soup without crackers...
 

I wanted a Vietnamese feast tonight. I settled for broccoli and cheese soup...

I'm starting to see shadows where no light is cast. Moving without puppetry. Whispering inaudibly. Insinuating thoughts towards me. Absorbed not reflected...

I have soup without crackers. I hold motion without mechanism. If energy precedes matter I should have marshmallow castles and bare-breasted frauleins and angels of mercy manifesting all around me... but only these shadows. These machinating, slivering, delusory vermin haunting my peripheral whilst I stumble through this madness of echo and ping...

I want love. And not that craigslist love of shared interests and copulatory compatibility. I want that new, fresh love I felt the first time I touched my lips to another, that tingle and mystery at once terrifying and ambrosic... that love of stepping to the edge of all previous known perceptions and dancing tentatively into something with no idea of what was happening or what might become... The love you cannot find in word or gesture or storybook, only on the tip of the most sensitive organs and on the cusp of rapidly uncontrollable, spiraling emotions... that love we've all lost with youth, when possibility ceased to be plausible and embryonic dreams gave way to misshapen, debilitating 'realities' forged by previous generations who lacked the evolutionary progression and/or courage to turn their art into precedent... I want this all, for me, for us, for a dying planet, for a sickened humanity, there must be something more than this game, this politicking endlessly around the truth, the task, the POINT of life! I want to be a part of something greater than myself that doesn't involve the mobilization of vast metallic hollow tubes pointing death at other vast, metallic hollow tubes peopled inside! If I must kill at least let me choose my prey, like the shamans that led the hunters to sustenance...

Meandering through my conduit 'brain' roams these yearnings and sadnesses and tragedies through which we have always lived and died, the point, where's the point? In any of this? I'm going mad...

I intend this for my journal, my journey, through 'recovery'? Through 'madness'? Through 'myself'? Through through through into something else, something more, something I don't yet understand but ache to. Something that I can someday identify in the pit of my stomach as a spark that can propel unquavering through my own prison of time and through to the end of what decayed matter I'll eventually cease to call 'me'.

I posted here because it seemed most appropriate, more secluded, less offensive to the more indefatigable ideologies featured at any recovery site. My ideals, my delusions are often offensive even to myself, but I want to feel safe here, I want a place to purge my mental vomit with less judgment and less pain and in colorful waves of nonsensical convulsions... Paradigmal epilepsy...

wow great post.. I especially liked your paragraph on love. Wish I could write like that. And may we ALL find the kind of love you're describing.. without the sucky stuff and pain that comes with it of course!! Is that possible? LOL

Happy journaling!

Your prose is stupendous.

If you've got books out in print please list them , that I can read them.:scoregood

No books, just creeping madness...

I feel sick to my stomach. i finally got to sleep after 23 hours awake after four hours of sleep after three hours the night before that and simultaneously (seriously, SIMULTANEOUSLY!) my cell phone rings as the fire alarms start howling in my hallway! Imagining I smelt gas I frantically rummage around for what might be valuable (what do I grab my ipod? cell phone? laptop? sanity?) and slunk dreamstruck down flights of stairs. Now, barely an hour of rest and wide awake. I didn't answer the phonecall, but the message pleads for me to come in to work in two hours time. Jesus, I think I do smell gas, screw it, I'm staying, I need sleep so so so so bad, eternal or temporary, I care not...

Phal, I hope I'm safe here, I need to be safe right now, my cravings are stupendous, my psyche is fragile, I think I'm going to be sick...

Extraordinary!

I hope you're safe here too, what are you afraid of?

I think I'm in love again (that's a joke, don't run off:c033:)

I am fiendin for pho

Darn Windy, sometimes I wish you'd speak French. (I don't always understand!)
and I'd like to take this moment to tell you that I'm in love with you too:e124:
and I'm definitely off topic....sorry

I don't speak French but I can speak a little Spanish. Louisiana was a French colony and we have French law. I'm in love with all the French girls !! woo hoo !!

thankyou siam for sharing that wonderful post from the heart (hug)

Siam,

Do you take anything to help you sleep? Prescription or otherwise?
Not getting enough sleep always contributes to my mental state. (in a bad way)

Secular Connections is a safe place for me...as I hope it will be for you. Here I'm finding self-discovery starts with relinquishing previous persona's, divesting in self ideas and formulating a reconstructed self based on nothingness. For when I have emptied myself of self I have become a reflection of the unbounded limitlessness of all. Then all or nothing will loose its meaning. Nothing will mean something as something that lost it meaning.

you are a great writer...thanks for the post...please feel free to unload it all....

