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Wednesday, July 12, 2000
12:58 
Dreams in detail. Those two are doozies.
Difficulty thinking today. Not sure what I'm doing. Pain in lower body is very distracting. Still feel that separation, still feel as though the only two places I can be right now are inside that small room or standing on the edge of the corpse-strewn field. There is still this uneasy pact between Thought and Memory however, although the Rationalist is throwing a sulk and feels very, very scared, and Instinct is worried. El has been very quiet, but I think she is still there. It is difficult to tell - although the welder's goggles have come off, I'm still wearing very dark glasses. I don't think she could use the phone yet. Today I'm not sure if other forms of communication would be possible. I feel more separate than I did yesterday, when I was sure all meaning was lost forever. Yesterday it seemed as though the price for connection, for feeling something like my old self, was the acceptance of redundancy and replacement. Now I'm not so sure but the world seems flatter than it did then.
My brother says "Not punishment, quarantine" and can't explain himself any further than that. Stuck in that small bare room being tormented by ravens is not my idea of caring isolation. Quarantine to stop me being infected by others, or stop me infecting others? He says I have an infection in the main access point (hence the weeping) which has spread up the top right hand strut of the main structure and into the skull. Presumably he thinks this is what caused yesterday's total nightmare.
Tried connecting last night. First time round was a definite hit. In came the wave of hot/cold pleasant/unpleasant tingle/not tingle and the pain was pushed into a different room for a while. Still there, still perceivable, but removed enough to take away the biting need for any form of relief no matter how permanent and irretrievable. The connection was observable enough for it to be quite apparent when it was broken. It wasn't the same as it was when we were making the link physically, however, not even a poor cousin. Like trying to compare a garden pond with the Sound of Mull. A different beast entirely, but still containing water. The pain came back quickly, ever so quickly, once that was broken, and we didn't get it back again not even to the level of the garden pond, although we finally seemed to achieve a puddle.
The access points were uncomfortable doing it remotely, as if it were harder to keep the angle of ingress stable and the connection walls were being bruised.
I found myself getting irritable and frightened and fractious though, as Andy said he was scanning, doing more. I'd said look, I'd said do this shield thing (better than having Spider do it), I'd said connect if you want, but one thing always seems to lead to another and it is very difficult for me to say no to remote work once any form of remote stuff has been started and I don't like that. I don't like continually having to fight to say no when he has already promised not to do remote work.
And I don't like the way it says he'll try spoofing the connection in his log, even though I don't know what that means. It makes me think thoughts of him trying to gain access without asking me first and I don't like that. I don't like the idea of him being able to do remote things without telling me/asking me. It always goes wrong.
We're still working through a hole as well, and yet they say it's my own fault because I won't come out. But I don't know how. The room is subtly different. Hugin and Munin no longer argue and bicker and hurt me with kindness. The only way I can describe the change is that before it felt like the walls were miles thick but now they are ordinary thickness. The quality of the soundproofing is changed. Every so often I think I can hear birds in the trees outside and my body is convinced it can sense the changing seasons through the floor and the walls.
It's different. But some days, like today, the walls still seem undeniably thick.
We're off on holiday today. Probably won't be any more entires after today's until Monday. Don't fret. I'll take a notebook and report back.
12:24
Bad day yesterday. In case you hadn't noticed.
For the few reading this who worry and don't know the whole story, I have some sort of illness, the main symptom of which at the moment is intense physical pain. It also causes mental disfunction (memory impairment, aphasia, synaesthesia, cognitive difficulties), muscle spasms, trembling, occasional loss of feeling and paralysis in extremities and limbs, occasional panic attacks, severe depression, visual disturbances and other things. I am also an acute and chronic insomniac.
Please to note also that I make a distinction between family, which means blood relatives like parents, and Family, which is nothing of the kind. Much of Family is non-consensus.
I'll get back to yesterday in a minute, but first order of the day is to note the dreams of last night.
Lots of them, as usual. Most of which I can't remember because the pain is exhausting me to the point where my dreams are difficult to remember.
