Had some messed up sleep this afternoon. I would blame the heat but this shit happens in the dead of winter too. Afternoon sleep is always the wackiest. Perhaps it is the ambient noise level. I don’t know.

Anyhow, I woke up… but not quite all the way. So I got stuck for a while in this half-awake state where all the ambient noise of the local rugrats playing and all the noise from the construction next door and the birds singing and whatever else swirled together and I could have sworn I was also hearing church bells ringing, not the cool carillon kind that play music but the God-awful (ha ha ha) kind that just ring and ring without tune or rhythm, like the Wind Chimes of Satan.

All in all, it was a very Calgon Take Me Away kind of moment.

Hard to imagine that I was only seven years old when that ad first aired, and yet I remember it so well after not seeing it for 32 years. Makes me wonder what the secret of making an ad people will remember for their entire life could be.

I have a dark suspicion that it involves being annoying. Or really good, I suppose. I mean, I still remember this commercial from my childhood and I remember quite enjoying it.

I could have sworn it involved a whole lot of young people at night, doing that cool “using one candle to light two, two to light four, and so on” thing. That was the version I liked. Even as a wee thing, I grasped the symbolism, and candles at night in a group can be so beautiful. Each candle a person, each light unique, all forming a pattern. How can you not like that?

But there is no candles in the version above, so perhaps I am mixing it up with another ad. Or there was another version for Xmas or something. After all, the first version was an enormous hit. It really caught the public’s attention and focused the zeitgeist, which was the idea of course.

So it would not surprise me if there was a sequel. Or if I totally made it up in my mind. That is always a possibility in a mind as fertile as mine. Sometimes things spring whole out the darkness and manage to sneak into my memories without having to pass the reality guards.

Anyhow, eventually I was able to pull my wits together and escape the Calgon Whirlpool, and the strange things is, now that I am fully awake, I actually feel quite good. Relaxed, calm, mellow. So I guess it was all worth it.

Only problem is, I feel so calm and mellow that I want to go right back to sleep! And I bet I would get really top drawer sleep too. But I got things to do.

(But I might just do it anyhow, and be a little irresponsible. I do not feel this positive very often. If I could get some really good sleep out of it, that could really help me along. )

Looking forward to going back into therapy on Thursday morning. My therapist has been gone on a two week vacation, and so it feels like it has been several forevers since I saw him last. I have gone through a fairly rough patch without him, and part of me resents him for going away on me and leaving me to fend for myself for a couple of weeks.

But of course, the rest of me, most of me, knows that he has as much right to a vacation as anyone else. It is just hard to be entirely reasonable and rational about someone on whom you have grown dependent.

And, I suppose, part of my problem is that I put such intense pressure on myself to always be sensible and honest and reasonable and easy to get along with and so on. I do not give myself any leeway to be “in a mood”, to behave in an unreasonable way out of the need to express an emotion, to be grumpy or crabby or put out, to act for purely emotional reasons, to really express my whole self.

Instead I am tightly locked inside myself, with very little of the enormous pool of latent emotional energy that makes my emotional weather system so volatile can make it to the surface and get expressed.

Everything stays inside. Sometimes I feel like a dormant volcano, one that dreams of erupting and plans on erupting some day, but in reality has accumulated such a tightly packed volcanic plug in its cone that it will likely never erupt again.

But if it does, it will be with shattering force. Like motherfucking Krakatoa, baby.

Other times, I feel like a vast electrical cloud, filled with unimaginable energies, but most of the time far too high in the sky to strike anything on the ground, and so the energy just grows and grows without any way to discharge. And what does reach the ground is random and destructive but does not really accomplish anything.

So really, recovery for me is like building a bridge back to the reality I fled from so long ago, when I was molested by my father, and have been fleeing from ever since.

I realized the other night, as I lay in bed trying to sleep, that a really big part of me wants to go in the opposite direction as my dreams and aspirations. It wants to be able to curl up into a ball and shut reality out somehow, so that I just did not have to deal with it.

I suppose that is the part of me that finds the idea of catatonia attractive. I think these feelings are coming to light because I am getting closer to dealing with my deep problems, and the only way out is through my conscious mind, so I have to become painfully conscious of them, and definitely not
just push them back below the surface and bury them deep again.

It will not be easy. But I am a pretty implacable fighter once I set my mind on something. I might not move really fast, but I give no ground and victory is inevitable.

It just gets lonely sometimes.