Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Evidence Mounts
Evidence is mounting that our ‘newbie’ is swiping time on a regular basis. Thunder called this morning to say his car won’t start again. Since we couldn’t afford to keep up his Triple A membership I needed to go sit with the car. His college is 42 miles away. This threw a spanner in the works for my day.
Eyvonne, a late riser, had just gotten up while I’d been up long enough to get some work accomplished. We were both eating. It was breakfast for her, second breakfast for me (maybe I am a hobbit) so I assumed it was about 10:30.
“I have a commitment at 3:30 in Shurdue,” Eyvonne said. Shurdue is nine miles in the opposite direction from Thunder’s school.
“What time is it now?” I asked. “12:30,” she said. My fork stopped halfway between my plate and my mouth. “12:30?” She nodded.
It was lunchtime. I’d missed second breakfast completely. All the time between cookies for breakfast at 6 a.m. and now was AWOL. Suddenly I remembered the strange dream I’d had just before waking.
Eyvonne and I were in a huge glassed in room like a solarium or greenhouse. It was very old and we were there because we were instrumental to restoring it. It was like two stories high, all very old windows, with a concrete floor. The floor was cracked and broken in places. The end of the building had a very large door, which was open. Dried leaves were blowing about here and there. This man who looks almost exactly like me was with us.
He was a bit heavier, more muscled up than I am. He said I needed to dance with him. I thought it was a joke but he remained very serious. Eyvonne watched as I went into his arms. Music started and we danced. He held me very close.
I felt awkward at first, then relaxed, almost laughed. Eyvonne was obviously trying not to laugh. It was like I was dancing with my own mirror image. But I felt smaller, somehow rather frail compared to him, as if my masculinity were not as robust. He led as we danced and I was content to follow. In fact I was rather enjoying myself. We danced out the door. Outside people were parking their cars and going into the building the greenhouse was attached to, or enjoying its park like surroundings with antique wrought iron fences. This was either a public place, or soon to be a place the public would enjoy. People who saw us dancing smiled.
When I woke the dream hung with me. All day the strangeness of it haunted me. I know when a dream does that it’s important. But I felt foolish asking Eyvonne to dreamsay (interpret) it or even just listen to it. I felt silly about dancing with a guy, especially a guy who looked so much like me. Eyvonne is great at dreamsaying. She has a natural knack for the work. She is my partner. There is very little I cannot just say to her. It bothered me that I was reluctant to talk to her about this dream. Which made me very aware the dream’s message might be one I didn’t want to hear, especially in light of the fact that losing a few hours brought it back in detail. “What’s up honey?” Eyvonne asked.
I was blinking back tears. I hate crying. She came around table and put her hand on my arm, which made me feel even more like crying.
“Lost most of the morning,” I said. “I’m sorry you’re having a hard time,” she said. Sympathy is tough for me. I swallowed hard.
“You noticed anything unusual? Anything that doesn’t seem like one of us?” She shook her head. “No.”
“Stay alert OK?”
“Sure,” she said. I applied myself to finishing a piece of chocolate cake with an inch of icing and sprinkles. It made my sore tooth hurt like hell. Which kind of jolted me. That damn tooth. Normally I don’t even notice if it hurts. We’d completed root canal on it two months ago. The dentist declared it ‘finished’ even though it still hurt at the time.
What I think he meant was he was finished with it as he’d been working on it off and on for six months and wanted the second half of his money. When we’d started the whole root canal thing he’d said it would take two visits. We were on about the fourteenth when he declared it done. “But it still hurts,” I said.
“It will hurt for a while,” he said.
He didn’t say what constituted a while. It hurt a week later. It hurt a month later. It was annoying so I turned the pain off. After that the only one who could tell us how badly it really hurt was Ian, who can always feel pain even when the rest of us are clueless.
I knew if I tried chewing on that side of my mouth I did feel something uncomfortable. Ian said it hurt like a sonofabitch. So I stopped chewing on that side. But I wondered what purpose having root canal served if the tooth still hurt as bad as the first time we saw the dentist for it.
