A haven for creative people living with mental illness. This is the place where you can tell it like it is, not yet another place where you have to pretend to be someone you've been told you should be.
When I was younger
and believed God/the Universe/whatever was on my side despite the
mountain of evidence to the contrary, I reckoned I would one day
magically turn into a confident and clever person with an impressive
and unexpected solution for any problem. There would be aces up my
sleeves along with my arms! I could pull a rabbit out of my hat at
the drop of the hat! I would be some sort of female amalgamation of
Gambit and MacGyver!
That was the
fantasy.
The reality is I’m
a bumbling numpty with a cool tattoo on my left calf.
Image copyright Cara Hartley/Ornery Owl
The photo is mine. I can't fathom why anyone else would want to use it, however I will allow it with proper attribution for neutral or positive purposes such as a tattoo appreciation or a Motörhead fan post. If you want to use it for immature and stupid reasons such as sniveling about how horrible it is for women to have tattoos or making shitty remarks about the weird indentations in my chonky leg, you can go fuck yourself.
As for those people who enjoy feeling smug and superior about their tattoo-free state, isn't it nice that we live in a society where you can choose not to have tattoos while those who want them can have them? I have seven tattoos. They all have personal meaning for me. I hope someday I can afford to get a few more.
If I had to pick a favorite Motörhead song, it would be Orgasmatron. The blunt philosophical takedown of religion, politics, and war delivered by a raspy-voiced, no-bullshit working class champion over a hard-driving melody and precise backbeat is at once brazen and transcendent.
When I listen to this music, I become young again for a little while.
For a short time, I'm not the handicapped woman who has to use a very visible mobility device to walk more than short distances--a device that is the only thing that people seem to notice about me, because it's sure as fuck the only thing they can talk about. Either that or they think my memory is shot to fuck and they need to remind me about it every time they see me because I'm going to forget I have it otherwise? Hell, I don't know.
I feel like I need to put a bumper sticker on the walker. Something with an arrow pointing up that says "I'm up here." Or maybe "the walker's fine. How are you?" Or maybe "not dead yet, merely pining for the fjords." Maybe I need to make a series of snarky, interchangeable signs.
I can't understand why people are so interested in my fucking walker. Have you never seen a person using a mobility device before? Has your life really been that sheltered? Did you fancy that everyone was able-bodied before this weirdo with her fancy wheeled frame thingy came to town?
I haven't been able to muster the wherewithal to go for a stroll again since the last fiasco when one person saw fit to stop and ask me in very concerned tones if I was all right because I had my fat ass parked on the seat of the walker and was looking at the sky and contemplating whether I wanted to make penne or lasagna for dinner.
I was prepared to let that slide. But then the fellow who always thinks I need a pep talk came out of the place he's fixing up and asked how I was. Not content to let it go at "I'm okay," he went on with his usual schpiel with a bit of unwanted icing on the cake about how I have beautiful hair and if we could just get my body to match my hair, I'd be a real doll.
I'm never comfortable with people talking about my appearance, so I said "well, I don't really care what I look like," which apparently startled this gent, as he said in a startled voice "why not?"
"I just don't," said I, tapping my forehead. "I'm this. I'm not my body."
"Oh, Honey, you need to believe in yourself!"
I wasn't up to explaining that I'm a realist and I don't think that the problems I have with my body can be resolved. So I said "okey-dokey" and went on my way.
You might think that's the end of this stupid story, but you would be badly mistaken. As I was passing the general store, a fellow was coming out and, of all things, asked me if I needed a ride.
I said, "no, I'm just walking." I tried to make a joke of it and said "if I don't, nobody else will."
"Are you sure you don't need a ride?"
Fuck's sake. Do I really look that decrepit?
"No thanks."
I really just cannot.
I like walking to the edge of town and sitting by the tree for a spell, contemplating lasagna or how I made the entire house smell like cabbage when I cooked The Italian Windbreaker (which contains a hearty helping of cabbage), or why Costco doesn't sell Tater Tots.
