Author: Michelle

Too much of a good thing–moderate my what!?

I never done good things
I never done bad things
I never did anything out of the blue,
–David Bowie/Ashes to Ashes

I have great difficulty moderating my behavior. My temperament skews to extremes sometimes. I seem all bland on the outside, but on the inside I might be wondering what someone would do if I punched them in the face. Oh, I never do. I just wonder about it.

Even innocent behaviors like bathing are a problem. I like a good hot bath. Super hot. This means that often when I get out of the tub, I am…fainty.
Hot water too hot. Dizzy. Pulse racing. Lay down before I fall down. If you sit on my bed, and it’s damp, I haven’t had an accident, I’ve just had the bath water up turned up too high, resulting in an emergency post-bath lie down with my feet on the headboard.

There is a very good chance that some day I’ll be found dead, naked in the bathroom after passing out and cracking my head open on the bathtub or the tile. Maybe I should have gone with resilient flooring…

Wow. That took an unintended morbid direction. Not uncommon with me. I am very morbid. Death is a hobby of mine.

And other behaviors? Ones that are maybe less innocuous? Yeah. I have those too.

EatingDrinkingDrugsFood
Whiskeyvodkatequilabeer
Some is never enough.

Just ask those of us who helped Rick celebrate his birthday all weekend.

You can tell who we are–we are the ones whose asses are still dragging today. The ones who valiantly attempted to drink all of the wine, beer, vodka and whiskey in the Tigard area over a three day period. The ones hitting the humidor just a little too hard. By Sunday we were all just a teeny bit strung out. Our livers are demanding new hosts. Still. It was fun weekend.

The food was delicious,too. Thank you, Chelle, for being the one sane and relatively sensible note to the weekend. Well, except for the cheese dip.

But.

But.

Aren’t you eventually supposed to stop partying quite so hard? We have nothing to prove: we partied through the 80’s. Our party cred is strong. Football season is sacred, of course, but shouldn’t we take it easy the rest of the year? (I know, I know…shouldn’t is ironically a shouldn’t.)

Instead, we’re plotting ways to increase our consumption while still staying alert. I do not think that is a sensible, moderate approach.

Of course, I am the one who sensibly got rid of all of my piercings but compensated with tattoos. Sensible is not one of my strengths, I’m afraid.
Which, honestly, is mostly a good thing. I’m financially responsible and gainfully employed. I have a Roth IRA, a well-stocked 403b and a full pension. I pay my bills.

I figure I can be whimsical and offbeat in all of the other ways.

All? OK. Maybe not all.

I just told someone I’ve never snorted lines off of a naked hooker. So that’s something.

To aspire to?

No. No. No.

I’m having trouble concentrating now. It’s probably irreversible dain bramage caused by Fireball. Or the massive depression caused by a weekend long party draining every last bit of serotonin out of my body.

Great.

I’m going to go take a hot bath. Yes, I’ll be careful.

Update: I survived the bath, but mostly because I had an idea as soon as I got in the tub, so I got out to write it down (because that’s what scribblers do) and by the time I got back in it was a normal human temperature.

Also? Know what? Fuck moderation. Fuck sensible and the horse it rode in on. Fuck common sense, and screw rational.

Being complicit with evil

There is a recurring nightmare that I have been having since the mid ’90’s. Not regularly, but every several years it makes an appearance. Sometimes it returns over a period of several weeks. It is never a welcome visitor.

In the beginning, it’s always an airport. It’s always the middle of the night. There is always a sky full of stars. A person parks on the top level of a deserted parking garage and gets out of the car. Sometimes there is ice and snow that sparkles in the moonlit star-drenched night. Sometimes, it’s a warm summer night. Still star-drenched. Either way, the woman stops under the night sky and marvels at how beautiful it all is. She hums to herself and twirls in the night wind. Sometimes her boots crunch in the snow and her cheeks flush with the cold. Other times, her summer dress twirls up as she spins.

She is always happy. She’s there to pick up the man she loves.

When it’s icy, she always wonders why she didn’t think to call ahead and check and see if the flight was delayed due to weather. In the dream, there’s never such a thing as a smart phone to check. The dream started before there were miracle phones.

It’s always a woman. I am often not sure if the woman is me or all women or a specific woman in particular, but frequently it is me. Sometimes she doesn’t look like me, but she still is. Other times she does. Sometimes she isn’t me at all, I am just watching the dream like a movie. The first time, the woman was me.

She always twirls a few times under the bright, bright stars and goes into the airport. Humming.

The airport isn’t one she’s ever been to before. It’s very bright. Very white. Very clean. There are hardly any people around. The bars and shops are closed. No flights are arriving.

