on Depression

I know why I like music so much: It makes me feel something.

Depression sucks all the color out of experiences. Depression is apathy, it is lethargic, it is inertia. In the grip of depression, I feel nothing. I feel no hate, no anger, no love, no pleasure. Nothing.

Music lends me emotions. I borrow them until I can feel my own. 

Depression has led me to allow a lot of abuse in my life. It kept me from leaving an emotionally abusive ex-husband. Eventually he left me. I filed for divorce two years after he said goodbye. Depression kept me from fighting that rapist; I was emotionally paralyzed, mentally separated from my body; nothing mattered. 

Depression has prohibited me from expressing emotion, because I had none to express.

Is emotion the primary source of human motivation? You'd think so if you could watch the reel of my life. I never accomplished much that I wanted to accomplish. My ambitions have been stymied by involuntary inertia.

Depression has kept me from laughing at my son's jokes. It has kept me from hugging my husband back when he comforts me. Later, these memories fuel the guilt-laden loneliness that precedes a new cycle of apathy. 

I understand the appeal of masochism: when your emotions are blank, physical pain is a blessing because it's reassuring to know you can still feel something. 

Depression is mental paralysis. 

in which my entire life changes

Been a while, eh?
A lot has happened.
As you might imagine.
But it has all happened within the past few days.

Turns out, I'm not as good a student as I've always thought I was.
I blame my mother.
She always told me I was a good student. I wasn't.
In grade school I was more interested in other things.
I did well in art class. My high school art teacher told me I was the only student to develop their own personal style. It was reminiscent of Edvard Munch, he said.
I liked band, too, and did well there, though I never practiced my instrument enough to excel. The excuse was that I couldn't take it home (I played mallet percussion) but really that wouldn't have mattered. I wasn't a practicer.
I aced most tests but I almost never did my homework.

I learned to do homework in college.

And now I'm back in college - grad school - which is why I haven't been here on the blog much. My brain has been filled with nuances of American History (those Pinkertons - whew!) and teasing out the valid data from an uninvolved psychology professor. It hasn't left much room for contemplation.

I still thought I was a good student until my Mom mailed me my old report cards. I don't know why she did that, but she did. Maybe she was cleaning out the attic. Anyway, now I remember all the "She could do better" and "doesn't turn in homework" comments.

And lately I've been leaning more toward creating (anything really) than writing reports.
It made me seriously reconsider grad school.

Something else has been happening. It's been in the works a good long time.

It's big:
I got my disability rating from the VA.

This changes everything. EVERY. THING.

I have medical care for life now.
Medical care for life.

And I have a retirement now.

I have a retirement.

I mean, holy shit.

I hadn't even realized I was concerned about that until the concern was resolved. Suddenly, I can do things with my life that don't involve a struggle. There will still be struggles. Like getting out of bed in the morning - that rating ain't for nothing, after all - but there will be at least some things that won't be a struggle.

I can stop trying to fit my broke ass into some sort of corporate-leads-to-retirement-income position and just fucking live.

...I don't even know what that would look like.

I have to think about this. 

bits of death, as remembrances

death writes
in tears
that dry

death remembers
with hands
that take

~

Every morning, I see the bones of Naanaa.
I have no picture of him,
not anymore,
but his purr still rumbles
and his paws still steal silent -
and acrobat dancing on heartstrings,
singing his joy in requiem.

~

When my soul wanders away again,
and night comes to take my vision,
I'll wait for daylight in your dreams.

Light my candle, dear,
and I'll wonder through your thoughts;
hold close my photos, dear,
and I'll see you in my eyes.

Someday you'll wander with me again,
when night falls on your vision -
we'll wait for daylight, you and me,
dreaming in the darkness.

~

To Naanaa,
whose bones still watch over me,
my sentinel kitty,
the hunter whose death still haunts me:
I see you
today and every day,
and I love you.

~
This post brought to you by witches in fiction 2015: death rites and remembrances.

rocks

What do you do when the rock that holds you above the water

only has room for you? 

Sorry child, you're all grown up - 

no room on the rock.

But look, I can reach out - 

I can throw small rocks

your way.

Build your own castle with them.

Just not here.

You can't stand here.

---

Written for the imaginary garden with real toads.
This has been a Flash Fiction 55. 

family: I love you

From my handfasting with Archer.
We were lucky to have Zoya Greene do the photography for us.
As you can tell, she's amazing.

This summer I went to two weddings.
One of them was my own.
The other was my cousin's.
Both of them were wonderful.

Yes, my mother's husband literally ruined (for me, my husband, and my son) the family reunion-type events that were to follow the cousin's wedding, by throwing a temper tantrum about my style of hospitality. I and my small family of three were excluded from further festivities. But he's my mother's husband, her rock, so I'm focusing on what I've learned from the experience: I'm ready for my family to start acting like the people I believed they were when I was a child. And, they are not ready. And finally: I still love them. So I'll take my lessons and move on.

I'm not really, completely moved on yet, but I'm working on it.
I have to. If I don't move forward, the depression will kill me.
And my small family isn't ready for me to go yet.

