November 15, 2006

67 and still counting

 

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Posted by Red Monkey at 8:58 PM | Comments (4) | Struggles | TrackBack | Stumble

October 25, 2006

Rushing to Conclusions

There are times when I just flipping hate people.

I was watching Michael J. Fox on The Actor's Studio a few months ago. At first I was impressed with how well his meds were working on his Parkinson's ... but it didn't take very long at all before the movement and jerking and shaking became extremely noticeable. And, he couldn't get all the way through the interview without having to stop, go off-stage, take his next round of meds and take a moment to walk and get things back under control again. Later I heard that while he was on an episode of Boston Legal, they had to completely shift the shooting schedule to catch his appearances at just the right moment. He looked completely rigid and I don't know if that was simply the muscle rigidity which builds during Parkinson's or if it was the product of an immense force of will to make the muscles stop tremoring.

Not surprisingly to people at all in the know, Fox (not to be confused with the Fox Broadcasting company) created the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research in 2000. Not surprisingly, he's talked frequently about stem cell research.

Not surprisingly, he's campaigning for some Democrats who support stem cell research.

Not surprisingly, Rush Limbaugh, who in my oh-so-humble opinion has absolutely NO right to talk about anyone else's medical condition EVER, spoke out against Fox. Okay ... speaking out against him is one thing. Rush doesn't like stem cell research and thinks it's evil, fine. He can think that. But coming out and saying that he thought Fox was only acting is absolutely reprehensible to me.

Let's just assume that the devastation caused by this disease is a fake. Let's make all those with Parkinson's into whiny little fakers when things start to deteriorate quickly.

Now, of course, Rush has backed off somewhat, however wanting to hold true to the course, he's now accusing Fox of just being a shill for the Democrats.

Right ... cuz the poor Parkinson's dude can't have his own thoughts and beliefs, right?

This, to me, is the worst of Republican party. I'm not saying all Republicans are bad or that they would all do what Rush has done. I'm just saying this type of hot air without facts ... this spout off at the mouth and think later ... is what's gone horribly wrong in the democratic experiment. And, actually, Democrats are susceptible to this as well, don't get me wrong. But in the stories I've heard most recently, it always seems to be Republicans jumping the fastest to the worst conclusions and spouting them as if they are facts.

I wish ... I wish that we could go back to that mythical time where the news was not about ratings and sensationalism. I wish that we would be presented with the facts instead of the "choice" facts and insinuations and opinion misrepresented as fact.

When I was a child ... the first time someone taught us the scientific method ... I was hooked. It seemed like the logical and grown-up way to think and behave. Research, define the problem, hypothesize, experimentation in controlled manner, draw conclusions based on the uncovered facts and observations.

The first time, as a teenager, that I realized that the whole of the adult world did not subscribe to this methodology, I was shocked ... grew ever more cynical ... and began to question adults ever more.

I wish we wouldn't alway rush to the bottom dollar ... to the sensational ... to the easy conclusions. I wish we'd critically examine all the evidence more thoroughly before making our pronouncements public. I know we're only human and sometimes we simply vent or spout off ... but particularly any public persona, be they talk show, news reporter, politician or even celebrity ... public speech from whomever should be more deliberate, researched, thought out.

Posted by Red Monkey at 11:33 AM | Comments (12) | Struggles | TrackBack | Stumble

October 18, 2006

Locked Doors

After waking up at 3:30 a.m. this morning for no apparent reason other than I seem incapable of getting a full night's sleep right now, I went surfing blogs and found a wonderful, thought-provoking post over at: Looking Beyond the Cracked Window.

I've quoted a bit of it below ... and well, this is probably going to be another one of my novel-length posts. So if you're idly perusing and not wanting to think or get involved, you probably ought to scroll down to the post below this one.

I have been for years baffled by other people's ability to remember with such vivid detail, their youth. I have moments. Clearly defined moments. Yet I can not remember lengthy details of say a vacation to Hampton Beach or a trip North to Maine. Like so many appear to be able to do.
Early years? Pffft.

