Just Because

She got out of town
On a railway New York bound
Took all except my name
Another alien on Broadway

Well, some things in this world
You just can't change
Some things you can't see
Until it gets too late

And, baby, baby, baby, when all your love is gone
Who will save me
From all I'm up against out in this world?
And maybe, maybe, maybe you'll find something that's enough to keep you
But if the bright lights don't receive you
You should turn yourself around and come on home

I've got a hole in me now
Yeah, I got a scar I can talk about
And she keeps a picture of me
In her apartment in the city

Well, some things in this world
Man, they don't make sense
Some things you don't need until they leave you
Then, they're things that you miss

You say, baby, baby, baby, when all your love is gone
Who will save me
From all I'm up against out in this world?
And maybe, maybe, maybe you'll find something that's enough to keep you
But if the bright lights don't receive you
You should turn yourself around and come on home

Let that city take you in
(Come on home)
Let that city spit you out
(Come on home)
Let that city take you down...
For God's sakes, turn around!

Baby, baby, baby, when all your love is gone
Who will save me
From all I'm up against out in this world?
Well, maybe, maybe, maybe you'll find something that's enough to keep you
But if the bright lights don't receive you
Turn yourself around and come on home
Yeah, come on home

Baby, baby, baby, come on home
Come on home

Woot!

I just acquired a new full-time client by sheer force of my flaming fucking awesomeness.

(Ok, so it probably has something to do with the fact that I write interesting, engaging blogs that are good for SEO and deliver them when I say I'm going to EVERY. FUCKING. TIME. Which no one else can do to save their lives.)

But still...a new convert to the fold simply because I am a badass motherfucker. Not bad for a late Sunday. *Smirk*

I'm Calling You Out, You Bastard

Dear Bipolar Demon,

You've had control of me for the past several weeks. I have been able to wrest my mind back a few times, but in a day or two, you come back to snatch it away again.

Like right now--I feel like everything is pointless, that I'll never get better, that all I am good for is lying around and crying, that I will feel this way until the day I die.

But you know what? Fuck you. Fuck you, because I know that isn't true. I know it's not me saying these things. I know it's you whispering these things in my ear in your seductive voice that's so, so, so easy to believe.

Fuck you.

I have felt better in the past. I have gotten better. I won't always feel this way because there have been times--sometimes fairly long periods of time--when your bitch ass has been chained to the dungeon wall in my brain and gagged so I couldn't hear a goddamn word you said. Just because you've managed to break loose again doesn't mean I'll never be able to lock you up again. It just means I need some stronger chains next time.

I know what you're trying to do to me. And I'll have you know that tomorrow, I'm hiding my shotgun from myself. No, that's not right. I'm not hiding it from myself; I'm hiding it from you, you cocksucking sonofabitch. The unloaded shotgun will be buried in the back of the closet in the other room, and the shells will be put in some difficult-to-get-to location that I haven't decided upon yet. And they will remain there until you're locked up again.

If I have someone come in on me, I will beat them to death with the vacuum cleaner if need be, but I will NOT let you take advantage of me. I will not let you control the part of me that is prone to self-destruct. I didn't give in to you without meds, you lying bastard, and I'm not about to now. You might get the upper hand for a minute, but by the time I'm able to lay hands on both gun and shells, I'll have snapped out of it.

You don't have the power to kill me yourself. All you can do is try to drive me to kill myself, and I don't want to die. Get that straight, asshole.

I have been broken so many times in my life. You will not do it again. You will not break me. You will not outwit me. You will not beat me. I didn't go through all the shit I've gone through for you to break me now. I didn't come this far for you to stop me now. It's too late for you to win this time.

I'm on to your game, you treacherous little motherfucker, and after a couple of days of increased meds, I'm coming for you. There is nowhere you can run and nowhere you can hide. I will break you this time and not the other way around.

Your ass is mine. I promise you that.

~An Angry Bunny

Music Video Of The Day

For obvious reasons:



Head for the future
Run from the past
Hide from the mirror
And live in a glass
What dreams forget, the whiskey remembers
Kinda like molasses in late December

This Again

I really hate this fucking time of year.

I have been pretty diligent about staying on top of meds, sleep, etc., etc., but I'm still sinking. I'm not batshit, bouncing-off-the-walls crazy or anything. I'm just...blank. I wouldn't even call it depressed. I think it requires more energy than I have now to be depressed. I'm just...here.

I haven't done enough work to amount to anything in weeks. So, of course, I'm extra-behind again. The real problem here is that I don't charge nearly enough money for my work, but what do you do? Hell, hardly anybody will pay me these super-low rates. If I jacked them up, I wouldn't have any customers at all. :(

So I've got a zillion things to do, no motivation to do them (again), and no way to pay anyone to help me. And each day I fuck around and do nothing, I get that much more behind. I can't even bring myself to give a shit.

