As you may or may not already know, my friends Tucker and Nils are making a film full of filthy adventures. I've read the script, and though I'm clearly a fan, I have to say it was completely hilarious, and if you don't go see the movie, you're a masochist.

I'm supposed to be making a cameo appearance within the backdrop of a scene. This cameo involved me posing passed out on a couch with an empty bottle of Tequila in my hand. I'm not much of an actress, but something about that character seemed familiar to me. Something in me said, "I understand that girl. I can get inside her. I see her motivations." Piece o' cake.

Except, tonight, Tucker calls me and says, "We have to give you a line. It doesn't make sense if we don't."

Wha...what? I have to say a line? In a movie? In front of a camera? Wha...what?

I don't even let Aunt Judy take my picture at the labor day picnic. I run away or grab the camera like Sean Penn. I nearly had to walk a red carpet once. I planned to run it, until I found a rear entrance. I am woefully unqualified to say a line in a movie, even if it is a simple two word retort.

I've found myself wandering around my humble abode all evening saying the line. Word 1, word 2. Over and over. It's just two words. It's not a whole line, like: "These pretzels are makin' me thirsty," or anything.

...it is divine.

Last night I met an ex-physicist with whom I had a rational and wonderful conversation about Decartian dualism, versus emergent materialism--he sides with materialism--before he pulled out a computer chip with English numerals on the side of it and told me he found it on an alien spaceship.

"They have clock radios on alien spaceships?"
"No, no. This is from an alien device called an Annosyniciser."
"What's it do?"
"It emits love."
"Well that sounds like a wonderful machine."
"Oh it is. A major advancement."

...by Paulo Coelho:

Now, according to the Tradition, a new war will begin. And even more sophisticated war, survived by no one--because it is through its battles that man's growth will be completed. We will see the two armies--on one side, those who still believe in the human race, and know that our next step involves the growth of individual gifts. On the other side will be those who deny the future. Those who believe that life has a material ending, and--unfortunately--those who, although they have faith, believe that they discovered the path to enlightenment, and want the others to follow it with them.

For the planet Earth, that day is still a long way off. But for each of us, that day can be tomorrow. One has only to accept a simple fact: Love--of God and of others--shows us the way. Our defects, our dangerous depths, our suppressed hatreds, our moments of weakness and desperation--all are unimportant. If what we want to do is heal ourselves first, so that we can go in search of our dreams, we will never reach paradise. If, on the other hand, we accept all that is wrong about us--and despite it, believe that we are deserving of a happy life--then we will have thrown open an immense window that will allow Love to enter. Little by little, our defects will disappear, because one who is happy can look at the world only with love--the force that regenerates everything that exists in the Universe.

I mean, if you don't like to hear about them, then there's no point sticking around these parts.

This is my place to spit feelings, not anecdotes, or wisdom, or "the way," or even any kind of decent technical writing that proves a point, or is based in fact/forensics/reality--I'm so not grounded in any of that. This is a just a journal. It's therapy. It's a wall I toss the spaghetti of my soul upon, to see if maybe it's done yet. Cheesy, I know.

So, again: This place is for the feelings. Nothing more. That's why I started it; that's why I still write in it. I have a real hard time feeling the overabundance of emotions I get rising up, like, every twenty seconds--BAM!

Today, we have: Tired. Hurt. Used. Stupid (not really a feeling, is it?) I feel all sorts of used, though--and since I'm feeling used, I'll use a way over-used metaphor to describe the intensity of the usury because the "spaghetti of my soul" wasn't lame enough--I feel like Sisyphus, you know? That mythical dude who spent eternity pushing a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down? 'Cept the boulder is my loved ones, all my ex boyfriends, the majority of my friends, pretty much every personal relationship I've ever had compacted into one extremely heavy, selfish, worthless boulder that berates and bitches endlessly to be rolled up a mountain, and subsequently rewards all my efforts by rolling the fuck away, leaving me tired, hurt, used and lonely, though I was most assuredly alone the whole time, whether I was aware of it or not.