I see pics [of her childhood], I know I was there(the pic is evidence of that...duh), yet there is no emotional attachment to it.
It bothers me at times. Sometimes it feels as if there was no childhood. Then at the same exact time, I know I had a great childhood. Weird. (With the exception of my brothers torturing me)....
Having been very solitary(which is ironic I had lots of friends), I would pull into myself. In a room full of people, yet not really there. Self isolation. One would think, with all the thinking and questioning I did as child and throughout my life, I'd have recollection of it.
And with all the muddling around I do up there, rearranging those boxes, digging through them....I wouldve found the key to unlock some of them.
In my quest over the years to keep me secure, that included locking myself out at times. Pinkerton Security. Secure. Unbreakable. Impenetrable.
What is it I fear?
I havent a clue.
And to really put this entry in a twist? I kinda like it that way.
Why open a locked door, for no reason. I dont need to go there. Dont have a desire to do so. In not doing so, in no way effects my life.
Shhhh.....Don't say it.

Jod{i} got me to thinking about how I handle memory and childhood and locked doors. I love her post, what she's written, how it flows together. And part of what got me to thinking is that she and I are pretty much total opposites about this except for the fact that we reflect on it and think and question.

I remember huge chunks of my childhood ... back to when I was two or three. Of course, one of the reasons that I remember so much is becaues we moved a great deal when I was very young. Amarillo, Texas; Houston, Texas; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Carmel, Indiana; Austin, Texas ... then I started kindergarten.

So when I described the floorplan to the apartment where I have my first memory, Mom was able to state that was one of the apartments in Houston. So, I was between 2 and 3 when I rolled out of my big kid's bed and slowly rolled down to the floor. I couldn't have had that bed for very long, because Mom had dragged some of our ugly vinyl dining room chairs to my room and faced the backs of the chairs against my bed in a vain attempt to keep me from hitting the floor. It didn't work, but it did slow me down.

I can remember being sleepy-tired, content, happy, and crawling off down the hallway to where Mom was sitting at her desk, presumably working on bills. The hallway was all dark, but Mom's room was bright and sunny and she had such a look of joy on her face when I crawled in to see her.

I can remember what was to be my first halloween of trick or treating "for really" at the age of four. My dad brought home one of those cheesy little mask and smock costumes that were so common in the 70s, in every drugstore, dimestore and TG&Y's. It was a little red riding hood mask and Mom had been working on a better cape for me. But when Dad put the mask in front of his face, I burst into tears and froze, rooted to the ground, terrified to move.

There are many, many other events that I remember in amazing technicolour detail.

I barely remember just two months after that halloween costume ... when as I went to put an ornament on the Christmas tree, I used all the dexterity of a four year old and managed to pull the tree on top of me. This is when we discovered just how allergic to pine/cedar I actually am. Apparently I broke out in hives EVERYWHERE the tree had touched me ... almost immediately. While I don't remember this very clearly, I do remember a few stop action scenes. Stretching to put the ornament on the tree ... admonishments to not let the ornament drop ... attempting to firmly place the ornament ... and then ... then I was swimming in pine needles, confused, scared and feeling more than a little bit lost.

I remember our trip to Disney World, to the Alamo, Sea World ... train rides to Grandma's house, long drives in Dad's mustard-yellow Pinto.

But ... where Jod{i} says she sometimes feels like she had no childhood and yet knows she had a great childhood ... I knew that as idyllic as most of my childhood seemed, I did not have a great childhood. By the time I was about seven, I knew my father had a problem with drinking. And I knew that caused him to behave badly and erratically at times. In fact, I can remember thinking that Dad was going to be in a LOT of trouble once the open container law passed ... and I was quite concerned about how we would transport our Dr. Peppers back home on those rare occasions we stopped at a fast food joint.

And then ... then, there's the locked boxes.

Pinkerton Security. Secure. Unbreakable. Impenetrable.

