Rape Culture

I am so fucking sick to death of rape culture and horrible people.  So, just for my own benefit, if not for anyone else's, I've decided to compile a list of links to articles that I have found to be useful/horrifying/heartwrenching.  Peruse at your own discretion, trigger warnings like WHOA.

Cranky

So due to a series of fuckups, some of which are mine, I'll readily admit to that, I haven't gotten my hormone suppression shot that I need for all my ladypart problems.  I've been taking this shot for maybe 5 years now, and because I don't have it, my body is being flooded with all these hormones I haven't had in my system for a long long time.  Which has basically turned me into a 14 year old girl.  I cry all the time, I'm a total rageaholic, I get my feelings hurt at everything.  It's like puberty plus PMS plus an unstable person to begin with.  I am a dangerous scary woman with hormones.  I've been trying to think of an all-natural way to supress my hormones, but there isn't really an anti-edamame.  Anti-soy milk.  Whatever.  Basically I'm playing a lot of violent videogames and crying and trying to avoid unnecessary social interactions.  So not a whole lot different I guess.

In an attempt to alleviate some of this rage, I asked for advice, and got a whole lot of people telling me to exercise.  But I'm a lazy fuck, so I tried to write about it instead.  What came out was disjointed and nonsensical and somewhat serial killer manifesto-y.  I sent it to my darling darling Kiki, and asked him to fix me because I apparently have no clue how to write anymore.  He said it was coarse, which it is.  Honestly there's not a lot of art to it, it's just kind of raw emotions vomited onto a page.  Being the asshole that he is, he told me to rewrite it, and then did it himself.  Because he's a jerk and a thief, and made it way better.  I'm going to post both of them here, in the spirit of disclosure, so you all can see the horrible things I put on paper, and then what they would sound like if I had talent.  He took my raw bare stupid girl emotions, and made them sound nice.  Love him, enjoy these.

Red (original)

Let’s all play the rage game.
So fucking delicate, like porcelain on a swingset, nails on a chalkboard, trapped in a box, cliché cliché cliché.
I want to bash my head through a wall.  I gnaw on my own hands just to let some anger seep through my protective barrier and out into the world and back into me.  Out my mouth and through my fingers.
Ripping pieces of paper up into tiny strips is no longer satisfying me; I crave blood like an animal.  My inhalations come in hot and stifling.  My head thumps like a speaker, whub whub whub.
My ribs are locked closed with a chastity belt, I’m stuck and trapped, and oh my god help me let me out.

Red (Redo)

Let’s all play a game.
like hangman on the blackboard with a cocaine nail
drifting sweetly side to side
from a porcelain chain
trapped
in a box
my game.
my rage.

I put my head through the wall just to see the other side
and i bite my flesh to watch the blood flow.
something needs to permeate
because this hatred deeply seeps
my head throbs slowly with my heart
and these shallow breaths are short and incomplete.
I’m trapped alone
inside myself
and to shed this skin
from off my chest
no longer
calms the beast.
it’s life I crave,
Oh, God,
will nothing else suffice?

X-Ray Vision

Too much of the super serial.  I need to get back to the goofy, the evil, the world-conquering madness.  Like I talked about in one of my first posts, many moons ago, I have always had a penchant for evil motherfuckers.  Why are the bad guys so much more deliciously entertaining, and why do I ALWAYS inevitably root for them?  Probably because they are so much more human.  I hate to use Superman as an example, because he isn't human, but he's so flipping perfect that it's annoying.  He's nice and smart, and blah blah blah.  He has superpowers, and he uses them to save the world, and do good deeds, and get kittens out of trees.  No real person would do that.  They would just check out ladies in the locker room for awhile, and then go rob a bank.  Which is I'm pretty sure what villains do.  They have sweet lairs and death rays and check out chicks' boobs.  They have flaws, like anger and vengeance and greed and just plain homicidal crazytown.  I want to hug them all, and clink my gin martini against theirs, and cackle wildly.  They get to tell it like it is, and make the hero cry because he can't handle it.  Also lackeys!  I want lackeys!  I promise you, random internet readership, when my accounting prowess allows me to rise the ranks of political power and I become the lady that gets to sit on the Iron Throne, I will remember you.  And I'll have need of tons of lackeys.

