Dreamsick again. I think I've been dreamsick every day this week. The frustrating part is not remembering any of the dreams. All the feeling, none of the details. Or maybe I did remember them, but I didn't think about them or write them down, so they're lost now. In one of them I wrote a story called Tether. I don't remember what the story was about, if I even dreamed that part at all.

A young butcherbird was singing outside my window, and occasionally making baby squeaks. It was a nice way to wake up. I don't remember exactly but I think he was a Pied Butcherbird Cracticus nigrogularis, though really there's an equal chance he was a Grey Butcherbird Cracticus torquatus. He was perched on the downpipe under the eaves to keep out of the rain, and I was too muddled and half-drowned by sleep.



I'm tired of everything that's eldrich and alien being described as horrifying. Wonder and awe are overwhelming anyway, horror thinly-veiled xenophobia is unnecessary to underscore the power of the truly weird. I have known horror and evil, and it was all human. The marvellous and alien and other that I have known has not always been beautiful, or anything that could be called "good", and certainly never safe, but it has never needed eye-peeling, madness-inducing horror to bring it poignancy.

I got in touch with Weird Tales, the editor is overwhelmed at the moment. I can live with that, it's just nice to know that my submission actually reached her. I don't mind how long it takes her to read it, especially this late in the year with all the stuff and the seasonal madness.

I have this hypothesis that Christmas can't help but suck.

When you're a kid, Christmas is introduced to you with these huge expectations that everything will be wonderful on Christmas day. Nothing can ever meet the expectations that we are taught to have for Christmas. Whether it's the fact that year after year you don't get that pony, or that every Christmas morning is just a bitter reminder that you're the poor kid with alcoholic parents, or the fact that Grandpa died on Christmas day when you were eight, or your family always ends up fighting over dinner, or it doesn't snow, or no one else believes in Mr Hankey, Christmas is just so godamned easy to ruin.

Even if Grandpa didn't die on Christmas day, even if he died in July his not being there any more diminishes every Christmas after. But it's so much worse if Grandpa dies on Christmas day. If something bad happens on Christmas day, it's somehow a bigger tragedy than if it happened on any other day of the year. Everything is intensified so that Christmas lends itself to horrible tragedies that would just be regular misfortune the rest of the year. And a tragedy that would be a tragedy no matter when it happened is somehow worse for happening on Christmas.

Christmas is made for disappointment because we all want so much, and that's ok. And Christmas is supposed to be a time for miracles, and dreams coming true, and all that hippy crap. So when it doesn't deliver, of course you're diappointed. Grandpa didn't come back to life for Christmas lunch, and you know you weren't really expecting it but secretly in some small way you hoped because it's Christmas godamnit and that's when Jesus and Santa Claus gang up to make everything perfect for everyone.

The illusion is so precious to people that if one does shout "Bah! Humbug!" and decline to engage in the specious exultation of a day no more prone to miracle than any other yet far more amenable to tragedy and disappointment, one is branded a scrooge and treated as a pitable, cold-hearted villain who hates children and wants everyone to be miserable. It's the opposite of the truth of course, I don't want anyone to be miserable on Christmas, but Christmas makes people miserable.

So. I say this without bitterness, without malice, and with good reason. Seriously, fuck Christmas.

Here's a video that will hopefully get a smile.



If that didn't make you smile, this one most certainly will.

Hrm. So. In order, before the end of January:

Staff party.
Show application.
Expected in Sydney.
Performing in Brisbane.
Expected back in Sydney.
Seasonal gifting.
Woodford.
Moving house.

I'm sure I've missed stuff, and I've left out all the awesome gigs I want to go to. And at least the show application doesn't cost anything, and I won't have to start the show til after we've moved, giving me a small window to extend my music collection in important directions. And I'm volunteering at Woodford so I don't have to worry about ticket or camping costs, just food and lots of Chai.

I met a strange little cat on Saturday night. I mean, he was perfectly ordinary, just entirely out of place. He had no tail but clearly wasn't a manx, and was mostly white with grey blotches, and in the grey blotches he had charcoal spots. Domestic cats don't have spots. They are all genetically stripy, even solid-coloured cats are stripy. The only time you find spots on domestic cats is when they have been outbred with wild cats, such as the leopard cat. The one exception is the Egyptian Mau. The cats in Borneo (sometimes called Borneo Bobtail Cats, though not a recognised breed) have mixed with leopard cats and sometimes show spots. They also have a unique genetic bottleneck and are all tailless or partially tailless. This sweet little cat was in all respects perfectly ordinary... for Borneo. Not for Brisbane.
And yet, even with an explanation, nobody seemed to understand how utterly utterly wrong this cat was. It was like they couldn't see strangeness at all, even when it was pointed out.

I didn't end up doing a show on Saturday night due to illness of the vomitational kind. I spent part of the night sitting on FST's front steps waiting to find out whether or not I was going to be copiously and violently revisited by my dinner, and watching some rats Rattus norvegicus in the trees. I couldn't see them well but R. norvegicus has a very distinctive face, and a couple of them came quite close to check me out and establish whether I was a threat. I also saw a Bush Stone Curlew Burhinus grallarius go wandering up the middle of the street, a couple of fruit bats (probably Black Flying Foxes Pteropus alecto) and a fluffy grey kitty (Felis silvestris cattus cutefluffykin).