For all of the things I remembered then and remember now, there have always been parts of my childhood that I locked away in a strongbox and tried to throw the key as far into Balcones Woods as I possibly could.

And here, for me, is the really intriguing part. I both know and refuse to know what is in those boxes. While some people prefer to throw away the keys to those locked boxes and never open them ... my curse is that I cannot quit tampering with the boxes. I can't find the bloody keys to them anymore ... and I strongly suspect I know what is in each one.

And I should leave them alone.

But, you know, I was that little kid who couldn't leave the mostly healed scab alone, either. I have to pick it off, pick off the edge of the sticker and minutely examine what lies beneath.

I know that the box under the basement stairs holds some things that I was not old enough to understand at 6, at 7, at 8, at 9. By 10, I'd started a new box and tried shoving that one up in the attic. And I was so focused on forgetting what was in that box, that I only had a ghost of a memory of what was in the first one.

And to really put this entry in a twist? I kinda like it that way.
Why open a locked door, for no reason. I dont need to go there. Dont have a desire to do so. In not doing so, in no way effects my life.
Shhhh.....Don't say it.

Honestly, I wish I could say that, too. I wish those dusty old boxes would stay stuck in their corners and rot and moulder away until they were destroyed by time.

Instead, there's always some reason or another for me to go to the cellar or the attic and poke around ... and invariably, I stub my toe on those boxes. Those damn boxes that no matter how I pick at them, they won't quite open.

I managed to decipher some of the coded writing on the outside of the one in the attic ... and I think I've got a chunk of the combination figured out to the cellar strongbox.

I want to open them.

I dread opening them.

The locked doors of those boxes contain my missing pieces to explain the differences between the extreme disconnects from memory to memory and event to event.

They are locked for a reason. And, probably like in most horror movies, they should stay locked. Somewhere, someone in a theatre watching the movie of our lives is screaming at me that it's a trap ... just as I used to scream at Joe Hardy during the Hardy Boy Mysteries.

But like the intrepid detectives, I want the secrets out in the light, no matter how dangerous they may seem in the moment of uncovering them.

Locked doors.

Maybe this dia de los muertos I'll uncover my skeleton key.

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:15 PM | Comments (2) | Struggles | TrackBack | Stumble

October 10, 2006

dancing on the edge

Something that came to me during a conversation with a dear friend ... reminding me that we all do this dance in our own ways now and then.

it's more fun to play with the knife blade than to make a decision
the agonizing and alive feeling
one little thrust ... one word
and it's the melodramatic end of the world as we know it
or
we could
we could put it away ...
          and then, perhaps agonize over could have beens
but the pain of playing there on the edge
that makes us both miserable and alive all at once

remember what it was like to live without the self-recriminations?
to live as the true self ...
you do remember that?

but now … now
we're just dancing on the knife's edge

          so i should just plunge it in then

I would certainly recommend putting the damn thing away
putting it all behind us
but
    i'm not so sure we can do that
physically and emotionally exhausted and drained from all our other issues
and not thinking straight

so we're gonna do this that we shouldn't do
then punish ourselves for the rest of our lives
when the only thing we did
was to be human

we convince ourselves that we're trapped
and helpless
alone and weak
and when we're convinced of all of that
we spin our wheels
mired in the mud
and getting nowhere

looking behind at mistakes
ahead at what might have been
and then down to the mud
sure we'll never get out of this rut
and move forward

so we're haunted
by everything that led to this place
and haunted by everything that we could have once accomplished

uncommitted to action
playing on the edge of slicing the pain away
or putting the painful and pretty distraction away
and owning our own lives

dancing on the knife's edge
just to feel alive

Posted by Red Monkey at 7:21 PM | Comments (2) | Struggles | TrackBack | Stumble

September 3, 2006

Her Story

My mother is insane.