I suppose a normal person wouldn’t have lasted a week before they called the dentist to complain. But we were programmed in early childhood never to complain.
If the dentist says it will hurt a while then tough it out and don’t bother the man. Don’t even dream of mentioning the $300 we paid him to not make our tooth feel better. It’s a dissociative pattern. It’s a microcosmic look at why we ended up in so many awful relationships and then stayed in those awful relationships.
Although I believe we now live our life from the perspective not of victim, but of survivor, in fact beyond survivor, we still have those early tracks laid down to derail us.
It doesn’t really hurt, or at least not enough to bother anyone about. He didn’t really hurt you. Why did you make him mad? Maybe you ought to look at your behavior, what did you do to provoke him? Lie still it will be over in a minute. This won’t hurt. Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.
Anyone see the progression here? Oprah, you of all people should get it.
We drove to Thunder’s college and tried to start his car. It made weird clicking sounds but didn’t start. We called Triple A. While waiting for the tow truck we messed about with the car and it started. We turned it off and restarted it. We did this four times. The tow truck arrived and we were all standing around sort of sheepishly.
“What was wrong?” the driver asked.
We explained what had happened and he was nice enough to do some troubleshooting. “Turn it off and we’ll see if it restarts,” he said.
He seemed to grasp that the car was Thunder’s even though I’d made the call for roadside service. He would have been blind if he’d failed to notice it looked suspiciously like a rez car parked among all those brand new Yuppie kid cars.
“What year is this Cougar?” he asked.
Thunder grinned. “1988 .”
It was guy bonding.
After the car started one more time we all deemed it best I drive it to the garage near our home. The tow truck guy waved on his way out of the parking lot. I hugged Thunder. College security drove up, perhaps sent to investigate a possible Indian uprising. Thunder explained and Eyvonne waved.
“See you Saturday,” I hollered.
Saturday there was yet another college band concert where we would probably see the bell of the tuba, and if we were lucky, Thunder’s forehead. But the music was always grand.
As I drove the Cougar home I remembered how much I loved the car. It has this big roomy luxury feel to it that not even an SUV has today. It’s low to the road and has way too much power. The temptation to let it out was high but Eyvonne was right behind me.
I relaxed and just drove with the radio blasting and window down, enjoying the unexpectedly warm afternoon. Indian summer. Why the hell is it called Indian summer anyway? Probably something derogatory.
I remember at one point being very aware someone was up with me. Although I thought so at first, it wasn’t Keeper. In some ways it felt very much like him, male, tough guy kind of presentation. Maybe the car had drawn our newbie up. I stayed real calm and low key, just let it happen like I didn't notice anything. I didn’t want to scare this one back into hiding.
I was reminded of my dream. I noticed as I relaxed he was more present. I felt him settle into ops and take the wheel. But he didn’t lock me out. We just shared loving driving this car. I let it be all the way up the highway. I noticed how he sat, a bit more open than I do when I drive. He was a bit heavier than me, more muscled up. I noticed his hands in particular as he held the wheel. They were bigger than mine and rougher, calloused. Working man’s hands. He bailed as we approached the garage.
That wasn’t half bad, I thought. If he loves this car how bad can he be? I would have bet anything he likes Guinness too.
Then I pondered what an experienced a driver he was. He’d either driven before or he was the quickest learner I’d ever encountered. Again I thought about my dream. Were we dancing yet? I was really glad there were no hostile overtones. Somehow thinking of hostility brought Keeper to mind. I reached inside to brush him with the faintest mindtouch. I couldn’t find him anywhere.
I turned the car off, let it sit a minute and then tried to restart it. Nothing. No matter what I tried it wouldn’t start. Eyvonne sat waiting patiently. To her it was immaterial whether it started or not, we’d accomplished what we set out to do.
I was rattled and restless. I’d nicknamed our newbie Pleiades. The closer I got to him the less I understood. Eyvonne and I talked about what to do if Thunder’s car cost too much to fix. Sarah’s car had problems too.
