There's stuff in Indogo and journal

written in pencil, no less. Graphite, that is.  Lead. Were they ever made with lead?

Google it.'

I'm fortunate to have gotten through to BA without Google...and RN...I'd never have been able to focus.

that's not true. It's an excuse for not focusing now.

there/s no excuse 4 u
LOL

I wasn't jealous of him because I was not attached to him. Upset at other father for not including daughter...total transference, seriously, Max

Why did they never talk to me about anything important. Like cancer or death or sexual maturity?

Relationships? They just happen. Like autumn leaves. Like June in Pennsylvania.

No malice Alice

go ask.

The One Unforgivable Thing

Forgiveness is a given, not a decision.

Rev. Roy -- tip off was his "decision" to forgive me for naivete. Yet so relieved that I would not be tossed out of MCC for the article that that dumb shit reporter wrought up.

Had to do with handicap ADA stuff, of course. Everything did. It was Michelle's personal crusade.

A noble one, to be sure, but one that got distorted...like the real Crusades, with a few centuries' worth of 20/20 hindsight...they MEANT well.

There it is that road to hell. We all pave away every day we naive and meek inheriting the world by paving the road to hell with our good intentions. What does that mean? My rhetoric caboose is running ahead of the engine.

Caboose loose moose...I enjoy words. Language. I am a writer.

I enjoy colors and forms and consistancy of vision. I am a photographer.

I live to serve. I am a Virgo. I am a nurse.

But I'm nobody's mother. That's by choice. Though I've chosen to mother adults who can damn well take care of themselves or find some other mother to smother care for them. We helpless ones.

I will lose the spirit of this, and I will fail to read it.

Of all people, Anna. You, of all people judging, pre-judging your work as worthless before you even look at it. You can't tell when you are writing it. You'd have to stop and be all self-conscious and lose the flow...

Let it go for gods's sake, let it go...

I let it go.

I am a person capable of change. Before the Tower. Before disaster shoe-horns me into another situation I have to survive, not thrive in. I have choice. I am fortunate. I am not spitting on the shoes of death...though I may bitch-slap his silly face.

O. U. Again.

And again.

Until, like Groundhogs Day, we get it R I G H T. What did he get right? Heart opened? Became real? Got the babe? Who was Sleeping Beauty in this one?

No one is coming. Godot is here.

Where Am I Now?

I'd start from there but it's too pathetic. Now my computer is mucked up--dancing arrow. Joe says he can fix it. Joe thinks he can do anything if he just keeps smiling.

Barking Parrots

I was walking my cats (or they were walking me) and we passed by a passel of parrots.

They squawked, as parrots are wont to. Then they started...barking. I listened closer. Indeed, the parrots were imitating the yappy dogs that populate this neighborhood.

Next door live 2 little yappy dogs. I don't know what they are, but I suspect the notorious Pomchis, cross between 2 of the most obnoxious breeds ever created, making the Hybrid from Hell that bark incessantly next door.

I've thought of slipping them a little tainted meat. Or slamming their fuzzy little heads in with a hammer.

Even the parrots are taking up the tune. What next? Barking mockingbirds?

DISCLAIMER: No animals were harmed in the writing of this blog

You deal with pain by pretending it doesn't exist

What I didn't do with my English B.A.

I was accepted at Temple MFA and Penn State. Playwrighting, which was unusual because they don't usually take English BA's. They made an exception because I sent 2 versions of my play, the second a re-write. They liked that I was a good re-wrighter.

Even Mozart re-wrote. Despite Amadeaus which implies his music plopped out perfectly formed like well-formed stools. Well, no, not quite. Re-write.

I didn't go because I was afraid. I stayed home and worked for John Hancock Insurance 5 minutes up the road. Administrative assistant. Not that it wasn't good experience, but if I'd had any sort of guidance, I'd be anywhere else.

I had no guidance.

I've never had luck finding mentors. I've decided to mentor myself. Imperfect, harsh, but what else can I do?

The embolism...Sisyphian World...so it goes

When she almost died on Saint Patrick's day, I panicked and believed if I didn't carry her last name I'd be shut out of all ER's in her future, which I saw a lot of. I was still working, so I wasn't thinking about money. It never occurred to me I'd become disabled and unable to support myself in any style I chose.

I wasn't earning a lot as an RN in the Keys, but I knew I could go anywhere else and make a good living.