"Through 'myself'? Through through through into something else, something more, something I don't yet understand but ache to. "

i really liked this part of the "vomit" - don't know it just made my whole body tingle....? thanks for an interesting read

i don't know your story, but wish you well =)

I play this game sometimes walking around the skyways. I'll find people who are immersed in their blackberries, not paying attention to their surroundings. I'll walk right towards them, and as they unconsciously shift course I'll imperceptibly veer towards them further until we nearly brush against one another as we pass. Sometimes we actually collide, often times the nearness is enough to jolt them out of their cybernetic daydream. Am I mean? Or is this just metaphorical of my yearning for human contact?

I often want to scream at them, wave my hands in the air, even hit them, "I'm HERE I'm HERE!" Like some gestaltian need for recogniton. I want to grab people and shake them violently until they are shocked into the moment that should bind us all together. I want to parade around the planet soliciting poems and paintings and lovemaking until the whole world weeps for its idiocy. We're wasting time, things are getting worse and we are addicted to separating ourselves from one another.

I slept a lot last night, much needed. I dreamt of someone, a friend, maybe lover, maybe myself... their eyes were black and empty... there was a pool of water, a deep black hole, it was understood by me that this dark puddle was a sucking, a vacuum in which entry would mean forever sinking with no possibility of parole, I watched this shadow, grey and diseased walk into the pool resigned, immediately sinking as I watched, able to see his face looking up at me expressionless as he went... it was raining outside, that's all I remember...

Today it's raining too, and I sit in the vacuum of my apartment, looking around at all these odds and ends, these half-read books and expired coupons and pictures of people who've long forgotten me. Unfinished tasks and soggy dreams and lost loves and embered ambitions. I remember wondering last year at this time if I would be like this still now, and I am, every time I move, trying to flee myself I find myself again, in a new place, more isolated than ever, in darkness looking into the brightened windows of other peoples lives wondering what it must be like to be normal, to want life more than death, to be able to function without eccentricities, chemicals, to settle for less in order to gain more...

Someone asked me about sleep, I don't take anything really, sometimes I'll take this tablet called 'Midnite' that's supposed to be all natural. It works ok, it feels like when you get out of a long hot bath, relaxes your body, and often it's suggestive enough to your mind that it will follow suit.

Someone asked me what I was afraid of... I'm afraid of myself... (and heffalumps and dropbears and people who think Rush Limbaugh has ever or will ever have a point)...

Someone said something about nothingness. You cannot build around nothingness, nothingness is not a nucleus, it's not a foundation, it's not an idea or material, nothingness is the vacuum realization that we are more space than matter, that none of any of this really matters, it's therapudic to empty the garbage in your brain through meditation, and this is what I think was meant, but reconstructing a 'self' based on 'nothingness' is like trying to rebuild your house in the middle of a lake, it's nonsensical and completely defeats the purpose of having a calm body of water in which to cleanse your soul...

I don't know what else to say today, I feel stable, just very sad...

You write beautifully. I wonder if you weren't sad what your writing would be like

Wow. These are great posts, siam. The paragraph about love in the original post was especially wonderful. If that's "mental vomit," I'll take another helping.

"I remember wondering last year at this time if I would be like this still now, and I am, every time I move, trying to flee myself I find myself again, in a new place, more isolated than ever, in darkness looking into the brightened windows of other peoples lives wondering what it must be like to be normal, to want life more than death, to be able to function without eccentricities, chemicals, to settle for less in order to gain more..."

i like this line...it's funny how certain emotions strike..sometimes even when you weren't even aware of them....thanks for your post

Itss beautifull writing but, I thinkk your losing yourselff in all of it......

"For it is by self forgetting that one finds."

Your writing is masterful. Your insight concerning love, hope, human separation and indifference regarding death evoke such compelling contemplations of our lives.

