Nebraska 1987

 

Downtown Omaha, 1980s

I have no idea if I've written about this before, but my post about a specific day in Rego Park, Queens in 1984 generated some high, anonymous praise. Just a few years later, in the summer of 1987, I bolted to Omaha Nebraska for 3 delirious months. I didn't bolt there from Queens, I bolted from Austin (again). I had moved to NYC from Austin upon college graduation in 1983, moved back to Austin in 1985, and by summer of '87 was in a bad spot with some bad habits and had to move away again. When I moved to NYC it was the actualization of a dream that I followed through with...but things did not work out the way I had hoped & I moved back to Austin to latch back onto my partying lifestyle with my hardcore scene that was still active here. I had 3 adorable apartments in the neighborhood I now live in again (very expensive, very quaint, near downtown), but my demons got the better of me, and I treated them with the only cure I knew at the time: running away.

I had met this awesome girl when I went to Ireland for the first time in the summer of 1984 (another dream realized), and we fell so hard in love with that tiny country that we stayed friends after the trip and talked every day on the phone and made plans to move to Ireland - it was my second really big dream (moving to NYC was the first one). She lived in Houston at that time and was from a big farm family from Nebraska. I moved back to Austin and she moved back to Nebraska after college in Houston. We wrote letters everyday and pined for Ireland and the boys we fell in love with there. We had a shared dream and it was intoxicating for us. I worked at boring, low end jobs and was partying a lot with my college buddies. I seemed to moving in the opposite direction of a young person who was forging forward with their life. (A side note: I am seeing lots of music right now during SXSW and seeing all these young kids play their hearts out in these bands and makes me reminisce about my youth and I feel such compassion for that lost girl. Also proud that I am sober and able to enjoy the music and the connections with people in a really delightful way.)

So after 3 years of intense partying and bumbling around dumb low wage jobs, I dumped my super sweet boyfriend and packed up my Toyota Corolla and moved to Omaha to live with Julie. Our plan was solid: save up $500 and move to Ireland - back when $500 was a fortune to me! The end result of that I'll get to at some point but the process of planning the drive, driving without gps or smart phone (seems unbelievable now!), being giddy with Julie through our letters (handwritten letters!) about our plans was intoxicating. Our plan was valid and real, but I was also "pulling a geographic", which in AA lingo means running away from your problems by moving across country...something I'm really good at and LOVE doing.

I pulled up to her house with my crumply sheet of handwritten instructions gripped into onto the steering wheel and we had a joyous reunion. I had a basement bedroom in an ancient house that was full of character and charm. Julie greeted me with a full bottle of vodka (my beverage of choice!) and we drank that and drove to the brick streeted downtown to hang out at the Irish bar there. I quickly found a Bagpipe band and joined them and bought a practice chanter and started teaching myself songs on that. I was going to join the Omaha Pipes & Drums! I met lots of cool people and got a job making sandwiches at the Irish pub during the day. The Irish lady there with dyed black hair hated me as all her regulars stared at me, this cute young, college educated girl who'd replaced some toothless old hag. She either fired me or I quit, and then I became a Merry Maid for a week or so, and that sucked so I went on to work in call center, which was really the suck. Omaha is full of these call centers, where people call 800 numbers late at night to order records COD over the phone. I've had so many crappy jobs like this, I should create a new blog called Marsha's Super Crappy Jobs. It would have many entries!

But those 3 months in Omaha were filled with magic too...it was the first time since those heady first years after meeting my bio-dad in 1979 in NYC that my life seemed filled with promise and I had dreams to look strive for...I can see now that I've had a lifetime pattern: find something I love and strive towards it, and if it doesn't work out or ends, then come back to Austin (or a mountain in Oregon) and just do regular life stuff until the next big dream pops up. It took a long time for the Antarctic dream to materialize, and now that that seems to be over, it's been tough coming up with something that I can be that excited about...but I really need something juicy that I can sink my teeth into dream wise. It has come at a great cost to be a dream chaser (no family, thin connections (or very deep brief ones), loneliness), but it has been a price I am willing to pay.

