An Fhirinne in aghaidh an tSaoil (original) (raw)

The Uncanny...

January 20th, 2019 (10:56 pm)

I was trying to explain this to someone else who is an artist, but while he understood the images, he could not grasp what the Uncanny actually is.

Me, I grew up this way. Despite being surrounded by mostly normal things, in a relatively normal neighbourhood, I also grew up across from a cemetery and wildlife that cut through my backyard and drew me away along a deep creek into the nearby woods. There was always a feeling of presence and a lingering darkness around the edges. I was notorious for disappearing for hours in the still-wild places and back in those days, parents would not panic at that.

I was lucky in that there was horror there, and it was tolerated with bemusement: old horror movies, shortbread cookies in the shapes of monsters, the local horror show host living down the street (hello, Mr. Carter/Sammy Terry), and even television had strangeness in programs like "One Step Beyond", "Twilight Zone", "The Outer Limits", "The Addams Family", and to lesser degree, "The Munsters". I delighted in getting a Day of the Dead skeleton when I was six and as I had favoured black clothing since I was able to have an opinion--around age three--I did my best to be a forerunner for what would eventually be called a goth kid or baby bat.

But despite all the lovely friends who give me wonderful Halloween things for Christmas and my birthday, this has never been about Halloween.

...It's about that odd feeling you are seeing things more preternatural than normal. It's the perception of ghostly presences just beyond your peripheral vision. It's the sepia photograph that gives you a slight chill, or the very peculiar eeriness that makes you take a step back. The whispery voices you can only just ALMOST hear and understand, but that remain an airy sound below the level of understanding. THAT is the world that I love and the world I take pains to keep about me.

I Give Up...

November 14th, 2018 (09:17 pm)

...I totally LOATHE social media. It's shallow, it's 'noisy' and annoying and there's so little on offer there. Other than a lot of photos, I don't see the point of it.

I can't just post little things; I never have been able to do that. I think coherently, in depth and developed layers. No one cares if I'm in line for yet another venti matcha frapp nor am I taking selfies.

Seriously, I look at FB and I just want to vomit. I don't know how you all put up with it.

Chlanna

November 21st, 2017 (06:02 pm)

Home

Home is a concept, really. It is where you ‘are’ in the centre of your being. For most people, ‘home’ is generally ‘where one feels most safe and comfortable’, and it often relates back to family, where one grew up, etc.

In my case, I had a very solid family foundation early on, but it was ripped away around the same time that my Great-Grandmother died. There’s a blog post on “Family” which tells more about that, but I’m not sure I should post it. Grandma Sherrill had been the heart and the centre of Home, and when she was no longer here, so many family traditions left with her. For many reasons, this left me more or less adrift for many years.

But Home for me has become a combination of things.

I originally thought and felt that my Home was finding the things I had always loved and surrounding myself with them. As time has worn on and I have given up the idea of ever finding my soulmate and not willing to settle for less, I’m also okay with living alone. I like things just so, and after having had a long-term roommate, I will never, EVER compromise how I live or what I want to do again to live diplomatically with another person. I think I missed my window with the soulmate, but I always thought he’d accept me As I Am. Maybe that’s not rational; I can admit I am not much of an adult and my maturity rather levelled out around the age of nineteen or so.

If you read the essay about “Gothy is as Gothy Does”, you’ll see references to being German. I grew up thinking I was initially about 100% German-American. When I was about twelve or thirteen, I found out my very-off-the-boat, former Kaiser’s Guardsman Grandpa Nuffer was not really my grandfather and my Mom was not German. Like, at all. My last name and my face reveal a strong German influx, as I look very Prussian and exactly like my Dad and his Twin. (Which, sadly, also means I look very masculine, which is not a good thing when you grow up in a female body.) When I go to the Heidelberg Haus, they often start speaking Deutsch to me (and I understand it; I spent years learning German). And because We Never Spoke About Mom’s Family EVER, I always presumed ‘Carlyle’ was a French name. (Go ahead and snigger.) But I identified as German, because America can be a wonderful place, but it has very little mutual history for the immigrants who settled here. ‘American history’ is a laughable subject in school. Like a lot of people who grow up in America, that sense of having been cut off from my past and my legacy began to grow as I grew older.

