Opening today's blog with a song that my dad gave me to follow me through life, and I hope it gives you hope. It's been a long, cold winter... but we'll get through this.
Here Comes The Sun.
When I was a kid, a road rash, scrape, or bloody cut was treated with mercurochrome which my dad kept in a medicine cabinet that dated to the 1880s, in his house on Dwight Way. This was so unpleasant that most kids would do most anything to avoid being anointed with the potent red tincture. So painfully repugnant was this vile medicine, we would cry at the mere threat of it.
(Mercurochrome bottle found in the midden at my home in Berkeley, and filled with colored water for effect)
None of us can sleep with the metaphoric scrapes and burns we have sustained in this pandemic.
Last night was one long, horrific nightmare. I went to bed early in a futile attempt to beat the sleeplessness so that I'd have extra hours to make up for the time I didn't sleep. It was as if my entire being has been stung by mercurochrome.
I put on the old Addams Family TV show, dropped a full dose of CBD, and fell asleep the second episode in, and sometime in my sleep, managed to both turn off the TV and up-end a bag of crackers, leaving me lying, in the dark, on a bed of crunchy crumbs. After spending some time sweeping crumbs off from under myself, I managed to fall asleep. At 1:18 a.m. I woke up again, probably because there were crumbs digging into my ass crack and responded to a text from my son from a few hours earlier. He was, surprisingly, still awake. After that, I entreated sleep to come by an oft-used tactic; writing a potential short story in my head. Essentially, I consider different topics and then try to write a decent first outline in my mind based on a theme that is pleasant, calming and potentially a good short piece, essay or semi-autobiographical. In lighter times, these themes sometimes play out the following days into a creative writing piece that I find worthy, sometimes it seems as if I had played out some weird celestial acid trip. Most of the time, my mind drifts to certain concepts that I will replay over and over again in my normal state of insomnia. Oh, Satan be gone, but not these days.
Last night, the topic of this seemingly endless lockdown kept replaying and I couldn't get past the obsessive thought-loop. I could think of nothing else. I took another large dose of CBD at 2 a.m. and willed sleep to come and spent the remainder of the night in a half somnolent state that neither resembled sleep nor being awake. By 7:30 a.m. I tried to make excuses not to get out of bed, but guilt from the ever-present Protestant work ethic forced me up rather like a disjointed ragdoll and I threw on my robe, which has a large hole in the back where, Yaya, a beloved former rescue dog chewed it, and flopped on the sofa to start working. I probably looked like a deranged homeless woman with a mental disorder. A FB friend on a Berkeley page posted this marvelous cartoon he drew of a well-known street lady from the 70s and it's so me right now.
(cartoon courtesy fellow Berkeley Kid, Les Toil)
I worked wearing my pajamas for a few hours while wrestling with a new loaf of sourdough between trying to concentrate on work. I had no toast for breakfast, which was a bummer, and even though the amazing cup of Burundu medium roast coffee was on hit, the morning was just a complete wash in every possible way.
The sourdough came out nicely, eventually.
By noon, everything went south. For some reason, I couldn't organize and collate the work my vendors needed, and was unsure about whether the spreadsheets contained the correct data for each vendor. I stripped my gears trying to figure out how to do mundane tasks that are a regular part of my daily routine. My heart was pounding out of my chest in an irregular pattern and I couldn't focus. It took some time to determine that the feeling of being a hapless nitwit was actually an anxiety attack, not a heart attack.
Admission: I have PTSD, mild bi-polarism, and have endured anxiety/panic attacks since I was 18 years old. For forty Goddamned years my body has intermittently thrown me into a vortex of heart palpitations, mind-numbing confusion, fight or flight response, literal jaw-clenching anxiety and then into a weird euphoria that has no substance. I know what this feels like and this kind of anxiety we're going through right now, during this pandemic is not the normal kind of anxiety.
I mentioned the other day being tossed by the Ocean (Yemaya) repeatedly and coming up laughing. Being in the vortex of the ocean is a far, far more amenable situation than sitting in my living room trying to cope with what feels like my own body trying to kill me for no rational reason.
Why is this anxiety and insomnia a thing right now? I'm a naturally rather reclusive person, I enjoy the privacy and sanctity of my home, and being here without being bothered or intruded upon is, in general, an absolute privilege for me. It's because I am worried for everyone, myself included, and I live in a bubble wherein my inner-self does not believe that I will be a casualty and yet there is dichotomy there and the cognitive dissonance makes me want to just hide. This is an anxiety I've never experienced before and I don't think any of us know how to really rationalize it and move on.
Georgia and Texas are opening up certain businesses earlier than I, personally, would feel comfortable with. This decision is publicly stated to alleviate the tension on the economy. Something I said several weeks ago is now coming out in articles far more eloquent than I can write:
If we put people back to work before it feels safe, employees are subjected to a decision: go back to work and risk being infected and infecting their families or; face being turned down for unemployment. As of today there are 30,000,000 unemployment applications. The Feds are not going to pay all of those people no matter what and opening up certain Red states who are aligned with the Orange Dickwangle In Chief guarantees that many of these people who refuse to return to unsafe working conditions, will not be eligible for unemployment. That is the full explanation for these early openings and it is not because people need to work; it is because the States and Federal government has zero intention of paying that many people to stay home and stay safe.
We do not need mass murdered pork, beef and chicken to survive. We do not need haircuts. We do not need waxing, pedicures or manicures, or to go bowling or golfing. We need people to survive. We don't need people to go back to work in potentially unsafe conditions to save the EDD the money they say they don't have.
Trump flew the Blue Angels and the Thunderbirds over several states at an enormous cost; what about Congress (with Trump's alliance) allocating those funds to feed/house/clothe those who are now unemployed rather than require them to go back to work before it is safe?
There is a 900% increase in calls to crisis hotlines. People are suffering. People are suffering the loss of connection to other people, to their daily lives, to the ebb and flow of what our normal used to be.
I have several Zoom meetings every single week and I look forward to most of them but honestly, I'm finding that they fatigue me. I want to connect with one or two people at a time. I want to see what people are really feeling. I don't want cocktail hours and laughter and chatter -- not all the time -- I want to get down to why we want to connect in the first place. The fact that I love you and want to be important in your life. I want to be important somewhere, to someone.
We all do.
Mercurochrome reminds me of my dad, who loved me enough to stain my cuts and scrapes with it's sharp, burning smear. My dad wanted me to heal and move on to the next injury and he wanted me to survive in spite of the pain of it.
I don't know why my dad became part of this post, but my dad -- the highest
honor on my altar -- and the ancestor I most beseech for connection is sending me this over and over...
Ibae been tonu Donald Edward Wood.
I am listening, and hearing you...
but I still hated your mercurochrome.
Thank you for sharing this sis!
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