I must brag to the whole world that I did actually get an email from Rick. The first time I read it, while it was still a surprise, I felt this undercurrent of hilarity just beneath the surface. Except that this is not just a little bit of hilarity, but extreme hilarity, like laughing to the point where somebody has to drag you to the hospital for having lost control of your bodily functions, that level of laughter.
I am now rereading it. Some of the things that felt hilarious, or felt 'not quite right somehow,' were things that seemed to be unlikely to be true.
Someone else is looking at my world and joining it, this dystopian world that I live in, and they're learning the language that I speak, and learning my culture.
I am a xenophile. I went outside to put my rent check into the office door slot, and on the way there, I heard a couple of people talking in a foreign language. My antennae went up and I zoomed in all my focus on them. I don't know what language it was, but it reminded me of either Russian or something like Swedish. I didn't get close enough to hear them very well. They were Caucasian-looking, not dark skinned. The girl was blond. They were playing a game, something like badminton. I was happy to hear the sound of a foreign language.
I had become a xenophile as a teenager while reading National Geographic. I learned to love unfamiliar cultures and languages. I took Spanish class and German class in school, but never went very far with them, as I was indeed living below my potential for all this time, due to health problems, as I still had some health problems which began in my late teens, such as sleep apnea.
Someone enters this world, but they know they must pretend to believe all that I believe. It was like my favorite movie, What Dreams May Come, where, every time Christi (Christy? I forget how they spell it) talks to Annie, she freaks out because she knows that he's dead and gone forever. So he has to pretend to be someone else. He has to join her world and believe what she believes.
I get that same feeling when Rick talks to me, because I am living in a really terrible, isolated little world that no one else understands. He has to protect his own mental health by separating his own beliefs from mine. But he goes along with some of my assumptions, although they might seem strange to him. And he's not doing it deliberately, either - it happens automatically. He genuinely needs to protect himself against bonding too deeply with an unhealthy person who he cannot help in the real world, as most of my problems are the result of my severe chronic fatigue (although I'm still able to get up and go to work every day in spite of that). He can't actually do the physical work for me, the things I need to do to completely change my lifestyle, such as get rid of a large number of my belongings. I work on that project very slowly, bit by bit, but it is taking forever.
I wonder. After I get disconnected from the net, am I going to be blogging on my netbook, and saving it for later, to be uploaded on wi-fi somewhere? I don't think I'll get as much radiation burn from the netbook radio if I'm only quickly uploading a blog or something - not like uploading a video for many minutes. However, I will still get some radiation from it. There's an internet cafe, but it's in an inconvenient location for me, and I wonder if they have actual cables so that you don't have to use wi-fi. There was a time in the past when an internet cafe would have cable connections, but I wasn't using them at that time in my life.
If I am blogging on my netbook, that won't be very ergonomic, but I will probably do it, as I feel the need to write constantly. What's that disease called? It's an actual disease, where someone has to write constantly on everything even after they run out of paper, and they'll write on the walls, even. The quality of the writing is low. It's just constant babbling. My writing is medium quality, not extremely low quality. It's readable, but it tends to drag on and on for hours.
I wonder what level of writing quality I will be at when I have quit caffeine and have gotten rid of all the sources of St. John's Wort residue? When I am off caffeine, I write differently. I withdrew from caffeine today while resting, and I noticed that my right eye, the one affected by the dental fillings, was getting swollen. Caffeine is a diuretic, so it reduces swelling.
I want to drill the fillings out myself. However, the one in the back, the molar, might still have a little bit of mercury-silver left in it, underneath the plastic. I would be afraid to disturb that material while drilling.