I say that knowing that my sister sometimes reads this blog and will probably disagree with me and will perhaps even be a bit horrified by my writing that. But I think of a particular definition of insane: doing the same thing over and over and over and over yet again and yet expecting different results.

My mother is insane.

She hides in her condo after work most evenings, terrified and disapproving of the world around her. She has recently made one of her periodic attempts to break that same pattern that she has played out so many times before. Unfortunately, she's going about it in the same way that she has before. Not so much examining her own self as condemning the behaviours in others which she thinks she sees ... which she fears she feels.

Everyone has betrayed her ... her entire life has been full of attempting to reach out and to love and then being betrayed.

Other eyes see her story in different ways. But what I'm writing today -- I think -- is how it has looked through her eyes.

I don't know what her first betrayal was. I'm not sure that she is capable and strong enough to remember that first betrayal.

In bits and pieces ... in fits and spurts ... she has related to me how her mother betrayed her. How fearful my mother was of having her first born child. She was terrified of that small, tiny creature. Afraid to do something wrong. Scared to death she'd damage that tiny life.

So she turned to her mother. And was abandoned. Through my mother's telling, her mother refused to help her learn how to deal with the new infant. Abandoned her alone with this tiny alien creature and ignored my mother's fear and paralyzing terror. Walked away.

She struggled to overcome her fears and nurture the baby. Four years later, as she awaited the birth of the second child, she rested assured that this time, she lived in the same town as her mother and would be able to get some help as she learned to cope with both a precocious four year old and a newborn.

This time, thought, her mother made plans to be out of town at some other family event. And this time, her husband waited out the birth of his second child in the bar across the street from the hospital. Where the first baby had been relatively quiet ... to the point where my mother suspected the baby was a candidate for SIDS ... the second baby was anything but quiet and perhaps even more at risk for SIDS, requiring an intensive hospitalization before the age of one.

And she was alone and abandoned with two children to care for. Her husband gave her no support. Her mother gave her no support.

And yet, she kept at both of these people who should have been her support. She kept reaching out to them over and over and over again, expecting different results, expecting that they would somehow miraculously change, that she would finally find the right words to make them see her fears and help her.

As we grew up, my sister and I, she and her mother exchanged long phone calls every Saturday morning ... occasionally Sunday morning instead. One week my mother would call, the next her mother would call. Yet, when my sister or I talked happily of Grandma, Mom would get this look of bitter frustration ... bitter disappointment ... sadness ... a little masked rage ... and utter confusion ... expressions of emotion that flickered so quickly across her face and through her words, I was never really sure what I was seeing until I was much, much older. Jealousy that we seemed to get along splendidly with the one woman she really wanted to connect with.

I don't know what the tension is between them. I don't know much about my mother's childhood except that she utterly idolized her father, adored him to pieces. And I know about the tension between her and her mother. I can make some educated guesses about that tension. But I won't do that right now.

Every friend that my mom had during her adult life ... at least so long as I was old enough to observe the pattern ... each one betrayed her. Some friends would last two or three years. Some last seven or eight. But she only had one close, female friend at a time. It was as if she could screw up enough courage to "put herself out there" once ... and that was it. And when the inevitible "betrayal," or difference of opinion, would come along, Mom withdrew into her shell and hid from the world once again.

It was an amazing pattern to grow up with. I would watch her, timid and yet yearning for human contact, yearning for some sort of affirmation from someone other than her own children. Creeping ever so slowly out of the house ... into a class of some sort, usually art. Cautiously making friends with one woman in the class ... and I would be so happy. She finally had another adult to talk to, things to do with herself during the day while we were gone to school. Something to distract her from the fact that her life revolved around cleaning the house for her two allergy-ridden children.

And then, I would hear the tale of betrayal again. Once it was a friend telling her in no uncertain terms that Mom needed to be less judgmental and cut her kids some slack now and again. Another time, a friend made the mistake of trying to get Mom to relax and take a real vacation. Another time, it was a horrible racial slur made against someone that Mom found to be a very good person. Some of the betrayals were certainly "real," whatever that is. Some were simply friendships that had become too close, too revealing. Terrified of having to look at herself and her life, she bolted instead.

