C’mon and drug me up

Well, I figure after such a depressing last blog, I should keep you updated as to the waning of the Snuff It’s. I distracted myself in a stupid way last night (4 Quart pitchers are rather malevolent), and then I got a call from my sweet dear friend Maggie. We chatted and chatted and she cheered me up. She was shocked to hear both of our exes were in a photoshoot together for On Our Backs. I kinda liked the jocularity of it all. And she called me a beautiful butch which made me happy. Margaret has always made me feel better since our first days of art school. She had a unicycle but I never got to see her ride it. Sometimes when I had the snuffits she would let me sleep over and tell me all about her cat and how he looked like Barbra Striesand (He did too!). She has frigging amazing mental health bedside manner. It’s really graceful and classy, and not many people can treat crazy people like that.

Anyway, another few reasons for getting over this strain of Snuff It’s is that I’m just a really freakin’ curious person. I want to know what the hell is going to happen. I feel like an ineffectual spectator to civilization’s downfall. I feel sort of like a global rubbernecker. I think I’m so weird because I grew up right near the end of the Cold War. Maybe I would have survived it better if I hadn’t snuck off with mum’s copy of Where The Wind Blows and started anticipating imminent nuclear war.

I remember one time I wrote a letter to Reagan asking him for nuclear disarmament. I must have been six or seven. He sent me back a brochure about all the fascinating facts of the White House, including Abe Lincoln’s ghost.

Thus began my fascination with ghosts.

Once in the psych ward an orderly asked me what my fascination with death was. He seemed to think it had to do with me being crazy. But it’s just kinda . . . there. When I came back from France and Germany all my pictures were of concentration camps and graveyards. I’m just kinda weird. But then I’ve also been struggling with issues of death since my depressive episodes started when I was seven.

One of my meds is being increased, the one that could cause a fatal skin rash. It’s also really good for depression, so hopefully that will improve life.

I saw my sister, which cheered me up. She kept sticking her finger up my nose and making me slap her thigh until I noticed a bruise. And she headbutted me several times. I think she pulled my hair a few times too. Sometimes I think I just became a butch so she couldn’t yank my hair the way she used to.

I also think I’m just really sad about Christopher still. I had always wanted to be more involved in his life, he was such a goof and I always heard such funny stories about what he was up to. I think it’s especially sad and humbling when someone younger dies. Death doesn’t seem so removed anymore, it feels present everywhere.

I guess I would say I’ve also had some kind of spiritual intervention. It’s a bit hard to describe though, sort of like feeling outside thoughts enter into your soul about what’s going on. Not like hearing voices, or seeing The Virgin Mary (or even the Harlot Mary). Just these emotional messages that you can understand, and sometimes it translates into words and sometimes not at all.

I came upon an interesting fact recently, which in a really weird way cheered me up. It said that the most dangerous suicidal episodes when people actually complete the act are usually the first three suicidal episodes a person has in their life. Afterwards people begin to learn that these feelings are temporary. Even me, these ones have really scared me but the longest each episode lasts is three hours. I still feel sad, but I won’t be in the danger zone until the next one. Like waves. I find depression really fluctates compared to mania. Mania increases to tremendous proportions, but when you’re in a major episode it’s pretty persistent and all consuming for days and days. I never noticed having three hours of feeling slightly normal before going up again. Maybe that’s just me.

But anyway, I am WAY past my first experience with ideation, I must have gone through at least sixty of these episodes in my life. I do internet reading on suicide and try to grapple with it logically as a medical condition to keep from feeling too hopeless. And I’m really trying to shed my own stigma and recognize and honour this as a symptom of a lifelong disability and not a true judgement of who I really am. Sometimes I like to make myself feel better by imagining what social changes should take place to preserve the health and dignity of other people with mental health issues. Sometimes I imagine starting a terrorist organization made up of the mentally ill doing outrageous acts of . . . uh, activism. Like peeing on Ewan Cameron’s grave.