But last night I dreamt that a bunch of us went to the Corryvreckan. Not that suprising, as Jura is my favourite place in the whole world (so much so that I just got distracted for thirty minutes looking at websites about it and pining). We were dropped off in a cave on the North side, which is odd, as that's Scarba, which is all cliffs and I don't remember there being any caves on the Scarba coast, and this was a big one. I'm not sure what we were doing in the cave, but there was something about undertaking sonar surveys of it, as it was mainly full of water.
We surveyed this cave and found some things like a metal box with stuff in, and we left a note for anyone else who came in that we had done this work and that they were to contact us for further information, and be careful with their sonar because there were things living there that didn't like the noise (like penguins!!! Dreams are so mad sometimes).
It turned into nightmare here because the boat didn't come back for us. We had to swim out, and the Gulf was in flood. Although it wasn't a windy day, the race was awful, and it was terrifying trying to swim out through the turbulence and rips and sucking undercurrents.
There was lots of other stuff last night too, some of it part of the same dream as that one there, but at the moment that part is the only one I have the brain mass to remember. That in itself is infuriating, because I am so used to being able to remember my dreams in detail (see previous entries).
Hang on, my archive doesn't appear to be listing all entries all of a sudden.
Tuesday, July 11, 2000
16:37
I lay down at the world's end late last night, early this morning, and the dragon looked me over curiously, noting the changes. I lay down in the strange silence wrought by the cessation of the ravens' bickering and felt hard scales brush across my chest.
"It is very deep," the dragon says. "Far too narrow for me. It is wide open, and weeping."
The Rationalist pulls its hat down over its ears so as not to hear while muttering about the unlikelihood of bacteria penetrating a non-existent hole to cause infection and Instinct sighs and wallows in the sorely missed warmth of the massive reptile's presence. Hugin and Munin huddle together in one black, puffed-up mass of feathers, each not entirely convinced of this apparent reconciliation by the other.
The empath lies there in silence, staring at the ceiling, emptied by despair until even the presence of the dragon seems meaningless, waiting for the horse to arrive and demand a rider.
The pain is getting worse. I can't breathe with it. I'm sitting here, struggling to type as spasms seize my hands and my vision greys with it. I can hear myself on the verge of screaming, the sounds issuing forth with no thought or heed towards volition. Tears stream. I try panting as women in labour do, find it only makes it worse. My legs move and fidget restlessly as if my body thinks that will distract me. There is weight in my chest, as though lungs filling with fluid.
Dear gods please. Please.
11:28
Nightmares. Too many nightmares. Is that like too many secrets? Will a black box disguised as an answering machine prove to the be the ultimate panacea as well as the ultimate weapon? One long night of nightmares, punctuated by shivering and sweating and crying in bed while my husband slept soundly to one side. So dehydrated now.
I hate the ones about kidnapping. I hate them more when they involve small children. Nightmares about diving, about being trapped in a wreck in a strong current, snagged on a piece of rusty metal. Nightmares about my PhD, returning to work to find they have held a music festival in my field and all the work is ruined. Nightmares about fidning a new doctor, about sorting out returning to my PhD. Nightmares about being trapped in the Alps. One long night of it.
And the thing about nightmares is that the subject itself need not be scary. The fear can be there no matter what the subject matter.
A night of riding the dark mare having been abandoned finally by my Family. My thighs are covered in sweat and phlegm from her mouth and I stink of the grave. I sit on her still, legs bonded to her flanks by some magical force, and Hugin and Munin sit together on the branch of a dead tree above me and look out with me across the rotting corpses on the field. I look down and see Raven pluck the eye from a relatively fresh body and note with no surprise that the face is mine. He had one of my eyes years ago, he might as well take the other one now.
I have been trapped in that room with them so long perhaps I have come to love them, even with their endless arguing. I hope they are coming with me, I marvel that they have kept up as the horse ran wild across the Dreaming.
They look down as the horse shifts uneasily and scrapes one foot.
