Category: post-migration (Page 9 of 10)

Some other place I don’t know where I am.
Some other place where I don’t know anyone.
Some other place where I don’t have any friends.
Some other stupid hotel room.
Some other gloomy rain-soaked sky.

I had a dream that Tommy (one of our moderators who passed away unexpectedly on Friday) had left a scrapbook behind.

I went to retrieve it.

It was a big scrapbook with a rough red cover and big thick cream colored pages.

I flipped through the pages but I wasn’t sure what I was looking at.

Tommy was in the room with me. He explained to me that it was “character development.”

I’m pretending the rustling sounds are waves of maple leaves gently crashing up onto a beach of patchy and blighted grass and Creeping Jenny underneath my rake.

A really cold beach: 50 degrees.

Let’s pretend it’s Massachusetts, then.

Estoy tan solo que podría llorar

o Estoy solo y me dan ganas de ponerme a llorar

I keep waking up and reflexively thinking about how I’m going to need to get out of bed and get it together and get back on the highway. Just where the fuck am I, anyway?

Then I look around the room I’m in and I remember.

Heyyyy, stupid. You’re in your own bed!

click, set, go:

… some familiar places to not belong.

… pedal to the metal in between the nowhere I’m going and the nowhere I’m from.

I was laying in bed with David and he suddenly had a startled expression.

He said “Your heart and your throat are going to go. It’s just going to explode.”

Tears rolled out of both of his eyes.“

No one’s going to be there. Who’s going to be there for you?”

I know that.

But why do YOU know that?

Everytime I see a commercial for auto insurance, Coors, or Oscar-Mayer Lunchables…

I cheer myself up by reminding myself that “aspirational marketing” is intentionally directed at people who can’t afford the product.

(We did cover that last week.)

Because otherwise you just spend your whole life alternating between painful involvement and painful isolation/alienation.

Shut up. You don’t know my life.

I’d heard the backstory about the founder.

She had behavioral problems and she’d been kicked out of every group in town.

So she went off and founded this place. It helps thousands of people every month.

I knew it was her when I saw her.

She had a couple stacks of paper for a staff training exercise.

She started to explain it, and I said “these are hexidecimal color codes.”

She lit up.

Each piece of paper was broken up into a grid representing a master code with the hex codes for all 256 shades of grey. In HTML and graphics, colors are represented by a hex code , with #00 00 00 being black at one end and #FF FF FF being white at the other end.

The other stacks of paper contained variations of greys in the 16K color range. (The color range can actually extend into the millions. On older computers/graphics processing hardware, they’d pruned that down to about 256 colors on your screen… over time that became 32,000 colors, then 64,000 colors and so on and so on and so on .. my Mac can display millions of colors with four or five scaled resolution options.)

What’s the point of the exercise?

Survivors of abuse and trauma are prone to “black and white” thinking, that is to say, “I like you right up until the point that you do or say something that I don’t like.”

And then it isn’t “I’m upset about this thing you said.”

It’s “I don’t like you anymore.”

(Mmmmmmhmmm.)

I watched this sweet old lady describe the exercise.

She’s adorable.

I tried to imagine some hateful support group deciding that she was garbage and should be thrown away.

I just loved how she basically said “fuck you” and created all of this.

I teared up a little.

The point of the exercise was to get the staff to “match” shades of grey in the range of millions with the 256 shades of grey in the master sheet and then explain how they are not in fact the same color.

“Okay, you’re going to explain this one to the other staff.”

I can do it in one word: “splitting.”

We were on Facetime and I was telling him about some of the volunteer work I do, I was talking about how some of the folks who come in are court-ordered, and they’re all mad about it and bitching that it’s a bunch of bullshit and they got played, and blah blah blah and I ask them if they’d rather grab a broom and sweep the 101 or, you know, you can always tell the judge fuck off I’d rather be in jail — right?

I talked about how the “probationers” might not be addicts but they probably have other stuff going on. Legal problems, living in rough neighborhoods, just living the life… and how I was sitting there with a couple of them just kicking it and talking about life. We were cutting up small pieces of paper for a staff training exercise and they were actually enjoying what they were doing so much that I pretended that I didn’t know that there was a paper slicer that could have cut all of this paper in about two minutes flat.

I guess after I told him a couple stories about what I was up to lately, he was finally comfortable enough to tell me that he was extremely suicidal the night that I’d met him and that I looked “scary” and that he was just hoping I’d come over and kill him.

“But no, you were really sweet and smart and cool and-“

I just stared at my phone in disbelief.

I guess… that says a lot… about your needs versus my needs…

The night we met, we were cuddling but I was apprehensive and my PTSD went off. I kept feeling like someone else lived there and might show up unannounced.

Then I saw the pipe on his dresser. He protested it wasn’t his.

I was like, “ you said you live alone, byeeeee.”

I’m not sure why I even stayed in contact with him, other than he was kind of funny and cute and a good kisser and I lived far enough away from him … it wasn’t a risk.

And that’s the morning I found myself walking across Times Square at 4am; mumbling something to no one in particular on my quasi-shadow banned social media like “sometimes you have a choice about how to spend or end your night.”

That was strike one and strike two — I’ve said enough and I don’t need to go on.