I used to think genetics and DNA were only biology. But there is one very remarkable thing that continued to happen all my life that make me wonder if there’s more than simply molecules and chemicals coming together to determine who and what we are.

I have been an Anglophile for most of my life, but that turned into my life’s study of Celtia and Wales and Scotland in specific, Ireland a bit less so, and generally from Pre-History to the Dark Ages. When I say ‘life’s study’, I mean that I own professional, authoritative and scholarly books concerning history and archaeology, folklore and mythos. If you don’t know the difference between a regular ‘history book’ and what I’m referring to, what I term a ‘regular history book’ is focused on a casual/popular history audience and will cost much less than $100 after the large print run of the books comes out and is carried in chain bookstores. They often have lots of big, white margins, extra spacing between the lines, and they don’t often run past three hundred pages in length.

Professional, scholarly books are on the university or professional level, are much more complex and detailed, with copious footnotes, references, and are generally on the cutting-edge of their subjects at the point in time in which they are released. Small, cramped type, thin margins, and a lot more information without the basic explanations are in these books. They often cost several hundred dollars and are in small print runs that jack the prices up even higher when you understand they’re generally only available in their country of origin and have to be imported to America. The internet has given me a lot of access to these, but it’s an ongoing Damocleasian swordfight with what I can afford right now versus that ever-growing list of books I desperately want and/or need (which runs into several hundred volumes). I also grew tired of reading translations, so I’m bouncing back and forth between Scots Gaelic, Cymraeg, and dealing with Irish while it altered from ‘Old Form Irish’ to ‘New Form Irish’ in the past thirty years (and I have books from both periods). Many books are up on Celtic/uni websites that have been scanned in over the past fifty years, but I hate reading on a computer. Although I did give in and buy a few CDs/DVDs that have about 350 total ancient books I would have to go to England or Ireland to read the hardcopies. Worse, with the Pictish Symbol Stones I’m obsessed with and my firm conviction they are star charts, I’ve veered into astroarchaeology in the past six to ten years. OUCH!

Essentially, I am deep in research and have been for decades. I have another blog dedicated to this astroarchaeology and some of my findings, but I am also torn between the idea of publishing them ‘now’ or waiting and writing a book, since I think I’ve discovered a few things I would hate to see put into the books of other people before I could publish. More on all that later.

But all throughout my life, I have experienced this ‘thing’ where I will see a landscape in either a photo, a movie, or on television, and without knowing where it was, I would say aloud, “That is where I’m from”, and it would turn out to be Scotland, in the Strathclyde area. Every, single time. All my closest friends have witnessed this for years, and this was with all the ribbing I got from my former roommate, who would always say, “But you’re German and French!” I’ve also always said my ultimate life dream would be to move to Scotland and raise sheep.

About ten years ago I finally glommed onto the knowledge that the Carlyles were Scottish. It was only within the last three years I had my DNA tested (thank you, Uncle John!) and discovered I am not, in fact, 100% or even 50% German. But I am predominantly Scottish, with quite a bit of those coloured dots on my DNA map concentrated in Strathclyde, and the name “Carlyle” is not only Strathclyde Briton (i.e., Welsh), but it means “The Stronghold of Lugh”. Despite the vagaries of naming conventions (another entirely different essay, but leave it to say that last names being ‘set in stone’ is a relatively modern thing), most people with similar last names are not necessarily related. However, it turns out some families are, and the Sykes families in Yorks and the Carlyles in Strathclyde are two that actually ‘mostly are’. The likelihood of two Carlyles (in all their varied spellings: Carlisle, Carlysle, etcetera, because more standardised spelling is also fairly modern) from two different areas of the world being related and originally descended from Strathclyde are statistically quite good.

