I'm whipped today. Just whipped. I waited around most of the morning to find out if I was being laid off or not. To my utter dismay, I found out not only am I not being laid off, but I am expected to justify every single minute of my day. I just don't think I want my job enough to do that. I mean, I need my job, and it would be nice to keep it long enough to get my hysterectomy... but this is going to get ridiculous.
I used to be a gore-whore. If it was sick, twisted, depraved and monstrous, chances are I've seen it. Suicides? No problem. Flaming martyrs? No problem. Obscure, graphic crime scene photos from the 20s? Torture? Animal experimentation? Zippocat? No problem.
One would think, with our department being the IT Help Desk, that we would not have much to do with the criminal cases that flow through the office at the rate of about 1600 per week. However, we have a great deal of exposure to the media behind the cases - surveillance videos, stupid people filming their own shenanigans, autopsy photos & video, crime scene photos and video, the criminal documents themselves. I watched a man with a gun hunt another man down in a grocery store. I've seen the autopsy of a small child that wasn't even recognizable as a human anymore, it was that badly beaten. The left overs of a home-made car bomb, or the occasional case of - well, suffice it to say, bad things happening to small people. Brutality inflicted on humans by humans is at my daily disposal, and at first I was titillated when I found the folders full of images of dead bodies, because I am somewhat of a necrophiliac. It just doesn't turn me on anymore. I thought all the years of gore sites like rotten.com, bangedup, ogrish & Stiles had hardened me to things like this. I thought I was immune.
I think it was seeing the crime scene photos of a lonely grave out in the middle of the desert. A woman's body, badly burnt, turned into a mummy, shrunken and unidentifiable, that did it to me. Someone had a CD full of crime scene photos & they couldn't get the CD-Rom to read it. I opened the disk, changed the view to thumbnails & the person I was assisting enlarged one of the photos in the top row, which just happened to be a close up of this woman. It was startling and unexpected, and every time I closed my eyes for the rest of the day, there she was in photo negative. She didn't continue to haunt me, but the setting did. There are a million places out here that look just like that grave site did - abandoned lots, construction sites, quarries, the vast empty wasteland of Nevada is full of sagebrush and windblown trash. There are so many places outside Nevada just like that, too, even in the most crowded cities are places where bodies can lay undisturbed and unnoticed. Within my beliefs, the shell we leave behind is just like that windblown trash - it's really of no use to anyone anymore. We slough it off like a cicada's husk when we die. To the living, though, that husk is the last vestige anyone will ever see of a loved one. The funerary rites are necessary to put ghosts to rest, necessary for the survivors to heal and move on. Every body forgotten and discarded in abandoned lots, quarries, dumpsters, the Great Big Empty, is a door that will never close.
I feel bruised and battered inside - every day I am exposed to more murders or assaults or kidnappings, and so much more... mankind's imagination when it comes to causing grief and harm seems infinite. I try to fill my off-time with playful things, captioned cats, comics, artwork, news articles that highlight the weirdly funny instead of the weirdly malicious. It's the things that creep out on the sidebars that nail me - like the pit bull yesterday or Monday, or the man who injected his wife with his own HIV-infected blood so she'd fuck him again - and someone trying to defend him because apparently enforced celibacy makes men do things like this & they should be excused for their actions. I think about some of the work I've been doing on myself regarding becoming more compassionate, meditations, protective and healing mantras I'm learning, and then another day at work makes me wonder why I'm trying to be more sympathetic to the human plight. We, as a species, are not all that worthy of compassion and sympathy - but I suppose, simply because of that, I should be all that more determined to open myself to those feelings. When I pray for one, I pray for all, and when I pray for all, I pray for myself.
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