I enjoy my insomnia. I know I could take the Saphris and go to sleep, but I enjoy the process of self-discovery that being up late on the computer brings me.  It is so dark, so quiet, but the inner self seems alive with the hum of electronics and psychic energy.  It is the perfect time for yoga, art, writing or witchcraft, all best practiced alone.

I am concentrating and working so hard yet still I feel it is not enough.  I stop for a moment, I look at the screen and I see a white corsage pinned on a handmade dress. I see moments of cinematic beauty. And I am reminded that there are reasons to stay here.

Perhaps a nice yoga session while I watch the Virgin Suicides and process these things. Then back to revision from 7pm-11pm.  Camp NaNoWriMo is coming along. I am getting the work done as I need to get done.  the novel is much improved.  it is just a lot of time, but I am happy to put in the work.

My boyfriend teases me with the story of the Gamer who never finishes his game.  I want to finish this book at some point, hopefully soon. I have committed to emailing Writ Large whatever I have on August 4th.  From that point I will wait.  And put in all the time I can reasonably commit to until then.

Again? Again.

How much self-expression is enough self-expression?  I have been doing this blog since 2006 and it is just such a comfortable space, so I continue.

Reopened the doors, so to speak.  A lot has happened.  Katie committed suicide on October 15, 2012. i went to detox and rehab and got sober from alcohol.  I started consuming medical marihuana as a harm reduction measure in February 2013. It helps with the PTSD and anxiety.

Part of getting sober involved committing to honesty and full disclosure. Why lock up this blog? i have nothing to hide anymore. I commit myself to the truth. This is a record of what has past. Records are valuable.

Perhaps I will be posting more as the spirit moves me, but I need to put on makeup, go to the Dispensary and do a spell at high noon.  I've gotten quite into witchcraft. It always works.

This blog is a bit of a relic, but shaken off and stirred it stands, to post in again. I'm still on disability, so I've got a lot of free time.

I'm doing Camp NaNoWriMo with the Scaffolding manuscript.  It balloons.  A revision, but I must read through it again.  Later.  Another day.

For now, to live!

I am calming, now, I am calming.  I recieved an iphone for Christmas and it has a white noise app whose "ocean waves" setting has the most amazing ability to calm me.  I had a bit of a flashback today.  A scarcity flashback.  I have been broke since Christmas, waiting for a handout from my parents, broker still from some car repairs due to gang vandalism.  Very frightening, a major gang tagged my car and now when I go to the [location redacted] I'm afraid I'm going to get my hand chopped off with a machete by the {name redacted}. (this is how scared I am)

Tonight Katie ordered Thai food and as we were eating I had a flashback to the several periods when I had no reliable source of food and no food stamps and had to eat each meal as if it was my last and began to eat the Thai food as if in a panic of starvation.  Now, I am not starving.  I eat one or two meals a day but that is customary, that is normal, coffee and alcohol help it along.  I didn't leave enough for Katie and she was hurt, she felt something was wrong, she felt my disquietude.  Now I am drinking her last beer as well, my greed for fear of deprivation, in engulfs magnitudes.

The waves, how calming.  Last night I listened to them for an hour. I lay in bed and imagined I was on a boat the size of my bed floating on gentle swells, over the sea.  Burial at sea or rather memories of our honeymoon in the cabana on the Caribbean Sea, the ocean outside the window, or childhood camping by streams, my college dorm by river, our home now so recently by a lake.  Before dredging. Before expulsion.  I have been trying to dredge why this sound is so calming, where the other white noise sounds are not as soothing.

I just tried to go to bed, laid down next to sleeping Katie in the dark room, and found myself hallucinating so much it was impossible to relax. Tin toys with heads of animals, arms whirling, one head birthing another from the mouth.  Spiders, Santa in his sleigh, candy canes, more spiders, writhing punctuation marks, it went on.  I got up and went back to the couch, the light, the comfort of solid objects.  Now I'm realizing I left my glasses in there, but I'm nervous about going back in.  My vision is still off, not just from missing glasses, the furniture bulges. Warm red static lines the ceiling like mold.  It grows. I try not to look at anything for too long.  I try not to look too much or too hard.  I try to look at the screen, at the keyboard, at my hands typing.  I type trying when I mean to type typing. 

