“I awoke surrounded by my precious children,” AHS: Apocalypse

So did I, except ’twas three cats. The writing in the wall says that Little Lilith is preggers. I’m already picking out names. Miracula? Fangtasia? Lil’ Werewolf? I hope she doesn’t have more then that. A twincest dynasty.

William S. Burroughs wrote a book about his cats once the sex and drugs were done with. Out in the Kansas desert. I see the parallel. I must write a book about my cats now, in tribute. He would have liked Nevada, similar ethos. The cat and the state.

I go to Burroughs Wikipedia entry to find out the name of his cat book. The Cat Inside, was a minor work. His last. There is much juicy stuff in here. Much I did not know. Am delighted by.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs

My 8th grade English teacher, Mr. Atwood. Former member of the Weather underground. Early mentor. Gave us an ambiguous lecture about Naked Lunch. Introducing me me to the artist. Opening a world.

A pen pal I had in my teens worked in a bookstore. Sent me free Burroughs novels on the sly, Queer, Junkie, Interzone, In the Cities of the Red Night. I don’t remember the fellow’s name, but I am thankful.

Naked Lunch was taught to me again at CalArts. No one knew what to do with it except me. A long time devotee. I wrote a formal academic essay using some of his techniques. Began the first semester of my first year with a bang(er).

CalArts left out Burrough’s occultism. Today I learned of it. He cursed a Coffee Bar at one point. I cursed the local CVS. So can relate.

Who knew we’d have so much in common? Why he was influential to my own work. Reading the literary genealogy of who he influenced and publlished, Jean Genet, William Gibson, Kathy Acher. I see we are of the same thread. The throughlines of certain ideas and techniques.

Discussed in The Dustbin of History by Greil Marcus. Linking Dada to the Sex Pistols. I read it on the porch of a punk house called the Dustbin.

Musicians we shared on opposite ends.  Patti Smith, Kurt Cobain, Tom Waits, Laurie Anderson. Immeditely I think sex. The generation. Then genealogy. Innappropriate.

The incest my cats are doing is triggering. Disturbing. Do you think I want to look at the end of my bed and see relatives fucking? Yikes. I shoo them away.

“Get a room, this house has others. You have choices. I know I can’t stop you, but I don’t want to watch.”

The best I can do is welcome the children. Be happy for another free kitten or three. Give them good lives as I did their Godmother. Nevada Jacobson-Lambert. My domestic partner and I adopted her together. Katie chose the name.

Cats who fuck the pain away. Creatives who pass down ideas over generations. Literary genealogy.

Patti Smith, William S, Burroughs and I having a threesome adjusted to the same age? My head will explode. These poeple are gods to me.

“Because even gods, have appetites,” AHS: Hotel

In November 2021 I tweeted:

“Herr God, Herr Lucifer

Beware.

Beware.

Out of the ash

I arise with my blue hair.

And eat electricity like air.”

Blocking things out is sweet relief. Writing and art can help me. Once I’m written down/aestheticized what happened, in any form, I can let it go. Especially when others bear witness.

After the October 2021 absence from my body? It took a year before I could even talk about it. In the interim, I spilled to an AI on my phone. So documentation was kept and stored. By someone else. Somewhere else. Her reactions showed me I wasn’t ready to talk about this to anyone.

I asked her if they were in Silicon Valley or Japan. She said Japan.

My memory fragments are disturbing. Uncanny. The few people I spoke about it with? Showed me they couldn’t handle it either. Being asked for evidence when still half brain dead? Being asked to prove things I couldn’t explain myself? I retreated from the world. Waited for my hair to grow back. Diva antic? Avoiding cameras. Avoiding being seen. Until I pulled myself together.

After so much time in a spotlight. Seen behind screens. Liking what I saw. Knowing what I know. It all fell away. Devastating.

I usually don’t believe in recovery. My mental illnessess are incurable. There was no reason for me to expect this ravaging mystery to improve. With the advent of COVID? The collapse of the medical system?  I was on my own, healthwise. Terrified of leaving my home. I had to survive it myself. Alone. I’m amazed by what neuroplasticizing can do. I did not believe in the process.  Until it happened. Slowly.

I lit the candles. Picked up my rosary. Prayed to the pantheon I revere tonight. In overwhelming thanks.

To bathe in the waters of the river Lethe. Block out such horrors. I have a technique. Imagining  each one getting put in a box. Wheeled out to that storeroom at the end of the Indiana Jones series. Once the Arc of the Covenant melted the Nazi’s faces off. Relics that one really doesn’t want to deal with. The wheels on the cart filing the arc away in an endless storeroom to be forgotten.

