A word of warning

I've spent the weekend with a dear friend who's going through heroin withdrawals, and I just want to say to all of you: DON'T DO HEROIN. EVER!! IT DOES VERY BAD THINGS TO YOU. Okay, I need a goddamned nap. Agh!

Love and thirst are one.

Do you think I won't steal from you?
I would blithely shear your sun-kissed ringlets,
And leave you bleating bald,
Spin it all into gold and hoard it in my bowels.
I don't want love, I want you--
One rosy piece at a time.

God made me flat and dry like a worry stone,
So circle me with your thumbs.
Writhe around in a cloud of sighs
Like a child in warm sheets.
Come with tears, moist breath, water everywhere;
I am storing up for the dry season.

I dare you to turn away now, love.
You are not your own,
You were bought at a price.

-Anonymous

First define your audience...

For a young child growing up with a strict religious upbringing, there is no more delightful place to play than inside a church building. Churches are wonderful places to play for anyone, but they are especially fun for a child who attends the same church on Sundays and Wednesdays, because she can take a wicked pleasure in invading all the secret rooms and holy places usually revered on meeting days. I don't think I ever told you that growing up, I had the rare privilege of having a church for a playground. My mother worked for years as the church secretary, and in the summers I would go to work with her and have my run of the entire building. The church pews were a site for endless games of tag and hide-and-seek with my brother; the workroom upstairs had more craft supplies than you would need to make a thousand Noah's arks out of felt and construction paper; the hidden closets and attics held more treasures and discoveries than an inquisitive little girl could get through in a year. When that church was empty of the faithful during the working hours, every toy in every classroom, every puppet behind the youth room stage, every frosted animal cookie in the baby's nursery, was mine. We even used to slip into the room where they kept the communion supplies, nipping some of the grape juice and snacking on the unleavened bread when Mom wasn't looking. Luckily, in the Church of Christ there is nothing especially sacred about the bread and the fruit of the vine themselves, so if we were caught, no one threatened us with having wasted the body of Christ.

The one place we didn't venture was the baptismal pool, which was located behind the pulpit in the main room. There was something sacred about that place; it was where people descended with black souls and rushed back out of the water with lily-white ones. They only opened it to the view of the church when some poor sinner decided to give his or her life to Christ. Every now and then I would try to look back there and dip in a curious toe, but I always felt the breath of God on my neck and I had to run back to safer areas of the church. I was relieved many years later to have my soul cleansed in a regular swimming pool at church camp, rather than that terrifying little resevoir of atonement hiding behind the sanctuary wall.

You see, the church was mine, but the salvation performed there didn't belong to me. Though I knew all of the church's secrets and places to hide, God still seemed to have secrets I wasn't worthy of knowing. Much later in life, when I finally knew that water was just water and secrets were only illusions, I wished I could go back to the church and stick a defiant toe into that pool without flinching. I am disappointed in the little girl who couldn't conquer every shadowy place that all the other churchgoers were too afraid to penetrate. Sometimes I don't know whether she even emerged from the swimming pool that summer night or if she drowned there. These days, I find myself no longer wanting to believe in sacred things. There is something strangely comforting, Elliot, about finding out that there's really nowhere left to hide.

I rule at life.

People are always talking about how they need time to think. Their lives are busy and complicated and they never have time to sit down and take stock of it all. I may have actually expressed this need once or twice, but what I'm learning from these two weeks of being trapped in my apartment with non-functioning feet is, I need LESS time to think. Sitting around all day with nothing to do but read and watch Queer as Folk DVDs has given me plenty o' time to think about all the things I'm usually too busy to obsess over, and quite frankly, I miss those busy days. When I think, I think mostly about the things I've done wrong and how I should have handled them better. And in that vein, my thoughts this week keep coming back to the same thought: Laura.

Yeah, we all saw this one coming. I was mad at everyone involved in the Elliot situation, and she was the only one left for me to take it out on. So she ended up getting all of the anger I had stored up for Elliot and Courtney. At first I was so self-assured and tranquil about the whole thing, but lately the veneer of apathy about my former life is starting to crack. I thought I saw her in the car next to me the other day, and my heart leapt up with joy before I could stop it. It wasn't her, of course, but why the hell do I care? When I have too much time to think, I think, "If you don't want her in your life anymore, why do you still check her blog every day? Why do you still have pictures of her around your room? Why do you still wonder if one of the messages on your phone is from her?" I wish that I would just shut the hell up.

Fuck.

I like pleasure spiked with pain and music is my aeroplane

The surgery went off without a hitch. Actually, it went off with one hitch, and then continued from there in a hitch-free manner. After the anesthesia wore off, I was treated to 48 hours of some of the most intense pain I ever experienced. Luckily M and D from work took me in to nurse me back to health until my parents could get down here. I've spent most of this weekend in a haze of pain and Percocet, crying for someone to bring me ice, water, food, pills. I had to crawl on my back at the rate of one foot every ten seconds anytime I wanted to go the bathroom. In short, I've been a pathetic mess who's lucky enough to have people in my life that care about me to put up with my shit. Now I'm alone in my apartment for the next two weeks with only the occasional visitor to look forward to. If any of you out there love me, give me a call to make the days pass more quickly.

I want to type more, but the longer I sit in a chair, the more my feet swell to giant proportions. I'm supposed to keep them elevated and on ice. They gave me crutches to get around, but crutches as a concept only work when you have one bad foot. When there are two bad feet, crutches are just something harder than the floor to fall on. I'll stick to crawling for now. Keep me in your thoughts, my dears.

Love in all the wrong places

Surgery update: It was postponed last Friday because I got strep throat. It is occuring TODAY at 1:00pm, so think happy thoughts around that time.

My new friends Lorne and Judith took me to the house of some friends of theirs for dinner last night. I was promised that I would meet some VERY interesting people. Apparently these folks are in a polyamorous setup in a house in North Austin, and they all just sort of share each other as they live together. They study tantra and witchcraft and yada yada yada, and supposedly they're very deep and very sexually in tune. Well, I'm here to report that they were some of the most dull people I've met since I moved here. How disappointing! They weren't interesting, they were just people who try to cultivate bizarre and exotic interests to hide the fact that they have absolutely no personality. Their house was draped in scarves and tapestries, there was strange Middle Eastern music playing in the background, they grew peyote cacti in the backyard...and yet still they were totally boring. It was such a cheat. Lorne and Judith are themselves in an "open relationship," which is not polyamory per se, but still seems to spice things up for them. Different strokes for different folks, eh?

In other news, my parents are arriving tomorrow and I have remnants of hickie marks on my neck. Yes, hickies. Who gives hickies after the age of 15, I don't know, but apparently they haven't gone out of style yet. I'm praying that the marks fade; I really don't want to have that "Who's sucking on your neck?" conversation right now. I already had to teach class in this state, much to the amusement of the 16 and 17-year-olds.

Well, I go now to face the surgeon. If I die, I hope that doesn't mean the hickies will never fade from my corpse. That could make my funeral awkward for my family. Closed casket, perhaps?