(Speaking of evil geniuses, like myself, I'm gonna be an asshole and plug my friend's comic here.  It is absolutely brilliant.  The art is evolving at an exponential rate, the dialogue feels incredibly real, the characters are intricate, the story is about a fucking mad scientist.  What more could you want?  It's called String Theory, and it is dark and magical.  Go read it.)

This next piece is actually new.  I wrote it at the behest of a friend of mine who yelled at me for the last post I made, and told me to write something new, and gave me the topic of a recent encounter.  And while I thought it was wretched (thus the name), he told me it was "hot", and had "flair".  Anyway, I was sick and tired of being so dark and moody and godawful depressing in this blog, so I decided to post it.  Fuck it.  I can't be pretentious ALL the time.

hackhackhack

Like a kid on a tire swing, I am giddy and awkward.  The first touch is blue electricity, you make me into a slack-jawed moron.  My brain puts out the Away For Lunch sign, and all my movements become animal.  Sharpened shoulder blades and snarling lips.
Fourth of fucking July
Tiny explosions
Claws and teeth
An order, a command
Pulling hair, pushing the wall
A bright white flash!
Sticky spots on the carpet and the corners of my lips.  Grasping for air, searching for clothes.  Awkward again, but a satisfied sense of a cat licking his lips after a bowl of milk.  I stretch, and give him a high-five for his dick.

Mosquitoes

Aeee, over a month with no entries.  I am a terrible blogger.  I think once I realized that I had no more old shit to put up, and I had to start writing actual things again, I got terrified and hid my head in the sand.  Little girl.  Also for the last two weeks I've had what the doctors think is West Nile, but can't confirm without stupid expensive tests.  So mostly I've been sleeping and trying to get rid of crushing headaches.  My body is awesome.

I was thinking about it the other day (No, really?) and I don't think I've been capable of love for a very very long time.  I think the last few serious relationships I've had were more me trying to pretend that I could still feel.  And I don't say this in a dark gothy "my heart is black like my lipliner" kind of way.  It's just sort of a startling observation.  I think I've been a very broken woman.  Strike that, AM a very broken woman.  And I think that my inability to really let go and fall and feel and love has given me a very twisted and jaded sense of what sex should be.  Not that I think I'm alone in this, we as a nation are a very bitter people.  I guess I'm not real sure what the "right" way to think about sex is either.  I've tried all of the wrong ways.  I spent years using it as a weapon, and years avoiding it like a shack with a chainsaw killer inside.  For a while I was completely bored by it, and only put up with it as a person does their laundry.  I've been obsessed with it, and terrified of it.  I spent years only having "Oops, probably shouldn't have done that" sex. There have only been a few times ever that I have felt what I imagine normal people feel after sex.  Satisfied.  Ick-free.  Satiated?

So now what?  I mean this both in a metaphorical sense and a literal one.  How do I continue living with a broken sense of love and sex, and how do I end this post?  My brain has been a little too fuzzy since I've gotten sick to really write anything new, and since brain swelling is a symptom that things are getting worse, let's not push the pretentious.  I could just end this post without having a bit of... whatever at the end.  From the feedback I get, no one really likes that part anyway.  I have a piece from way back when that I wrote about my ambivalent feelings towards sex.  But it is some seriously dark shit.  And I'm feeling a tad judgy at myself right now for even having written it. Although, looking back a few posts ago, I had another bit of embarrassing nonsense, and I puffed my chest out and posted it anyway.