"I remember what the air smells like on cool crisp mornings, Mugin," the empath says. "I remember what it looked like outside that door. I remember the taste of blackberries in the rain and the smell of cow's breath. I remember what it felt like to be loved, and I remember what it felt like to be lost. You can't taunt me any more."
Hugin drops a feather that drifts down slowly, shifting on the tiny air currents, to settle on the freshly plucked face of the corpse before them, covering the empty sockets.
01:16
And thus the world ends. Not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a sigh.
Monday, July 10, 2000
14:59
Lesson for the day: The lesson for today appears to be:
| The fact that other people are able to rely on you for certain things does not necessarily mean that you can rely on them for those same things. |
Does this seem obvious? I mean, I'm not talking about professional type stuff. I'm not talking about relying on someone to be able to make a decent cup of coffee just because you can do it, I'm talking about friendship, really. I have just been ... is told off the right phrase? I don't know. I'm feeling rather hard done by at the moment. I'm wondering why it is that despite everything, I know, if I know nothing else, that my loved ones can rely on me for support but it is being hammered home time after time that no matter what anyone says, it is not possible for me to rely on anyone else for the same thing.
Am I really that demanding? Hang on, I'll ask Frood.
Frood says I can be demanding, like anyone can be, but I'm not especially so. Phew, that's a relief. I was starting to think I was some sort of bloody albatross. I don't think I'm demanding. I demand very little, but what I do demand I demand completely. And those demands are quite simple. I demand that my friends and those I love be honest with me, that if they do things for me they do them because they want to, not because they feel they have to, even if they do feel they have to.
And I expect, if they say they will do something, that they will do it, or explain why and explain why at the soonest given opportunity. I expect common courtesy as well as intimacy, because common courtesy is ever so important between friends. Not the letter of common courtesy, but the spirit behind it. The difference between writing a thankyou letter and calling someone for a chat as well as saying thankyou.
Someone on RP just suggested dong an RF FAQ about the Rules of Hospitality. I think it's a damn good idea.
11:41
Sentiment for the day: Fuck it. Just fuck it. All of it.
11:03
Stick insects. I kid ye not, last night I dreamt about stick insects. I dreamt about the problems of stick insects, of finding them privet, of what happens when they get trapped in a bread and butter pudding (I think that's what happened - and if you can spot the paraphrase, well done). Oh no, it was a sandwich, because it was my lunch (maybe someone thought it would like the lettuce - I know we tried feeding them lettuce) and I carried on eating it after this poor thing had suffocated accidentally in the butter. I retrieved it with surgical tweezers and ate the sandwich anyway, even though it had bright green legs in it.
So Frood said he'd get me some more stick insects, and I said we had to get a proper tank to keep them in this time, not a tupperware box, because the box didn't belong to us and so we couldn't put holes in the lid. And the jug for the spare water filter was no good because they could climb up the sides and get out (and they couldn't from a tank?), and it wasn't big enough, and the bits of bamboo I had given them to stand on all fell down to the bottom higglety-pigglety. So if he was going to get me some more stick insects, I wanted a proper tank and some sticks for them to play on and some privet. Because stick insects eat privet.
There was this bizarre sequence that involved going around cutting off bits of privet from people's privet bushes and hedges, even though some of those bushes looked more like variegated thyme and they were all very young bushes for some reason, only just planted, with that first spurt of growth that leaves newly-planted bushes looked leggy and a bit straggly.
Anyway, we had to go to Yarnton nurseries to get the stick insects (they have a reptile house there, I guess they might sell stick insects) because no pet shops actually in Oxford sell them (possibly true). This involved going on the bus up towards Kidlington (I I don't know why we didn't take the car - I expect we decided bringing a big glass tank back on the luggage rack of one of the bikes was a bit foolish), but we actually walked most of the way, and the north end of Oxford turned into something looking like the north end of Southampton or something, with really bizarre architecture.
Then things got sticky and there were people out to get us, as there often are (well, if not out to get us then at least conflict of some description, or less than pleasant jobs to be done) and it descends into a mire of forgetfulness.
