PS--Aint that an interesting post? True, though.

Every now and then, I get an email like this, and I just think...good lord, what is this person smoking?

Hey Bunny,

I just stumbled across your blog for the first time, and damn girl you must've spent your life looking for something: answers, purpose, a hiadus from "life"; regretfully, only to be eaten by one asshole only to be shit out of another. I can empathize only a few of your issues, mainly the alcohol and drug abuse. Yes, they numb'ed out all the loud mouth bitches tellin me what to do with my life, as well as the inner voice telling me im worthless. I started see'ing a shrink who would "console" (her word) "macabre" being mine. Realizing my life isn't worth living, and that I'll never regain the mental wit I had once had I resorted to the only thing my hackneyed self could do. Find the only place on earth where malignant brain tumors had been eradicated, AIDS diminished, Multiple Sclerosis cured; where mentally unstable people belong. Anyways, look up Abadiania, Brazil and check out whats so amazing about this place. I never believed in this shit, and still don'. All I can say is that after a two week visit, I'm back in the U.S chillen here free from The Captains' allure, and incredulously devoid of any drug paraphernalia. Believe it or not you can still get the answers and help you've been searching for, you'll even be able to settle down and lead a normal 30yrold female life... Anyways just check it out, it'll seem like bullshit but you can find sites with evidence that His shit actually works. The truth of the matter is that with current medical and psycological breakthorughs you wont be able to get the help you need/deserve. The dude in Abadiana CAN for a fact fix your psychosis and any other problems you may have. I myself am incredulous at this post because for some reason i care about your well being (wtf?). Also i feel like this is your only chance to save yourself from a bitter end like death/rape in an alleyway puddle of cat urine.

Dude's talking about "John of God." I don't need my amazing psychiatrist, I need to go to Brazil and pay 1500 bucks to have an "entity" stick it's fingers up my nose. Do yourself a favor, visit the site and feel really fuckin' normal for a tad.

There's not a lot between me and my upstairs neighbors, and if I can hear the pitter-patter of their little Chihuahua's claws on their hard wood floors, then they surely--at three in the morning--heard this jagoff yell, "I'm fucking your ass."

To his credit, it was a true statement, that he was having sex with my ass. It was also true to our situation about thirty seconds prior--the situation of the various parts of him that were in the various crevices of me--when he yelled, "My finger is in your ass!" Indeed, his finger was in my ass. His thumb, I guessed. I don't know. You can't really see what's going in and out of your ass on your hands and knees. You have to make a guess, or sleep with a douche like this, who will tell you exactly what's in your ass. Shortly after, when he yelled, "I can feel my finger in your ass on my dick!" I imagined it was because he could probably feel his finger or thumb through my ass on his dick.

But why yell these things out, really? Is it necessary? No, and it's not sexy, either.

To begin this entry, I must explain that I'm balls deep in recovery right now, and I find it absolutely exhausting. Every day is the same bullshit: trying to feel, trying not to let anger rule me, trying to detach from all the things that keep me...me. I can't drink or do drugs. I have to abstain from them, and I'm doing only sort of okay at that, and while I'm abstaining from those vices, I've got to figure out how to manage quitting sex, too. I can't do that. I'm too horny. Sex will have to be the vice I get around to quitting once I've figured out how to abstain from the rest of the nonsense. Perhaps I'll procrastinate on that forever. I am a very sexual person. That's why they call me Bunny, for christ's sake. I'm always humping.

So while I'm procrastinating about sex and allowing myself to have it, I'm also having a difficult time finding it. It's hard to get a good lay in a town where everyone's batshit, lives-in-the-woods crazy or over sixty. There are three attractive single guys in town who bathe, and I've done two of them already.

The first of them went missing, which was not fun. I was sort of into him, but he stood me up and it was a rather embarrassing outcome, not because he did it while I was in public sitting by myself over a glass of wine and a bread basket, waiting for him to show while everybody in town looked at me piteously, but because of who he is, which is a slacker. He does some sort of construction job for a living, can't keep a conversation going, has no college education, is divorced or separated with a kid and isn't particularly good looking. I've never had great taste in guys, but even for me, it was a stretch. He had nice eyes--a cuteness, a quirkiness--and there was something really naughty about him. He had a devious smile. He was a troublemaker; I like that.

He ended up being very good in bed, and I rather enjoyed being with him. Not just sleeping with him, but being around him too, in his presence. I don't know if my being "into" him was desperation so much as a clicking, or a chemistry. Some people...well, you really just ought to have sex with them. It's the right thing to do. You have compatible pheromones. It wouldn't be appropriate to maintain the distance between, according to the rules of nature.

