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01:14 - May 18, 2003
really really can't
See, what I need to do is not play videogames and not write so much shit about my mother and about smoke curling up from the floor, and not eat frozen dinners that make my stomach turn and go shopping in stupid places like Target that give me a headache from every woman who stands behind me in line's perfume, and not boulder in the bouldering cave if all I'm going to do is think about how terribly weak I am and how I can't really boulder that well at all. What I need to do is get my music software set up again and then actually use it to write music, and get a job as well, and record things, fix my microphone so it doesn't echo everywhere and mess up the entire track... and I need to work out in other ways besides bouldering, so that I can boulder eventually, and then climb, and when I go back to Colorado I'll be able to face some of the mountains. And I need to figure out how I'm going to save money this summer, and not buy anything really stupid. I also need to work on this new idea in not just a conceptual way, this idea of viewing anxiety and depression as objectively as I can.. or not necessarily objectively, but in tiny increments that I can concentrate on one at a time. Like when in Steak and Shake today I felt the slamming nausea, suddenly, I just focused on the inside of my eyelids and how they felt heavy, kind of like I was stoned, but not. And how my fingers were cold, and the sides of my mouth sucked in so I was biting the insides of my cheeks. By doing that, I'm thinking... heaviness, coldness, pressure... but not nausea. I can do that sometimes, but sometimes I really really can't.

00:39 - May 16, 2003
unable
I do remember the last time I cried. It was December 24, 2002. It bothered me not to know so I read back and looked it up. Though, what follows has nothing to do with that.

It strikes me as somehow wrong when my mother, sobbing and falling sideways on the couch, reaches for me gasping, 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' and I can feel the tears right behind my own eyes like an open, burning flame but in my throat I force them to stay there... behind my eyes, nowhere else... not in my voice (cracking) or in my arms (shaking) when I hug her back. Reluctantly! my mind shouts... reluctantly, make it reluctant. For me not to be able to let my mother see me cry when she has laid herself open like a cleaved heart in front of me, her hard, cynical teenaged daughter, is the most ridiculous thing in the world, but it doesn't make a whit of difference. She's apologising because every time I see her she digs under my skin, small jabs, then bigger, about how much more I love my dad and how I make her feel like she's nothing, and it just escalates, me getting calmer, her getting louder (perfectly in character) until she's literally stopped making any sense at all, and I have given up trying to reason and just start drawing choppy lines of ink across the legal pad of paper where we've been writing our gin rummy scores before the cards get forgotten in the screaming. (Always hers... I stopped raising my voice years ago, but is that really noble of me, or just infuriating? because when my dad does it I could drive a knife through his flesh.)

What I can never say to her is that I understand, that I know nothing is right, that I know nothing is happening and nothing is going anywhere. I know that everything is wrong, and with both of us even, that when I think about life sometimes I see the same fucking long black straight dusty road that she does and that everything we touch we crumble to bits in our fingers and everything we hope for we overshoot and it ends up just being disappointing. I can't say this to her for no reason at all that I can think of. It would make her feel better and probably closer to me and maybe she wouldn't cry anymore, and she'd probably hug me harder and go 'oh, Hannah' and cry and smile at the same time like she does. and i cannot bear to think of that happening. It makes me cringe, seriously cringe.

I used to tell her, I think. I wouldn't now, I wouldn't tell her, say, that yesterday I sat at my kitchen counter with my bag of pretzels and book and apricot juice and thought about how I would probably still be alive ten years from now, and how fucking unbearable it seemed, ten years like a slow sour syrup drip, every second tangible. Ten more years like this. And when I thought 'this' I thought about how I was supposed to be happy, and that I actually probably am, or at least ok, ok enough that I'm not sitting in my closet with pocketknives like I did freshman year of high school, but freshman year of high school I actually told my mother, in so many words, that I really wished that I would die right here in my room, right now, before something snapped. I would never do that now, never. Even when she gives me the perfect segway (it's horrible how I say it: segway, like her pain is only how it relates to mine, but that isn't what I mean) with her words. When she says 'nothing is happening', I know what she means, she means 'NOTHING IS HAPPENING.' And it is a fucking travesty that the sky does not cave in right into the street, that a knight in shining armour doesn't break down the door that very second, the boy you've been missing so powerfully for the longest time in metal clothes, or regular clothes even, and that every word you're ever spoken isn't gilded in gold framed somewhere because you think it's so fucking important. Instead, you wake up and you go to work and you come home and knit a sweater and pet the cat and eat and go to sleep. There has to be more, but there just.... there just isn't. Sometimes temporarily you think you see something, but it's a mirage, like water in the desert.