I now know why some people become hermits and recluses. Fuck that boulder.

But what I feel the most is the term that's not actually an emotion: Stupid. I feel really fucking stupid. How do you not know you're rolling a boulder? How do you not know it's worthless? How do you get angry at anyone else, when it was you who put one foot in front of the other and ended up here? Complex stuff, you know.

So those are some of the feelings thingys. I haven't actually been rolling a physical boulder around, though I did drop a world-class deuce this morning.

Twenty years. When you're thirty-one, that seems like an eternity.

I just walked up the street from my bungalow with my dog to get a bottle of wine at 2pm, not because I wanted to have a glass or two with dinner, but because sobriety was not for me today, and now I'm drinking the whole thing, sans-glass with one of those little bags of lays potato chips mom used to put in my lunch bag. You know, the kind from the supersnack pack? I used to eat those things, and mom would say, "Jeez, Eerin...those greasy chips are the reason you've got acne." No, my greasy skin was reason my face used to be such a mess, and it's currently the reason why I get carded every time I try to buy a bottle of wine. I pass for twenty if the light is right and my cheeks are all puffy due to some shutdown in my thyroid gland. "Can I see your ID, please," the clerk asked suspiciously just an hour or so ago. I've got one!, she thought. 1977? As my dog would say, "Blurrfft?"

[Aside: It must be said, I bought a cheddar cheese stick and a bottle of wine and a snackpack bag of potato chips. Maxie is quite fond of cheese. Also, I'm going to pre-apologize for any sort of descent into madness this entry might take. I'm drinking a whole bottle of wine, which is like two bottles of liquor for you folk with good livers. It might get crazy. I don't really know.]

And then I think back to twenty, when I did indeed try to buy liquor just like twenty-somethings do, and had enough red lipstick on, and seductive enough a facial expression, and low cut enough a top to convince the mullet-headed, toothless boy at Lakewood liquors to sell me booze. God, I felt so cool. I felt self-possessed and adult, a full-grown human being, no...a woman. I took my booze to a party, where I sipped it like a woman (never been a fan of the keg). I chatted up college boys. We discussed adult things while some cornfed boy played Meatloaf's "Bat out of Hell" on a "boombox" (a primitive device primitive people one played music upon). "I'm joining the Peace Corps, soon," I said, self-importantly. "I hope to be stationed in Africa," I said, like the Peace Corps was going to take me with all my mental problems. But so grown up, I was. Really, really formulated into a self-possessed being.

And at twenty years of age, I was as grown up as the disease I've had all my life, for it was not precisely but approximately twenty years ago I came down with a case of depression that greets me each morning, "Hi there, fuckface! Wanna do things all day while I tell you how much you suck?" Every morning, for twenty years. It's our anniversary, and you could say my depression, my wife, is a full-grown woman, a clingy one I'm plain fucking tired of living with, a fucking bitch, frankly, and you can take her and kill her and eat her if you want. Where's a creepy Czech when I need one? Perhaps this is a brutal linkage. That poor boy. Honestly, I think it's mere physical manifestation of the sort of immaterial consumption of the soul that happens between mother and son...or daughter. We fucking eat each other. Why not cannibalism? It's the physical manifestation of the emotional act.

In honor of our twenty-year anniversary (it is getting rather difficult to type, no shit), I decided I was going to visit a psychiatrist.

Last time I went to a psychiatrist, a specialist in bipolar, he told me emphatically "You have bipolar axis I," and tried to put me on mood stabilizers I didn't need, because I had a thyroid problem, and my day was like: 2, 10!, 1, 10!, 2, 10! Much due to the thumping and bumping of the thyroid, you know? The rest, he didn't care about, and in "the rest" was the whole reason I was upset and had a painful and pretty debilitating personality disorder it took me another year of private research to self diagnose. It's always been a self-diagnosis, so I've never taken it too seriously (you're so not supposed to do that). To add, it's a recently discovered PD, and there are, like, twelve psychiatrists that agree it exists. And they're fucking right. Because here I am, I have this, and I exist.

