#worn-smooth

[elanormcinerney]

bomberqueen17 | Now And At The Hour Of Our Death

(thx @worn-smooth for my new bucky/nat life)

[unreconstructedfangirl]

Replies...

To this post under the cut. Warning for dad issues and terminal illness.

ninezku replied to your post “Update, for those who are interested:”

Wow, that is rough and intense. No wonder you're confused. It's a bit terrifying how much shit parents can say and do to us and still there is that connection, love and frustration and devotion and guilt, always following. I wish you strength! *hugs*

Thank you. It is intense. I can’t honestly say that everything between us has always been shit, but some of it has. Definitely. It’s such a confusing feeling to love someone in a bone-deep way, and suffer when they suffer, and yet also feel... I dunno. Other things. It’s like, my heart tells me I love him and I would forgive him anything, but my mind says that realistically, there’s no forgetting some things. It’s almost numbing. Almost.

worn-smooth replied to your post “Update, for those who are interested:”

I'm so sorry. That's a lot to bear.

down-the-rabbit-hole-wooohoo replied to your post “Update, for those who are interested:”

Thinking of you – this is tough.

Thank you both. Any and all good vibes anyone can send can only help, and I’m grateful for all positive thoughts.

musabenedetta replied to your post “Update, for those who are interested:”

You are going through about the worst thing a person can go through. All I can say is, I've been there. It's tough. Be gentle with yourself. I'm here if you want to talk. (This is sussexbound, by the way.)

I think the person that’s going through the worst thing a person can go through is my dad, really. His brain is going and he can only watch helplessly as it goes, and can’t remember why it’s happening, but he knows he’s losing it. He just keeps repeating, again and again “My brain is dying. I’m brain dead.” It’s heartbreaking. Thanks for your kind thoughts.

otp221b replied to your post “Update, for those who are interested:”

I'm so sorry. I've been through it, and it's such a terrible thing, it gets so hard. You're a wonderful, strong person for helping your father with end-of-life.

I’m trying to be has helpful and kind as I can. I don’t know that I’m wonderful or strong. And, I get to go home in a week -- My Dad’s wife is the one who stays behind to manage this. I’m so worried about her, and I feel so guilty about the fact that I can’t stay. Ugh. It’s awful.

hesaiddangerous replied to your post “Update, for those who are interested:”

I'm so sorry, that is so much to bear. My dad was diagnosed with a brain tumor last week, I can sort of imagine how you feel. Take care!

Oh no! What kind? I’m so sorry! If you need to talk, please feel free to email me any time -- my email address is unreconstructedfangirl (at) gmail (dot) com. Maybe we can support each other?

dora-altamont replied to your post “Update, for those who are interested:”

You sound like you're partly grieving for the father you didn't have, the loving one. Maybe the one he could have been in a different life. That's ok. You deserved better. However strong you have to be right now, remember to be kind to yourself too.

You know what? I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. I’m grieving for what never really has been, and what never can be, now. I don’t know that I deserved better -- I think we all get what we get, and we cope with what we have to cope with, and what matters in life is how we deal with it. I’m not sure how useful it is to think in terms of what one deserves in a case like this; I think you have to accept, process, and live through what you have. I’m ok. I’m managing. But, it’s sad to lose the last hope that he will ever really be my father in a way that’s meaningful to me. I don’t know it I’m managing to be his daughter in a way that meaningful to him. I feel like he and I have never agreed about what those words meant. Despite that, I still love him.

I’m not sure if anything I’m writing makes sense. But... thank you. This was a very helpful thought.

Thanks again, to anyone who has sent kind thoughts and wished me well. It means a lot.

[marginalutilite]

If you wanna get me something for my birthday, buy me a Kindle e-book off my wish list! I've linked it above, prices going from lowest to highest, starting at the $5.99 range, but you can buy me something for $3.99 or $2.99, too. worn-smooth and mariecalloway already got me The Stress of Her Regard and Anya's Ghost, respectively--thanks, you two!

[marginalutilite]

Have you read random acts of senseless violence? Did we already talk about it and I spaced it? I just got it on Jo Weldon's rec in what makes this book so great and I don think it's aged super well (I can see it being momentous and awesome at the time) but it still made me feel fucked up! Do you still want me to send you the story if junk,

Yah, I still want you to send me The Story of Junk, even though worn-smooth says the woman was an evil rat who sold out her friends to get out of her own drug arrest, but hey, Nan Goldin/Cookie Mueller/bohemian scene gossip! I haven’t read Random Acts of Senseless Violence yet, but I have gotten into a whole bunch of Jo Walton recs—I mean, I’m about to read British naval intrigue based on her word in Master and Commander. I think I have a better stomach for these old school relics b/c it all sort of boils down to my nostalgia for my hard SF childhood.

