My Face for the World to See (Part II):
The Diary of Sherilyn Connelly
a fiction


August 21 - 31, 2000

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Thursday, 31 August 2000 (electric mainline)
6:52am


I shaved this morning, the first time since the day of the eels show in June. Last night, I realized the time was right; Madeline and I were at Anodyne's salon, her for a long-overdue haircut and me just for a bang trim. I was inspecting my face in one of those industrial-strength handheld mirrors (one of which we also have at the apartment, but the lighting helped too), and it was obvious that my face was pretty much as healed as it was going to get. Besides, the stuff on the upper lip was coming in awful strong, and as usual I was feeling nothing so much as a hairy slug in Anodyne's presence. Oh, she understands fully, no question there, but still. The time had come.

Another cycle begins.

8:54am

As I'm arriving at the office, Leigh tells me that she's gotten a ticket for a big scary seminar happening downtown this week, and would I be interested in going—she'd gotten hers from the The Den Mother's admin, and it would be easy enough to get one for me, too. Apparently The Big Boss will be speaking, as well as some others from our department, on the topic of working with webmonkeys such as myself. Certainly seems like something I'd find interesting, although I'm a bit surprised I hadn't heard about it beforehand.

So what do I do? I turn her down. Brian, I say, has been out all this week (true) and one of us should be here if he comes back today. She suggests that maybe she can just go for a while, then come back and let me us the pass. Don't rush yourself, I say. If I don't go today, no biggie. So she says she'll look into getting me a ticket for tomorrow, and leaves.

I turned down the opportunity to go somewhere else and do something potentially interestings, because...um...I have no idea why, actually. My, but I feel like quite the dork. I do have some actual work to do, and I've gotten into a bad habit of finding reasons to leave work early this week, so not going to the convention thing kinda evens it out. Yeah, that's it.

It's at the Moscone Center, she said. Wow. I haven't been to that in years, not since my programming class in high school used to take field trips to the computer shows. (take good care of her, won't you?) We were geeks, and by gum, we were proud of it. The teacher even gave us an assignment: whoever left the show with the most free stuff won. ("Win" being a relative term.) Kept things interesting.

Damn. Now I guess I really am going to have to try to go tomorrow, as my curiosity is kicking in, as well as my regret at not having accepted the original offer. Heaven forbid I be dragged out of my little hole.

10:39am

Bleargh. I should have gone with Leigh after all: in Brian's continued absence, Pike and I have to be proxy for him at a meeting later this morning. It's in regard to the Palm stuff we'd been working on so I have a pretty good idea what's going on, but I don't care for the idea of speaking for other people. This is gonna suck.

12:14pm

Didn't go too badly, even though every time I opened my mouth I felt like I was saying nothing but "Timmy!" The other people seemed to understand me, so I guess it went okay.

5:00pm

Warning, objects in the past may appear larger than they actually are.

10:37pm

On the bus tonight, I saw a girl who reminded me a great deal of Holly, or at least how I remember Holly: small, with soulful, haunted eyes under a mop of hair. Tough, in a fragile way. I have no idea where Holly is now. Still back in Fresno, I'd imagine. Last I'd heard she'd gotten involved with a guy in his twenties, the greasy sort who cruised for high-school girls. Think Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused. (Yep, he played Wooderson. You'd forgotten that, hadn't you?)

I never did see her after the early nineties. My very brief time with her was in '87, but by the time The Ex and I got together, she'd already developed her own negative history with Holly. I've never been entirely certain what happened between them—most likely something involving a boy, since they tended to attract the same type—but The Ex did not like her and as such was doubly threatened by the fact that I'd once had feelings for her. She had no reason to be, but in those days, it didn't take much. Considering her past boyfriends, it wasn't too surprising. It wasn't until the second half of our relationship that her fears would become grounded—and at that time was when I became much less trustworthy. Ah, irony.