I think I need a big, obvious set of headphones to wear as I gimp along. Then I can ignore everyone and listen to audiobooks.
In case anyone needs instruction on how to talk to them crippled-up disabled-like retreads, here's the highly classified, secret method.
Talk to us like you'd talk to anyone else.
Seriously.
I've never heard one single disabled person say that they want constant pep talks or to constantly answer questions about their mobility devices.
I just want to take a fucking walk in peace.
Maybe my sign needs to simply say "my back is jacked up so I use this thing. No, it's not likely to improve. Can we please talk about something else?"
I know people "mean well," but it gets really boring always having to have the same conversation. To be honest, I don't give a fuck if they mean well. This shit is still invasive and offensive.
This is a response to a post on The Mighty entitled What Love Is Like Through the Eyes of Someone With Borderline Personality Disorder.
"I also don’t understand boundaries or ambiguity, so sometimes I mistake the gestures or actions of others for love and end up caring much more for someone than they care about me."
"Unfortunately, a common problem for me (and I’m learning many with BPD struggle with this) is that I find myself in a position where relationships become broken and end quite frequently. I struggle to let go."
"Even through the pain, I still love the person and can’t stop. Some may say this helps in some way, but often it leaves me hurt as I watch people move on in life without me."
Love sucks. It bites. It blows. It stinks.
Whenever I see that "love like you'll never get hurt" type crap, I just want to start throwing things. No fucking thank you. I do not enjoy ending up in the ER with blood running down my arms. Because that's where that kind of thinking inevitably puts me.
I came to a point where I'd been hurt so much that my behavior tends to be the opposite at this point. I come off as cold because I'm trying to keep myself safe. I don't like to be touched. I'm afraid of forming deep, meaningful friendships, and romantic love can go take a flying leap. I don't like casual sex, and at this point, I have the libido of roadkill anyway. I just don't ever want to go through that mess again. It isn't worth it.
~The Cheese Hath Grated It~
Love hurts
Love scars
Love wounds and marks
Any heart not tough or strong enough
To take a lot of pain, take a lot of pain
Love is like a cloud, it holds a lot of rain
Love hurts
Ooh love hurts
I'm young
I know
But even so
I know a thing or two, I learned from you
I really learned a lot, really learned a lot
Love is like a flame, it burns you when it's hot
Love hurts
Ooh love hurts
Some fools think
Of happiness, blissfulness, togetherness
Some fools fool themselves, I guess
They're not foolin' me
I know it isn't true I know it isn't true
Love is just a lie made to make you blue
Love hurts
Ooh love hurts
Ooh love hurts
I know it isn't true
I know it isn't true
Love is just a lie made to make you blue
Love hurts
Ooh love hurts
Ooh, love hurts, ooh
Trigger warning/content warning/warning warning/danger danger: Discussion of suicide ideation. If you don't want to read about that, don't read this post.
Would you like to know the practical problem with being thrown on a downward spiral?
Have you guessed that I'm going to tell you anyway?
"With" is correct in this case, Grammarly. Not "of." Fuck off.
Anyway...
The practical problem with falling down the hole is having to re-establish my productivity patterns after making a break with them in favor of Netflix and Brood While Hoping the Asteroid Obliterates The Earth Soon So I Can Quit Feeling Like This.
Seeing as my brain is (as I have explained before) like one of these fucked-up spiderwebs...
Click to enlarge
"Like" is correct in this case, Grammarly. Not "as." Fuck off again.
Anyway, my brain is a Peyote spiderweb or an LSD spiderweb. Those look normal at first, but on closer examination, they aren't.
I think it's freaky that the Peyote and LSD spiderwebs look more normal than the Caffeine spiderweb. I drink coffee and tea all the time for "mental clarity." Or maybe just because I like them, seeing as apparently in a person with ADD, caffeine really doesn't do jack shit for your mental clarity. This is why I can drink coffee and then go to sleep, no problem, except for the fact that I am perhaps a bit more likely to wake up having to pee two hours later. Which might happen anyways, so it's kind of a crapshoot.
