not my planet

I keep wondering why I have a blog when I put most of my everyday accounts of everyday on my LiveJournal but this one was supposed to be for something more organized and it has turned out less so. Occasionally I think of a rant I might want to write and then I think to myself oh that would be way too much trouble and so there goes another day when I put nothing on my blog.

Well this afternoon I wrote something and because it is close to bedtime I don’t have the energy for making a recording of it so you all are going to have to imagine my intonation on this one. Reading it through a few times will probably help you to decide where the commas would be if I deigned to use them which I rarely do because I do not like telling people when they should pause. Obviously the sentence needs to end so I’ve retained periods but even there I sometimes leave them out because two thoughts go together and again I do not feel the need for a semicolon to announce New Thought Now as it seems obvious enough to me.

So here is an entry. I would like to say that I am going to try to do this more often and of course I am but I cannot even begin to predict whether I will actually do so. Too many variables. I had a name for this when I started writing it but I forgot to write down the name and now I have forgotten it. It started with an “S” and I believe it was only one word. Anyone who would like to suggest something feel free.

And thus:

~~~~~~~

You ever have one of those mornings you wake up before sunrise and you already know the day is going to be too bright and too warm and one whole side of your body is aching because every time you sleep in your bed now whichever side you slept on for the past x hours wakes up in pain be it the left right or backsides. You can’t even drink your coffee without taking your bupe first because you are a little sick but you can’t tell if it’s because you didn’t eat enough yesterday or because you’re, you know, sick, so you let the good pills melt under your tongue and you’re careful not to swallow and they take forever partly because you are always dehydrated and partly because you are on such a large dose and partly because drugs always do something unusual when they enter your body in particular.

Once the bupe is melted you can drink your coffee which is cold now but that is fine as the first hint of day is already impressing you with its mildness and somewhere over the city you hear a small single-engine aircraft and right then your gut twists up just enough so you can feel it but not enough that anything you can do will untwist it. You go about your morning you have some errands to run groceries to buy bills to mail and maybe you could use a new hat but you can’t find a hat that suits you so you buy some more socks because you’ve taken a liking to a completely different kind and it will take some time to collect enough to last from one laundry day to the next and you try to remember the last time you did laundry but you can’t reckon it at all. Was it last summer? Or did you do laundry in the fall? I don’t think I did.

Last night for about a minute the objects that surround you closely in your room keeping you safe from the outside took a step back and looked unfamiliar not unfamiliar enough to send you into a panic but unfamiliar enough to make you tilt your head. You’re on your thirty-hour circadian rhythm and tomorrow is a daylight day that is today is a daylight day the day that is too warm and too bright and in the morning you heard that small airplane and it reminds you of things you cannot say or rather things you have already said and do not feel like saying again heat humidity and afternoons trying to fend off advances and it is not clear what the connection between the small aircraft and those things are except that there were lots of them back then it seems or was it his obsession with them that made you think so.

He got to work with airplanes but you never could decide what you wanted to work on much less work with and it turns out there is no work put together in such a way that you can do it and you wonder whether any other of his passions are still indulging him but you have to stop because it makes you feel like you are supposed to come to someone’s rescue if there is someone back there still needing rescue. If it were any other family you’d say oh they’re watching and not letting anything happen but they were watching both of you and look what happened.

But so you get up thinking that it will be another day like other days but after the airplane flies over you notice the objects surrounding you taking another step back and the day becomes like another kind of day as familiar as the day you were expecting but older by far like so old you cannot place a beginning date on it older than time which to you is only a little less than 50 years old at this point before that the same oblivion that awaits you the same immersion and dissolution or that is not the same but another configuration in which you do not figure as anybody anyone would recognize.

I aim to be dead long before I die but still moving in fact moving so fast I am as transparent as a blur. Life I’ll say it again once more lines itself up with and runs alongside that which is not its reverse but its twin the same only a little different that difference just enough to matter or to make matters not worse but worsted or basted or stitched together skin reaching into its own decomposition and growing together with it.

I know few Christians who do not fear death. I should qualify Christians with Conservative or maybe I should just say my mom fears death more than any other saved soul I have ever met. Her heavenly home is already built and lit and polished and awaiting her whereas mine is uncertain or I should say it consists of the internal consistency of what’s uncertain where nothing survives but the question of what now or what next and not to suggest that I have achieved some superior understanding of understanding I have achieved only less and less understanding the more I have come to know but that last step into whatever no longer frightens me particularly. It seems unthinkable naturally but that is only because it is. Where thought stops there is no imagining a what now or what next and that is impossible to understand or comprehend so the only reasonable response is to give up knowing.

