Stream of Consciousness

[ER]

Me wrestling with the little voice in my head this morning at pre-dawn Mass:

...there's black ice all over this parking lot, imagine if my godson's grandmother wiped out and fell so soon after that surgery fixed her back....of course I don't want her to fall, what am I, a sadistic beast?....wonder if she sees that ice...maybe I should tell her...okay, I told her, see, I'm not so evil...oh, there's another patch and she doesn't see it yet...I will not laugh if she falls, I will not laugh if she falls, I will not...good, she navigated it...all right potential comedy crisis averted....

[ER]

One thing you guys likely don’t know about me, and one you probably already do.

I am a high-energy person (that’s the previously gnosis-leaning part) rather like a rubber bouncy ball. I walk fast, I leap up onto things mid-stride, I cannot stand lethargy, and I go twenty-percent down the path to insanity when I am inactive for more than a few hours. I even minored in PE, and according to a survey I once took, I’m 96% straight, way above average compared to the other females in university-level PE classes with me. (And no I do not have ADD, which besides, doesn’t actually exist anymore than hypoglycemia or cholera.)

The other fact, which some or all of you probably do know by now is that I don’t sleep soundly.

Last night, well, the dark portion of the planet’s spin cycle, and since it’s still spread out around me like a sour blanket, I guess I should say this night, now, I had the other hemisphere of my sleep issues, which is when I go to sleep just fine, but then I wake up at some point in the night unable to return to Morpheus’ realm. Not as drear as insomnia but not something to fill my yearning soul with whatcha call joy, either.

I had just come awake with this odd taste braodcasting in my mouth, like I had tipped-up and swallowed the salt in the bottom of a pretzel bag. I don’t mean I was thirsty, I mean I tasted salt very strongly, which may be a bad sign or nothing, since I remember in some class or other I took in college, the instructor said phantom tastes can be linked to masses in the brain, epilepsy, and other ill humors God designed to cull the excess population.

I had been having this panicky dream where I was standing next to this immense reflecting pool in a 19th century park in my city, it was high summer, hot out, and I was totally alone in the entire place except for this little boy, barely more than a toddler. He was standing in profile maybe thirty feet from me, at the edge of the reflecting pool, I was at the foot of a hillside near a gazebo where in real life a gangster named George Remus once ineptly murdered his cheating wife, and the dwarf-child turned toward me and he had a Damien-like oddity about him that made my emotions go from disconcerted (the dial set at maybe a four) directly to afraid (“up to eleven”). The kid’s hair was that black, flat, that early Mr. Rodgers kind of hair, and his skin was pale and waxy; even his body proportions weren’t right for a child’s, like when you see those odd adult-baby Jesus figures painted above the altars of old Spanish churches. His eyes were blue and cruel and he looked at me by turning his neck sideways without moving his body, and he grinned by parting his lips and showing these tiny shell-thin teeth, and I think I woke up with a boom right then and there, and it was the sort of dream you’re glad to wake up from, that gives you real life relief to leave behind.

So I laid there, darkness, house quiet, and because I don’t like to sleep in any sort of light, the clock was flipped down on its face, I looked, it was 4:03 AM, and I knew then I wouldn’t go back to sleep. When these reverse insomnia half-nights would happen to me in say, 2005, during the brief epoch when for the only time in life I ever lived alone (except for that tail-end of college after my roommate moved out to get married) I’d get up and do stuff, but nowadays in this life-chapter when I play at mommy, the way all parents are actually just playing at this role none of us were born into, I have to think of others, don’t I?

So I looked over and my husband was lying there totally asleep, which means I must’ve come awake quietly-like since he normally wakes up when I do. I had a thought come to mind exactly then: gee, I wish I could speak with a northern English accent. I really loved hearing them talk when I was over there years ago, I really did.

“Tham Southriners ain’t ‘ard like we are up ‘ere, t’ey tend to run t’soft dawn there Southways like. We’re ‘arder stock up ‘ere in t’ Narth…”

When I was little my mother had already learned to speak like an American, which is an impressive talent, if you think about it, throwing off the accent she’d had for eighteen years, though she always said, remember, El,  I didn’t lose an accent I learned a new one.