I wish there were someone out there in this world who gave a shit.

I am so alone.

A Critical Analysis

Dear Self,

One of your biggest flaws is the fact that you're a coward. You always have been. You detest that weakness in others because you know it's a mirror for your own chicken-shittedness.

In addition to being a coward, you have this nasty habit of having no strength of your own convictions. You allow yourself to be talked into things that are terrible ideas. You go along with shit that you know is detrimental to yourself and, sometimes, others.

This is not a one-time event. This is a pattern that has repeated itself throughout your entire life. Yes, to a very large degree, it's because it's what you were groomed to do. You were raised by a narcissist and an enabler of the narcissist. You learned that the only way you could get through life without being crushed underneath someone else's foot was to just lie down on the floor for them, cover your eyes, and hope for the best.

Because of this, you've attracted the worst of the worst. Unscrupulous people sense that inherent weakness within you and exploit it. Nearly every single relationship you've had in both your child and adult lives--be it with friends, family, lovers, co-workers, everyone--has ended in you being taken advantage of and ultimately betrayed and left worse off than you were to start with. All your efforts to just roll over for people in order to avoid pain and confrontation have ended in just that--pain and confrontation.

You'd think at some point you'd get the goddamn hint. As The Last Psychiatrist says, if you flip a coin to help you make decisions, you'll get it right half the time. If you're currently batting less than .500, it's either time to completely change the way you do things or get a damned coin.

Yes, you got (figuratively) fucked as a child. But it's time to try to get past it. You cannot always live in fear of doing things differently and keep reliving the same toxic situations over and over, only with slightly different characters. If you always cave to the strongest influence on you at any given time, only to turn around and cave in the opposite direction a few miles down the road, you will never, ever, ever develop anything that can be called "character," and you will live at the mercy of someone else for the rest of your life--something you swore to yourself you wouldn't do after you got the hell out of your parents' house.

Do not keep playing out your pathetic psychodramas and bringing hell down on the heads of yourself and the one or two people in your life who ever actually gave a shit about you. You've been in one classic narcissist/borderline relationship after another your entire life.

Most of the time, YOU'RE the borderline, desperately clinging to the narcissist(s) because you want him/her/them to give you an identity. Remember that anyone who will give you an identity is going to saddle you with one that, in your right mind, you wouldn't fucking want in the first place.

On the other hand, you have, much to your chagrin, been the narcissist in the relationship, raining shit down on the couple of people in the world who've ever given a flying fuck about you. You have become your mother, in the ugliest way possible. You pander to people you shouldn't even bother giving the time of day, and you are mean, cruel, and heartless to people you should be the most loving and appreciative toward. Yes, in some ways, it is instinctual for you, having only been exposed to that kind of thing for most of your life with no healthy examples to fill the gap. But now you know better, and it's time to stop. You are no better than your mother if you continue down this road. In fact, you're worse because you realize what you're doing, and she most likely does not.

The thing about being either narcissistic or borderline is that they do not occur in a vacuum. You behave in these ways in relation to other people. With no one else around you, you cannot be either of these things. And that's what truly scares you the most--if you don't play out these ridiculous psychodramas, you have no roadmap whatsoever about how to go about life and living. You think you need these things in order to not be alone, but now you finally see that, ultimately, these stupid crutches that you cling to are EXACTLY what's keeping you crippled in the first place. And, yes, they will see to it that you are alone forever.

You know that now, so throw your poisonous crutches aside and walk on your own two feet. Or crawl if you have to. Hell, lay down and roll. Anything is better than continuing to rely on the demons that only want to consume you from the inside out. This is not just for you but for the people around you as well. Fallout from each and every one of your meltdowns hurts everyone. Not just you, not just the other people involved, but innocent bystanders as well. You know that these things are evil, and you've got a responsibility to at least keep them caged if you can't exorcise them altogether.

And that brings us to your other fatal flaw: You're wishy-washy as hell. This is mostly because of the cowardice and lack of character and backbone you exhibit. You say you should do x when you're in the presence of one person, but then you turn around and say you should do y, which is the exact opposite of x, when you're in the presence of another.

Do something. ANYTHING. It doesn't even matter anymore. Anything is better than being caught in this perpetual cycle of self-doubt, of ruminating, of questioning and never doing anything. You do this because, ultimately, you are afraid of changing, and keeping yourself constantly tied up in some sort of Catch-22 double-bind provides you with plausible deniability to continue spinning your wheels and doing absolutely nothing.

It is not enough to merely define the problem. You have to try to solve it, too.

After nearly two years of being medicated, a year of introspection, and six months of actively isolating yourself from the world to work on your problems, you finally have a fairly objective view of things that you have NEVER had before because your brain was so fucked up. It's easy to hide behind the "I don't know what to do" curtain, but the truth is, you do know. You've always known. You have an excellent sense of what's right and what's wrong; you just hardly ever have the integrity to act upon it.

