Dear Blog Reader,
So I’m realizing that you’re really out there. Yikes. And we have a … uh …relationship going. Double yikes. So, lucky for you I DRANK COFFEE TODAY!!! Woooooo hooooooo!!!! Yeeeeeeeee haaaaaaaawwww!!! … I wrote a story about it for my book, which never made the cut, but not because it didn’t TOTALLY KICK ASS!! Woooooooo hooooooooooo!!!! Yeeeeeeee Haaaaaaaaaaaw!! The story is below this photo, which I took recently on my sister’s street. Such a funny contrast, the Fall leaves and the sandals. And I was worried that Toronto would be the igloo of my childhood!

But wait. I can’t stop now. I’m caffeinated! More about “us”. Thanks so much for being there! I was freaked out by you at first, but now I’m warming up to the whole idea. Like any intimate relationship, I know we both have “issues” and “walls”, maybe even some “hurts from the past”. Let’s do our best to work through them, shall we? I’ll try not to drink too much coffee and you, well… I wish you would pick up a little more around the house… but I’m also committed to accepting you for exactly who you are, unconditionally. I think I can get over that thing you did that time. I really do. You’re only human. xoxo Jess

COFFEE BREAK:
I just downed a Venti soy cappucino from my local coffee-chain, the closest thing we’ve come to the giant insects we all thought in the sixties would take over the planet one day. I spent four dollars on the sucker and I’m getting a bang for my buck.

Once, as I called her from a red London phone booth, I told my English friend Amy that I had just had a cup of coffee. Amy is very pure, doesn’t eat this, doesn’t eat that, many omissions due, I might add ironically, to my counsel. I confessed that I had been riding the bucking bronco which is caffeine and she told me the story of the spider in the Times:

“The Times did an experiment where they gave a spider nicotine, alcohol and caffeine. After each drug, they had the spider spin a web. The nicotine web was a bit messy and nervy, the alcohol web was a little sloppy, as one might imagine. But the caffeine web, the caffeine web was a total DISAAAAHSTAH!”

And that’s exactly how she said it: Disaahstah. It is painful to be admonished in a proper English accent. I felt ashamed that my friend had caught me. I was the spider and whatever web I was planning to spin that day was doomed already. She wouldn’t trust me again until the coffee beans had run their course. She would listen to me differently, awaiting a misstep, a botched corner or mis-aligned silky strand.

So I am the spider right now, and you are in my web. Luckily, we are both experiencing the initial rush of confidence, adrenaline, and mild euphoria.

I feel like I can write anything!! I’m quite impressed with the above paragraphs, thinking that the spider imagery is a nice touch. I can see this book becoming a HUGE bestseller and my friend Amy outing herself at posh parties as THE English Amy in “Hip Chick”. Aaaaah, caffeine. No wonder we do it. It feels so damned good.

Caffeine is an excellent example of the principle: The bigger the front, the bigger the back. The front to a cup of coffee is what I’m experiencing right now: The up, the rush, the high. And there will be an equally intense back. If I’m smart, I’ll just caffeinate myself right through the back, feeling it as little as possible.

In fact, most of North American life is a big avoidance of the back of things. Life starts out and we get, get, get: Bigger, richer, more responsibile, more aware, more kids. Then it starts to slide in the other direction. We begin to lose things. Our hair, our flexibility, some dreams, eventually some friends, finally our minds and then it’s over. And we’re not encouraged to feel the losses.

I awoke in the middle of the night sobbing recently. I had been having a dream about two sets of relationships in my life: First was my mother and sister, the principle family members I grew up with. As adults, we all live airplane distances from one another. My sister had just left from a week-long visit the day before and I hadn’t spoken to my mother in about ten days. In the dream, I felt a real sense of powerlessness over the changes occurring within these relationships, namely the improvement of things with sister Sue and what I know will be the eventual loss of my mother.

The other duo brought forth in the dream consisted of two good friends from high school. We were thicker than thieves as kids, then pulled apart for a while, and now I am godmother to their babies. The relationships have grown, changed, and because of that, a loss has taken place. The me I was and the them they were are gone. Everything is good, but new people are here now, actively forcing me to let go of the past and shed an ego skin. And that hurts. I wonder how a spider feels when I whack his web with a broom.