I just ejected an amazing insect from my room. It had two sets of membraneous wings, compound eyes, and BOBBLES on the ends of its antennae! I think it might have been some kind of big weird Neuroptera, only I didn't have an identification key and now I don't have the insect, and I didn't observe quite enough details to do it from memory because the critter wouldn't hold still, but it was the first time I've ever seen an actual creature with bobbles on the end of its antennae. It was NEAT!

Wife and I went to a special preview screening of Where The Wild Things Are tonight. All I have to say is GO AND SEE IT!

Actually, that's not all I have to say. I want everyone to promise me that they will howl near the end. You'll know when it's the right thing to do, you'll have to fight to stop yourself. Please do it. Please do it because I couldn't. Everyone wanted to, you could feel it, but no one, not even me, could be the first to do it and give everyone else permission.

Please promise me you will give yourself permission to howl.

I'm going back to see it again, and next time I will howl. But I think I'll always regret not howling tonight.

Don't analyse it either. I mean, it is ripe for analysis, but don't do it to yourself. It's wild, so just feel the wildness and forget about analysing the semiotics and symbolism. Anyone who isn't moved by this film has no soul, so don't intellectualise it.

New story coagulating. It's a big one. Reading By Moonlight is still grinding along in fits and starts, and I'm grateful that I'm under no particular pressure to finish any of these lengthy tales in a specific timeframe. After reading greygirlbeast's blog too long I don't think that's where I want to be right now. Yes, I write. Yes, I want to write. No, I don't think I want to be in a place of having to write, year in, year out, whether I feel like it or not, forcing myself through story upon story because my living depends on it. Not now.

Anyway. A new story. Two of them perhaps, mirrors, different windows onto the same event. They will be separate narratives, and probably kept that way, rather than merged into a single story from alternating angles. But these things never go as I think they will. Reading By Moonlight isn't. I thought it was a story I've been wanting to tell for ten-ish years, and it quickly turned out to be something entirely different. That story is still hanging about in the wings. This new one isn't it, but it still has similarities. No, that's wrong. It has commonalities.

There is a longicorn beetle on the TV unit. I think it wandered in to get out of the rain a few days ago. They do that here, this isn't the first. Little ones, though for all I know this may be the same one from several months ago. I do hope it's not an indication that the house is rotting. Longicorns like damp, rotting wood. They have big mandibles for crunching it down. They're splendid and sort of intimidating-looking yet totally harmless and good-natured. I've never met a mean longicorn, though truth to tell I've not met many.

It's wiggling its antennae around wildly, and just took flight for a few moments. The back door is wide open, I hope it can find its way out. I don't want to harm it in a rescue attempt. I worry about breaking one of its splendid long antennae. It seems quite fond of the cornice, and I worry again that the house might be rotting. It won't be my problem if the house is rotting because they've more or less told us we're to leave in January. Not a great time to move, but move we must. Straight after Christmas and Woodford, not sure how they think three students will be able to afford to move in January, but realistically I don't think they actually care.

Damien Hirst distresses me. Not in a groovy, challenges my boundaries, provocative art way. In a ponies in vats of formaldehyde is just horrible way.

NSP: Rights, does anybody know their rights? You see, I’ve learned something today. Our forefathers came to this country because they believed in an idea, an idea called freedom. They wanted to leave in a place where you couldn’t be prosecuted for your beliefs – where a person could live the way he chooses to live. You see us as being perverted because we’re different from you; people are afraid of us because they don’t understand, and sometimes it’s easier to persecute than to understand.
Kyle: Dude, you have sex with children.
NSP: We are human. Most of us didn’t even choose to be attracted to young boys. We were born that way. We can’t help the way we are and if you all can’t understand that, well, then, I guess you’ll just have to put us away.
Kyle: Dude! You have SEX with CHILDREN.
Stan: Yeah, you know we believe in equality for everybody and tolerance and all that gay stuff, but dude, fuck you.

I'm sure that whole South Park quote could be rewritten about art and putting ponies in vats of formaldehyde, but as if I'm doing that. You get the idea. I believe in artistic freedom and edginess and pushing boundaries and challenging people with your art and all that hippie stuff, but dude, fuck you. You kill ponies.

So the other day I was round at Caine's place and he thrusts a copy of Leviathan by John Birmingham into my hands and says I should read it because it's awesome and he luuuuuuurves Birmingham, is totez gay for him and even defends his obnoxious militant meativorousness, and besides the book is about Syndey's criminal underworld history of seedy decadence.

Today I was in the bookshop and I picked up a book called Leviathan: Or, the Whale by Philip Hoare, think "gee that looks interesting," and put it back.

Moments later, downstairs in the same bookshop, FST thrusts a book into my hands saying "OO SHINY!" and I read the back, get it, and start reading it on the bus. The title doesn't register until some way into the story. It's Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld.