I'm still in Key West, struggling a bit...I do like to keep a prosperity consiousness. I go to Emmet Fox "Sermon on the Mount" meeting q Wednesday and I just went to Unity last Sunday. God, it was so Christian and God-ish. If that had been my first time I'd not have gone back.

It's mostly because I isolate and I need to do things to force myself to be with people or I vanish into my Kindle and am tolerably happy just reading 24/7, or dreaming myself into the settings of the books I'm reading. But that's not good for me in the long run.

Know yourself. I took a class in metaphysics and got a friend in the bargain. That's more important than any lesson, though Sylvia would say otherwise.

I can be disciplined. It's a matter of believing there is anything in this Sisyphian world worth getting intense about.

She cheated me out of her death. Idiot. Truly she was delusional at the end. VA shrink declared her mentally well, according to Michelle. I felt I was travelling down the rabbit hole every time I walked through those sliding glass doors.

The sound of her scooter...chills. I still hear something that sounds like it and my heart races.

What did I miss? How have I not served? What will I have to justify or make up for? Not that there was any making up for. No, with an NPD, you can never make up for. You are every horrible thing they see in their own dark souls and project out because they can't bear to look and see they are alone in their bitter hatefulness.

And you? You are codependent, or borderline/fragile (living with an NPD will make you that way.--There's a horrible book about Princess Diana that talks all about her alleged personality disorders. You live with the King to be and see... how he cut her and cut her...sounds very familiar, her story and mine. We have the same personality profile, I can't remember the name, the Idealist/Healer/etc...

Scary, really. No place in this world for such as us.

That's not quite true. There is a place. 6 feet under, with Sid Vicious. All my treasured suicides. I used to think dying by sticking your head in an oven was cooking your head. I'd only ever seen electric ovens. It was seeing Death of a Salesman that woke me up.

That and an insurance salesman I worked for who used to talk about "taking the gas pipe" when sales didn't go well. Oh, my first real job after college. Pathetic.

Personality Disorders: live with this

I met a guy in mourning from divorce. He said his wife was diagnosed as borderline. We clicked immediately.

My spouse was diagnosed as narcissistic personality disorder. Which means I married a monster, without the ability to empathize. NPD's can have a group of people they consider worthy of splashing bounty upon...Michelle's simpatico group grew smaller and smaller until it included only herself, really. I didn't understand why someone who'd been a social butterfly became so isolated.

Why someone in a 12-step program for decades actually disdained the very people who were in place to save her soul. It's sad really.

And hard to untangle... at some point I gained a voice. With much yanking on my arms to pull me out of my cave. That's the darkness I don't want to think about.

"You've lost weight" is the most common remark I get. No, not really. My clothes still fit the same. *takes clothes from washer into dryer except for Jams World dresses which will shrink just enough to feel snug*

Style. I never paid it any mind. Even as a 'tween. (Which wasn't a word when I was, in the early-mid 1970's) I developed an eye after Jr. High but by then it was too late. Overweight, acne, and hand-me-downs. I didn't even have a pair of blue jeans till I was 11 or so. My mother said I may as well go along with the fad now.

I am...

Nathamlin

I created an alternate personality on Flickr called Nathaniel Hamlin. Hamlin in honor of Amie who turned me on to Veganism. Nat because of Matt. Then after Nathaniel Hawthorne, with sister Charlotte and brother E.A. (Edgar Alan). EA committed suicide. May have sexually abused Nat. But not that much older and consensual as far as that goes.

Nat's mother is Mundy Gato's soulmate. Mundy is the character I created for my play about the Jonestown massacre. Mundy is sometimes in college and sometimes an adult in Key West. Lots of promise, now teaches high school. Sometimes he's written really cool poetry...why not? Yes, he's a famous poet but not a wealthy one. Divorces, drugs, no real money in writing poetry no matter how well-esteemed. Not unless branch out and do all sorts of marketing shit and workshops and performance art... he's as crushed by life as he was crushed by death as a young man who ran away the night of the Kool-Aid.

He wrote the note.

So he feels responsible for all the deaths in Jonestown, including his mother (always) and best friend, lover (sometimes), infant (sometimes)... sister...maybe.

Belinda is like Schrodinger's cat. Gato is her name too.

It's too hard to exolain

Very weird. Very scared.

