Well, that was a good intermission. Better than the play, I’d say — so on-the-nose it punched you squaw in the face, just like a knock-knock joke, and yes, I am grateful that you didn’t say orange. I will buy your Samoas. Your islands denuded of monkey trees; your hickory farms and your chess kings; your food courts, where you are sentenced to brutal diarrhea, a Bosch breaking rocks in the sun. Another ten museums and you’re done. Vaporetto. Outie.

“Thirdly…”

Here’s the third paragraph — contents will not be at all surprising to those familiar with my oeuvre (which is the French word for “egg”):

“I took acid every chance I got that summer. It was the only thing that made sense to me, the only way to render myself defenseless enough to admit what I pretended not to know. It gave me a clarity, a wintergreen astringence, and if sometimes I had hallucinations, they didn’t show me things that weren’t there; rather, they showed me things that were always there, but couldn’t otherwise be seen. Afternoons atomized into nights as I sat in the Meadow, hands turgid with chi, deeply understanding a blade of grass, watching the broken neon sign on the Hotel Essex shine over the treeline: HOTEL   SEX. Then the regret, as I came down, and everything became insoluble and opaque again.”

As Dion and the Belmonts did not sing, “Why must I be a teenager on drugs?”

(I’m also afraid I’ve used the phrase “turgid with chi” before. I’m pretty sure of it, in fact. Eesh.)

Since LUMINA is not available online (I KNOW!) or even for your e-reader (COME ON!), it must be purchased and delivered through the actual mail, if you can believe it. I know that I don’t have that kind of time or patience, so in case you don’t either, I’ll give you the nutshell version: People are strange, when you’re a stranger, and also when you’re on a bunch of LSD.

(Cover image from LUMINA: “Shopping,” by Andreas Englund)

I love gratitude as much as the next person who pretends to love gratitude does. It has often brought me great comfort, or at least distraction. When my mother’s husband called me, weeping, to tell me she was dead, the first thing I thought, right after “oh fucking no, oh, no, no, no,” was “how can I spin this so it’s even a little bit livable with,” and I launched right into a litany of our blessings — she went quickly and painlessly at home in her husband’s arms, just like she would have wanted; she was at peace and out of pain now; we were all so very lucky to know her in the first place, and in dying before the rest of us, she would never have to know the grief we were feeling, and wasn’t it better to take that suffering upon ourselves rather than let her bear it? SO VERY GRATEFUL, was I. A beam of dedicated energy, energy dedicated to love. And it worked, for a while there — genuine gratitude got me through that first week, it was the crux (and the crutch) of my eulogy at her memorial; it was renewed with every sincere expression of sympathy or condolence I received. But you know what else got me through that stage? Binge eating and smoking like eight joints a day. And that’s not sustainable either.

To act grateful all the time is to deny the special nature of gratitude. Gratitude is an exalted state of peace reached for temporary moments between crises. It’s not the baseline* human emotion, every variance from which is a personal failing of will. If you’re grateful all the time, you’re ignoring the existence of half the universe, which is the half that sucks. Being mortal means living in fear, confusion, and desperation to survive, and how can you be grateful for that? You can’t, or the whole concept of gratitude means nothing. For without knowledge of pain, can there be knowledge of joy? Et cet-e-ra, et cet-e-ra?

Trying to be grateful when you’re just not is too much cognitive dissonance. Affirmations only work if you believe the content of them in the first place — they can only affirm things already inside you, they can’t sell you anything you don’t already have.** If you’re trying to tell yourself something you don’t believe, it’s only going to cause your rational self-consciousness to pop up and say, “Wait a minute — is that true?” And then you realize you don’t believe it, and yet you go on repeating this affirming phrase, which is now just you mocking yourself (“I am a loved and loving person! I am a loved and loving person! Nyah, I’m such a wuvved and wuvving person! Nyah!”). And then it’s your fault that it didn’t work, because you didn’t want it enough.

I want it. I want to be grateful all the time, because you can’t be unhappy in the midst of feeling grateful. Gratitude, while it lasts, obviates negativity — you have to look at the positive aspects of something to feel gratitude for it. If it was simply a matter of counting my blessings, I’d be delirious with glee all the time. And I’d be a blithering ignoramus with no concept of reality.

Thanks for reading!

(* I just imagined saying that word as “bass-e-leen,” because it’s only one consonant and a pronunciation from “Vaseline.”)

(** “Oh, Oz never did give nothin’ to the Tin Man, that he didn’t, didn’t already have…”)

Me and my chair buddy and my favorite t-shirt and all the lines on my face, and that thing I do where I pull one part of my mouth to the left and just kind of leave it there for the entirety of my public life.