After a day, I can safely say my shadow has not come back full force. Particularly considering that it's been a week and half since I've been zapped, this qualifies as progress. The upper lip is most problematic, though, as I knew it would be. There are dozens of little tiny hairs, just waiting to bloom. I can't help wondering how much of it is the simple tenaciousness of upper lip hair (Our Lord and Savior gave us these differences to help tell man and woman apart, after all, and now here I am going against His Divine Will, so what the fuck do I expect?), and how much of it is because Phil went easy on my upper lip for fear of putting me through too much pain. I told him not to worry about that, and I was serious, for this very reason. But I don't doubt he's had clients take this sort of thing personally, hold him responsible for the extreme discomfort of the procedure. We're talking about trannies, after all, who don't always seem to understand cause and effect. And, yes, I'm including myself in that statement.

Have I mentioned lately what a long, boring, aggravating and banal process this can be? Not just zapping, but transitioning—although right about now I can't help feeling like it's the fucking electro that's holding everything up. And in case you hadn't worked this one out for yourself, lemme letcha in on a little secret: the phrase "getting a sex change" is a lie. It implies a simple, quick process, akin to the reversal of polarity by flipping a switch. Indeed, I'm sure we all at one time or another in school had a substitute teacher of the opposite gender of the regular teacher, and some wag in the class would say, "They got a sex change." Grrr. Look, I realize that I'm a cultural punchline. There's no way around that. The fat hairy 6' man who wants to be a girl is one of the most reliable stock characters in lowbrow comedy. Fine, swell, that's the lot in life I've drawn. (Hence my aforementioned sympathy for apotemnophiliacs, and even to an extent pedophiles. They no more asked to be how they are than I asked to be how I am, so how dare I pass judgment?) All things being equal I kinda woulda preferred to have been born a Japanese girl, but all things are not equal, and such is the physics of the crumbling cookie.

However, the notion of "getting a sex change" is as incorrect and false as "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." It just don't work that way. Never has, never will So, please, give it a rest, huh?

For the record, I'm not bitter. I'm just tired. Believe me, there's a difference.

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Wednesday, 30 August 2000 (limp)
11:37am


This is what happened. It was in early '98. Burnout had come by to drop off some grass, and we were hanging out, smoking. As usual, Burnout's capacity for the stuff astounded me. For as much as I've seen him smoke at one time, I've never gotten the sense that it affected his behavior or abilities in the slightest. Probably because he's a drug veteran. When you have a history of IV usage and sport a methadone patch on your arm, grass has about as much affect on you as a wine cooler would on Charles Bukowski.

I, on the other hand, was thoroughly baked. What the hell, I figured, I was home and I had no other plans for the evening. Besides, it doesn't take much. I'm such a lightweight, it's like I'm an exception to the body-weight concept. I'm big (and was much bigger then), but my tolerance is fairly low.

The phone rang. It was late in the afternoon, and The Ex wasn't home from work yet; I thought it might be her, calling to say she's running late. Nothing the answering machine couldn't handle, and she'd certainly understand, but apparently I was feeling lucky. I answered the phone.

What's the absolute worst thing that can be on the other end of the telephone when you're stoned out of your gourd, and are somewhat prone to paranoia to begin with?

That's right. The cops.

Well, strictly speaking it wasn't the cops. It was some program they were running called PAL, having to do with kids. More than that, having to do with keeping kids off drugs. And, of course, they were calling because they wanted money. "You want to help keep kids off drugs, don't you?" It was the most shameless, help-the-children bullshit rhetoric imaginable, the kind of stuff the "Just Say No" types lap up.

So. I'm stoned, with my dealer in my home, and the police call me asking for money. It felt not unlike the ironically-timed-police-convention scene in Drugstore Cowboy or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (Take your pick.)

It was a set-up. It had to be. Burnout was an ex-hippie with a criminal record including possession—surely they'd been tracking him for years, waiting for the right moment to pounce. That moment was now. It made perfect sense. It would be a great trophy bust, and my involvement would prove that they don't just target minorities: look! a cornfed white guy in his mid-twenties with a college education! we don't discriminate! After all, it was just too much of a coincidence.