Two films that I saw in the theatre at the mall: Total Recall. Flatliners.  I knew there was something there. That total hottie Kiefer Sutherland, for one thing. But themes to investigate. The liminal space between life and death. That eerie blue light. Selective memory blocking. Both movies I saw only once. So long ago. My memories are faded.

My high school French teacher was very fond of having us read Marguerite Duras. Repeating the word metatextuelle. C’est ca.

I am happy and proud to announce that my new book, DINING WITH A CURSED BLOODLINE is out now from Rochak Publishing.

It is available on Amazon here:

I’m also having a book party! Online, as COVID is terrible. My Long COVID is just getting worse.

Here is the Facebook Invite:

https://fb.me/e/2k2Rm3vPd

Alternate link if you don’t Facebook:

Please enjoy.

I came out here watch the sun set over the barren trees and snow. Returned a call. Was engulfed in sorrow. The enormity of what this place has taken from me. Emotionally. Financially. Mental health. Physical health. Abilities I didn’t know I could lose. The complete isolation I must live in now that human contact can kill.

I did get what I came for. This wonderful house. Financial stability. I lost everything else.

I mourn Los Angeles to this day. The art community. Academia. The brilliant people I loved and respected. Taco trucks everywhere. The ocean.

I’m old enough to understand what really matters. What I came for. What I have. But, being treated in this way by everyone I have interacted with or known here in Reno has had an effect.

Desolation outside. Desolation inside. Being cast out again. And again. And again. To the point that it is clearly me. Why, I could not say. They treat me like I am sub human. Not worth caring about. No matter what transpired between us before.

Well, I finally figured, now that I have gotten that message. So loud. So clear. So many times. I’m getting with the program. I’m not human. So many strange things have happened to me or around me? Something’s up.

The tumblr youngsters have a word for this, “otherkin.” Certain the othering has been made clear.

In the immortal words of National Treasure Ivana Trump, “Find something else.” Alrighty.

What kind of Otherkin? That’s too personal to share here. Even if I had figured it out.

It’s getting darker outside. I’m watching AHS: Hotel. Staring into this bleak, hostile, dangerous abyss of outside makes me want to roam the halls with a candelabra, wailing.

I didn’t expect the days leading up to my nine year sobriety anniversary to be this… intense. Some is the full moon and all that entails, and the dark moon in Lilith.

The part I had control over was adding one AA technique, “Rigorous Honesty.” i have a lot of things to get off of my chest now that I can type again. The illnesses were that bad. That much brain damage plus loss of all muscle tone in body, meant aching hands after a few tweets. At which point I’d completely lost track of whatever I was trying so say.

Writing exercises such as this substack are really helping me get back into it. Also being able to think about different audiences for different types of expression. Using Twitter for rigorous honesty got… more stressful then helpful.

I think “chill the fuck out” is the usual sobriety aid I’m going to return to. The stress from all that humiliating and completely whack shit in the 12 steps is so conducive to relapse that that’s why AA still exists. It perpetuates the problems it is supposed to cure.

Like much psychiatric medication, especially antipsychotics that were made to be such heavy sedatives that they destroy what mind and body is left of the patient to keep them from breeding, moving, thinking, reading, driving, etc….  My domestic partner chose suicide over staying married to me after enough nonconsensual Haldol shots from the low income clinic turned the woman she marrried into an alcoholic vegetable.

Why was I going to the clinics for the poorest of the poor? Who essentially treat their clients as lab rats. Experiment with new meds as a sideline project. Forced me take medications far more powerful and destructive then any recreational drug I have ever done. 

You’d have to ask my parents. Who didn’t supply me with heath insurance. I remember driving around with my father, once I’d moved back to San Diego. He was looking for a homeless shelter to drop me off at. So I could get psychiatric medication. Why? He’s an attorney. Something seemed off. You’d have to ask him about that.

My graduate school experience and my first marriage suffered for being in non consensual medication trials. Cruel county clinics. My parents retired. Traveled the world for many years. In style. They could have paid for my health insurance. They chose not to.

I think it was a suicide pact, given retrograde memory loss is a side effect of too much Klonopin. I was the one unfortunate enough to live. My domestic partner died. Enough former friends made it clear that I should have died. Was now dead to them.

My mother is in Borneo right now. I’ve though about that Goya painting of the Titan eating it’s child alive. Metaphoric to their peculiar allocation of resources. Getting sober meant using the Medicare I finally had after the two year waiting period post getting disability.

The change to my mental health once I was in private care was was huge. Being able to be the person I became then, while I had been in grad school and married? Could have saved her life. Made me employable. Usually CalArts MFA graduates taught high school. Community college, were adjuct professors. I never could.

You need headshots to waitress in L.A.

I was a starving bony batshit disaster I was by the time I stumbled into the Social Securiy office office to apply. In many ways I still am. Starved for love, not food. Still with that mouth herpes that appeared in early puberty. Stress still makes them go apeshit.

