Why do they stay?

When M. abused me in TX, was it deserved for past behavior w/ other men? I was sort of thoughtless when leaving someone -- just did it. I was devoted to B., like a relative, and it didn't occur to me to be serious for long about anyone else, to really stay by them. Until MS, that is, and he was abusive, also addicted. He cheated; I cheated. We broke up a lot. I moved. I returned. I lost P., a great guy set to be an heir who could more than walk. Why am I sleeping in pee? Is this, too, karma? The cheating, the debts for being in a low- or no-pay profession, are all of these rectified? I tortured myself for years about it and gave myself hopeful little promises about life after debt. Maybe I am a glutton for punishment. I feel I have yet to experience a really true & great relationship w/ someone. I used to believe I could never marry a paraplegic. Through it all -- until my lights were knocked out in AA -- I stayed kind in daily ways. Then I went just crazy and very creative. My sister & mother caught it from me but no one else. I caught it from them, too. BB called this a.m. to ask for money again -- this time for a tradeshow -- and prefaced it w/ her claim (true) that T. had invited her to NY free of charge. He is such a funny rich democrat -- the phone ringing off the hook as if it were a fundraiser in reverse. Cherokee called five times and let it ring 30 times each. Today he isn't drinking, is a little ill from it, and good company, why I stay. The aroma of urine fills the living room. My handwashed jeans are drying in the bathroom after being covered in yesterday's urine on the couch. CN wrote to complain that she hadn't even asked for money, but there was a large outburst from her that my sister is crazy and T. is supporting her. My sister is depending on my mother, as I said. T. called Grace Church about getting married and the realtor about a pied a terre. The words "pied a terre" came to me just in time, spontaneously -- I thought it meant garden apt., wh. it could mean, but in NY it means second dwelling, and co-ops don't like them. Condo then. He'll actually make $$ on one, instead of blowing it at hotels or on rent. I want to dive into an apt. w/o pee. I thought about it -- the pee is the hardest part -- it seems impossible, but I pretended that something great could happen -- something out there in the real world of NY -- something exceptional, that could help me transcend the pee & the namecalling. I never believed you "deserved" abuse from someone from another religion. If you "deserved" it for displays of outrage in childhood, why not from someone of the same religion as you, meaning it sounds like a religious explanation for what happened. Your M's displays were so much later than childhood as are T.'s. T. said the other day that it felt really great to attack me verbally. He must be so pissed that I can walk, and I'm handy. And I couldn't care less. I have enough $$ to leave & live somewhere, but I want to stay. Why do they stay? You know the women's magazine question. Why do they stay?

Letter to BL

B., T. has been out of his mind here. I feel it's been 26 hrs. of name-calling w/ a few little moments of affection. His doctor called to speak to me about my getting a follow-up sonogram, and T. threw the phone across the floor telling us to fuck off. I told her he's gone incompetent/incontinent. She thought of catheterizing him, but part of it is his joy at pissing in his $1.7 million apartment and on the furniture and bedding. I cannot escape. It's like he's my employer 24 hrs. a day for the chance to be in NY, and then I rarely go out, anyway. I've been thought by friends to be in a funk lately. I get too quiet & distant. I feel shame to be lying in pee at night for a place to stay. So when the three women asked us for money -- really, it was four, including my sister -- I ask, on whose back? I've said to him that his bankers don't abuse him when he earns in the market, but he abuses me, who work here. It's as if I think C. should work for her "writer's grant" by sleeping in pee. Also, he doesn't allow the use of the computer -- like many employers -- how would she write? No, she wants a no-strings policy toward monetary gifts to her. My sister says no harm in asking for free money from T., but and now we're less sisters for it -- there is harm in it. He assails me for hours when someone I know approaches him for money. They pretend he's a sane jerk of a rich guy who owes them, but really he's a developmentally disabled alcoholic who doesn't think straight long enough to set up a writer's slush fund. We did (together) working on this get $2,000 for a novelist we knew in Houston, whom Donald Barthelme praised as being the best writer there and whose eight novels have never been pub'd. But I didn't get a chance to tell C. about it, bec. she was so indignant that a rich man of her acquaintance wouldn't just write her a check to live on for a year. This is C.N. I befriended her last Oct. in NY. She's a "giant" but has no pub'd book. She is very gifted and hates my sister, bec. she knows T.'s helped my sister financially -- says my sister is crazy. I tell her my sister is a good artist, a devoted heterosexual girlfriend of certain men over the years, and a healer of old animals. C. says it doesn't matter if I think my sister is talented or if she has cared for a cancer patient or animals. C. owns houses but won't sell one. Bec. I am this very calm person w/ bipolar -- I'm very tall -- people say model-like and usu. quiet -- they ignore the bipolar thing until moments like these then tell their friends I'm mentally ill. So I've thought along the lines of economics again -- had been doing that already. C. is a boss-type, must be in charge, is always right, never wrong, and talented, as I said. A retired lawyer. If I pay her, and she's the boss, she writes her novel and buys restaurant meals w/ the money, then I am a customer of her unpub'd novels? Am I like the school who hires the writer to write? Am I a school? Or a customer buying a carload of her imagination-theory? I don't own houses I could sell. I feel that I should have a place to call my own that is dry & clean & good for doing my own work. If I am a patron, and C. the star-boss who dictates my expenditures ... can you make sense of these dynamics? L., my friend who cut her visit to NY short and wanted compensation from T. for her travel expenses, is set to inherit many millions from her stepfather but didn't buy me lunch for years of poverty in my mother's house. I've been volunteering in literature a lot -- editorial, attendance at readings, help in fundraisers -- all of this is scoffed at. Helping T. is denigrated as hopeless activity for me. C. covers her tracks by saying she is a Marxist/Progressive/atheist -- I've only claimed to be a liberal. I need as the buyer of C.'s talent -- she keeps the rights to her talent? -- to understand the position. I have no home, yet she wants checks from me, and T. abuses me in his home in exchange for paying the bills here. Dump C.? Just quietly avoid her? She's a town gossip. She'll tell everyone she meets to stick up for her right to T.'s money. She hasn't even considered what he already pays in taxes.

