The spiders start to crawl all over your feet and up your legs. They are biting you, and you know they are black widows. They can crawl so fast. You don’t feel well and you begin to fall—and as you begin to fall you hit the panel of letters and numbers with the side of your head and the door opens because you needed to suffer first. The spiders vanish because they were never really there and you feel much better, and you step into a modern room filled with windows. It smells of salt from the ocean.
There are paintings and pictures on the walls, images from your mind, images you would paint if you knew how. The white curtains billow in the soft breeze in front of windows that run from the floor to the 30 foot ceilings. You think you could live here forever except for the black shadows you see out of the corner of your eye. You know if you don’t call people and tell them where you are, they will forget you and never come visit you again. When you look out the windows you see the ocean all around and you look and look until it gets dark and you notice the white beacon of light going round and round. You realize you live in a lighthouse 1,000 feet above the sea and you will no longer have visitors.
Day 53
I dreamt I could fly. I was sitting on the roof of my father’s station wagon with my legs crossed and I had a miniature drink umbrella from the Chinese food restaurant in each hand. When my father started to drive I took off and floated around town for a while. If I tipped to the right, I turned right—same with the left. I flew up to Rt. 22 and down the highway a bit.
When I got to Robert Hall, the automatic doors glided open and I flew right in, navigating up and down the rows of men’s suits. I could see myself in the mirrors between the aisles. I got tired and hot so I stopped to lean against one of the columns holding up the ceiling and pressed my cheek against it because it was so cool. I left it there for such a long time. My cheek looked red when I looked at myself in the mirror.
Day 54
I am the latest bloomer. My eyes have seen things my brain did not register—or I chose not to consider.
Day 55
In New Guinea there is a tribe that used to consider eating the brains of the dead part of their tradition. Some members of this tribe walked around like the undead, staring and seeming not to hear, and stumbling around with a stiff and awkward gait—zombies. The prions from the dead brains affect the living brains of the tribe members who ate them—something like mad cow disease in people. Sometimes it takes years for this disease to take hold—so even though this practice was stopped years ago—people are still developing this zombie disease which is called Kuru—or there is the slight chance that they really are zombies and this is just another indicator of Armageddon.
A much better indicator, in my opinion, than frogs falling from the sky or swarms of locusts.
Day 56
Did you pull the wings off of a bee when you were a kid? How about the legs off of a spider? Did you ever bury a cat up to its neck and run it over with a lawn mower? Or put some alcohol on a beetle then set it on fire and to watch it walk and start to glow before it stopped moving? Did you ever lie to make someone look bad? Or lie to make yourself look good? Did you ever throw a lit match at someone’s face? Did you ever spit in someone’s food? Or put ingredients in that should not be in food? Masturbating in the car, how about that? Did you ever pretend you were deaf just for fun? Did you ever hit a dog, or your child? Cut yourself, scratch yourself, punch something really hard and break a finger because you were mad that you’d bitten your tongue? Wish something were dead? Wish you were dead?
Day 57
Every single basement has a dark corner or room no one likes. Maybe the whole basement is dark and scary. Spirits collect in dark and cluttered spaces. They hide and wait for you because they are stuck. Some people can see them. Some people see the long thin black wispy figures with arms ten feet long that unfold as they slowly reach for you in the dark because you have to go down there to get something or fix a light bulb or retrieve a screwdriver.
Part of you revs up and moves really quickly to get out of there because you know if you wait long enough and the arms fully unfold, they can touch you and then part of you belongs in the black corner in the basement. Then it will be very hard to be normal again. You will wake up in the middle of the night, and you won’t be able to get back to sleep because you will worry about all the things you have done wrong and how you are hurting people.
You can’t get this out of your mind now and you think that maybe if you count and envision each number in your head as you say it in your mind; you can block some of the bad thoughts. Or maybe you can pray—say the Lord’s Prayer over and over and over and God will surely be there to help you because you are saying his prayer. But it doesn’t help.
God doesn’t give a fuck when you are miserable—he doesn’t care if you pray. You can pray until there is blood dripping out of your mouth and nothing will change. God is an asshole that way. Even a relatively rotten person will assist you if you are begging for help, but your thoughts will just revolve through your mind over and over until you want to take a gun like the lead in Fight Club and shoot them out of your head. Maybe someday you will, but for now, you are trying to figure why God is such a jerk-off and you have to live like this.
You wonder why you feel forsaken—well it’s probably because you have been forsaken and you don’t know how to live in that state. Because when you are a kid somebody probably told you everything would be all right, and now you realize they lied. So you keep lying to yourself, telling yourself it’s not such a big deal, but actually it is, because now the dark corners in your basement have started to get darker. And bigger. The arms get longer and longer and pretty soon there won’t be anywhere you can go where they can’t touch you. So you start to drink or take pills or do some other kind of drug so you can’t tell when you get touched. But now the problem is you get touched all the time, but you don’t know it. At least now you don’t care.