But then he went poof, so what can I say but whatever?

After him came a few trysts with some lesbians. One on vacation with her girlfriends. A girl from New Zealand I wasn't the least bit attracted to. She was very pretty, but I wasn't into her, and I had sex with her anyway, for a reason I'll get to in a bit. It was the wrong and selfish thing to do, and I regret it, because it's not like you can have sex with someone without them figuring out you're apathetic about the act mid-act, and you're faking the moans and the pleasure, and if you do fake it, isn't it irresponsible? You can't just say, in passing, that you entered another body because there was just something interesting about her soft hair and pink lips, and the way girls are so very pretty. That's part of why I did it, though. They are so pretty. They're like cupcakes. Don't you want to eat a cupcake? It's not the most satisfying of meals, but so attractive, pink, pretty, sweet. You have to bite it, you know?

After that was a Mexican girl with short blonde hair and amazing breasts. Bulbous. They defied gravity, too big to be so firm. I fucked her on her boyfriend's pergo flooring while he jerked off on the couch. Here's a tip: don't fuck on pergo flooring. My elbows and knees were void of skin when I was done. I was a real mess.

After the Mexican girl was the guy who works the bar at the Italian restaurant down the street.

Now, this guy is right up my alley: aggressive as hell, bald (too much testosterone) and brutal in bed. He threw me face first up against a building and violated me, and dammit, that sort of aggression makes me happy in my special areas, fills me with a certain warm feeling of comfort and of coming home. Say you were a normal person, and you slept with this bald guy--it would be disturbing. But I'm not normal. For me, there was a sort of drifting back, like revisiting a lover long gone, one who broke your heart but still lingers in your memory, and for the life of you, you cannot forget him, though "him" is not really a man; its the pain itself. I find myself so unable to dissociate pain from pleasure, and though I've really tried to get the two going separately, this dipshit really pressed my buttons, and I can't seem to stop myself from thinking about him, the parts of him and how well he chokes while fucking--just the right amount of pressure so that it hurts but doesn't hurt too much and doesn't put you out. It's good for me. I know...I know...

I'm actively working to avoid him and all the others like him. I feel as if, with enough work, I can make a fissure there, and force it to stick. He's the past and the past was a shitshow. I don't want more of the past. Men who live here, they're the past. They're like me: fucked in the head. This seems to be the place you go to escape whatever abusive situation you were either in, or caused. These people are polarized. Dazed. They drug and drink or they're straight edge, and everyone has a dogma that's either completely out of touch with reality or unreasonably close-minded. It's a place for contrarians, people who who are different for the sake of being different, whether its reasonable or based on biases or no, and sometimes I'm disturbed I fit in here so well. God, what does that say about me, that I've entrenched myself in a little squirrel hole filled with loops and managed to blend in?

So, I decided after baldy to stick to vacationers to get my kicks. I didn't feel I needed to invite into my life the drama of the men who lived here, the baggage, the projection of so many succubae that weren't me onto me, evil she-ghosts I've got nothing to do with and probably don't even resemble much.

I fell into a bachelor party Thursday night with the intention of picking off the best man. I didn't know why him. Same with the girl from New Zealand, there wasn't much attraction, but my reasoning for having sex right now is this: I guess I feel, that if someone doesn't touch me, put their hands on me and define the limits of my body, the places where my skin ends and the rest of the world begins, then I don't exist at all. I can't begin to tell you how disconcerting that feeling that you're not real is. Fucking helps.

The bachelor party chose a bar, and we went to it, and naturally, the bar they chose was the Italian restaurant where the bald guy works. The universe, it seems, is merciless with its tests of our fortitude. I got plastered on bourbon, tried to maintain focus on the best man, because, really, he was the best man for me, though my body didn't want him at all. I figured I could force my body into it, like I could force a fissure. He ran his hands up and down my legs, saying they were soft, pulling my knee into his crotch and asking me if I felt how hard his penis was. I did. He was a talker, of course. I didn't need all the talk. Wouldn't it have been sexier to pull a girl's knee to your penis while talking about politics or some random shit, than to narrate the act? I felt like the bald guy would've known that.

This scenario was frustrating. I cannot tell you a single thing about the way the best man looked. I simply did not care. I wanted to have sex, and badly, but not with him. With the guy who sure to choke me, which I knew was wrong for me and a step back toward the shitshow, but I couldn't stop myself from wanting it, either. It was instinctual.

Sex is something, that when wrapped around and through violence enough, you'll have a bitch of a time unraveling the mess to its pure state and form again.

