“In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.” ~ Carl Jung

                   

“The universe is like a dome; it vibrates to that which you say in it, and answers the same back to you; so also is the law of action; we reap what we sow.” ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan

Wednesday afternoon. Sunny and mild, mid 60’s. Absolutely beautiful outside.

Well, yesterday I sat down to post, but then I got distracted by a phone call from my mother, and as a result, I was never able to regain my concentration long enough to post. My mother has that effect on me: She is able to completely disconcert me with just a conversation. What happens, actually, is that she starts to use that unassailable logic that is hers alone, and I usually lose my temper, and everything just degenerates.

Yesterday was so bad that I actually considered banging my head on my desk while she was talking to see if I could make my head feel better . . .

I know that I should be more patient with her, and I realize that age is taking its toll. She forgets more than she remembers, and I suppose if I were a good daughter, I would take all of this in stride, but I just can’t. I really can’t. The things that she says just blow my mind as they are so bizarre. For example, because she has decided that she will have no pets once her cat and dog die, then that means that I cannot have any more pets. When I tell her that I will always have at least one dog, she says things like, “Well, that just doesn’t make any sense,” and then I feel like an idiot for trying to justify something that really needs no justification.

This dance between mothers and daughters—does it ever end?

“What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner  solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours—that is  what you must be able to attain.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a young poet

For the last two nights, I’ve gone up to the prescribed dosage on my Seroquel. I had hesitated to do this because taking 75 mg in the past left me feeling so tired the next day, but I couldn’t take this not sleeping, and obviously the 50 mg wasn’t doing it for me. Each night, I’ve gone to sleep one hour earlier than the night before, which is progress. Last night, I actually fell asleep at 2 a.m., only to be awakened by Alfie who wanted to go out.

I swear that I think the dogs wait for my breathing patterns to change, and then make noise to wake me up . . . Breathing evenly? Yep? Okay, it’s time! And then they take turns waking me as going out together in the wee hours of the morning must be too taxing or something. I love my dogs, but by 5 a.m. I was having irate conversations with them.

Then I had to get up to drive Corey to work at 7. He’s working a 13 hour shift today, and boy was he surly. He’s so put out that he has to go back on the security schedule as there is no definite away date yet. I understand as he had already reconciled his mindset to being finished with that job. Going back on shifts must seem like a giant step backwards, even though it’s only a delay.

Anyway, I took him to work, came back home and slept for a few hours, took Eamonn to work, came home and slept for a few hours, and then took Brett to school and came home and slept for a few hours. Not ideal, but I did sleep, only to be awakened this afternoon by . . . you got it, a telephone call from my mother.

Geez. It just makes me want to go somewhere where there are no phones. I know. That’s selfish. Blame it on the sleep deprivation.

“Certain words now in our knowledge we will not use again, and we will never forget them. We need them. Like the back of the picture. Like our marrow, and the color in our veins. We shine the lantern of our sleep on them, to make sure, and there they are, trembling already for the day of witness. They will be buried with us, and rise with the rest.” ~ W.S. Merwin from Houses and Travellers

So yesterday, I had my telephone interview with my long-term disability provider. They are refiling my Social Security claim. The interesting thing is that since I was denied, my new date of disability becomes the date of my previous denial. Such a crock.

So we went over my medications, the doctors that I’m seeing, my conditions. Nothing new, really. Now they’ll file a claim, and then we do a lot of waiting only to be denied on the first round. Then we appeal again, and I get assigned a hearing date. I’m looking at about 12 months minimum to go through this process once again. Denial in the first phase is almost automatic. It’s as if this bureaucracy deliberately creates more work for itself and everyone else.

Let’s see, she has headaches everyday, debilitating migraines that she sees a neurologist for, chronic back pain, this, that, and the other . . . Denied.

I really don’t know how some people manage to go through the whole process and come out with benefits. I know of a couple of people who have actually been approved, and quite frankly, I am more disabled than they are. It’s not a bragging contest. Just a fact. But as with my mother, I am looking for inherent logic, and the fact is that there is none. There is nothing logical or efficient about the Social Security Administration.

This morning on the way to school Brett and I touched on a few political topics, and he told me that quite frankly, he doesn’t want to get distracted by political activism at the moment because he needs to concentrate on school. I understand, I really do. To give in to the desire to fight the system takes a lot of time and energy, and I just cannot go around mad at the things that Rick Santorum says 24 hours a day, or it would only add to my pain—physical, emotional, psychological. As it is, I’m sitting on a heating pad as I type this.

“I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions—not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation of something I do not know.” ~ Carl Jung, near the end of his life, in Memories, Dreams

Yes, two Jung quotes in the same post. Unusual for me, but they both seemed to fit, and I couldn’t choose one over the other.

I’ve never really studied Jung as I came of age at a time when Freud still held sway, all of that oral, anal fixation stuff. Oedipal and Electra complexes. Id, ego, and superego. My first psychology teacher was a kook. She would mention oral fixations and then make sucking motions with her mouth like she was sucking on a pacifier. Strange the things you remember. But I find now that I really appreciate Jung more, especially after I learned what a misogynist Freud was.

By the way, just as an aside, orange slices (the candy) and Pepsi really do not go well together. Just found that out.

So, where am I? Corey is unsettled. Politics is the same old bullshit. I’m getting ready to take on another battle with the SSA. I still need to do taxes and the FAFSA forms for Brett and Corey. My computer is still dead. My dogs both delight and aggravate me. My mother . . . well, nothing new there either.

As for myself: I really cannot “add up the sum,” as the quote says. I have ideas constantly about plots for stories, literally, all the time. I wonder if I get my hands on an IBM Selectric what excuse I’ll use after that. I could do this, you know? I really could, but I am so caught up in defining my worth, in trying to define my convictions that I never seem to stop long enough to get anything done.

So what kind of person am I? I was born, and now, I exist, simply exist. Still waiting to start living.

More later. Peace.

                   

Today’s post features real ads for medicines/curatives that contained cocaine, amphetamines, and other interesting ingredients (such as heroin, cannabis, and morphine). Here is my favorite: Mabel is Unstable . . . so let’s tranquilize her with butabarbital . . .

                   

Music by Charlie Winston, “She Went Quietly”

                    

Meditation at Lagunitas

All the new thinking is about loss.

In this it resembles all the old thinking.

The idea, for example, that each particular erases

the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-

faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk

of that black birch is, by his presence,

some tragic falling off from a first world

of undivided light. Or the other notion that,

because there is in this world no one thing

to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,

a word is elegy to what it signifies.

We talked about it late last night and in the voice

of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone

almost querulous. After a while I understood that,

talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,

pine, hair, woman, you

and I. There was a woman

I made love to and I remembered how, holding

her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,

I felt a violent wonder at her presence

like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river

with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,

muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish

called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.

Longing, we say, because desire is full

of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.

But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,

the thing her father said that hurt her, what

she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous

as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,

saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

~ Robert Hass, from Praise

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