Stick insects. Sigh.
Sunday, July 09, 2000
20:54
Sometimes I really hate the way I am wired. Sometimes I hate that I know what to do when other people don't and I can't tell them. Not won't, not will not, but cannot. Conflicting obligations, conflicting wiring, my needs versus the needs of others - and if others have needs, I don't. Not that I can admit to, not even to myself. I get frustrated (the story of my life) in certain situations with other people knowing I could handle it if those situations were reversed, knowing it because I have. Am I supposed to sit by and accept that I have a pile of crap in my life, looking at the bright side and saying "Well, at least it means that I can help others when it happens to them"?
People tell me that I am incisive and have astonishing clarity of vision. This is because I deal with so many problems, all of the time, that it seems I can apply what I learn to the problems of others. I took an online psych test yesterday (the one that indicated I am Idiosyncratic, but possibly have schizotypal personality disorder) and one of the prompts says:
| "I have a lot of abilities I cant seem to take advantage of. When I'm good at something, I can help other people with it, but can't seem to put my ability to work for myself." |
And I just thought, gods. How many times have I thought that?
Maybe this is the same. Pass me someone who is having some serious emotional problems and I can generally make him feel better, or at least make him feel calm enough to start tackling the problem, even if it takes me a couple of days of paying attention to him. When I get lost in a pit, there is often some objective, lucid part of me standing on an edge watching people trying to drag me out, going "Oooh, wouldn't do it like that, mate. You want to be doing it this way. Things will only get worse if you do/say that." But can I tell them? Hell no.
Why can't other people remain calm and attentive and pay attention to what's really going on? Why is it that the junk comes out and bites them and they squeal and yelp and get angry and frustrated? Why is it, if I want help, I have to be strong enough to sit on the junk? I have to remain strong and lucid and calm and attentive. Why is it that the only place I can really express myself without fear or worry of upsetting people is this thing? People don't have to read this, you see. If they make the choice to expose themselves to the blackness inside my head, then that is their choice, I'm not foisting it on them.
Hugin and Munin are both black. Ravens, you see, it kind of goes with the territory. But Hugin's black is deeper than Munin's. Munin is scruffier but his sheen is brighter. Hugin brings the suppressants, Munin waves the banner of hope and gets upset when I ignore him. Hope is supposed to be Hugin's territory, but he's too busy telling me I'm crazy.
People ask me how I feel, but can I tell them? Really? The whole, ugly truth? No. Because it's hard enough to deal with my upset without upsetting others too. Because upsetting others means I have to comfort them when I want to be the one who is comforted. So I sit on it. I sit on it and say "Just feeling a bit miserable." Even the odd occasion I have called Frood and told him I am feeling suicidal, that has hardly been the half of it, and I play down how bad it is, even if I want him to rush home there and then and hold me close and never let go. Because I know he can't.
And I'd rather not give people the option of having to refuse to tend to my needs because they have something else to do. Even though I know I'm not the most important thing in the world, I don't always have the emotional strength to have it rubbed in my face.
Whing whinge moan moan whinge whinge moan. How much self-pity can I spew out in one day?
I've had enough of this. I really have. Is it ever going to end? I'm not really this self-pitying whinge bag, you know. I'd quite like to get back to having a life that I can manage. Not a perfect life, not a mad happy, slap-dash Brady Bunch life, just a life. Something more than an existence.
18:09
Watching a programme we taped at 0320 this morning. "Total Balalaika" on Channel 4. It has the Leningrad Cowboys on it, you see, and we're huge fans.
Frood just said he wants to be the guy who minces about with the fake guitar shaped like a tractor.
"I can do that! Gizza job!"
17:23
Did I mention that I can't shift? Probably not. Even Hugin looks a little mournful at that. Brother accuses me of sniping at his life when I ache for the things he has, the simple things, like space. He talks of shifting and I am reduced to a ball of tears on the carpet. I get back from the gym and read the mail and I am crying while I stretch, which is not easy. For once both Thought and Memory fall silent and let the tears fall, and somehow that is just as bad as if they had continued to argue.