OBVIOUS MUCH?

This... could get interesting. Nice knowing you >.>

Wow. My last post makes it seem like I've been really sad and broken lately, but I haven't. I mean, obviously I was when I wrote it, and the stuff in it has made me intermittently sad whenever it's floated up and demanded brainmeats be given over to its articulation, but my overall mood and sense of wellbeing has been on a slow and fairly stable improvement. I still think that Fluvoxamine and I are a bad mix, and I need different pills that don't make me quite so depressed and aggressive.

Paradoxical reactions. I told New Doctor I have them. I told him I was having them. I am not impressed that he didn't change my medication when I asked him to straight away. When I go back to see him, which must be soon, I shall go armed with extensive research and medical journal articles.

My mum has been reading Invisible Heroes and is very grateful I marched her into the bookshop and ordered her to buy it last time we had lunch in the city together. She's done a lot of successful self-healing over the years since she left my biofather, but she's still finding it good to understand what she did.

I think that the thing that has lifted my spirits a lot over the last few weeks was running the latest club event festival of joy. Not so much the euphoria of the aftermath of a successful club, though that is a wonderful thing. More the actual work of getting it up and running, it gives me a sense of time, of deadlines, responsibilities, tasks to be performed, and a feeling that I'm doing something useful. I think that the unusually long break between the last two clubs was actually a bad thing, because I had nothing really to keep me grounded when I needed it most. University unfortunately isn't that thing at the moment, and to keep on at Uni I think I need to be running clubs.

So if Captain Bligh gets her way my business is fucked, my mental health is fucked, and my chance of ever finishing my degree is fucked. Fucking slagbeast. I am really angry at her right now, and I'm going to make sure she knows it. I'm also angry at KRudd for entirely different reasons, and I'm going to make sure he knows it too.

I'm planning to start making my own makeup next year. I found a supplier that made me so happy and ferret-shocked I might tear apart and explode into bazillionty dust particles. I figure I'll just start out doing it as a very exciting hobby, and if I discover I have a tremendous talent for it I might launch a line. It's a great thing though, in that it ranges from brainlessly simple to PH.D. in chemistry complex, so the possibilities are endless. And hey, mountains of cheap, unique makeup.

Squirmy stuff that's been hovering about for a few days. Triggery also. Difficult to approach because of the potential for hurting people. Well, one person. Well, tao_ov_dreaming.

Over the years of our relationship a lot of stuff happened, some good, some bad, some wonderous, some horrible. I must remember not to generalise. But by the same token I must remember not to diminish.

I find myself from time to time wondering how I have a wife who is so patient and compassionate, and a favourite squeezy toy who is so gentle and forgiving, and how I could possibly deserve these people. Because, you see, I have this whole messed up picture of myself created by so many internalised voices that say it takes two to tango, there's two sides to every story, I must have been as terrible as anything that happened to me.

Ok so more than a few times I did give as good as I got, and I was never any lily white innocent. But I also gave the best I had, and what I got in return seems to have been his worst. Now I feel used up and wasted, and there's nowhere near the good left to me that there used to be, and those voices must be wrong because he is so much better than he was when we set out and I am so much worse. I am finally starting to see that this was not equal or balanced abuse, and have only to look at the outcome to see the truth of that.

The voices lie. Our relationship was not fair. I did not have to have done something to deserve it. I did not necessarily treat him just as badly.

And now... now I feel like I haven't got anything good left for Wife and FST, like they are getting less than they deserve that was ever good in me because it was all taken and turned into shit.

And I still feel like I must have deserved all of that and by extension I couldn't possibly deserve any of this.

And I'm crying and I should be squishing FST and I can't because I need to get this out and once again FST has to wait and gets to spend time with a version of me that is broken and sad, without enough good left to give.

And everyone else gets the best of someone who took the best of me and turned me into what he was, then turned himself into something good and beautiful and left me.

Sleepy Kali sleeping in my own bed tonight. It's not over yet, but I'm home.

The dreamers are still asleep.

Fuck you November 13.

A girl walked by me wearing purple shoes. This brought me an unexpected amount of happiness. I think this means I am coming back to life. I can smell the mock orange bush flowering next to the stairs. I can actually smell it. It's difficult to explain how utterly dulled my senses become that even strong stimuli, like the smell of a jasmine bush spazzing out 20 cm away from my face, can completely fail to register. It's not just not noticing, it's as if I can't smell it at all. But today I can.

Watching (more like ignoring) From Dusk Til Dawn I realised that FST looks kind of like Juliette Lewis. Only shorter. It sometimes seems as if there's only so many faces to go round, and Hollywood just picks a reasonably good example of each to showcase. Also, I wish I had a body like Salma Hayek.

I have discovered to my horror that I have turned into a jerk. I don't mean in the traumatised-people-are-selfish way, I knew about that and I accept it as something that has to happen because there's no one else to look after me. Traumatised people invariably go through phases of being selfish jerks, especially when left untreated. So I'm not bothered by that, I figure it's something that will go away on its own as I recover. No, this realisation is far more unpleasant.

