In the middle of the night, talking in my pain, in my rage, in my unmet need, in my solipsistic fury, in my lonely-shit state, in my abandoned hurting child, in my wanting love and broken love and broken trust and wanting trust and needing consistency and eating chaos. In my cold and tired and frightened and violated. In my room. In MY room. In my room. In my fear and vulnerability, in my hoping against hope I won’t regret later saying or not saying, writing or not writing, doing or not doing. In my desperate desire that the littlest fucking thing will be used as grounds to hurt me, deny my needs, stomp on feelings, violate boundaries, use & abuse & discard. In my wishing so hard that someone in this chaotic self-absorption would have a mind at work and a heart that works and the nerve to face their demons so I don’t have to keep getting slammed to the ground by their runaway socially sanctioned unexploded and unexplored flaws and… I need… sleep… in my night… I reach… I fight… I yearn. I yearn in my night for relief. In my night for rest for a weary soul. In my night for knowing I can get angry and draw a line in the sand and not get tsunami’d to prove I am nothing to a bitter, vengeful, self-absorbed ocean. If you’re better than me, act like it, motherpussbucket. In my night, in my shadow, I fight, and yet while am at it, I get handed others’ shadows too, and for some reason I get upset. Fight your own shit, this is not what I’m here for. Stop wasting my time. I’m cold, I hurt, I want a nap, I want someone who believes me, I want it to be easier, I want to be cared about in action more than words, more than bonbons of apologies after the fact when what I needed was someone to do something hard and inconvenient for themselves without making it A Huge Thing, just because they care that I can’t fight alone and survive. I need… in my night… safety… sanctuary…

I self-validate after a straw that broke this llama’s back and read my irreverent Hanukkah letter to the Prophet Elijah for absolutely no raisin. It’s a dumpster fire of a world & life so who cares?

We each live in a world in our heads, and mostly slightly to one side. Mine is full of fire and the stuff of nightmares that happened during the day. Who the fuck is worth talking to anymore? And cui bono? Who would benefit? If I just want some relief, well then I should continue to please myself with this essentially masturbatory pressure release valve of a podcast. Maybe I keep doing this so I don’t explode at other people at inopportune and consequential moments. Maybe I do it to self-validate, or self-flagellate, or both. In the past I’ve had to just get through brain explosions of words, without thinking about an end goal. Sometimes I can’t know where I’m going, and only know that getting away from the worst of the pain is the only way to survive, even if it’s no way to live, ongoing. But since people aren’t optional and I’ll continue to encounter them randomly in the overworld, and I feel weakened from battling chthonic minotaurs and myths and monsters and telltale hearts and sins, what do I do? Pratchett, in ‘Men at Arms,’ writes on a theme that humans aren’t naturally paid-up members of the human race, but need to be bounced around by other humans in a sort of Brownian motion to, well, stay human (with Jon Batiste). Otherwise we come under our own influence. We become the wretch, concentred all in self, while we live forfeiting all renown, and, doubly dying, go down to the vile dust from whence we sprung. Unwept, unsung, and without an exciting Lin-Manuel Miranda (or LMM-inspired devotee) testament to our legacy. Without a foundation or orphanage or even a tear shed or memory spoken or glass raised to mark the end of a life lived so frantically alone. What is a legacy? I wrote a song voices will never share. I loved a man who died, a dog who died. I wrote a book no one will read. Made a podcast no one will hear. Scrawled words in places no one will read. Sang and spoke words that will never be remembered. I had money and a life and a home and possessions and lost them and gained new ones and lost them. I had some love once. Now it is gone, yet I remain, confused as fuck. I suppose there is no justice. Just us.

Makes one a bit doo-lally. So here’s me, full-on doo-lally.

The latest fad in the Alex-verse. Also prescribed: three medium dogs (as needed for misanthropy) and Ye Olde Seaside Cure. Plus ye olde surgical anaesthetic (you liquor, you brought her) for breakthrough pain.

Yup. Over and over.

Yeah, don’t listen to this. Skip it. It didn’t make sense while I was saying it either. It was mouth noises to deal with overwhelming anxiety of doing something stressful and overwhelming and cope with a lot of other triggers and ongoing stressors against which I feel powerless. I go down a spiralling rabbit hole and give myself a good ol’ Chidi Anagonye fork-in-a-garbage-disposal stomachache & headache inducing pile o’ garbage. Time to kick dirt over this pile & move on.