Day 58
One, two
The lie was true
Three, four
A rotten core
Five, six
Uncommon tricks
Seven, eight
The light’s on, wait
Nine, ten
You hide again
Day 59
Everything really does get affected because of money. Just do what you want and the money will follow. Crock. Of. Shit. And it’s nauseating to hear Sting or Oprah tell us all how money really does not mean anything—all the important things cannot be bought with money. Oh really zillionaire? My house is important—I bought it with money. My car, yeah, I need that too and guess how I got it?
Last I checked we buy food, clothes and everything else with money. If it is not important to some people, I will gladly take the surplus you have off your hands. But it is a shame how we cannot do the things we want the way we want to because money is involved. I don’t know where I’m going with this. Oprah had a very public fit one day because a store would not open especially for her. Money brat. Oprah, if this information is wrong, tell me.
Day 60
When I was in grammar school, I was walking home from summer art class and there was no one around except a two or three-year-old girl on her swing in her yard. I walked over to her and thought she was so cute. She was round and soft. I grabbed onto the bottom of her legs and dug my nails as hard as I could into the back of her calves and watched her smiling face change. Her mother came out the back door and I left.
Day 61
The world was supposed to come to an end. Again. This time it is supposed to end in October. Maybe the world did come to an end like some people said. Nah. I think the old man who talks about this on TV is wrong and he is a media whore just like anybody else, except maybe he is a little worse because he is doing it in the name of Jay-sus Christ.
Is this because we have been bad and like the Bible says—God wants to do a reset? He is going to rid the world of all the bad—then he’s going to come back and do it again? Th
is sounds like an asshole to me. He creates us, supposedly, gives us the most vague and ridiculous ideas in the form of parables and writes ten very important rules in stone we are supposed follow, and then he leaves and never contacts us, never responds, leaves no signs. Sounds like the worst parent in the world. Left to your own wiles and then punished to the point of death because you did not do exactly what the self-centered leader told you to do.
You are supposed to worship this invisible entity blindly. You are supposed to love him. And worship only him, no others, and praise him, and honor and blah, blah, blah. He sounds like a narcissistic, egotistical creep. And if you don’t follow this and love and praise and have faith and pray—you could get possessed by his enemy, Satan, who was an angel for fuck’s sake and he challenged this pompous lord and was cast into flames forever because of his lack of obedience. And supposedly possession can’t happen—nothing can happen—without God’s permission anyway.
How am I supposed to love this God? This God who allowed his son to be crucified? This God who tested someone by saying he had to offer his son as a sacrifice in his honor, but then basically said—just kidding—it was just a test. This is along the same lines of a prank the bully-jocks would pull in high school—‘do this thing we say or your head gets flushed’—‘Okay, okay, I’ll do it!’ To get them off your back you listen to them and do something embarrassing or personally harmful and the jocks are like, ‘Hahahaha! We were just kidding you idiot.’ I don’t know if I want that kind of association.
I would not have been friends with that jock in high school—so what is the difference? Maybe I could stomach this more if he wasn’t packaged by the churches and preachers as a loving and caring and all-forgiving God. Maybe if they told me he was kind of a prick but I had to follow him anyway I would be a little more understanding. But for now—the whole things sounds like a mess to me.
Day 62
Some people seem like they really have their shit together. You can watch them plow through the day doing everything right…they know where all their stuff is, they seem to have all the answers, they do everything in the right order and don’t seem to have to second guess themselves about much. Things seem more black and white to them. They are dull to be around, but they generally seem happier than people who are more creative where there is almost no black and white—but every shade of grey and 75 million colors that represent every option and opinion we have and every choice we need to make. It’s almost too much because there is an argument for either side of every story. Not making a decision is bad though—and it is enviable when someone can make a real decision and stick by the answer and the results.
I live in fear that every decision I have made is wrong…so far they have been.
Day 63
I want bad things to happen to people that have done me wrong. I want them to suffer and I want them to be taught a lesson. In fact, I want bad things to happen to people who were mean to me, or disagreed with me, or thought they were better than me. And I want to watch it happen. I want to watch their expressions, and I will feel so happy when they do not get their way or something bad happens to them. I want to watch them get slapped in the face. I don’t need to see them be tortured or killed—but I want them to be embarrassed and realize they are human and not any better than anyone else.
I need to see things equalized a little. I want to know why things are so hard for me and why I can’t stop thinking and why my brain is the way it is. I want things to be hard for the people who’ve always had things be far too easy for them. I want someone to explain to me why I could not have friends, and why that girl in grammar school did not want to be seen with me. And why I was rejected by everyone. I wish bad things for people, which is probably not good for me at all. But it is one of the only things that make me happy. I want all these people to have it bad. I want the world to say fuck you to them for a change.