I've very seldom been more freaked out than I was at that moment, made worse by the fact that panicking was simply not an option. I had to play it cool, in spite of the fact that I have a hard time ordering a pizza when I'm stoned, let alone not alerting the cop on the phone that I'm aware of his SWAT team ready to break down the door at any moment, another glorious victory in the War on Drugs.

I politely interjected that I wasn't interested, and he countered it with a well-scripted response about why I should be intereted, why I couldn't possibly take another breath in good conscience without doing everything possible to help keep kids off drugs. I decided against hanging up entirely, because then they'd know I was on to them. Besides, it was the cops. Yeah, it was their telemarketing arm, but still, you don't just hang up on these people. Liable to piss them off.

When he got to the "How much do you think you can afford to donate today?" part, I said that I really couldn't afford anything at all since I was unemployed (true) and my currently absent girlfriend was therefore in charge of the finances. Reasonable enough, right? Nope! Just like in the classic xtian tradition, poverty shouldn't stand in the way of tithing. He kept lowering the amount: "$30? No? How about $20? Can you afford $20? $15? Can you spare $15 to help keep kids off drugs?"

Turns out $10 was what I could spare to keep kids off drugs. I had to acquiesce eventually, since I couldn't hang up and he wasn't going to take no for an answer. The next part was even scarier: giving him my name and number. I was convinced that it was just a formality, that he already knew who I was and where I lived. But I had to play along. I did try to get clever, though, and give a zip code from out of town, in hopes that the bill would get lost in the mail. He saw right through it, and I claimed that I'd accidentally given him my old work zip code. The ninja-suited cops which I was certain were going to crash through the windows at that moment, didn't.

Indeed, no busts happened that day at all, at least not in my home. But I learned my lesson about answering the phone.

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Tuesday, 29 August 2000 (djangology)
7:31am


If I had more discipline as a writer, I could probably turn my dream from last night into a story. It was vivid and linear enough—the kind which, when you first remember it, you're not sure if it's a dream or a rogue fragment of a past life. Did that not actually happen? It didn't, but it felt like it could have, if only I had fundamentally different views about how the universe operates. Maybe it'll see the light of day, maybe it won't.

10:20am

Gee, what a surprise. Turns out my fear that my upper lip was going to forever be a mass of scarred flesh were just a teeny bit overstated. It's mostly healed, and there doesn't appear to be any lasting damage. There's still a bit of flaking and the overall color is a tad pinker than I'd like, so I won't be shaving just yet. But soon. If nothing else, to get rid of the sparse but still visible patches of dark hair. The battle ain't over yet.

1:52pm

I just reserved a car for this weekend. How grown-up is that? Not only am I old enough to do so, I'm two years older than old enough.

There's an interesting article in the latest Salon about apotemnophilia, the desire to amputate a healthy limb from one's own body. It's an issue on which I can see both sides: while I find the concept of having a limb amputated personally horrifying, it's not much of a leap for me to believe that there are people who consider two arms or two legs to be one too many. After all, outwardly, there's no more anything wrong with my body than with theirs. It's all in the mind, and it's not something that can be cured by counseling. (Indeed, I can't help but be amused that the main focus of the article, a fellow who has been unsuccessfully seeking a doctor to remove his leg, is a psychoanalyst by profession.) The body requires modification, and there are no outward symptoms; it's imcumbent upon the sufferer to convey this in a manner which will be taken seriously. Trust me, that can be an unholy bitch. At least wanting to change one's gender can be expressed in terms regular people can sorta kinda grasp. But wanting to remove a limb? That one's beyond the scope of all a but a very small group of people to understand.

Again, it all boils down to being queer, and I'm sure most would object to the suggestion that apotemnophiacs have anything in common with them. There's a powerful tendency amongst different kinds of queers (and most all minorities) to cordon themselves off, to declare all other kinds of deviation to be, well, deviant. Me? Me, I'm pretty much normal—I was just born into the wrong body, y'know? I don't really wanna talk about it. But those people, those people are sick. Do you know what they do to each other? It's disgusting. Not even just, say, between gay men and trannies, but between M2Fs and F2Ms. To my way of thinking, the only difference between the two groups is whether they were born male or female, and it makes no more sense for them to discriminate against one another than it would for any other group of people with the same affliction to segregate by gender.