I know the depth her throat has to pull from to speak these words, but I am unable to let her hear me say this.

18:57 - May 15, 2003
roll with anything
Over the last year, I'd say, I've been trying to get mad less. I mean inwardly mad, not outwardly stomping yelling mad, because I don't really do that... ever, really... probably once a year. I remember how Lara said, over and over, while I paced around the lobby of the DU gym muttering about how I couldn't stand such stupidity and I couldn't believe how fucking OUT OF IT some people can be, that she had never seen me this angry. Most people never do. But I'm always angry like that inside my head. Not always. But a lot of the time. Like today I went for a job interview and it took forever to get there because Lake St. was down to 1 lane and I was in back of a cement truck, and when I finally got there after turning the wrong way down Greenwood, the woman who was supposed to interview me had gone home for the afternoon. I wasn't late. She just wasn't there. She hadn't called or anything, just didn't show up. The receptionist gave me a bland, apologetic smile, and said to come back tomorrow. Tomorrow? Another 45 minutes behind a cement truck, and a quarter of my gas tank empty? I gritted my teeth and grinned and thanked her and floated out the door and into my car and put my head down on the steering wheel and... seethed isn't the right word, I wasn't clenching anything or punching the upholstery, but I felt the tears of frustration behind my eyes. I can't remember the last time I cried. Of course, I also can't really remember the last time I had a real reason to. After I hugged Nick goodbye I went into my room and didn't feel anything. I felt more a few days before that when he was standing in the middle of his packed up room, surrounded by boxes and empty wall space. I almost cried then, but didn't. And I feel more now that it's been a week since I left and more than that since he did. But not enough.

But that isn't the point. The point is so much more gets me mad than should, or not even really mad, but extremely frustrated. I still can't stand it when my dad whistles loudly and carelessly as he walks around the house, because he always used to do that right after he decided he wasn't going to listen to my argument anymore. It was his 'this discussion is closed because I say so' whistle, and I can't even stand to hear him whistle anymore. I really can't stand when people are chronically late for everything. I hate people who wear too much perfume. And people who talk to me while I'm trying to read. There's ten million things that I can really get riled up over, and it's not the kind of person I want to be. In my rational brain, I'm the kind of person who rolls with the punches, but in practice, I can't seem to calm my mind down enough to roll with anything.

23:39 - May 13, 2003
tomahawk concert
Um....I think I just attended one of the best concerts I can remember ever going to. That is to be expected of course, but fuck. Ever since I got these tickets I was worried that Mike Patton doesn't really do all these amazing things with his voice, that it's all done with computers, but I was, thankfully, dead wrong. I've loved Mike Patton's work for years. I followed him from Faith No More to Mr. Bungle to Fantomas to Tomahawk (Tomahawk's who I saw tonight) and am never less than amazed, and never more so than tonight.

I was in the second row (if there were rows; it was standing room, but what I mean is I was right behind the people leaning on the stage) and so close that he accidentally spit on me while he was singing 'Sir Yes Sir.' I didn't know whether to be disgusted or happy. I mean it's spit. ew. But it's Mike Patton's spit. I was having a severe teen moment, even while being thrown around by moshers.

The thing I love about him is he can even scream creatively. And he was his own sound board, and his own sound check. Every other band I have ever seen waits in the eaves while the crew sets up their instruments, adjusts the sound, and says 'testing' into the mikes, etc... but Patton was out there with the first crew member, setting up his own equipment, adjusting his own sound, and instead of saying 'testing' into the microphone, he spat viciously at it, blew it raspberries, spun a few knobs, crooned a few opera notes, even put it in his mouth and popped his tongue. Not too many people were paying attention because they all thought he was just this crew guy, but I was two feet in front of him and I was entertained.

And during the show he sang through gas masks, hooted like an owl, whistled through his front teeth, breathed in rhythms for the songs, hummed with the mike in his mouth, made what sounded like kazoo noises, let the air escape from his throat one click at a time, and... damn. That range. He can get so low it's just a rumble with the bass and in the next moment he's in the stratosphere crooning in Italian... I think it was Italian. The way he looks, just a sleazy seeming guy with slicked back dark hair and a barely noticeable goatee, albeit dripping with charisma, but when he opens his mouth... it's all over.

Ahhhhhh.

00:08 - May 11, 2003
lightning
dear t_____,
i'm back in my computer room at home watching a lightning storm and remembering everything suddenly in a swirl of the same kind of rain that's soaking my windows. it is both warm and terribly painful at the exact same time, kind of like you.

 

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