I hope this is not too dark a time for you. I also hope that you find not just safety, but admiration and support for sharing these ideas.

Nice work.

I imagine it would be happier.

Gross. :p

For the first time in awhile today I didn't have any cravings, I didn't see any shadows. What I'm left with is guilt. Why am I always guilty and how do I get rid of it? Inevitably the guilt, and the fear of future guiltiness leads me back to drinking. I've done horrible stupid things to wonderful beautiful people and the fear of doing them again encapsulates me and holds me away from that outside world. Maybe it's only part of the equation, it's difficult to decipher now, I've become such a mess that I cannot read my own codes, I've forgotten all my own passwords, I have no access to my roots any longer...

New York City, 2007, I'm working in the city, staying at the Essex House, an old friend who I grew up with doing theater, haven't seen her in years, comes up from the lower east side to meet for (guess what?) a drink. I don't know why this is permissible in my mind as I've spent the previous year grappling for the first time with admitted alcoholism, with varied success but with a greater self knowledge now, I KNEW it was a bad idea, I KNEW it was a bad idea, I KNEW IT WAS A BAD FRIGGIN IDEA?!!?!! Since moving back east for this job I had been cheating in my sobriety...

Three things happen to me always when I go back, even just to visit. #1 I start swearing every other word, it's contagious... #2 I start losing my R's in mimic... #3 I start incorporating alcohol into my meals...

It starts off well enough, a third friend that was supposed to meet us feigned a headache and gracefully bowed out (after we called her when she didn't show up), we make fun of her, knowing that she's an upper west side snob and just couldn't stomach coming ALL the way to touristy midtown on the subway. A beer. A Burger. Some catching up... What I'm guessing was about four beers in some Romanian guy starts talking to us, nice enough guy, interesting conversation about I forget what, everything's fine, I step out to smoke...

Outside there's a bongo bum singing blues and his friend. I start talking to them as I'm inclined to do, 'specially when on my way to drunk, give em both a smoke and go back in...

Romanian guy now sitting next to friend, fine, I suggest a shot and a toast... Third shot round responsibly declined by friend and Romanian guy... three or four more beers in my by this time... starting to feel that slide, like all traction has been lost on a slope made of wet rubber, I'm destructive, I'm in this for the goal, I imagine I've always loved (let's call her) jasmine, this Romanian guy's trying to pick her up... I go out to smoke...

Bums drinking whiskey in a bag, I joke about the Yankees, they tell me I shouldn't wear a Red Sox hat in the city at night, easy prey... I jokingserious direct their eyes through the window, telling them that the Romanian guy is trying to pick up my girl and what they think I should do about it... obvious drunken bum responses given 'fight fight fight!', ... but it is in jest on my part... one of my vices, funking with people when I drink...

Go back in, thinly veiled funking with Romanian guy... I think I'm so slick when I drink but how horribly obvious must I have been?... eventually convincing both for one last shot together in return for my implicit agreement that it's getting late and this is the last... Remember vaguity... walking Jasmine outside, insisting on buying her a taxi, ... suggesting that she can stay in my hotel room... did I try to pick her up? This girl I watched play anne frank as I sat in the light booth with her mother calling cues?... what else did I say?... how big of a fool did I make of me?...

Somehow, being LITERALLY across the street from my hotel I took a taxi home that night. Maybe I rode the taxi with her? But I don't think so. I remember walking forever and ever around New York. I must have somehow simply gone the wrong way, somehow, being DIRECTLY across the street from my hotel. Eventually I must have realized that I was lost and, though I know Manhattan fairly well could not get an accurate reading on the GRIDLIKE street concoction they got going on there... I must have gotten into a taxi just for the simplicity of saying two words and having them take me there.... I remember pulling out my wallet... I had three hundred dollars when I met with jasmine... I have nothing in my wallet now... all of that money couldn't have gone at the bar though I did buy drinks for three people for four hours and probably gave a twenty to each of the bar bums.... I remember the taxi guy furious, and getting out and stumbling... black.

I wake up somehow four hours later, work, jesus, thank god i am so recently and deeply drunk that there is no hangover until the day is almost done, I cut off early anyhow... I have a text from jasmine, she wonders if i got home ok.. apparently called her during lost wanderings... I text back breif... 'Y got home sry abt lst ngt'... no reply. I don't expect I'll ever see or hear from her again.