And you know what? Maybe I DO want to talk about my dead mom all the time! DEAD MOM DEAD MOM DEAD MOM! I want to talk about it — her — the whole thing, and I don’t want to talk about anything else, so how about that?

Hey! For the last few years of her life, my mother was mentally ill, bankrupt, in poor physical health, and living in filth! How fucking horrible is that! REALLY FUCKING HORRIBLE, OKAY? And I knew she was going to die — I spent every fucking minute between 2009 and…now…worried every time the phone rang or even when it didn’t, thinking about the neglected animals suffering in their home that the ASPCA somehow couldn’t rescue,* in nigh-constant agony and guilt and shame and anger and grief and existential despair, unable to do a fucking thing. And I don’t think I realized that, until I looked back at my notebook from May, and saw how I’d been living day to day. This is the problem with journaling, and the problem with blogging, and the problem with therapy — your own words wind up confronting you with things you didn’t want to know, things you would take any amount of drug or sleep or spending to avoid knowing.

My mom died the day after Thanksgiving 2012. It was of course a Friday, and I had gone to the office for a few hours in the morning, where I started a document with the words, “I spoke to my mother the other night, for what may be the last time, for all I know.” I was trying to write about the last time I spoke to her, which was Thursday, November 9, when she hung up on me. I didn’t necessarily want to write about that call, but I knew that I had to get the dialogue and the details down on paper, for who knew what future use. I did not find out until the next day that she died while I was at the office writing about her, making those words come true.

I understand that, along with waterboarding, one of the most effective tactics of torture is forcing someone to watch a loved one suffer in front of them while they can do nothing. And that describes the last four years of my life. I know I’m not alone in this; I imagine that anyone who’s watched a loved one fight a fatal illness knows it well. I personally know people who have had it much worse than me on this score, and still, I’m going to crawl way out on this tree branch here and say mine was pretty fucking bad, and that sometimes I really don’t know how I’m functional at all, considering how incredibly, extremely ill my mother was for my entire life.**** And I’m really angry and really upset, and I feel like hell. I want to find someone to be nasty and mean and sarcastic to, and to scream at, and to blame — well, I already have the blame guy, but he’s so pathetic and mentally ill that being nasty and sarcastic to him would not even be fun. But if you know anybody who might be a good candidate for the verbal abuse and the screaming, like some asshole bully or something, I am on it. I should get myself a Sparring Bob.

I just looked for a full half hour for a gif of Lars Ulrich in the documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster screaming at James Hetfield, “When I think of you, I think FAAAAAAAAACK.”

The end!

(*ASPCA sucks for many reasons, and one is that it gets a Charity Watch rating of C+, which means that too much of the money does not go to programs or infrastructure but goes instead to sending me mail and purchasing ad time for their horrible, horrible ads which make everyone in the world want to kill themselves. I know the animal cops do the best they can in a heart-rending job, and they’re often hampered by state or town laws, but really, guys. You’re supposed to stop exactly this scenario from happening.**)

(** Adult Protective Services of New York can also go fucking die any old time, since that’s basically what they told me/my mother when I tried to get her some help. One of their operators actually said to me, “If he’s abusive, why hasn’t she tried to leave?” In a snotty tone of voice, too. If I owned a car that I knew how to drive, I would have shown up at her office that day and personally shown her what abuse looks like.***)

(*** OH YES I DID just retroactively threaten a municipal employee.)

(**** Lexapro, Wellbutrin, cannabinoids.)

I want to abandon this blog, even though just typing the word abandon brings up such an awful twisting grief in me. The blog anthropomorphs into a crying, bewildered child — Please, please don’t abandon me! Seriously, I can ascribe human emotions to anything, which is why I have to be careful to use our oatmeal bowls equally often, and not always use the dark blue one, which is the one I suspect I theoretically might like best, if it were possible for me to consider liking one over the others. I am a sucker for anguish, and anguish sucks.

So the idea is to turn the beat around! Got to hear percussion! Turn it upside down! Love to hear it, love to hear it! *~*~*Dance break*~*~*    ^^^Okay, dance break over, stop dancing now.^^^ No, yeah. So the idea is to like BE HAPPPY, and yes I’m aware that that’s happpy with three p’s, but that’s one of those joyful typographic accidents the universe allows us to create and then embrace, so the Great Spirit commands that everybody get the fuck with it and embrace the three p’s! Which brings up a very important formative memory of mine, springing from my early adulthood here in New York City, when there was a late-night phone sex commercial for 1-900-GOT-PEEE that ran about every ten minutes between 1 and 5 a.m. every night, wherein a sexy female voiceover informed you that “the extra ‘e’ [was] for extra pee!” Thus: I’m happpy with an extra pee!