Anyway, enough about my caffeine consumption. The OCD part of my synaptic fuckery (yes, I really do have OCD, I'm not using it as a euphemism for "hyper-organized," which I am not) hates like a motherfucker when my patterns get disrupted. I don't have an exact time of day for getting things done--the bipolar part of my synaptic fuckery hates the fuck out of rigid deadlines--but I do like to have certain things done on certain days at a certain period in the day. For instance, I like to have my Monday morning "share this shit around with these certain blog hops" post done in the morning. Not "at *8:15 sharp" or even "by ten," just "in the morning." Because that is how I roll.
When my shit psyche has decided to take me off the rails into "fuck everything, it all sucks" town, and I have gotten nothing accomplished, my pattern is fucked for the day, possibly for the week, and I am anxious as fuck.
This is why I start wanting to throw shit whenever some clown-ass shrink sells a book claiming that people can be "cured" of mental illness if you just follow their sage wisdom, which is probably the same fucking "sage wisdom" that some other fucker touted in some other book, and it probably involves Stopping that Stinkin' Thinkin' and instead Thinking Positive, Say Halleluja, and Boy Howdy, You are Cured! And if you aren't you're doing it wrong. Kind of like with all the cabbage soup Special K Weight Watchers Jenny Craig Nutrisystem Medifast Slimfast Alli Atkins Detox Tea Shit Your Pants In Public and Be A Fucking Grouch that No-One Can Stand To Be Around Because Your Ass is Fucking Starving And This Shit Only Works Long-Term For About 5% Of People diets out there. If the millionth one of these crap-ass bullshit not enough nutrition to keep a fucking ant alive diets doesn't work long-term for the dieter, it's always the dieter's fault and not the fault of a flawed-ass program designed to keep you paying into a flawed and fucked system forever while you remain filled with self-loathing for your entire miserable life.
But my misanthropic self digresses.
You can't "cure" mental illness any more than you can cure type 2 diabetes with whatever brand of snake oil or mantras or "defining yourself" or whatever the fuck bullshit they're spouting. Type 2 diabetes occasionally goes into remission. Occasionally. It can never be cured. Myself, I ain't going to bank on it going into remission because that's highly unlikely. I'm going to go with Reality Bites on this one, use my insulin, and other than that, try not to obsess about the fact that this fucking disease makes me multiple times more vulnerable than your average 54-year-old for strokes and kidney failure. It wouldn't do me one damn bit of good to obsess about that shit, so I'm not going to. Not the same thing as being in denial, I'm fully aware that I have diabetes. But it's not going to cure me to think about it all day long or to try to pray it away or wave magic wands at it or eat only bran and some sort of overpriced oil for the rest of my life.
With mental illness, you don't cure it, you learn techniques to cope with your fucked and broken brain. Nobody has ever "cured" mental illness. They have taught people to deal with shit. That's all. If you're lucky, you find a sympathetic shrink who will help you learn some coping skills and hopefully teach you how to get along with yourself rather than just teaching you to be an obedient little cog in the machine. If you're not lucky, well, welcome to the club. I've never resonated with mental health professionals. I always feel like they're not listening to what I'm really saying. Some of them are sort of pleasant to shoot the shit with, the rest just piss me off. Most of them have nothing to offer me. So, I'll make do with what I can do. It's cheaper, both in terms of money and time lost.
Because I have rapid-cycling type 2 bipolar disorder, I've had people imply that it's no big deal when I go down the hole, because I'll cycle back up again within a week to ten days. This is true to a degree, although circumstances do impact mood and feeling ignored and ostracized can keep me down for longer. On the other hand, sometimes I just need to be left the fuck alone for a while. An adorable little bundle of contradictions, me.
I read that statistically, people with type 2 bipolar disorder are more likely to commit suicide than people with bipolar 1 or schizophrenia. On the surface, this doesn't make sense. Since bipolar 2 presents with hypomania rather than full mania and people with bipolar 2 don't experience psychosis, wouldn't this mean that they are more capable of reasoning things out?