We were already almost broke and I couldn’t even bill my clients for another couple weeks, then it would take a week or two for them to pay me. Money makes me cranky. Maybe that’s why Eyvonne and I ended up fighting which is a rarity for us. I was driving out our own driveway enroute to her appointment in Suredue to fix a friend’s computer problem. We were down and dirty in a blink.
I felt unreasonably angry with her and she responded by yelling at me to stop driving like a dickhead or she was getting out of the car. I stopped the car when I realized she already had the door open and her leg out. This was not the best moment in my life. We resolved things although I was compelled to bitch for several miles about her poor judgment in trying to exit a moving vehicle.
“This was about control Eyvonne! I don’t want to be controlled by you or anybody else!”
“It was not about control,” she said.
We were silent for a few miles and then just started talking randomly about something else. For Eyvonne the fight was like a summer storm, fast, furious and over. Now the sun was out again. For me it lingered.
The flashpoint of my anger seemed low even given the number of triggers. I still felt residual anger. Mindless, undirected hostility.
“It’s lack of sex,” Eyvonne said.
“Yeah,” I said wistfully. She was at least partly right.
We call our kids the Sex Police. It was uncanny how seldom we had the chance to be alone. If we were by some miracle alone for an evening and even thought about a romantic interlude one of them called or came home unexpectedly.
The computer problem we expected to take an hour to fix took three. When we finally got home there were four cars in the driveway and all the lights in the house were on.
“You thought about sex didn’t you?” Eyvonne said.
© 2004 M. S. Eliot
Eyvonne, a late riser, had just gotten up while I’d been up long enough to get some work accomplished. We were both eating. It was breakfast for her, second breakfast for me (maybe I am a hobbit) so I assumed it was about 10:30.
“I have a commitment at 3:30 in Shurdue,” Eyvonne said. Shurdue is nine miles in the opposite direction from Thunder’s school.
“What time is it now?” I asked. “12:30,” she said. My fork stopped halfway between my plate and my mouth. “12:30?” She nodded.
It was lunchtime. I’d missed second breakfast completely. All the time between cookies for breakfast at 6 a.m. and now was AWOL. Suddenly I remembered the strange dream I’d had just before waking.
Eyvonne and I were in a huge glassed in room like a solarium or greenhouse. It was very old and we were there because we were instrumental to restoring it. It was like two stories high, all very old windows, with a concrete floor. The floor was cracked and broken in places. The end of the building had a very large door, which was open. Dried leaves were blowing about here and there. This man who looks almost exactly like me was with us.
He was a bit heavier, more muscled up than I am. He said I needed to dance with him. I thought it was a joke but he remained very serious. Eyvonne watched as I went into his arms. Music started and we danced. He held me very close.
I felt awkward at first, then relaxed, almost laughed. Eyvonne was obviously trying not to laugh. It was like I was dancing with my own mirror image. But I felt smaller, somehow rather frail compared to him, as if my masculinity were not as robust. He led as we danced and I was content to follow. In fact I was rather enjoying myself. We danced out the door. Outside people were parking their cars and going into the building the greenhouse was attached to, or enjoying its park like surroundings with antique wrought iron fences. This was either a public place, or soon to be a place the public would enjoy. People who saw us dancing smiled.
When I woke the dream hung with me. All day the strangeness of it haunted me. I know when a dream does that it’s important. But I felt foolish asking Eyvonne to dreamsay (interpret) it or even just listen to it. I felt silly about dancing with a guy, especially a guy who looked so much like me. Eyvonne is great at dreamsaying. She has a natural knack for the work. She is my partner. There is very little I cannot just say to her. It bothered me that I was reluctant to talk to her about this dream. Which made me very aware the dream’s message might be one I didn’t want to hear, especially in light of the fact that losing a few hours brought it back in detail. “What’s up honey?” Eyvonne asked.
I was blinking back tears. I hate crying. She came around table and put her hand on my arm, which made me feel even more like crying.