I watched when she finally went to therapy ... she left any therapist who suggested that she needed to make some behavioural changes.

So, as I had known she would, she turned to the church. Another day, I'll tell of that betrayal. (And no, it doesn't involve any kind of Catholic priest scandal at all.)

And as I grew to adulthood, past the pesky quasi-adolesence of the 20s, I realized that all of this was a simple pattern.

Mom is in love with fear.

For whatever reason, it's a comfort to her. She's known fear for so much of her life, that she cannot function for any real length of time without it. She feared for years what would happen if she left her alcoholic, abusive husband. She feared what would happen to her when her eldest moved out of the house. (The fire of the devil she knew or the cauldron of living as a divorced woman?) She moved out with the youngest child, now 15, and struck out on her own. She lived with the fear of having no money now that she had no husband. She feared all men. She feared the power of her bosses. She feared that the eldest would reject her, so she both rejected and latched onto both children. She feared everything in the world around her. All those people, out to hurt her ... ready to offer a hand which would inevitably turn around and bite her.

And yet, she did the same things over and over and over again.

After all of this ... knowing much of the abuse and years of fear that she underwent while married ... why, and more to the point, how, can I say that my mother is insane? It is not because she has such a difficult time reaching out and trusting ... but because she thinks that she is reaching out when she is pushing others away. Because she thinks that she is listening to others when she is only thinking of herself. I don't say she is insane as a judgment ... it is a statement of fact. She continually believes in the same manner and expects that the world will suddenly conform to her. Unbending even as she attempts change.

And until I can learn a new way to reach out to her, it is insanity for me to try. Years of listening to her ... attempting to coach her ... attempting to strengthen her self-esteem ... bolster her confidence ... only to face derision and scorn masked as loving concern.

It may be that she has been betrayed and abandoned too many times for a relative to reach her at all.

Posted by Red Monkey at 3:50 PM | Comments (6) | Struggles | TrackBack | Stumble

August 21, 2006

Compassion, Empathy

I've been there. Totally broke, credit gone, health insurance useless to help me pay the bills, and then, something else breaks or disappears and has to be replaced. For me, it was finding out that my cat had cancer. This was the kitten who imprinted as human and tried for the first six weeks that I had him to learn to walk on his hind legs "like everyone else." This was the kitten who followed me around like a dog, and was the sweetest, most loving cat I've ever known. When I was down and broke and just about hopeless and found out that he had to either have a leg amputated or be put down, I ran through the house looking for something, anything, to sell to raise the money for his surgery.

I found my old Viewmaster reels and a Viewmaster from the 40s or 50s (I think). I listed them all out, some of them rather old and hopefully worth money. And I put a note at the end of the pre-eBay "auction" listing on a newsgroup: Please don't flame me if I've put a too-high starting bid. I'm trying to raise money for my cat's surgery to remove the cancer from his leg."

You know what? No one bid on those Viewmasters. Instead, I got donations. Someone Fed Ex'd me a crisp $100 dollar bill. Checks came in over a week's time. Brenden got his surgery and lived another five years before passing of old age.

E.J. Knapp needs some help. He's lost his job and had to go on disability. His retirement savings is gone. He's gonna lose the house. But now, the bank's taken his car and he's got just about a day left to raise enough money to save the car so he can make it to doctor appointments, therapy, and just keeping food in the house. Trust me, the mass transit in New Mexico ain't great, so when he says "the transit system in this town is all but non-existent" he ain't kidding.

He's selling short stories for $2 a pop. He's got under $150 left to raise ... if he doesn't raise it by August 23, 2006 (it looks like) ... then the car is gone and he's pretty well screwed. He doesn't want charity. He wants to give you something tangible in return.

Help him out ... direct link to the short stories being offered.

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:51 AM | Comments (0) | Struggles | TrackBack | Stumble