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Saturday, August 25, 2007

Rock bottom remainder

I was going to post about how fucked up Ingram is. You know, the book distributor who listed my book He's on Top as publisher cancelled, so now Amazon hasn't stocked it for over a week and sales have plumetted, very real dollars that I have lost and can't afford to lose. It makes me feel stupid for being excited that we sold out our first printing, for being silly enough to buy blogads, for thinking that, like, being at the top of their bestseller list would mean, like, they'd stock my book. I know it's not personal, it's just frustrating to not be able to do a thing.

But that's really a side issue, a way of me diverting my energy from the task at hand. Serenity prayer and all, but I think it's way too easy to want to change the things we cannot change, because then the world is your oyster. If only...becomes a fantasy way of remaking things with no practical application. So I try to let it go and do something that actually matters. I took the night off after the Bluestockings reading on Thursday, went home and watched Weeds and realized how much guilt I carry around just for doing something as simple as that. I need to catch up, desperately, but that time away made my mind race with ideas, made me think things were going to be okay. Maybe they are and maybe they aren't, I can't say and don't know and don't have the hubris to predict. I would like to hope they couldn't be worse than this week that just passed, but who really knows. Today is a big day that will tell me a lot and getting through it will be its own triumph.

I think I’m always waiting to hit rock bottom. I like it there, on some level. Maybe not consciously, but I’m so used to it, and sometimes I feel like the only way to succeed, or maybe even survive, is to sink lower and lower until there’s nowhere lower to go. Of course, there is always somewhere lower to go, but I have my own breaking points, I suppose. There’s a reason I’m writing a story for one of my books called “The Depths of Despair.” I know this is not the right way to live, I know I’m mistreating my mind, my body. Yet I can’t seem to help it. I think that fear of failure and fear of success start to trump even the merest step toward getting better. Yet I don’t want a year to go by and be stuck in the same sad, pathetic place. I don’t even want a week or a month to go by. I have to find a way to kick my own ass, a way different from anything I’ve tried before. Because my world is falling apart, crumbling as if before my eyes and I watch in slow motion, drag out the minutes by not sleeping, so I have more time to see it. I almost wish I were a cutter, or were drinking or doing drugs or something to make it not so raw, so visible. I guess the only thing I can have faith in is that as much as I like the comfort zone of rock bottom, as much as failure is so fucking seductive, I do somehow manage to escape at the last minute, a magic trick even I don’t know how I’ve pulled off. Instead it's just tears and that hollow feeling that I keep trying to find some healthy way to fill, cheating with Yolato that helps in the instant but doesn't quite do the trick. I realize just how long it's been there, the chicanery and falsehoods I've let myself tell myself to stave it off. What was all of 2006 except an exercise in that? I'm going to San Francisco in October to read a story about that, in fact. It's paradoxical in that I know what I most need is to be alone, I'm not so fit for the social niceties of late.

This week everything came crashing down and I literally lost it. I think losing it in public brings things home a little more clearly. Not just the crying, but the sense that it never stops, that it's out of my control, that my insides are leaking out, all over the sidewalk, the drugstore, the gym. And part of me wishes I could hide away and never emerge, never have to lose it in public quite like that, so starkly, so clearly saying, This girl is not okay. At the same time, I know that would be its own not so kind death and that if I ever really want to live out my dreams, ever want to birth another person, let alone my own potential, I have to live through this one possibly agonizing day at a time, and appreciate the little things, because they are there, if I look closely enough. I guess all I can expect, ever, is to learn from my mistakes. I'm a stubborn creature of habit and seem to like to make the same ones over and over again, but I am trying, because I think as much as rock bottom fits me like a glove, there's an optimism there, maybe smiling through the tears, that fits me even better, that fits me like a clingy, low-cut dress and high heels, that molds itself to make me feel beautiful, make me feel me. Perhaps thats how I need to think of it, and adapt myself, adjust, rearrange, cater to not the rock bottom, but the sliver of a smile right above it.

Well, this morning I was able to prove to myself what a colossal failure I am at even the simplest of tasks. Go me. I deserve any bad news I get, for sure.

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