Which means that all those years I thought I was predominantly German, I was still recognising what was the real homeland of the majority of my DNA. I do not believe in ghosts and I am one of those extremely logical people who does not have time for fantasy when it comes to pretending to be what one is not, but I found this to be remarkable. I no longer say, “That is where I’m from”, I say: “I bet that’s Strathclyde” when I see an initially unidentified landscape that makes my heart leap.

Ultimately, that’s my Home.

Gothy is as Gothy Does

November 18th, 2017 (04:21 pm)

I have become the ipso facto Keeper of the Past. Like many from a family diaspora, I tend to hunt down and find things from the past; in point of fact, my specific past. I started out around the age of ten falling in love with the past. I read Victorian gothic novels, ancient Greek, Roman, and Hindu books dealing with their pantheons, collected herbs and simples (and labelled them in Sanskrit so that The Chaos would not know or be able to read what was in all the many, many dozens of tiny bottles), and became obsessed with honestly how creepy most of the parts of ‘being German’ that had been handed down to me actually were when viewed in the light of day. Part of this latter attitude was the legacy of WWII, because German-Americans did not want to talk about being German in that period so close to it all, and every other whitebread cultural group always used “the Germans” as their boogie men. (Don’t believe me? Research all the WWI movies, books, and TV shows in the late 50s/early 60s that were obsessed with Nazis being The Ultimate Bad before the Russians took that designation over in the Cold War.) Add to that the only movies in the afternoons on television being old black and white Film Noir movies and The Scariest Cartoons in the World (Merrie Melodies and all those other weird short films where inanimate objects come to life).

As I grew up next to an old cemetery on a huge hill that went back to the Revolutionary War, that was where I spent most of my time. Luckily or not, I also grew up during the period when horror and the macabre were very popular in the 1960s, so I had a compleat diet of Hammer Horror and B-movies, The Addams Family (loved) and The Munsters (not so much because the humour was extremely heavy-handed and ‘the pretty girl being treated like a monster’ made little sense to me) on television, giant Movie Monster shortbread cookies, the local Horror Theatre TV host living down the street (Sammy Terry), and no end of really hideous Beach movies that featured Peter Lorre, Christopher Lee, Boris Karloff, and others. My uncle Freddie exposed me to Rat Fink and the monster car-cartoon creations that drove strange vehicles and seemed like nightmares. Because I exhibited artistic talent very early, my Mom arranged semi-private lessons with a local artist when I was nine (sadly, I don’t remember the artist’s name, but her creepy collection of peculiar stuff to draw and paint, the dark, weird house she lived in on New Jersey street just south of 22nd Street, and the other paying art students were a little freaky and made a huge impression upon me. ‘Art’ at the time still suffered from the Beatnik phase).

The Rolling Stones (NOT the Beatles, believe it or not, since they were too poppy for me and I only really loved their period between “Revolver” and “The White Album”, despite my getting into rhythm and blues and rock when the British Invasion started) turned me into an Anglophile. You cannot image how thrilled I was at age eleven to receive a Blue Willow teapot and ACTUAL BRITISH LOOSE-LEAF TEA for Christmas one year. (Yeah, I was an odd kid.) Prior to that, ‘tea’ was that miserable Lipton’s red tea that parents only gave you with dry toast when you were ill, or the sickly-sweet iced tea that was powdered-in-a-jar that the adults drank all summer.

By the time I reached school and was shown German Expressionist films, I was inured to the horror and in fact welcomed it as normal for me, despite the fact my sister Teresa was all about Pink! Pink! Pink! and nothing like me. (The six years between us made a huge difference~! She used to tell her friends I was ‘exotic’.) I preferred black clothing from the time I was a toddler (and have the photos to prove it) and it was only the tsunami of Pop, Peter Max, and Yellow Submarine in the later 1960s that gave me my wildly colourful obsession, although always framed in and surrounded by black, black, black, black, black (No. 1). Yeah, I came by being a Goth Kid naturally and I have never outgrown it.