So yeah.  Because I hate being self-censoring and judgy, which are things I never wanted this blog to be, and things I always seem to find myself being, let's just do it anyway.  I'd apologize for how absurdly dark this piece is, but really, it's coming of age poetry, of COURSE it's dark.  I'll make it up to you guys (my vast readership in Russia and Malaysia) at some later date when I'm not quite so exhausted by everything.  I promise, I won't stop writing wordy pretentious pieces of metaphor anytime soon.  <3

Vacant

I'm just a rag doll
touch me, use me, abuse me
throw me out with yesterday's coffee grinds
twist my little legs into
your favorite position
I don't mind
just tell me what you like
And I'll try my damnedest to comply
Give me a time, a location
and E Inc. is on the job
and when you fill me up
and I'm motionless on your bed
pick me up and get me on my way
I have the world to please
Don't fret about my feelings
I have none anymore
I am a hollow shell
with soft warm places
for you to exploit
just tell me what you like
bend me, break me, bruise me
If I get sore, don't stop
my cries will only get louder
and I'll hold back my tears
so you don't lose your precious excitement
Impale me again
I can't say I'll like it
but I'll make sure you do
At your service
my legs are open

A Punch, A Scream

To quote my dearest darling Kiki, hateloathecuntfuck.  I am a ragey lady.  I am full of rage.  I envy the ladies in my group therapy that say they have problems connecting with their rage, because I feel constantly about to burst.  I am terrified of myself, and I'm worried for the people around me that I might be terrifying.  Or possibly I'm just an annoying little cunt, who knows.

I had to step out of group for a minute tonight and just pace and rage and boil.  We were talking about how most rape victims and abuse victims have problems with people touching them, and are incapable of sex.  And I started thinking about how I went in the opposite direction, and became a slutty McSlutslut, and how that made me weird and different, even in a room full of people that are weird and different.  And I got angry at the situation that did this to me, and I got angry at myself for not EVER being a normal person, and I got angry at myself for choosing that kind of destructive behavior in response to a shitty situation, and I got angry at myself for being so fucking angry all the time.  The co-facilitator tried to calm me down, by asking me if my anger was an animal, what it would be.  I said a panther, because it was the first thing that came to my head, and she said that was good.  I wonder what an incorrect response would be.  Is there someone out there who has a penguin as their rage animal?  An angry little cottontail rabbit?  A mean and vengeful pigeon that shits on people?  Whatever.  She told me to think of that panther the next time I get angry, but I have no idea how that will be helpful in any way at all.  When I'm angry, I don't have any coherent thoughts, and I can't imagine how thinking of a large black jungle cat will make that better, but I said I'd try it anyhow.  Sometimes I feel like the field of psychology is a bunch of hippy mumbo jumbo, but like I said back in my drug days, I'll try anything once.  Except heroin, but that's mostly because I hate needles.

Off-topic again.  Sorry.  My therapist seems to have more realistic methods to cope with the rage, other than connecting with my spirit animal.  She suggested Krav Maga, which I'm going to look into.  She also said it seemed like most of my anger is stored in my hands and arms, which, while being kind of mumbo-y, is probably true.  She also suggested I do some exercises at the gym which involve my arms, because I only really work on my lower half.  However I do it, I need to get some of this aggression out.  I have to stop walking into a room and immediately planning my escape, I have to stop being constantly psyched up for a fight, I have to stop dressing in such a manner where I know I can fight.  Little unhealthy me.  My core is rotten.

I wanted to put something else at the end of this, but it turns out this is the last piece I had on Facebook, and as I said in my first post, that was really the whole point of this blog.  Which means that I had nothing more relevant to put here, and also means that from here on out, everything will be brand-spanking new.  Or really really old, but I'm going to shy away from those, because they all kind of suck.  I guess I can make the stretch that I talk about being angry and crazy in this piece, but really I'm just talking about a boy.  Which is number one on my list of reasons why my writing sucks, immediately followed by lack of content, too much metaphor, overt sexuality, over-dramatization, and dumb in-jokes.  If I make fun of me first, it takes all your power away!  I win!

Braveheart
 
My body is a little space heater, with no one to warm. Can I put my body next to yours? You elusive haunting motherfucker.

