Namaste, Bitches

Right now, I hate this time of year. Past keeps colliding with present and future. The lighting, the way the coming darkness looks through the kitchen window as I'm washing dishes, the fluorescent light overhead... It's still hot outside, but when the night comes down I get cold. I just feel dark and lonely inside, unmoored from time and perspective.

I've been quite active today. Thinking a lot. Yeah, mostly about myself. I love Diana Paxson's books, especially her more Pagan ones, & one of my favorites is White Raven. It's the story of Tristan & Isolde told from the perspective of Isolde's handmaiden, Branwen. A lot of this past year has been spent reflecting on what's truly important to me. I've spent a lot of my past being, like Branwen, a mother hen to many, many people. It's grown waaaaay out of proportion from 'Mother Hen' to 'Massive Control Freak'. Like Branwen, I have come to realize that I have to let people leave the nest. Both people in 'real life', people like Jody & people I work with. I cannot prevent mistakes from happening somewhere sometime. People have to live their lives and I have to live mine. I made a very big decision inside myself to let go of work. I chose time over money, and while it's only been the past couple of weeks that I've had more time than money, and I cannot believe what a difference it has made. I like time far more than I like money, and that's the honest fucking truth. I bought myself a wristwatch with skulls on it as a reminder. I don't care if the thing starts running backwards or stops or the hands fall off like the rest of my watches - when I go to work, I put my skully watch on & think about what's really important.

I am also not drunk right now, and I love y'all. And thank you all so much for being yourselves, and for being there for one another and for being there for me.

I know I'm going to be taking a drumming class in January.

As much as I love this waning of the year... I also hate it. Hate what it does to me. I wish I was honestly crazy, or maybe if I just had a schizophrenic label taped to my forehead I could at least tell myself, "Oh, hey, yeah, I'm nuts, it's perfectly normal for me to hallucinate." Removal of stress is what's done me in. I just know it. Stress and workaholism, in its own damaging way, is a fantastic shield for a lot of emotional crap to hide behind, safe and sound where it never fully bothers you.

Tonight, as I was leaving work, I saw two cowboys in the lobby of the Excalibur. I'm not talking ranch hands like at Bonnie Springs, or the stable guys... at first I thought 'bikers', but no, these were dusty, right-off-the-range cowboys. Wearing beat up, tattered longriders, sprung leather boots, they were dusty and smelled like horse and sage and desert night. They were older, with long lank greying hair and moustaches. For a minute, I thought one was Jody's boyfriend, Brad - who looks a lot like Sam Elliott (he was in Ghostrider). Then, they walked past a pillar and emerged on the other side as two mid-20's club guys in nylon t-shirts and tight jeans, clean shaven, clean, smelling of some hideous cologne, probably Axe or something like that. Brain spoke & said, "brothers, for a long time". One of them looked at me, probably because I had some bizarre befuddled expression on my face. The Excalibur is an anachronism all on its own, and woefully tacky... but even two trail-hardened cowboys seemed strangely out of place there, walking past a huge plastic statue of Spongebob Squarepants.

The more I think about the nature of linear and non-linear time, the more malleable it becomes. Past, present, future, all merging into one seemless conglomeration of events and people and places. It'd be okay, if I was completely mad. If I didn't have moments when I could almost touch the 'infinite being of light' within me. If I didn't have those Jonathan Livingston Seagull moments. Knowing that part of why my memory of my childhood is so absent is because I wasn't there.

Rob tells me to deny everything. Everything except for what I know is right there, accessible to my five senses & all this crap would go away. The hard part is that I don't always know the difference. I believe, therefore it is real, it simply is what it is, and it cannot be separated from what it is not - because it's all part of the same thing. Excising my belief in reincarnation & precognition and Vodou and sympathetic magic and the power of the mind to manifest things into being, the power of the body to heal itself and others makes no more sense than pulling out a perfectly good tooth - or separating atoms of carbon from other atoms of carbon. Sometimes I feel like... well, it's as if someone gave me glasses with the Kabbalistic Tree diagrammed on them, so that everything I see is connected to everything else along one of those pathways. And everything fits into those neat little sephiratic filing cabinets. And all those drawers are connected to one another. And in the center, where the Daath is is light. Endless, limitless light. Only if I look directly into that light, I see everything out of its filing cabinets - past, present, future, everything, every star, every planet, every living thing, every spiritual entity, every place, every negative space, all glommed together, everything happening at once, without end forever, amen. That is what the light is. Everything is light.

I just looked at the calendar & noticed... I've only got three weeks left of playtime. Then it's back to work time. Waaahhh!

Been out of the house over the past few days, shopping for Rob's clothes, mostly. Feeling that autumn melancholy sweep over me like it does every year. Thinking about the slow, inexorable passage of time, the ticking of the clock, counting out my mortal span.

The root of mortal, mori, means death. As mortal beings, we are not living, we are dying. Like the year itself, growing old, passing on.

Looking at my greying hair, wondering if I should give up on the vanity of dying it. Rob's right, tho - if we're out together, people will ask if I'm his mother, or they'll think he's a very unattractive gigolo or something. I guess I'll give it another few years, see if I'm tired of shopping for new colors when I'm 35.