This is also why my house is called The Museum by first my nieces and later by my friends. Over time I became very clever at finding precisely what I wanted at garage and yard sales, antique malls, EBay, and sometimes even discarded on the street. In my own, past-obsessed way, I have collected Blue Willow dishes and Friendship pattern silverware (both what Grandma Sherrill used and served food before us every single weekend and holiday), old kitchen utensils from the late 50s/early 60s (like what my Mom had before she discarded it all for Newer! Better! More Plasticker!), Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass themed items (the first movie that imprinted upon me at age three was the 1933 version that featured Cary Grant as the Gryphon. I am still obsessed with All thing Gryphon and it’s “my” animal in every way), Lewis Carroll (ditto the previous, but he also made me into a photographer), any anything else I can shove into my sweet little 1920 Art & Craft bungalow. My only complaints are that everything was scaled small in that period (closets, outside toilets before the tiny bathroom editions, kitchens) and I wish my house was over to the East about six streets so that I lived on a curvy Irvington street instead of the grid pattern where the old guy across the street appears to live on his front porch, glares at me all the time (as if my living here was an affront to him personally), and has taught his grandson to shout horrible things at anyone he sees in the neighbourhood. Try enjoying sitting on my porch with that going on!

Add to this my having learned to turn my nightmares into humour to remove the sting. My first major nightmare at age three or four involved burned up/charred people and a black iron horse head like the ones you see on old-fashioned lawn ornaments meant to mimic old horse-tethering posts, so for many years I was terrified of them. Of course, the neighbor up the hill from the house my Dad built had one in his yard. Eventually I figured out if I brought one into my apartment as an adult, the creep-factor died away. Friends started giving me blackened figures and creatures once they saw I had a ‘collection’. The same thing worked with ‘the Vegetable People’, the animated horrors in those Merrie Melodies and other old cartoons that both scared and thrilled me. Ditto with the many implements of dental torture, Victorian asthmatic breathing apparatuses, medical implements, x-rays, etcetera, that have filled my sickly life with living nightmares. Better to live WITH them than to be afraid of them. (Such is the life of a person with little or no immune system all their days. I have had perhaps only about a month’s worth of healthy days my entire life. Every other one is full of medicines, procedures, doctors, pain, grief, and just trying to pull through to the next hopefully better day.)

I used to fear what my sister and my nieces and nephew would think of all this. Colour me shocked and surprised when they expressed eager interest and they appeared to find it all not only cool, but began arguing with my sister on how they might divvy it all up once I was gone. Which is not as macabre as it sounds, since I am the oldest one among us and my health’s never been great; I’m okay with it. I can’t express how happy that made me, because that is one of the best levels of acceptance a person could want.

I AM Still here...

July 11th, 2017 (08:40 pm)

...so don't delete me, LJ!

F

A Tale of Two Danse Societies

November 24th, 2016 (11:01 pm)

A band easily overlooked by Americans in general is The Danse Society. However, for a band that had few singles that cracked the all-important MTV market starting in 1984 with "2000 Light Years From Home" (featured in a 15 second clip on MTV's "London Calling" program hosted by Jools Holland in 1984, not to be confused with his newer "London Calling" of 2012) and termed "positive punk" by the weekly British rock press, they have had a very, very long reach indeed!

The band was electronic--but not. Played dance music, but was not a dance band. Dark and moody, but nothing Hammer Horror or schlocky, it was more about the inner psyche of young men going through the sturm und drang of growing up and not fitting in with what was then conceived as 'normal'. They were sexy in the way men are naturally; subconsciously but well evident to those watching them perform. They were the dark muses of dark youth.

"Say It Again" pinged in 1986 enough that the American MTV channel used a clip from it for their station promotional ads, and "Hold On" sank without much of a trace. But then, by 1986 MTV was obsessed by big hair bands, and The Danse Society was never a big hair band. (And for those who groaned over big hair bands, MTV eventually declared "big hair metal is over" in 1991 and suddenly grunge and rap were their featured genres, only going to prove that for a "music channel', MTV did not always know what it was doing.) You can also blame MTV for reality television programmes, but that's another article. There was an odd occurrence in 1994 when MTV pushed Steve Rawlings' splinter band Society and their single "Love It" into frequent rotation...six years after it had been released. Still not sure why. By that time, The Danse Society had broken up and was long gone, another casualty of a record company's disdain at bothering to promote them properly.

