July 8, 2006
Pete and Repeat
It's been seven months since my last confession...no...wait, seven months since I finished nursing school. I am getting to the place where I don't get physically ill from the anticipation of going to work. Nursing school I just gutted out with my eyes closed, but this...this actual caring for the infirm stuff. Madre de Dios. The buck plops right in my lap. One morning I got home and was completely hashed. I had gotten teary eyed and a little gaspy when I was out the hospital doors and tasted my first breath of fresh air in 13 hours. My husband and I talked. He wanted to know why I was struggling so much. He asked me, "Didn't you learn everything you needed to know in nursing school." My answer to him and the world in general is, "Hell no, not even close." It would be nice to have an internship and residency program of some sort before nurses take other human being's lives in their hands. Basically I got 3 weeks of orientation and off I went. "Here's your code to the controlled substance dispenser and a drawerful of insulin syringes and how many extra shifts can you work this week." Trial by fire -- only it's the patients that get blistered.
Anyway, I'm just barely starting to inch my head out of outer darkness, or lower darkness, or whatever nice way there is to call my ass. I look inside, both while in darkness and with a little light shining and I see nothing. The huge gaps of time in my past are bigger. There's so much I don't remember, so much I can't tease out about myself. I just plain confuse myself. So, I thought that I would start blogging old journal entries. I randomly pulled one out and started looking through it and damned if I wasn't feeling the same thing in 1988 that I do in 2006. Same problems within myself. Same angst. Same. Same. Pete and Repeat.
P.S.
Oh my. The temptation to edit old entries may be too much. Is to leave them be to set them free? I don't know if I like who I was in 1988. I don't know if I want anyone else to see that I was, as one therapist described me, a Libertine. So, to edit or not? How does anyone ever write an autobiography. Ouch!
Posted by swift at 2:25 AM | Comments (2)
September 1, 2004
To My Supposed Molester
Dear whomever:
What did you do to me and why? What was it inside you that saw me as prey? Who saw you as prey? How far back does the predation go? Or are/were you just born evil? Will you ever understand how you have dissected me spiritually, emotionally? If you did, I doubt that you would care. It would probably give you more pleasure, more satisfaction. Do you realize that the evil in you now lives in me. That I wake up every morning and see the evil possibilities in myself and choose to walk the other direction. I'm tired of making that choice every day. Tired. Do you make that choice or do you just continue on down that path? No amount of therapy or drugs or prayer or silent screams at midnight will ever glue the pieces of my mind and spirit back together. For this life, the breach/the break/the dissociation is permanent. I will never be whole. And I don't want to hear anyone's crap about how things will heal in time. That I need to do something "good" and nurturing for myself every day. I do do something good and nurturing for myself every day. I leave the gun in the closet. I leave the knife in the drawer. I leave the pills in the bottle. I keep the car on the road (and the hose out of the exhaust). Is it not enough nurturing to go on living another day? Go on living until life or God or circumstance decide that I am finished with this ridiculous life of mine?
If I ever remember who you are, what will I do? If I ever remember what you did, what will I do? What to do? What to do? What to do with myself?
Most Sincerely,
The Little Girl
Posted by swift at 6:14 AM
April 24, 2004
The Damn Noise!!
It just keeps going, and going. All morning. For Lewis' sake. The war is constantly on my mind and I'm tired of hearing what everyone has to say about it. Papa George W. The Left. The Right. The Middle. The News. The Pundits. The Celebrities. The people at work. The Man-on-the-street. Will everyone just SHUT UP!? PLEASE?? I just want to think what I think. I just want to feel what I feel. I want my experience without the pressure. I just want it to stop.