"Can you feel my penis? It's really hard." Yes, it was hard. It was, indeed, erect. There really wasn't a need to discuss it. "Do you want to fuck me? You're going to fuck me, aren't you?" It got to the point where I was ready to walk out and go home.

You see, there's this interesting thing happening to me, lately. Sometimes I find myself in a situation like this, where there's drama, and there's the destructive thing I'm supposed to do, faithfully--according to training and history--I ought to fall right in and end me, and then there's the overly moral voice opposing it critically, and instead of going with either voice, something in me rises up, detached and unemotional about it all and it says, "Meh. Go get a taco and watch some Arrested Development." That's the new voice, the middle ground voice. The voice that prefers solitude to violence, and doesn't really give a crap about anything, about drugs, sex or alcohol. It's a voice of reason. I've never had that voice before, and its still sort of weak in me, so while I heard it, and it's musings about tacos and Arrested Development, I went to bed with the best man anyway, and it happened to be one of the worst lays of my life. He was bumbling and awkward. He kissed with his teeth, and the talking didn't stop after we left the bar. He narrated everything, loudly. "Oh you're putting a condom on me. Now you're riding my dick. You're riding my dick. I'm feeling your tits. You're fucking me. Are you gonna cum? Huh? Are you coming?" I had to put my hand over his mouth to muster an orgasm, and I'm almost positive a taco and some Arrested Development would have been the better ending to my night. I drove him back to his hotel and he sat in my car, with lovely intent, telling me something about how I should really follow my dreams, a thing I don't have and never have had a problem doing. I wanted to tell him to dream big about getting the fuck out of my car and then go for it, chase that dream the fuck away from me, I'm tired.

On the way back to my house, 4am or so, I stopped at a convenience store for some Gatorade. An Estonian man with a black guitar was sitting on a bench outside, strumming and singing. He shouted something at me. He was bald and very pretty. Blue eyes, big muscles; cute smile. "You beautiful," he yelled. "You beautiful girl." I smiled, thanked him and went inside to buy my Gatorade. He followed me in and introduced himself as "Maximus Fedor Emelianenko," beating his chest somewhat hilariously while doing it.

"Come here and listen," he said, pulling me from the register to an open laptop perched in the corner, atop a stack of Sierra Mist. He put big black headphones--the leather-covered foam kind with the cord that spirals--on my head. Russian hip hop came through them. It was mellow and put me in a good mood, though I hadn't a clue about what was being said. The language sounded smooth and velvety. His computer began displaying a slide show of photographs, brilliantly taken. African men with great white beards in direct sunlight, against teal paint weathering off the wall of a taco stand, almost macro, so that every wire of fur on their faces had a story to tell. "You take these?" I asked. He nodded, yes, and smiled. I watched and listened, and Maximus Fedor Emelianenko began to knead my hip in a very telling way. "What are you doing tonight?"

It wasn't night. The sun was about to rise. I reeked of latex already, and I wasn't sure how I'd feel about myself tomorrow if Maximus Fedor Emelianenko and I did anything Sapphic after I'd done so many not very enjoyable Sapphic things with the best man for no reason. Could I really be that girl? A part of me was certain I could, the same part that wants the bald guy who works at the Italian restaurant. It said, "Go for it. He's incredible." The other part--the very judgemental, very critical part--said, "Are-you-crazy-it's-four-o'clock-he'll-prolly-take-you-to-his-car-and-rape-you-and-leave-you-bleeding-in-a-ditch-you-stupid-bitch!"

I decided I didn't want to listen to either of those voices. Instead, I gave Maximus Fedor Emelianenko a big hug, and told him he was very talented. Then I went home with my Gatorade to watch some Arrested Development. While the sun rose, I lay in my very soft bed, under my very soft covers and hugged my own body, for some reason. Probably because waiting for others to do it for you, when it is needed so badly, is a recipe for disaster.

The cult that gathered on my front lawn, attributes some sort of magical value to the quartz crystal. A good magical value, not a bad one like that horrific puppet movie, A Dark Crystal, with the evil purple rock that sucked the life forces from little Gelflings and concentrated them into juices those vain, eagle-beaked monsters then drank to maintain youthful glow in their beak areas. That fucking movie. Oh, that movie ruined my dreams for two years. I couldn't look at birds of prey without flinching for half a decade, though I think my reaction to the movie was a severe one, since my family had our very own life-force-robbing crystal in the home I grew up in--not dark...blonde. It was called "Mom," and should you be strapped down and forced to look at and listen to its commonly brutal emanations, you'd suffer the same sort of depletion in your soul as the little Gelfling.