Truth is, though, things are actually quite all right over here. I’ve been working on a number of projects that are not this blog, including a collection of “pieces,” SCARE QUOTES IN ALL CAPS, and I’ll be posting some excerpts over the next few weeks. I kind of feel like crap but I kind of feel okay at the same time, but I don’t want anybody to think I’m not in constant utter despair, because I believe that constant utter despair is what is warranted from all sentient and feeling beings. But I also don’t want to be the ultrabummer, which is like the unabomber, except less fun at parties.

This is going REALLY WELL so far, wouldn’t you say?

I’m writhing and wringing my hands, waiting for either my mother or [her husband] to call me back. Here I am reporting live from the no news is not necessarily good news but isn’t definitively bad news either, though it’s not definitively good. News desk. Is me, with a piece of ABC gum collecting pieces of the almonds I ate from my teeth. The cat is horking in the background. I’m bouncing a little, waiting for myself to do something that I can report upon. Basically, if I don’t hear from her by 9 – you know what, I think I’ll ease up on this for tonight.

I called her Wednesday before noon, then today before noon, then [him] at 6pm tonight. When do I call again? Why do I always do this? I always panic and she’s always “fine,” with some complaints, but she’s always alive if not kicking. And she will be this time. I dread this so much, the fear and the waiting and the dread. The scenarios. People will say I didn’t do enough, I should have done more. We sent every kind of authority over there, the ASPCA, a housecleaner – I’m not going to defend myself…is the kind of thing said by people who are going to keep defending themselves, long after anyone else cares.

Another cat on the desk. I’ve trained them badly. Now I’m thinking I should call the police right away and have them do a welfare check. Why right away? News stories about people using dead relatives to claim benefits while the corpses rot in a chair. He’s been keeping her barely alive and totally addled, and…no, because then he’d have her call. If she was alive, he’d have her call. She’d have called by now if she was alive. So since she’s already dead, there’s really no rush, unless he’s going to commit suicide or kill the cats because I left a bunch of messages and he knows he’s about to be busted.

Logically: She would not call back because:

That’s not her cell phone number anymore.
She didn’t get either message I left her.
* Because she doesn’t know how to work her phone.
* Because he works it for her and deletes messages he doesn’t want her to hear?
She didn’t want to call back.
She meant to call back and forgot, twice.
She is unable to call back.
* Because he doesn’t want her to.
* Because she is infirm or addled.
* Because she’s dead.

She doesn’t have the cell phone number anymore, or doesn’t know how to work it. She’s bizarrely impaired when it comes to phones, for someone who adopted the answering machine and fax as soon as they were available. She doesn’t know how to get her messages, or so she says. Sometimes her mailbox was full because she said she didn’t know how to delete the old messages. He does that for her. They used to have a home phone, but nobody ever answered it, or sometimes it picked up and made sounds like a fax, and then it was out of service.

How long do I wait to call the police? What is the risk in waiting? Is this time-sensitive, or can it wait overnight? What could I find out tomorrow that would make me wish I’d have called tonight? I don’t know the words, but if you hum a few bars…

This is such a fun game! “Is My Mother Dead?” Let’s play it every few weeks in our imagination. Why do I need to put myself through this “creative” “exercise”? It’s a good way to make myself grateful when she turns out to be alive. If she’s not, I will be pretty fucked up, I’m going to guess. Last time I called was 2-3 months ago, that’s a long time. But that’s the best I could do. What else could I have done? What else do people do? They ask rhetorical questions, don’t they?

She’s alive, I know, she’s fine. But I already feel grief. I feel loss and sadness. I know I’ve said and done everything I could or would want to do or say. I forgive you, Mom, that’s what she wanted to know but couldn’t hear. She was so happy that fall, when I was taking her to her doctors. I was there, I was her friend, she was forgiven. And I have forgiven her, whether she knows it or not – in fact, I don’t think she should have to be forgiven, because she honestly did the best she could; she did. I’m grateful that she carried me to term. Later, when it was my choice, I didn’t.

