Do the common people who throw their coins in the fountain, as it were, expect an answer, or is it enough for them to be part of the zeitgeist, with the occasional random chance that Neil Gaiman or Amanda Palmer or someone might respond. Do they want a response from other nobodies?
Back in 2007 I posted this:
http://noveleye.blogspot.com/2007/08/mortality-part-2.html
and she's still here. Turning 85 today. So she's already lived a more than a year beyond the diagnosis. But something's different. She seems ready to die now. And it's hardening/closing faster, leaving her short of breath. I had to go down and clean up her apt. so she could come home from rehab after a small heart attack and small stroke that have left her blind in one eye. There's so much I could write about it, but I'm still processing--what I feel, what I need. They are saying six months now.
We finally had that sort of peace that I was looking for. And now I hate myself for all the wasted years, but I can't do that. They might have been exactly as I feared they would be--all anger and pain. But now I need more time, more time, and that is what we never get.
I'm cleaning out my mother's apartment. She's not dead yet, but they say it's just a matter of time. And it needs to be clean before she can come out of rehab. My mother is a hoarder. My mother is a hoarder's hoarder. We've carted 2 station wagons worth to the thrift store, and this is a three room apartment. We've barely begun. I found a box of Christmas ornaments from my childhood and sat down and cried.
I'm finding it hard to function--both because it's a daunting task, and because it renders everything so futile. If we will all end up like this then why should we buy anything now. Much talk with my therapist about this. That we buy things to make us happy now--the future is the future and many people (not my mother) start to weed as they get older--finding less and less that objects are important. I am already less of a purchaser and I have never been the hoarder that my mother is. A collector, perhaps, but when things don't fit in shelves, they have to go. Zen teaches the release of all things--that even emotions are fleeting things, certainly objects are.
But added to the simple stress of cleaning an overcrowded apartment, is being face-to-face with the death of my last parent. That I must deal with all the pieces that she has used to get herself through, and that I will suddenly be no one's child. There will be nothing between myself and my own mortality. Not that there ever really is, but we lie to ourselves. My mother is 85. It's hardly a tragedy to die at her age, she is two generations removed from me, but at the same time, it is relatively early in my time with her--when friends parents are young and robust at 60 or 65 now. And I have deliberately kept myself away from her, so what years we had are lost.
My therapist says too that I cannot blame myself for that either--that I did what I needed to do to protect myself, but my guilt and stress, blame and anger does not respond to such intellectual reasoning.
I haven't been here in a while.
Isn't it funny how we describe some of the sites as if they were rooms or places--physical space.
June and July were...hard. It rained almost non-stop in June, and perhaps half the time in July. It's raining today. And I could not outrun my black dogs.
I suffer from depression. I think I've made that pretty clear on here. Most of the time it's just a general sorrow--a little more effort to be happy or functioning. The past two months have been major darkness. An inability to see much good in anything--a hopelessness, a lack of dreams for the future. If you've never been there (another sense of a physical location) then you cannot understand.
Oddly, just before it went dark I went to see one of my favorite bands, The Psychedelic Furs in concert. I'd only waited 25 years for the chance. They were old, of course, but sounded good and the setting was intimate. I had no expectations and thus enjoyed myself very much. The only funny thing was how happy the lead singer seemed to be. He smiled all the time--like he'd discovered Prozac.
Now this is a gloom and doom sort of band. So seeing him smile seemed, discordant. And it related to something on Bones (the show), where the phychiatrist played by Stephen Fry said that no-matter how depressed or nihilistic a dark band seems, somehow they create something--the anti nihilism. They express themselves.
And I've heard other depressed actors talk about their struggles, and my question is--HOW DO THEY DO IT? When I'm depressed I can barely get out of bed. Everything seems pointless. The voices in my head say that I won't get that role, I won't write anything good, etc. And so I do nothing.
How do they channel their darkness--some with drugs both legal and illegal, but my legal drugs make little impact and the illegal will take you down eventually.
Amidst the craptastic cullinary choices, I watch an Asian gentleman consume an elaborate meal from what appears to be a thermos, but is really a beautifully packaged set of small containers complete with chopsticks. Like all terminuses (termini, locaii?) the range of humanity is broad but shallow. Behind me I hear, "Ich bin jahre. Alles klar." The elegantly dressed, the ethnic, the eccentric. A young woman goes by in an outfit I could have used for the Vietnam play-all tie-dye and patches.
you write this:
I tried to kill a f*#&ing hour today.
It struggled in my arms
And when I thought I had a grip
I found I held nothing.
The new Star Trek (which is now old) is fantastic and FAN-tastic as well. Friend T who missed the Trekkiedom in all its forms still enjoyed it, and those of us who worshiped Star Trek for 30+ years--well, it kept the essence and was a damn good ride as well.
And the core is Zachary Quinto as Spock. Spock is my favorite character--always has been. I heart Spock, and Quinto seems born to play young Spock (although he is only a few years younger than Nimoy was when he took the role originally). Quinto outside of Spock does not interest me in the least, by the way.
Star Trek succeeds because at its core are a group of great characters, and this movie gave each of them their own space--even if it is not "true" to the original origin stories. I am not so bothered by that. The friendship of Kirk and Spock, Spock's divided nature--all there.
Sometimes I wonder if my fondness for Spock comes from my own feelings of division, but a tiny look at ST fan fiction for all 43 years of its existence shows that many women are drawn to Spock. Is it the House problem? Women want to save the wounded. Kirk doesn't need us, but Spock does? I even do not mind the romance of Spock and Uhura, although it certainly breaks canon--both for the humor it provides, and for the added vulnerability it brings. That Uhura can love the emotionless Spock and he her. Majel Barrett got it when she created Nurse Chapel's long unrequited love for Spock. She was all of us--yearning and hoping.
Seeing the movie has drawn me back to a book I loved as a child--perhaps the first piece of quality fan fiction to come out of the show--Star Trek: The New Voyages. I read it over and over along with Nimoy's I am Not Spock. The stories are personal and sad, and explore emotions in a way that was not always possible in the show, particularly in 1966. By 1976, the year of the book, much more could be described and explored, including, interestingly, a torture story that leaves Kirk shattered.
The first story is about Spock literally divided into two beings, the Vulcan and the human and his realization that neither can exist without the other. Is that true of my division? That I am who I am because of it?