Spinning Straw into Gold... how to write a memoir

You're lucky if you're a writer because even the worst shit is just material, fodder, gold. If you can spin it well.

Have to change the title. Sounds like I'm the transsexual. I'm not, I'm born female and like it that way. I never understood really the urge to be the opposite gender (AS IF...as if gender was so simple. There is no true opposite of any gender.

That was in Slaughterhouse 5 as well... I am Billy Pilgrim. There's a description of all the genders on Earth that we can't detect because they are in the 5th dimension. But all are necessary for the perpetuation of the species.

I was also reading about history based on DNA. There's a way to trace the female line mRNA or something and a way to trace the male like (that old fave Y chromasone) 

How do you tell a boy chromasone from a girl chromasone? You pull down its genes.

LOL. I speak LOL kitteh. I don't think I should write in that tongue. It is a raspy one. Will it go the way of Valley Girl talk? Do Valley Girls still talk Valley Girl talk?

I'm from the Valley. The Wyoming Valley which is not The Valley, nor is it in Wyoming. It's been called "The Valley With a Heart"...my GLBT friends from there (it's a great place to be FROM) re-dubbed it "The Valley Without a Brain". But there are mountains, small ones, like in Wales, which they think they were before the continents drifted apart.

Which is why so many Welsh settled there. Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania. You may have passed it on your way to someplace else. Inevitably, when I tell peeps where I'm from, if they've heard of it at all (twin city Scranton is the home of Edith Bunker's relatives and The Office) it's from reading it on an exit sign.

My dorm-mate at Cornell asked me if I lived in a white house. Yes, I replied, why? Because she'd passed Wilkes-Barre/Scranton on Rt 81 and every house she could see from the highway was white. I'd never thought about it. Aren't houses mostly white? No, in livelier places they paint houses all sorts of colors.

I'm still slapped back by the chronic trauma of growing up in a colorless place.

This memoir is not therapy, but it may serve that purpose. If not for me, maybe for you.

Books do make people unhappy. (Farenheit 451)

Nuns n Fun my memoir chapter 1

Chapter I

I am born again.

For no better reason than the guy offering was hawt and I was in no mood to argue. Beware, if it talks like a monk, acts like a monk, looks like a monk, to the nunnery with the relationship attempt.

Think about Abelard and Heloise. If you are a boy, think very hard about Abelard. (Castrated for knocking up his student Heloise.) If a girl, think how Heloise pined like forever, but that monk (balls-free, no mystery here) refused to be drawn into the romantic fairy tales.

Heloise named her baby Astrolabe. Cool. A science geek. He became a monk also, Heloise an abbess. So much for scarlet letters. And I'm sure a science geek could find plenty of like-minded companions in that nunnery.

Poor Ophelia. Straight girls just can't imagine how much FUN it can be to be a NUN.

Get thee to a nunnery? Dude, I'm there. I am sooo there.

I'd do Sister Betrille. (Ancient TV show about a nun with a hat so enormous she could fly. Sally Field--cute and nickel will get you massive career.) Not to denigrate Ms. Field's worthiness in receiving accolades fame fortune.

Wasn't it she who played Sybil? Gotta break gotta break gotta break glass. Now read it was highly fictionalized.

I'm not a nun. I have been diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. So maybe I'm a nun in a fugue state. But mostly I'm a crank.

I'm 50 years old and I had to take a class to figure out how to figure out who I am. I think because too many mes (plural of me) and I hit overload and tilt. Just when I think I know, I do something inconsistant. Anomolous. And other words I cannot spell.

I'm dyslexic with numbers. I have vast trouble with dichotomies: choices of one or the other. Yes or no. 0 or 1. Simple yet so hard. Left and right. They keep reversing then going back again.

I'm told I'm a character because of where Uranus sits on my chart. What is it about the word Uranus that elicits a giggle...I've heard all the puns n jokes yet or because of, in memorium of laughter past. Maybe how to keep a marriage alive.

Patterns. I leap then I look. Not because I'm brave or even stupid (though I can fake those).

There are things I dread doing. This is one of them. I push and push and I can't push myself anymore...

We create our worlds.

I created Nathamlin. Don't tell anyone.

It's all material. You're lucky if you're a writer because even the worst shit is just material, fodder, gold. If you can spin it well. Hey, I like that.