Spin around with a spinney spinney spin spin

"Tone."
"Tone of voice."
"Bad tone of voice."
"Not getting right tone of voice."
"Maybe someday I'll get the right tone of voice."

Here's how I got to be living across the water from my home. I say things, the things I say are perceived as being bad, Trey loads up all kinds of feelings about her perceptions and has a total skitz out.

She means it: she wants to have a better experience of me than she does. So here's what I do--I avoid her calls when I'm feeling less than 100% happy. This includes feeling a little tired, a little sad, a lot sad, a little hungry, a little distracted, just recently arrived at home, on my way out of the house, when I'm out of the house, when I'm working, when I'm sleeping, when I'm eating, when I'm reading, when I'm petting the cat, when I'm in the garden, when I'm watching the clouds slide across the sky. I feel safe talking with her when I know only a controlled voice will come out of my mouth. Which means Skype goes bong bong and the phone goes buzz buzz and I walk out of the room without thinking twice--it's so not worth risking the untended nasalized inflection, string of single syllable words, downward intonation, over articulated phonemes, or mumbled response. I do the same with email, where tone is much harder to quantify and so easy to embroider.

But even so, this path of careful tending of the interaction garden--so that every conversation is curated for optimal accord, Trey feels neglected and abandoned. Unloved. Het up. So when I do contact her this morning (after she tried the night before to raise me after I had "gone to bed"), she's already wound up about feeling unloved that when I say I'll take care of the thing she was calling to ask me to take care of she has a full-on freak.

"What do I have to do to get you to talk to me like you love me?" she asks as if its a non-provocative, neutral thing to say to your fiance-in-name-only, who she's too afraid to commit to because he might have another suicidal break when he may be unable to keep his shit together after feeling criticized by the woman he loves when she expresses her frustration at all of the things he does that make her feel bad--particularly the things that involve having an ineffably foul tone of voice that is defined by the ear of the behearer through a series of filters that trigger an briared nest of synapses that create the feeling of terror, mistrust, and loss of love and hope and home.

It's so easy for me to break what she keeps at the edge of the table and pushes when she believes the worst. And then we dance barefoot on the shards of family china on the hardwood floor blaming each other for our heavy steps and the blood we spill.

Is anybody reading this and wondering if the people in these stories ever want to kiss?

Remutilate Me, part 1

I've been listening to a bunch of audio podcasts about depression treatment, which have been mostly low-level, academic, or arms-length such that the fact that feeling fit to die is something experienced by individuals trying to live lives was glossed over. But one little nugget jumped out that I had never applied to my understanding of what's going on with me.

Self-mutilation.

I've heard that this is mostly something that girls and women do to themselves. I've certainly seen some interesting evidence of cutting on the forearms of colleagues and thought "Wow, there's evidence of a specific coping mechanism" or "What modern primitive body manipulation boutique does work like that?" I got my left ear pierced along with my nose during my first two years of college, which I recognized as an attempt to create a rite of passage for myself without a larger cultural awareness of what it is for a young man with a nose ring and suicide chain through the eyes of a woman from India ("Where are you from?" she asked with wide eyes. I was staring at her bindhi dot thinking the same thing--but apparently, her cultural signifier didn't mean "this young woman is married, and has an ayurvedic enhancement to the female reproductive organs for assistance during childbirth" like mine did).

But it hadn't occurred to me that I had been overcoming my reluctance to slice myself open and let the happiness in by outsourcing the task. And that I'd been doing it for a while.

I don't have an adequate data mash-up time line of traumatic emotional events and physical wounds attributed to accidents from 1970 to the present, but here's what I do have:

1973 (est.)
Chicken Pox (trio of pock marks next to left eye)

1974 (est.)
Banged Forehead (between eyebrows)
Banged Chin

1975, Summer
Broken Arm (Swing set)

1976, Summer
Skinned Knees (Bicycle)

1978, Winter
Concussion (landed on forehead rollerskating)

1979, just after Christmas
Thrown from horse

1980, January/February
Mononucleosis (Question: How does a celibate 9 year old become the only person at school to come down with a communicable immune deficiency disease? What does his internal chemistry need to be for him to allow this to set up shop for a month?)

