Saying the Quiet Part out Loud
Yes! I’m talking about you, you Apollo devotee/Trojan princess gifted/cursed to prophesize truths no one ever believes!
Sunday, July 6, 2025
It’d sluffed it out of my mouth before, but hadn’t realized how much it was truth until the other day when it sailed past my teeth and hit the air.
We all know recovering alcoholics don’t drink just for today; they stay sober one day at a time.
In the original Lethal Weapon, Mel Gibson’s character admits he has a special bullet to commit suicide. “Every single day, I wake up and think of a reason not to do it. Every single day.”
A few mornings ago, unbidden and apropos of nothing, my tongue said, “Every day I have to come up with something to justify my existence.”
Back in late 2022 when the crap of my life finally burst out of my turtle shell and demanded attention, as all crap eventually does, it opened the door to a dark wooden staircase in a black hole going endlessly downward into nothingness.
A surcease. The answer to having reached pointlessness. An exit few would notice, fewer would cry over.
Oh, don’t look at me like that! It’s how I felt at the time. Emotions come and go in waves, like everything else in the universe, so what’s their point if’n we don’t let ourselves feel them? “Don’t worry, be happy” may be a great song and video (it is) yet value non-springeth from platitudes but from effort’s depth.
Besides, minimizing or dismissing other people’s sensibilities because one’s external exposure to them differs from their internal experience makes only the speaker feel better, not the hearer. It essentially commands them to lie, hide, and deny one’s feelings so as to soothe the soother… thus reinforcing the negativity… which then gets internalized… thereby making the misery all that harder to release.
And ain’t that a hellova healthcare tactic? Avoid pain at all costs—except the cost of perpetuating the pain. I mean, what profit a corporation that heals rather than treats?
Being the one diddling with suicidal ideation, I learned ‘twas better to sit with, not fight, my raw destructive emotions until they dissipated on their own. Yeah, I felt hopeless and helpless. But those were but negative-energy waves, and energy changes constantly, naturally. It’s the resistance, the denial—the fight—that scars our spirit. No battle, no wound.
Ha! Try telling that to someone with a plan, a date, and a means to their end! I’m nothing if not inconsistently inconsistent!
The dark descent behind Door Number 2 was so alluring, so it’s-very-nearly-over consoling, I started writing My Life as a Turtle: how I made it to geezer by lying, hiding, and denying a few months later let my daughter know why I was taking the coward’s way out. That screwed-up in reverse, of course, since the weekly gut ejaculation slowly dragged me back toward the surface. I finally de-chose Door Number 2 about nine months later.
Shut up. I see the irony.
But I was okay. I had found purpose again and within a fortnight had made ready to plunge myself into rearranging and reassessing and reconfiguring and all those other “re”s that make up recovery, reentry, and reconstruction.
Activity breeds opportunity. No time to think = no time to wallow, a simple little equation that’s served me so well for so long. Get over it. Bulldoze onward. You’ve stared down your demons, real and imagined, and vanquished them to the outer cosmos. You’ve made peace with your mother, your father, your place in the time-space continuum. Figured out what “religion” and “deity” mean in your world. You’re past stages two (clean up) and three (repair) of the crisis sequence. All ya gotta do now is give yourself time to recover.
All is well; all will be well. Things are looking up in every direction.
Liar, liar, baggy, patched jeans on fire.
Oh, is that surprising? My Life as a Turtle was all about making it to geezer by lying, hiding, and denying. Did you/I think a first-draft exposé of such lifelong dumbasfuckery would miraculously alter my inculcated operating system?
Haha! The joke’s on you… me. Just another dumbasfuck, jump-to-the-back-of-the-book-to-see-how-it ends subterfuge.
I was so, so busy, busy, busy accomplishing more nothing, nada, zilch than ever before. Yeah, sure, I drew up plans. Outlined, even wrote textbooks. Dozens of earnestly begun, absurdly non-completed projects, curriculums, and schedules now clutter my misbegotten database, in who-knows-what folders under I’ve-no-clue file names. We just hit the six-month mark on that investor’s deck which shoulda/woulda/coulda taken me three or four weeks to complete, tops.