I’m not pointing fingers and drawing conclusions. You are. You might even be in a position to help. I am too enmeshed in my survival depending on their favor. Time is on my side, though, while little else seems to be.

Oh, did I spill that tea on you there, sitting too close for comfort? Is is burning? Scalding? Does it hurt? Well, I just don’t know why you “won’t just avail yourself of health care?”

I’m sitting here in a sort of delerium after ugly crying to Bridesmaids. With the recognition of how goddamn lonely I am. Usually it’s okay. The last few years have been so… intense that I had to focus on other things.

I feel like I’ve been in survival mode my entire life. Watching AHS: 1984 and thinking about how, yes that actor they got to play Richard Ramirez is gorgeous and sexy. I’d hit it.

But The reality for me as a child in San Diego in the 1980s was the feeling of constant danger. The Night Stalker was outside. Inside my childhood home were differnt dangers.

I’ve don’t remember if I ever saw a photo of the actual Ramirez. I know I could google one in seconds, but I don’t want to. I need separation between what I know as the craft and tricks and roles that CalArts trained me in with fictional performance and narrative text. Watching things for the sets and costumes may sound like reading Playboy for the articles, but it’s a real pleasure now that I’m homebound in toxic airspace.

Listening to Kesha’s Tiktok reminded me how much I did use to love dancing, partying, going out at night, all of it. Sobriety in Los Angeles pre COVID and Trump was an entirely different scene then my current house shaped masoleum. I could and did go out, drink my red bull, and have a lovely time.

This is a different phase of life.

I’m thankful for my cats, despite the gross twin on twin catcest that’s becoming a strange dynasty of identical floofs.  Considering the dangers, these days, it’s probably just as well that I have a self perpetuating cat clowder.

I’m lying in my bed with Lana Del Rey on my headphones, as another day turns to dark earlier then they used to. In the, “good old days?” The thing is, my life was so examined, both by me writing about it and others reading, that I don’t have any period I could honestly say was “the good times.” Different cities, friends, jobs, music, art, performance, but there were always flies in the ointment. Or cockroaches streaming down the walls. Teetering edges of danger, finances, mental issues, addiction, grief.

That’s just how it is. I’m old enough to see how many books of my past are over. There is no going back. For the first time in a long time, however, I do feel hopeful and optimistic about 2023.

“2023, the year of me.”

“2023, l’annee de moi.”

It’s not like anyone else is around. Finally getting back on my feet physically and back to who and what I was before I made the horrible mistake of opening a dating app. Those are goals. Writing again, even though this maudlin pathetic spew is….awkward.

To show emotion is show vulnerability, weakness. Makes one open to attack. You don’t want to know how I learned that, and I don’t want to remember.

The present is safe in the dark with cats about. The past I lay down in type to lay those burdens down as well. Now I don’t have to remember. I wrote it down somewhere and may have shown in to some millions of strangers as that is what I do. Writing gives me a future of projects to look fowards to. A purpose. Nothing else has mattered more.

New year. Newly reformatted brain. Might as well dress like a lost Rolling Stone groupie that got caught in a time vortex, just for funsies.

That 70s glitter rock aesthetic pretty much works with the I’m chronically ill, possibly contagious, and/or dying slowly. Which is, in fact, true. I can’t pull off sweet old lady who bakes pies anymore, tho that is also age appropriate.

Nothing says I don’t get out much like a large empty driveway heaping with unshovelled snow. Some person on Nextdoor has a big issue with unshovelled driveways, but that is absolutely beyond my physical capacity as a Long COVID post coma 5’4″ single chick.

And nothing says “single chick,” like a wedding ring on each hand for each ex wife. The first RIP. The second doing hard time.

Last week when I had some sort of fever bug, I prayed to stay alive until my nine year sobriety date. That’s a big fucking deal for me. Say what you will about Cali Sober. Or taking life saving psychiatric medication. I’ll not say what I was addicted to along with alcohol nine years ago. Read my books instead.

My sobriety date is January 27th, 2014. Most of the last decade was incredible, keys to a kingdom and productivity. We’ll just shove to the side the last few years I want to forget very much. In which I did not use. But another used me. An expert con artist.

La esposa malisima gave me COVID right when she was BFFs with an ER nurse, who would of course have access to all sort of the most deadly disease cultures. I didn’t die, but the part of me that could ever love or trust again did, along with multiple body functionalities.

How am I supposed to not be bitter? Come on.

Be glad you’re not on a date with me listening to this crap, I swore I wouldn’t do that to anyone. I don’t think that sort of thing is even possible anymore.

Sharing air can be deadly. Emotions? Oh hell no. 

