Geshundheit

Does anyone else suffer as badly as I do from hayfever? You know how when your pollen allergies kick in, you don't quite believe you are congested and full of mucus, because when you try to blow your nose, nothing comes out, and you really, really want to sneeze, but it feels like the sneeze is trapped in the backside of your sinuses, crawling up behind your frontal lobe, giving you an itchy headache and making a hash of your thinking, and you spend half the day crazy with the idea of sneezing, until you think you might be going insane, and when it finally happens, there is such a feeling of relief that you nearly want to cry - and then the mucus starts and won't stop, like someone turned on a horrible, evil faucet and then the third and fourth and seventeenth sneezes make your eyes water, and you wish you could go back to just chasing it back and forth, because there is no putting the sneeze back?



I feel like I am waiting for the first sneeze to happen, only with the shit that is building up in my head. Not mucus so much as unending questions and demands, and yes, emotions. As long as I keep them safely scratching at the edges of my brain, then I am not in love, I can't get hurt, I'll just take some antihistamine and sleep like the dead for thirteen hours when I can wake up and repeat the process until allergy season is over. But I suppose that that is not how it really works. Eventually I am going to have to let the sneeze come and admit that I really do feel deeply about all this, and admit that heartbreak is inevitable. I am far too realistic - read: cynical - to believe for a second that the things I want so desperately will come to pass, to believe that he feels a tenth the way for me that I feel for him. Even if there is a chance that I could be wrong, and that the truth is that some of what I wanted has already happened. He must care for me at least a little, or he wouldn't be sitting around eating my tomato soup and washing my supper dishes.

So here he is, right in front of me, right next to me, and I still haven't said the word out loud. I keep rubbing my nose, hoping to keep this explosion contained, and he thinks the reason my voice is hoarse and quiet is because I have a burgeoning spring cold, or that I am allergic to the nascent flowers and buds. I will do nothing to disabuse him of this notion. Maybe it really is just a cold. Maybe I really am just under the weather. Maybe I can find a way to just sleepwalk my way through until this comes to a close, and blame my red eyes and sad countenance on the Benadryl hangover.

I'm hardly what I'd call HOPELESS.

Quit giving me that look. I'm still just as cynical as ever.



Live with it.

It's hereditary

You know how I really knew it was over with my ex-husband? When we were melting down, and I was always teetering on the precipice of irrationality, I tried to maintain a little equilibrium. I did this in a lot of ways. I wrote some poetry, I took some long walks, and I listened to a LOT of music. Of course I did. I listened to a lot of angry music very loud. One day I was blasting the Replacements' Tim while curled in the fetal position in the armchair in our living room, wondering how I would breathe my way through another day, and my ex walked into the house after a long day of work, walked straight to the stereo, and turned it down. Not a word of explanation, not a greeting in my direction, not a glance to ensure he had my permission to do so. He just turned my music down. I knew at that point that there was no going back. No amount of compromise or therapy or mutual respect could take someone who used Air Supply as the background music to our first makeout session and make him into the sort of person who understood that Bastards of Young was the only thing that was going to make me see the light of morning. You can't fight destiny.

I mention this rather sorrowful episode because Cap'n J. has chosen to put himself - and his sidekick, Miss Thing - to sleep tonight to the soothing sounds of the Ramones. He has watched Rock and Roll High School three times in two days, and when I sent him to shower this morning he was screaming about Sheena at the top of his lungs. He doesn't love them for their leather jackets or their virulently theatrical anti-theatricality. He loves them because they WRECK. He loves them because all kids are rock and roll through and through - they are noisy, don't recognize boundaries, revel in the fantastic, are sensualists in the best sense of the word. Kids are made to pogo and slam dance. Their whole existence is the altered state of reality that later in life the more reckless will try to recreate with substances. Their pulses are stronger and brighter.

You know those people who get wrist tattoos that are mantras? They read things like: Faith. or Breathe. I met a guy last weekend whose wrist read ROCK. I'm never going to counsel my children to have faith; we all lose it, and no one can TELL you how to find it. You have to discover it on your own. And I'm never going to remind them to breathe. Their autonomic nervous systems should take care of that nicely for them. But if there are two lessons I hope my kids learn from me before I set them loose in the wilds of adulthood, they are: 1) Don't be an asshole and 2) ROCK. There will come a time in their lives when they are going to want to play their music loud, and some poor sucker is gonna try to turn it down. I want them to understand that the only proper response is to turn that shit back up again.