1982, Spring and Fall
Ingrown Toenails (two out-patient cutting off's of toenails)

1983, October
(Death of Grandfather on birthday, therapy soon thereafter)

1985, January/February
Broken Arm

1986-1987 (Christmas-late February)
(Admission to adolescent psych ward on Christmas Eve, 2 months, suicidal depression)

1988, Springtime
Broken Wrist

1988-1992, Winter-Spring-Summer
Sore Throats Galore

1992-95, Winter-Spring-Summer
Acute Spinal Pain--neck and low back (from flattening curves in spine for voice classes at college)

1998, March
(Divorced from Sheila, sent packing, prayed to be taken in my sleep every night while sleeping on floor at mom's apartment)

1999, March
(Dumped by Ashley, after she returns home and becomes instantly engaged to an old friend after spending 3 ecstatic months in my arms: mom comes over and takes knife out of my hand in my garden apartment)

2006, October
Acute Spinal Pain--sacrum (unable to walk two days before beginning of grad school, week before birthday, right after receiving news that Evie was dumping me for the third time and had found a new romance in a guy from Austin she met at a Vancouver gay wedding)

2008, late January
(Breakdown with Trey, desire for death, scratching of face with nails, banging of head into plaster walls, Paxil-induced seizures)

2008, July
Sprained Wrists (landed on hands while flying off bike caught in streetcar tracks, trying not to be late to meet Trey who was waiting for me a few blocks away)

2009, June
Broken Arms (weeks after completing grad school, two smashed ulnas requiring immediate reconstructive surgery with plates and pins, months of hydrocodone followed by withdrawal, physical therapy, scar healing, movement recovered)

2010, March
Arm Surgery (Removal of plates and pins, total bone recovery, slow-to-heal weepy wounds)

I'm laying this out as a series of Burma-Shave signs along the highway. I'll revisit the highway soon to give more detail on topography, conditions, and roadside hospitality.

The Revenger's Strategem; or, The tragical historie of Shelby the glazier

(This is the basic outline of a Jacobean Tragedy to be developed later.)

Prologue
If there is disorder in the kingdom, it is the manifestation of the disorder of the king. To heal the canker in the body politic, the head of the serpent must be severed. In doing so, the disease of the king can spread to the avenger and be perpetuated in the new generation.

Act 1
Mad king does mad things and issues a crazy proclamation. The queen puts on brave face for court, but is spied on by servants who see her galloping her horse toward the hovel of a witch.

Act 2
Courtiers plot to depose the king by political means and thwarted by the king's minons. Subplot of exiled son of prior king and his country bride being discovered by fleeing courtiers.

Act 3
Courtiers flee the kingdom after king initiaties a purge of all residents with arbitrary characteristics (tone of voice, word choice, body posture). King manifests meterological events (tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes) which level the castle. By magical means (from the queen and the witch) the castle is restored, though vulnerable to the king's future assaults.

Act 4
The skies darken on the sabbath, dark spirits are conjured from the past, and generations of dishonored dead take control of the kingdom. The king is consumed by his creation as a shockwave is sent beyond the castle into the woods beyond.

Act 5
The forces of the son of the exiled king (including courtiers who have turned away from the current king, the queen, and the witch) storm the castle and do vanquish with the forces of darkness. The son of the exiled king is crowned and adorned in the mantle of state which transform the new king into the vanquished king. The new king's first words are the vanquished king's proclamation.

Epilogue
The plum tree that drops its fruit into the stagnant pool feeds a festering brew of decay and rot. The brine that feeds the tree infects every fiber, every branch, blossom, and root. It is they cycle of life, the exchanged breath, forever unbroken.

Exeunt omnes.

The reflex is a lonely child

My dad was a sensitive little kid growing up outside of Tulsa, OK in the fifties. His parents were divorced. His mother was 1/4 Cherokee and my dad saw her through the special prism little boys use to see their mothers. His mother lived in Sparks, NV and worked as a blackjack dealer. Family lore describes her with long straight black hair and bright, flashing eyes: a "wild" girl. She was 19 when she had my father and had been married before she met my dad's father. He was a charismatic bully who would drink and yell and get violent. They weren't married long. Shortly after my dad was born and his father left Tulsa, dad's mother met another man and had my dad's half sister. Then his mother left for Sparks, leaving the kids in the care of her mother.

My dad and his half sister were best friends and they both loved their grandmother. When my dad would cry for his mother, both his half sister and grandmother would comfort him. A few times a year, his mother would send for him, and my five year-old father would ride the train across the plains and into the mountains to see her. And back again to his grandmother and half sister.

His father resettled in California, and sent a demand back to his mother-in-law. My dad was to live in California with the new family, a step-mother, two older step-brothers, and a baby half brother. To live permanently in California. So my dad boarded the train in Tulsa for the last time and never saw his grandmother again. It would be 20 years before he saw his half sister again.

His mother died from blood poisoning caused by an illegal abortion when my dad was six. It's unclear if there was a funeral. Family lore describes this as the moment when my dad turned off his heart. On his bedroll in the garage, with the smell of lawnmower gasoline, oil dripped from a sedan, and windowsill cobwebs he would cry into the pillow he stuffed into his mouth. There was only room in the house for the family, so my dad should take what he was offered. What was left.