I have turned into a jerk, it seems, insofar as I have developed a lot of ugly, petty habits I hate. I suppose I have done this in further pursuit of an image (false though it may be) of normality, human-ness. Things like making judgements of people based on reputation, without haviing met them. That's bullshit and I have always hated it, yet here I am, doing it. Gossiping. God I hate gossip. It's one of the things I despise most ferociously about this species, I don't understand why they do it and I think it warrants being sent to the freaking showers. And I find myself gossiping. There's other things, like divulging information that isn't my business to divulge.

I don't want to be that kind of jerk for the sake of integrating into this world. How did this even happen? I've started turning into something I hate without even noticing.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH

I ran out of wire with two links to go. Then there was almost a sunshower and that was nice but it was spitting on my laptop so I moved and I got splinters in my butt. Today is fired.

About halfway into the ninth week since I sent the most recent submission to Weird Tales. It's been my experience with very busy editors that they get back to you straight away if they're flat-out not interested, and they'll take a little longer if they're making up their mind or choosing between a couple of possibilities, so I'm cautiously optimistic that, at the very least, they like it enough to consider it.

Today was fruitful. I managed to squeeze a few dollars out of the budget for beads, and am most of the way through the Steampunk Engineer prayer necklace. I have about a dozen more planned. Stupid not being able to buy beads as fast as I have ideas. I need to start shopping at a bead place that does wholesale discounts, instead of at the most expensive bead shop in the whole damn city because it's the only one I know how to get to. Especially annoyed now that I've found out just how damn easy the cheaper place is to get to. Stupid stupids.

It must be November, everyone's dying. Blasted horrible month.

I have a bad case of the yuks. I've had a day or two of feeling agitated and bored and unable to focus, and now I feel all shades of yuk, but nothing specific. I can't tell if I'm hungry or tired or nauseous or irritated or sad or anxious or anything. I hate this feeling. It's not even a feeling, really, just an ugly mashup of feeling-slurry and thought-tailings. You know when you fuck up, and you want to unfuck the fuckup, and you just feel like anything you try will only fuck it up worse? That's the only clearly identifiable feeling I have right now. Bleh.

Moving on, because thinking or blogging about it won't change anything. For my next experiment I will put all the money I find in a box and save it up for... like a month or two. Just to see how much there is.

I have some profundities to post but such an attack of fetid ennui that it's not happening here, now. Ok there's another identifiable feeling--a feeling of absolute seething hatred for the way I feel right now.

I feel like I should post, and more importantly post something of substance, but I don't know what. I'm in staggering amounts of pain all over. Just the tension of getting through yesterday has caused all kinds of aching everywhere. And tired, dear gods the tired. And it's the kind of too-tired, where if I try to relax I feel leaden and exhausted but also jittery. I can't sleep for wanting to get up and run around, but I can't get up for exhaustion, so I just lie there twitching and occasionally have seizures.

Well, here's an article about the Oxfrod juggling study... http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091016114055.htm

I feel a little bit homesick but I'm not well enough to come out of hiding yet. I think I haven't been home in about three or four weeks and there's still a glassy wall of screaming around any serious thoughts of going back. Fortunately I have a weirdly copious amount of clean underwear and spare clothes. I'm not sure how that happened in the bigger picture because I didn't take this many clothes with me, mainly just a few changes of undies, because I thought I'd only be a couple of days. So that's kind of strange, but at least I haven't been wearing the same clothes for a month.

I think I am about to have another tooth breakage. I'm back to chewing on one side of my face til it does. It actually hurts more while it's breaking than it does once it's broken, once the chunk comes out it is almost painless. So damn sick of this. I wish I could afford a real dentist, instead of this dental hospital crap. It's all made worse, I'm sure, by the fact that I clench my teeth a lot. More now than previously, the medication has made it worse, but in any case, grinding and clenching are the sort of things dentists are SUPPOSED TO NOTICE.

I'm smoking less. That's quite good. More to the point, I'm wanting less to smoke, I'm just forgetting to do it.

I've been thinking about buying a PS2, because they're really cheap now. Then on Thursday night Caine came round with his, completely unprompted. He left it here & said we could use it. Good trick, that.

Yep, as predicted the wedding was brutal and exhausting. There was nothing unpleasant about it, it was a really nice day. It was just completely over-fucking-whelming and emotionally draining. I'm still feeling really flattened. I got to FST's and said I'm tired and fragile and I just need hugs. Hugs was exactly what I got, and no other crap. I am so grateful for that. We've had pizza + the Simpsons + fruit juice, and flattened or not, I feel over nine thousand better than I did when I left the reception. I think I managed to get through as much of it as I did because I was still chilled out from last night, when I got slightly and happily smashed. I don't want to make a habit of self-medicating, but sometimes it's a Good Thing and it helps.

I'm kind of glad that tao_ov_dreaming couldn't come along. Safe doesn't just mean I'll catch you when you fall. It also means I won't kick you when you're down, and I don't really feel that I can trust him not to kick me when I'm down. Mainly because kicking me when I'm down is something he's been known to do. This week. Oh yes I just did.

