Monkey mind Sept. 22, 2012

  

“They call me a jack of all trades, usually use the word ‘lucky’ in the same sentence,” she wrote in an essay back in mid-2011. “I beg to differ.”

This came during one of her in-between career times, during a trip to Europe.

“With some many interests and the propensity towards kicking ass out of sheer will power and the sort of quick burn out effort that would put an ant to shame, I find myself unable to focus. I’ve done the singer thing and found out how quickly what you love can turn to what you love to hate. I’ve done the teacher thing, the horse training thing (a new one to me since she never mentioned this during our early conversations), the visual art thing, the writing thing, the restaurant thing.”

When asked what she wanted by a customer one day, she said, “I want to be happy.”

But in quoting Camus, she let her paranoia show: “external circumstances will bring you down,” she wrote, and you can accept life “as a long string of eternal punishment or you can accept it as inevitable and make the best of it.”

She ignores the fact that throughout her life, she seems to have manufactured those external conditions that ultimately bring her down, and neglects to point out that these come often as the result of romantic entanglements, and the “lucky” she referred to appears to be about her “trickling up” the corporate ladder – generally leading to someone eventually stalking her.

She talked about her previous boss and current stalker.

“We had a good time,” she said, “until he made it turn bad,” a statement she made to me back when I asked about it in April. How he made it bad was by falling in love with her.

“We were just having fun,” she said, neglecting to say in her written account how he turned into a stalker.

She also neglected to point out in her written account that he was so distraught, he closed the restaurant (which at this writing appears to have reopened).

In explaining why she needed to go off to Europe at that point, she wrote: “At the very moment I think I’m stuck again, frittering every possible bit of energy away into ever random tasks/job/relationship (keyword here) I’ve decided to co-dependently sacrifice myself to, wondering if there is any hope for me at all or whether I’m going to spend the rest of my life only half committed to the grand notion of carpe diem.”

At which point, she books a trip to Europe.

All of this is relevant today because she seems to have come to that point in her life again, “burn out” as her most recent poem indicated and fewer and less quality stories she’s been producing, not to mention the low salary she is working her ass off to earn.

The question of whether she actually got the raise or not still remains unanswered, and if so, has her work load been reduced by the owner so that as she can pursue those things that sooth the soul as she wrote, “Dancing, singing, traveling or more frankly, trying to figure out what the hell it was that was going to south my soul.”

It is hard to tell with the owner these days since he’s floating in a limbo all his own, absent from staff meeting and planning his own trip to Europe. He may have retreated into a mentally safe place of his own, leaving her to do whatever the hell she wants.

The trouble is when she gets into this state, she always looks for someone to blame, and gauging from her most recent poems, that person is likely me.

Over the course of the month of August, I thought thing had calmed down, a space of non-interaction that would allow us to reboot and get back to a non-hostile environment.

But that’s not her.

“I have a rather annoying tendency to attack the semi-tended sol around me with the crazy spade once things appear to be quite and seemingly well-tended,” she wrote about her job in the New York City restaurant and places prior to that.

Calmness is an illusion

“That’s how it might appear on the outside, but I may assure you, there have been – during my 31 years of my life – perhaps a total of five minutes during which I have actually been calm.”

She calls it having “a monkey mind.”

Somethings never change, and you have to wonder how soon she will depart of office, repeating a pattern of behavior she apparently has engaged in all of her life.



email to Al Sullivan

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