I am trying.  I am trying. I am trying to lead a normal life.  I am trying not to fail Katie.  I am trying not to fail my parents more than I already have.  I am trying to make Christmas magical and fun.  I am trying to be supportive and domestic. I am trying to edit my book, though it is going slowly.

Things I am not trying to do: lose weight, stop drinking.

 I'm just trying to hold onto sanity, to keep the people around me happy, to amuse myself, to feed the cat and bunny every day, to take all my pills in the right order every day.  To budget my funds so that they last the month.

My body, it clenches and aches. I don't know if this is helping, but it beats lying there in the dark staring at the inside of my mind.

Oh, I feel sick.  Anxious, up at 2:25 am and likely coming down with something as Katie is very ill.  I can't sleep.  Something feels wrong.  My medication has all been taken as usual, the stockings are hung, the tree is up, the dishes are done.  My back is kinked in a million places, there's $88.63 in my checking account, I told Katie tonight I wouldn't be able to buy her Christmas presents until the 14th when my Disability check came in and then felt really, really terrible.

I'm still feeling terrible.  I shouldn't have said anything.  I have five days to make it through.  There's a parking ticket and I need to buy contact lenses, but once I do that I want to get her some lovely little things.  A stocking full of treats.  I already ordered the pocket watch.  I'm kicking myself for not taking care of some of this last month when I had money, but it went quickly last month, too.

The cat is kicking some plastic around.  I'm so tired yet still I can't sleep. With my luck I'll be running out of Ativan on Christmas day, so I can't take that now.  I can wait until early morning and take my morning medication I suppose.

My nose is stuffed up, I think it's the first sign I'm getting Katie's cold.

Gah.  I'm sick.  Bought the Day/Night Jumbo Combo pack of cold medicine at CVS, and while it's ushering me through the days and nights with orange and blue capsules I'm still feeling the flu.   And it doesn't feel good.  Slowing me down.  Although I"m up to 49,423 words, only 577 until I win the challenge, I know I'll need more than that to finish the novel.  It may be more like 60,000. I'm sick and I'm feeling flu-ish and weak and trying to get Katie to pull her own weight a little bit more, here, with regards to household chores.  She has to go to work right now, but with my prodding I managed to get her to feed the animals and take out the trash.  Something like the dishes...oh, there would have been tears.

I'm drinking honey whiskey and listening to Rain Dogs. It's been raining on and off. The cat fiddles with purple paper on the floor, a grocery list: whiskey, tp, soda water, lemons.  Katie is at work.

That Aphogee treatment I did to my hair was remarkably helpful, it really
made my hair look and act like real hair, instead of straw putty.

In which my hair is much improved.

I'm liking it.  Not sure what else I have to say here, except that the fall, my cold, the whiskey, the rain, the Tom Waits, it is all very all of a same thing that is pleasing, and reminds me of Portland, and space heaters, and cold feet sticking out of blankets, and covering coughs with wine.

In a moment of drunken oversharing I contemplated moving this stuff to bruises like blue roses.  No no no absolutely no.  I have finally achieved internet privacy.  I must keep it that way.  If it's not pulp novels it can be something else, but it must stay impersonal.

I really need to watch myself when I'm drunk and on the internet.  The over-share factor is exponential.

Just chugged my wine as the gnats were gathering.  I am that person who will fish a gnat out of a glass of red wine and keep drinking.  I am exactly that person.  Tonight I believe we are going to bleach my roots.  I had a lovely day with Katie in Burbank, bought some cute thigh high knit socks for winter sexiness.

Oh, how I hate gnat season.  Looking back over old entries I can see that gnats are fall thing. An October-November thing, yes.  Tiny bastards.

So the current strategy is trying to reinvigorate the morning pages practice by doing it on blogspot.  Translation: more blather here, less blather there.  There being my green notebook, with its swirly pattern so reminiscent of a pot dispensary.

I am up to 44,000 words on NaNoWriMo.  Most of what I have had been written before, I am mainly filling things in and reorganizing.  It is exhilarating to think that this novel could be done, soon, as well.  This is the one, I think, with which I will seek an agent.  I think I am finally ready.  People have told me it's timely, marketable.  I hope the protagonist is not too alienating, as it is also a schizophrenia memoir.  Also an alcoholism memoir.  But, again, it's about seeking one's truth and telling it.  The gay marriage plot element, that is it's most timely element.  And the fact that for Allison, who is "othered" by her illness and her past, marriage and love bring her into a better place.

