SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE

I am listening to the aforementioned on loop to drown out the man with whom it seems I am destined to be imprisoned again and again. Admittedly, I asked to be let in. I rang the doorbell. I tapped on his window with my sunglasses. I knelt before his letterbox and told him not to be childish and to let me in. The aforementioned is all very absurd. The whole thing is absurd. And I am being sucked into the supermassive black hole of the absurdity.

The last couple of days I was good. I was never 1) with my mother 2) with The Snark 3) with only myself - and these are the three conditions in which I am bad.

NOTICE ME! ACKNOWLEDGE ME! COME TO ASDA AFTER THE TEA - I WILL BUY YOU DINNER (+ COOK IT) THE ANGEL BUNNY says the note clutched in the mouth of the man who has just brought me a mug of tea, and kneels before me, looking penitant. I do wish he would just go away. Tea acknowledged as being welcome. But I am rather hungry... & he does cook rather well... I suppose once again that my gluttony will overcome my principles.

But I find myself pulling my wig to pieces just so that I will not be able to go out (but of course I would - I would just have to wear a hat or a something) so that I can simply simply simply not have to interact with these people who shout at me and wrathfully lean over me, eyes wide, coils of dark dark hair like a flurry of live black snakes abput to consume me. He reminded me, earler, of nothing so much as the horrible fire-monsters in Mirrormask. How they seem to deconstruct one, to consume one, until there is less than one, until there is a fraction, a 0.? until there is a 0.0 and one is 0 and no longer exists. Reminiscent of Zero, 'I'm your loverm I'm your zero' - only in his case I want to be neither becuase he is making himself seem utterly repellant, insinuate-ing himself into the list of People I Dread along with my mother - though perhaps now more so than my mother in some way, since I have liked him and been disappointed by him more recently? Yes - all this is horrible. His screaming hideous imititations of my voice at me - which, if they were true, would preclude ever speaking, ever saying anything to anyone. I feel very young and very much like crying - he somehow has the effect of being like some sort of vastly overwhelming big brother from hell. With all the unpleasant under/over-tones of someone one has once worshipped - like some inhuman forest faun. Never really liked perhaps...

But strangely perhaps I was worst yesterday. Unthinkingly so. I was happy and I didn't really think about it. Now, though, that my world has once more temporarily imploded, it seems ever more imperitive that I MUST not make saving myself from - this horridness - any more difficult. I need all the energy I can save from these people's depletions of it. To endure this and to escape this. How terribly teenage-angst, I know. Perhaps it's the Muse.

So yes - if I am surrounded ny people trying to destroy me (paranoia anyone? But it does seem that way), by the torn-up, stupid spiteful letters of a forest-faun-gone-wrong/'ANGEL-BUNNY', by The Snark, by the Mother-Monster (who may for all I know be perfectly lovely to me when I next see her - in which case I will feel guilty.

So now I sign off, being handed a chivalric white ribbon by Him Who I Will Will Will Avoid, and wishing so very much I were in a soundproofed room of my own, Virginia-Woolf-esque-ly.

No photo today. I am suddenly shy of that - as I feel stamped on my The World and very very little and delicate and no no no no photo.

'don't forget to breathe'

I am happy. Simply. So what must I do to counter-balance this horror of hyper-intensity? I must savage my appearance as a sort of compensatory measure. Possinly to remind myself that I am able to endure it if and when unhappiness descends. To the music of Wagner. If and when the rainstorm dashes against the Nietzsche-built-mountain-sides of my... soul? self? s...

I have not been good. But there is something so exhilarating about tearing myself to shreds like a silken scarf - like the silken scarf in Wilde's poem - 'Symphony in Yellow'. 'It's a bitter-sweet symphony, that's life...' 'I'm a million different people from one day to the next...' Yes I am, and some of them are far more sensible than to destroy themselves on a daily basis.

Perhaps I need a natural predator. My life is too easy for me. I am too... content. Some black-clawed thing like the long-limb-ed ravens I was fascinated with years and years ago - self-constructed nightmares. Or the terrible spider I was convinced was crawling up a silken thread last night - half-dream - so much so that I hollered for light and reassurance that there was indeed no terrible spider. Yes, my life would be so much better with nightmare-ravens and nightmare-spiders she said with just a trace of irony...

It is such sweet sorrow, this tearing apart of myself. But it is also a search for the purity of the essential. A disdaining of the unneccesary. But - Carrie! Hair is neccesary, don't you think...? You are human and need only endure ordinary human sufferings. That is sufficient evidence of your durability, surely? Or perhaps you shout stand on a mountain and shout at the gods - I can endure your beautiful lightening for I am inhuman and subhuman and superhuman and require a showdown!

Got Up, Got Out Of Bed, Dragged A Comb Across My Head...'

