The Hurt Stormwalker Juggled The Itchy Misconception

6:47 AM 6/7/10

This is a summary of the past 24 hours.

I recently went to MySpace again after not being there for a while. I saw that my friend Lindsay had posted another creative writing class assignment on her blog. It was called, 'Fast Desk's Itchy Lie.' The assignment was to write something that ended with the last line, 'The fast desk juggled the itchy lie.' It was up to you to decide how to interpret the nonsense and make up a story or poem to fit around it.

Lindsay made a character nicknamed 'Desk.' He got that name because he was so big that he couldn't sit in a regular school desk (the little ones with the chair attached to the desk) so the teachers gave him a big teacher's desk instead, and the kids started calling him 'Desk.' The 'itchy lie' was an explanation of how Desk and all his friends had gotten poison ivy after going home through the woods when they weren't allowed to go home that way.

So that is where the strange sentence comes from.

Yesterday morning I was told to look for my friend on MySpace. I already have him on Facebook. Facebook is the place where I pretend to be a normal, respectable person with a good reputation. My Facebook page says nothing at all about me, and it only has a couple of terrible photos taken from bad angles, and not much more than that. On the other hand, my MySpace page has links to my blogs, Flickr photos, names of books that I read, etc, so it's the page that tells all the weird, scary stuff about me. I didn't go find my friend on MySpace at first, so that I wouldn't be worried about what his friends thought of me, because they would see only the boring Facebook page that says nothing. But now it's time to go on MySpace and let his friends be able to look at me and see my weirdness - if he accepts me as a friend, that is.

I didn't make a friend request yet, I just looked at his pages. They were private - no looking unless you are a friend. After I looked him up on MySpace, I went to bed. This was after I got home from work Sunday morning.

I was asleep about an hour. Then they woke me up. They burned me and wouldn't let me go back to sleep.

I started to hear booming noises, one after another after another, coming from outside. It was a strange thunderstorm. The thunder was too close together. There was one boom, then a second or two later, another boom, as though lots of lightning bolts were striking very quickly. Usually there is a long pause between booms.

I was naked. They told me that I had better get dressed, because I might end up going outside whether I wanted to or not. They gave me a feeling that the house might be destroyed. They said there might be a tornado. I did get dressed, and then I looked out the window for a while, but couldn't see the storm from where I was.

I went outside and went looking for the storm. It wasn't directly overhead, but it was nearby. The fast-booming strange thunder part of it was small and dense, and it moved very fast, and soon, it was out of range, and I didn't hear any more thunder. There was a little bit of rain and wind, but not much. So I went out walking down the street, looking for a place where I could look at the whole storm.

I wandered down the street looking up at the sky. The wind was exciting and refreshing. I walked along the bushes, pulled off a honeysuckle flower and licked the nectar off it. I could feel that the storm wasn't going to hit me directly. I went down a little side street that I had never walked down before, and I imagined that the people inside the houses were looking out their windows at me, and that they would admire me for walking outside under the storm. The voices called me Stormwalker. I think that's because I recently wrote about having a crush on Luke Skywalker when I was a child. I remembered my mother, a long time ago, called herself 'Raindance' as her CB radio name (or maybe it was 'Sundance' - I should ask), and 'Stormwalker' seemed to live up to that name.

The shadows under the trees were dark and mysterious. I wanted to crawl under the bushes and go exploring in the woods, but I was too tired to go on that much of an adventure. I went home.

Then I went back out again to get something to eat, and then finally I went back inside and tried to sleep again. But I hardly slept at all. I might have napped a little bit.