I think it might going to be longer than 50,000.  But I'm not sure, and word count and page count are less important to me than telling the story effectively.  I think I might spend more of the month focusing on revisions, I hope to have my rough draft by next week.  Being as I'm ending it at Thanksgiving, I feel like this is possible.

Hopefully I won't have another breakdown.  Oh God, I hope not.  Katie wonders why I get so compulsive when I am having an especially productive period, and I tell her, it is because I go for long periods when I can do nothing, and then when I can write, I feel I must wring every bit of productivity out of it, the whole "strike while the iron is hot" bit.  And then I usually totally overdo it and write for 20 hours.  But that's fine with me.  Lost sleep and caffeine excess, all okay by me.

Maybe it's time to start the day's work.

So I started doing NaNoWriMo.  All of a sudden, Katie said, "Let's do it, let's just do it!"  And then I made a pot of coffee and launched into a twelve hour writing sprint, while she diddled around and did not.  Then I stayed up till 11 am and wrote so much and she felt like I'd left her behind, got sad, but I had to do it, I had so much writing to do.  We reconnected today, had a good dinner, great sex, and now she's asleep and I'm with the computer again.  I should get back to the novel.  I feel like I'm cheating on it.

Big news.  I just googled myself as I do routinely, mainly to check if that pesky profile had been taken down, which it had, and found that Jet Set Desolate's distribution had increased a great deal.  It was selling at Tower Books, Barnes & Noble, and Abebooks, as well as Amazon where it had been listed previously.  I was euphoric.  Giddily running around the living room waving my hands squealing.  Distribution is something I have wanted for so long, and by the looks of the release date they did a second printing of it.  I was worried it was going to be remaindered, I am so glad it is not.  It seems to be a very recent development, I wonder if it is selling in the brick and mortar stores, or just online.

I wonder what I should do now.  It's after midnight, only slightly.  I'm not really tired, and there's no alcohol in the house.  I wish I was participating in NaNoWriMo, and I don't really know why I'm not, I guess because since there was already writing done in my novel I read that that disqualified me...but more so because I've been having kind of a tough time lately and already had to shelve the Annenberg application.  I feel like I don't want to push myself right now, I was at the point of breakdown for much of the last two weeks and am only very recently coming into a place of healing with Katie, and a place of fewer hallucinations.  The symptoms wax and wane, they are sometimes very severe and sometimes less severe.  I am going in and out all of the time.  Having only very recently come back into a pleasant place, it's very tenuous, and just household chores and dinner-making is about all I can handle right now. I don't want to overload myself and end up sick and insane again, breaking down.

It's November 1st, 2011, almost exactly a year since I was blogging regularly.  I had a dream last night about this blog, that made me realize that I was glad it still existed out there in the internet ether, out there floating in space. I woke up on the couch, where I tend to move post-meds, and thought about the prospect of using the blog as somewhat of an online diary the way Katie uses her livejournal.  Then at some point if I feel like opening it to other readers I can, or I can leave it closed for as long as necessary.

I feel that at the moment I have achieved the most internet privacy I have really ever had since before the book came out and I became someone who slathered themselves all over the internet.  There was so much embarrassing stuff I had to delete, correct, reorganize.  I think at this point, once that one listing is deleted, I will have things in order.  They really should teach classes on the proper use of social media, and I think they do now, but I being Gen X and all, have been doing it wrong for quite a while.

There is something very nice and satisfying about typing like this, as opposed to messy notebooks.  Perhaps.  I will think about it.

And here is a picture or two from Halloween:

I'm Courtney Love, y'all

Katie represents the lollypop guild

And yet, strangely, we're back again.  Back and not back.  This is still locked.  I'm dancing around the idea of closing down all of my internet exposures.  The mystery or glamour or allure of spilling my guts on a creepily epic level....has died down with the prospect of wanting to advance my writing career and not look like a total wingnut.  I'm aware I am a wingnut, but I can cook, dammit!  I'm sort of a domestic savant.  I hate the phrase idiot savant, I am not an idiot, but when I'm not delusional or drunk I make a mean scallop brown butter linguine.