What it means is that people with bipolar 2 do not experience altered states and therefore tend not to experience the euphoria which sometimes (by no means always) accompanies a full mania. I've only experienced full mania when taking SSRIs and I don't know how anyone handles that state. I was tremendously agitated and nothing made any damn sense at all. I did not experience euphoria. It was like my entire body was electrified and I just wanted to turn it the fuck off, but I couldn't. Bipolar 2 does not come with full mania, although when untreated, I did at times experience giddiness surrounding a given situation. When I realized that I was mistaking giddiness for happiness and that I have only experienced actual happiness a handful of times in my life, that right there kind of made me want to off myself. It was really discouraging.
Similarly, people with bipolar 2 do not experience hallucinations or delusions (except when taking narcotics, at least in my case). The metaphysical part of my belief system thinks that it's possible that for people with schizophrenia, the barrier between worlds is not closed and they see creatures such as elementals and spirits all the time. Whatever the case, for people with Bipolar 2, we are aware of the world as it is. This means we are more likely to aware that reality, in fact, does fucking suck, and sometimes we are not able to Stop That Stinkin' Thinkin'. The more we look at our crap-ass, hopeless situation, the more hopeless we feel. There is no magic fairy dust. There is no Happy Ever After. There is only more of the same fucking shit to look forward to because even if we pull ourselves out of this round of fuckery, we're just back on the same roller coaster. As Sylvia Plath (who had bipolar disorder) said:
"To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?"
--Sylvia Plath (27 October 1932 - 11 February 1963)
As I have learned, it does descend, again and again and again.
Sorry, but I'm rubbish at making shape poems and I just got through writing a book review and I haven't even gotten to writing a chapter in my own story yet, so you get this tortured-scream free verse, in part inspired by the song I'm about to share, one to which I've been able to relate to all too well in my life.
Please, I implore you, this is one of those don't try to fix me pieces. Let me let it bleed. If there's one place a person ought to be able to express the dark, the bitter, the broken, that place is poetry.
Also, please don't say "I hope this isn't autobiographical."
It is, and saying that will not make it not autobiographical.
Let me let it bleed.
The aftermath of bullying is forever.
To every bastard who mentally, physically, or sexually abused and took advantage of my younger self with her low self-esteem who was so desperate to be loved, burn in hell.
These sorts of assholes seek vulnerable women to prey on. They are low-life predatory sadists.
Only you can set you free Do not let what advertisers tell you You must be in order to be "beautiful" Keep you locked away Closed off from the world Don't let the quest for silver and gold Trap you in a crate of greed Until your need for wealth Becomes more a coffin than a birdcage Only you can set you free
Other than substance addiction issues, one might not think that Bon Scott and Amy Winehouse have much in common. However, both of them were involved to the point of obsession with people who were incredibly bad for them, and although musically speaking they are both artists I can't get enough of, I have to stop listening after a fairly brief period of time because I know what and who they're singing about and it's really depressing.
The other issue is the fact that I can relate all too well to being obsessed with a person who is really, really, really horrible for you. I did it more than once. People think that all-consuming "love" is wonderful. It's anything but, and usually, it isn't really love, it's an obsession. So, yanno, no thanks to ending up in the ER with bloody wrists over some asshole who doesn't deserve my pain. Better to be alone than to be with someone toxic.
Although, unfortunately, in my case, more often than not, I'm alone in bad company.
Plus, in the case of AC/DC, I can only listen for just so long (and that isn't long these days) before I start getting really pissed off about the way Malcolm Young went out. Dementia is the absolute fucking worst, particularly when it takes out someone whose intelligence was a key part of who they were. Malcolm Young was a high school dropout, but he was smarter than a lot of people with strings of letters behind their names.
The late Glen Campbell's wife said of dementia "It's better to die some other way," and she's absolutely right. Fuck dementia.
As Bob Seger once said, sometimes I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then.
All right, you've all met my wounded inner child and I had a day where I crashed and burned. As I said, I do not do well with confrontation. However, I bounce back more quickly than I used to, and today, the bitch is back. Now, meet my sassy inner child and my asshole super-ego.