[marginalutilite]

Books I lent/gave to worn-smooth

A bunch of old $pread magazines

Aliens & Anorexia by Chris Kraus (in which Kraus ponders Simone Weil)

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary Mccarthy ( I told her, if you're gonna write a memoir, you have to read this)

Close To The Knives by David Wojnarowicz (I just remembered I wrote a journal entry on the occasion of my 21st birthday on the first few pages of that book, so, enjoy that!)

Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis

No Hurry to Get Home: The Memoir of the New Yorker Writer Whose Unconventional Life and Adventures Spanned the Century by Emily Hahn (with its instructive chapter on becoming opium addicted in a very genteel manner while in China)

The Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner (She hadn't even heard of it! So I felt this was very nec. )

Hatred of Capitalism (the semiotexte collection Maggie Lange sent me in the early oughts)

The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl In America by Michelle Tea (and I'm well-rid of it--begone, Michelle Tea! Much as I once loved you.)

Switch Hitters: Lesbians Write Gay Male Erotica and Gay Men Write Lesbian Erotica ed. by Carol Queen and Lawrence Schimel

Nothing But The Girl ed. by Susie Bright (90s lesbian erotic photography)

Is that it? I remember I wanted to give her The Feminist Porn Book, but at the last minute I couldn't part with it. I'm already very much enjoying her books, starting with A Day In The Life: Tales from the Lower East Side, Heather Lewis' House Rules, and Intoxication: An Anthology of Stimulant-Based Writing. Except for How Loathsome, which I finished last night. Gorgeously illustrated, but it's sort of like Ted Naifeh belatedly discovering the existence of drugs and trans* people and telling us all about it.

[marginalutilite]

So I just met with worn-smooth, and she treated me to an iced latte, and we exchanged a whole countercultural treasure trove of High Risk and semiotexte books, and she's going to send me the manuscript of what I still think should be called Middle Class Transgression even if that does sound like someone's thesis. I feel special! Plus, it was the height of nostalgic delight, listening to Live Through This in her car, me envying her an adulthood that took place in the 90's. We tried to take pictures of our historic meeting, but I ended up looking like one huge cavernous cheek, the surface of a Caty moon--and I was trying for a profile! And she doesn't know whether she wants to have pics up of herself, but Maggie, I will still send you the photographic evidence.

I felt apprehensive talking to her about the things that bothered me most about her writing, but I felt like it was better that than write a tumblr post about it. (I'm only doing so now b/c she expressed active interest in seeing how people responded to such a thing.) But she was perfectly approachable about all of my...were they critiques, exactly? I said that it seemed off and overwrought, how she/the narrator/the protagonist seemed to just be stumbling about until she bumped into a drug-vector-as-person and then, boom, injection drug use occurred. Like the desire for dope was an infectious disease. And how it was still hard for me to bridge the experiential gap, trying to understand how, being a very occasional chipper, her heroin use could so obsess her and so skew her life. And finally, how, given the countercultural context of her use, how all the people she interacted with saw their dope use as a badge of honor, as part of their conceptions of themselves as outlaws, as cache. B/c in my experience beginning to be a junkie in the 'oughts, it was the exact opposite of what I wanted to do to be cool as all hell to the groups I claimed membership in---you know, You're Making Escorts Look Bad or You Could Be Spending All This Money and Energy on Activism. And b/c for these people dope use was part of emulating something, was an element of their collective Fuck All This, they didn't even cohere to the basic norms that the working class junkies I started doing dope amongst did--stuff like, you know, don't fuck over your running partner if you want to be able to trust them to have your back later. Don't be flagrantly high in public, you'll get in trouble. Etc. Like, that trope of junkiedom as being associated with extreme instability and ethical poverty really held true, with her crowd.

But, she told me a lot of it made more sense in chronological order--for example, the afterschool special phenomenon of Kate being a seductive entry point for her into heroin was something limited to Kate, it just didn't seem that way with all of the Kate narrative spliced throughout her tumblr telling. And she replied with a lot of other explanations and backstories that maybe it's best I allow her to write down here in her own words.