Danger on the stage

This morning, I was reading chapters five and six of Scaffolding on TikTok, and reflecting on how the literary world worked before the Internet. What is was like to come of age as an artist and a thinker when access to that world was guarded in different ways.

This great conversation the world was having, about politics and poetry and art. I wanted in long before I was 18. I found my way there through punk rock, zines, and riot grrrl. There I found the confidence, that some have called crazy, to go onstage and give it my best shot.

When you are a teenager from a privileged background, danger sounds like adventure and poverty sounds like romance. Both are fallacies, of course. As I was to discover.

Now that my life is calm and inhabited by more cats then people, I have more time to think of the dangers of the world stage. Which one does not choose to occupy, that choice is made by others and by one's actions over a lifetime. My own naïveté meant that I saw only the positives, my ambition burning like an infernal fire. Living in L.A. is like that. Everyone hustling for the same dream, or different versions of it.

In Reno, being the person I am I know implicitly that complete abstinence from human contact is the only way for me to avoid trouble. In Los Angeles it was about networking and who you know/knew/met at a party once. It's good for your career to be social. In Reno, I trust no one and nothing. I go nowhere socially. Even then I cannot escape the trouble that finds me.

I've been listening lately, through the walls of this this old house that I love. I have been hearing some disturbing things. While one part of me says, "Remember you are Schizophrenic, you are not on antipsychotics so could be hearing voices," these voices are quite unlike those whom I had befriended before.

I hear a parental figure berating a son. I heard a social worker dealing with a crisis next door involving their son's interest in the dark web, deepfake pornography, unliterary interest in me, serious danger to me, and how that was to be dealt with. I am concerned.

I was determined not to take my trash out this weekend and just hide, I was so scared. People in Reno routinely carry guns. This is Trump country. A conspicuous lesbian who knows no longer how many screens and metaphorical stages she functions on, given the multimedia web I have built as the technology evolved. I isolate for safety but that also means there are a lot of things I do not know about how the outside world sees me. Especially locally.

I ended up taking my trash out anyway, and will have to take it in tomorrow. Followed by a crucial therapy session. We are still getting through the getting to know you and your problems stage of a new therapist and new problems are multiplying like benighted bunny rabbits.

It is quite inconvenient to have the last week before my ten year sobriety anniversary complicated with this crap. I am beyond vexed.  Every afternoon I have a petite nervous breakdown and take my meds early. Hide under the covers clutching a Rosary. Trying to remember the Padre Nuestra. My Spanish Hail Mary is on point, but I never followed up in memorizing the other prayer.

I'm a witch, not quite a bruja, but culturally Roman Catholic so respond to this stuff. I prefer reciting the Rosary in Spanish as then the prayers become spell like incantations. The "Our Father who art in heaven" bit in English I do not agree with a single line of. Would prefer to do it in another language. My French is better, perhaps I'll try that next.

This afternoon, as usual, I didn't have the stamina to finish the Rosary in any language so fell asleep. A nap was really what I needed anyway. To not exist not in this world but in another, for a time, where nothing mattered, and nothing hurt.