I had made the decision to stop participating in the Poems in April prompts, but I rescind that decision at this point. I had an absolutely odious interaction with one individual, which is what caused my meltdown. I don't tolerate being patronized or told that my truth is a fabrication.
The preceding statement remains true. But overall, my interactions with people from this link-up have been super positive, and I'm not going to allow, as Inspector Tom Barnaby would say, a barney with a person whose condescension towards me caused my temper to go nova to stop me from making positive connections.
Around these parts, the heart and soul take precedence over credentials every time. I honestly don't give a flying flea-bitten fuck in hell what your credentials are. I care about who you are and how you treat others. I don't care if you have a Doctorate in Everything or if you dropped out of kindergarten. A fuck I don't give.
Look, obviously it's pretty impressive if you managed to get a Doctorate in Everything or even a Doctorate in Anything. Or a Master's. Or a Bachelors. Or an Associate's Degree. Or even if you managed to graduate high school. Or if you got a GED. Credentials mean you worked through a program, and the higher the program, one assumes the more knowledge you obtained. It still doesn't make your thoughts any more important than the thoughts of people who have not obtained the level of certification that you have.
I care about your heart. I care about your soul. I give not one single fuck about your credentials. Do not expend your energy bragging about your credentials to me. I probably care more about the ingredient list on my bottle of cold brew coffee from Stok. Coffee. Almond milk. Cane sugar. Chocolate syrup. The good stuff!
Unless you are performing a service for me where credentials are important (i.e. I don't want you operating on me unless you are an actual surgeon) please reserve your bragging about your credentials to your own damn space. Nobody here cares.
That being said, I am not going to allow a thoroughly odious interaction with one person stop me from forming connections with the vastly greater number of good and supportive people. They have shown me their support, and I want to do the same for them.
In the future, to prevent another donnybrook, I will refrain from interacting with the individual who lit my fuse in the first place. I may possess the soul of a ten-year-old child (I learn best by playing games and I have a collection of several hundred stuffed animals) but I am capable of behaving like a civilized adult. With people I don't get on with, I find the best course of action is to forego communication with said individual. Unless they insist on poking the bear, the problem should be solved.
Here's Twisted Sister to tell it like it is.
As one commenter said, I've never seen anyone so angry about carrots.
The disobedient son in the video is played by the video director's son. The angry dad is played by Mark "Douglas C. Neidermeyer" Metcalf.
I've come a long way in keeping my temper in check from the days of my youth, but there are a few things that make me really hot under the collar, and then I overreact just a teeny tiny little bit and hit the red button with the nearest sledgehammer, sending the verbal nukes a-flyin'.
One thing that sets me off like nobody's business is the implication that I'm a liar or one of those self-important twits who would create a puff piece minimizing the struggles of a person with a cognitive, physical, or psychological impairment to prove how Deep and Poetical (TM) I am. I have ripped shit more than once on the kind of people who say things like "he's so autistic" or "she's so bipolar" when what they mean is "he's withdrawn and not socially adept" and "she's mercurial." Do NOT use people's health conditions as adjectives. It's really fucking rude. Recently, I fired a real estate agent who believed that questioning my credibility would inspire me to "move quickly." Say whaaaaaat???? In what Universe does that even make sense? I remarked that this guy must have watched American Psycho and thought that it was a business training video. The lack of logic in this line of thinking is astounding.
Having my credibility questioned is a real sore point for me. All my life I've had people imply that I was "just looking for attention" or "being dramatic" or straight-up lying about my symptoms. I have a lot of physical issues that have never been resolved, and the scars on my arms are not the result of "seeking attention," fuck you very much. They are the result of having been in one whole fuckload of psychological pain and feeling like no-one was on my side.
Point of trivia: my ex-husband has Asperger's syndrome and I have bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder. This combination proved to be oil and water. He is one of my great friends in this life and I have been very worried about him as he is having some serious health issues. But a marriage between such polar opposites in the neurodivergent spectrum proved to be a volatile combination and not sustainable.