Sometimes I just go to sleep and have strange dreams about beautiful women and political intrigue. Which I think I’m going to do right now.

The Snuff It’s

I have been on a very long road trip with two queer gals and a mother through Western USA. Among the things we saw was the Arches in Utah. some lizards. petroglyphs, cave dwellings in Colorado, some canyons, The Balancing Rock, Devil’s Tower, Sturgis, deer, bikers, and a helluva lot of RV parks. I am now an expert in doing sewage dumps, after mum undid the lid and got splattered in liquid poo and refused to do it again. I’ve seen first hand the RV class system, and dudes, we may as well have been towing around a cardboard box the way those people treated us. One day we were driving down the road when bikers kept pointing and gesturing at us, we discovered our sewage hose had fallen out of it’s wee container and was being merrily dragged down the road.

Mister the weiner dog was with us and I was really glad for that, because one night at two in the morning I got the Snuff It’s BAD. As in, I had worked out a plan and was about to carry it out IMMEDIATELY. I’m sure it would have been a pretty gory scene had I carried it out. Anyway, I was crying and feeling pretty hopeless and working up the nerve to just go do it and have it over with, and Mister started licking my face, and he just would not stop until I had calmed down. And then he snuggled right up to me until I fell asleep.

I keep getting the Snuff It’s off and on and it’s really bothering me. I’m not sure if I’m going to make it through this time. There isn’t really anyone I can talk to about this stuff, because people freak out and get mad at you if you’re talking suicide. I guess sometimes I just feel people would be better off without me, no one understands me, people think making fun of me is actually funny instead of abusive and making me want to kill myself even more. And people act like my bipolar disorder is a big burden on them, and besides all of that, I’m just not sure someone as marginalized as me has a fair chance in this world. I’m so tired of fighting and I’m so tired of not being loved. Most of all, I am tired of always wanting to kill myself, and I don’t know anymore how to make it stop. What makes me most sad is that I still feel like part of me died in the hospital and is never coming back.

I don’t know what else to say except that this pain is really awful and I’m running out of ways to make it go away.

Randomness

Okay, first link, THIS is why I am seriously fuckin’ glad I’m not working in a call centre these days. Although to be honest, this lady is SO over the top with her vitrol that it was probably an entertaining highlight of this telemarketer’s day. And yeah, most calls are recorded, so if you’re yelling at some anonymous caller, it just might find it’s way onto the internet somehow.

www.penisland.com is NOT a land of penises, in case you were going to plan a trip there, nor is it a porn site. It’s a badly thought out url for Pen Island, a store focusing on pens. For more bad urls from legit companies, check this out.

ART CAN KILL YOU! By now you must have heard of the inflatable sculpture Dreamscapes, about the size of a football pitch with interiors to walk through, it bust through it’s moorings and floated forty meters, killing two people and wounding others.

This week a group of brave adventurers are trooping out to see the St. Louis Ghost Train! I’ve never seen it before, but you can be sure I will write about my experience. Some say it is just car headlights, but I know people who have been chased by the light far beyond the bounds of the railbed.

If Hitler reincarnated, could he be a kitty cat? Check out these Cats That Look Like Hitler.

And finally, if you grew up watching NFB animated shorts, you’re in for a treat! The NFB has uploaded FIFTY(!) shorts onto it’s website. Click on Large Format if you have broadband. I recommend “The Owl That Married A Goose” and the all time classic “The Big Snit.” So come shake yer eyes at this!

Titty Twisters?

Hmm, I start this blog with no clue as to what to write. But they say you should write nevertheless.

I got my eyes checked today, they found a cataract, which I knew about anyway since the last time I got my eyes checked they noticed it. But it’s not in a spot that hinders my vision. Anyway, what was really funny about it was that he asked me if I had ever been punched in the eye, because that’s what could have caused it. I said no, but in the car on the way home I remembered the time some girls jumped me and my friend Danielle. I think I got punched seven times in the eye. And then ˆ probably had PTSD, thinking back on it now. It took a really long time to get my confidence up for walking in downtown Saskatoon.