We were giddy about our Moving to Ireland dream. We only went to Irish bars, listened to Irish music, read Irish books...but I had met a guy in Austin before moving to Nebraska and he wanted be with me and was calling me every day and deep down I wasn't as brave as Julie about moving somewhere with no plan and so little money. I ended up moving back to Austin to be with the guy....and Julie moved...to Ireland.

I felt like a failure and a chump. I got a super boring job at UT and started reading A Course in Miracles just for something to latch onto. Julie wrote me letters and I sat in my windowless auditorium on campus, feeling like a loser reading about her adventures. I had my boyfriend, but was partying hard on the side and started hanging out with old punk rock friends and got back into the hard partying lifestyle. I was heading towards 30 years old and did not like the direction my life was taking...weekend blowouts with 24 hour vomiting hangovers and low self-esteem jobs that matched how I felt on the inside. My higher self knew I needed to change...and the 80's ended, and I got married in 91 and sober in 92. Divorced in 95 and then 9 years later I atone for my shame of not moving to Ireland by moving to Antarctica for the biggest and best dream ever that lasted over a decade.

There were 20 years that passed btwn my first trip to Ireland where I fell so hard in love with a country, and my first step onto the White Continent, which was the Real Dream materialized. And now I can afford  to do anything. I could easily moved to Ireland, I could move anywhere and do anything. Anything but the thing I would most like to do: return to the Ice. But all is good. The second tier dreams of world travel and free time I am most grateful for.

I'm a known coward in a coward's skin...

Written on 06/05/18 and never posted...just read and it seems really good!

Heavenly Father

Since returning from Taos I have continued my tradition of making drama out of nothing...the giddy few days after the return, the loss of something yummy/nervewracking, the emergence of something new and different and the obsession with this Bon Iver song that I can't stop listening to.

I am sitting here in my bedroom right now just sick over something that has or hasn't happened at work. I'm in this tedious and boring warehouse that I am able to make fun by seeing it as a way to get a workout every day. Two of us (the 56 year olds) work all day steadily and get heaps of work done. The two 27 year olds go on two hour lunches and giggle and laugh all day about inappropriate videos and crap they are watching on Facebook, while I am hurting myself wrapping pallets, panting, busy as F8ck. I can't blame this scenario on anyone as I have seen me do this many times: be a martyr at work while others are laughing and having fun. There is usually a breaking point where I blow up at the boss and shout at them for not making the others work...and while they agree that I am doing the bulk of the work, they are so rankled by my outbursts that I get a lower review than the slow moving and barely working ones with the lighthearted personalities. Boy what would that be like: to be lighthearted! I have no fracking idea! I take everything so seriously and treat the job like it is the most valuable thing in the world to me (sometimes it is the only really compelling thing I have going on in my life). Mixed in with this weird dynamic is some ear shattering classic rock that blares all day and a two-hour talk show in the morning that makes me very uncomfortable. I'm usually not overly PC about guy talk in warehouses but something is different here and I can't quite put my finger on it. So four weeks into trying everything I can not to hear this radio show that is insulting to women, I go to work prepared to give notice and find that the speaker has blown out and the sound is only from the computer and I think hallelujah! Later in the morning I feeling home free when the two young guys come over near me and are laughing about a video they are watching on their phone and turn the volume up really loud and I just lose it - but only internally, because this type of discomfort, of the toxic work environment variety is brand new to me and for some reason I am too afraid to say anything to the boss, who is very cool and a good person. I go outside at lunch, heart pounding and strident and call the person in HR who placed me at this assignment and just let loose...I tell him I need a different job and what were they thinking putting a woman in here. He tells me to finish out the day and he'll deal with it. Over the lunch hour I start to feel like a big ninny, like a puss, like I can't deal with my own shit, so I call him back and tell him I'll say something and he doesn't need to do anything unless I get back with him. I got back to work and find the afternoon going by easily and don't feel the need to say anything but all of of a sudden the guys look kicked down. The mood changes and everyone is silent and the warehouse is silent. Did they get a call and ass chewing from HR? They must have because everyone's acting very cowed and shamed. And of course, I feel even worse - I feel terrible that they feel terrible. But isn't that how women are programmed and taught to feel? I know I was. I was told that in no way can the man in the house be bothered at all and you must adjust every aspect of your personality to fit into what could be possibly acceptable to him. And guess what it was never acceptable...no matter how polite and sweet and obedient I was it was never going to be good enough. So I drag this miserable programmed self with me into every work environment I've ever been in...either the bullied or the bullyer...never having known how to be a team player, never having learned how to be on a team. God that's hard to write and it really sucks. It's not always black and white like that as there are many times when I'm just the happy superstar at work or just so content that I'm not really worried about anyone else. But sometimes this old sad self shows up and I don't know how to deal with her. I can quit. I can move. I can go on a trip. All these things help but they don't cure. I have spent 24 hours feeling really horrible about how I handled this. Why didn't I have the courage just to talk to the boss. Why did I go over his head so that they had to be reprimanded and are now walking on eggshells around me. When am I going to give myself permission to exit this incredibly old and painful story; and more key: what am I getting out of it. What am I trying to prove and to whom? I'm just filled with very uncomfortable shame about at the whole thing, where I should feel no shame. I did the right thing. It is okay for them to be uncomfortable and not just me. I don't need this job at all...I'm just doing it for "fun" and things got completely out of hand with my psychically. After the perfectly respectful and loving mother-womb bliss I feel in Taos to come back and be slammed into a work environment filled with loud toxic rantings that are based in degrading women. To be around people who make themselves feel better by making fun of others. I need to give myself more time to be put back together after Taos. 