“Lost most of the morning,” I said. “I’m sorry you’re having a hard time,” she said. Sympathy is tough for me. I swallowed hard.
“You noticed anything unusual? Anything that doesn’t seem like one of us?” She shook her head. “No.”
“Stay alert OK?”
“Sure,” she said. I applied myself to finishing a piece of chocolate cake with an inch of icing and sprinkles. It made my sore tooth hurt like hell. Which kind of jolted me. That damn tooth. Normally I don’t even notice if it hurts. We’d completed root canal on it two months ago. The dentist declared it ‘finished’ even though it still hurt at the time.
What I think he meant was he was finished with it as he’d been working on it off and on for six months and wanted the second half of his money. When we’d started the whole root canal thing he’d said it would take two visits. We were on about the fourteenth when he declared it done. “But it still hurts,” I said.
“It will hurt for a while,” he said.
He didn’t say what constituted a while. It hurt a week later. It hurt a month later. It was annoying so I turned the pain off. After that the only one who could tell us how badly it really hurt was Ian, who can always feel pain even when the rest of us are clueless.
I knew if I tried chewing on that side of my mouth I did feel something uncomfortable. Ian said it hurt like a sonofabitch. So I stopped chewing on that side. But I wondered what purpose having root canal served if the tooth still hurt as bad as the first time we saw the dentist for it.
I suppose a normal person wouldn’t have lasted a week before they called the dentist to complain. But we were programmed in early childhood never to complain.
If the dentist says it will hurt a while then tough it out and don’t bother the man. Don’t even dream of mentioning the $300 we paid him to not make our tooth feel better. It’s a dissociative pattern. It’s a microcosmic look at why we ended up in so many awful relationships and then stayed in those awful relationships.
Although I believe we now live our life from the perspective not of victim, but of survivor, in fact beyond survivor, we still have those early tracks laid down to derail us.
It doesn’t really hurt, or at least not enough to bother anyone about. He didn’t really hurt you. Why did you make him mad? Maybe you ought to look at your behavior, what did you do to provoke him? Lie still it will be over in a minute. This won’t hurt. Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.
Anyone see the progression here? Oprah, you of all people should get it.
We drove to Thunder’s college and tried to start his car. It made weird clicking sounds but didn’t start. We called Triple A. While waiting for the tow truck we messed about with the car and it started. We turned it off and restarted it. We did this four times. The tow truck arrived and we were all standing around sort of sheepishly.
“What was wrong?” the driver asked.
We explained what had happened and he was nice enough to do some troubleshooting. “Turn it off and we’ll see if it restarts,” he said.
He seemed to grasp that the car was Thunder’s even though I’d made the call for roadside service. He would have been blind if he’d failed to notice it looked suspiciously like a rez car parked among all those brand new Yuppie kid cars.
“What year is this Cougar?” he asked.
Thunder grinned. “1988 .”
It was guy bonding.
After the car started one more time we all deemed it best I drive it to the garage near our home. The tow truck guy waved on his way out of the parking lot. I hugged Thunder. College security drove up, perhaps sent to investigate a possible Indian uprising. Thunder explained and Eyvonne waved.
“See you Saturday,” I hollered.
Saturday there was yet another college band concert where we would probably see the bell of the tuba, and if we were lucky, Thunder’s forehead. But the music was always grand.
As I drove the Cougar home I remembered how much I loved the car. It has this big roomy luxury feel to it that not even an SUV has today. It’s low to the road and has way too much power. The temptation to let it out was high but Eyvonne was right behind me.
I relaxed and just drove with the radio blasting and window down, enjoying the unexpectedly warm afternoon. Indian summer. Why the hell is it called Indian summer anyway? Probably something derogatory.
I remember at one point being very aware someone was up with me. Although I thought so at first, it wasn’t Keeper. In some ways it felt very much like him, male, tough guy kind of presentation. Maybe the car had drawn our newbie up. I stayed real calm and low key, just let it happen like I didn't notice anything. I didn’t want to scare this one back into hiding.
