The Almost Unbearable Years

So much disappointment
close to 15 years

so called friends & family
leaving me
to tears ...

Tears that turn to sickness?
this could be the TRUTH

not living - just existing
inside: worn & bruised

I'M A GIVER ...
should I have to change?

MAKES ONE QUIVER ...
yet another year of pain

Clocks With Wings

Time is flying. Been catching up on movies and worthwhile television series. Have fallen in love with Californication and getting into Breaking Bad, with Bryan Cranston.

Mom is still causing much drama and there has been lots of bullshit happening back at the house where my apartment is. What a year, and it's only April!

MARCH MADNESS

It's Chaka Khan's birthday, and Resse Witherspoon's, and my ex-bosses, a lady I really used to admire greatly before the plot to get my now unecessary black face out of the company. Truth-be-told, I STILL admire Myra, but I can never forget all the pain casued me when i was no longer needed as the first black employee of a 10 person yet high-profile office in my third year. After the other minorities were added and a more "obvious" black person with a thick Jamacian accent came to work at the office in a higher capacity then my front desk do-all-and-take-little-credit position. Every year though, I remember Myra on this day especially. She is, or at least WAS as fiery as Ms Chaka Khan and taught me so much, just watching her. This before my supervisor had her turn on me ... or at least, that is how it seemed.

Anyway, I am at my mother's again and she is driving me to distraction - again! Man oh man, what a life mine has become! And what a year it has been - already!

It seems I might have just dodged a big health "bullet", after a CTScan in January or so, and then a recent pre-MRI consultation based on the findings in the CAT Scan. Now, I am on a waiting list for an MRI, when an appointment becomes available. But the neurology specialist says he's 80+ % sure I don't have the devestating, crippling disease that the CAT Scan person made a note about in my file!!!!! This is something that has been on my mind for a couple of months now, so to say I am relieved would be a gross understatement ...

There has been alot of foolishness and unpleasantness happening at the house where I live, also. Crackhead/drug dealers moved in three or four months ago and have caused me much stress over that time. Finally, they were evicted just before I came back here to mom's a week or so ago. But the stress of the miss-management that allowed them to be living there and the risidual bad feelings have not simply disapeared with the people.

Every new year I hope that things will be better and a load of crap comes flying in my direction from the get-go. It is very tiring; probably so, even if I didn't have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Now on top of the aforementioned drama, I am still between family physicans and now it looks like I have to pay thirty dollars I do not have to get my file from my last quack to give to someone who MIGHT become my new doctor, but only AFTER I pay for and get that file ... Charming!

Still have no sex life in NS.

Whatever!

My sister just called after not calling Mom for about a week. She has a boyfriend now, who lives out of town, and I think she spends her weekends where he lives. Before calling last week she and and our mother had not spoken in a month! Mom and I had just started watching a movie and it's been paused on the DVD player for close to an hour now. There goes my attempt at quality time again; another evening trying to watch a movie with mom probably gone to waste. Mom does not know how to get off the phone once on, and especially when she is speaking with her only daughter. They talk forever ...

Now it is eleven o'clock pm!

"This Suffering State"

"A lot of SEEING is really HEARING, and feeling ..."

Stevie Wonder (to Oprah Winfrey), 2004

Tuesday, June 10th 2004

Have an appointment in Halifax at 3:00pm which I am going to be late for, it seems! By the looks of it, I may be as much as a whole half hour late - and for the second time ... I am so not amused, but what can I do?

Leaving home at about 2:30, I walked all the way to the bus terminal, hoping to burn some calories. Half-way there I realize that I forgot to eat something. It is a warm day and I am wearing what I call my "Star Trek bridge" synthetic top. As well, got on my thing summer jacket, starting to sweat a little (being "fat" is definitely a problem!)

Oh, it is such a lovely day. Summer seems to have arrived, finally.

Turns out I was twenty minutes late for my doctor's appointment. Three more hours and I am told he would have been gone ...!

The doc and I covered a lot of conversational ground today. Things such as: my lack of a social life and suggestions on how to rectify the situation. Nothing earth shattering though.

Back on the Halifax bus, on Barrington Street, on-route back home to MON. Thought I saw an acquaintance of an acquaintance walking the street, but he is supposed to be on vacation in Germany ...

How do I rectify this great LONELINESS in my life now? No man is an Island ... No man is an Island.

9:30pm. I am on the lonely bus home and there is an "obvious" gay brunette guy sitting across from me of the ilk I would have NEVER ever considered in my Toronto days. He is probably too young anyway. They all seem to be, these days. Desperation setting in?

* * *

Tuesday, June 15, 2004

- Compile a book of "Everything I've Learned"

- Write myself a movie to star in! Showcase my artistic strengths

Wednesday, June 16, 2004

Day at the library. Rather nice. Got a little bit accomplished. It is 8:57pm and I am aboard the bus on route to home. By now I am tired, hungry, and a whole lot fed-up; frustrated. Why? well, no computer of my own, after all this time!!! My own fault, for true, but how long do we have to pay for our past transgressions?