Anyway. My sister & nieces are Jehovah's Witnesses. JW weddings are all homilies about who's in charge, the minister giving random advice about how to run a good marriage, and loads of JEHOVAH RULZ OK stuff. I kind of hate the whole thing. It's nothing but You Tarzan. You Jane. Jehovah-god rulz. Make babies. Man > woman. Jesus > man > woman. Woman do as you're told. Jehovah-god is ace WOO! Man > woman. Do as you're told, woman. Jesus is way cool. Yay Jehovah!

I just put on my best tolerant face and try not to look too much like I'm not listening. I try not to flash my shameless pagan boobs at the nice christians when I'm getting changed in the car, keep the conversation to pointless pleasantries, and do my best not to steal the wine glasses (even though THEY'RE NOT NAILED DOON!). It's brief and relatively painless, and I can always talk pagan-feminist-anarchist-science with my mum when we adjourn to the leper colony.

My mum said today that if there was a virgin birth then Jesus ought to have been female, and I explained to her why he could have been a male if he was a lizard (parthenogenesis & ZW chromosome structure). Then I spent the next while giggling about Lizard-Jesus. I suppose that would make the Jesus immaculate conception thing truly miraculous, since in the unlikely event that a human woman did reproduce by parthenogenesis the offspring would have to be female because there would be no Y-chromosome donor. Unless he was a lizard and we should really be paying attention to David Icke.

Religion is weird. To me, I mean. I can't undersand remote spirituality, where divinity is something/somewhere distant. I can't understand the idea of an intermediary between me and divinity. I don't understand miracles because as I see it, if something happens, it's possible. I can't understand the idea of a creator who is less complex and diverse than that which hesheit has created. I can't dig a supreme god+goddess creator-couple for the same reasons I can't dig a supreme father-god as creator. I find an insect creator-god slightly more plausible, but still basically ridiculous because that would not reflect the diversity and complexity of the universe. A supreme creator-god can not be less than hisherits creation, and the more complex you realise the universe is, the more complex any supreme creator-god you believe in must be, or it's fucking stupid to believe in it.

But I'm an ecstatic and a witch and (hopefully one day) a scientist, so religion would be weird to me like that. I'm sure that ecstatic-witch-science is probably pretty weird-looking to those who don't do it.

Other stuff. The prickly-pears are flowering. Harvesting the fruit is a pain (sometimes literally) but they're delicious. There's a little spider roaming about in my stuff. Just in my stuff. Not that general part of the room, just my stuff. Nawh, he likes me! It's been 8 weeks and some hours since I sent off my most recent submission to Weird Tales, I hope that bodes well. The house across the road has their front door open, and down their hall I can see that in their loungeroom they have a life-size human (presumably replica) skeleton, seated at a piano, wearing headphones. Fucking AWESOME!

A setback presupposes progress. So I suppose that's something.

Today has been somewhat constructive. I had lunch with my mum. I decided to go to my middle neice's wedding tomorrow after all, which is going to be brutal and headfuckey but I can't just not go.

I have edited and returned my article for the Animism anthology, having had it gently pointed out to me that when I checked it off my mental list of Shit I Need To Do I hadn't actually done it. lupabitch raised some cool counterpoints that I would like to explore further at some point.

More pieces have been falling into place with the program. It seems I was right, and letting myself get eaten again was exactly what I needed to do to grab some of the pieces. Actually, that was one of the pieces.

I'm coming back in. Slowly, because this was a big one with a lot of angles. But it's happening, despite my getting intermittently shoved backwards. Since I've been doing this whole "I have PTSD and I am going to be honest with everyone about it" thing, there's been a really weird trend of people who would have accepted my excuses and outright lies contradicting and apparently disbelieving me when I tell the truth. If I say I have nothing, I can't do this now it means I HAVE NOTHING AND I CAN'T DO THIS RIGHT NOW. If I say I'm having a bad day and I'm a bit fragile it means I'M HAVING A BAD DAY AND I'M A BIT FRAGILE. If I say I'm not up to going out it means I'M NOT UP TO GOING OUT. If I say I'm out of spoons it means I'VE GOT NO FUCKING RESOURCES LEFT, I'M EXHAUSTED, GTFO. And so on and so forth. And yet, I can't... seems to be the cue for cornering me and trying to force me to do whatever it is that I patently can't do, right then. No spoons seems to be code for I have boundless energy and functional coping mechanisms, and I would like to tackle everything all at once.

I've been parsing a lot of anger and feelings of hurt, betrayal, fear and mistrust. I'm still at the FUCK YOU! In the FACE! With a BRICK! stage, it's going to take a little while longer to get to the I can express my feelings about this in a mature and constructive fashion stage. I'll get there, because that's the kind of person I would like to be.