I need someone I can count on to lighten the load, whose cost/benefit ratio of presence in my life is not like a damn black hole. It’s catching, like vampirism. If demand exceeds supply, I become more demanding with more unmet needs and diminishing returns, and then that gets passed on to whoever is making demands on me. We can’t squeeze blood from stones, and if I have been exanguinated and become another soul-sucking hungry ghost time sink, that will become my whole fucking world. I will lose hope and faith that there’s anyone in the world with whom I am enough, and who is enough, and we can feel at ease rather than guarding our throats and fighting over our time and attention. Maybe if we’re right in the middle of a conversation, don’t interrupt me to answer the phone, or let me know if you’re expecting a particular important call? I dunno. Sometimes it just feels all too late to raise any issue with anyone, that my only options are (A) put up with it, or (2) give up on them entirely because no one ever changes for any reason other than personal gain or loss. Argh. Would be nice if the people we’re supposed to turn to for support weren’t more interested in what they can get out of it, or what they’re afraid of happening. How can you possibly be present with me if you’re thinking about money, or consequences, or waiting for your turn to speak, or saying the right thing, or appearing to be good? That’s when I’m least effective at giving support too, but it’s not my job to do this. Argh. I try so hard to fend my thoughts away from other people, but they’re so damn ubiquitous, Dr. Snacks. How do I fight off my brain fever? If only I hadn’t lost my creative faculties. I need to try. And try. And go on trying. I need to try everything. And more. And try really hard. And see if dreams are viable until I find the one that signals me to come on home, and says FUCK YES to me right back.

I was living to be inspired. To fall in love with an idea, to pass on a gift I’ve gotten when I have nothing left but experiences, words, passion, stubbornness. The first performing arts center. That’s the hill I wanna die on. The light I reach for. A spotlight to shine on others, that will go on burning and shining and showing after I’ve gone. We show who we are, or who we’re not. Do you like my mask? Would you like the mirror? I want this and I want to go on wanting it with the passion I do now. I am going to deputise people into keeping my passion alive, and aim as high as I fucking can. I learned that. Don’t hold back on my ambitions, don’t listen to haters, don’t damp my light, love the goal more than I mind the pain or struggle or heartache or personal inconveniences or bills or anything and do the thing that would make me break into my own apartment and go without heat, food, friends, love, anything. If I love the thing so much I want it to exist no matter what I will die to make it real. A simple performing arts center. A window to another world. A wardrobe. Costumes. Imagination. I’ve been building to this since I was tiny. I’m remembering shit I tried to stage when I was six, before things got really bad and the cult took off and hijacked my theatricality for self-destruction. I will romanticise the fuck out of making this real. This will be my dream in the dark and the light. Please, stay alive, dream, and I will try to feed and water you every day. Blood, sweat, tears, hell or high water. I love the theatre. I love performance. Let me infect someone with the itch before I expire.

‘Tick, Tick… BOOM’ was necessary medicine. …I had something else to say but too many noises and distractions came up suddenly at once and I lost my focus. I hate it when that happens. Putting on my hearing protectors. I also hate it when I can’t make the barrage stop immediately. I guess this is why people snap suddenly and yell, “shut up and leave me alone!” Maybe sometimes we don’t have the time, patience, energy to fucking hold it together and negotiate a peace settlement because there’s something else going on. Like when I was fleeing domestic violence, and had to do something incredibly urgently on a time limit to stay safe and take care of myself and a couple of young dudes were blocking my way and I snapped at them, “Make a hole!” And they laughed and “where’s the fire?” We weren’t in the same reality. There was no point, no time, no reason for explanations or treating them as anything but an obstructive pair of cattle in my way. I give people a chance to respond to language, but if they want to have a chat or ask questions when I am in no mood or state to stop and play parent or teacher, peace is no longer an option. If one feels others are rude and aggressive, one must ask oneself, “How do I respond when people are polite and respectful?” If one ignores polite words, doesn’t take respectful behaviour seriously, consistently overlooks and puts off dealing with people who act kindly to attend to the aggressive, one is teaching that the only way to get results with one is aggression. Reward behaviour that’s desired, rather than taking it for granted and punishing through neglect, say I. Kindness unanswered, generosity taken advantage of, goes elsewhere for reception. Love ignored and told, ‘later, not now,’ will become estranged. Hard as it is to hold the line in fight-flight-freeze-fawn mode when facing bullies, and even though I often fall into fawning and fail and feel humiliated later, it’s self-preservation working. It’s me knowing that if it goes badly here, no one will have my back, so I have to take care of me, get through it, and put up a fresh thick wall here. Every wall in me tells a story, usually the thickness of several stories, and cemented-up breaches. The thing is, in the labyrinth of me, there are openings all along, secret panels and passages, but most people aren’t looking or listening right. I richly reward effort, because effort speaks volumes. Even if one is violently disappointed by what one finds in the heart of my labyrinth, feeling ripped off for all the trouble it took, it means a lot when someone tries a little longer, and stronger, with me. I only do that with people I care about, until the extra chances run dry and it’s time to go back to dogs, wondering whether humans deserve to survive. I would like to be less that. Don’t know how.