2 Sans-culottide CCXXX: #Freewrite 22:09
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Card of the day: Justice (Inverted): Injustice
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They made me clock out at 6:40 today and wait an extra 15 minutes before letting me leave the building. I am told that this is illegal. They needed me to stay in order to have the minimum number of people in the building for reasons of safety and more importantly, i suspect, theft prevention. However, I had to clock out at that time otherwise I would have been given a paid lunch. The store had made over 4 thousand dollars during the morning shift alone, I wasn’t supposed to close but someone called out sick and we are already only have skeleton crews as it is. I got covid last march days after they switched corporate policy from 10 paid days off for covid to 5. I never tested positive despite getting 4 tests, but my roommate tested positive and we had all the same symptoms. I stayed out for the full 10 days without pay cause i didn’t want to spread it or get sicker. They cut me to just a couple hours a week right after that, it wasn’t till the end of June that i got back up to ~20 hours a week.
I need to work harder to get a second job. I messaged a former boss at the college from which I am still on extended medical leave, or maybe they consider me a drop-out at this point. It has never been my plan to drop out, or at least it wasn’t until sometime around year 2 of my leave. I don’t want to be a drop out, and I am writing every day (trying to write every day, but that’s implied I suppose) in hopes of getting my thesis done and graduating and then I can hopefully get some cushy jobs as a writing tutor or dissertation editor or maybe even possibly get into grad school.
My boyfriend says I should report to my manager the coworker who made me clock out and stay late, but I don’t want him to get in trouble. he doesn’t make much more than I do and anyway besides if I start leaving knives filed away between coworker’s vertebrae then I can forget about making allies.
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sometimes i do still want to cut. it’s an addiction that mostly goes to sleep after—after what, you get clean? that metaphor doesn’t really make sense when applied to drugs (*images of people getting their bloodstreams flushed with dish-soap, sending my brain through a carwash until all the wrinkles have been smoothed down nice and neat*)—after a few months or so, at least in my case. but of course getting clean is even less applicable to cutting. with cutting the clean up is part of the ritual, was part, is part of the ritual, part of the art. you get everything nice and clean and laid out beforehand unless you’re really far gone before you even make a practice swipe or two or at the very least you put everything back the way you found it because there is an ethics to cutting as well as an aesthetic, and i never let anyone walk in on me or a mess I’d made in the bathroom (usually bathrooms, home bathrooms with a shower or better a bathtub, cause blood congeals real quick and it can be a pain to get it all to go down the drain of a sink even if you have the water on blast all while you’re doing it and after, when I would bandage myself up real nice and neat, I took a lot of pride in learning how to get my arms put away in the bandages and except for when I was really strung out and building up tolerance to it I would make sure I only had one arm or the other in full bandages at a time, and favor the other arm, which would be further along in the healing process, skin grows back quick and a week was usually longer then necessary for the bandages, except maybe when I took a razor blade to my skin and basically removed everything from the whole inside of my forearm, razor blades are second worst of all, better only then fingernails which is one I hope I never need to go back to) because you never know what shit other people might be going through, hell i had more than one friend during that time were former cutters, and there is honor among addicts and former addicts, much more honor then authorities or parents or medical professionals, except for the medical professionals who themselves used to cut, which I’ve met a couple of and they are always, in my limited experience, much more understanding and just generally chill about the whole thing, which only a couple of the very best therapists I’ve had even come close to matching, in overall understanding and patience and chillness and respect for the situation, people who understand that me cutting is actually a positive sign, since when I am at the point of cutting it isn’t even a matter of me not cutting and going about my day or me cutting and relapsing back into a cycle of cutting, but rather a matter of me cutting and cleaning myself up real nice and going about my day or me drinking one or two or one time almost three bottles of wine over the course of 20 or 35 minutes, and even that is still a survival strategy compared to other stuff.
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I would like to learn about the evolution of pre-death behaviors. the way animals and I suppose other organisms as well get ready to die. because of course evolution shapes that kind of thing, the demands of evolution are of course not to live as long as possible and fuck as much as possible, but rather to make the likelihood that the next generation and succeeding generations which share even some of your gene matter (the condensed mode, or part of the condensed mode, of the species and the species-niche-being which through reproduction unfolds itself and sets about production of the next condensed mode) and so of course proximate death behavior is very important, in terms of disposal of the body and reduction of harm/maximization of benefits left over to offspring and siblings yes, but also other species members and even the overall ecosystem more broadly. and I would like to learn more about the development of pre-death behaviors among humans, partly with an eye to such behaviors that leave the door open for in case you survive the illness or injury or whatever and are re-admitted into the realm of the living, the ongoing. resurrections are always dicey, i was born not breathing and I’ve walked back from the cliff edge a few times, climbed twice back up from the face of the cliff after letting the gravel and the scree take my footing into its flow. i would like to understand myself better and maybe use that understanding to live better, and to die better, and to resurrect better too.
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but you get yourself cleaned up and put back together and if you have a walk in clinic (which I did then but wouldn’t now) you get them to look over everything within the first couple days to make sure things are coming along nicely, and usually they’ll get you to agree to sleep there for a night or two, which is a pain but often a good idea anyway, and for the nights when it really isn’t and you’d be better off around friends or out drinking (I don’t regret any of those nights, its the nights I made myself wait and suffer that I regret, sometimes, some of the time, some of those times) then its usually though not always still worth it and anyway, if you agree at first and have learned how to perform mental wellness for them and stability, in the case of my nurses they’re often happy to let you go on your own. its when they have already invoked magisterial powers, both informally and in the case of actually being committed (which admittedly isn’t always made formalized to your face) that things get really hard to untangle, both in my own expirence and in what I’ve researched.