Yeah, Mom, I didn't lose my virginity, I gained a boyfriend.

Okay, true, but I’d get her to talk with her Galwegian accent sometimes, mainly to prove to my schoolmates I wasn’t kidding about where my mother was from, and it’d be the one she instantly slipped into the summers when she’d go back home, and it’d make me feel shivery wondering which was my real mother, the one who mostly sounded like my father and me, or the one who talked all lilting and swift like someone off those rare RTE television shows PBS would occasionally put on Saturday afternoons.

My point being, if she can learn an accent, I can too, so it must be laziness and lack of motivation on my part. Like if someone came and said, “Evelyn, I am going to kill your son if you do not learn to talk with a northern English accent in one year.” That’d get me mastering one, wouldn’t you think? Maybe during the nights when I don’t sleep?

But anyhow, a bit ago I looked over at my sleeping husband, as I said, and the way he sleeps is a little funny. Me (high energy person that it’s been established I am) move around a lot in the night, but he lies there a little like they depict Sheldon Cooper doing, flat on his back, arms down, and he typically stays like that til morning. If he wasn’t breathing and having proper REM, he’d look dead. I suppose it’s a comfortable position or he’d never be able to maintain it, he’d spill about restless as water, like I do, leaving me to think that I bet all those scores of women he slept with before me probably woke up at some point and thought, “Gee, what a polite sleeper he is, he didn’t roll around at all.”

Or perhaps I have my cause and effect backward and he learned to sleep like that after getting screeched at by bunches of women when he’d wake them up, since even the hottest girls aren’t summer peaches when you rudely wake them up in the middle of the night. Not everyone is as tolerant as me, after all. (Being tolerant is a key to contentedness, since this world is a mighty fouled-up sorta place.)

I thought about waking my bridegroom up to entertain me in some fashion or other, maybe play the questions game I have always done with everyone close to me, (Would you rather fall down an elevator shaft or eat ground glass? Those sorts of edifying questions.) but the man works an awfully strenuous job at times, especially for a pretty boy few people would associate doing the line of work he does, restoring old houses, so he needs his rest and I laid there for I am not sure how long, making a game of twiddling my left thumb in one direction and my right another,  and eventually I was rewarded by hearing an owl outside, kinda nice.

Finally I got up and crept into our so-called master bathroom, and sat on the edge of the tub and watched Netflix on my phone, one ear-bud popped in, and oh dear God above, I have discovered that The End of The F**cking World may be the greatest, I mean THEE greatest thing I have ever, ever, ever seen. Oh, my gosh, I did not know a show could be so good. I would have LOVED to have been friends at seventeen with that girl on there! Heck, I’d adopt her right now just to laugh at her beautiful outlook on life! She has the coolest attitude, one I never did at all, even on my worst days when my inner biological time bomb would reach 0:00 and I’d throw shade at people just for sport. (I never do that now, no.)

I was loving that show so much I hated to hear stirring in the house, my youngest, (the second worst sleeper in the house) ran in and hopped on my lap at exactly the part in the series where someone was about to get murdered, and my reptile brain went, why didn’t I abort her??? (Shame on my reptile brain!)

So now I am going to finish it later when my afore-referenced littlest leaves for kindergarten, but I will say when they invent a form of virtual reality that doesn’t leave you throwing up dizzy after watching it---I mean you PS4VR---I am so going to tag along in three-dimensions, with those kids on there.

Hope everyone has a nice day!

[ER]

I am beginning to think things we don’t do can weigh as heavily against us as things we actually do, that not doing the right thing is itself doing something wrong because it is like setting an unintentional burden on someone else to deal with what we originally faced. The easy path is not always the best one, and one time I took the easy path, and I wonder if others aren’t paying for that now.

I have written in here in the past about how in college there was this guy I knew from history classes and he wasn't bad to talk to, knew a lot about the subject, so I used to see him around campus and conversed with him, and eventually I'd go sit around and have a tea or something with him after our lectures, and one day he asked if I wanted to go get nachos, so what the heck, I did, we ended up hanging out until evening, and I thought he was cool enough, whatever, he was all right, we hung out a few more times, several times for various reasons he came over to where my roommate and I lived, and from this he got the idea that I wanted to go out with him romantically, when I didn't, not go-out go-out, and one day he told me how much he liked me, and I told him thanks but...