They made a mistake on my schedule. I told them to change my availability, starting June 10th, but he accidentally changed it today. So I went in at 2:00 instead of the usual 4:00. This was early enough to see my friend for a few minutes before he left. We didn't get to talk. I had to talk to the other people around me, find out what needed to be done, and listen to a co-worker, a new lady who I've just met, who I've discovered NEVER SHUTS UP. There is always something else to say. I was in an irritable mood and didn't feel like listening to her. It was one thing after another after another, like those thunder booms. I looked across the room to see my friend and got a glimpse, just barely. He saw me - he looked happy and excited - it was a surprise that I was there early. (The voices then bombarded me with the phrase 'I'm not THAT desperate, I'm not THAT desperate, I'm not THAT desperate.') I wish I could've talked to him. I am afraid to go talk to him in front of his co-workers and the managers. I can't explain to anybody why it's important for me to go see him, why I care, why I am going over there from a different department when I don't need anything, why I am talking about nothing in particular to somebody who is 16 years younger than I am, when there's work to do in my own department.

At 2:30 he left and didn't come back. I had my back turned, but out of the corner of my eye I saw someone walking past, and I looked after he had gone by. I didn't get to say goodbye to him.

I am waiting for an answer to an email I sent him on Facebook. I don't trust emails and text messages. I have sent him some and he has told me he didn't get them. I don't know what to believe. He could be not getting them, or he could be lying. He sent me an answer to one I sent, on Facebook, a test email, where I asked if he was getting this, and he said, 'yes I get them all' or something like that. This doesn't really satisfy my paranoia - anyone can hack an email and write something in it.

I spent the next couple hours thinking of various things. One thing they did was make me obsess about him. They made me talk about the rules of what I cannot do online. Don't rely on email to do anything that could hurt you, such as, asking someone out on a date, through email, because if they don't answer, you don't know if they ever got the message, if they're ignoring it, or if it got hacked and intercepted, and you can get hurt badly and then damage the relationship, distrusting someone and withdrawing and avoiding them, because they seem to be ignoring all of your emails and not answering direct questions. So don't depend on email to do things like that, if it can hurt you.

They were trying to rehearse words that I would say to try to get him to go out with me while he was broken up with his girlfriend (which is probably just temporary). But I wasn't doing very well with it, I was fighting against them. The mood was wrong. I explained to them that my life was full of pain and suffering, and I had nothing to offer him, I could not be fun and entertaining, I could not be happy and cheerful, I could not be like the girlfriend he had. Instead, I am grim and serious, looking at a different world than everyone else is looking at. If I pretend to be a normal, happy, healthy person, then it will all be a lie.

Then we were thinking about building a shield. We talked about what materials I wanted to test and how I might be able to do it and how much it might cost.

After working there, I left to go to my other job. I slept in the car in the parking lot for a few minutes between 9:00 and 10:00 PM. This was the last overnight at McD that I am doing, unless I change my schedule and get back on overnights, but I won't do that for a while. I want to try out the new schedule.

At McD I put on the headset. I'm the lady who talks to you when you pull up to the sign - actually, first you have to listen to the automatic, prerecorded suggestive sell ('Warm up with a nice hot mocha!'), which everybody thinks is a real person and they say 'no' and then start talking to it. That annoys me. Don't do it, LOL.

When I put on the headset, I started to get the crawlies. I know all about crawlies. A few years ago there was a major cootie outbreak that got all over my legs and ankles. At the same time, the kids at Eric's daughter's school were told that they had a lice outbreak. It wasn't lice, though. We all thought we had lice and we used lice treatments, but no lice were ever found. These mites were microscopic. I decided that they are some type of mange or scabies mites. The doctor never found any either, and he told me that I had 'delusional parasitosis.' (I hate doctors.) Eventually I discovered that the mites are worst if you're around animals, like cats and dogs, or if you're on a farm with cows and other large animals. It seems to be some kind of mange that's able to survive on humans. I used to worry about them a lot. But I stopped worrying about parasites when I discovered that somebody was reading and controlling my mind - a much worse thing to worry about than mites.

So the crawlies annoyed me only a little bit, and then I didn't worry about it much anymore.