They confuse the destination with the journey. I'm not transitioning out of some kind of political belief in the superiority of women (a flag Maggie waves with pride); I do not consider men evil. On a superficial level I'm extremely relieved not to have to continue on as a boy, but I also realize I'm being driven by something much deeper than ideology. And not all trannies possess that sort of ideology at all; many M2Fs are still burdened with the cookie-cutter sexism foisted upon boys growing up in this society.

I was going somewhere else with this, but for the life of me I'm not sure where where it was.

9:54pm

The telemarketers want me, bad. I know this because at least three times a night the phone rings, the caller ID says "Unknown Name Unknown Number," they don't leave a message, and I have yet to have anyone say to me that they try to call but I'm never home. Ergo, solicitors. (In the unlikely event that it is an actual friend calling from an unlisted number, it's their own damn fault for not leaving a message.) Indeed, it was because of such calls that I got voicemail and caller ID to begin with. Screening calls is now longer impolite; now it's a fact of life. Unfortunately, my high-techy phone won't let me turn off the ringer entirely. It's not as though I need the fucking thing.

Then there was the time that Burnout was over, and the phone rang, and I made the extremely bad decision to answer it...but that'll have to wait. As usual, I'm finding I don't have the energy to tell the story. This is bad.

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Monday, 28 August 2000 (the child is gone)
9:56am


I cut the proverbial cord this weekend: I didn't refill my Meridia prescription. It's questionable as whether or not it's ever really been anything more than a placebic crutch for me, and an expensive one at that. I guess I'm going to find out. I still have the actual prescription from my endocrinologist should the panic set in...

11:53am

So Rae gave me the email address of the guy who videotaped the fashion show in June. I wrote him last night, requesing a copy. His reply:

Well, unfortunate news, the camera that shot the fashion show got stolen a few days later before I had a chance to copy the footage and the tape was still in the Camera. But I have stills that I took off the video on to my computer, if you describe who you were I can e-mail you those stills. I haven't done the greatest job letting everyone know that there are no videos avalible so anything you can do to let other people know would be appreciated.

I think I've lost the ability to be surprised.

3:34pm

I had lunch with Tania and Whitman. They're leaving the Bay Area for good at the end of the week. Maybe I'll see them again, maybe I won't. Never can tell. Nothing comes as a surprise, but that doesn't mean anything is predictable, either.

5:16pm

It was over before I even knew it existed. I can't possibly want it back. Moreover, it was never my world to begin with, it doesn't want me, and what happens to it is out of my hands.

9:54pm

I paid the rent tonight, a process which has gone essentially the same over the last five years: taking the cash over to the landlords' house. No unnecssary paper trail (with the possible exception of the receipts they give me, something The Ex originally insisted on, even though we've never made a point of keeping them), no checks to bounce. Of course, the guy does always count it out, but I don't take it personally. I'm sure it's more a precaution against human error than a sign of distrust.

Thankfully, tonight I had some built-in small talk: their recent trip to Alaska. Seems he has relatives up there, and they spent the first half of August in the Great Frozen North. I found myself increasingly jealous as they described the trip, and more specifically, the weather and daylight patterns. Now, I'm no fan of the sun, but the way they described it, three weeks of daylight sounds pretty neat.

Even neater would be to go during the winter (and at night, which requires specific planning) to see the Aurora Borealis. Much like the notion of the sun just kinda hanging there in the sky, I can grasp why it happens on a scientific level, but I suspect seeing it in person would be practically an emotional experience. Not unlike barefoot's hallucintatory trip to the Scottish Highlands in the early nineties. On that note, Tania and Whitman are actually going to spend a month in Whitman's native Scotland before officially settling in their new home of Riverside. Me? I'm going to Las Vegas for the weekend. They win.