AND...AND...AND..I just want the reign of blood and oil and terror and tribes and religion diamonds and evil to stop, Where-everitis, whatever the reason. It just needs to stop. I don't care why it/they started. What difference does it make? WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE? WHATWHATWHATWHAT?????? My heart wants to explode out of my chest. I want to walk across the mountains and the ocean and the desert and twist the metal in my hands and scream into their ridiculous faces, All of them. You stupid vainglorious testicleheaded idiots. "WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?????" You are corn meal and blood. You are nothing but a cycle of endless pain and stink. On and on and on and on. You and your sweet innocent children after you. Sweet and innocent children until you take them and contort their brains down into their filthy intestines and their stinking guts up into their pristine heads until they think nothing but bloody foul shit. All of you. I don't care what your nationality, color, religion or creed is. You have taken your babies and fouled them. Shame upon you. Shame. I want to pull the grieving mothers and widows, the screaming children and babies into a big bombed out basement somewhere, pull a big blanket over our heads, and just say, "shaah shaah, it's all going to be ok now." But it never will, will it? Will it?
And what do we do my little patriotic Americanos? Hell, I don't even know. I can't even begin to comment on us because I don't understand us. I've never felt a part of us. Never been much of a Puritan though I have an ancestor on the Mayflower. (very scary.) I don't understand conservatives or Republicans. I don't understand lefties or Democrats. I don't even understand the middle anymore. I never have understood white people, even though I be one. I know I'll be very interested to find out the truth of why my friends are/have been sacrificing their children and spouses and siblings, because I'll be damned if the government is really doing it for "patriotism". I know my friends and their families are doing it for that reason. The government is not. The rich and powerful men and woman in the suits who drive around with tinted windows know nothing of bleeding and dieing.
The powerful in government don't remember that they are only blood and cornmeal. They don't remember that one day they will open their eyes and not be able to move. They will have a tube in every orifice of their body, and then some. They won't be able to move because every limb will be tied down. All the power. All the money. All tinted windows. All the armies. All the democracies. All that won't matter anymore. Then it comes back down to bloody foul shit. Endless pain and stink. And when they die, maybe their family cares and maybe they don't, but I'll be there at their bedside and I'll care because I have never forgotten that we're all blood and cornmeal. (OK, that was a very strange aside. hmmmm)
I found a book I thought I wanted to see, "Just Another War." It had war pictures in Iraq by a photographer named Kenneth Jarecke. He's always out there taking the pics that "the man" doesn't want us to see. (Who is "the man" anyway??) So, of course, I wanted to see them. Upon further research I found his pictures of Iraq are accompanied by poems and musings (?) (and doodles??) by some woman (Exene Cervenka) who is supposed to be somebody in the punk rock/esoteric/artsy/deepthought world. Yeah well whatever. Aaaaargh. Noise, noise, noise, noise, more damn noise. Here is something so personal to me that I can barely breath to think about it. War is something I've thought about constantly since I was a young child. The first poem I ever wrote was about war. I was 9. Most of the pictures I see are filtered by the government to be patriotic in some form or another. I wanted to see Jarecke's pictures. I wanted to absorb them. I wanted to feel them without anyone else’s noise. Without anyone else's punk ass doodle's. Who in the hell are these people that have to scream and slather themselves all over everyone else's space. Why can't I get these pictures sans doodles? Huh?????? I guess I need to spend more time on disgusting.com or something and sort through the crap. Lovely.
Posted by swift at 12:01 PM | Comments (2)
November 29, 2003
Daniel
Took a few minutes to cruise other blogs. Just wasting time when I should be writing my final paper. The usual procrastination. Ran into some 9/11 stuff. Jogged back some memories. I've survived my life from a very early age with various protective mechanisms: numbing, filing, compartmentalizing, deep shafting, whatever works. As an adult, numbing is the easiest. I just don't feel mine or anyone else's pain. I just do what needs to be done. At work. At home. Where ever. What ever. One foot in front of another. Push ahead. Push along.
When I least expect it someone or something just punches through my skin. I'll walk into a patient's room and look and him or her and there will be a connection, a bond and I'll feel and I'll care more than usual. The hole from Daniel Pearl's death has never closed. He will pop into my head unexpectedly and I will feel the loss of someone I never knew. The loss of something beautiful and precious that needed to be here for as long as possible.
Posted by swift at 10:23 AM