Monday, May 31, 2010


This post was published to Better Living Through Adver... at 5:21:49 AM 5/31/2010
An explanation of sorts...


Two posts in one day...this will likely be the only time this happens, unless I am extremely inspired or bored. One comes more than the other.
After looking at my very first blog post I realized that the title might not make sense without a little background. I chose the title after reconnecting with a friend I’d had a falling out with for many years. I came back from the dead so to speak, and many did not expect me to. I think most expected me to continue living my life like a speeding train waiting to crash and burn and later it would be talked about as some inevitibilty. Of course, I am the kind of person that strives even harder when someone has the expectation that I will fail.
It seems like my entire life has had some sort of adversity. Someone told me that its because I’m a Scorpio…I tend to think that being born to the parents I have, it was probably inevitable, regardless of my date of birth. My mother took us to a hippie commune where we lived for a few years, and nowadays when people think of hippies and the 60’s in general they think peace, love and good vibrations or whatever. What they don’t seem to remember is that hippies were social outcasts, people HATED them! People wanted to actually do you harm for being different. Sort of odd now that I think of how the same statement could apply to my teenage years in the punk scene. My mother and her friends were seriously bucking the system by ‘dropping out’ and going to live in the wilderness. The communities surrounding this wilderness were not exactly happy that ‘the hippies’ had moved in. There were FBI raids on our land and brutalities that most people only see on TV. The FBI agents scared the shit out of me as a little kid. I was under the age of 6, but don’t remember my exact age when I got interrogated. Without another adult present, without my family. My interrogator scared me so bad that to this day I remember his name: Barry Lawson. He tried to get me to tell things about my mother that weren’t true and threatened that I would be taken from her, etc. Of course these days this kind of thing might happen, but people would be pissed about it at least. Back then, if you looked different you might as well have just checked your rights at the door. Ok…so now I think on that, and it’s probably STILL true. I have memories of SWAT teams pointing their guns at children, beating and slamming the bodies of our friends inside car doors, and my mother imploring me to be quiet as we hid inside the Wolf Creek Inn (a now historic hotel in Wolf Creek, Oregon) watching through a basement grate at the violence happening outside. Ok…I am rambling off of the point that I had wanted to make…it being that I grew up very differently than your average American, and that made it difficult for me to fit in a lot of the time. I have always felt like I am swimming against the current. I guess you can just say I am a survivor of many things: unenlightened parenting (though aren’t we all?), drug overdoses, kidnapping, rape, torture, heroin addiction (13 years clean, thank you), PTSD, and I am still trying to survive marriage and motherhood. I seriously struggle with the last sentence turning over and over whether to leave it and I probably will because despite the discomfort it causes me, it illuminates a small amount of the adversity I speak of and somehow writing it makes it less powerful and reminds me that life’s seemingly large problems are only bumps in the road and they will not crush me. I am so, so fortunate to still be here to write these words…
EDIT: The photo is a LIFE Magazine cover that pictures the commune I grew up on. Yes, they did a story on us; cool right? And no, I am not pictured...I was a year old at the time.

May 31, 2010

As good a place to start as any...


Today my husband is home from work and is listening to old Beatles music, something I would never choose, but still seem to enjoy. The song “Yellow Submarine” brings back memories of when I was a little girl. I loved this song and the movie. I loved to watch the escape from the Blue Meanies (click here to see the whole movie on Google), and I would sing along. I sang yellow submarine like it was a nursery rhyme, which is what I thought it was. I could not imagine why someone would make something that great for grown-ups, it had to be for kids. I thought Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was the prettiest song ever when I was three. Maybe because I could imagine all of the things described clearly, having already had a massive lsd trip when I was two.
My mother had taken me to a friend’s house who happened to be a drug dealer. She and and him were chit-chatting away happily when my mother said, ‘whats that in her mouth?’ at which point her friend leapt off the couch (this is my mom’s part of the story, as I have no recollection of this part of the story) at the speed of light only able to say oh my god, oh my god, oh my god…My mother was able to get out of him that it had been his stash of super powerful 4-way LSD tabs…7 of them. I ate all of them. That’s 28 hits people, in a two year old. And as far as I understand, the content of each tab in micrograms and in purity was much higher back then (1970). So you could say that I was flying pretty high within 30 minutes or so. Too late for stomach pumping, etc., though to hear my mother tell it, I was an expert at finding drugs in anyone’s home and if they had lost it years ago, chances are I would find it and eat it within minutes of arriving. My mother had to stop taking me to her friend’s houses and only invite them to her home…but alas, we still had instances of drinking Clorox, an entire bottle of cherry flavored pink medicine and who knows what else.
I know it will be hard for some people to swallow, but I actually remember bits and pieces from that ‘trip’. I may elaborate on that some other time, as I think that writing it down might cause me to remember more. I also wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that I remember things from before I was even able to talk. There are some people who think it’s impossible to have pre-verbal memories, but I can tell them without a doubt that they are wrong. I can remember the entire layout of our home when I was only a year old. We lived in Forest Knolls in Marin County, California, USA. I remember the trunk below the window at the top of the stairs. My mother would climb out of that window to sit on the roof and sun herself. I could climb the trunk and go out with her. I remember discovering gravity when I set my slice of banana down on the slightly sloped roof and watching it roll away as if it had a life of its own and had just decided it did not want to be eaten by me. So I let it go. I remember that house burning. I remember a lot of things, but I won’t write them now. The mood just struck me and I figured this is as good a place to start as any.
For anyone coming across this blog: As I wrote in some previous notes, I am mostly writing here to compile my thoughts. There will be no attempt at chronological order. If you happen to read it, please feel free to ask questions, as I hope they will help jar my memory or cause me to think in a direction not previously thought of.


KKinDK