Occasionally I get a little help with my narrative or perspective.

Today someone shared about entering the rooms feeling “better than” and he talked about being harsh or malicious or judgmental instead of having compassion or empathy for newcomers.

He couldn’t stay sober.

Something clicked: I went into the rooms feeling very much less than, and I had the great fortune of finding an AA group full of “better thans.”

I didn’t get along with quite a few of them and I didn’t really have any compassion or empathy for them either. I basically fucking hated their guts.

And I couldn’t stay sober either.

Well, most of them are gone now.

I guess whether you are a “better than” or a “less than,” the waves will lap away at you until you’re just “one of,” and you will eventually have that removed from you one way or the other.

I didn’t like it out there.

And I do not have a Plan B.

I’m like well? I can live and work anywhere I want to.

So “where the fuck to now?”

I already know that geographicals aren’t a cure.

They’re a treatment. 😉

You might think that the serial escape artist would be all over this job opportunity.I’m known for taking random job offers in random cities, sight unseen.I decided to go get a hotel and check it out before we got to the offer/acceptance stage.

Everyone’s like “Who are you and what have you done with-?”

Because he doesn’t care where he’s going or what’s going to happen there.

I got a connecting flight in Paris and checked in on Facebook. I announced that I was joining Al Qaeda to be a bareback comfort girl for the freedom fighters.

About 1 minute later my roommate was texting me: “GURL DELETE THAT SHIT RIGHT NOW.”

I think this has something to do with why Facebook closed my account with a message that I am “ineligible for Facebook.”

I woke up early from a dream: I’d put in my notice and I’d quit my job.I was sad that I was leaving. I wasn’t even sure why I was leaving. I liked my job… Why would I do that? It was one of the best things that had ever happened to me. Why are you doing this?

I wanted to call HR and take my notice back.

It was too late. I grieved.

I guess there’ll be a dowry of two chickens and a goat or whatever.

I’ve seen the amount of internal accounting controls involved in simply marking down a sales order, heaven only knows what kind of paperwork you’d have to fill out to buy me.

One of my interview questions involved some role play where they needed to save their work because they had 11 minutes before they were killed in a tsunami.

I made a face and asked who on earth would want to spend the last 11 minutes of their life talking to our front-end call center.

What, it’s role play! I’m trying to make it believable!

I don’t trust anyone with my problems anymore.

“So how are you going to do a fourth or a fifth step?”

“Uh, a priest or a hobo or a hooker probably.”

“All excellent choices. It just says it has to be another person.”

“Exactly. I can rent a birthday clown or a mime to make angry faces at my resentments and scared faces at my fears, and I’d better get a damn good show during my sexual inventory!”

“Well there’s one thing I won’t miss about America. All the obligatory holidays I’m forced to attend.”

(Josh): “There’s a loaded pistol in my backpack if you can’t take it anymore.”

“Uhhhh if it was my own family I’d probably take you up on that.”

(Josh): “By the way this an orgy house. Michelle’s dad is gay, he’s a bear and they had a 6-person shower custom built for orgies. Hopefully there aren’t any dildos laying around today, I don’t need my daughter seeing that.”

“Theyyyy wha-?” Good god, no wonder I don’t faze you or your wife.

They were nice people. Her father and his partner were apparently the kind of high strung bears who’d hyperventilate over a carelessly flicked cigarette ash landing in the wrong direction on the patio if you know what what I mean though.

The best thing about thanksgiving was their 5-year old daughter announcing that “Grandpa’s stuffing tastes like penises.”

“I’ll bet grandpa’s stuffing DOES taste like penises.”

:HORRIFIED LOOK FROM MICHELLE:

I drove from Seattle to Los Angeles and then onward to Austin.
I picked up a couple of Russian hitchhikers in Tucson and they kept me company for the next 1,000 miles or so.

I was a little incredulous at their plans to sleep in a tent out in the desert.
“We are from Russia. And sleeping outside is good for you.”

They’re on their way to Cuba and then South America via New Orleans and Ft Lauderdale. Any other week I would have taken them the whole way but its a company holiday, I’m off all week, and I have plans for Thanksgiving.

We swapped stories and they told me about working as harvesters out in the marijuana fields out in California and all the strange addicts and miscreants they’d encountered along the way.

“Oh boy, and then you ended up in a car with me.”

I’m glad they’re experiencing the America that I know and love. 😉

I appreciated having some company because Seattle to Austin is a long, long, long time to be out there alone on a highway and lost in your head.

Their English was decent enough. One of them coined the term “minery,” as in a “mine,” and this prompted me to come up with ideas like a “minery tour” where you drive a convertible around the back woods of West Virginia and stop at every mine for a coal sample.

That sounds fun. I’d totally do that.

I had a sad, and it was beautiful all the same, when one of the girls sang along to Anna Nalick’s “(2am) breathe.”

I told them that was the album/song I was listening to when I was moving out of Key West.

I’d barbacked at the 801/New Orleans house and one of our DJs (Junior) played the Blake Jarrell remix of that song all the time.

They asked where they could set up a tent and I don’t really do that sort of thing, so I took them up on the top of the 360 bridge overlook and I  found them a clearing in the woods. It was pitch black out, and boy aren’t they in for a surprise.