I started thinking about how I occasionally step out of linear time to go somewhere else. Fold the map, so to speak, stop the clock. Wherever it is I go when I do that, time is longer there than it is here. Maybe that's why I feel so much older than I am, why my hair is so much greyer than it should be, why it started to grey when I was 12... About 2 years after I consciously recognized myself as Pagan.

And of all the time I spend outside of time, I seem to waste it on making sure I get to work on time, waste it on making it to appointments, waste it on getting someplace here faster than the local physics allow.

Thinking about all the time that has left gaps in my memory - no memory of being here, like when I got hit by the car. I spent a week of local time somewhere else, and that's time I'll never retrieve.

I bought a pedometer today, mainly because the doctor wants me to walk an hour every day at a brisk pace. I keep telling people I do a tremendous amount of brisk walking at work, but I honestly don't know how much walking that really is. So now, as well as tracking the minutes of my life, one sweep of the second hand at a time, I'll also be tuning into my steps. Briskly going nowhere, same as usual.

Anyway, been doing school crap, trying to make Java programs work, math math math, reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, reading about all my ethnobotanical heroes before they became tenured at Harvard & Yale, before the Grateful Dead, before Vietnam... watching an old film of Bob Dylan, watching history fly by. 5 years since September 11, 2001. 100 years since Mohandas K. Gandhi.

I'm so tired.

Last night my coworkers accosted me in the hallway with a tiny little birthday cake & told me I couldn't make a work-related wish. Well, my non-work-related wish came true - it rained!

Sheung Yi, my Capricornian counterpart, went to the Bellagio & picked up these decadent little cakes - coffee layered, fudge mousse, pumpkin & carrot. These little cakes were unbelievable, and pretty, too. She also got me U2's 'How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb', and my current favorite song is 'Peace & Love or Else'. It's funky. Sheung Yi is a New Year's baby, and I can't go all out for her due to timing, but I got her a cupcake cake & a mini-mousse all her own, complete w/birthday candle.

The other day, Maggie called us. She's got a 3-yr old daughter & a new husband, been working security down at the courthouse. I don't think about her much, she was only a 2-time fling. It's weird to get calls like that out of the blue, and goes to show we should change our phone number more often.

Been thinking a lot about the relatively short lifespan of many of my relatives, thinking to myself that at 32 my life is about half over. The first 30 years went by so fast. Thinking about all my attempted suicides and how the easiest one is basically living til you die. It's a slow, painful and painfully dull suicide, but it has a huge success rate.

I have to work tonight, which means navigating traffic & road closures. Still got to cook dinner, wrap Sheung Yi's present, get dressed, etc. & so forth. Shooting to leave at 7:30 or 7:45. I'm having lamb for dinner!

Sometimes I get pissed off. Like tonight. Rob says my schedule sucks because he has to be hungry right when he wakes up so we can eat before I go to work. And lately, mainly due to school & work, I haven't been exactly in the mood to cook. So obviously, his not being hungry but still having to go get something for dinner is all my fault.

1) He does not have to get up when I get up. He can get up before I get up. He can get up after I get up. He can stay in bed til 8pm most nights if he so desired, or he could sleep all night while I'm at work & be up all day if he wanted.

2) He has two legs, two arms, and the car. If he wanted to he could take me to work & then go forth into the city & find something to eat when he gets hungry. His stomach is not dependent on me to fill it with foodly goodness. Hel's bells, he could open a can of soup or something.

3) All these years, he's been wanting me to go to school. I kept telling him that I cannot go to school and work full time. It's not possible. So now that I am doing it, going to school & working full time, I feel like he is utterly resentful of me because I am spending money on school and spending time on school, and because my deciding to go to school prevented us from moving to Washington - even though that in itself was contingent on me getting fired from the Excalibur when they did their computer upgrade, which they so far have not done. (I'm still working there - Bradley is not - how's that for a twist ending?).

4) He wanted me to make hamburgers all this past week - we went to the store on like, Tuesday morning & got hamburger meat, buns, veggies, etc. Hamburgers, to me, are very time consuming and involve a lot of prep work (and I get no help), and involve the broiler which is no fun to clean. Well, Tuesday we slept late & he wasn't hungry. Wednesday I had class. Thursday... Rob's been having bad heartburn & acid problems & he wasn't into a heavy meal, and I can't even remember what we ate. Friday night I had class again. I think I fed us slightly rotten meat on Saturday. Our fridge is fairly cold, and clean due to a turkey massacre the week of Thanksgiving... but, that meat had been sitting there since Tuesday, it was sort of grey & gamey. I managed to somehow choke it down (I've been having textural & odor issues w/food lately, especially meat and bread - that sour, yeasty bread smell that can turn sour & moldy at any point) and we've had no ill effects, but my brain is still telling me that hamburger meat was bad. And this on top of a week long battle for me to actually keep food down to begin with.

5) I am so freaking tired right now. Tired of working, tired of training, tired of going to school, tired of the house being all fucked up, tired of dirty snake tanks, and tired of being resented because I am not Martha Fucking Stewart.