I am today haunted by a song. Not even a song I have heard for a long while. The Snark has his theories, but The Snark always has his theories. I leave him to them.

Having been entirely surrounded by people for a couple of days, I have been good. That is, yes, there has been moonlight and mayhem and mock-murder - but no intentional self-destruction in the Trichotillomaniac sense. This pleases me, it need hardly be said. I say that in the present-tense becuase obviously at the time I was too busy with moonlight and mayhem and mock-murder to think about that.

Then I returned home. To my mother. *cue PSYCHO music* And stayed up all night becuase I was too - too what? - too furious and generally unhappy to throw the things on my bed off my bed and go to bed - and becuase the sitting-room seemed so much further away from her than my bedroom. The next day, after more dread-full-ness, I was... Hardly good. But the night was worst as the night always is.

Reading with great and for me very relevant interest 'The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise' by R.D. Laing I can only agree all too heartily that IT'S ALL MY FAMILY'S FAULT. I do not tell them this, remembering with horror the moment when, when I was circa five, my mother, apropos some (not-to-be-publically-shouted-from-the-rooftops) issue (shall we say) of hers, said 'It's your fault I [insert issue here]. I always thought that rather absurd. So. I have put my red slipper-shoe down. GRANDMOTHER: You have upset your mother. ME: She deserved it. Not very nice, no, but neccesary if I am not always to suffer for the sins of my ancestors. I may have, for finaincal reasons, to step down in some utterly insincere manner. When my grandmother says 'see ow you'll get on without us' (or words to that effect) she is, to some rather down-heart-en-ing extent, correct (if not right). But for now I AM VICTORIOUS. & I rather like it.This is all relevant to the Trichotillomania question becuase, I don't know about anyone else, but my Trichotillomaniac tendancies tend to fluctuate in direct correlation with the impositions of the world around me. If I am overtaxed I press the self-destruct button and hope for the best. Salvation or oblivion. Which is a little extreme, I know, and never works out quite that way, I know - but what else is there for it but direct confrontation? And direct confrontation is (as I found to some extent when I did it last night, backed against my mother's sitting room wall, vision blurred with absolute terror, screaming 'leave me alone' repeatedly and loudly to a pointing, grinning, accusatory gargoyle with some dried white substance encrusted on her chin ... nightmarish).

This evening, though, having slept to my heart's content at the house of a compassionate friend (with whom I did not fail to have an intermittant and easily sorted exchange of shouts of the 'leave-me-alone-I-really-am-dreadfully-tired' variety, me, and hand-gestures-of-an-excessively-expressive-nature, them), I feel... better. And am being good. Becuase I am so tired of being bad. And the confrontations of the last few days have tired me in a somewhat enjoyable manner. I am past the point of being emotionally involved with people who behave so absurdly. This is not flounce-ing expostulation. This is simply how things stand. It is... like lying on a poavement having been run over. There is nothing more one can do, nothing more that can possibly be asked of one (even though it always is of course - but that is merely sound a fury from some far-off incomprehesible or at least uncomprehended land) - so there is no need for the self-destruct button. No need for the numbness of the post-pull. No need for escape becuase this is the calm after the storm.

Growing Pains

As though I am going to be going to a children's birthday party (as a child, you understand, not as an adult gatecrasher and eater-of-jelly) I am a mixture of nerves and excitement. I ought to have grown out og this. Ever so often my hand strays to my head and tears-plucks-pulls a little more hair from my head. But I feel fairly lighthearted about it tonight. I think perhaps the combination of coffee and wine has helped. But, as the friend who is doing something to a peice of wood with a knife out of the corner of my eye has pointed out - I don't really want to be doind it. The tearing-plucking-pulling not the party, that is.

Doctor Doctor...