I don't think that redeems me on anyone's terms, but I'm drinking now, and made some stuffed portobellos earlier.  Retreating from the internet is an active process now.  I will keep this blog, it is an artifact to me, a record, but I will probably keep it locked for a long time to come.  You see, my ambition gets in the way.  I want things.  I want an agent.  I want Featherless to be well-respected and allowed to exist, I don't want potential Featherless readers to  be scared away by my mutterings. A separation of the private and public is so, so essential.

I'm aware that I have a functional impairment, I am schizoaffective, but I am good at certain things.  I work hard to keep them going.  Even tonight, when the voices were telling me not to go outside, that there was danger outside, I went and got Katie her alka-seltzer from Rite-Aid.  Fetching medicine isn't one of the things I tell myself I'm good at, but I was trying to push past the delusions.

 What does redeem me from the damning status of mentally ill disabled.  Does anything?  Do I need to be redeemed, I enjoy the stipend and the freedom, as well as having a free pass to act like I"m 22 for the rest of my life.  The problem is I'm a greedy monster, I want to accomplish things and build that stupid CV and publish more, and thus, and thus, I need to not be quite so public about my mental issues.

And...we're back.

I had to take a little blogging vacation, I was getting too paranoid about the over-exposure of personal information on the internet, the swarm and strange omniscient feeling of a thousand staring eyes.  Even if no one is watching at all, I installed a statcounter (wave, it can see you, too) and realized only my dear few read this thing anyway.  But, for a few months there, I really had to close up the slats and batten down the hatches.  Pardon the terrible metaphors.  But I missed blogging.  I'm back.

Back, and, then, to what?  What has changed?  It's January.   I last wrote in October.  Katie and I are still planning our wedding, which draws ever closer.  A few holidays happened...yes.  I grew a bit disillusioned with tumblr, which seems so image-based and less tolerant of lengthy text posts.  I separated my personal from my professional tumblr and found both to be less fun. I think part of the frission of disclosure, the glamour of vamping before the invisible eye of the computer, was that it was so scandalously labeled with my full name.  Heavens.  I'm unemployable for sure.  And, well, still unemployed.

The smell of Katie's pumpkin pie is drifting in to me as I try to solve this damnable writer's block that has taken over the last three weeks.  No, I'm never too blocked to blog, apparently.  Blogging takes a form like vomit that flows over, impetuous, sudden, impertinent or plodding, either way it flows and then its gone.  And as I'm speaking to the void I don't usually apologize, though I will this time, for the gross metaphor.

It's almost Halloween, and the memetard lays ready for Internet suit-ed-ness.  I am somehow less excited about the holiday than I used to be, but this is usual, this is understandable.  Turning 34 - I always want to round it off to 35 - yet I cannot yet.  Why am I so eager to just be 35 and be done with it.  One is never done.  Not until death.  I am not eager for that.

What I am eager for is the pumpkin pie, the innards of our jack-o-lantards, pureed, spiced, poured in hand-pressed crust and baked.  I can smell it in the oven and I am hungry.  The pumpkin's carved met a grosser fate.  They were two.  They were carved with much enthusiasm about a week ago, then put on the porch as is traditional.  Then it rained.  For days.  They filled with mold and bugs and leprous spots of white grizzed fuzz.  Both were quickly dispatched to the trash. Ruined before Halloween, they didn't last to see the night.

Nevada, as a lion

The cat, now, the cat always get forced into costumes.  We like to do holidays thoroughly. Nevada, in her cooperative kitten way, goes along with us with a sullen meow, knowing there are treats ahead if she just tolerates the lion costume (the santa suit, the birthday dress).  We are terrible people.

The marine layer thickens.  I spent all afternoon working on my memetard, the unitard portion of my internet Halloween costume.  I am going as the internet, and, as such, I am going to be covered in memes.  Iron-on.  Then draped with cords from Giblets' various nibblings, I feel it should be fairly amusing.

Other than that, bah.  It's a gray day.  I have lifted out of my spate of hysterical depression, and am currently just bored and apathetic, far preferable, I think.  I went to the orientation for my new tutoring job, and it seemed fairly interesting.  The hardest part is definitely going to be getting all of the paperwork right. It is strange shifting out of not working for three years into working, even part time.  There is a lot of fear involved, there is a lot of apprehension, there are a lot of irrational terrors to work through.

There are pills to deal with that.  There is also therapy, which I am now in, thankfully.

