Category: …and everything else

I hurt myself today
to see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real

I am torn flesh, blood dripping raw; wounded and wary. Flailed skin wrapped in barbed wire, held together with duct tape and small ‘keep out, no trespassing’ signs. I don’t trust you, I don’t trust anyone. If I did, I would talk to you, could talk to you – tell you about the fear, the balance and the line I walk. The tension between flat out self-destruction and preservation, and how tightly wound I am between those two points. How very close I’ve come this quarter to slipping over, sliding down and just…breaking. It would be so easy to let go.

I wear this crown of thorns
upon my liar’s chair
full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair

I can’t cry, you know. Oh, sure – a few tears might slip out, now and again. The silent and poetic kind that film so well; poignant ones. But full on, body wracking sobs – I haven’t been able to do that in a long time, since J~ passed, and the ability was waning before that. It’s a letting go that I can’t do, a loss of control that I fear will unbind me. And if I become unbound, I don’t think I’ll be able to pull myself back together, not again. I don’t think I have the strength, the will. Not anymore. Not this time.

So many people tell me how strong I am, how amazed they are at my strength. But it’s not really strength, it’s self-preservation. I hold on tightly to the one thing I can to keep from flying apart at the seams.

what have I become?
my sweetest friend
everyone I know
goes away in the end

My wall cracked last night, and I almost talked to someone about this. I almost vocalized what I hide behind a computer screen and scripted words. And I walked, feet following the split in the concrete sidewalk, and felt the air on raw cold skin, and I paniced and bolted. I hid behind laughter and self-deprecation, and shooed Adam off to homework, myself to home and silence and aloneness, to repair the breach that almost broke the dam.

How damned trite. This entire thing – trite. The words, the lyrics, the attempt to express what cannot be expressed.

Do you know the ultimate irony? Me, writing about affect and connectivity, when I hold myself as such an island. Come close enough to shout, but don’t you dare set foot upon the shore. My damned empire of dirt.

I will let you down
I will make you hurt

People keep telling me I have a beautiful soul. I wonder what they’d think if they saw all the tarnish that I keep hidden from view. People keep saying a lot of very nice things about me – so why does it not matter? Why is it the cruelty, the meanness and mockery, that stays with me? Why does the positive wash over and off me without impact, but the negative takes root and grows? Why can’t I believe the good? Why do I only believe the bad?

Why is it that one person can hurt me and undo anything good done to me by others? Why do I only focus on the pain? I don’t like this person I become when I feel this way, but the only way I know to never feel like this is to never give anyone the chance. Why can’t the good be stronger than the bad – why do I have to lose myself? Why does it have to hurt?

If I could, I would start again a million miles away, and I would keep myself. I would find a way.

For what should have been a “good” night, I feel remarkably empty inside, and very much like curling up and crying. I don’t know if it’s the end of quarter, this fun group is probably going to break apart now, blues, or… no. Scratch that. I do know exactly what it is, and there’s not a great way to address it in any sort of vague manner. Would it suffice to say that I really only ask that people be nice? Probably not – I’d have my words, “don’t take me so seriously”, thrown back at me (again).

Why does that softness that is there have to turn to hardness when there’s more than one or two people around? That’s what I want to know, and it’s what I’ll likely never get the answer to. If nothing else, the answer will never come because the quarter is over and I’d be willing to place money: that’s all she wrote.

That’s all she wrote.

He sat a week, day and night, under the pipal tree
Vowing not to rise until he understood
And on that eighth morning he realized
All beings suffer,
The cause of suffering is ignorance
Ignorance can be overcome
The way to overcome ignorance is the eightfold path
Calling the earth as his witness
He became Buddha, the Enlightened One

Budu Saranai! (May the serenity of the Buddha’s be yours!)

This gem is also lifted off of Neil Gaiman’s blog: Terrorist Has No Idea What To Do With All This Plutonium.

Yaquub Akhtar, the leader of an eight-man cell linked to a terrorist organization known as the Army Of Martyrs, admitted Tuesday that he “doesn’t have the slightest clue” what to do with the quarter-kilogram of plutonium he recently acquired. “We had just given thanks to Allah for this glorious means to destroy the Great Satan once and for all, when [sub-lieutenant] Mahmoud [Ghassan] asked, ‘So, what’s the next step?'” Akhtar said. “I was at a loss.”

As Neil notes, although the story is from The Onion, it’s probably damned close to the truth…

Taken directly from The Washington Post,

In an unusual case of mistaken identity, a woman who thought a block of white cheese was cocaine is charged with trying to hire a hit man to rob and kill four men. The woman also was mistaken about the hit man. He turned out to be an undercover police officer.

Jessica Sandy Booth, 18, was arrested over the weekend and remains in jail with bond set at $1 million on four charges of attempted murder and four counts of soliciting a murder.

According to police, Booth was in the Memphis home of the four intended victims last week when she mistook a block of queso fresco cheese for cocaine _ inspiring the idea to hire someone to break into the home, take the drugs, and kill the men.

An informant described the plot to police, who arranged a meeting between Booth and the undercover officer.

The undercover officer gave Booth some nonfunctioning handguns, bought ammunition for her because she was too young, and the two proceeded to the home under police surveillance.

Booth told the officer that any children inside the house old enough to testify would have to be killed, police said.

A search of the home with the permission of the occupants revealed no drugs _ only the white, crumbly cheese common in Mexican cuisine.

“Four men were going to lose their lives over some cheese,” said Lt. Jeff Clark, who heads Project Safe Neighborhoods.

Really, what do you say to that? It reads like one of those “behold the power of cheese” commercials from the late 1990s.