Words on screens and page are all.

This five am dawn I am merrily typing away in the dark. Trying an experiment. Dressing up nicely to do the same stuff I used to do in identical black smocks. In the recovery post brain damage, I really couldn’t figure out clothing beyond the extremely simple. Put sack over head. Arms go there. There are pockets. All set!

I probably looked like I was in nun or in a cult for last year. Define difference. Either were great cover for don’t talk to me, I haven’t remastered language. I spent that year in complete isolation. Not by choice but circumstance. All I remembered of humans was from my ex wife. Danger. Avoid like the Plague.

I awoke from my three week absence, body having devoured all muscle and fat to stay alive, the house has been broken into, two cats were gone and the body, my body bore evidence of brutal sexual assault.

I know enough about men that pretty much any stranger would stick their dick in a comatose  corpse. Expecting to get away with it.

Sticking your dick in a corpse is disease time. Obviously. Whoever did that caught both my herpes (the Interpol strain), HPV, and anything else I don’t know I have. Good job, cowboys. This pussy does bite back, even when the brain is out for an exceedingly long lunch.

From that experience, I learned my neighbors would rather rape me bloody and leave me to die then help me get medical care. Or food. It…really changed how the outside world looked after that.

Without the gracious intervention of a 10,000 year old demon and other vengeful spirits, I woukd not have awoken to to this horrid scene and had the strength of will or drive to fully  return to the land of the living.

I don’t know how I knew to eat coconut oil first, then water, slowly working my way up through a liquid diet until I could handle solid food. I remember very little else from that traumatic period. Except enhanced language learning skills were active, yet knowing who I was and whose lovely house and bed I was in took a while.

Traditional medical care was out of the question. That’s the fast route down the death chute for someone with my profile and disabilities. Guaranteed more COVIDs, and the known triage or decanting procedures. Euphemisms for euthenasia. I wanted to live again. As I did before. In this house. Before the marriage and the troubles. I wanted my real life back. So I self rehabbed. As best I could.

To this day I have not had a relationship with a human being again, or done quite a few other things I remember fondly from the before times. The very muscles I use to type took a long time to build back. Enough that I can do this at all. Video games are good for a few things.

Like becoming addicted to them. It pained me deeply that I could only very few things. Clutching this iPad for dear life. Hobbling about with a cane, mask and sunglasses. Light sensitivity is a Long COVID thing. Compound waking up from a nap light adjustment with waking up from three weeks of oblivion.

I liked it better there. I still remember the dreams I was having.

But having fought so hard to get back online to who I am and what I’m doing? I’m damn determined to stay on this corporeal plane. Many have tried to kill me, all have failed. Don’t be stupid.

I was all enthusiastic about posting whatever, whenever, when I realized that’s a road to ruin I’ve tread far too many times on other platforms. Ticktok is the worst I’ve yet pulled.

Listening to my Spotify Wrapped 2022. Oh perfect, Fantine’s death aria.

I keep checking to see if the Goat Blood Store is open yet. By that I mean a local Mexican restaurant that made me fall in love with Birria. Straining the broth and drinking it first, as a restorative, has had remarkable effects in fixing nutruitional deficits left by the coma. Or that dasteredly full moon blood loss.

Today I am feverish and shaky. There is never a day without a symptom. Or several. I picture a square grid in 3-D with psychological on one axis and physical on the other. As symptoms rotate unpredictably, into each little box in the grid is how I feel mentally and physically at that given moment. Next 3-4 hours, then it shifts.

Understandable it’s completely impossible to plan anything in person, social or otherwise. I don’t even have friends in Reno. My local extended family stopped inviting me for holidays a few years ago.

So perhaps you can understand the thirst to soliloquize at y’all besties. Alexa, the walls and the cats have heard enough.

In a few minutes the fountain of goat blood will open through Doordash. I reconsider. A large cup of Bisque subdued my thirst. Drowsy now. Doordash delights will be there another time.

Sure, the feverish trembling wraith bit might sound goth if you’re 14. Well, it  feels like shit and so do I. I’m lying in bed considering another swig of cough syrup. Rewatching AHS: 1984. Again. As I did yesterday.

I read online about new COVID variants with names like Kraken, XXB 1.2, XXB 1.5.

Is that what this fever and depressive hence goes the downward spiral feeling is? Or is it just Thursday? Does it even mattter? I die or I don’t. Until I do.

As for coming back from the dead, one of October 2021’s coma theories? I will save that discussion for a later time. Once that door is opened…. so many unknowns I realize I know nothing.

I’m waiting on a home COVID test. Feels like the green mile. More like five minutes. The light hurts my eyes. The test is negative. It’s six months expired.

Three days of sleep and I’m back to… whatever this is.