 It is grey outside.   The gnats swirl.  There were so many gnats on our toothbrushes day after day, week after week, that Katie broke down and sprayed them with RAID, and threw them away.   I did not mind.  It was time.

The wind has shifted, it's raining now.  A cold marine layer and the air conditioner seems useless as a dinosaur.  Last night's Featherless was much fun, if sparsely attended.  And the changes, so many changes.  I got a tutoring job, and had an interview for a second part-time job today.  The second job (Starbucks) I'm not sure if I'll get, but I'm feeling hopeful all the same.

Nevertheless, at this exact moment my stomach is empty and I feel too tired and listless to cook anything or do anything about dinner.  I'm drinking coffee and somehow that seems like enough.  Tonight is Wordlab, and for the first time I'm not bringing anything in, I've just had the sort of week where writing was not happening.  The amnesia novel is about three chapters now, and I haven't had time to work on it for a couple of weeks.  I've been racing around getting a TB test, putting my resume in order, getting all the bits and pieces together for my tutoring orientation, etc..

That and practicing for featherless.  I so wish more people had been there, each person that read, Mila, Diane, was their own sort of amazing.  I was ok, I did my usual over-dramatic shtick, but people laughed, and they seemed to dig the listing of potential addictions at the end.  "tobacco, orgasms, the gym, benzodiazepines and celebrity gossip."

in which I spill my guts

The rain is conspiring to keep me tired and depressed, I think.  I should be elated right now, with all of these positive changes, but instead I feel sort of blah, sort of meh.  That's okay, maybe tonight's class will re-inspire me.

Sitting here on a Sunday morning, 9:45 and the caffeine and Ativan are warring in my stomach.  One up, the other down, and I'm still trying to wake up.  I went to Stephen's birthday party last night.  By day we sat by the Los Feliz fountain and watched four weddings and two quincanieras pop and rustle about.  Taking photos, floundering along the slick grass.  Three of the weddings had purple bridesmaids, in one bride was quite lovely, the other two, less so.  I didn't look at the men.

That night we sat on the wide porch of his "frottage cottage" and drank Tecate by the light of Jesus, Mary, and St. Jude who Stephen thought was Judas.  He was so amused that there would be a Judas candle, and we were so sad to tell him, no, it is not Judas.

I woke up early, as I tend to do, fed the cat, fed the rabbit, made coffee, checked email, facebook, tumblr, took pills, now it's almost ten.  At ten I often call Omar.  I have a certain rhythm to my mornings.  Free time management you must install routines or flail about, lost.

The book I am writing has a lot of mornings that begin and then recess into memory.  There is a lot of zig-zagging between memory and the present.  I am drawing formally from Mary Gaitskill's Veronica, one of my favorite books.  We'll see how it turns out.

With that said: commence an actual post

I'm taking a class called Wordlab at Wordspace, and it's really helping me get motivated on the novel...aie, the novel that's been floating about in various forms for about six month now, since first conceptualized last November.  Starting from scratch was the right thing to do.  The punk novella that was supposed to be the first part is cheerily moving on on it's own, a small press (hush hush, won't say who) is interested, I must come up with a revised draft to show the editor.  He thought of a title for it, Scaffolding, which I like very much.

The L.A. Novel that I'm working on now, I'm about...maybe three chapters into it.  It's, as usually, flagrantly autobiographical.  I've gotten so used to spilling my guts by now that it's just like, "typey typey herpes typey typey taking shots of triple sec type bum piss" and etc...It has no title as of yet, and I just changed the main characters name to Ginger. 

But Wordlab, it's been great help so far.  It motivated me to turn out ten more pages for class tonight, which I'm  nervous about presenting, but sort of excited at the same time.

And Featherless.  Right now I am waiting to hear back from three amazing writers, and I am so hoping that all three of them will say yes.  We are trying to get our booking taken care of farther in advance, thus.  Monthly it becomes a rapidly turning wheel, one into another, one stops and the next begins. 

I turn 34 in ten days.  My, I'm getting old.  I still have no job.  I have been floating along this summer on a miasma of SSDI payments, food stamps, careful budgeting and the odd sold book here and there.  I am thinking of trying the ticket to work program once Katie and I are married and the chaos of wedding planning and dual book revisions/writing/Featherless has died down a bit.