But I tangent. The cult, they wear special hats made out of copper wire, in the shape of a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid, hangs a little white crystal, which hovers over their brain, about two or three inches from their scalp. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it is supposed to infuse their brain with some of the magic energy in the crystal. Perhaps it is meant to keep aliens or "big brother" from looking into their heads. I do not know. Should I ever know that answer, I promise to share it with you.

They were in my front yard the other day, a whole gaggle of them, in their pyramid hats. But these hats were not the regular pyramid hats. These hats were modified to include chin straps, so these must have been the extreme sport pyramid hats, or something: the brain-infusing, crystal headwear for the cultist on the go.

Two of the pyramid people had divining rods in their hands, those sticks commonly used by those who believe in folklore to find ground water. They were shuffling around in large, overly-strappy leather sandals and white socks, slowly, with the pointy section of the stick laid out parallel to the dirt of my driveway, periodically calling out to each other, "I feel a vibration over here, Harvey. Yes, there is an energy here." Whenever they'd find an energy, a third pyramid person--Harvey--would come over and pull out a little pendulum necklace, which would be held in the area of the energy and would spin clockwise or counterclockwise. One of those "wises" meant "yes." One meant "no." I'm not sure which was which, and I didn't think to ask.

So, apparently--according to the crystal pyramid people--there's a portal to another universe in my front yard. My friend, Brian, thinks that portal is my crotch, and considering every girl I sleep with lately disappears into thin air right afterward, I think he might be right.

I think you're a brilliant and intensely emotionally evocative writer. And a loving and touching woman. And a touch crazy, but it's only a touch and most of the time it's under control. Mild schizophrenia I suppose, which probably has some name or another.

You can and do use it creatively, as have many others. At this stage, a year or so past thirty, it's unlikely to progress and may regress.

Go bunny!

~Doug

But I don't have Schizophrenia. I'm not schizophrenic, schizoaffective or schizotypal. I'm not schizo anything; my psychiatrist says so. I do have problems, but I'm a normal neurotic, just like everyone else. I realize that may be a discomforting thing to read.

I also realize thought insertion/removal is a symptom of psychosis, I really do, and I don't have any other explanation for the phenomenon, which is an unreliable and untestable phenomenon, I know, but it is what it is, and I'm not going to pretend I don't see the world through the only frame of reference with which I'm able to see the world. At best, that's exhausting. At worst, that's a lie, and I'm not really into that sort of thing.

Furthermore, much like Science and Math, I do not have explanations for synchronicities/patterns, ubiquitous prophetic dreams, gut instincts, deja vu's, etc. That's a puzzle for our children's children to solve. Unlike many Scientists and Mathematicians, I'm a-okay with accepting for the time being that I do not know everything about, nor am I in complete control of the world. Only a nutbar would believe that.

I mean, come on guys.

Do you really think, that if I was schizophrenic, and my brain could invent all sorts of fantastical machinations with which to sync my conflicting inner and outer realities, I wouldn't invent my own X-ray vision so I could see naked bodies through clothing? Be serious. I would be "She Lube" from the "Planet Rimjob" in the "Deez-nuts" galaxy, and I'd have special X-ray visions and a magical vagina I'd use to smother my greatest enemies.

That's a funny joke, I think. I laugh at that all the time. I laughed when I said it to my therapist.

My therapist groaned. She asked, "Don't you feel something--sadness, anger, anything--when you say something like that? You know that's you, right? Not some character you're writing."

"Uh..." She stumps me.

I don't. I don't feel anything when I talk about that stuff. It's a chronological order of idiotic actions, shitty interpersonal relations and self mutilation. That's my life, I guess. I don't remember what it felt like. I don't usually feel. I just get really fucking angry every ten minutes or so.

How many emotions do you have? There's a lot, or so I've heard. I don't know what they feel like. Maybe in the abstract. I think I have two: "pissed" and "fine."

I don't get just a little pissed, though. I get Incredible Hulk mad and break shit. I broke my hand on a wall last month, like I'm some goddamned steroid case. I was ashamed of myself. What, am I a twelve year old boy?

Sometimes I wonder if that Rage Virus thingy from 28 Days Later is totally real, and I catch it breathing in bits of infected saliva when someone sneezes in line at the bank, because all of a sudden, in an instant, like BAM, I'm a fucking cunt and I want to kill someone. Not, like, rip their intestines out or anything, but definitely kill them, and really for no good reason.

But I think Danny Boyle got the concept wrong--he must have--because, from personal experience, the virus tends to mutate back into "fine" in like ten minutes or less, and then it goes away, and the only lasting negative affect of the infection is the notion that not ten minutes ago, I wanted to kill someone I didn't even know for no good reason. That person then usually reminds me, not physically, but spiritually, of either of my grandmothers, and then I'm met with undeniable evidence that there is no such thing as a Rage Virus. I am just homicidally angry about the shit family I grew up in.

