he whistles, he is never quiet. and i cannot stand never quiet. i want never quiet to die. painfully but silently. so then i decided not to go. but then i changed my mind again. then the day came, and i completely forgot about it, so that was that.

the guru guy i never heard of again. well, once i moved a couple of times and his mailings still went to an old address where nobody knew me. well, where nobody knew me under the name i had given him and his group. i thought i saw his wife once in a stripclub - don't ask. but years later i met some lady who wanted to cure my migraine with pressure again. except she wanted to apply pressure to my hand, to the spot between my index finger and my thumb. i forget on which hand and if it was supposed to be relevant in any way. she sat next to me and took my hand and rubbed hard and in a circle, and harder, and she kept rubbing, until at some point the pain on my hand overwhelmed the pain in my head and i thought i was cured and i quickly escaped the pressure lady. and of course, as soon as she was out of sight, the pain came back. won't people without migraines ever understand that migraine gets cured by powerful chemical compounds (my favorite being of an opiate variety...), not by applying fucking pressure? makes me think of my aunt who'd make me laugh as a child, because if you complained of a pain soemwhere, she'd step on your toe or slap your shoulder, and then ask whether you still felt the first pain, which of course you didn't right at that moment.

last night i bought myself some blue ear plugs. very cute: they come in a tiny blue round case. i put them on last night and i slept well, and when the boyfriend left for work this morning i put them back on and i've had them on all day and i'm enjoying the remoteness of everything. i know when there are car honks and i know when the neighbors walk in and out, but that's about it, and it's vague. i like vague. and i like quiet. well, depending. but right now i like remote quiet, and i'm getting it. if only i had olives too.

this is rather random, but i hate nicholas cage. i can't stand him. i want him to die. or at the very least, to get off the screen, any screen, and become a camera-phobic hermit. i can't even explain why. i know many people onsider him a great actor, and some women (gasp!) find him attractive, but i can't stand him. i can't see any movie he plays in because i won't be wtaching, i'll be gagging, and i'll be complaining about how much i hate him the whole time. i've given this quite a lot of thought, and i've decided that if i ever was driving a car somewhere, and he happened to cross the street in front of me, green light, red light, i don't care - i'd run him over. only way to get rid of that problem. nicholas cage is the very opposite of blue. i'm not saying he's evil - that's paul mccartney - but i'm saying he's wrong. perhaps not quite human. i wouldn't go near him if you paid me, i wouldn't go see one of his movies to save my own life. i cannot take him. i cannot take that he exists. it's unbelievable to me that the universe can hold both him and i and not collapse in a giant wet *ploick*. i hate him. i don't even know why (i don't think i've ever seen him in anything, so great is my dislike) - it's a gut reaction, like i have never had for anyone else. sure, i instantly hate a lot of people. usually, i find out later that they were allergic to animals, or that they didn't like animals, or that they had some other weird trait that i consider should never have passed the test of evolution and makes them retarded idiots with barely any right to breathe. but it is never as strong as my profound, unexplainable, gut-wrenching furious and total hatred for nicholas cage. somebody put him out of my misery.

i've been told that it's borderline wrong, to be so categorical, to love and hate and have nothing in between. but it's not true. i also have an awful lot of indifference. otherwise i don't know how i'd make it through most days. i don't know how anybody could survive without a big share of indifference. but then again, watch me care.