But Anglo-American band L.A. Guns covered TDS' "Sunset Gun" and that 'positive punk' movement back in 1981 had morphed into The First Wave of Goth--and The Danse Society was on nearly every Goth club DJ's playlist. By the time the 'Second Wave' hit with bands like Fields of the Nephilim and pop-Goth like Doctor and the Medics--and the high-profile, high-rotation of The Cure on MTV and even more straightlaced AOR stations--anyone and everyone who identified as Goth passed along tapes and later CDs and mp3s of The Danse Society. I know in my own case, everyone I shared TDS with loved them immediately, although the vinyl was not always readily found in late 1980s music stores.

Almost twenty years later, Allison Howells started The Danse Society Reformation Plot on FaceBook to promote the defunct band and to hopefully show the former band members how much they had been appreciated and revered in their absence. And to the surprise and delight of all the fans and musicians that had joined that page, The Danse Society DID reform in 2009.(1) For a few bright months the hopes and promise of the past were beginning to come together, and ex-pat Steve Rawlings returned from America to listen to the demos and record one song...which ended up languishing in the vaults for many years when Rawlings decided not to continue.

A singer saw an opening and offered to join the band in Rawlings' place--and like any marriage, for better or for worse, Maethelyiah (Luise Pile) came in and took over...at first only the singing duties, but very soon it was clear there were changes happening that were very un-Danse Society. Suddenly there were duckfaced pout poses with deep, forward-thrust cleavage, very stagey sexual posing, quasi-S&M scenarios that were embarrassingly silly on the videos, and jokey OMG horror tropes throughout the songs, not to mention some really inappropriate cover tunes. I believe the band were attempting to allow the singer to find her level within the band, but it was some time before they figured out she was not only working her way into one band member's marriage, but that she was taking over everything. When several band members--Paul Gilmartin and Martin Roberts in specific, but also David Whittaker in a separate move--wanted to get away from the singer and her complications, it set into motion a series of events.

There was no way to fire someone romantically connected to another band member, not in a band that was democratic. When the other three refused to play with Maeth and Paul Nash anymore, the three considered they were "splitting" from the two lovebirds. But Maeth and Nash decided they had "left"--and Maeth's history of taking on romantic and marriage relationships with male musicians, taking their band's names and value, and moving on to the next musician and his band meant she kicked Ali Howells off her own FaceBook page, took over the band's bank account, and eventually the band's website. (Proof of her past actions is on her www.maethelyiah.com website. Go read it before she deletes it.) All of this is counter to English law on band partnerships, which are required to be dissolved and the assets distributed among the members when there is a breakup.

Gilmartin and _Robert_s started over--and were immediately harassed repeatedly by the other two. Any attempts to use The Danse Society name had the other side calling promoters, contacting webmasters, and even the press with threats, insisting Gilmartin and Roberts were not legitimate.(2) Promoters were often told Gilmartin was "cancelling" a concert when it was not him but his rivals making the calls and emails.(3) When Gilmartin attempted to use both Heaven is Waiting and The Danse Society Reincarnated, they were still harassed. Maeth and Nash recently took away Gilmartin's trademark and are clearly not done attempting to stomp him and any band he is in into the ground. Roberts dropped out a couple of years ago, but any new members have also been harassed as well as their families.

From the very start, fans on The Danse Society Reformation Plot (before it was stolen from Allison Howells) were prepared to give BOTH versions of the band a chance--although quite soon many of those fans found themselves deleted and/or banned by Maeth if they were not 100% behind her. When fans first began to question Maeth directly on why she would not allow Gilmartin to have a band and just ignore him and get on with her own band, she deleted their comments and blocked them. Maeth has gone so far, so many times, to bait and provoke with insults both band members and their families--if and when she can get them to react, she deletes her own comments and calls the police to claim these innocent victims are actually ATTACKING HER WITH HER AS THE INNOCENT VICTIM. She did something very similar on her website recently.