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The doctor, the medical authority qua morality, qua judging the patient as having or not having agency and thus being a moral agent, as Foucault puts it in Madness and Civilization in the last chapter or 2, that’s what we are dealing with, and the sympathies and routines on the part of these figures, which vary significantly both historically (according to my academic research) and contemporary venues (according to my first hand research, my experience) make for vital components of the situation or context in which you cut and especially get put back together during and after cutting, the pains you have to or don’t have to take to go unnoticed or unremarked upon, the overall gestalt context in which takes place the rituals which surround and which are the cutting, and which a critical role is itself the clean up. and i am reminded that in the eucharist, there is no way to turn the body and blood of Kristos back into bread and wine, you have to store it in the tabernacle, which is “a fixed, locked box in which the Eucharist (consecrated communion hosts) is stored as part of the "reserved sacrament" rite. A container for the same purpose, which is set directly into a wall, is called an aumbry,” and that I suppose is what the episcopal church i grew up going to services at had, and the priest would keep it there for when she (both of the priests who were commissioned to St. Mark’s were women for most of the years during which I was attending services, though I do remember substitute priests and so forth who were there as well) would take it on her rounds to the elderly and the sick who were too sick and too elderly to make it to services. This I thought was maybe a rip off a little bit, cause not being present for the initiation of the miracle, the moment of transubstantiation (or do the American Episcopalians call it consubstantiation, like our Anglican forbearers and cousins?) is rather the exciting part. but I guess if they run out of the Host (as in Lord of Hosts, armies, or the Host as in that which acts as vessel and vehicle for the Substance, in which case is the Substance (as opposeed to the Accidents, the outward characteristics of bread-ness and wine-ness) Symbiotic? or Parasitic??) is I supose multiplied, or renewed altogether, and there’s nothing to stop the priest (when I wanted to be a priest I fantasized about all the magic tricks and heterodoxical sacraments I would work in pursuit of my overarching ultra-orthodox (as in more-orthodox-then-you, Mom and Dad and bishops and old people who gave me the creeps and were always touching me and handling me and didn’t anyone know these creeps were sick, dying even?! how I hated them, I hated only myself more for the sins of pride and wrath and hatred and overall narcissisms which so often accompanies or precedes hyper spiritual episodes of mine) from just using any old bread the person being visited cause he or she or they were too sick to come into church for had lying around. They could use any wine, cheap gas station wine or salted cooking wine or manischewitz (which was the first thing I ever got drunk on, after trying it and liking the sweet taste at a Shabbat i attended, later, when I swapped episcopalianism-cum-methodism for Juddaism, thanks to my secular Jewish friend’s invitation to celebrate Shabbat with the other jewish students, and I became an even more regular attendee for a while then him, and learned how to make challa, this was during the part of senior year when i stopped going to classes or maybe the first year of my leave, when I was ironically able to be more involved in campus life and partying and extracurricular events and so on then I ever was when i was in classes). The priest could just as easily use a really nice wine, say a dry 2016 Walla Walla Cab Sauv, or a 2017, which was technically lower quality due to its fruitiness and obviously one year less in the cellar but was nonetheless my drink of choice the summer-autumn I worked at a winery. and then the priest and the old infirm people to sick to come to church (not that they came to serve me when I had whooping cough or a torn acl or any number of conditions which prevented me from coming to church) could get drunk on the blood of a God, and how many people can say they’ve done that, and I remember when we were getting ready for our first communion, my sister and I and another girl from our age group, the older kids, the acolytes who had already gone through it, one of them, a troublemaker who I thought was so cool with his long dark hair and high rate of absence from services he was supposed to be an officiant in, and who I probably in retrospect had a crush or would have if I didn’t have to oppress everything homoerrotic except of course from my rather striking devotions to a similarly long haired trouble making more-devout-than-thou rabble rouser, whose face I drew obsessively and whose blood I drank, though his body I would store in the back of my mouth or under my tongue when they changed it to gluten free bread, and also I knew myself to be so infinitely corrupt and sinful that I would not dare sully my God with getting forgiven by him, because that’s why we can’t have nice things, and so instead I would take the offending bit of bread that everyone always fawned over as being sooo superior to the tasteless but unoffensive inoffensive white crackers (which I spat out less often but still most of the time, for probably gosh months and months) into the dirt of a little plant nearby the altar where people could write prayers in a little notebook and light candles and where you were supposed to leave money but I didn’t have any money and didn’t feel like involving those creeps my parents in my devotions, and so instead I would pray for and to the grey tabby cat named Mr. Misty who my parents abandoned when we couldn’t find him to put him inside before going on our vacation even though I begged to be left behind to look after him and his brother. I still see both of them in my dreams and I miss them, and it is they whose forgiveness my parents ought to beg for on judgement day, not me and certainly not any God who had the power to curtail their petty acts of abuse but couldn’t be bothered to. now I pray to the gods I build myself, to the spirits who visit me with love, to the holy spirit which moves in the kindness and solidarity of the oppressed, which riots with them and in them, which haunts them and their enemies alike with visions of better worlds, worlds which break into our own in the moments when the impossible renders itself impossible, or something.
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I told my boyfriend that if I had become a priest, I wouldn’t have stopped there.
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