During the school year, he lived off the coast of his father's arrangements. Freed from the watchful eye of the truant officer, my dad would take off for the Russian River and live for three months of the year. In my imagination, I see my dad like Huckleberry Finn: catching frogs for dinner, meeting up with unsavory characters, scavenging out of the garbage cans of vacationers. He described laying still in empty fields for hours, waiting for the buzzards to begin circling. The black birds would spiral closer and land near my dad, hopping closer, and when he felt one nibble at his clothes he'd jump up and try to throw his arms around it. I also place him in the hollows of trees, surrounded by cold night, huddling in the damp without a blanket, afraid and in mourning for his life. By the dates on newspapers, and the ebb of daytrippers, he would know to begin the 30-mile journey back to his father's house.

Skip to dad at 18--in love with the long-haired exotic girl from high school who'd been living in Santiago, Chile with her parents, writing letters to the girl from infantry base camps in Vietnam. Dad had found a way to keep safe, from his volatile sergeant and fellow grunts whose aim and judgment he mistrusted, by working as a forward scout. This is apparently the riskiest job a soldier can accept, and that he decided it was the best way to keep safe speaks to my dad's ability to perceive the ultraviolet spectrum of potential dangers. He had undertaken an advanced course in solitude and foraging as a child, an excellent preparation for tracking the Khmer Rouge through the mountains of Cambodia. He was able to perform this task for two tours and keep from getting shot--though the magazine clip of his rifle caught a slug two inches from his heart in the first moments of a firefight.

Between his tours, he married the exotic dark haired girl with the sparking eyes. He had his pay back to his father for safekeeping in a bank account. Returning home, he discovered that the money had been spent on his father's family--the old man having no regrets or shame in stealing his son's salary. And so my dad went to work for his father drilling wells, work he swore he would never do when he enlisted in the army.

And so he would come home, pass me in my high chair with alphabet soup letters cooling in broth puddles on the silvery tray, and within moments angry words would come down the hall chilling me further. In my little mind a tiny logic sequence ran:

The big man makes mom cry.
I love mom.
I choose mom over the big man.
I choose mom over the big man in me.
The big man always puts mom in danger.
Therefore, when things get scary, and mom starts to cry, I will kill the big man--even if the big man in me is the only big man I can kill.

Anhedonia, My Reflection

Letters from exile. Tracing the ridges of my fault lines. The opportunity to stitch my mind back together and become someone worth being.

I spoke with Trey this morning as she was getting ready for work. If I keep the content of the conversation in the range of "how are you," "just called to check in," and "I hope you have a really great day," things are pretty okay. When we have an activity to focus on: like talking through ideas for her next presentation while walking on the shore, or getting lunch and sitting down to eat it, or going to a parties at her friends' houses. It's harder to keep the mood constant during interstitial "so what do you want to do next" times, or "now that we've talked about what we planned to talk about, how are you doing?" times, or transitions. Arrivals particularly.

As best as I can tell, it's like this. Sometimes it's different, but it's mostly awful.

I come in the door and feel glad to see Trey. Trey comes to the door. I say hello. Trey looks at me sideways. I say, "What's wrong?" Trey hugs me and says hi. I'm confused about the sideways look and don't hug back because I think I must have done something wrong. Trey still hugs me and says hi again. I say it's still me from the first time she said hi. She says, "I know, silly. Hug me." I say I don't want to because I think she's mad at me because she looked at me sideways when I came in the door and said hello. Trey begins to cry, which is loud. I try to talk and then stop. Trey cries more and walks into the house--all of the above having happened in the doorway in the span of 8 seconds.

At this point, a few things could happen. I could collapse to the floor (not sure why this became my go-to response to relationship stress, but a year ago February it seemed like the most natural thing to do to crumple into a heap of skin and bone on the hardwood), which brings more crying with pleas to "come on, be strong." I could follow her into the next room and talk in a way (with wrong tone or words or some other ineffable wrongness) that brings more crying and pleas to "stop being so cruel." I could sit silently on her couch looking at the floor in a posture of control blended with catatonic detachment. Or I could walk outside and hear her cries reach me on the sidewalk.

This doesn't happen every time. But if I don't hit the right note in my door knocking, or lock unlocking, or first hello-ing I'm hosed. Because it's my responsibility to keep the relationship in the middle of the tracks. The story in the house is that she responds to what I give her--so if I bring the crazy, she responds in kind. The inverse, if she cries then I must have done the thing to provoke her tears, is also true. How we regain attraction, love, or lust for each other is a mystery to me. How we get to a shared trust where we can start making wedding plans again seems like something another person could do easily. I feel so far from being acceptable to her.

The memories of our first heart brimming full year are paved under with a parking lot of grievances, broken trust, and neglect. The results of my poor stewardship of paradise.