Then the other day some redneck yelled something at me from a car. I don’t think it was homophobic, but it could have been. He didn’t say fucking dyke. It was really interesting to watch my own response though, first I was startled and ready to run, then in a matter of seconds I had my back up and was itching to pound the shit out of him. I was strategically thinking how to incapacitate him, and then I started considering all my options for causing the most amount of pain while he was on the ground. I always thought it was elegant street justice for a homophobe to be severely debilitated for the rest of his life for having the audacity to go after an innocent homo walking the dog. I mean, I was furious!!! I wanted to crack this guy’s spine!

I didn’t fight back the first time I got bashed, but I think any other times I would definitely go after them tooth and nail, pulling a Kill Bill and ripping out eyeballs kind of thing.

I secretly admire people who can do things like bite off a rapists penis or like my cousin, grab the gun of a rapist and point it straight back at them until they poo their pants.

That all being said, 99.998 percent of the time violence is so not the answer. And most of the time, luckily, you never have to make a spikey fist with all your keys and ram it into some guy’s face.

I took self defense after my beating, but it was woefully absent on the issue of female attackers. They say you should just kick them in the balls, but unless your attacking woman is a pre-op tranny, that’s really unhelpful. What do you do when a woman’s getting rank on you? Titty twisters?

Ch ch ch changes!

Over the past few weeks I’ve been in a bit of a quandry as to what to do with my life. When Christopher died it really hit home the fact that we all have such a limited time here on earth, and our lives could end at any moment.

So . . . I had some debauched times, involving drinking, loads of pot, gambling, and my first trip to the horse track (I didn’t win anything). After that was done, I still didn’t feel any better about where my life was headed, especially after some splitting hangovers and watching money fly out of my wallet to the great capitalist unknown.

And some other things were bothering me too, besides not having a job and living with Mum again. Mum’s not bad, but it’s not exactly appealling to let cutie pies know you’re still in your parent’s house. Since being treated for bipolar disorder I’ve gained an excess of fifty pounds, most of it on my belly and rump. The first year the weight gain was so bad that I got massive stretch marks, which made me feel even worse. Lately I’ve discovered I can’t bend over to attend to things on the ground or I start having trouble breathing. I’m getting really fucking sick of being fat.

I went to the doctor today and said I wanted off Zyprexa. Zyprexa, my antipsychotic friend for the past three and a half years. Besides being one of THE major drugs that causes immense weight gain, it is also linked to causing diabetes, which I’m already predisposed to. So I got a prescription for Lamictal, and over the next few weeks will be doing the taper off/taper on dance. Lamictal has it’s own drawbacks, including a sometimes fatal skin rash. I never knew skin rashes could be fatal, but there ya go.

Not only that, but I’m going to try to stick to a sensible diet and exercise regime. Tonight I have to mow the lawn, but I’m also going to start going for half hour walks everyday.

My next health task is going to be quitting smoking. I really want to do it this time, especially since I haven’t had a sweetheart the entire time I’ve been a smoker. It’s blocking my womanly odors! But first thing is first.

I’m also in the process of getting together a demo reel to apply for jobs as an editor. I am a kick ass editor, in case you didn’t know. There was a rumour for a while that all of my early work was in camera, but only Bisexual Wannabe was in camera, the rest was edited together on various machines, some of them very archaic. Also my cousin and I have an idea for a television show that we’re going to try and get some development money for. I never thought I’d work in television, but I need a job, and it’s a fun project.

Aside from that, life is strange. I thought I would be moving back to Vancouver, but after visiting there for a week I decided not to. I don’t know where I would fit in, right now I’m seriously considering either Toronto or Winnipeg, although something tells me I should stay in Saskatoon for a while yet.