Part of it, I suppose, was this spark of a desire in me to get away from civilization. Not merely as a vacation, and not at this precise moment, either. A little later in life. I have this absurd fantasy (as though the whole gender-change thing wasn't absurd enough) of moving someplace relatively isolated, someplace more nature than technology. Which isn't to say I wouldn't have a computer and net access, but still, a place where the sun hangs in the sky for weeks on end, or if you see the sun it's through the tall redwoods, or maybe even just a place where the locals have resisted dozens of attempts to mark the exit to their town and there are no streetlights when it gets dark. (Regarding the latter, that hellbeast Martha Stewart is probably going to ruin my chances of that one ever coming true.)

10:18pm

I'd like to say it started innocently enough, but I'd be lying. It was rotten from the beginning, and only got worse.

sometime after midnight

I wonder if there's something psychologically unhealthy about having to see one's reflection too often. I'm frequently up in the middle of the night—indeed, it seems like I'm awake at night much more than I'm asleep—and since I use the bathroom fairly regularly, I can't help but see myself. Perhaps it's not a good thing that I should see myself on such a steady basis and in so many levels of disrepair. It's not narcissism, either. It's more like the opposite. I long for the respite others take for granted, to not have to deal with myself for seven or eight hours at a stretch....

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Sunday, 27 August 2000 (on the bound)
11:56am


My upper lip is healing up quite nicely, all things considered. In theory, I could reschedule to get zapped tomorrow. But I won't. Not even with all the dark hair which is plainly visible. I simply gotta rest.

8:13pm

So I'm looking at myself in the mirror, laced into the corset I'll be wearing under the bridesmaid's dress for Dana's wedding, and a thought keeps going through my mind: why can't my body be naturally shaped like this?

Yeah, okay, so my glass is half-empty.

10:03pm

"Resinated" is a real word. A helpful tip for your next Scrabble game.

sometime after midnight

I just dreamed that I got kicked out of some kind of church function (I think it was the youth group my mom forced Jonco and I to attend when we were teenagers) for smoking grass. I was actually upset, not so much for getting kicked out as for getting the person I got the stuff from in trouble. As part of my "penance"—I was told to leave and not come back, and then given fuckin' homework—I was supposed to "dwell on the Ten Commandments." I woke up before I had a chance to tell them that I have to part company with the commandments right off the bat because of the whole "thou shalt have no other gods before me" stuff, since I neither believe in their god nor anybody else's. Not something I never really got a chance to tell those people in real life, either.

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Saturday, 26 August 2000 (1000 lights)
6:29pm


I don't care what we look like, we've been very productive grownups today, running around from couples' therapy to a thrift store (donating clothes) to Kaiser (fluid testing) to the Serramonte Mall (picking up my 'mones) to Target (all manner of shopping) to Trader Joe's (more esoteric shopping—yogurt, yogurt, yogurt!) to, finally home, where we continued on with the laundry started before we'd left in the morning. We're doing our chores before we play. So there.

Just remember: the risk, while significant, is manageable.

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Friday, 25 August 2000 (die wölfe kommen zurück)
12:03pm


Finally cancelled my electro appointments. The anxiety will probably start kicking in any time now.

7:46pm

I've been working. No, really.

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Thursday, 24 August 2000 (blue of my oblivion)
12:56pm


Break's over.

2:44pm

Cool. Images: A Journal of Film and Popular Culture is almost enough to make me miss film school. Thankfully, there's Dumbass & The Fag to keep me grounded. If there's anything lacking in modern film education, these days, it's balance.

5:10pm

Brian just told me one of the most disturbing things I've heard in a long time: Martha Stewart wants to move to Bolinas. No. No. NO. That is wrong. That is very, horribly, despicably, earth-shatteringly wrong. She must be stopped.

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Wednesday, 23 August 2000 (roses from my friends)
7:32am


I bought The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book yesterday, to see how a master works. Not in cartooning—I figured out very early on that I couldn't draw a straight line with both hands, a ruler and a sextant—but in self-expression. This is my story. This is what happened. It isn't pretty, but I'm going to tell it anyway. That's what I've always strove for, what my favorite artists have always exemplified (Pete Townshend, Lou Reed, my brother Tom, to name but a few) and I feel like I've lost sight of it lately. Hopefully I'll find some inspiration.