So I wake myself up with my own wailing, actual wailing like I imagine they do in Jerusalem. I am startled by the intensity of it all when my conscious mind finally kicks in and says “What the hell is going on here?”. I am embarrassed, worried that my upstairs neighbor, a Sammy Hagar look-alike, might be listening to this pathetic midnight sob.

I am not surprised that I feel grief. What seems weird to me is that, clearly, there was no space in my waking life to feel this stuff. I hadn’t created the room to feel the loss or the pain consciously, all of which seemed very natural now that it was happening. I kept this stuff a secret even from myself and it had to sneak out in the middle of the night to breathe.

Another front and back: Big front that I am still in the lives of these people and our connections get richer by the day. Big back that the price I pay for that is the pain of letting go of life as it slips by.

The caffeine is sort of leveling off now. No longer high, my brain just feels buzzed. Hovering somewhere between a rush and a crash, my eyes are fixed on the screen as I await the inevitable blacktop of the runway that greets my bumpy landing.

Headache moving in as my fingers get less confident on the keyboard. Tiny little tremors rip through them, my own personal electrical storm. Because I know a little too much about this stuff, I am imagining my bones being completely leached of all calcium by the caffeine I’ve ingested and I am having flash-forwards to the funky electric chair that slides up the staircase which my future children will have to install for me in our future house so that grandma can get to her TV and crocheting.

I am noticing my heartbeat now. I seems louder than normal.

I think I’m in for the crash sometime soon. It’s been about an hour since I bought the coffee. I’m thinking: maybe the spider makes a helluva web the first hour. The best friggin’ web he’s done in months! He sits back, evaluating with pride his stunning work. The scientists from the Times seemed to miss that. But then it all changes. The finishing touches are necessary for maximum fly-catching and the crash is setting in. Irritable, the spider lurks back into the center of the web, looking around, wondering what to do next. “I hate making webs” he thinks to himself. He is frozen, a victim of his own plummeting spider blood sugar. Life, just moments ago one fantastic vision of idiot flies sailing head-long into his masterpiece, now sucks. Who cares? He drops a defiant poop and glares at the scientists.

The problem with caffeine is that the crash makes me want to escape myself. And one of the great escapes from the conscious mind is sleep. But I can’t sleep. The caffeine won’t permit it. I am destined, like a four-dollar zombie, to stare blankly as miserable, resentful thoughts march through my brain like a bunch of Eastern European soldiers on a rainy day. Lucky I am alone right now. I wouldn’t want to be someone in my presence. I would judge me silently and harshly. My eyes are cold like a shark’s and my vibe is not exactly warm. My head is pounding now and my conscious mind is in total control. The chatterbox. So this is what she meant by
“disaaahstah”.

Sick of my mind, I am now dusting my office. It pisses me off every time I dust something so hard it falls over, and my web seems to be getting messy as quickly as clean. The scientists would love this.

I want to just sit down and read, doing some research for this book I have the grandiosity to think that I can write and that you–whoever the hell you are–will read. Oh God, what’s it all about anyway? Life, I mean. Who do I think I am, writing a book? Whatever. My heart is loud again. I can’t sit still to read.

I put on the newest Madonna CD. It helps to drown out the voices in my head, but I am insanely jealous of her. How on earth did she manage a career like that, actually changing and growing and expressing herself every single time we as a culture declared her all dried up? The yoga! Motherhood!! And that SEX book!!? She’s crazy, man. She lives in England now. Maybe Amy knows her.

I’m dancing at my keyboard now. Body moving to Madonna’s beat. Grateful to be discharging energy some other way than through my brain, I am like a kid at a rave, my spine undulating just because the drugs and the music demand it.

I would stop reading now if I were you. I don’t expect much more of myself. I either need to re-caffeinate or sit through the withdrawal of a headache, followed tomorrow by a death-deep nap. Then I will be myself again, catching a fly or two.

THANKS TO NEIL SATTIN OF NEILSATTIN.COM FOR THIS LINK SHOWING THE CAFFEINE WEB

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 10:38 pm and is filed under My Life, Photos, Spiritual Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.