I was reminded of my dream. I noticed as I relaxed he was more present. I felt him settle into ops and take the wheel. But he didn’t lock me out. We just shared loving driving this car. I let it be all the way up the highway. I noticed how he sat, a bit more open than I do when I drive. He was a bit heavier than me, more muscled up. I noticed his hands in particular as he held the wheel. They were bigger than mine and rougher, calloused. Working man’s hands. He bailed as we approached the garage.
That wasn’t half bad, I thought. If he loves this car how bad can he be? I would have bet anything he likes Guinness too.
Then I pondered what an experienced a driver he was. He’d either driven before or he was the quickest learner I’d ever encountered. Again I thought about my dream. Were we dancing yet? I was really glad there were no hostile overtones. Somehow thinking of hostility brought Keeper to mind. I reached inside to brush him with the faintest mindtouch. I couldn’t find him anywhere.
I turned the car off, let it sit a minute and then tried to restart it. Nothing. No matter what I tried it wouldn’t start. Eyvonne sat waiting patiently. To her it was immaterial whether it started or not, we’d accomplished what we set out to do.
I was rattled and restless. I’d nicknamed our newbie Pleiades. The closer I got to him the less I understood. Eyvonne and I talked about what to do if Thunder’s car cost too much to fix. Sarah’s car had problems too.
We were already almost broke and I couldn’t even bill my clients for another couple weeks, then it would take a week or two for them to pay me. Money makes me cranky. Maybe that’s why Eyvonne and I ended up fighting which is a rarity for us. I was driving out our own driveway enroute to her appointment in Suredue to fix a friend’s computer problem. We were down and dirty in a blink.
I felt unreasonably angry with her and she responded by yelling at me to stop driving like a dickhead or she was getting out of the car. I stopped the car when I realized she already had the door open and her leg out. This was not the best moment in my life. We resolved things although I was compelled to bitch for several miles about her poor judgment in trying to exit a moving vehicle.
“This was about control Eyvonne! I don’t want to be controlled by you or anybody else!”
“It was not about control,” she said.
We were silent for a few miles and then just started talking randomly about something else. For Eyvonne the fight was like a summer storm, fast, furious and over. Now the sun was out again. For me it lingered.
The flashpoint of my anger seemed low even given the number of triggers. I still felt residual anger. Mindless, undirected hostility.
“It’s lack of sex,” Eyvonne said.
“Yeah,” I said wistfully. She was at least partly right.
We call our kids the Sex Police. It was uncanny how seldom we had the chance to be alone. If we were by some miracle alone for an evening and even thought about a romantic interlude one of them called or came home unexpectedly.
The computer problem we expected to take an hour to fix took three. When we finally got home there were four cars in the driveway and all the lights in the house were on.
“You thought about sex didn’t you?” Eyvonne said.
© 2004 M. S. Eliot
Plot Anxiety
How can you experience a slump and a crisis at the same time? No, this is not a stupid joke snatched from an email forward. I’m serious!
We’re still less than half way finished producing a 50,000 word novel in less than a month. Remember we started late because we didn’t know about nanowrimo until Nov. 5.
In case you’re interested our personal word count at midnight last night was 18,650. I’ve grown to hate the countdown clock on the nanowrimo website which this morning cheerfully reminded me there are 13 days, 14 hours, 55 minutes and 49 seconds left in the month. Even though we’re producing at a pretty good rate I'm worried our late start may doom us.
I clicked about on nanowrimo forums last night after I couldn’t write any more. In some ways it made me feel better. There are lots of people already gracefully accepting defeat. Others are hovering about where we are, somewhat less than halfway done. I noted a few already topping 50,000, but one of them admitted he’s on sick leave from work and has basically done nothing else all month.
Does any of this make me feel better? No. Obsessive to the end, when I take on a task nothing less than the finish line will do. Nor can I allow any other single thing to fall by the wayside. I still need to keep the woodstove going as it’s our only source of heat; do laundry; run the dishwasher; walk the dog; cook; and delete a thousand emails and spybots a day because my spam and spybot programs either quit working or the game has gone to the next level. Oh yeah I still need to attend to my clients so we can make it through December, you know, the month AFTER nanowrimo.