She’s going to be okay either way. If she’s alive, which we all know she is, she’s okay. And if she’s dead, she’s okay. I’d be even more okay with it if [he] were dead, but I know better than to hope, and this isn’t about me being okay. I’ve been okay, because I said goodbye to the person I knew when there was still a trace of her to say goodbye to. Yes, I gave up, and up gave me. I used to be proud of having given her up. Like I was proud of giving up the thumb I sucked for way too long, the scrap of dirty cloth it soothed me to rub. I put them all down. Wanting a mommy was a childish thing, it wasn’t serving me anymore. Wanting my mommy was – I don’t know what to say. A waste of time, in the end.

Bill just called and told me she’s not dead. Either she didn’t get the message or she’s blowing me off. He’s always been right in the past, and he’s right this time too. So okay. She’s okay. Everything is going to be okay.

II. Around age nine or so, I became aware that it was already too late for me to fully live my life. For instance: On realizing that there was a potentially infinite number of pieces of music — potentially infinite, but not quite; it was still a finite number that could be calculated, even if that number constantly changed — anyway, blah blah, a lot of music, more than you could listen to in your lifetime, I decided that I would never listen to the same song twice, because why? You already heard it. You could never hear all the music in the world, but you could hear as much as possible over the span of your life. But I’d already missed my chance, wasted too much time. I already knew fewer songs, and therefore fewer facts about the world, than, say, the precocious seven-year-old who’d figured this out years ago and was busy stuffing her ears with music I would never be able to make the time to hear. And I still had to read all the books, visit all the cities, master all the trades — there was so much to do, if one was to become perfect, complete, the only person who would ever understand what it was to know everything. Which, now, I never would. My life would be limited forever, because nobody thought to start my training regimen when I was still young enough for it to work. I could have been the greatest human being who ever lived. But it was too late. I lolled on the floor in my bedroom thinking about how lucky this person was, this imagined Janice, who began at birth with the knowledge I had now, a Janice that could do it over but the right way this time. I envied her.

III. Aware that none of this is universal experience and therefore useless. Aware that one is privileged to have things such as a bedroom, a Metrocard, or the time to ruminate on the contradiction posed by an amount of music that is finite and yet can’t be quantified. Aware that none of it is important. Not even the life and death stuff. Many years ago, I went to a weekly open mike where I’d often see the same people perform more than once. One guy worked for the NYC Coroner’s Office in the field of cadaver transport, and after watching him, I came to understand two things: 1. There’s nothing more mundane than life and death. 2. Some, if not most, cadaver transporters are unrepentant sociopaths, and in a way we’re all lucky that there’s gainful employment available to these unfortunate sufferers of sociopathy, because it keeps at least some of them at least temporarily off the streets, and really, who else is going to be able to pick up dead bodies day after day after day, and then go to an open mike to talk about the rack on that one corpse?

Time is going to pass. That’s easy for the old to say. When you’re stuck in it, it’s like being ground between enormous shrieking whetstones, and pain brings you very much into the moment, the never fucking ending moment. You can try to hypnotize yourself — it takes a lot of practice, but it’s possible — of course, it’s easiest to get your own attention through torture, so thinking of the worst things happening, the worst eventualities coming to pass, is the most reliable method of distracting yourself from the pain. You bang your elbow to forget about your head. Invent a protective layer of pain between you and the pain; filter red light through amber. It still hurts, but it hurts in a different way now, a way you could swear you chose.

Life is teeming on the streets. I never knew what that meant until I was walking to the subway today and I saw it, all this intent, leaking out of eye sockets and nostrils, pushing mushy bodies around on the sidewalk. Some wary, some oblivious. I keep my head up and my shoulders back, scoping the periphery. Everything I do is about being better, righter, more prepared than I was before. More insufferably self-involved. Not to mention telling the same anecdotes to the same people so many times.

My jiggling leg is causing the desk to shake just enough so that the screen moves slightly, and the image of myself in the top left corner of the screen nods at me in agreement. Yes, your leg is jiggling.

Anyway, I was thinking earlier about the idea of “a light at the end of the tunnel,” and it just sounded really foreboding to me. Maybe the light is an oncoming train bearing down on you! Or even a big-ass truck! That’s the most likely explanation; tunnels are used for transportation. Or maybe it’s, you know, THE LIGHT, as in the one you are either supposed to COME TOWARDS or not, depending on whether or not it’s YOUR TIME. Maybe the end of the tunnel is the end of everything. All I know is, I’ve seen so many lights at the ends of so many tunnels, and yet I’ve never, ever emerged from the Habitrail.