Gilmartin for his part has never harassed the other side. He has never attempted to cancel any of their gigs (despite recent published falsehoods to the contrary). And he figured the fans were smart enough to make their own choices and to support one or both of the bands by their own choice. But neither Luisa Pile or Paul Nash wants that to happen.

If you like the mock-operatics, the cartoony horror lyrics, and the hippie song covers, then Maethelyiah and Paul Nash's The Danse Society OFFICIAL are for you. If you like a band that sounds like the original The Danse Society that writes new songs that progress from that past version, then you want Paul Gilmartin's The Danse Society Reincarnated. They are TWO TOTALLY DIFFERENT BANDS and you are free to like them both, like one, or despise them both.

But the point is, YOU are the fans.

YOU make the choice

. The choice should not and will not be made for you by a female singer that cares nothing for you, nor cares what The Danse Society is and has always been about. And believe that: you're nothing to one of those bands.

(1) Ali gave all the band members full access to her FaceBook site so that they could continue to easily communicate with their fan base.

(2) I have been informed the "legal threats" were signed by a roadie, not a lawyer.

(3) I was shown some of these cancellation emails and letters that had been written by someone whose first language was not English, based on the grammar.

Another Day of Needles and Pain

April 27th, 2016 (01:05 pm)

For years I was relatively pain-free. I had these horrible knee surgeries back in 1970 and 1971, which were little more than someone taking my right knee apart and pulling out whatever they did not like the look of, and in 1977 when the left knee finally collapsed from years of supporting the right knee, when a "this will be relatively painless and the recovery is quick" arthroscopic operation was done. Clearly these orthopedic surgeons had a strange sense of humour, because that early arthroscopic surgery was painful and took longer to recover from than those that disassembled my other knee! And back in those fairly barbaric days, they never gave you physical therapy, either--they wrapped you from hip to ankle and immoblised the joint for up to six weeks. Yeah, that works.

But I did finally reach a detente with my knees. I found a non-steroidal way to deal with no cartilledge and bone-on-bone grinding. I continued to walk quickly, but I no longer ran, and I used to be FAST. But in the past six years of my prison sentence where I'm working, the right knee's become dodgy. The first time it blew up to the size of a cantaloupe just from climbing a steep stairwell. All I felt was a twinge inside the joint; no warning of the agony to come. It happened again last October when my foot slipped off a carpetted stair step and I twisted my knee around and broke my wrist--although no one discovered the break. It was only when the sprain took over nine months to mend that it was admitted: "Oh, it must have been broken, then."

This time, I was entangled by some cut branches while I was trying to get out of the garage, they grabbed my trouser leg and started to send me sprawling--and I came down too hard and possibly at an angle on the right knee. Cue swelling about the size of a large mango on Monday. I've been home all week so far.

Today I gave in (because I could not find anyonw who could drive me--and you have to use your right leg to both accelerate and brake), I painfully drove myself. They no longer have any Immediate Care/Med Cheks on my side of town, so I went ahead and went to OrthoIndy in Greenwood, figuring they would at least know about knees. THe poor ailing joint was stuck with needles galore: a big one with 'anesthesia' (EXTREMELY painful), one to draw out almost 70ccs of knee fluid, and then a third to put in cortisone. OWWWWW. But I'm also off for the rest of the week, so I'm hoping my boss doesn't grow lethal about my having a legitimate reason for being off with an orthopaedic surgeon's insistence.

I cannot take nSAIDs and I do not like painkillers; I can take Tylenol if I also want to run to the bathroom with diarrhea frequently. So I tough all this out, using as much arnica gel and menthol/camphor gels as I can. But last night in bed I was in pure hell of pain, so I'm hoping this now-artificially blown up knee will let me sleep tonight.