10:20am

From the documentation for creating channels on AvantGo:

"User-Submitted Channels are displayed at the bottom of our channel listing without a description, and are generally looked down upon by the AvantGo Channels. If the world of channels were a John Hughes film, the part of the User-Submitted Channels would be played by Anthony Michael Hall."

By gawd, they speak my language.

2:29pm

Still haven't called and cancelled my next couple electro appointments. Real soon, though.

4:56pm

The last episode of Survivor is tonight. I never did watch the show, nor do I watch Big Brother, although we've caught a few minutes of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? now and again. I'm feeling the need to point out that not watching these isn't any kind of a statement on my part. I just didn't really care. The fact that I didn't care isn't a statement or protest, either, or in any way meant to signify my heightened cultural tastes. I'm not above a goddamned thing, I just don't watch much teevee. It's a habit I've mostly fallen out of. I admit, I'm probably missing a lot of neat stuff; The West Wing is supposed to kick ass, and barefoot has raved about Sports Night and Freaks and Geeks, both of which I think have since been cancelled. Star Trek: Voyager, South Park and Law & Order are pretty much the extent of my habitual shows, although I keep an eye on the listings for cool old movies on AMC or the occasional interesting documentary. Like, there was this one the other night about the history of vaudeville, and...well, never mind that.

Hell, during the '91 - '92 season The Ex and I arranged our Saturdays around Twin Peaks, so I know what it's like to get caught up in a cultural phenomenon, even if most people gave up on that particular one before we did. (Have I mentioned that Billy Zane's character deflowered Audrey Horne?) It's just that Survivor and its ilk have become such a hot-button topic (the nation hasn't been this divided since the conflict between hawks and doves during Vietnam), I don't want me not watching the show to mean that I'm lining up on the anti-Survivor side. I'm not. Honest. If you enjoy that show or any other, swell. Be my guest. Madeline and I will probably be seeing American Psycho at The Red Vic tonight, so I can hardly claim anything resembling aesthetic or cultural superiority. We all love our trash, and that's fine, no matter what form it takes. Like, I'm really looking forward to The Red Vic's movie tomorrow night, Antique Smut. Grindhouse fare from the first half of the twentieth century, the kind of stuff Tom Lehrer was talking about? I am so there...

9:57pm

Walking back to the apartment from where we'd parked across the street, I could see the teevee screens of two of my neighbors. Both showed what appeared to be people sitting around a campfire. Survivor, I reckoned. Even though I wasn't a part of it as such, it's nice to know that this is a collective cultural moment. You were either watching the show, or not. By contrast, nobody noticed when Twin Peaks ended.

And I had in fact been seeing American Psycho at The Red Vic. (The audience was somewhat small; afterwards, I heard one of the employees theorize that everyone was home watching the show.) Wow. What a terrific movie. I've never read the book, but now I suppose I'm going to have to. If Christian Bale doesn't get an Oscar nomination, it'll be proof of the lack of justice in the universe. Of course there's no way in hell the Academy is going to acknowledge this movie, but still, he deserves it.

At least now, maybe, that Betty Page biopic that Guinevere Turner is allegedly supposed to write and star in will finally get made. Maybe.

sometime after midnight

To look at my face, it is plainly obvious that I'm totally fucked. The scarring on my upper lip is severe, and can never entirely heal. It may eventually not look as bad as it does right now, but it'll never look smooth or natural, either. There will always be a remnant, a reminder. The area around my mouth will have the texture of burnt flesh, for that is essentially what it is—and what is more immediately suggestive of masculinity than darkness on the upper lip? My ego will find itself presented with a new challenge, that of convincing itself that I don't have a permanent reminder of my botched attempt at something resembling normality. (Yeah, I know, the "n" word.) It will not always look quite as obvious as it does now, but because of just that—how it looks now—I'm deciding against going to The Ex's party this weekend, a party which will be her last in the Bay Area as she is on the verge of fulfilling her dream of living in Santa Cruz, which I know to have been her fondest wish during the nineties. (Well, towards the latter half of the decade "living in Santa Cruz" was in a dead heat for fondest wish status with "me getting my shit together and working on saving our relationship." But one out of two ain't bad, right? And, in the long run, aren't all parties involved getting what they really wanted?) Who knows, the redness may have even mostly gone away by the first week of September, after our Vegas trip, when Danny is probably going to be in town. But I still feel like I've gone downhill since he saw me April of last year, and I suspect he'll notice it, too.