I'm hoping that writing some of these out will help me little by little deal with the guilt. This was hardly one of my worst, but it was the last time I got drunk with real consequences. I lost a friend, albeit one I'd only talked to a few times since high school, it was someone I grew up with and respected and was close to her parents and have mutual friends with. It was someone who, if I was a normal person, I might have been very interested in keeping in touch with again, maybe working with her on some of her projects which she alluded to before we met up, another in a long series of old theater friends trying to get me back in the arts... but drinking acted like an atomic bomb on this situation. It completely obliterated any possibility of anything that may have existed in just a few hours. It takes so little time to ruin years of memories and long standing friendships. It takes so little, almost nothing. I hate this. I hate all of this. This guilt, this regret, and this one of the more benign episodes, not involving police or bodily fluids or self harm or sex or injury.

How can I forgive myself for any of this? I'm supposed to look at myself and say 'I forgive you siamcat, you have a 'disease' and it's not your fault, you're trying to get better now so all this is ok'. It's NOT OK! It's NOT OK that I've RUINED things and HURT people and GIVEN UP possibility and STUNTED my growth on EVERY PERCEIVABLE LEVEL EVER!!!!

Crap,... I don't know.

How about starting with today, yesterday is gone. Don't dwell on it any more than your dropbears or heffalumps. Concentrate on making today a success. Tomorrow today will be one yesterday that you wont regret.

I'll be looking into heffalumps soon, I'd forgotten all about them. I don't know where I'm going to find that book though...

Take care, bon appetit, dessert must follow.

Wow. Awesome writing.





You move on. Cut yourself some slack no matter how difficult that is for you to do.

For me, it's the only way to begin to heal.

The people on this board know how it feels to watch the destruction of our own lives. We have watched relationships split up. We have kissed our jobs goodbye. We have watched wealth fly out of our pockets. We have watched families splinter into dysfunctional chaos. We have had our physical and mental health rot. We have watched love either still-born or murdered by stupidity or mistakes. We find a common bond. We are normal people who were seduced by alcohol.

Blindness regarding the damage that alcohol often brings seems abnormal to me. It’s like living in a war zone with bullets flying all around and saying “none of these have hit me, so I’m not involved.” I’m not trying to blame to innocent people. I want to clarify what a normal reaction should involve when considering alcohol. Some bleed, some don’t. Some die, some don’t.

All of us can look back to when we were younger, less thoughtful, or more impetuous and repeat the words that have been spoken a trillion times “if only I knew then what I know now.” If anyone in the rest of the world could ever forgive any one of us, it will begin with us forgiving ourselves.

Hope comes from our own minds. The world may judge us, but, while sober, we can grow, learn, love, notice and see. We can forgive ourselves and forgive everyone around us for being human.

Hmm, since I can't speak from my own experience here, I'll just say I hope you find what you need. I have nothing to offer.

my head hurts

((((Siam))))

Many people are afraid to forgive because they feel they must remember the wrong or they will not learn from it. The opposite is true. Through forgiveness, the wrong is released from its emotional stranglehold on us so that we can learn from it. Through the power and intelligence of the heart, the release of forgiveness brings expanded intelligence to work with the situation more effectively. -- David McArthur & Bruce McArthur

When I first found out about my husband's heroin addiction, I was really angry. And I thought it would be a long time before I forgave him. But as I recovered from the initial shock, I came to realize that it was not my place to forgive. This was not something he had done to me, he had done it to himself. It took him a long time to admit his problem to me, and only did it then because I confronted him about it. He was ashamed of himself for becoming addicted, and had allowed self-loathing to fester in his heart, building walls around himself to "protect" me and the girls from his hurt. Throughout all of this, I have fought to maintain a certain level of peace in myself, and have continued living life. He is slowly working on forgiving himself for what he has done. He has said that seeing me and the girls living, loving, and being happy despite his addiction has helped him to realize that the present continues to unfold despite the past.

So don't say, 'I forgive you siamcat, you have a 'disease' and it's not your fault, you're trying to get better now so all this is ok'. Instead, try saying, 'I forgive me. It is all my fault, but the past is done, there's nothing I can do to change it. The best I can do is to try to make the present better so it won't happen anymore.'