Though, wouldn't it be nice if there was a Rage Virus you could blame all your problems on?

I don't remember being very aware of what my face looked like when I was growing up. I used to cover it up in an insane amount of makeup, and when the acne got bad, I switched to not looking in the mirror, which is a habit I still have. Along the way, somebody told me I have hazel eyes, and so that's what I always say I have.

So, I'm thinking, what's so damn wrong with looking in a mirror, you know? It seems to me, if you have a problem with your own corporeality, and it's so bad you avoid reflections of your body and face, isn't the next best course of action to just stand in front of a fucking mirror and get over it?

That's what I did today. It sucked, I must say, but I did learn a very interesting thing about myself: I do not have hazel eyes. They are not hazel at all. They're like that slate blue color baby's eyes are at a few weeks old with some bits of green in the middle.

I'm thirty two years, one month and eleven days old, and I just learned what color my eyes are.

I get emails all the time asking me, "Bunny, why are you crazy. Why are you so damn crazy?"

Imagine you're six. You're sleeping lightly--only halfsies in sleep--on a hot summer night, your synthetic, pink nightie just a bit twisted around your midsection, suggesting you've not been sleeping long. You never sleep well. The color of your eyes in family photos of your childhood are unnoticeable, so shrouded in purple the skin beneath them is. You look like the grim reaper.

A breeze blows through the open window of your bedroom. It catches the gauzy fabric of your curtains and billows them a bit, shakes your Snoopy lampshade. The movement is unsettling. Any movement in the night is unsettling. It always has been, since...well...since time started for you, and you don't know why, but you are always afraid at night. What's more, no one believes you have a reason to be. You hear things you are told you didn't hear. You see things you are told you did not see, and the air of the world is full, solid, weighted with uneasy matter that no one else can see.

And then someone is pulling on your toes and tickling the bottoms of your feet. You snap to from whatever halfsies sleep you were experiencing and lift your head, but there's no one at the bottom of the bed. Just a few weird shapes and swirls. Something looks like an eye, and it winks at you. There's whispering and laughs. Sweat pours out through every pore on your body especially the wrinkled skin between your heels and your toes.

You spend the remainder of the night tossing and turning between your parents' annoyed torsos. "We've got to do something about this," says daddy. He sighs his displeasure with you. He is mad. It hurts when dad is mad at you, but you can't seem to stop seeing, hearing feeling things that are not there.

A thought dawns on you. Could you be? Are you? Are you are crazy?

Now, imagine you are seven. You are slumbering with your family along the St. Lawrence river in an old canvas camper your father has renovated. It is hot and summer again. No covers. Your sister sleeps next to you, deeply, snorting air through the tiny passage in her deviated nose. The campground is mostly quiet. There are the sounds of the barges blowing their great horns, some crackling/burning wood, and that crunch noise flip-flops on gravel make when campers head past to the community bathroom for a late night pee. Black shapes pass from one side of the canvas to the other: their shadows cast.

The family sleeps, but you do not. You never sleep well.

There is a desperate whispering on the other side of the canvas. A man. There's no shadow, but his voice is quite clear in your ear, and he mutters things like, "How could she do this to me...how...I don't...how could this happen...why...how did this happen." You can almost feel his sadness through the canvas, the air, different dimensions and total suspension of disbelief. It is impossible, but now you feel so desperately sad, and you were not sad before.

"Daddy, there's a ghost!" you cry out. He rolls over to his side and rubs his eyes.
"What do you mean?"
"A ghost! There's a ghost out there!"

Daddy is quite used to his daughter claiming there are ghosts everywhere, and mustering patience to deal with her and her ghosts--yet again--and at such a late hour is a tough feat. He is silent for a moment, during which time, one of the great horns of the barges on the St. Lawrence blows again. It's a haunting enough sound to explain the whole "ghost thing."

"Oh, honey, that's just a barge."
"No! No, it's a man. It's a ghost. He's right there; can't you hear him?"
"Honey...it's just a horn from a barge. It's okay. You're going to be fine."

And I was not fine. I had not been fine for some time, or to be honest, not any time I could remember. I was walking fear. Swirling shapes and noises followed me everywhere, even into my dreams, and I was often so terrified of being alone that there were nights I purposely wet the bed so that I'd have a reason to crawl into bed with mom and dad. I pissed myself so I wouldn't have be alone. I was not fine at all, and almost certain I was crazy.