If I were on a different computer, then I would comment about Rick's dental fillings on his blog, although he might not find it within himself to answer me yet. But I won't say 'Oh no!' as I said to him in email, as I was totally freaking out at the time. It's most likely that I am going to write a comment asking which type of fillings he has gotten and which types he already has - are they metallic, or are they plastic? And there is something suspicious about the speed of doing the filling, if they are plastic. They are supposed to shine this blue light that fuses together the molecules of the plastic, and I don't know enough about it, but they are supposed to shine the blue light every time they add a layer of plastic, and if they just wad it all in there and shine the blue light afterwards, then the plastic isn't penetrated as deeply by the light, and it might not solidify completely, thereby causing it to leach more chemicals into your mouth. This is only what I have read on the internet while researching my own fillings, so I don't know very much about this. But they say, that's the reason why it's supposed to take a long time to do a plastic filling. The link to that page - I don't recall the title of the post, but it's on the Ukraine blog: http://tryukraine.blogspot.com/. The dental filling story is on there somewhere.
There was one mistake or glitch in his email, where he seemed to have skipped an important word. There was one sentence where he seemed to be saying the opposite of what he meant, because he forgot the word 'not.' I could take advantage of that glitch. I COULD make his blog an uncomfortable place for him and other visitors, thereby gaining his trust. Or I could just add the word 'not' to the sentence. Either way.
I'll be off the net - still wanting to write some kind of journals, as I have always written journals. I wrote them in spiral bound notebooks in the past, during my many years of chronic fatigue, and I would sometimes write in them all day long.
I described an 'apocalypse fantasy' where some outside force changes your life for you even if you are stagnant and immobile. I kind of do have a problem which is happening right now. This is the month of May, and my car inspection expires now. There is no way in hell that I can pass inspection. My rear bumper is still crushed from the rear ending accident in October or whenever it was. Long story. It didn't get fixed yet, the end.
I am also now living in Bellefonte, a very inconvenient distance away from my job. I didn't want to live here, but, long story, the end.
So... I will soon be getting harassed by the cops over and over again every time I drive my car, unless I figure out where to go to avoid the cops patrolling, and yes, they do have specific times and places where they tend to hang out, but normally I don't care, and I don't pay any attention to this, and so I'm not really aware of which areas to avoid. So I might have to start paying fines for my expired car.
I will also have to change the way that I get food, long story, the end. That's if I stop driving and use the bus. I wanted to live in my car, but the car is... probably not healthy, as it's kind of moldy now that there's been some water leaking into the car and onto the floor, which has happened a couple of times for unknown reasons, probably coming from something that was crushed in the accident. And, if I can't fix my car yet, then it will be hard to avoid being harassed for living in an expired inspection car. If you are going to live in your car, the car has to be one that won't draw attention to itself, and a car with a crushed bumper and an expired sticker is exactly the kind of car that the cops will be giving tickets to again and again, so, living in my car right now is a bad idea.
I wondered about what kind of refrigerator I might buy that would run on batteries. I've researched this and I seriously meant to do it, but I didn't have moral support from anybody who didn't think I was crazy for wanting to live in my car. That's why I like Rick. Rick likes to take a tiny little backpack and go walking miles and miles out in the woods while starving to death. And he does this on purpose, several times a year. If it seems weird that I want to live in my car, then maybe someone who likes sleeping in an exposed little tent that doesn't even go all the way to the ground, but instead at ground level it's all open and the wind blows right through it, and that can't possibly be comfortable, - and you should see the 'bed' that I've been sleeping on since 2007 when I had to throw away my mattress because it got drug residues on it, and I didn't want to keep buying new mattresses and throwing them away every time they got contaminated - so my 'bed' is kind of similar, in spirit, to that open-bottomed tent that Rick sleeps in while hiking. It's about that bad, except it's indoors. I've been sleeping like that for several years now. I basically sleep on a flat little mat on the floor, without a blanket, and without a pillow, not comfortable. I have had to throw away too many blankets and pillows from drug residue contamination. In some weird way I actually understand what it feels like to go hiking. My dreadlocks are symbolic of that, as in, what it would be like to simply not have any shampoo at all.
But anyway. If he understands about hiking, then he might understand my 'weird' desire to learn how to live out of my car, and my desire to read about this on the net and take it seriously. It seems like a bad idea in so many ways... but people are really doing it, for real, and not paying rent. And I am still a car owner, as of now. I can just imagine lots of people totally freaking out, mostly about my safety. They would think that somebody would break into the car and rape me or something. The most likely event that would happen, involving anybody doing anything to the car, is police harassment or somebody putting a whatchamajigger, a heel, or, what are those things called? The thing that stops your wheel from moving, so that they have to tow the car away, or you have to pay a fine. I can't remember it. That's the most likely violation of my physical space that would occur.