We need an obsessive-compulsive dissociative behavior support group but we don’t have time.
ARG!
Sometimes I wonder if we’re cheating because we can swap ops and continue working long after singletons crash and burn, but we can’t expand the hours in the month. Not even Oprah can do that.
I decided at about 1 a.m. last night that nanowrimo is really an economic plot to increase coffee and booze sales thereby surreptitiously lifting the country out of the depression it’s not in before enough of us get wise and try to do something about it.
Or maybe it’s one of those university-sponsored studies to see how far people will go to achieve a stated goal. You know, like the ones Erich Fromm wrote about in his book “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.” These were normal everyday people who demonstrated varying degrees of willingness to press a button delivering a potent electric shock to another person.
In the experiment few people refused to keep pressing the button even when it delivered a shock big enough to cause pain. Some were upset but followed directives after pressure to do so was applied. Most were disturbed by their own actions, sweating, becoming restless, trying to talk their way out of it, but in the end most pushed the button (which by the way was a fake, no electric shocks were actually delivered, the screaming was pre-recorded). The ones that really scared me, and probably scared the people who’d set up the experiment, were those who never questioned it. They just pushed the button because they’d contracted to do so, no sweat. They scared me more than the psychopaths who enjoyed pushing the button. Psychopaths you can identify of you watch their behaviors. Ordinary people capable of becoming Nazis are harder to pin down without extenuating circumstances.
Becoming multiple meant being on the receiving end of some of those extenuating circumstances. Fromm’s book, although published in 1973, provides amazing insight into today’s world situation. It also gave me insight into what formed the people who abused me into fragmenting.
So, enough about the writing slump. Which isn’t really a slump because we’re writing at a good pace; it just doesn’t appear to be fast enough to meet the deadline.
On to the crisis.
Does this novel have a plot? I asked el.
He growled, “Plot this,” and made a universal gesture.
If he’s that cranky we’re in trouble. He's generally a swet, even tempered guy. Kind of like Henry after the brain injury in the movie "Regarding Henry." He looks kinda like Harrison Ford too.
I know he’s upset because we have a project due for a client very soon and we haven’t even started it. Lillie is also upset because we need to gather materials in the woods to make Christmas wreaths.
It’s a sign of our worsening economic condition that we need to do this. In good years we don’t make wreaths to sell. In moderate years we need to do so to afford Christmas gifts. In really bad years we need to sell wreaths to eat. This year we’re sort of between gifts and food. If we’re really lucky we’ll get paid for writing a grant that should be awarded soon. When that happens the organization we wrote it for owes us three percent of their award.
Our income is like a roller coaster. It’s the unexpected stuff that always kills us.This month we had to pay over $150 toward Thunder’s needs at college. Yesterday we found out we had to pay $160 to finalize Sarah’s semester so she can begin the process of transferring to a closer school. Sarah announced a few days ago her car needed to be inspected this month. Who did she think was going to do that, elves? She and Thunder have both been having car trouble too. And we need to order wood or we’ll be running out probably in the middle of the first snowstorm of the season. Do you sense a growing pessimism here? What would Oprah do?
Owl and Eyvonne both have part time jobs they are hoping will develop into full time work. That can take years in our rural county. Usually it only occurs when someone retires or dies. Jobs are pretty scarce here.
The school system is the county’s biggest employer, followed by banks and saw mills. The bankers have the county’s economy figured out. It’s simple, if you work for the school system or a bank you qualify for a mortgage, if you work for a sawmill you don’t.
We have a mortgage because I can out talk anyone. I convinced them I’d pay the mortgage even if I didn’t have money for food. Which has happened.
In case you now believe the crisis of the slump and crisis routine is economic you’re wrong. We’re so used to economic idiocy it’s just part of the background noise.