There is one gallery open, and she wanders in to see if they have any interesting pieces.

There are a few sculptures, and some fairly good paintings. She turns to start to walk out, and a curtain opens in front of a one way mirror that she can see through. Thinking it must be a performance piece, she stops in front of the window. On a stool, there is a nude child. Sometimes it’s a boy, sometimes a girl. Always very young. Three to six years old, maybe. The child is sleeping, or maybe sedated. The woman looks around for a way to get into the room. It’s not right for this nude child to be on display. She calls out, thinking someone from the gallery will help her. She notices that there isn’t a cash register or any apparent place for staff to enter or leave other than the main door.

She goes back out into the airport, but no one is at any of the check-in desks any more. She doesn’t see a phone anywhere so she can contact the police. The airport appears to be deserted.

She goes back into the gallery, and sees that there is a masked man in the room with the child now. He has what appears to be a sharpened antler or piece of horn in his hand, and he has tied the child down, gagged him, and is flaying him with the sharp object. He turns to the mirror occasionally and cuts pieces of the child’s hair easily. Like he is demonstrating how sharp his crude knife is.

Blood drips onto the floor.

The child is sedated, but not unconscious. The man turns on a speaker so she can hear that the child is whimpering.

That is when she realizes that as the man is cutting the child’s skin off piece by piece, he is masturbating. Then she realizes that she is almost as aroused as he is.

Then I wake up screaming.

The first time I had the dream, I was living alone and going through a very dark patch. I wasn’t sleeping well. The night terrors didn’t help that situation. My complicity with a child being tortured kept me awake for days. During the day, I obsessed about what the dream meant, and what it meant that I hadn’t helped the child. What it meant that I was getting off on it. When I did sleep, the nightmare would wake me up again.

Eventually, it occurred to me that I needed to separate the me in the dream from the me in real life. It didn’t make the nightmare any less disturbing, but it did give me enough distance from it to stop blaming myself for the evil committed in a dream. It seems like that would have been obvious, but at that point in my life I was really not functioning rationally.

I was blaming my real self for actions and responses that were purely imaginary. Not only imaginary but unconscious.

Once I realized that, the dream mostly stopped. It returns every few years, usually if I am spending a little too much time inside my own head.

It still keeps me from sleeping when I have it.

Even though I know that I am not someone who gets off on watching children be mutilated, I still find myself wondering what sort of evil I think I am complicit in that causes the dream to keep coming back.

If I figure it out, maybe it will stop.

Beer tattoo 2

She pulled a chair over to the counter where the little metal box was sitting. With a magnifying glass, she could see that there really was a tiny creature inside the box. Was it a cage?. The creature looked mostly human, but with large, red-irised eyes, dangerous looking teeth and long hands. When it wasn’t smiling or laughing, it looked harmless enough. Beautiful, even, with gold hair curling down to it’s shoulders. She couldn’t tell if it was male or female.

It looked like it was waiting for something. It extended a hand toward the side of the cage, and made a motion like opening a door. She sat up straight in her chair, started to reach toward the cage, then saw the mark on her hand and reconsidered. She touched the unfurling vines, they were definitely unfurling, and shook her head slowly.

The creature’s eyes narrowed. It lifted one hand slightly in a circular gesture. The wind picked up outside. She saw the creature’s mouth moving, the sound she heard was like bells. And then the door blew open and she yelled “stop!”

The creature lowered it’s hand and the wind died back. It raised an eyebrow. She shook her head again, too dangerous. It smiled, was it sadly? Nodded at her. “Better” she heard in her head. Better? It nodded again. Could it understand what she was thinking? Another nod. Could it think things at her? It gave her a half smile. Not all things. Some things.

She didn’t think she wanted to have the kind of thoughts in her head she was likely to receive from this Thing.

It laughed. Definitely a laugh. Not like bells. Like a much larger creature. Male, she thought. He bowed.

She woke up in the cold dark, on the kitchen floor, red eyes looking down at her. She couldn’t breathe. Something was around her neck. She struggled to wake up, clutching at the rope around her neck. Pain shot down her arm to her hand. The hand with the tattoo, the mark the creature had put there. The red eyes grew brighter, and she could breath again. She felt the rope slide down her arm, coiling. Not a rope. A vine. Coiling back around the poppy on her hand.

She touched the poppy. It was hot. The vines looked they were some sort of living material. On her arm. That couldn’t be good.

She looked up at the creature, who looked nervous. He was shaking his head slowly. Not good.

And she heard a voice asking for help…or was it tiny bells?

Not bells, said the voice in her head. Not help. Not me.