A co-worker said something, though. She was talking to another person, one of the managers, and this manager is someone who breaks the 'don't gossip about people' rule, and yes, when I'm talking to her, I gossip too. So, I was crouching down in a place where they couldn't see me - not to hide on purpose, but because I was tired and I wanted to sit down. The one girl was saying she was annoyed or bothered about something - I didn't hear all of it. I heard, 'It's a "personal problem,"' with distaste in her voice. Then there was a pause - somebody else must have said something or made a gesture. Then she said, 'It's so LONG...' and suddenly stopped talking. There was silence. Somebody must have warned her that I was crouching right nearby. I didn't really figure out what they were talking about, but I had a feeling they meant my long hair.

A while later I put the pieces together. This was 'the voices' that suggested this interpretation for me. They were complaining because somebody had lice, and when you put on the headsets, you get the lice from them. They think it's from me, because I have long hair and dreadlocks. It's so long that if you get lice, you can't do a lice treatment or comb it out.

I've heard voices telling me, ever since I started growing dreadlocks, that if there was a lice outbreak, it would be bad in my hair because you can't use a nit pick to remove the lice and the eggs.

And no, I don't have lice. Lice are 'macroscopic.' They're large and visible. You can actually catch them and see them. The things I felt tonight are crawly things, but you can't see them. And I actually 'caught' them myself, after putting on the headset that SOMEONE ELSE had used before me. Someone else has crawlies pretty badly - they must be someone who lives with dogs and cats, or someone who lives on a farm.

But they have this mistaken belief that just because I have dreadlocks, I'm the one who's giving 'lice' to the headsets.

So later on tonight the voices were urging me to say something to her, to deny that I have lice, to explain that it's actually some form of microscopic scabies mite, and it's coming from somebody else, not me, because I don't have dogs or cats or any pets at this apartment. But I didn't say anything. I just became a little cold and unfriendly.

The next incident occurred when somebody came in at 5:00 AM to work the morning shift. This particular lady is always complaining that some person or another smells bad. She asked me if I had gone home in between my two jobs. I said no, I hadn't gone home, I had gone straight from one job to the other, and had taken a nap. She didn't say WHY she wondered if I had gone home. I didn't ask and I didn't say anything else. I just finished what I was doing, and then I left the area and went downstairs to entertain myself at the computer, because there wasn't much left to do, and I could just read the training manuals for a while. I knew she was saying I should have gone home to take a shower. I just avoided her.

So THEN, something else happened. I was wearing a tank top underneath my McD shirt. Usually I wear an apron over top of that, but it was hot and I had only the two shirts on. I don't wear a bra. Every time I had a conversation with anybody, all that night and then in the morning, I caught them glancing down at my chest. So, obviously, it was see-through enough to offend all the people who aren't nudists like I am. So, somebody laid an apron down next to my stuff, my bag of cookies and snacks, without any explanation of why they put the apron there, and I understood it was a suggestion to put it on. I did, actually, put the apron on. That was the least of the attacks - the false beliefs that I had lice, that was worse, and the lady complaining about how I smell without actually saying so, that was also annoying. The apron was the least annoying.

Many things were left unsaid. I looked out the window without talking to anybody. I watched the crows landing on the garbage can and picking through it. When the manager came in, I asked him about the uniforms I had ordered, and he explained there was a problem and they had to order them again, so we were waiting a little longer. After that, I left without saying goodbye to anyone at all. They all felt like enemies to me. The hurt stormwalker juggled the itchy misconception.

On my way home, there was one good thing. I was close to my house when the radio played a decent song that I liked. It's not an amazing song, it's not a great song, but it's a good song. It's a remake of an old song, turned into dance music, with a good synthesizer. I don't know the name of it, but it goes, '...baby you're all that I need / when you're lying here in my arms / I'm finding it hard to believe / we're in heaven...' So I started tapping my feet and tapping the steering wheel with my hand, and instead of turning into the parking lot, I went on down the street to listen to the rest of the song. I turned it up.

The song finished. The news came on. They said that a terrible huge storm had gone through several states, and there were tornadoes. One of them had ripped apart a church full of people. They were all surprised and didn't know what was going on when the wall ripped off. I think they said most of the people were okay though. One person was killed somewhere.

I turned off the radio and came home to my apartment, and wrote this blog. That is where I am now.  I have survived.