Our son is autistic and has ADHD. He's strikingly intelligent, but his way of thinking and problem solving does not jibe with the modern education system. He learns by doing and is incapable of learning by reading textbooks. Yes, he can read. He is a prolific reader of the likes of Roger Zelazny (whose works I sometimes have trouble wrapping my brain around), Fred Saberhagen, Kurt Vonnegut, C.S. Lewis, Arthur C. Clarke, and J.R.R. Tolkien. He simply is unable to conform to the textbook-and-lecture style of learning.
I feel like the world is missing out on a lot of great talent by insisting that everybody look alike and dress alike and think alike and talk alike. The Stepford Wives was not an instruction manual.
One of the things that I loved about AC/DC, outside of their badass marriage of the blues to garage rock, was the fact that these cheeky-ass working-class bastards gave the middle finger to propriety at every turn. This doesn't mean they believed in being mean and stomping on other people. They themselves had been bullied and belittled and had quite enough of it. They were speaking up for the "mongrels", for the "ugly" people, for the people who had been told that they would never amount to anything because they were weird and different and not conventionally attractive.
They were not a band for the ever upper-class high society. They were a band for the outcasts, like me. So, when I stood up for them when people started accusing them of "devil worship," I got pigeonholed as a devil worshiper too. It was pretty funny in retrospect. I went around throwing devil horns and evil grins at the idiots spreading the rumors. I was probably the biggest excitement they had in their narrow-minded lives.
Fun's fun, but the reality is that I always felt bad for these guys who really weren't doing anything wrong. I had a particular affinity for Malcolm Young, because he was painfully shy (like I am by nature), because he tended to be depressive (gee, I wouldn't know anything about that, I'm just your dyed-in-the-wool ray of fucking sunshine), and because I could see that he was actually a lot more sensitive than he let on.
I have to confess that I was a bit jealous of the powerful bond of friendship that Malcolm had with Angus. Not everyone is lucky enough to have the other half of their soul born in the same lifetime. Forget having the other half of your soul be your guardian angel. Having them be your best bud is the way to roll!
In truth, most soul mate relationships I've observed have been platonic rather than romantic. Too much is made of the romantic soul mate bond.
In fairness, I think that (romantic) love stinks, so take my previous statement however you wish. Take it with a couple of grains of sea salt. I use sea salt in my cooking. I recommend it.
All this is leading up to something. Bear with me.
I honestly think that there is a degree of elitism in the insistence on rigidly adhering to certain concepts. People who do not have access to higher education don't get to learn the niceties of iambic pentameter (I didn't even know what the hell that was until I was in my 50's) or what the hell ever.
I didn't know the difference between a Haiku and a Senryu until I was in my 50's. I just liked the 5-7-5 pattern that I learned in the third grade or thereabouts and I enjoyed using it to express my dumb and worthless thoughts.
There's a lot of shit that I still don't know. It doesn't mean that I don't have the right to express my shit.
Similarly, there are a lot of musicians who are self-taught, who didn't have access to higher musical education, and, frankly, a lot of the time I like their work better than the works of those who have been properly trained. For instance, Chris Isaak (who, by the way, is an incredibly cool person) can't read music. He couldn't tell you what a pentatonic scale looks like, but if you were to play one for him, he would play it right back at you, embellish on it, and turn it into a really amazing song.
The slaves who sang the heart-rending spirituals on which the blues (a.k.a. the backbone of modern music) is based certainly did not have access to higher education about music or poetry. They sang to comfort themselves and their fellow slaves. They sang to convey messages. They did not express themselves in a "proper" fashion, but they damn well expressed themselves. They told their truth. They told their stories. And they had every right in the Universe to do both, propriety be damned!
As well, the idea that using profanity shows a lack of intelligence is elitist fuckery, and I don't have a whole lot to say to anyone who adheres to that foolish line of thinking.
I think I would have thrown myself from a precipice long ago if it weren't for the rule-breakers and "mongrels" of this world. I couldn't bear the idea of being shut in a room with a bunch of hoi-polloi. Pair me with the proletariat any day.