So someone learns my language, sees and understands my dystopian world, my strange and depressing life, sees my potential, my hidden talents, everything latent under the surface.
I've been having a fantasy of visiting Ukraine. Some of his blogs make it sound like you can just walk right in and expect to be pampered, without even bothering to learn how to speak Russian or Ukrainian. Everyone there is so eager to speak English for you that even if you struggle valiantly to talk to them in their own language, they will turn it back into English for you. Why bother? So I don't even need to learn anything. I can just get on a boat or a plane and go over there. Actually, I don't have a passport. I'd have to learn how to use money. I'm focused on money. I would understand.
By the way I get excited and want to tell about something having to do with the shortage of change - that's actually something that I've predicted would happen in the USA if... this is long. If people decided to start cashing out their paper bills in exchange for metal coins, because the metal coins actually have real value, while the paper does not - it's a long story. Anyway, if someone catches on to the idea that you can cash out paper bills in exchange for metal coins, without limit, and the metal coins have a real value - and if the value of those metal coins is greater than $1.00 - then there will be a shortage of coins. The melt value. The bullion value. But that's another story - I'll leave it for later. So anyhow, I just walk into Ukraine and expect to be pampered, the lazy dumb self-centered Americans who can't be bothered with learning anybody else's language except their own.
Someday, there will be a limit on how many dollars in change you are allowed to get at one time. They might figure out that they can infinitely cash their worthless paper bills and get something that has a value greater than $1.00... so they will have to start forbidding people to cash in huge numbers of paper bills and receiving something worth more than $1.00 in metal change. A coin shortage. I don't mean that it WILL happen, I mean that it CAN happen, under certain circumstances.
If I went to Ukraine, I'd sit on the hard cold concrete, which you are not supposed to do. Or I'd even lie down on it. I'm used to that sort of thing anyway. So I'm the dreadlocks lady who's lying down on the concrete in public places because you're not supposed to do that in Ukraine. If I heard his voice speaking Russian, it would be a beautiful sound, something wonderful that I couldn't understand, and I might laugh, or I might cry. I could not touch him, and I could not look at him directly; and of course, in the real world, it wouldn't happen like that, but this is the fantasy; and I would want to touch his hand, or hug him, or lay my head on his chest. If I looked in his eyes, I am afraid, as I am ugly, and sick, and unhealthy, and rejected, as my real world body is far below my potential. I am a stray cat coming to be fed. Like Alexander when I found him, and isn't Alexander a Russian sort of name? That is the name the voices gave me when I named Alexander.
Alexander - he appeared at the trailer where Eric used to live, before the real estate bubble encouraged the owners to sell that entire trailer park and make millions off it, and they made everyone leave, and they are building something else there now instead. Back then he was in the trailer, and there were lots of stray cats in the area. Alexander was eating something on the porch. Didn't we already have cat food on the porch? It was Ollie's food. I think we already had Snipe, too. Alex wanted to eat it. He came up on the porch, and he was afraid of me, because other people had chased him away. I sat silently and watched him while he ate. Sometimes I stood in the doorway looking through the window at him. Sometimes I opened the door, and there was nothing in between us, and he would continue to eat and not run away. If I moved too quickly or made a noise, he would dash off.
I sat silently. I sometimes put out a bowl of fresh water for him. Sometimes I moved, while kneeling on the porch, sometimes I would move and adjust my position, slowly, so I wouldn't scare him.
One time while he was eating, I moved towards him slowly. I reached with my hand and I gently laid the back of my fingertips against his forehead. He was terrified. He thought that I was going to kill him. I then withdrew my hand, and continued to kneel there silently. He continued eating.
When I saw him again... I think I did the same thing again. Just the back of my fingertips on his head.
One day, I didn't do it. He came to eat the food, and I did not lay my fingertips on his head.
After eating, he walked over to my hand and pressed his head against it.
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