I don’t know what to say after that. I either say nothing or everything. I wish I could share some profound truth that’s been revealed to me — I do feel like I know more now than I did before, but all the truths have been mundane. Everyone knows how the story starts: “I got the phone call…,” and beyond that the details don’t matter:  where I was (home), what I was wearing (a towel), what I was planning to do that day (meet a collaborator and do some work), before I got the phone call. All that matters is that I got it, THE PHONE CALL, the one where someone’s dead. Doesn’t matter who or why, especially because there’s never a why. Somebody’s dead. It’s pretty generic.

It was my stepfather calling, which is how I’ve found myself describing him in the wake of all this — before, he was always “my mother’s husband,” but once you’ve heard a man keening, keening, like all of his organs were being strangled, I guess you have a relationship of your own. He said she had a heart attack. That’s pretty mundane. Quick, too, one hopes; one is led by oneself to believe.

You know what, I can’t do this. I can’t write about it yet. I don’t know what the fuck to say about anything anymore. My stepfather — and you know what, I don’t like that either, now that I see it in writing; I don’t like the possessive, “my,” because HOT POTATO, MOTHERFUCKERS, HE IS NOT MINE; and I especially don’t like the “father” part, which is a huge insult to real fathers everywhere, including my very awesome one; this guy’s had nothing to do with fathering anything except 70 million cats and a houseful of squalor — now I don’t know how to finish that sentence either. My mother’s husband. What about him. Enough.

My mother’s husband says she loved watching the Monday night sitcoms on CBS. Her favorite show was “Two Broke Girls.” This makes me want to start watching it. She used to love “Perfect Strangers,” back when I lived with her after leaving the group home. Sometimes I watched it with her. It was funny, at the time. When my mother laughed, it was almost silent; she sort of bowed forward and put her knuckle to her nose, then picked up her head again and said, “That’s hysterical,” or “I love it.” I know this is a stupid thing to say, but: She loved to laugh. (I’m waiting for the obituary that tells us the deceased hated to laugh.) I loved making her laugh.

She did a lot of “funny” voices, do you know people like that? There was a woman I worked with at New York Press who never ever spoke in her own voice. It was always, “Hey, pardner’, can ya make me an extra copy of that?”, or “See here, doll face, I’m going out to lunch now, see?” I worked with this woman for months, and she was continually in character, until one day she stopped by the assistants’ desk to tell me she was going home early. It was only noon, and she didn’t look well at all. I said hey, Deb, are you okay? And she said, in her own nondescript Mid-Atlantic accent, No, I don’t think so. No, not okay. And then she walked out and never came back. True story.

My mom’s favorite voices were Bronx and British, and she did both very well, as she grew up in the Bronx, and then had two British roommates when she was eighteen and working at Magic Novelty, which she always pronounced Mayic Novelty, in the voice of the Spanish-speaking women she worked with. She also had a version of the boop-boop-be-doo voice, but hers was much more cartoony than sexy. She was very interested in being beautiful, but she didn’t try to look sexy. That wasn’t her thing at all. I have a kind of exaggerated way of speaking, I think, with every word trying to do double duty: explicating meaning while also commenting on the ridiculousness of assuming that anything has meaning that could be explicated. I feel like I express a lot of verbal air quotes. I got this from her, for whom most everything was a kind of stage dialogue.

I think the thing I wanted to say above was something about the moment of the call, how I’d expected it someday but not so soon. How I’d always wondered what it was going to feel like to get that call; how bloodthirsty I thought that curiosity made me; how I worried that curiosity might overwhelm all the other feelings I wanted to have at that moment, and that I’d miss it somehow, that I wouldn’t be able to experience anything but the glamour of the moment — no sadness, no love, just ZOMG, it’s happening, wow. But that was not the case. One day maybe I’ll be able to say what it was, but it wasn’t that.

My mom died this morning. It happened suddenly, quickly, without pain, with her husband right there — all things to be very grateful for.

I’m grateful she had me, and cared for me as best as she could.

I’m grateful for the good things I got from her: her creativity, her determination, her love of having fun. Her intuition. Her ball-busting-ness. Jesus, could she bust some balls.

I’m especially grateful for the best thing I got from her: my brother.

I’m grateful that I called her recently and invited her to dinner with me, her husband, and mine. Even though she couldn’t accept.

I’m grateful that she knew I cared about her. Even though.

I’m grateful that I heard the news right away, and that I’ll be able to plan a service for her according to her wishes.

I’m grateful that she’s okay now. If there was any pain or distress in her life, I’m grateful that it has been relieved.

I’m grateful for Bill, for my dad and stepmom, and for the friends who have become my family.

I’m grateful for the condolences I’ve received and those I know will come.

I’m grateful for your patience with me over the next few weeks as I recover.

Thanks.

Love.

– Janice