I do like to share my work, and for a while, it seems to go well enough. But I invariably learn the lesson that my truth is not pretty or polished enough and I am not sweet and sunny enough, and I end up saying "fuck it" and oozing back down the back alley from whence I crawled forth in the first place.
I will never be acceptable. For the most part, I think that's a good thing. But it does get kind of lonely, so now and then I go against my own rule about not engaging and I engage. This is generally a mistake.
Live and learn. Again and again and again.
Now I have to unruffle my feathers so I can prepare the latest Carnal Invasion manuscript for publication via my seedy little company, Naughty Netherworld Press, purveyors of high-quality Kindle smut. These are supposed to be gleeful romps featuring a group of randy, shapeshifting aliens having a go with elementals, humans, vampires, werewolves and such, not a heaping helping of angry argleblargh by a pissed-off editor. I need to switch gears toot sweet.
~Cie~
Cracks me up every time. I did see an interview later where Malcolm revealed that the director for this set of videos behaved like a drill sergeant and they couldn't wait to get away from him. Angus spent the entire interview doubled over with laughter. Reporters had a tendency to interview the brothers separately because when they were together they tended to start smirking and chortling about some joke that only they were in on, and one couldn't get much useful information out of them.
My truth will make you uncomfortable. You may end up thinking that I’m lying because surely in modern society, nobody could be allowed to fall through the cracks that much. But you asked, and so I’ll answer as briefly as possible.
I was born in 1965 in Denver, Colorado to a doctoral student in literature who had once wished to travel the country like his hero, Jack Kerouac, and his wife, a former nurse with a degree in fine arts.
My parents had abandoned the church but returned to it when I was seven years old. My then-three-year-old brother and I were baptized and became Catholic.
My bipolar disorder onset when I hit puberty, and I was always misunderstood.
Here are some questions I've answered for Share Your World. You can read them if you want. Or not, if you don't want. No skin off my nose either way.
What is the best pick me up that you know of? To shake you out of the blues?
The Blue Garage
Photoshop Image by The Real Cie
How about the blues? The blues is a goddamn art form! That shitty way I feel when my soul starts crashing in on itself and I feel like I'm lying dead at the bottom of a scummy trench? I think that shit should be called "the gray-green death bile from hell." But that's too long to say readily.
Here is a poem which Pepper, the main female protagonist in Team Netherworld's long-running WIP, Fetch, wrote for her beloved Gerry, the Fetch referred to in the story's title. I think it's kind of a poem about having the blues for the blues.
Where do you like to go when you eat out?
Somewhere cheap where the food tastes good and I'll be served quickly.
Do you believe in luck? Gratitude Question: Aside from necessities, what is one thing you couldn’t go a day without? My son
Notes:
I referenced my own work in this post, which for some reason makes me see the need to mention that I plan to participate in NaPoWriMo in April as I've done every year for the past several years. I'm also planning to participate in Camp NaNoWriMo. I might try to participate in the A to Z blogging challenge if it doesn't turn out to be too muckin' fuch. I haven't decided yet if my participation will be official or unofficial.
I call this one "A Space Oddity Makes An Embryonic Journey."
You can call it "Cie Was Fucking Around In Photoshop And Really Has No Idea What The Fuck She's Doing," and that would be quite accurate.
It got to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" stage, and then I named it and added it to my Fart Gallery, which is my folder for my art practice. Because that is how I roll.
So, this is for David Bowie, because he was and is wonderful. He gave me the gift of being his wonderfully unusual and unique self, which taught me that being different is a good thing. It isn't an easy thing, but the best thing to be is yourself.
It hasn't been easy being different in a world that demands conformity.
I'd rather be in good company with good-hearted oddballs like David than in with a hard-hearted in crowd who will only break bread with those they deem acceptable in a very superficial way.
I have gone underground with all of the Netherworld blogs and am considering doing so with most of the story blogs. Seeing the pageviews while never getting any comments just makes me paranoid-er.
The Crazy Creatives Cheerleading Camp blog is now open any time, not just for monthly posts. We're crazy and creative all the time!