MOTHER'S TRIBUTE

She sits there thinking about all the choices she has made, the ones she can remember; of the missteps and the disastrous aftermath endured. Sixty-five years old! It sounded funny, odd, as if it were truly someone else. But, then again, that’s how she had been feeling in recent years … not at all the woman whom he had prided herself in being raised by hard-working, God-fearing Christians in the Baptist church. She had been back-sliding, but only this time at a rapid-fire pace, and she didn’t like it at all. A morning glance in the bathroom mirror often said enough. And now …. Her sixty-fifth birthday was here. Sixty-five years on earth, four children, one husband, if one could even call it that. The “husband”, such as it was, had gone west the same year their youngest offspring was born. So much for love, commitment, and the vows of fidelity. Oh, please! The rumors of hubby’s legendary womanizing ways pre-dated their official union. Marriage did not seem to slow him down either. Actually, truth be told, he had been with so many women, she remembered lying in the hospital bed with their first born and the mother one of his many other “bastard” children in the next room, having just given birth to a child of her own – one of his! Foolishly, she had never remarried though there had been other loves.

Looking back, she had to shake her head in sheer amazement. How did she EVER make it through? And why did she have to be so stubborn and rebellious against her father’s warnings about this man who would become her cheating husband? Was it the need to escape home, or was it simply the fact that she had truly loved the rogue her brother-in-law had introduced her to? So many bad memories, broken promises, hurtful circumstances … Ending up a single parent raising three kids; having to give up the fourth child (the result of an on-on-off relationship years after the husband had left)! The money struggles to give the three children not only what they needed but what they wanted also. Sixty-five years - so full of strife and last-minute challenges. Oh, those challenges to make ends-meet …

She was honestly happy to be alive, to be able to say she had survived for sixty-five years, and the memories, those she could still easily grasp, they revealed more than the very real hardships faced. For, there had been joy and good times also. If only she could now, at sixty-five, learn to focus on those times that had brought feelings of warmth, and even happiness. This would be the challenge of the sixty-fifth year: to let go of the NEGATIVITY and see it all in another, more positive light. Extremely hard work, but not an impossible thing to do … Was she ready to make all the changes necessary?

Lost In Translation

I truly cannot get started. I simply do not know where to begin. I'm supposed to write SOMETHING, or so I have been lead to believe all these years. Am I wrong? Have I been that far off the mark? Am I missing the POINT completely? What the fuck is my purpose here? Just to suffer, and live in a painfilled stagnant state? Sometimes I just don't know!

Last night, in a chat room I had frequented (until last night!), the room-runner and I got into an exchange in private messages, after an earlier incident in the evening, with one of the room's admins. He was making some broad generalizations about homosexual men, and forgive me, I spoke up ... You'd think this would have been a good thing, especially since the room-running, Ron, is a gay men himself. But NO! I should have learned by now, chat room runners take their whole thing a little too seriously, and it's all about THE ROOM, not the individual or civil rights, or any kind of forward movement ... Well, I had left the room shortly after the bull shit started and I made my brief (for me!) comments, but upon my return, Ron approached me in private message, asking what he had already asked me earlier in the main room: "Are you calm (now)?" To which I replied that I had told him before I was already calm ... There was like maybe two minutes peace before he fired off another private message ....and then it started to turn ugly ...

I have removed Ron's chatroom from my FAVOURITES list and I do not see my self going back there anytime soon. He started on about how i was "over-reacting" or "taking it personally", according to him "like I always do"!!!!! Funny how people who know you basically from the your typing seem to THINK they know the heart and soul of you, and your every intent with the words you choose ... (Heavy sigh.) Well, Ron is wrong about me and my intentions and my reactions, but am I wrong to feel that it is my responsibility as a gay person to speak up when injustice is being done? Am I wrong to speak up as a black man when injustice is being done and someone is putting down blacks as a group? Is it more important to keep the peace and keep one's mouth shut than speaking from a place of knowledge, hoping to shed some light that might not otherwise be shone?

This past week with mom may have been the roughest yet. But even for me to say that, I realize it is hard to gage which MAMA DRAMA overrides another past experience. Damn, but I think she is losing it at a fast rate now. What’s sad about it is the fact that, at least from my perspective of being the only one around her for long periods of private time, she STILL will not admit to being the creator of the CHAOS; the very same chaos that has created a domino effect on this little family of ours. I imagine mom’s denial goes as far back as the 1960s – AT LEAST. Presently, as I write this, she is in the kitchen, making pancakes from scratch (or trying to), and talking to herself (the BIG CONSTANT!).

She has been freaking out over her Avon order, for one … Worried and worried about when it will arrive. I myself did her first online order, data entry wise.

And I came back again. Using my last $20 on a cab – partially to get her second Avon order right, and also to cover my utter loneliness at home last night!