The crisis is whoever is lurking around outside the system. They know I know they’re there. But they won’t step forward. I get only the smallest hints of their existence and none of their motivations or mindset.
Last night I told Eyvonne someone unknown to the system had ripped off an entire day.
She knows better than believing we just forgot a day, or we were so busy we can’t remember what we did that day. She’s forewarned and watchful. She's also on the alert now. I’m not quite worried but I am uneasy. I’m keeping a closer eye on Keeper who has been known to place his personal agenda higher than that of the collective view.
He justified it because in his opinion, it was the best thing for all of us: integration into a single person. It was like a religion for him. He sang it like a mantra, touted it like a snake oil salesman. In the end I think it was our steadfast rejection that crushed him. Ironoically the answer to his growing instability was integration with me. It made me crazy for a few days. I was kind of a born again integrationist. But it waned and all was well.
until a few weeks ago Keeper stepped out on his own again. That has never happened to me, having someone I integrated with just walk away. It happens to el all the time. So much we sometimes refer to him and anyone he’s integrated with as ‘the els.”
It puzzles me why Keeper left. He seems different too. Angry. He can cop an attitude about things in a blink. I don’t feel much different. Maybe a bit less prone to hostility, which makes sense if part of what I was feeling was his attitude developing.
You have to wonder, if we fragment as a survival strategy, why did Keeper step out now? And who is lurking just beyond the reach of my mindtouch?
Have we achieved plot trajectory yet?
Oprah, please be listening.
© 2004 M. S. Eliot
We’re still less than half way finished producing a 50,000 word novel in less than a month. Remember we started late because we didn’t know about nanowrimo until Nov. 5.
In case you’re interested our personal word count at midnight last night was 18,650. I’ve grown to hate the countdown clock on the nanowrimo website which this morning cheerfully reminded me there are 13 days, 14 hours, 55 minutes and 49 seconds left in the month. Even though we’re producing at a pretty good rate I'm worried our late start may doom us.
I clicked about on nanowrimo forums last night after I couldn’t write any more. In some ways it made me feel better. There are lots of people already gracefully accepting defeat. Others are hovering about where we are, somewhat less than halfway done. I noted a few already topping 50,000, but one of them admitted he’s on sick leave from work and has basically done nothing else all month.
Does any of this make me feel better? No. Obsessive to the end, when I take on a task nothing less than the finish line will do. Nor can I allow any other single thing to fall by the wayside. I still need to keep the woodstove going as it’s our only source of heat; do laundry; run the dishwasher; walk the dog; cook; and delete a thousand emails and spybots a day because my spam and spybot programs either quit working or the game has gone to the next level. Oh yeah I still need to attend to my clients so we can make it through December, you know, the month AFTER nanowrimo.
We need an obsessive-compulsive dissociative behavior support group but we don’t have time.
ARG!
Sometimes I wonder if we’re cheating because we can swap ops and continue working long after singletons crash and burn, but we can’t expand the hours in the month. Not even Oprah can do that.
I decided at about 1 a.m. last night that nanowrimo is really an economic plot to increase coffee and booze sales thereby surreptitiously lifting the country out of the depression it’s not in before enough of us get wise and try to do something about it.
Or maybe it’s one of those university-sponsored studies to see how far people will go to achieve a stated goal. You know, like the ones Erich Fromm wrote about in his book “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.” These were normal everyday people who demonstrated varying degrees of willingness to press a button delivering a potent electric shock to another person.
In the experiment few people refused to keep pressing the button even when it delivered a shock big enough to cause pain. Some were upset but followed directives after pressure to do so was applied. Most were disturbed by their own actions, sweating, becoming restless, trying to talk their way out of it, but in the end most pushed the button (which by the way was a fake, no electric shocks were actually delivered, the screaming was pre-recorded). The ones that really scared me, and probably scared the people who’d set up the experiment, were those who never questioned it. They just pushed the button because they’d contracted to do so, no sweat. They scared me more than the psychopaths who enjoyed pushing the button. Psychopaths you can identify of you watch their behaviors. Ordinary people capable of becoming Nazis are harder to pin down without extenuating circumstances.