My minds flits past you, (not even the curve of your mouth, the poetry of your jolted movement, the strange sadness hidden in your eyes, your velvet rimmed song; just your name) and my chest caves in, instantly killing the invalid yellow canary that lay inside. Tingling fingertips stretch towards you, only to find you maddeningly out of reach, and the anger rises. I avoid all mention of you, while at the same time I steer my thoughts, my car, my legs towards you. The fuse to my sanity, one beam of light glinting off your curls and it sets off the train until my mental stability explodes. All sense of reality and sanity are lost, I've become a villain in my own world.

I must have you, or you must be destroyed.

Fractured

I'm feeling very strange and disjointed.  Which is a nice way of saying I feel like a lunatic.  I burst into tears at odd moments, I laugh at depressing ones.  I scream at friends for nothing, I cry for an hour because I fucked up an order on Amazon.  I do not feel in control of my emotions, thoughts, or reactions.

I am concerned for my future children (Wolf and Anyanka) that between me and my future baby daddy Kiki, they will be raving fucking lunatics.  I was talking to a councilor the other day, a lady I just began seeing to try to cope with the whole rape thing, and I described it like a pot of water that is just about to boil.  That's how I feel at all times.  Like any little thing is just going to make me start acting crazy.  Er.  Crazier.  We talked about different ways to calm myself down when I get to the boiling point.  But there's no thoughts once I reach that place.  Just panic and terror and aggression and rage and blinding white.  I know I'll get better.  People always say that it has to get worse before it gets better, and I guess that makes sense.  Even talking about this at all is taking me from a numb kind of denial that I find so comforting into a realm of confusion and loss.  It's bringing up thoughts and feelings from my abuse and rape at age 16, that I never really dealt with due to my entrance into drugs, and my mind's ability to suppress and splinter.  I don't want to go crazy again, I didn't like it the first time.  My first reaction is to flee, so I can just get it over with in private, have a fucking birthday party for my swimming pool, lose all sense of reality, and then reemerge once I can conform to some sense of normality again.

I dislike this whole thing.  I like control, and logic, and neat little piles.  Easily explainable feelings, and rational thought.  Ledgers with perfect little columns of numbers.  Accounting makes sense, and very little of it is really subject to interpretation.  It calms me.

Anywhoodle, now that I've terrified every last one of my readers, let's delve into the silly little thing I wrote all this as an intro for.  Or, for which I wrote an intro, if you have a problem with dangling participles.  It is a collection of sorts.  Some of them are things I wrote in my car in the rain (thus the title), some of them were sheared from works that I started and then realized were never going to come together coherently.  Some of them were just little remnants of dreams that stayed on the tip of my tongue and needed a place to go.  All of them are not great, and none of them are ever going to go much further.  But I suppose that's a given.  Now before I start to get randomly depressed and have to flee, here's this thing.

Bits and Kibbles (Also titled: Thoughts while driving in the rain)
 
Nostalgia, you bitch.  She is a cruel and wicked mistress.

Our bodies slam together, and the resounding crash of thunder fills my backseat.

You are so beautiful when you cry.  So angelic, such color in your cheeks.  At least if you stay with him you'll always be pretty.

Let's make sweat angels in the sheets.

Are you ruined forever for everyone from our torrid entanglings, or I am the only one doomed?

"Guilt is a useless emotion," she tells me.  So I won't waste either of our time apologizing.

It was strange, after all these years of living here, she had never really looked at the ceiling of her front hallway in such depth.  The first time they had sex with each other it was like an explosion of flesh and sweat and noise and soft whispers afterwards that only ended when they had fallen blissfully into sleep.

I know you feel like you can never get any taller, do any better.  But if I let you stand on my shoulders, will you leave her?

Put that itchy finger on my trigger, and we'll shoot the sky.

The bright red eyes of the car before me stare at me through droplets on my glass.

We complete our backroom handshake, and the indiscretions can continue unopposed.

I can't tell you to stop, because that's the only way I know for certain that you never will.

My tender lovely mirage.  Will you be as wet as you look when I finally reach you?

Dirty thoughts squander behind the dark red velvet curtains in the whorehouse in my head.