Marxist-capitalist flowers for believers

The screamer gets the worm. I had given up men for dating; I had redoubled attention saved for women, who, it turned out, were all big drinkers or members of AA. I could put myself in with both strategies. I could admit that I had begged for money, but not over steak. I had pleaded to be paid to work – that was true. In the old days, it was understood that one got paid for paid work; in the new era, it wasn’t true. Work had come to mean something we as women did for cheap or free, something men did without breaking even; men were struggling to live, their bills in danger of not being paid, other expenses. Divorce was lining women’s pockets with men’s higher wages and turning liberals into misogynists: the name calling, alone, was an indictment of heterosexuality; the women, too, blamed women for giving up on or giving in to sex. Since I am not rich (though my boyfriend now is), I had decided to give my time freely, amply, to indulge in volunteerism, to lend whatever expertise I had to the gift economy. I had not thought that the women (except two of us) – acting no better than scratchy cats and whiny terriers – would interrupt my healthy strategy and demand etwas Geld from me. It was not hard to forget times we didn’t even meet due to my relative poverty, years of it, times I had worked but not been paid, times I had asked for “gas money” and jolted administrators younger than I to change not-for-profit policy for the next group. I had not asked outside my immediate family for assistance. That meant being a caregiver without resources in a down economy with a fallowed training for a “fiancé’s” family of young and old people, for a house I didn’t own, for an ideal still at work in this downslide: love – while my women friends courted and lived engaged with the sons of rich men. That b'cy alone took 10 years ...

It is the fourth time in a week a "friend" has asked to be paid for it. I had wanted to give a special gift -- a scarf in a favorite color, gold-toned earrings -- to friends who wanted cash, and not because she didn't own her own house or two, and not because she wouldn't soon or one day inherit, but because she had "cared" during a cancer scare or mopped up after a broken plan, while I, who own no house and running for free, had dared a union. Tuna rare, then.

How This Works

Work is archived at Ana Verse since Jan. 2006. The earliest entries in real-time are a poem from 1983 and a photo from 1962. By referring to the index or using links to tagged genres, you may read along the lines of interest or view photos of the garden (which together make a narrative).

There are to date 261 entries, of which 224 are viewable & 37 listed as in draft form. If you wish to read the entire blog in the order it was written -- as a mixed-genre book -- it will help to know there are 12 display pages w/ 20 entries per page. I suggest reading the entries by the month.

Although I interspersed genres in ms. form before the internet, the weblog form has revolutionized this practice & created interesting questions about chronology not possible with print.

"Go, little book."

A few things I'd like to remember from Russia

Peter the Great was 6'7".
St. Petersburg enjoys only 30 sunny days each year. We visited during three of them.
It stays light past 10 p.m. in July.
The Romanovs married German women.
The Romanovs married many women.
Serfs were freed by Czar Alexander two years before the American Emancipation Proclamation freed American slaves.
Bloody Sunday resulted from a peaceful protest by religious peasants.
One million died in Leningrad during the 900-day siege by the Nazis.
Peter the Great, who traveled with an entourage of 13 women, slayed his wife's lover and put his head in the square.
Lake Ladoga is the largest lake in Europe.
Onegin is the second largest lake in Europe.
Stalin secretly built a reservoir to give hydroelectric power to Moscow in 1941.
Kremlin means "fortress."
Great birch forests cover the landscape.
A ruble is a little less than a nickel.
Icons are painted on wood; frescoes are of stone.
Lacquer boxes are made of paper mache.
Vodka is taken very cold with pickles. Russian vodka is made of wheat and corn; Polish vodka is made of potatoes.
Czarina Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, had expensive taste in palaces. She devoted her life to parties and to her own beauty.
Amber is a pine resin not a stone.
Rasputin washed up in a river two days after his murder by royal conspirators with the breath still in his lungs.

St. Petersburg

We landed in St. Petersburg on Thursday and for three days we toured castles and museums and ate in terrific restaurants. We began with Catherine's Palace, built for Elizabeth, and named for her mother, Catherine, Peter the Great's second wife. The castle is famous for its ballrooms. Later, we toured churches and more castles, in particular, Peterhof, the "Russian Versailles," famous for its fountains and gardens and views of Gulf of Finland. We visited a war memorial that commemorates the 900-day siege of Leningrad by the Nazis during which 1 million residents of the city died, most of starvation. We saw Swan Lake one evening. We spent most of a day at the incredible Hermitage museum with its spectacular collection of Impressionist paintings. We finished with a private party with Russian band in a palace once owned by Russia's wealthiest family.

St. Petersburg, population 5 million, with its canal system and many rivers has been compared to Venice and is one of the world's most beautiful cities.