I keep getting concerned loved ones asking whether my thing with FST is making me worse. I am going to post what I have to say about that here, because I see that it is a recurrent concern. I realise that there is a great personal cost to me in this entanglement. There are also great benefits that are not immediately obvious to outside observers. If that cost-to-benefit ratio tips unfavourably I will not continue out of a desire to be nice. I will not place myself in a position where ending it becomes a logistical difficulty. The fact that after so many months FST's handle is still FST, which I remind all is short for Favourite Squeezy Toy, is a bit of a hint as to why FST is still FST. FST is kind of my blankey. I feel safe with FST in ways that I do not feel in any other company, and do not remember ever having felt before. Learning to feel safe is a tremendously important part of my healing. Also, I am able to build and rebuild some particularly important boundaries that were very badly damaged at a very early age, or never properly developed. I am not prepared to give that up right now on the basis of FSTs other, sometimes very glaring faults and failings.

As was recently pointed out by ghymoreid, safe spaces aren't just spaces where we can feel happy and fine. Safe spaces are also where we are free to feel all those ugly, painful things and release all the bottled-up stuff. Sometimes being in a safe space feels worse, because it's safe to feel all that horrible shit, you don't have to lock it up and keep your game face on. There have been times I have had to get away from FST and go to the shops just to feel a little less safe, so I could stop the flow of painful feelings and bottle some of that shit back up for a while. I know it sounds weird and a bit counterintuitive, and I don't expect anyone to understand who hasn't been there.

Sometimes it may look like I'm getting worse, when I'm actually just dumping a load of toxins. Sometimes I am actually getting worse, whether it looks that way or not. Please trust me to know the difference.

I wrote this over about two days while I had no internet access. In spite of that, it's not very good or interesting. It's the usual waffle and dross, with a dose of scab picking and extensive rightious indignation.

---

I'm sitting on the back steps at tao_ov_dreaming's house, watching the planes come in, wishing I could get on one of them and go somewhere. I don't much care where, just away. I can smell fried fish, the chippy round the corner isn't open today so it must be the neighbours. I don't know when I'll post this, there's no internet. I would really enjoy a beer and a cigarette. The TV is on in the background. I made an amazing batch of sesame snaps tonight, with black sesame seeds, black himalayan salt, a dash of vanilla, and stopped just short of burning. It's even nicer if I burn it a little, I discovered too late. Tonight I ran a deep bath with rosewater, climbed in with a book and then couldn't sit in there more than about 8 minutes. Too twitchy, I couldn't just sit in the bath and relax. I gave up. Waste of water, on the whole.

While I was picking up a couple of copies of Invisible Heroes I grabbed a book called Complete Self-Help For Your Nerves by Dr Claire Weekes. I partially got it just for the novelty of reading a book about my "nerves" -- it was originally printed in about 1962, when they were still routinely committing young women to asylums for their "nerves" (see eg: Girl, Interrupted).

It's interesting, a bit of a curious anachronism. The author is irritatingly smug and condescending. The word "foolish" appears far too many times, and she's very fond of explaining how "nerves" are your own fault, doncha know. And yet, it seems to have been quite a progressive book for its time.

The other night I was thinking about something greygirlbeast said recently, about how homophobia and transphobia aren't the right words, and transmisia is more accurate. Rolling it around in my head I came up with the complimentary idea of the heteropath. This is heterosexuality as pathology, when someone's sexual identity motivates them to harm themselves and others. Not to suggest for a second that a straight sexual identity is inherently pathological, but I think it's pretty clear that it can become so. Like those two cretins in Northern QLD who bashed a man to death and then succesfully invoked the so-called "gay panic defence" and were found not guilty of murder a couple of weeks ago, to my unending disgust. The victim's mother claims he wasn't even gay.

I didn't bother with a comparative term for teh gays because, really, how many times has it happened? Gay people have killed, sure, and killed straight folk from time to time, but they don't kill straight victims for being straight. They don't kill people because the percieved straightness of those people disgusts, horrifies and threatens them to such an extent that they can't stop themselves from killing the offending straight person--which is more or less the premise of the "gay panic defense". What I'd like to know is if it happened, would it hold up in court. If a lesbian killed a man for hitting on her, we'll throw in a history of rape and sexual abuse for good measure, could she argue a "straight panic defense" and be found not guilty of murder? Could a gay man beat a woman to death for intimating that she found him attractive, and have the charges reduced to manslaughter?

I'd like to see heteropath included in the DSM-V. And then I'd like to see it used to put Fred Phelps under round-the-clock psychiatric care with heavy medication.

An Oxfrod study suggests you can rewire a person's brain by teaching them to juggle. I would like to know more.

So. Getting eaten. The thing about getting eaten is that once you stop fighting it, it's over pretty quickly. It is terrible, and that's why I fight it, which is pointless and exhausting. As soon as I let go though, the worst is usually over pretty quickly. I always get the worst advice around this time, even people who should know better seem to think that be strong, stick it out and keep fighting is good advice that I need. Well, it's not. It's shit advice that will make me much worse if I follow it. Piss off.

And then there's the scorn for not following shitty advice that will make me worse. As if the only way to deserve respect is to keep fighting myself, wearing myself down, until it kills me. Way to make a person feel worse about being sick. I can only imagine that if I did sustain a massive compound fracture, these selfsame people would call me a spineless pussy for using a sling or crutches.