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Tuesday, 22 August 2000 (faded)
10:19am


Okay. There's no way around it, I'm hung over. Shouldn't be too surprised, since it does say "10% Alcohol" right there on the Green Death label.

Last night was kinda doomed from the start, I think. I got out there lated than I'd intended, and found Phil looking not unlike how I must seem at the end of a sesson. He hadn't just been zapped, but he was obviously not well. Apparently he'd had an accident on a boat that morning (I resisted the temptation to say "This was no boating accident!"), involving a something very large striking his left shoulder and doing considerable damage and causing no small amount of pain. But he had appointments to keep, two other people besides myself, and by gawd he was determined to keep them. It didn't help me to relax any to know that he was in pain as well—a fact of which I was reminded when the phone would ring every twenty minutes, and he would tell all the gory details to the seemingly inevitable inquiry of "How are you?" Not one to lie about such things, he is.

He stopped after two hours, which is about an hour sooner than usual, but I didn't argue; I'd told him earlier that given his condition he could stop whenever he wanted, and he'd said over and over that he would do the best he could.

As I walked to the bus stop, I was pretty much on autopilot. My consciousness was coming and going in waves, and it took all the concentration I could muster to keep my eyes open for a few mintues at a time. It's a pity I wasn't that out of it during the actual session; rather, I was very much aware throughout it. My mind had neither wandered nor relaxed.

I made an appointment for next Monday, then decided to go easy on myself and skip the first week of September. Among other things, Maddy and I will have just returned from Vegas, and I know I'll want nothing more than to rest that day. And my face simply need the rest. But I'll be back on the 11th...

3:42pm

Which is not to say I've never been truly hung over, mind you. Indeed, a couple bad hangovers are part of what convinced me that drinking wasn't worth the trouble. (Yeah, I know. I should make up my mind as to whether it's one word or two, and stick with it. But as a noun it sounds better to me as one word, and as an adjective it sounds better as two.) That, of course, combined with the cost and my proven genetic disposition towards chemical dependency in the form of an alcoholic father and crackhead brother. Addiction scares the bejeezus out of me, even if alcoholism is more commonly termed a disease rather than an addiction. Frankly, that's a semantic/philosophical debate I don't wanna get into.

Anyway, one time stands out in my mind above all others. It would have been in June of '93, when I was twenty, at my coworker Vicky's graduation party. This was one of the last major shindigs of my group of friends in Fresno (Astrid, Danny, The Ex, Jonco, et cetera) before 1994 came along and we splintered all over California. It was that time when we were pretty much indestructible. Oh, we knew change was coming—I was already swimming in a sea of red tape trying to apply to San Francisco State University, garnering the most mixed of feelings from The Ex—but it wasn't there yet. It frightens me that I should be experiencing such standard issue nostalgia-for-a-lost-youth, particularly one in which I wasn't all that happy, but there it is. And I don't suppose it's such a bad thing. It's a time which is very much gone forever, and there's no harm in savoring the pleasant memories, especially if it keeps the darker ones at bay.

Anyway—christ, if it wasn't for tangents, I wouldn't have anything to say at all—mudslides were the drink du jour. Indeed, they were the drink of many a jour. Vicky's boyfriend's skill at making them was pseudo-legendary, as was The Ex's fondness for them, earning her the (affectionate) nickname "Mudslide Queen." MSQ for short, of course.