I had an appointment yesterday. The night before - convinced that I would miss the appointment and plaintively bleating 'what shall I do? what shall I do?' - a blaze-ing row was had with a certain someone - masculine sride-ing and exclaiming 'you spoiled deluded stupid nut-nut it's not my responsability to make you keep your stupid appointment' - lovely - hyper-girl stumble-ing and crying and muscle-convulsions 'you ridiculous incomprehensible stupid man-idiot how then can I go to sleep when I just don't know if the appointment will be missed when I just don't know if I can trust myself to keep the appointment when I just don't know what will happen becuase it is impossible to know what will happen in the future but I want absolute certainty and why why why won't you help me you who have such a firm grasp on time and space that flee from me all three of you' and suchlike. I woke early - shouted and cried some more - and - having obtained the use of my own seemingly commandeered coffee - fled. My new tinted moisture-ise-er did horrible things to my eyes so that I artificially cried all the way to the appointment - two people actually asking me if I was alright. So I smiled and said nothing. So I breezily said 'fine thankyou' or 'yes thankyou' - not at all fair I think for my nerves and heartbreak to be revealed by accidental and atrificially--produced tears. I wandered around the buildings lost until I came to that in which I was to be grilled. I listened to the interesting loud talkings of someone a little less waiting-room-reserved than I. I folded and unfolded a square of paper in half-amused parody of what I thought I ought to look like in such a setting - aloof, nervous, jumpy. The doctor came and I explained to him what needs fixing - looking for some sort of judgement good or bad from his face that thankfully and professionally never came - apart at one point for a smile - I got a smile. It is easiest to talk honestly to blankness. Like now. And listening to my narration of it I felt sorrier and sorrier for myself - and had more and more respect for my attempts to overcome. Yes - I am a helpless and weak-willed ingenue. I am also a damn ambitious brave and resiliant little thing. That may, oh fallen-out-with-person, be 'feminist bullcrap' - I don't know. Nothing would disappoint me more than anything generic of that sort. But if to be at all happy with anything one strives to do is to exhibit 'feminist bullcrap', what is one to do? Roll over on one's back like a sycophantic bitch and get stamped on by the big alpha-male-gone-wrong paw of the pride of the wounded-pretty-thing? Dear dear the vitriol. Stop it Carrie stop it. Rah. Anyway - I said my say while wondering what it said about me - well insomniac binge-eating loud-shouting depth-dive-ing striver after such unearthly peace as cannot be striven for - and was offered CBT. Sometime soon. Watch. This. Space.

I find myself flicking through the pages of The Gaurdian singles section. I imagine what I might write were I to write in it:

Penniless Poet. 22.

Occasionally pretty, perpetually bad-hair-dazed, occasionally articulate...

Seeks...

Similar?

No no no!

Seeks...

Genius. Hopefully jacketed. Hopefully not so volatile predecessors.

Brilliant cook, conversationalist and generally dashingly-handsome-brillant-chap/chapette.

For gluttony of food & of talkings both witty and brilliant.

No mere mortals need apply.

Thus Far

Thus far today I am calm. I have, however, only be awake for an hour. So it would be a little odd if I had worked myself up into a state of hysteria quite yet. I have, however, already glowered. That does not bode well, pre-noon glowering. I think on the whole life needs to start being seen in more positive terms before I make any real effirt to save myself from myself. At the moment - it may sound excessive, but there you go - it's just too darn comforting to think that one could, if one wanted, descend ever downwards into the dark of unbeing. Because my life, dear world, is going wrong. Cue My Ex-Boyfriend: But you are too young for your life to be going wrong. No no no. I am on a trajectory I don't like. I have more or less wasted (in a creative sense) two decades of my life. I have given in too much to the world. Cue My Mother: But you have never given it - I have never known anyone who has given in less to the demands of the world. But there have been such people and I am not one of them. Must Try Harder. Cue My Mother: But you have done so much! Like what? Like exactly what? I have talked the talk alright - but everyone who knows me knows I talk more than I write or indeed more than I do anything of importance. I am in danger of becoming (becoming?!?) a Lord-Henry-Wotton-ish character who sits sadly in a corner hoping someone anyone will talk to them and let them talk because that is the only way they can be themselves - the only expression of any worth they have - becuase they do nothing - they sit and they talk and they do nothing. Always a cristicism my grandmother levelled against my early writing. That they sit and they talk and they do nothing. But words are so much more real to me than the supposed realities of the down-to-earth. This earth of thiers is fascinating really it is but only from something of a distance for my senses stand between it and I and I can but peer at it from a distance like a myopic owl. *Note to self must not call my mother - as I did a few days ago - a myopic owl - however much she resembles one - as, as she says, the middle-aged are senstive beings* Mostly what is going wrong is The Novel. Or, as it might more truthfully be termed, The UnNovel. The NonNovel. The NotNovel.

Interlude:
Ex-Boyfriend: Would you like a drink?
Carrie: Um... Yes...
Ex-Boyfriend: What of?
Carrie: Um um um um um um... Coffee? Instant will do.
Ex-Bofriend: With milk?
Carrie: Splash.

Also what is going wrong is my inability to - without vast hassle - upload any photopgraphs. This is not the fault of Blogger. This is the fault of my computer-situation.

So I inhle the fumes of joss sticks and remember what I was going to write... Ah yes. Christian Saints. A minor obsession of mine last term. (Last Term! Never again until my MA will I be able to order time in that way! And what other way is there prithee? Prithee? Where did that come from?)


Interjection:
Ex-Boyfriend: I have a strange feeling this tarp's going to be as big as this room! At least we won't get wet if it rains! [We?!? You don't honestly believe you are going to pursuade me to join you beneath this bit of fabric in insect-infested woodland do you?!? Think again!!! Oh I sound dangerously like the sort of uber-sensible woman I dislike so much - I suppose I shall just have to be brave...]