Okay, In my defense, that’s a math thing. For the umpteenth time, I do not math. This has been scientifically proven beyond all doubt through consistent replication. I grieve for what never was and so clearly never will be. Calculators, computers, and digital spreadsheets are mind-bogglingly anti-answers in the extreme. Nines remain my mortal enemies; they sneer at me on Sudoku pages. Let’s just don’t go there, okay? ‘Cause ♪ it’s all about the math, about the math, no spelling… ♫ 1
Then out of her usual blue came the vision, a Cassandra glimpse into the good, the bad, and the lying, hiding, denying I’d been lying, hiding, and denying about to myself. And just like that (the idiom, not the Sex and the City update) outta my mouth popped what my gut had been clenching about for months.
Understand, I write books for people with wonderful ideas for a living. And I’m pretty fucking good at it, one of the best, if I do say so myself—but thankfully I’m not the only one. My killer author called me “The Goat.” (I had to look up what that meant.) My terrified-of-exposure author thanked me for fleshing her out. (Not sarcastically, it turned out.) And my other-side-of-the-world celeb author said, “You’re just what this project’s been needing.” (The connection wasn’t great; that might be simply gist, not quote.)
The point is, just gimme thirty-some-odd years and a couple, three hundred clients, and I can nail this puppy. The more important point is that ghostwriting is my identity, my whole identity, and nothing but my identity, so help me Murgatroyd. It’s the everything I am, which—as part of my demons-stare-down versus shuffle-offing recovery—I’ve been trying to live up to, deny, and change, all in the same breath. Dumbasfuck.
But thanks to the mythological energy that feeds me sporadic knowings for no discernable reason—
… Yes! I’m talking about you, you Apollo devotee/Trojan princess gifted/cursed to prophesize truths no one ever believes!
… I now see the extent to which my entire life itself has been a lie, a fraud, a self-deception radiating onto untimely society. No, I am not the daughter my mother raised me to be. Nor am I the son my father would have wanted, had he given any of my proclamations or behaviors credence—which, looking back, must needs have taken concerted effort to not acknowledge since I clearly declared my truth time and again, only to have it talked over, pissed on, or eye-rolled away.
Whoa! I just this very moment see it. Damn, Cassandra!
No. I will not castigate myself for being dumbasfuck all these decades. Some people go whole lifetimes, multiple lifetimes, without getting it. Even today, when half the world is screaming it at the top of their manipulatedly outraged lungs.
Narcissism, neglect, and gaslighting blahblahblah aside, who and what I was could not exist at the time and place I slid out of my mother’s uterus. Since I could not be, I was not—at least to my family. Goddamnmotherfuckingsonovabitch, this explains so much! I was ignored and neglected because the only evidence of me was my corporeal mass (which never worked right in the first place).
Of course I had to hide and deny myself. Geez, how many times did I watch What the Fuck Do We know?2 and still not see it, even though whoever-it-was pointed it out over and over again. Nobody coulda believed my truth even if they’d wanted to because the primitive mind cannot see what it does not already know can exist.
I-as-who-I-was/am was non-conceivable. No dot for me on the map.
Thank you, imaginary figment ‘o mine. No wonder I had to justify the lie of my existence every single day. It was my sole proof of life!
Monday, July 7, 2025
Yesterday’s psychic upchuck wrung me dry. I could not wrest myself out of bed this morning, despite my plan to finally accomplish math things before an early client meeting.
Didn’t make it through said meeting, either. Even at my worst, I’ve always found a way to bulldoze through. But today my brain stopped braining, my vulnerable eye rebelled, and my stroke-or-MS aphasia, who cares which, shut me up.
Will yesterday’s epiphany change my recovery’s course? Will its clean drops displace enough dirty water that I’ll never want to dump my bucket again?
I fucking hope so. To mashup the pivotal line from When I’m 643 with the refrain from the one crappy Bye, Bye Birdie tune: it’s such a short, little life, and I’ve got a lot of living to do.
So far, so good; I shall leave you know. Meanwhile, I hope to write my way through another something that keeps poking my mental bear:
What’s my name?
I’ve used this construction before. It’s from the riff, “It’s all about the bass, about the bass, no treble” from the tune, uh, “All About the Bass” (About the Bass, No Treble). Meghan Trainer, 2015. Don’t listen to it unless you want an inescapable earworm.
Award-winning independent documentary written, produced, and directed by William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, and Mark Vicente (2004), renamed What the Bleep Do We Know?
August 2004 BBC television film starring Paul Freeman and Alun Armstrong, written by Tony Grounds, directed by Jon Jones, and produced by Pier Wilkie. No longer available anywhere, not even for cash money, except on https://archive.org/details/when-im-sixty-four-bbc2-2004/When+Im+64+(Clean/No+Subs).avi. I love this film; it cuddles my heart and sends me to bed with a smile.