Maybe I am or was batshit crazy

Dungstain does not understand trauma or its effects.

My entire life was stained by violence from the time I took a baseball bat to a drunken uncle who was battering his wife on the front lawn when I was home alone at age 11 to the time that a marine sergeant (who happened to be my brother) cracked three of my ribs by banging me against a piano and tried to choke me to death. I was 23, and a few months shy of 24, and I beat him in the face with a heavy flashlight to get his hands off my throat.

By the time that I was forty, the unending abuse, both physical and mental/emotional, had become so bad that I had developed a hair trigger response of bringing my fists up to defend myself whether the assault was physical or verbal.

I was told by others that, when I demolished the gangster wannabe in the halls of this building, my facial expression was demonic. The guy had threatened to kill my little dog, Levy. After that he started crossing the street to avoid me. That was only seven years ago.

Dealing with Dagstine, more than Nicky these days, sometimes sets off those same responses.

So yes, maybe I am batshit crazy. But at least the crazy has triggers and I worked with a cognitive therapist for several years trying to get control of it.

I think I still have a right to resent Dagstine’s remarks.

I doubt that he has ever had anything more traumatic than a stubbed toe happen to him.

I put the traumas of my life into my writing and there are times when I write obsessively for days and hours at a time trying to runaway from the memories and flashbacks.

I have never made any secret of that. Sometimes exhaustion is the only thing that lets me sleep because as soon as I put my head on the pillow the dreams, memories, and flashbacks start up again.

Some of them are violent and others are just a pit of sorrow. But I run from both of them.

I wanted to get some writing done today, but it looks like all I will do is blog and run in that manner..

I promised Sovay that I would help her with her novel, but I put her off until 5, which is an hour and a half from now.

My last neurologist attributes my seizure disorder to having been pounded against the wall repeatedly by my step father who stands six foot five inches tall and weighs two hundred and fifty pounds. He banged me against that wall until I grayed out. I was 42 at the time. There is a little bit of something inside my head that is probably benign, but the timing for the development of the first symptoms is perfect for when he beat me. He also admitted years later to being the person who cut the breaklines on my car, gave me a naughty boy smile, and laughed in my face.

If I am batshit crazy, then life made me a present of it.

More Batshit crazy and mythical attorneys

So leave Ms. Datlow alone, and stop concocting these absurd stories. Oh, and be sure to take your tricyclics or your MAOIs (whatever the doctor prescribed you), before you go to bed tonight.

Love Lawrence

This little gem is from his comment here

So here we have the newest thing from Dagstine. I’m supposedly batshit crazy because I suffer from PTSD. Larry, I am not on anti-depressants or other meds for being crazy. I chose to use my writing (a recognized therapy) and try to bull my way through it. When various parts of your life are impacted by attempted murder (from members of my family mostly) and a fifteen year marriage that was so abusive it was reminiscent of a concentration camp existence, PTSD is a natural outcome of it.

You are implying that our combat vets who return from our various wars are batshit crazy. You had better re-think this comment and all previous and subsequent comments.

And here we have the mythical attorney threat

My attorney called me in a flash, scalded me, and told me to remove it.

Don’t worry, you’ll be meeting him soon. Paperwork isn’t drawn up overnight, ya know.

That must have been a seriously fast notice. My google alerts are set to come in as it happens. So let’s see…. within minutes of posting your attorney contacted you. Damn, he’s faster than a speeding bullet. Does he also jump tall buildings in a single bound and fly through the air?

28 hours without sleep

I have gone 28 hours without sleep. Every time I put my head on the pillow I either get angry all over again, or I start having flashbacks. At Wednesday’s team meeting for Daverana Enterprises, we got off on a bitch session about Jean. The guys (Phil, Gustavo, and Niwi) went missing. In the course of it, we got off on the subject of my former step-son and that put me over the edge into flashbacks and nightmares.

I kept trying to leave the meeting as my stomach clenched up and another round of adrenaline hit me. I was shaking and sick to my stomach by the time I left. No one there meant to trigger those. They just happen. I’m as wired as I am on those night when I am trying to write myself into exhaustion so that I can lay down without having another round of memory noise.

The connections connect. The associations associate. I wish that my insurance covered more sessions with a cognitive therapist.

As I watch what is going down with Jean, I keep getting flooded with more memories. It is hard work to escape them. I’m hyper and nervous as a cat. But they won’t let me go. I have to just ride them out and keep going until I can let exhaustion release me.

It’s one of those bad nights.

PTSD is an odd creature.  One of the side effects is flashbacks and insomnia.  They go together.  Once the flashbacks get triggered, I can’t relax enough to sleep.  Putting my head on the pillow is just asking for another one.  The only way to ride them out is to stay so compulsively busy that eventually my body can override my mind and memories.

I fought it.  I always do.  For a little while, I thought I had managed to derail this round, but about six o’clock, i discovered that they had me by the heels.  I know what set them off, for all the good it did me.

When Dickstain (and i’m certain this will make him very happy) threw that meth picture at me in response to my comment “transgressive is no excuse for bad writing,” I felt like I had been hit in the solar plexus.

As of last Friday, i’m between books.  It takes me about a week to gear up for the next one.  i read through two different roughs, and tried to gear up fast enough, faster than usual, in order to put the flashback energy (if you can call it that) into fiction.  However, I was not fast enough.  So it’s going into blogging instead.

It’s what I call ‘binge writing,’ and usually the binge is fiction.

So i guess this could be called ‘binge bloggin.”