I imbibed quite a few of them myself that night, and not having yet seen Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf?, I was unaware of the mixing/worrying dichotomy. I honestly don't remember what else I drank that night, which is no surpise. Probably a few beers, and whatever else was around. I suppose it can be justified as experimentation, and a successful experiment at that, because the long term results were useful. Sorta like letting a little kid touch a hot stove: they learn not to do it again. I still vividly recall having touched the hot end of the cigarette lighter in my mom's car when I was three or four, thinking that the little icon looked like a trapeze. I didn't know that it was supposed to be a smoking cigarette, and even after I burnt my finger I still didn't know what the hell it was for. I simply knew that I would never touch it again. (I don't think my mom ever knew it happened. She'd left me in the car for a few minutes while she went into a store, and when she came back I was too embarrassed to tell her what had happened. Even then, I was developing a stoicism which would serve me well as I grew older. Pain? Yeah, I'm in pain. What of it?)

In this case, the short term had me passed out in the master bedroom's bathroom, surrounded by my own vomit. (Better than being surrounded by someone elses.) Blotto. As completely wasted as I'd ever been, or ever would be. When I came to, sort of, I was at least aware of my surroundings. Some of the puke had made it into the toilet; some of it hadn't. By some cruel twist of fate, the tiled floor happened to be roughly the same color as the vomit, a brownish-orange. As a result, it was difficult to tell exactly where the puke ended and the floor began, especially in my current state.

Whatever was left of my lucid mind piped up: You've puked all over Vicky's parents' bathroom. Congratulations! You're the worst kind of cliche. I'm sure you're very proud. Now clean it up. I reached for the toilet paper and pulled a few sheets off. Almost randomly, I dabbed at the floor. Paydirt! Paypuke, anyway. I wiped some up and put the paper in the toilet. At least now I had something to work with: that's what the floor looked like when it didn't have vomit. Get all the parts that don't look like that, and I'll be on the right track.

After another handful, my brain spoke up again: Better flush that toilet. What's the absolute worst thing that could happen while you're lying on the floor in front of a toilet filling with puke? That's right: overflow! So I flushed the toilet. Wiped up a few more handfuls, flushed the toilet, wiped up a few handfuls, and so on. Better to waste the water than to clog up the plumbing. Now there's a sig line, by god.

I got the bathroom cleaned up as well as could possibly be expected under the circumstances, and at some point The Ex was able to get me on my feet and take me home. Fortunately, Vicky only lived a few blocks from the condo my mom and I had just moved into (where my mom still lives now), so before long I was in bed, occasionally puking into my own toilet. Sometimes you can't ask for anything more than to be sick in one's own home.

I spent most of the next day in bed, grateful that I didn't have to go to work, and trying to figure out how people could do this on a regular basis. This sucked. I could barely remember the night before, and I was absolutely miserable now. And yet, this was a weekly (if not daily) routine for some people? What the fuck? I didn't get it, and I still don't. The ROI is all out of whack.

That wasn't the last time I drank, and I got hung over at least one more time, though nowhere near as bad. And alcohol is at least partially responsible for a night in '94 of doing things with The Other which may or may not have happened had all parties involved not been thoroughly shnookered. Can't really say. But by '95 or '96 I'd lost whatever desire I might have had to drink—except, of course, in Las Vegas. Those cheap margaritas are beckoning.

11:22pm

I want my face back, damnit. I think I'm going to call and cancel my upcoming electro appointments. I've done enough in the last two months, and it's time to heal.

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Monday, 21 August 2000 (seven blackbirds)
7:04am


The thing at Lee's mom's place was probably this weekend. I don't know. I guess it wouldn't have mattered.

10:07am

I've said it before, ergo it follows that I'll say it again: never take the train between 6am-9am, or 4pm-7pm. No good can come of it.

11:24am

Memories are not to be feared. Is it ironic that I keep forgetting it?

11:37am

1999, I now realize, was spent in a vacuum. I'm not sure what the hell that means, but somehow, it sounds right. I'm lucky if I can parse my thoughts into words at all these days, so I'm not going to quibble about whether or not they make sense.

1:18pm

Halle Berry in X-Men is, quite possibly, the greatest casting job ever in the history of film.

Well, maybe not. But it sure seemed that way while watching the movie.

sometime after midnight

Got zapped tonight for two hours, though it felt like six. Funny how that works.

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