Spontaneous ∂erivation

Meals planned out for tomorrow thanks to MyNetDiary. I can’t cut things well, although I’ve regained my touch typing skills, but slow, and keyboards don’t usually slice people’s fingers off. I’m going to be eating my accursed Del Monte Fruit Naturals, which are not actually all that healthy, but fooled me well.

I need to make tons of apple sauce once my mind is sane again.

Rice cooker has made beef broth rice with steamed mushrooms (a mere spattering of white button mushrooms). Stored in Lock & Lock’s for tomorrow.

I’m falling asleep and then violently dry-heaving for 5 minutes at a stretch and what seem to be 20 minute intervals inbetween. Dunno why.

Anyways. My worst nightmare. I have a large catalog of bad nightmares. But the worst is my parents finding me.

They arrive with nostalgic gifts. The worst was finding some of these gifts installed in my own car. Which means my parents had broken in.

It’s not my father threatening to kill me—much—I can handle that. In the dreams where he does strangle me, I can handle that… I go insane the next day but I can handle that.

But I had never thought about what I would do if my mother showed up. Despite her participation as an enabler, and her final and utltimate betrayal by hurting me physically, I would be required to deal with her… in bad ways. My father I wouldn’t hesitsteate. But my mtother….

And at that point life goes in one of two ways: I get killed, or my parents stalk me and stalk me and stalk me. They’ll start to stalk my neighbors, start to stalk my work site, stalk stalk stalk stalk. And someone will betray me. And I’ll have nowhere to go. I will go insane. I will go insane.

It probably would happen arund ab irtday .

Please. polease healppp.

Hm.

Overherd Update

I have, oddly enough, more problems with cows falling off the bed on my left side rather than my right. I suspect it has something to do with the setup of the bedroom (window is on my right, and safer than my left, which is near the door).

Anyways, I’ve found that with LRC on my right side, she doesn’t roll off. Cozy Cow’s Pillow Form is less liable to roll off, so ze did much better on my left. Overcow stayed in my arms and Ike, as always, stays on the wedge. Although I may have to draft him into army duty alongside Overcow soon.

Dreams

It’s an improvement, I suppose. Instead of a nightmare about my parents, or one of my blockbuster movie nightmares¹, I had a dream about what I now think of as “The Years of Zorn and Tharn.”

People who are fans of Watership Down know about zorn and tharn.² Zorn refers to mass destruction and catastrophe; tharn means “to be petrified with fear.”

Those are a great description for the time between cutting off relations with my parents and finding a new direction for my life. Yes. Years.

I was in an old hotel room. It was a crappy hotel room, circa the time when I was desperately seeking a job (and getting turned down all the fucking time…). There’s the fear of not knowing if your parents have tracked you down and are going to kill you the next day, and the fear of not knowing how you’ll survive if you have no money left. When you’re staring at both barrels and you know that there’s live ammunition in it.

It’s the aching loneliness, too. To know that you can’t trust anyone—because betrayal is too easy for friends to commit, especially if they are ignorant of the depth of the abuse and… some of them didn’t think it happened and that it was all in my head, because they couldn’t conceive of abusive parents existing outside of fiction. Strangers can be just as bad, and your random good Samaritan even worse. Private detectives are a world of bad.

This is the kind of time when you wonder if you should go look up the local train schedule so you can end it all.

And yet, you don’t, and the years become a kind of constant, nightmare torment, not because you believe there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but because you’re the kind of person who would go out in the night fighting.

Oh, and of course, throughout all this, you aren’t getting treatment for your bipolar (which you don’t know that you have) or your PTSD (which you also don’t know that you have).

“The Years of Zorn and Tharn”… I never wanted to relive them again. But apparently the GM who runs the IRL RPG campaign that I can never escape has decided that, if I can’t be gotten at through nightmares due to the barrier of cows, that I will be gotten at through dreams that cut out the middleman of fear and simply directly eat my soul.

Spoons

If you don’t know about spoons, please read this. Especially if the following paragraphs make you giggle. Because they sure as fuck don’t make me giggle.

At first I thought I had more, and now I realize that I am down to just three. At best. And it’s not even noon here yet. The doctor’s office—not the bartender or candyman, but my physician—ended up killing two spoons alone through a two-hour wait period in a claustrophobic sterile room after I arrived on time; the screaming in my head took most of the rest; and one careless reply tweet from someone destroyed a spoon. ONE TWEET DESTROYED A SPOON. Oh my fucking gods.

(It makes sense. My spoons are not physical spoons, they are mental spoons. It’s kind of like how if you’re a fighter, Drain Mana will probably not do anything to you, but if you’re of a spellcasting class….)

On the other hand, having counted my spoons, I then realized that going into work would be a bad idea. It would end up being one of those days at work where I destroy the productivity of the rest of the team by falling to pieces in the middle of one of our meetings. Those days happen, I realize now, because I don’t count my spoons as they get eaten by the machine of my PTSD.