There is a chapter in The Book I Read Most Recently entitled: Hunger.. 'Like all fasting, anorexia is a constant struggle with impulse, a drive for self-mastery that may in abjection find some kind of peace' (Melechi, 2003:290). I too have attempted to decide things which ought not to be matters of decision. Whether or not one's hair grows and stays grown ought not to be a matter of will. But I have made it so. I would, like Nietzsche's climber-upper-of-mountains, have will over EVERYTHING to do with me. Remote controls for the Sims around me. The strings to the puppets. The strings to myself. I remember a poem I write When I Was Very Young which teacher considered sinister. It was one of those I Wish poems. After reeling off all the socially-expected things I started on what I really really wished. One of these real wishes was that I knew what other people thought - what was in thier minds. A sort of child-scream against solipsism. It would make life so much easier, would it not? But then other people would know what one was thinking ONESELF! The HORROR! The point of all thise being that once one really understands quite how little power one has in a global sense, so to speak, it becomes imperative to excercise whatever power one actually does have as much as one possibly can. The older one gets, unfortunately, the less of this one realises one has. Even over oneself. The only thing I can refer to is the collection of letters by Oscar Wilde in which he laments that he is helplessly and really helplessly besotted with someone - and that this someone is taking over his life, destroying the hours in which he could be writing, and generally deplete-ing his very self. Making him less divine, less an Apollo, more a slave to a beautiful thing. Well I am the slave to a beautiful sensation and an ugly outcome. Moreover I am also the slave to a beautiful boy with whom I am helplessly besotted. It is horrible. It is horrible to be prone to besottedness and it is horrible to correspondingly have insufficient control over oneself not to leave the destroying of oneself to said besottedness-realted-life-apathy.

Interjection:
My Ex-Boyfriend (singing): 'Too much love will kill you...'

Yes. Yes, perhaps it might...

And the horriblest thing of all being that until I am as I wish to be - as divine as I wish to be - hubris alert! hubris alert! - then I feel I cannot reasonably pursue anyone else. And I have a horrible feeling that to give up on my rather Ancient-Grecian-beloved would be to ruin my life. But I know also that probably it is some silly bit of my brain that leads me to think thus when practically what can one DO if someone is only marginally fond of one but burst into tears for a few evenings and then JUST GET ON WITH IT?!? '[I] could be marvellous, [I] could be fabulous - soon...' Yes and that is the story of my life. SOON. I will stop tearing my hair out - SOON. I will fall in love with someone who actually wants me to - SOON. I will write a novel - SOON. 'Tommorow and tommorow and tommorow.' Then death. That is what I am afraid of. Twenty years have elapsed and I have a limited number of twenty-yeas-es left. Perhaps - who knows? - not any. I MUST GET ON WITH IT. But inertia reigns like the thing in 'The City Under The Sea'.

I'm Back

After a computer-malaise-related absence, here I am. Alright, it wasn't just that. For quite a couple of days I sank into a fatigue of 19-hour-long dream-crammed sleeps and general growling at anyone who disturbed me. I have lived through some dark times and some times brimming with an almost arcadia-like lightness of body and sprit over the last week. Like an exhaustion given into and recovered from. Probably more than like. And my hair looks like it and all. It sit here writing about it and pulling it out. I have sat on the floor of the sitting-room and tired to explain it to my mother, who retreats and says she is worried she will say something that will 'offend' me. Apart from the fact that I am really not the sort of person to be offended by anything exactly, I do understand and applaud her sensitivity - but I think the glass-blanket-of-not-saying of-not-looking of-not-going-near-it like-the-God-in-The-Days-of-The-Comet of it of it is best smashed. The beginning of it in obsessions about the feathers of parrots - the face-feathers of parrots. When I was 5. So I hardly think the thing can be blamed too much on my own will - for what five-year-old has will? But I have been thinking about it as a failure of will. Like an addiction. That is how I find I can best lead people to understand how it would feel. But I MUST GET BETTER. I must find some new and more vogorous obsession before I fall apart like a rotting flower. Writing writing writing (and perhaps what is known as hypomania? hypermania?) yes but the RXHAUSTION of it and the spates of sleeping and growling. So much of my delicious sinking into self-destruction comes I think from my self-strictures, my attempts to be celestially upright and behave PROPERLY. Damn it damn it damn it. This post is as you may imagine more automatically written than is general here - to some perhaps barely perceptible extent. We try - most of us try - now to live without souls. Without any spiritual lives at all. Without even an understanding and cultivating of our own peceptions. Or at least I have done. One is led to ve matter-of-fact - and too much of this, like too much time without dreaming-in-sleep , and we crumble and malfunction. My mother is right(?!?). I need a new obsession.