I wrote a poem for everyone who gives me bad advice and then scorns me for failing or refusing to impliment it. It's a haiku.

Thanks. So. Much. You dick.
Seriously. I hate you.
Go die in a fire.

I should have it printed on gilt-edged business cards and hand it out to everyone who pulls that shit. I know you mean well but you actually suck giant sweaty camel bollocks very very hard. Meaning well isn't good enough. Hitler meant well.

In other news about my emotional scabs, the first portion of the program is more or less finished and working. I'll keep using it on myself for a while and debugging it before I send it to anyone. It's a matter of dignity to not give advice that I am clearly not following. And if I'm following it, and it's not working, I would expect my friends to have the sense not to follow it. Don't take diet advice from fat people kind of thing. Speaking of fat people, why do they so often smell of cheese? What's with that?

I didn't really have a Halloween this year. Poo.

Well, anyway. I've been thinking about power lately. I mentioned in a post yesterday about perceiving power as a zero-sum game, where if I have it someone else doesn't. I do realise, at least superficially that this is really not the case, but some deep lessons are very hard to unlearn.

I often see discussions about power over vs. power with, personal power, empowerment, discussions mostly involving people who've read lots of Starhawk. Whatever whatever. People seem to think it's just that easy to reframe power, and for some it's really not.

I find it difficult to see power as anything but a zero-sum game because I have had my personal sense of power brutally taken, and replaced with a sense of someone else's power and my own lack thereof. More than once. It's really difficult to work with the idea of unlimited power when you've had a deep, visceral lesson (or several) that power is limited and must be taken from others as yours was taken from you.

Part of why I'm a big fan of consensus, I suppose. It's like an agreement to leave your power at the door and place everyone on equal footing. The problem I see with it now is that anything aimed at equalising everyone by dropping down to the lowest common denominator seldom enriches anyone. You can't raise someone up by forcing everyone else down to them. It's the whole Harrison Bergeron thing, though at least with consensus-based structures I've been involved in it was an agreement, rather than an imposition. Like running slower so the kid with the short legs can keep up, rather than being shackled so short leg kid can keep up. Neither is going to help short leg kid run faster though, somebody get him some rollerskates. I've been advocating being nice and running slower, what I now think I really should have been advocating is rollerskates.

So anyway. I have ideas about getting over boggles about money, but I haven't a scoob how to approach this. I mean, it's entirely possible that the whole idea of power is so abhorrent to me on some deep level that I avoid even seeing strategies that could lead to me developing some, because of how I have experienced power taken and displayed. Like if power means doing that you can keep it, I don't want it. You can tell me til you're blue in the face that power doesn't involve doing That at all, and I can't believe you at the moment because I happened to be on the recieving end of That. Furthermore, if power doesn't involve That, then that means someone did That to me when they didn't have to. What a fucking jerk. What was the point of That?

If ignorance is no defence in the eyes of the law, I refuse to accept it as a justification for That - and you wouldn't believe the number of people who have tried to convince me that someone only did That to me because they didn't know any better and I should be an enlightened hippy and forgive them for their ignorance. Try it in court, arsehole. "Your Honour, I didn't know that raping someone in the eyes with a firehose and then stabbing them eighty-two times with the skull of a dolphin on live TV was illegal." -- "Dismissed!"

Feeling powerless is pretty horrible. It's not as horrible as doing That. How can I unlearn the link between power and That? And if I don't unlearn it, how can I even begin to learn about healthy relationships to power? If I can't grok the possibility of power without That, do I accept an eternity of feeling powerless or do I turn into that monster and play that game? Because, you know, I want to believe there is a third option here, or even more options than that. I want to have faith in the words of others who tell me that it is possible. Sometimes I suspect they only tell me that to keep me powerless with false hope and that the only way is to be that monster and crush as many other people as I can.

It passes. It returns.

I'm still holding out for those other options, for the time being at least. The fact that I am unpacking some power boggles should be enough to keep me going for a while longer. This may be, I suspect, another of those peculiar challenges that come with PTSD. I'm sure other people encounter it, I also think there's probably a vast gulf of qualitative difference. I'm only privy to one side of that possible gulf so I can't really explain it. There's this glassy wall of screaming and paralysing, inarticulate, bowel-loosening terror where I want to run away from my own brain before I collide with my own rhombencephalon and shatter into a fine pink & grey smear of suffering, and I'm pretty sure most of everyone in the world doesn't get that. Ever, even when they face some of the same (or superficially similar) challenges and obstacles.

I probably should have planned this post before making it, instead of just rambling away, but there you go.

Different fish species flourished and signs they were numerous were found in the flowering of local trees and the appearance of certain species of birds. Gregory (1996) reports that blue mountain lorikeets announced that mullet had arrived, water lilies in bloom signified plentiful mussels, while the silky oak in flower indicated eels were about.
-Sylvie Shaw

I'm a bit blah over the whole Southern Hemisphere pagans smugly reminding everyone that it's Beltane this weekend, not Samhain, which is what Halloween really is and you're all doing it wrong you silly cowan blah blah. I don't associate with That Sort Of People but this time of year and at Christmas they are almost unavoidable. Ok, yes, I do flip the major sabbats but seriously, we have between six and twelve seasons in Australia, bearing no resemblance to the four European seasons, so SHUT UP. Piss off. We're ALL doing it wrong.