All of these feelings of shame and unworthiness and isolation that come up around this stuff are really hard for me to deal with. The good news is I didn't drink over it. In my 20's I would have gone straight to a bar and gotten blotto drunk and gone to work hungover the next day so that the shame would have been deserved. In twelve days I will have 25 years of sobriety. There is not enough blogosphere to describe what all I've been through in this quarter of a decade, but for the best of it start at the beginning of this blog, where my cup runneth over with the kind of goodies I had been waiting for. It is so easy for me to see why people relapse. To have to try and ride out some of the stuff programmed into us is almost unbearable - and so much of it takes a lifetime to undo. This so insignificant little temp job at this dopey little warehouse had to power to tap into my blackest little spot, and fortunately, I have the tools to be able to deal with it. I always hoped that all this stuff would just go away but it seems to cycle around every once in a while. I only like feeling on top of the world and bursting with badass-ery, so when I'm knocked off that high horse I crumple like an abandoned child - the blackest of the black, the dark dark hole of self loathing that 10 years of Hindu meditation did not ameliorate.

But I did the right thing. It was on the same day as the metoo hashtag, and I was just sick remembering the awful harrassment that I gagged myself over because "he is almost retired" and "it would kill his wife.." that hillbilly horseshit that I listened to and let guide my decision to not report my attacker. Fuck that guy. I wish I would have punched him. But I'm a "freezer" - and cannot bite back. I can feel uncomfortable for a few days if it means these guys have been read the riot act...and maybe it's good that they feel a little shame too. I did it for the sisterhood.

The worst part of all of that is that I feel very alone in it - like I don't have anyone who has my back or is on my side. That is an ancient story too, and if I question it and examine it more closely I see that is actually isn't that true. I talked to so many people, so many women, and now bonding with the ultimate comforter - words flowing from fingers. It got me by when I was 8 years old and has not let me down in going on 50 years.

To be able to see that the shame is from not feeling like I did it perfectly...that I don't have to always be brave, and that sometimes brave was just a bravado face hanging flimsily on a foetal terror. So dramatic. Not on purpose. Just the way I am.