Hope this helps,
Daisy

PS You're writing is really beautiful. If you're looking for something to do instead of drinking, why not write a book called, "Adventures & Musings in NYC" or something great like that?

Thanks for all your kind posts. I'm a perfectionist. Forgiveness is a tough thing for me. I guess if I really felt like I was moving on or living in general it might be easier for me to forget, if not forgive, the piercing atrocities of my past. I'm stuck in time, afraid to step forward or out of my cavernous self exile. To meet new people, to make new friends would only mean temptation for me, temptation to attempt the life of the normal, temptation to once again live and breath in the freedom of moderation, a dream never realized. I'm imprisoned and I'm hungry, for anything, human touch, validation, motion....

I've been thinking a lot about external manifestations of internal yearnings. What makes us choose excess over moderation. The carnal appetites we acquire in response to psychological mutations we acquired as children...

'The third child is always the mistake', or so it is written... there is a syndrome associated there, especially if it's been stated by the impregnators that this is so. My parents love me, but they were honest, two was enough, but they got a bonus. My brother and sister were overachievers. In rebellion to high expectations I strove to prove I could achieve more,... but never by the rules. I wrote lengthy papers, but on subjects out of context with the curriculum. I endeared myself to teachers and then skipped their classes to get high in the woods out back. I turned down cushy desk jobs for manual labor, traveled instead of collegiated, bachelored instead of married...

I'm trying to get through this all in my mind. Grow the funk up. This is childs stuff for shedding. But I stunted my grown, mentally, physically, somehow not so spiritually... By 13 I was drinking every weekend, by 14 every night. I dont' know how I got through it all, how I hid it enough from my parents, whiskey was the norm and it's certainly not olfactorally subtle. I showed up at a school drama meeting once when I was seventeen. A board meeting, four students and three parents and the school director. I apparently attempted to light many cigarettes in the cafetaria during the course, I cursed incessantly at the lack of support the Principal gave to the program, I loudly veto'ed any talk of Chorus Line or Guys and Dolls while slurring a long oration in favor of Annie. Stomped the table with my fists... I don't remember one moment of it.

Perhaps the one prescient choice I made in those days was not to pursue a life in the arts. It greatly facilitated my drug use, alcohol is easy to come by working professional theater, they don't mind if you're thirteen, fifteen, it's just the life style. Coffee and liquor, marijuanna and cocaine, you take the uppers through tech week and drink the rest of the run, then tear down, and do it all over again. I basically lived at the cast house every summer from age 14, had my own small room, a glorified closet in the attic, they called it the 'Anne Frank Room'. I fused so many chemicals into my blood, my genes, my DNA must look like a Rat Pack buffet of viral addictions, I hope to never procreate. In trying to find the beginning I remember this all, and it's a tough and muddy walk trying to get through it to reach back to a time when I didn't have that outlet, that infection encoraged or apathated by all around me.

To reconstruct a life without it is incredibly arduous, when there's no foundation from which to build, you're left with a muddy ground that periodically collapses all you try to build upon it. I have to get to the foundation, somehow, through this myriad of false starts and dead ends and trap doors and deceiving mirrored hallways back to a solid place from which I can begin to build a road forward. Every time I take a step now, it just feels like the ground is moving an equal distance backwards, away from my intentions...

I'm a third child :)

Something to keep on mind is that thinking about how difficult it is to rebuild your life is not going to make it happen. Stop thinking of it as a fight against the world. If you have convinced yourself that you are a mistake, a funk-up, a stunted person, then that's what you will make yourself. You said it yourself, you're afraid. We're all afraid, Saim, just of different things. Meeting new people, making new friends...it's scary. Anyone entering new relationships is exposing themselves and their vulnerabilities, but unless you want to spend the rest of your life "imprisoned and hungry" in your "cavernous exile", you just need to do it. If you're worried about temptation, try to get out in places where it wouldn't be an issue. Volunteer or go to public programs at nature centers, at libraries, museums, that kind of thing. I feel for you, Siam, and I really hope you are able to break out of yourself. Remember that every day you wake up, you have another chance to start life over again.

I hope that didn't sound too negative or anything...it wasn't meant that way :)