Except possibly moonvoice. I think she's doing it kind of right. Or, at least, more right than those of us (myself included) who observe a transposed European four-season calendar.

I wish there was a way for me to find out about the seasons as they were recognised and understood by Turrubal and Yaggera. I have an explanation somewhere of the Yolgnu seasons but that's all the way over *there* and really different. I don't even know if anyone knows any more how the seasons were measured here.

So I will keep celebrating my transposed European calendar wheel because it gives me a way to mark out the year, but I won't go pretending that it puts me more in touch with the earth and the seasons here in Australia. Anyone who thinks it does is a teeny tiny bit of a pretentious wanker.

Tonight for the first time ever in my life I saw a lit Jack-O-Lantern out front of someone's house. It made me really happy. So happy Halloween and fuck the bozos. Happy Beltane, happy Samhain, in fact happy October 31, no matter what you call it. Have fun :)

In completely unrelated areas, here's a nice shiny change of subject.

I've been doing a bit of an experiment for the last few months, to explore my attitudes towards money. Instead of thinking well now I'm going to sit down and explore my feelings about money, I decided to just pay attention to what I feel and how I react when I find money. As I spot things I think are unhealthy or unproductive, I can consciously change them. I've spotted a few interesting things. If I see a 5c coin and there are a lot of people around, I feel uncomfortable picking it up because I worry that it will make me look poor or desperate. If I am in a shop or place of business and I see money on the ground, I feel reluctant to pick it up because I think it must belong to the business. That's kind of funny. Sometimes even if there's no one around I feel a bit uncomfortable about picking up small coins, because I feel like 5/10/20c should not be important.

The larger the sum of money, the easier it is for me to overcome those feelings--up to a point. If I find anything larger than $5 I feel obliged to hand it in. To anyone, pretty much.

I can extrapolate these reactions to better understand how I feel about money. I bleed money like a motherfucker, because I think that small amounts shouldn't matter, so I don't keep track of them, and obviously the small amounts quickly add up to large amounts. I tend to feel very uncomfortable about being broke in company, and I will spend money I can't afford in social situations so that I can appear to have enough. These two things feed into each other very dangerously.

On the other hand, I have problems accepting money from others, be it as gifts or in payment, or even on loan. I feel that it "belongs" to them and I have no business taking it. This frequently leads me to grossly undercharge for almost everything I do, or not charge at all. Large sums of money are especially awkward, no matter how I come by them, because I assume it's someone else's and they must miss it. Even if it's a bonus or tax return or something that I have worked for, I still vaguely assume that I must have taken it off someone else, and they probably need it or want it back.

I'm trying to avoid Law Of Attraction ideas at the moment, because I need for my own sanity to believe that the universe is chaotic and random, and stuff can and does happen for no reason. I'm ok with the idea that we can influence and manipulate our own reality, but the implication that Jews/Gypsies/Homosexuals caused the holocaust with negative thought, that babies are raped & infected with HIV because they focused on rape & HIV, or that New Orleans brought hurricane Katrina on themselves is just more than I can handle. Actually, it reminds me of that God Hates Fags guy. So anyhow, I'm making sense of the implications of my own patterns without any of that stuff. One very obvious thing is that some of them are keeping me broke, not because I don't attract or invite money into my life but because I have difficulty accepting it and part with it too easily.

I also labour under the belief that money, power, and sometimes even food are zero-sum games. That if I have enough of any of these things, someone else doesn't. As a total bleeding heart fucking hippy I would generally rather go without than deprive others. The times I have stuck my hand out have generally been on behalf of others, my cat, my partner, whomever. I have a huge aversion to putting my hand out and saying "I need this, for myself, please help" because whatever it is I need, if I can't manage it on my own I don't want to deprive others of... something or other in order to get it. I've been working to get over it, to believe that I can have enough without depriving others, but it's tough.

Incidentally, this isn't leading up to a request for money. It's just a dissection of money stuff in my head.

One of the ways I'm looking at getting through the zero-sum stuff is by joining the local LETS program. I am fine with trading stuff for stuff, and superfine with placing a realistic value on directly exchanged goods and/or services. I'm ok with accepting gifts, I like presents. It's just when money comes into the picture that I go all flaccid. But I figure with a LETS scheme I can have enough, and not feel like I am making others go without. Like my haircut this week. The boy who did it was very grateful to have a model to practice on, I was very grateful to have a nice haircut, we both got what we needed and were stoked with it.

I figure if I get used to that kind of exchange, or rather if I get used to having my needs and some modest wants met on a direct exchange basis, then I can loosen up my zero-sum attitude towards money. Money, after all, is only a symbol of agreed value of goods and services, allowing indirect exhange and lacking intrinsic value. It's quite a great idea in that respect, I just have some ridiculous attitudes about it.