So I'm not bipolar, fuck him! And I went five years without a clinician tending to my brain because he fucking sucked so much. A fancy psychiatrist from New York City recently moved to Hippieville and set up office in her unbelievably luxe desert home, a psychiatrist whose papers I read and greatly respect. I rode my bike out to see her (102 degrees, yuck) to celebrate my twenty years of depression, and also because she's one of the smart brain doctors, one of the ones I've been watching, researching, who seems to understand. I sat before her and spilled everything, my whole life story. The goods. I wanted so badly for her to be the one who said, "You're right about how you feel, and everyone who tells you to 'shut the hell up' is wrong." I had no idea what kind of affect my story would have on her. I've always been told I bitched about nothing. I've been told I am whiny. I've been told I'm self indulgent. I've always thought differently, but nobody has ever confirmed.

"So that's about it," I said, and she looked as if she was going to puke. She got up, went over to her desk, and pulled out a rate card. She crossed off something on the card, and then handed it to me, saying, "I cannot believe you're still alive." She cut her rate by 75% so I could keep seeing her as much as possible.

"Do you think my self diagnosis is correct?" I asked her.
"I think you know more about family dynamics than ninety nine percent of family therapists."

So there it is. Fuck all you haters. I'm genius...

...and yet, still walking up to the liquor store at 2pm to get a bottle of wine and say no to today, I just can't do today.

It's twenty years now. Last time I rose carefree into the world, Billy Ocean's "Get out of my dreams, get into my car" was playing on my boombox. I guess I'm prayin' for the end of time. What a sick partnership I've entered into, and yet what an amazing time we live in, that doctors as distinguished as this are dedicated enough to cut their rate by hundreds of dollars just to listen to what a little girl from Buffalo thinks about mental illness. It's really something. I like this lady.

I'm pretty much trashed. I'm gonna wander uptown and hit on some hippies. Nice chatting with you.

My sister reminded me of something I should have written into the story, but forgot about (there's so very much to write). It makes an entertaining postscript:

The teacher dismissed for, sued for and found guilty of sexual harassment...what happened to him? Was he:

A) Run out of town by an angry mob of pitchfork-wielding fathers?
B) Socially ostracized into a cabin in the woods, never to be heard from again?
C) None of the above.

The answer is C. He reinvented himself as a local financial planner.

'Who are his clients?' you might ask. 'Who would be immoral enough to give their ducats to a pedophile?' Teachers from Jamestown, New York, of course. Not all of them, but last I heard, the bulk of his client roster is made up of Jamestown teachers who go to him with their savings to plan for retirement.

So you're an educator, and it is your job to work with children, and you buddy buddy up to a man who was found guilty in a court of law for harassing an underage girl--a trial at which once-humiliated, still-enraged girls volunteered to give testimony; YOUR FORMER STUDENTS--and you give that man your business so that he may continue to hang like an Ascaris worm from the bowels of Jamestown education by profiting off your earnings, conflict of interest business which makes you morally complicit in the abuse of youngsters...

...do you give a flying fuck about children? If not, why are you working with them? You're creepy, that's why, and somebody ought to fucking fire your ass.

I'm certain all sorts of "What the fucks" will come to me later. For now, I'm tired of talking about the place. Who wants to remember they grew up in a town where "come suck my dick in the practice room" is okay, but a lesbian principal isn't?

I got a lot of really nice comments about the story, which are always great to get, but I must say I was especially honored to get the compliment that came to me from a regular poster on our company messageboard:

Great Work

Wow...

So I always figured you probably knew my sisters; but certainly wouldn't have guessed you were with them the day of.

I've been waiting a long time for your exposition of Jamestown. That was really insightful, poignant and disturbingly accurate. Very well done, many thanks for taking the time to do that so well.

Best of luck in hippytown; and to your father's well-being after his bout with pneumonia.

-Chris Wilson

If Kathy Wilson's son thinks you did a decent job writing about the grand quirk that is Jamestown, then you most certainly did.