I hate the fact the last six years have required my SITTING so much; I am not that kind of person. I've gained weight from the steroids and the cumulative inactivity, and I'm afraid of losing even MORE muscle mass and growing weak.

I hate being weak. I hate being helpless.

I'm Here to Haunt Again

April 26th, 2016 (10:35 am)

Was offline for six months (new Boss is New Broom and trying to force us all to quit, so she's stripping everyone of every perk and niceity while continually punishing us like Bad Children). On at home now, will start posting soon!

Love you!

Grey :)

My Life AS...

October 16th, 2015 (09:27 am)

"I need to silence my most reliable way of gathering, processing, and expressing information, I need to put more effort into controlling and deadening and reducing and removing myself second-by-second than you could ever even conceive, I need to have quiet hands, because until I move 97% of the way in your direction you can’t even see that’s there’s a 3% for you to move towards me."

https://juststimming.wordpress.com/

God, nearly everything this woman writes could have come out of me. I wonder, I wonder...what would life have been like if I had been around accepting parents who tried to understand instead of beating the living crap out of me? I sometimes think my sister might understand more than she says, but she was as busy dodging the mindfucks and manipulation as I was...but she does work with autistic children within the public school system. She's one of their 'navigators' to take a student one-on-one throughout the school day and to keep them on track and calm.

On track and calm. Geez; I've learnt a good mimicry of that, but I'm sure I don't really know what that is, any more than I understand it when someone criticises me and growls, "Watch your tone!" (My tone? What I said was a matter-of-fact statement about a truth which had no personal reflection on either of us, so why are you getting so angry at me?) or decides I am "freaking out" when I am explaining how odd something strikes me as being.

Arguing that you're NOT "freaking out" or that your statement wasn't "pointed" or "directed" or "had ulterior meanings" doesn't seem to do a thing; people will not listen to those statements. I don't know how many times I have had to correct people, telling them that it's much too hard to lie or to have ulterior motives and that "what I said" is basic and all there is; it's just whatever it is.

You cannot imagine the horror of saying "I like this blue piece of paper" and you encounter someone who will start shouting and insist you're somehow offending or insulting them by that comment and they'll offer counter-productive and countering comments such as: "Oh, so you HATE my pink paper, do you?!?!?!?" (What? Your PINK paper? I never said a word about your pink paper.) "And now you're accusing me of pink paperism! I am utterly OFFENDED and PISSED OFF you would do that!" (What?!?!? NO! I never said ANYTHING like that! All I said was I liked the blue piece of paper, but never ANYTHING about YOU or other paper or even the colour PINK, much less whatever-it-is-about-pink that's upset you! What the hell is happening?!?!? Why are you yelling at me??????)

That sounds stupid, but this is a common conversation I have with people, but go ahead and insert any sort of innocuous subject into the place of "pink paper" and then imaging trying to explain to someone becoming a virago or shouty person that your non-personal, non-directed, non-emotional, and certainly NON-insulting comment was nothing like all these new things these people are pouring over your head. Sometimes, I just want to cry, because it's overwhelming and I do not understand why "I" am the wrongdoer in these situations, because I am not the one flying off the handle or getting louder and louder and louder or accusing the other person of anything. Why does that happen? Why am "I" the one with the mental handicap?

Sometimes I just want to die and not have to deal with anyone else that doesn't seem to have any ability to remain rational or unemotional about conversations. I'd like to just STOP. I'm tired of explaining and explaining and RE-explaining. I'm just sick of it.

While I was grateful to finally have the Asperger's Syndrome diagnosis that would "explain" me to people beyond the "high-functioning autistic" diagnosis I'd had for so long, I still don't understand why I'm in the crosshairs of other people's bad days, misperceptions, and even just pure illogic.

Really, I just want to die and STOP having to do this.

Back Again, Back Again, Jiggity-Jig!

October 6th, 2015 (10:04 am)

Still mulling the "I'd rather be posting in a blog but no one reads me anymore on LJ" issue. Still prefer LJ to other blogging; cannot STAND FB and other truncated social media!