"Just go to sleep. You'll be fine. You're fine," said my father, rolling onto his back, ignoring me again. The man continued his whispering on the other side of the canvas, and I couldn't lie back and pretend he wasn't there. I was not fine.

"I most certainly am not!"

Now.

Imagine you're 27. You sit next to your boyfriend and watch Deadwood on HBO, and somehow within the chunk of space that separates you from Ian McShane's face, a woman materializes. She has short blond hair and a neat appearance. She wears a pink and taupe sweater, the details of which you can clearly see. There's no fuzziness anymore. The bits of eyes and hands and noses that used to float around a few feet or so from your ceiling in your childhood bedroom are now very organized, very human-like busts and torsos, and they all seem to want something. They tell you what they want, because they can talk now, too. Great. Pushy, talky ghost torsos.

For some time now, you've been praying to various deities before bedtime--any of them that will listen--so you can get some sleep. You close your eyes and vigorously pray, "Dear Jesus, I know I haven't been your biggest fan, but that's more to do with the shitty people who follow your teachings than you, and anyway, can you please, please, please make a magical white bubble around me while I sleep, an impervious one, because I can't have dead people knocking on my skull all night. Xoxo, Erin." You're not one to praise Jesus, but this seems to keep the torsos away. You seem to be sleeping better. You can ignore whatever crazy is coming to you.

But the blond lady, she will not be ignored. She's rather pushy, actually. You tell her to go away. She says she won't, and that you have to tell your boyfriend something. A message.

No, you insist, and tilt your head to the right a bit so you can see Ian McShane snarl. Your boyfriend doesn't know you're crazy. He is a very rational person with a law degree, a materialist who thinks if you "can't see it, it doesn't exist."

She won't leave you alone. "Hello! I'm not going away!" she says. "He's in danger!" she says. "He's going to die!" she says.

And so you turn to your boyfriend and say, "Um...sweetie...did you used to know a blond woman...who died?"
"I don't know," he replies, his face all contorted. Quizzical.
"She says...er...she had blond hair and her name was Jane. She used to watch you when you were little."
"Jane? My godmother?" [The torso nods yes].
"Yes."
"What about her?"
"Well...and this is going to sound crazy, but...she's here, and she says I've got to take you to the hospital."
"What?"
"She's here. She says you're going to die if I don't take you to the hospital."
"I mean...what the..."

You get up and gather his shoes, and while you bend down to put them on his feet--he's not going to put them on himself--he asks sarcastically:

"You mean, you see dead people and my Godmother is one of them?"
"Yes."
"Okay then, Bunny, if that's Jane, ask her what she gave me to drink instead of apple juice that made me cry."
"She says vinegar."
"What?"
"Vinegar."
"Good guess."
"That's not a guess. Jane says we have to go to the hospital."
"But Bunny, Jane is dead."
"I agree."

You take your boyfriend to the hospital. He is admitted for emergency surgery. The doctors who perform the operation say, "He had maybe a day left to live."

Later that night you sleep unsoundly in a chair next to your boyfriend, and have a dream about Jane. She gives you a bowl of Doritos for some reason. She pets your head and says, "You did a good thing."

Now.

You're 30, living in Manhattan. Chinatown, to be specific. It's 3am, and raining. The evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table. You're drunk. You've been drunk for about a month, and because you're the only white person living in your neighborhood, and you're always drunk, it seems as if you've been on one big drug trip--for months now--barreling dizzily through the grimy alleys of some exotic, disgusting, third-world place, communing with rats, pissing in doorways, sliding on the slime that coats the sidewalks, the slime the seeps through the trash bags left for pickup, the slime the seeps out of the bellies of the finless, gutted sharks that are piled high affront the shops.

This place, it's ancient and awful. This is the place of death, poverty, disease. This is the place of murder, rape and torture. Hangings. Stabbings. You name it; it happened here, and its ghosts are not pleasant.

The nightmares, oh they're awful. You don't sleep for days and drink and drink and drink, and then go sliding around the city, barely cognizant, broken from reality, an open knife in your hand. Some nights you don't even know if that person--that one, right there--is a person or a dead person who's resembling a person and seems like a real person. The whole world is turned on its head. No amount of prayer keeps the white bubble up. No deity is powerful enough. New York is too miserable. Nothing keeps the whispers quiet. It's as if you're six again, except there's no jumping into mom's and dad's bed. Not even if you wet your own. There's no justification. There's no escape from the crazy.

There never has been. Not for a moment. Not for a minute of this life.

And so I suppose, this is my very long, elaborate way of telling you that while you may ask me why I am so crazy, I have no answer to give you. I can only say that I never take a breath without mourning the absence of all the things I've never had: a good night's sleep, stability and peace.