In other news, the general consensus among people I know here is that something BIG is about to happen, and not something nice either. I’m talking either a major terrorist attack or a natural disaster, and probably within a few months. I know, that’s the most vague prediction I’ve ever heard too, but something isn’t right in the world, there’s a weird energy and I can’t for the life of me put my finger on it. I googled End of the World predictions and nothing came up that looked remotely like what would happen. I don’t think it will be the end or anything though, just some very rough, very difficult times. And probably a lot of death.

But maybe we’re all wrong. Ya never know.

Either way, I want to get this spare tire of mine to roll away before the Big thing hits.

SCREAMS IN THE NIGHT!

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My cuz Deanna and I were up to no good over at her friend’s place out in the country. We had just said goodbye to her sister when out of nowhere an unearthly noise pierced the darkness of midnight. I was so shocked to hear it that I started smoking my cigarette even harder to try and finish it and get back inside. It came again, an eerie cry that sounded not unlike a woman screaming in extreme pain, like she was being brutally murdered. It came again, and this time it was getting closer.

“What the hell was that?”

I have to admit, my first thought was that it was an animal, but as it got closer and closer and inspired more and more fear, I began to have all kinds of wild thoughts. It sounded so much like it was a woman, what if at any second a bloody woman with a knife in her eye staggered up the walk and shrieked, with her demented murderer coming close behind, ready to destroy all the regrettably stoned witnesses? Not only that, but it was coming so close to the house, and I finally gave up my cigarette and ran inside, where we told everyone what was happening and two men went out to investigate.

They had seen a cougar, or rather, heard it, the other night out near the barn. They imitated the shriek, and the shrieking came back, but when they yelled Hey! nobody came or answered. Meanwhile we were huddled in the instrument room with quivering knees. Convinced it was really “just” a cougar, things calmed down again. Until somebody started hearing things coming from the basement . . . where there wasn’t anybody.

It’s true, cougars have returned to Saskatchewan, even around that bustling metropolis, Saskatoon. And jesus, they really do sound like murdered women.

Swelter

It’s HOT here in Vancouver, as in beads of sweat are running down my face, as in I want to pass out. It’s been an interesting trip, full of, strangeness. I got to see a room of sweaty lesbians last night, which was really nice. I’ve been to the ocean, to various little happenings. I saw the totem pole which had been repatriated by the Haisla. David Sukuzi was there for the ceremony, he got the biggest applause. It’s perfect beach weather, and it would probably be cooler at the beach, but I’m now running out of money and can’t even go. Life’s rough that way.

I REALLY miss Mister and Schrodinger, I get some reports on how they are doing. Mister is in Clicker Training for little dogs, and we still have to work on him ignoring bathroom rules, little doof. Everytime I see a little dog here (and there are a lot of them!) I miss my tiny pals. So far I haven’t seen a weiner dog as handsome and adorable as Mister. And I’m sure Schrodinger is getting bigger too, little goof. He’s got this really angular little face and such beautiful fur.

Either way, tomorrow night I will have my little friends with me again, and I’m looking forward to it.

I should really venture forth into the hot hot hot and find something else to kill the time. Arg, what can I do with a teeny amount of money in a big expensive city?

Christopher Ian Cuthand February 18 1986 – June 2 2006

We buried my little cousin on Thursday, out at Little Pine reserve. His death was tragic and sudden, and we are all forever changed.

When we talk about him, we can’t help but laugh because he was such a hilarious guy. He was sort of shy, but had this cheeky sense of humour, everyone loved him instantly. When I lived in Vancouver I would regularily hear Christopher stories, funny things he said or did. I heard about one time when he finally got his lava lamp and freaked out late one night because he thought the blobs made the face of the devil at him. He had a hamster named Mr. T, and he loved making wontons with my mom. He was just this bright happy sunbeam in all of our lives.