You do not get to make up the narrative of your life as you go along. You don't get to say, "Well, I know what's right, so that doesn't make me a bad person. I just had my hands tied by such-and-such, and that's why I couldn't do the right thing...." You are the sum of your actions, nothing more and nothing less. If your actions are shitty, then you're a shitty person, regardless of what kind of mental gymnastics you try to perform to convince yourself you aren't.

You can be better than this. You are not forever confined by your past. Your battle with the bipolar demons have shown you that. You can rise above if you try hard enough. You do not have to lie, cheat, manipulate, and two-time your way through life just to keep from getting your head chopped off. There is a better way.

I know that you've made a lot of progress, but at this point, it's mostly been in isolation. And I know that you have remained in isolation because you are afraid that at some point, when the pressure is on, that you will revert to type. But everyone has that fear, and the only thing you can do is face each thing that life throws at you one at a time and do the very best you know how to do each time. Eventually, it will become a habit, and the fear that your dark self will take over will ease because your not-dark self is so much stronger.

What was going to be a short memo has turned into an epic, so I will try to end this quickly. You have taken a lot of steps in the right direction, but it's time to test the person you're becoming, to try it by fire, so that it will become strong and tempered from the flames.

Do what's right. If you're not sure what's right, get a damned coin. If you're lucky, there may be a benevolent God out there who has enough of a hand for parlor tricks to make sure the "right" side of the coin turns up when it needs to.

~Bunny

P.S. Those dreams that are haunting you are trying to tell you something in that strange, confused, and muddled way that dreams have. Listen to them.

Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude...it's a lovely word, isn't it?

I don't often get the chance to indulge in it. More often, I'm on the receiving end. But I'm relishing in it right now.

Perhaps I'm a horrible person. Or perhaps some people just have it coming because their sense of hubris is astounding.

A few days ago, my mother called to tell me that Cousin Jesus's wife (who left him right after she got pregnant, then came back right before she had the baby in order to net a bunch of expensive shower gifts from my kinfolks, had the baby in early August, and stayed with him for a couple of months) called him to tell him that she is having him served with divorce papers.

Divorce. Papers.

Excuse me for a moment.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

*Ahem*

Ok.

I'm good now.

You see, the thing about Cousin Jesus--and the very reason that I've come to call him that--is that my whole family thinks he walks on water. He can do NO wrong, regardless of the fact that he's a drunk, a manipulator, a liar, a user, and, worst of all in my eyes, a goddamn hypocrite with an entitlement complex. He genuinely believes that the world owes him something just by virtue of him living in it. And, truth be told, I guess it's no wonder that he believes it because he's always had anything he's ever wanted just handed to him, and it's not the least bit appreciated.

It doesn't matter how many times he gets drunk and wrecks his truck; somebody's always there to hand him money to get a new one. It doesn't matter how many times he gets arrested; somebody's always there to bail him out to make sure he doesn't actually get booked. It doesn't matter how many financial jams he gets himself into; somebody's always there to funnel him money to keep him from getting his phone turned off or his truck repossessed or God knows what else.

I, on the other hand, the non-alcoholic, non-hypocritical, non-white-trash, college-educated member of the family, can do no right in the eyes of the rest of my kinfolks. I've never been arrested, never defaulted on a loan, never wrecked a vehicle because I was drunk, and certainly never expected the world to GIVE me a goddamn thing. Oh, and I didn't live in my mama's house until I got married at 30 years old and then promptly move into a trailer in her backyard, either. But, still, somehow, Cousin Jesus heals the sick and raises the dead while I am a non-entity, even to my own mother (or at least up until very, very recently--as in the last few months). It's pretty disgusting, actually.

Anyway, now, while I think that Cousin Jesus had no business getting married in the first place to someone as childish and immature as he is--which I said to my mother before the wedding in 2010--and he damn sure had no business fucking reproducing (God help us), I have to say that she's really no better than he is. Why? Well, like I said, she's childish and immature, and, really, nobody in her right mind would have the bastard to start with, so there's gotta be something wrong with her, too.

But, yes, I am taking an enormous amount of pleasure in this because he's finally found something that he can't either talk his way out of or convince someone else to buy his way out of. Watching a narcissist fall is one of the great pleasures of life, in my opinion.

Sometimes, it's nice knowing that people can't get away with being self-righteous, manipulative, overly-entitled dickheads their whole lives. Watching it come back and bite them in the ass is worth all the bullshit you have to put up with to get to that point. And I do believe that it almost always *does* come back to them one day, even if they believe that they're invincible.

I've fallen far enough. Time to watch somebody else do it for awhile.

Do You Ever...?

Do you ever look at your life and wonder "Why did I give up drinking again?" Yeah, that's me right now. More to follow later. Too much shit to do to write more right this second.