She keeps saying this thing to me, "Erin, how are you still alive?" And I go, "What do you mean?"

Over the few months we've been working together, I've been thinking about that. What does she mean by that? My life's not been that crazy. Has it?

Some times I think we're born into something, and it can be dysfunctional as hell, and without logic or reason, and because it is all we know, we consider it the epicenter of normalcy. We do what we have to do, initially, to survive inside of it, and that becomes a pattern of behavior that's, to put it frankly, fuckin' insane. Then we're operating out of insanity, and so that's just what we do. It's all we know. Insanity.

Here's what I do: move. Fast, impulsive, get-the-fuck-out, barreling. I barrel through life. I used to hear that from my mother a lot, "Erin, quit barreling through the living room." I have this gargantuan pelvis and a dearth of grace, and I barrel, this way and that, careening through rooms, across sidewalks, smacking my hipbones off tables, fences, poles, etc. with great abandon. If the flesh between my skin and hips hadn't been robbed off all feeling during a doozy of a fall sometime in '92, it would ache nonstop. I just blasted my right hip into a chair at the coffee shop. Everybody looked up, and there I was, bent over a chair with my hand under a half-capsized paper cup, drops of milky coffee running down my forearm. Hi everyone. I'm Erin. I barrel.

And it's not just movement. It's driving. It's running. It's drinking. It's the physical moving about the country; I just moved into my fifteenth apartment.

So what's wrong with that (?), I think. Is it something more than free-spiritedness? Surely its not.

But yeah, it is. It's wrong. It's wild, uncontrolled living. It's slow suicide. When I think of the things I've survived--alcohol poisonings, drunken falls, sober falls, starvation, crashes on bikes, crashes in cars, drug abuse, violent relationships with sociopaths and multiple suicide attempts--I wonder how it is that I've gotten this far in life--not physically, like my therapist does--but spiritually? How am I possibly intact? What kind of person seduces death like this and honest-to-God, truly, deeply BELIEVES they're just "free spirited?" How little attention have I been paying to reality?

These thoughts didn't come to me out of therapy. You would think they would, but they didn't.

It snowed in the desert last week, irrationally (I'm telling you, this place is kooky). The pines and yuccas and cacti iced over, and the pink vagina became even pinker with its coating of snow; a pastel pink, you could say. The pink of baby shower wrapping paper.

I came home to a Tarantula at my door. He was sitting on the "L" portion of my "Welcome" mat, and there was a dusting of snow on his back. He seemed to be trying to warm himself by hanging out on the other side of the sliding glass door that leads into my current, fifteenth kitchen. "Hi there, buddy," I said, like I say to any animal I see because I love animals.

He looked cold, and that made me sad. I didn't want him to be cold, and so, without first thinking of the consequences, I put my palm out and scuttled him onto it with my other hand. A giant, poisonous spider. I held him there in my palms, warming him up and cooing at him as if he were a kitten, until I kind of came-to and the reality of the situation--there is a giant, poisonous spider in your palms--became rather difficult to ignore.

I put him down again. He was fine. Didn't throw him or anything, but who does this? Who sees a giant, poisonous spider on their doorstep and says, "Oh, he must be cold; I'll pick him up?"

That's not right, and it never has been.

When you're broken, it feels more real. You feel like you're not playing along, because you can't anymore. That's over. You're not afraid of confronting the shadows you see, you just don't give a fuck. But even if you're calling out the shadows, telling them they're not real, it doesn't matter. You're still facing that wall.

I don't know if we're talking about the same thing, but that's what your words brought to me.

I have the smartest fans. Its so cool. Very inspiring.

That place I grew up, the one with the weeds, Swedes and serial killers? That used to be a great inland ocean. I remember finding fossils of little crustaceanish creatures in the shale that lined the shores of Lake Chautauqua on summer breaks, and often, I'd trace the space their body had left in the rock with my finger and thoughtfully considered what they had looked like, what colors they had been and what they might think of the world today. Like, what if time was an illusion and flexible, and it bent back upon itself? What if this Nautilus-like critter suddenly found itself in Jamestown New York on the shore of Lake Chautauqua in 1985 between a Dairy Queen cup and a broken beer bottle? What would it think of its bizarre surroundings? What would such a thing feel like?

Bear with me; this will meander. I'm not a writer. I'm an artist. I don't get the whole: first, then second, then third thing.

So I drove out to one of the neighboring burbs this afternoon to get a new pair of sunglasses. Retail therapy; my sister would be proud.