It’s been a really hard past week, more so because now we’re just expected to go with the flow again, when we’ve had such intense time together.

He was so young, it really makes you aware of your mortality.

I think what’s really pulling me through is this intense faith I have, something I wouldn’t have gotten, ironically, if I hadn’t gone crazy.

You never really can tell what’s going to come around the corner.

Message from a Scraling

This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.
What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location… it increases toward a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

This is a message being conveyed at Yucca Mountain, one of the biggest sites of nuclear waste. This message has to be created in a form which humans or other life forms 10 000 years into the future will understand, irregardless of how advanced or primitive (hate that word). (wrap your brain around that one!) If that’s not scary enough, listen to this. The Shoshone, who have been contesting the nuclear waste site, have a legend that “tell[s] of Yucca Mountain (known as Snake Mountain) and how the snake would rise up as a horrific serpent if it were ever harmed.” It’s also the site of Shoshone and Paite prayer rings, burial grounds, and sacred waterways. Of course. I mean, talk about the set up for a gory horror movie starring a zombie Graham Greene on a horse.

“This land was sacred to my people since time immemorial, and now I want to EAT YOUR BRAINS!!!!”

Currently the plan is to architecturally construct the site in a very forboding manner, involving large thorny concrete spikes, large black looming rocks, and a sort of unmanned interpretive centre in all UN languages and Navajo (apparently the Shoshone and Paite will be gone by then).

If you think that’s awful, consider this fact. Mount Rushmore, with those looming white man faces, is considered a sacred site by the Lakota. And it was good for their ar-thur-itis too. Actually, I just made that last part up.

But if you want to know something really trippy, Vikings called us scralings. Scralings, isn’t that hilarious? It’s like something out of Lord of the Rings or a really bad text video game.

Hands up all the queer girls who are ogling the Pepsi commercial

Last year around this time I wrote about Parker Posey’s sexiest moment as the bitchy senior who sprays the freshmen girls down with condiments. Now I add her latest achievement, the Pepsi commercial. I would never call Pepsi commercials an achievement normally, but she is so freakin’ cute in it. Someone said she looked dorky, I guess she makes dorky kinda hot though.

I’ve gotten hooked to the freakin’ ad, and everytime I hear the jingle I drop whatever I’m doing and stand slack jawed in front of the television set drooling. And apparently I’m not the only one.

In honour of Parker Posey day (which I have just made up), here is a series of links. If you’re a Parker Posey fan, you might find some of the links probative.

The commercial in it’s entirety Although it sucks that Parker Posey doesn’t come in until later, it does show some new Parker Posey Pepsi footage, oo la la. Including someone shoving her! That makes two terrible things to befall our heroine in one ad, the second being when that idiot man throws her up into the air and she doesn’t come back. It would have been cooler if it ended with her booting him in the groin and taking his wallet. Any other suggested alternative endings, please post them in the comments section.

If you have not heard of Parker Posey you have obviously been living under a rock. But there’s the Wikipedia entry for her.

At my graduation screening I was in the middle of a mixed episode, and screamed out to the audience “Hey! This isn’t Josie and the Pussycats!”

An old friend who lived in the same crack neighborhood as I saw Parker Posey in our neighborhood park where the crack dealers hung out. And maybe you’re thinking “Oh no, she was probably doing something more innocuous and movie star-ish like cocaine or marijuana,” but believe me, all they sell there is crack. The only other thing people go to that neighborhood for is to visit the art centres. Drug trade, art, due to economic circumstances the two seem to go together. Who knows, maybe Parker Posey was just hanging out in a scary neighborhood. She didn’t dance down the street or anything wild.

On a googling expedition I discovered this lovely stanza under the promising title “Parker Posey cum”:
Parker Posey cum
Parker Posey lesbian
u several in they’re etc.
ours eg nor j.
with has where’s
latter masturbation had becoming
except end otherwise k co her
Parker Posey ..

Happy Parker Posey Day!