Still feeling relatively young despite my age, but have struggled all year with a knee injury that keeps re-injuring just as it's healing, so the stress is all over BOTH legs (both the limper and the support legs) and it's keeping me from doing what I want. That, and the continuing Car Nightmare...sheesh.

Car Nightmare in a Capsule: Car threatens to die during trips longer than 30 to 45 minutes, and will compleatly refuse to restart if I stop somewhere after driving that long. However, an hour or two later it WILL restart as if nothing's wrong. Local mechs have changed out over $800 of various parts while they GUESS at what's wrong with it, but insist it has to be 'playing dead' when they look at it. When I was finally able to show them during a 'dead session', the hired mech suddenly knew it was the computer sensor telling the carburettor the engine was overheating when it was not--but owner of garage, despite telling me they would be sending it to an electrics expert insisted instead on trying to change out the distributor "...because he wants to find something he can charge you for!" (direct quote from his son, who was yelling AT ME because they were unable to MAKE the car die over and over repeatedly at command, despite my telling them it was intermittent and would not happen if you tried to make it do so and my words being typed on the work order). Outcome: Still driving it short-term, afraid to leave the city limits on my own, and while the hired mech was able to get the car to restart when it died by pouring a little water over the fucked up computer sensor, I'm not sure I can use that trick NOW that the owner dicked around with it for three days trying to find something else to charge me for. (The next time it does refuse to start up again, I'll try it, but have been hesitant to "count" on that working after the owner's stubborn refusal to send it on to the electrics people.)

Like most of us, really hating this getting older thing. It might not be so bad if I had "old lady" interests, but I have the same damned interests I had at 19 and I don't really FEEL any older than 19! But the mirror shows me horrors and the knees have kept me sidelined enough to gain unwanted weight (since I can't really WALK most of the time). Really, really sucky.

In between misery with the knees, I work on the house and my research on constellations, etc. and plan on trying to get back to perfumery WHENEVER all the CRAP in the air decides do finally die down for the year. Right now I have gooey sinuses and am sick to death of mucus.

I did decide that since my nieces and nephew keep talking about my house, I should get a few things in order...so I'm locking away my writing into files and data sticks and shredding all the printouts at the rabbit. It's not that I don't want them to read some of what I've written, it's that some of it requires a bit of explanation if you weren't in on why it was written or what was going on at the time, so: passwords and no hardcopies. Plus, this means I'll be emptying out what seems like a blue million (maybe about 20) big binders. I rather doubt the kids would be shocked, but my sister might be, since she's already terrified of the Horror Bathroom.

Found antique frames that fit some of my lenticular Halloween portraits (Score!). Got genuinely creepy real early 20th C double-wedding photo reframed, but should eventually be made more 'artistically creepy' with pencils and put into a new, more elabourate frame. Until then, it's at least up and you have to look twice to figure out if it's MEANT to be as creepy as it is. (It's as if two ghost couples decided to get married just before they all committed mutual suicide pacts; it's such a weird photo!)

All the dental teeth are remounted in wax on their cards; skull x-rays are on the light box and I just got a new stash of the little skull bracelets that I keep giving to whomever asks. (Basically I wear two wristfuls, and whenever someone goes, "Oh, those are so cute!" I pull them off and give them away. The kids, my Godchildren, and friends are all enjoying being grabby and they're so much more fun than mere friendship bracelets!)

I'm good. Feeling lonely that most of my friends live further out than I can currently drive, but most of those who WERE close to me either moved away or were 'let go' in the Friends Cull where I got rid of anyone who really was just taking advantage of my Aquarian nature. Yeah, I'm a lot of fun to be with, I manage to plan really fun and/or bizarre activities, I'm overly generous, and I don't count the pennies, but if someone thinks I'm going to 100% "fund them", they're mistaken. Friendship is a two-way street and I got rid of those who only went "their way" and never back toward me.

Hope you're all doing well/better--I know it's been hard out there.

Love you!

Grey ;)