The closest Walmarts and Home Depots and Targets are a dangerous half hour's drive via a highway littered with the aged and Asian drivers, people who go whichever way they choose through a roundabout, people who play with the settings on their single lens reflex cameras while driving. Hippyville is at the bottom of a bathtub of sorts--an evaporated inland ocean--surrounded by great, green rims at the North and East, and a mountain range at the West. Anywhere within the basin you can see it, because Hippyville is day-glo pink. No shit. Pink, like hot pink; seriously fucking pink. Pink as my watermelon bowl.

And today, on my drive home from the neighboring burb, through the lenses of the new sunglasses that were supposed to assuage my pain--but of course did not--I noted the pinkness, and I'll be damned. People, I'm living in a giant vagina.

I've literally crawled into a womb.

The town in which I went to college was once at the bottom of great inland ocean. Apparently, everything was. We used to collect rocks from the creekbed that lined campus and make impressions of the fossils for design class, you know, so we could talk about symmetry in nature and other fun stuff. In ceramics class, I pressed porcelain into different fossils I found and adorned my poorly thrown pots with them. It was kind of the only way I was able to get a decent grade in that class. Fucking clay sucks.

For Theories and Concepts class, we had to put together a collaborative project. This dude with a wood major built an enormous structure out of plywood, a collapsed corner of a room, with an ascending floor and descending ceiling meant to play with the concept of perspective. A fine arts major painted it all sorts of dark colors. Other people adorned it in certain ways, trying for a grade the way I had with the pots in ceramics.

Now, the shape of this thing really got to me. I had a hard time dealing with it. I wasn't the type that got overly artsy about art school. I was a design major for Christ's sake, and my specialty was logos. What the fuck was all the black and the clove cigarettes and the blathering on about Sam Beckett for? I considered it hubris; but this big black hallway type thing, it really got to me. It made me very uncomfortable. I'd spend whole sessions of Theories and Concepts just staring into it with this choking feeling in my throat. A discomfort, a twitching. The panic I felt in my bedroom at night. The anxiety that made me check my dolls and my Holly Hobby lamp for recording devices. The nightmares I'd have when I fell asleep on my boyfriend's chest, and the desperate breathlessness I experienced when I woke from them. The dull ache of knowing in my heart, that I was inherently alone, no matter how much company I surrounded myself with.

The subconscious notion that everything about the real world was false, and all that seemed good was bad.

I decided the concept I'd explore would be one I didn't actually understand, but was obsessed with nonetheless. I pulled a little piece of The Republic, The Allegory of the Cave (a description courtesy of Wikipedia):

Socrates begins his presentation by describing a scenario in which what people take to be real would in fact be an illusion. He asks Glaucon to imagine a cave inhabited by prisoners who have been chained and held immobile since childhood: not only are their arms and legs held in place, but their heads are also fixed, compelled to gaze at a wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which puppets of various animals, plants and other things are moved. The puppets cast shadows on the wall, and the prisoners watch these shadows. There are also echoes off the wall from the noise produced from the walkway.

Socrates asks if it isn't reasonable that the prisoners would take the shadows to be real things and the echoes to be real sounds, not just reflections of reality, since they are all they had ever seen. Wouldn't they praise as clever whoever could best guess which shadow would come next, as someone who understood the nature of the world? And wouldn't the whole of their society depend on the shadows on the wall?

I read this as part of AP English in my senior year of highschool, and like I said, I never understood it much, but it haunted me. I had printed out a copy and put it into my diary. I thought about it a bit too much. Maybe it was an obsession. Something about that man, chained up, staring forward and being fed a reality that wasn't his...it felt so real, and when I walked up and down the ascending floor of the dark hallway, I thought of him. I thought of what it must feel like to think all reality a few false shadows. What it must feel like to live in that cave, to want to leave, and to be unable to understand why.

So I drilled a hole through one wall, and shone a light through a warped, colored piece of glass that cast a shadow on the other side of the wall bearing no resemblance to the piece of glass that had mothered its existence.

As it was the only authentic act of my undergraduate career, it was an A+. My mother took a picture of my standing next to it, anorexic in a pink top, perfect makeup, perfect hair, the flash from her camera erasing the beam. It looks as if I'm gesturing toward nothing.

Maybe time isn't flexible, for you. For me it is. One day, I'm an ancient crustacean. I'm uncomplicated. Simple. Easy. And though there is an undeniable ache in me, reality is a finite thing with parameters and boundaries and rules. It is false, but tenable. Next day, I'm scuttling across the floor of an evaporated ocean, a giant pink vagina, a womb, and nothing I see or hear or feel makes sense. I have to learn the world again.

I imagine I feel the same way that crustacean would feel. The same way the man in the cave would feel. Broken.

But at least the real is actually real, and it will never be false again.