He seemed to take it well.

Soon after, though, I heard he was running his mouth about me, saying some not nice things, calling me in effect a tease, so I went over to talk to him at his place, and said hey, sorry, didn't mean to be a jerk, if I was, etc. So he listened, didn't say much, had this annoyed posture, and I saw I wasn't making much progress against his being mad, so I stopped and he asked if I was done, and I said yeah, and he went off on me from his side of all this, which was like bizarro-reality, no relation to anything I ever understood, and I listened a moment and realized there was no point to being there, I shouldn't have tried, so I turned away from him disgusted and feeling stupid for making an effort, and next thing I knew he put his hand on the back of my head and slammed it against the wall by his front door, not as hard as he could have but hard enough to hurt.

He goes, "Got your attention?"

I was seeing stars, so, uh, yeah.

He realized what he'd done and shut up and I think he said, "You can go." Or "Just go." Something like that.
 
Which I did, not quite believing he'd just done that. I kept it to myself for a bit and finally told my roommate, who wanted to get her brother and his hockey friends to go back and get the guy but I said no, I could take care of him myself if I wanted, I just hoped to forget this, which...I did. I’d see him around sometimes but never talked to him again and he never said sorry for what he’d done. If anything he still seemed mad.

Thing is, I heard about him the other day, that guy, he has a wife, and a daughter who is a teenager, and I can't help but wonder how he treats them? And that made me wonder if I had said or done something twenty years ago, would I maybe have made other lives better, possibly saving someone else physical abuse? Is it going on now?

I've just been thinking about that.

[Alex]

Hindsight is a terrible thing. You did what you did at the time and no amount of beating yourself up over it now is going to change that. Yes, if you could go back and do things again you might do it differently, but don't go overthinking these things. The thing you wish you had done differently might not have turned out better, or even may have ended up being much worse. Maybe your friends would have went too far and ended up in prison for murder?

[ER]

I had a weird thought. (You a weird thought??? You'll never convince us of that!)

Okay...if Stalin had not starved the collective farmers in the 1930s in order to feed the industrial workers (and fund industrial expansion) it's possible the USSR may have been too weak to effectively resist Germany in 1941-1945. Is it possible that in an awful way Stalin was right and he saved the world?

Also macrons are not really cookies.

[ER]

Ever had an evening that makes you want to flip a coin between taking up drinking, or having another baby?

[ER]

Slumber party here tonight. We'll have a downstairs full of third-grade girls all wired on soft drinks and chocolate.

 I'm a little scared.

My daughter has bragged to all of them, her school and soccer friends, that she has a gay cousin who lives with us. Funny, once that would have been hushed up, but among post-Millennials it apparently makes her a rock star.

After eight the bargain is I get banished upstairs lest I embarrass her. I can't convince her I was almost cool once upon a time. Sigh. Bring back the '90s.

[Alex]

Ever had an evening that makes you want to flip a coin between taking up drinking, or having another baby?

I find having either one tends to lead to the other.

[Alex]

So an evil plan of mine was finally discovered today. One of Kristi's friends, Janet who prides herself on being a very good psychologist hates Steven Segall with a passion. She has a son in law who has a habit of making little trinkets like fridge magnets with his profile on it and messages written on it like "To Janet, with love Steve. I will never forget that night with you." and so on. About 5 weeks ago we went round to Janet's house so I could help her out with some stuff she needed done (she is paralysed in one side of her hip). While we were there I slipped a DVD of his somewhere in Janet's house. I have no idea what the name of it was, but it involved him fighting vampires.

Anyway, after we left she found said DVD and assumed Gavin left it. Much family arguements ensued over the holiday season about this. Tonight Janet realised it was me who done it when she and Kristi met up. I think she has sworn some sort of Mormon blood oath to end me now.

Oh, I also hacked my wife's facebook account and put a post up where she has nominated that the 20th of January now and forever be remembered as The Hoff Day, so I am also in trouble with her.

[ER]

Last night I had a case of what the Irish call "the horrors." The horrors differ from night terrors, which, naturally, I have, also, and they aren't insomnia, no, no, no. The horrors are where you wake up all freaked out, usually after bad dreams that share a common theme, and you're totally creeped.