So here I am, not at work, and killing a spoon through blogging, because I am stupid that way.

I’m going to go hold the LRC for a while. I need epic hugs.

1. I really hate the ones that descend into the horror genre, especially the slashers. So cliché that I’m concerned about my imagination, I really am. And the sequels are all bad. [↩]
2. Here’s the full Lapine Glossary. [↩]

Last night I had a long extended nightmare where my father found me at long last and, through a combination of beatings, screamings, guilt-trippings, and ambushes, asserted control and took everything away from me—my house, my job, my connection to the internets, my name.

This is a repeating nightmare worthy of the Recurring Dreams mechanic in Echo Bazaar, but there’s never a branch of it that yields rewards.¹

Anyways, when I woke up from a particularly bad reliving of a segment of my former life, I found out that the Overcow was in a corner of the bed and not tucked up against me like she was the previous night. Nocturnal locomotion, I guess. Combined with the elevation of the bed wedge and the way I gradually slide down it as the night wears on, she must have fallen out of my arms.

I tucked the Overcow in my arms again and fell asleep promptly (which normally doesn’t happen to me after a nightmare involving my father; usually I stay awake through fear) and dreamed about playing an Alice in Wonderland virtual reality video game. It was set in the future, and actually consumed you so that your reality became the game (natch). My gods, it was thrilling and surreal. The imagery was such that most people would have considered this a nightmare, but to me it was simply fun, although the part where the Queen showed up as a planet-eating monster that stretched as high as a space elevator was a little stressful. (I suppose the parts where random Wonderland creatures showed up and started killing people a la Cloverfield could have been stressful, too.)

Anyways, I’m up now. I have to face the mailbox. I have really bad issues with getting my mail. I have the Overcow, so I guess in a little while I shall be fetching the mail.

*shudder*

1. Echo Bazaar dreams may take some pain to bring up to a level when they start giving you actual items, like Memories of Light or Unaccountably Peckish 1. But such levels exist. [↩]

Memorial Day is a serious holiday and a good one to have.

Unfortunately, in my dreams my father returned and strangled me while somebody was bombing the place where I used to live at with my parents (the last incarnation of it). He was very ineffective, but then again, being pinned down and strangled while the world is going to hell was not a good feeling in any way, shape, or form.

My father always had a thing for inducing terror.

Today I technically should remember him, because he was a good soldier and all that. Won awards. Fought on the side of the Americans during the Vietnam War.

Beating and terrorizing his wife and daughter, on the other hand, is barely something to be considered, if at all, today.

Except, you know, for my PTSD.

I swear to all the gods in the heavens and all the demons in the hells and all the spirits walking the earth, PTSD should be a swear word. I personally prefix half of my thoughts during this time with “fuck it fuck it FUCK IT argh” anyways.

So, right. Tea. Laundry. Too late to pray that I don’t get two corners of the PTSD tarp blown off today.

Even before the bed wedge, and before I started taking Ambien regularly, I had these dreams from time to time.

Usually they were dreams about someone taking care of me while I was in bed. Kind of like a parent, actually. Fussing over me. Rubbing my back, proposing to read stories (I never remember the stories), and suchlike.

The weird thing is that none of that ever happened. My parents never fussed over me, never touched me in any way that was not either painful or uncomfortable (usually because of pain), and never, ever, ever read me stories or even encourage me to read outside of school.

The dreams usually come when I’m falling asleep, and then I wake up, and confess I am a bit teary-eyed when I find out they’re not real. (I’m tearing up right now just thinking about these.)

Of course, after I wake up, usually in the wee hours of the morning, something like a small PTSD episode grips me, and then the rest of the night is a sort of insomnia hell. I don’t understand that either.

Anyways, that is why I take Ambien.

So this early morning, around 2am, I woke up after a disturbing nightmare, the kind that tends to leave me awake but tired and plagues with insomnia. I’d taken a full sleeping pill just four hours before, so it was too soon to resort to that.

Obviously the place to go next was Twitter. Where I discovered that @cleolinda recommended iZen Garden, a little iPhone app that replicates a dry sand garden, you know, the kind you put a few rocks in and then trace around them with a rake.

The app comes with 100 different kinds of objects you can place, move, and rake around, including fossils, bonsai trees, flowers, fountains that run and make soothing noises, and rocks. There are also animated butterflies you can add.

And of course, there must be soothing ambient sound in general, like tiny bells in the distance, rain, birds, etc. They all manage—even the bells—to not be annoying.

I bought it and played around with it, and the sounds and possibly the very simple act of raking repeatedly put me to sleep for the next eight hours, which I really quite needed. No dreams remembered at all, even, which is generally the way I like sleep to work.

I don’t know if it’ll continue to work (for instance, having Neil Gaiman read Coraline to me no longer works well). But it was relaxing. And it is rather pretty.