I used to think I was lucky—I did not have to worry or even think. Things have changed. I said one day I would change my luck and give it to someone who needed it more than I did because everything just fell into place for me. Someone surely could use some of this luck. My life has been shit since then. I thought it was a good thing to do. Everything you do comes back to you, right? It did not work that way. My luck tanked and I am a miserable person. I am claiming my luck, that luck that was mine, back. I will no longer give away anything that is truly mine. I can no longer listen to that superior laugh people do when they feel that they are better than everyone else.
Day 64
How can you tell when you should leave someone? Is emotional neglect enough? How about being called a cunt, or having your grammar corrected in front of friends and family, or having your antique furniture you were saving from your family be put on the curb for trash pick-up? Or being told you were being ‘trained’ after your newlywed husband refused to talk to you for a month? Maybe being told you were not really sick but looking for attention when you had pneumonia?
On the other side of the coin, what if you have not worked in fifteen years and this same man supported you and gave you everything you could ever need. Vacations and diamonds. A perfect house in one of the best neighborhoods and school systems in the United States. So am I a hooker? Does that actually make me a prostitute? Should I have left my honeymoon when he told me wasn’t speaking to me because he “realized what he had gotten himself into” by marrying me—and he did not like the way I packed?
Can you really stay married to someone and feel that they are an asshole half the time? He thinks I am a waste of space and wonders if my father is disappointed with me because I am such an underachiever. How I am wasting my God-given talents? Can a person like you—or love you—and not talk to you? How many times can you try to talk to someone, or go to therapy, or read books to help salvage an emotionally ridiculous relationship? Can you stay in the relationship and retain your dignity and not have people think that you are a doormat?
Day 65
Pleasure to meet you — oh, the pleasure is all mine. Are any of our relationships pure, or do we all have a motive, even with the people we supposedly love? You are interesting to me, so I get mental stimulation. You are beautiful, so I look even better when I am with you. Do we ever give anything without expecting something in return? Do we want to be noticed when we do charity work, or are we really that altruistic? I tried to find something with pure motive, but I couldn’t find anything. When I draw, I want people to see the pictures and to say they are interesting or worth something. When I write, I want people to relate and buy the book and give me money.
Day 66
I cut my birds flight feathers today. She can’t fly as well now and she needs me to get from place to place. She can still flutter around without hurting herself—but she relies on me as her transportation. Maybe this is what my husband did to me. Or I did to myself. Maybe I am crippled now and I can no longer do anything on my own and I need him for everything, even though I do not want to be anywhere near him, and I’d rather be doing anything else than what I am doing.
Wake up, pee, drink water, get dressed, drink Coke, take out the garbage, empty the dishwasher, let the dog out, feed the dog, sweep the kitchen, take a shower, talk to my friend on the phone, draw, check the computer, go to the shrink if it’s Monday, think how retarded I am, walk the dog…get it? I can’t do much more because I am sick. Whatever. Sometimes I take college classes and I pretend I like them. I don’t like anything. I liked watching porn for a while but that got old really fast. Sometimes I like to draw. Most of the time it hurts my brain and I am lonely. I like to watch movies—two hours without me.
Day 67
I’ve decided it would be easier to follow the trail of breadcrumbs through the woods—rain or shine—just to have someone tell me where to go. I’d be able to hear the birds as I wander…I’d be able to see the trees as it gets dark…I’d be able to follow someone’s trail to help me arrive at the house and it least it would not be my fault when I get shoved
into the oven—or someone else does. I would be grateful when the door shuts and I don’t have to hear it or feel it anymore ever again.
Oh…you’re not happy—I don’t care. Oh…you cannot take care of yourself—it’s no longer my fault. I can stop trying to grow up into the person I will never be. I will no longer have to look at other people who are smiling and happy and pretend I am happy so I don’t disturb or not be the kind of person they want to be around or invite me over and regret or have nothing, nothing, nothing, to look forward to. To be flat-lining every second of my life and have no one to tell because I really do have everything I could ever want.
I could withhold food from the pets and slowly watch them starve. I could clean out the closets and find tiny crosses hidden under the paper on the shelves. I could go see houses that I could buy, but have no real motivation because it would be too much trouble to move. I actually want ice cream, but I can’t eat it anymore. When I was young I would lie in bed and feel that a string was being pulled through my fingers and I could not grab it hard enough to hold onto it. Somehow I could feel it in my blood cells and everything vibrated and changed and I had to clench my jaw to prevent myself from screaming. My fingers felt too big for my hands. I wonder if that was the beginning of psychosis.
My mother wore bobby pins in her hair and one fell on the floor. Some water spilled on it and it left a blackish-teal mark on the hardwood that was beautiful because it ruined something. My mattress was on the floor and I used to play with the spring on the bottom of my sister’s crib. I could spin the spring and it would go so fast around the metal rod that it would hover in mid-air for a few seconds and I knew that if I spun it fast enough the world would stop for a minute and everything would be fine.
100 Unfortunate Days Page 5