This is me, moving on.
With my small family.
And yes, with my mother.
I don't know, yet, what the mechanics of ignoring her husband's existence will look like.
But I'm giving it my best shot.

Because if I were to pay attention
- especially to his power over my place in my big family -
the depression might kill me.
And I still have work to do.
A child to raise.
A child who will always find sanctuary with me, regardless of any other human being in the world.

Moving on.
Always, moving on. 

[book review] Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy: Advice and Confessions on Writing, Love, and Cannibals

Dinty W. Moore's Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy: Advice and Confessions on Writing, Love, and Cannibals is not really an advice book. Nor is it really about love or cannibals, although there is advice in there to be gleaned, and he does mention both love and cannibals. He also talks a lot about Michel de Montaigne, an essayist Dinty seems to admire. It's really a string of confessions about writing and living as a writer, and it's really very funny. It's also quite short, and the high ratio of illustrations mean you're turning pages rather more rapidly than usual.

The book has an index, which I only mention because it helped me just now, when I couldn't remember how to spell Michel de Montaigne, but I'm not sure why it's there, except as a joke. Maybe it's a joke. 

More on this later. 

[book review] Viper Wine

"Venetia Stanley was the great beauty of her day, so dazzling she inspired Ben Jonson to poetry and Van Dyck to painting. But now she is married, the adoration to which she has become accustomed has curdled to scrutiny, and she fears her powers are waning. Her devoted husband, Sir Kenelm Digby—explorer, diplomat, philosopher, alchemist— refuses to prepare a beauty tonic for her, insisting on her continued perfection.

Venetia, growing desperate, secretly engages an apothecary to sell her “viper wine”—a strange potion said to bolster the blood and invigorate the skin.  The results are instant, glorious, and addictive, and soon the ladies of the court of Charles I are looking unnaturally youthful. But there is a terrible price to be paid, as science clashes with magic, puritans rebel against the decadent monarchy, and England slides into civil war.

Based on real events and written with anachronistic verve, Viper Wine is an intoxicating brew of love, longing and vanity, where the 17th and 21st centuries mix and mingle in the most enchanting and mind-bending ways."

This book has the potential to address the ways vanity and the exultation of youth corrupt the human mind and rot our social structures from inside the individuals. - 12 May 2015



Clearly, it took me a loooooong time to get through halfway through this book.
I'm still not done with it, really. I've written my review based on what I've read so far, and I feel free now to read it at a more leisurely pace.

More leisurely than taking two months to read 200 75 pages? Yes.

I haven't been able to read much this summer, and this book takes more energy than I've had anyway. It's not for the lighthearted.

You may have noticed that I haven't written much either.

I took a hiatus from my computer.

I'm probably back. Mostly.

~~~

My review of Viper Wine by Hermione Eyre follows:

My first thought, after reading the description of the book, was that Viper Wine had the potential to make a powerful statement about the social and psychological damage done by the beauty standard. The false value of aesthetic beauty, the judgment of worth by beauty, the patriarchal grading of women by their relative beauty, the competition that arises and demands unnatural measures to achieve "beauty" - all of these damage ourselves and our society, and this book could show us how.

 I looked at the table of contents. The chapter titles sounded like short stories ("A Discourse Between Brothers") or poems ("Moonbeams Are Cold and Moist"). The include modern pop culture references ("Fame" and "Yellow Submarine"). Together, they hinted at a poetic, ornate, satirically flowery style of writing. They were right.

 There is a prologue, and Epilogue, and 38 chapters. There are about 400 pages of text. Large pages. There is also a Bibliography (selected), and a list of illustrations. This surprised me. I mean, yeah, it says it's based on real events, but that phrase gets tossed about quite a lot with very little research to back it up. Not so in this case. Perhaps it's because this novel, this fictionalization, was written by a journalist. But frankly, calling Hermione Eyre (surely that's a pen name?) a journalist after reading any of this book at all, feels so incomplete as to be false. This woman is an Author. She has crafted what is perhaps a masterpiece.

 I took a peek at the author photo on the back flap, curious about the face that made Viper Wine. The woman in the photo challenges the viewer and does not seem above leaping out of the photo for a fist fight - if only to place bets on the winner.

 I wondered, before beginning the journey that has been Reading The Book, whether there could be a connection between the ornate writing style and the theme of social beauty concepts, especially in the damage those concepts do; is the writing style another layer of satire? Now that I'm halfway into the book, I feel it must be intentional. Whatever the case, it works.

 Seriously, don't let the ornate style turn you away before giving this book a try. It isn't over the top, and somehow it manages to not be pretentious. The story is woven by its prose. Every thread is important. Every word addresses the characters in the most human terms and stabs at the modern feminist's foes. The text describes the patriarchy without subscribing to it. If nothing else, this story is a feminist victory.

In the end, I ranked this book at four stars instead of five only because it is not broadly accessible; the average reader will have difficulty with some of the style devices - both the overall ornateness and the insertion of radio static (no really; I don't know how else to describe it), which is original and interesting, but hard to 'get' at first. 

(I ranked the back cover copy fairly low because books that only list their praise on the back annoy me. Give me a reason to open it, not sound bites.)