Inhalation

Does love ever really go away?  The older and (debatably) wiser I get, the more I want to tell myself that it does.  That we grow up and that old soft tugging on the chestular innards will just dissipate until we no longer sit around mopey on occasion at the thought of those wretched ancient flames.  But I don't think it does.

There was a drug I used to do, and it's been years and years since I've even seen the stuff, but I still find myself craving it from time to time.  Which is a nice way of saying I crave it at least once a day.  Sometimes I'll get a taste in the back of my throat or my hair will stand up on end and I'll think about it, and I'll WANT it.  I spoke a while back to a friend of mine who has also been clean for many years, and I asked him if the cravings ever went away.  He said he had once asked an old man this, a man that hadn't gotten high in 30 or 40 years.  Apparently the old man said that he still had cravings, every single day.  I know I'll never do it again, but I still have the cravings, and when I'm in a period of high stress, I sometimes cling to the thought of it.  That if my life ever gets so bad I can't cope anymore, I can always just go find some.

I know this is a strange way to say it, but I think love is the same way.  Sometimes I'll go for months without thinking of it, and then some nights I can't get it out of my head.  And in times of dire anxiety and high-pitched wailings of anger and stress, I find my thoughts turning back to it once again, like a safety net.  I can't stand the thought of clinging to a tumultuous past, but it IS like a drug, and those ancient fires still burn bright.  No, I don't spend my nights dreaming about those old lovers anymore, and I don't make elaborate plans in my head for ways of making it work again.  But it is always there, like a rat in a bucket clawing its way into my chest. (Too much Game of Thrones)

I've been avoiding posting this next piece, for many reasons.  I don't want to look/feel frail, and this makes me appear so.  It's exceedingly personal, and not in a cute or flattering way.  In a... glimpse into the mind of a madwoman kind of way.  But I'm nothing if not an honest person, and I try my damnedest to be an open book.  So in that spirit, here is a thingy I wrote long ago about a particular love that I fucked up, ran my car over, and backed up and did it again.

Scientific Findings of the Heart
 
Curled up in a ball at the bottom of the shower, the tears on my cheeks feel hotter than the water.

I was only a baby. I was such a child when I destroyed everything. But would you punish a child who broke a dish for the rest of her life? Forever ever?

No, I'm wrong. I was heart-broken before I even started dating. I was broken, I am not a whole woman. And the more I fuck up, the more pieces get chipped away.

My writings sound like 14 year old diary entries.

Stop it. Stop haunting me. It's been so long, go away. Stay away from my friends, stay away from my dreams, stay out of life. Or dear god, get in it. Burrow your little head into my life until all you see is the inside of me and all I see is that I am full of you.

Just say you forgive me. Just SAY it. I don't care if you mean it. (Yes I do. I care very much.) I want to be forgiven. I want to know that my reckless stupid dish-breaking child self didn't ruin your life. Like I ruined so much (all) of mine.

I feel pathetic for having feelings. Other people don't. They don't smile or frown, they talk about the traffic on the way home, what they had for dinner, their kid's first tooth. Their dish-breaking children. I want to be strong/robotic. I want to be cold and calculating. (STOP! Cold and calculating is what got you into this mess!) No. I was only a baby. I didn't know.

I wish I could still smoke away all my feelings. Puff puff pass those emotions to the next person, in a stream of beautiful clouds exhaling from my lips.

Instead I get to write 14 year old diary entries. A 14 year old with an advanced degree in English (You never went to college).

Science. Go back to the science. You titled this damn piece for a good reason. Science sez! I just had a dream about you. I haven't been a broken woman all these years, I just had a dream. And I'm hungry, which makes me a little emotional. And I watch/play/read/listen to beautiful things, and think that means that my life should be full of beautiful things and people that love me and romantic gestures and happiness, because I can't conceive of the difference between beautiful fiction and my life. Back up. Back to the facts. Tears are hotter than water. You were a child. You are hungry, and have bad (beautiful) dreams. Eat. Avoid sleep, where he haunts and smiles and pretends you never killed him.

Everything will be fine. Or it won't, and you'll die.