I feel like I am living someone else's life. Not that this person has a life that is worse than mine and it is somehow some terrible mistake, I just feel no sense of connection to this life. A while back, some months now, I was having episodes where I was losing the sensation in my arm and occasionally it would get so bad that I became utterly convinced that the arm was not mine, that it belonged to someone else, or was just a spare arm lying around. It wasn't a bad arm, it's not that I didn't like it or appreciate it, it just wasn't mine. My entire life feels like that at the moment. I'm not saying I don't deserve this life, that some karmic clerical error has occurred, because that would be stupid and crap and just silly, but it doesn't feel like mine. It feels detached, dreamlike, only it's a bad dream. I know this is incorrect, I really do, just as I knew, really, that the arm was mine. It was attached at the shoulder and everything.
It's difficult to think past the pain sometimes.
But I can't shift. And a shifter who can't shift is about as much use to anyone, including herself, as a chocolate teapot. Maybe that's why this life doesn't feel like mine. Maybe.
And dammit it fucking hurts.
13:14
I'm not alone in my feelings of isolation, of course. Don't worry, Mallory, there are plenty of us. I still say I'm not actually clinically depressed though, although according to various psych tests I have an idiosyncratic personality type verging on a schizotypal personality disorder. If I haven't gone off the verge already (warning! Soft verges).
Not that I pay that much more attention to personality types than I do to horoscopes.
Funny how I suspect Mallory understands some things better than my brother does, even though I talk to him more.
Gym today and my knees have seized. Bit worried about that. Going to the gym and having to give up halfway through because of the pain never improves my mood.
11:45
Dreams dreams dreams dreams dreams. I wonder what is going on in my head to produce such strange nightly visions.
Not so memorable this time, I can't remember the story in such detail as the night before last's, just fragments. Not entirely sure even which order they came in. I'm getting so tired, and I think that might be the difference. Too tired to remember such things past the various awakenings during the night.
I remember there being a point when Sean Connery was dressed in armour and was making Kevin Costner, also dressed in armour, nail his hand to a telegraph pole and then ram a candle through a huge hole in the palm just below the nail. Sean Connery was sweating, stoic and grey-faced but he was perfectly calm and wasn't even shaking. Kevin Costner was shivering and quaking and screaming "I can't! I can't! I just can't do it!" Connery was just saying "Yes you can, boy, just do it, it is necessary." It was some sort of magic that needed to be done. There was a storm coming in and it was important that Connery get hit by lightning but that it go through his hand and, more importantly, the candle wax in the hole in his hand, before it hit the rest of him.
It worked, the magic, whatever it was. I know that much. I was watching from an upstairs window nearby and saw the resulting puffs of glowing light.
There was a sequence where some of us (who, I'm not sure, I think we were all escapees from the stones mailing list were all sitting in a caravan waiting to go on TV to talk about something, some chat segment of daytime TV. Frood bought the caravan, I don't know why. It was near a motorway, and there was this astonishing, long, steep hill that he cycled up to get to the studio, while I gawped in amazement. Peter turned up in that segment as well, telling me it was easy to cycle up the hill, even though his bike only had three gears (sturmy-archer?), which wasn't very nice.
There was also a segment I really can't remember very well at all that involved being in that little market town with the enclosed streets (a little like meandering versions of the Golden Cross in Oxford or the Glastonbury Experience, only under cover, actually with buildings on top of them) that I visit so frequently in my dreams, doing some sort of investigative work a lá the FBI. I think, maybe, there was a piano teacher, or maybe she was a therapist, who had premises in one of the enclosed areas, and we needed to talk to her about something. One of us (there were three women in our party, including me, but I'm not sure who the others were - I think maybe one of them was M) had bought a set of crystal wind chimes and accidentally left it in these premises, and there was some discussion about whether to interrupt to get them back, which I did, being tactless, and hence found out something very important that we would not have found out otherwise.
I don't like having dreams I can't remember properly, but I'm so damn tired.
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