When the sun shines down finally swinging over to the west as it does implacably every day around this time is when what you most cannot say presses itself mute and suffocating. Because you wish to be concrete you think to mention the bed or the blue curtains or the way that room in particular hung over the northeast corner of the house precariously because as I said storms come from the southwest and so you want to be under the southwestern wall as they are more likely to hop over you and take that bedroom right off the opposite side of the house. We lived on the side of a hill not the very top but on a low ridge on the side of a larger hill but there were no hills in front of us that is none close by to the west where I thought we needed one.

One night the wind blew so hard it started to roar and we who thought we would always know and have time to head down to the basement were caught listening in paralyzed wonder at how much louder it might get before dying down.

What is there to tell in a story and to whom does one tell it. You could make a list but there seems little point in explaining it point by point this is not an exposé. Another engine sounds somehere on the network of streets in which you now live encircled by motorized traffic how could you have chosen this for yourself the internal combustion engine was his fetish and now you must listen to them all thirty hours. Mostly they blend together into a pleasant rushing hum but ever so often someone finds it necessary to show off their skill at defeating the purpose of a muffler and if it only makes you think of rednecks and beer you get off lucky.

They’d kill you if they knew you but if that’s it then they are relatively harmless. There is no such thing as worse than death because death is not the worst thing we can imagine we only think it is because we cannot imagine it at all and somehow that makes it terrible. Nothing is worse than death not because death is the worst of all things but because the comparison is without sense. What makes sense or what remains barely intelligible in the face of tremendous pain is that life can bear atrocities and keep going. To experience a fate worse than death means only to have to take on at full intensity the capacity of life for suffering. That there are infinite ways to suffer and infinite variations and gradations of pain—

I was born without endorphins. This is not strictly true or rather it has not been medically established but my hunch is that some level of some one or other of them is not what it would optimally be. I realize this is to claim that my pain is worse than yours but that is not the point at all it is that I do not understand why everyone is not screaming. Why are you not screaming. Very few do and most of them are very young. I am told I screamed a lot and was a “fussy” baby. I think that meant I annoyed my parents with my susceptibility to discomfort. As an infant I was allowed to convulse.

You’d think, this many words in, that you could have named it by now but that is the heck of it it won’t be named because the only things I could say about it would be insufferably mundane he put his thing there and asked me to do this other thing that I did not want to do and I said no many times but he badgered me as many times as I would say no plus the one time I would finally give in.

This happened repeatedly.

See what I mean? There is nothing there about single engine airplanes and their low whine and objects receding or the time and the place getting lost inside of the labyrinth where I try to hunt down what pricks.

It was not just the physical discomfort or the shame but the continual battering at my puny defenses and he certainly was not the only one and his way was not the only way in which it was done.

Have I listed my diagnoses lately? Someone on the Internet has asserted that many psychiatric diagnoses are subsumed by PTSD. If that is true then the only diagnoses leftover from all I have written on my records would be Complex PTSD if it were yet diagnosable overlaying everything else only with Psychotic Features still sticking out thus making me a case of Complex PTSD with Psychotic Features. Everything else disappears viewed through the lens of this possible information for what is information but possible information when one is not sure yet whether it states the case exactly. Left out also is the question am I on the Autism spectrum but that question has been tabled until such time as I can afford to ask it privately. Until then I am simply going to assume that I am.

I hear sounds that few others hear. I have physical sensations that few others have. I only like the sun in the wintertime when it is low and scattered not only because it is less bright but because it signals cool air and it causes colors to floresce. At least, I see them floresce. This happens almost every evening as well up to a certain amount of cloud cover.

I forgot the Opiate Dependency. I can never remember that it is considered pathological.

If I keep writing the engines will stop.

Right?

4 thoughts on “not my planet”

  1. i don’t know why we aren’t all screaming, either. srsly. in fear, if not in pain. well, not all the time, but sometimes.

    it’s odd that your mother so fears death. a certain tv evangelist i used to watch (though i’d rather not admit to it) once said, wrt an airplane flight so turbulent that the plane could’ve gone down easily, “let ‘er rip!” he was ready to go home to Jesus! i’ve been on a flight like that and did not react like him, but still, that seems at least consistent with his fundamentalist thinking. yearning for that mansion in the sky, wot?

  2. very beautifully crafted and compelling poetry, erik. the ideas here flow together in a very powerful way. thanks for sharing this.

  3. @daisy: Yeah my Mom is very afraid of anything that might cause sickness or death. I don’t know if she realizes it but it’s the vulnerable spot of her armor as a Christian soldier! Her argument against my getting any surgeries for transition: I might pick up a staph infection at the hospital.

    a) Rare.
    b) Treatable.
    c) Can’t let fear of whatever dictate one’s life.

    But I still don’t know why we aren’t all screaming. Especially in airplanes!

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