Becoming multiple meant being on the receiving end of some of those extenuating circumstances. Fromm’s book, although published in 1973, provides amazing insight into today’s world situation. It also gave me insight into what formed the people who abused me into fragmenting.
So, enough about the writing slump. Which isn’t really a slump because we’re writing at a good pace; it just doesn’t appear to be fast enough to meet the deadline.
On to the crisis.
Does this novel have a plot? I asked el.
He growled, “Plot this,” and made a universal gesture.
If he’s that cranky we’re in trouble. He's generally a swet, even tempered guy. Kind of like Henry after the brain injury in the movie "Regarding Henry." He looks kinda like Harrison Ford too.
I know he’s upset because we have a project due for a client very soon and we haven’t even started it. Lillie is also upset because we need to gather materials in the woods to make Christmas wreaths.
It’s a sign of our worsening economic condition that we need to do this. In good years we don’t make wreaths to sell. In moderate years we need to do so to afford Christmas gifts. In really bad years we need to sell wreaths to eat. This year we’re sort of between gifts and food. If we’re really lucky we’ll get paid for writing a grant that should be awarded soon. When that happens the organization we wrote it for owes us three percent of their award.
Our income is like a roller coaster. It’s the unexpected stuff that always kills us.This month we had to pay over $150 toward Thunder’s needs at college. Yesterday we found out we had to pay $160 to finalize Sarah’s semester so she can begin the process of transferring to a closer school. Sarah announced a few days ago her car needed to be inspected this month. Who did she think was going to do that, elves? She and Thunder have both been having car trouble too. And we need to order wood or we’ll be running out probably in the middle of the first snowstorm of the season. Do you sense a growing pessimism here? What would Oprah do?
Owl and Eyvonne both have part time jobs they are hoping will develop into full time work. That can take years in our rural county. Usually it only occurs when someone retires or dies. Jobs are pretty scarce here.
The school system is the county’s biggest employer, followed by banks and saw mills. The bankers have the county’s economy figured out. It’s simple, if you work for the school system or a bank you qualify for a mortgage, if you work for a sawmill you don’t.
We have a mortgage because I can out talk anyone. I convinced them I’d pay the mortgage even if I didn’t have money for food. Which has happened.
In case you now believe the crisis of the slump and crisis routine is economic you’re wrong. We’re so used to economic idiocy it’s just part of the background noise.
The crisis is whoever is lurking around outside the system. They know I know they’re there. But they won’t step forward. I get only the smallest hints of their existence and none of their motivations or mindset.
Last night I told Eyvonne someone unknown to the system had ripped off an entire day.
She knows better than believing we just forgot a day, or we were so busy we can’t remember what we did that day. She’s forewarned and watchful. She's also on the alert now. I’m not quite worried but I am uneasy. I’m keeping a closer eye on Keeper who has been known to place his personal agenda higher than that of the collective view.
He justified it because in his opinion, it was the best thing for all of us: integration into a single person. It was like a religion for him. He sang it like a mantra, touted it like a snake oil salesman. In the end I think it was our steadfast rejection that crushed him. Ironoically the answer to his growing instability was integration with me. It made me crazy for a few days. I was kind of a born again integrationist. But it waned and all was well.
until a few weeks ago Keeper stepped out on his own again. That has never happened to me, having someone I integrated with just walk away. It happens to el all the time. So much we sometimes refer to him and anyone he’s integrated with as ‘the els.”
It puzzles me why Keeper left. He seems different too. Angry. He can cop an attitude about things in a blink. I don’t feel much different. Maybe a bit less prone to hostility, which makes sense if part of what I was feeling was his attitude developing.
You have to wonder, if we fragment as a survival strategy, why did Keeper step out now? And who is lurking just beyond the reach of my mindtouch?
Have we achieved plot trajectory yet?
Oprah, please be listening.
© 2004 M. S. Eliot
