Google
Cocaine and vodka enema.
Still going strong.
What?
It’s an old blog post, one I wrote six, maybe seven years ago.
And yet.
It still gets hits, every day.
EVERY DAY.
I haven’t read it since I wrote it, I almost never re-read the blogs after I have published them.
Oh.
Once and a while I do, or I might go back and do a fast edit on a piece.
Occasionally I will go back and re-read one if someone comments on it in a particular way, but for the most part, I write them, I send them out to the Universe, then I move the fuck on.
I can’t see who reads my blogs.
This is probably a good thing.
Although.
I can figure out once in a while that someone has a thing for one of the pieces I have written.
Perhaps it is about them.
I suspect an ex boyfriend of reading a certain blog I posted after our break up.
I have no recollection what I wrote.
But I do know that it resonated with a lot of people, I had folks coming out of the wood work to share about how they had gotten through a painful break up or that what I had written helped them through a break up.
Or when I was in Anchorage while my father was in a coma.
Tons of response to those blogs.
And often someone reads a blog and suddenly I’m getting something sent in the mail or someone is helping me out when I’ve been in a pinch.
All those kind, sweet, generous, anonymous folks who helped when I had the horrible ankle incident.
Or when I was the starving, literally at times, artist in Paris and I got some support from unexpected places.
I have been given a lot from this blog.
Sometimes it bites me in the ass.
Words that make me cringe, sometimes with gratitude, sometimes with a hand thwack to my forehead, when I am told the following, “I read you blog.”
Well.
Fuck me.
That can be great.
And.
Sometimes.
Well.
Not so great.
Doesn’t seem to matter how many times I write it here, I am more than my blog, you are not getting the full Carmen Show, but.
You do get a great bit of it and despite my protestations, people will read what they want to read and see what they want to see.
I have had people tell me they read my blog then tell me a completely different narrative than the one I wrote.
It makes me laugh.
We all see what we need to see, what we want to see, not necessarily what is reality.
Not my place to teach or direct or give a damn, I suppose, I’m trying here just like I’m trying elsewhere, just to tell my story in this moment.
The moment changes.
I change.
Things change.
But folks keep reading certain things and though I jest about that blog, it’s about recovery and I find it sort of funny that it gets so many hits, but maybe someone gets what they need from it.
No directions though.
No “how to” there.
Just a sad story about a sick woman, and not me, it wasn’t about me, (but I bet you a dime that most folks think it is me writing about me) it was about a woman my friend was dating and the things that they would do when they were fucked up.
Oh the things we do when we are fucked up.
The stories I have heard.
Funny, hilarious.
Fucking tragic.
I’ve been criticized for putting too much out there, cautioned too.
I have had moments when I absolutely agreed and other times where I felt like, fuck off, I’m not interested in editing myself more than I already do.
I do edit myself.
I don’t write about it all.
I think about it sometimes, but I have made amends twice about things that I have written here and both times it was painful enough to make it very clear to me that the only person I can ever write about here is me.
My experiences.
My pain.
My joy.
My life.
No one else’s.
Oh.
Sure.
I do live in relation to other humans, so there are interactions, but I don’t presume to write about people, I can observe, but I can not hurt another person.
Because.
I could.
Oh.
I could be a scathing fucking bitch about some of the things that I have heard or witnessed or had done to me.
But.
Well.
I would end up getting hurt then and this is a place where I come to heal and to learn.
If I wasn’t still learning seven years of blogging later I wouldn’t still be doing this, if it didn’t fulfill some need in me I would have stopped.
There is still so much to write about though.
Which is just fucking lovely.
I’ll keep writing until there’s not, and maybe, I will still keep writing then, because things change, even the past changes, more will be revealed and when it is, well, I want to be there to bear witness and to write about that too.
How many times can I write about the House in Windsor and all the things that happened to me there, and all the things that happened that I don’t know that happen.
How many times?
I could write every year about the seasons and the changes in the weather, how the house was never really hot, even in the depths of summer, because of all the old growth oak trees surrounding it.
Or.
The lilac trees the soft rot of the blooms in high July heat and the intangible biting sweetness in cool water when they first bloom in May.
The reminder, always, of how that grass in summer time grew so high in the back yard and how it felt on my bare feet.
Playing catch with a softball with my aunt Marybeth.
Damn.
She had an arm.
Dreaming about the boys I had crushes on at school.
Sitting in my room listening to music on my boom box.
Joining the Columbia House Record club and the utter joy of opening that first cardboard box full of tape cassettes.
Feeling alive and feeling the magic that could happen, feeling like I was just on the other side of a plate of glass and how to get to the other side were everyone else was and how they seemed to know what to do.
I did a lot of pretending.
I did a lot of walking tall and faking it until I made it.
I remember once running into someone I had gone to school with when I was working as the floor manager at the Angelic Brewing Company; he told me how much he had admired me in school, he was a grade or two below me, about how he’d observed the way I walked and how I carried myself, that he had emulated me.
That I had been cool.
I have had many a compliment, but that one haunts me.
I walk tall now, but I am not always so confident.
I love myself more and have less fear of fear.
Although not perhaps less fear.
Just a better way of getting through it.
I love that young girl in that house, she was brave and strong and so much more courageous than I ever gave her credit for.
And beautiful.
I wish she knew how beautiful she was.
Singing to herself in her room, late at night, dreaming of intangible things while cutting out photographs from fashion magazines to collage onto the wall.
And knowing, although not knowing how, exactly.
That one day.
She was going to get the fuck out.
And you know what?
I did.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Auntiebubba 