Mine last night were about this book I been reading called Mighty Fitz: The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. It's a well-written, to the point, exploration of the terrible November 10, 1975 disaster during a Lake Superior storm that featured 90 MPH winds and four-story waves, that sent the Edmund Fitzgerald, the largest and supposedly safest ore carrier on the Great Lakes to the bottom with all hands.

It was a disaster that happened in less time than you could sing your A,B,Cs. One moment the captain was, as his final message said, "Holding our own" and then next...the ship was plowing into the bottom at thirty-five miles an hour.

About twenty years ago I read another book about a maritime disaster called The Perfect Storm, and while that too was terrible in its descriptions, it bothered me less if at all, because I think I caught on that its author, Sebastian Junger, I think was his name, was deliberately injecting sensation into something sensational enough, yet in Mighty Fitz, the writer maintained a journalistic calm that made it all the more eerie and awful.

Somehow the worst part....well, no "somehow," I know why....was his semi-clinical detailing of exactly how the ship was believed to go under, how its 28,000-tons of iron ore shifted as the vessel rolled in the worst seas even the most veteran of sailors had ever seen, doing so just as the heftiest wave of all hit, a monster the height of a Ferris wheel and weighing so much it literally pushed the Edmund Fitzgerald bow-down to the bottom of the lake, all within seconds. The impact of the water would have hit the bridge like a semi, crushing foot-thick steel and sending those poor men there out the other side, like bullets fired from a gun, likely never knowing what hit them, possibly killing them instantly, then, because the ship was almost 800 feet long, the Fitz would've been standing on its head, out of the waves like a statue, since Superior was only 550 feet deep there.

All but four of the crew were in the stern section and without warning all those in the back would have been thrown perhaps hundreds of feet downward, falling into blackness, terribly injured or killed, just before the weight of the cargo split the ship in two, which made their half violent spill backward, dropping them again hundreds of feet the other way, making them hit the interior walls, crushed under falling material inside, smashing them just before that part too went under, all the way into the 35-degree near-freezing deep, drowning those trapped inside who somehow made it through being thrown around.

I was dumb enough to read that before bed, and it lodged deep into my brain in ways Stephen King's fluff never does---this was real!!!!- and so I laid there falling asleep trying to make myself stop thinking about it, stop imagining it, but I dreamed about it all, those men thrown around in the darkness, no warning, then plunged under....and I woke up so spooked and disturbed I had to get up and go downstairs and watch TV for a while til I felt calmer.

Today it's more like....processed by my brain and still horrid but not overwhelming, but last night it did get me.

[ER]

Right now I have two part-time jobs, one I work two days a week in an office, one I do at home (both aside from my real job, which is sharing life with three children and a really cool husband!!) but I keep getting offered a chance to take up this position next year when my littlest is in school all day, and on the surface it sounds ideal. It's three days a week, would let me keep my current two day a week job, would fit in around school hours, and the pay is potentially several times what I'm making right now.

Trouble is, somehow it makes me feel like a joke to be working for my father now, and to be thinking of taking up another job which happens to be offered by some man I've known since I was a teenager, who was almost my father in law.

See what I mean? There's some....how should I say it...some vulnerability in the fact I am landing these easy jobs given to me by these men I know, rather than swinging my way into the  shield wall of the real world, succeeding or failing via real competition.

Maybe that's not a valid consideration but it is sort of weighing on me. Money, security, fairly easy work, versus....what? Starting low and elbowing up?

Someone said I should go to graduate school, but truthfully I think I'd be skin and bones by the end of my first semester from throwing up so often at the mentality of colleges in this decade.

So I have the luxury of too many choices open to me.

One of you please flip a coin for me.

[Alex]

It landed on its edge.

[ER]

It landed on its edge.

Ah, that made up my mind for me....

[indianasmith]

You know my opinion.  Don't look a gift horse in the mouth! LOL

[ER]

Speaking of gifts, you know what he said again Monday?

"If you work with me and like it, I'll turn it all over to you someday and you can have it, since Clare doesn't want it."

He has built his business up again nicely since he came back from California, and it's almost reaching the point of an offer I can't refuse.