midnight rantings

Crazy wants to write, fine. Crazy gets to write. At least Crazy stopped to put on pants first because it's the middle of the goddamn night and it's cold downstairs.

My crazy is coming out a lot recently. Tics and twitches that made cameos or recurring roles through my life are coming back for a curtain call. OCD swings in during conversation with Martin. “I cleaned the cat pan,” he said. “Thank you,” I reply. And then Crazy piped up. “Wash your hands.” “Yes, I've got that covered,” Martin said. He is very patient with my crazy, even though I haven't had a decent night's sleep in four days and neither has he. I sleep in 90 minute bursts, and then wake and cannot fall back under. Insomnia links elbows with anxiety. I've learned so much how to cope with that, I don't recognize it. My first impulse when it triggers is to ignore the fuck out of it.

Borders may be filing bankruptcy. The deal for financing hinges on the all-profit Plus cards that we are selling in the stores. So yeah, it's up to me to save my job. I know this song. Holy shitballs, here it comes, rolling over me like waves of storm clouds and echoing far-off thunder.

But it's not my fault, for realz this time. Still, my heartbeats skip and roar in my ears. Every sound in the sleeping world keeps me awake. Body ache, nausea, and love-seeking cats are no help either. Martin is a godsend, so calm and cool and unaffected even when my antics rob him from sleep and leave him exhausted and zombified during his work day. He's taken to reading to me at night to help calm me down. No one has read to me since my parents did when I was a child.

I loved reading aloud. I read to my brother a lot in my youth, and to the children I babysat, and to my boyfriends when I penned horrendous, gothic prose as a teenager. My ex-husband refused to be read at, citing some leftover baggage from his father reading to him. I've read to Martin over the phone, web-cam, and in person. This is the first reversal and I am touched by his kindness.

We're reading Christopher Moore's The Lamb, a humorous but poignant retelling of the Christ story from the perspective of Jesus' childhood friend, Biff. Moore has done his research. My childhood faith in God swells remembrance. Tonight, I cried to recall the love of Jesus as only a six year-old girl can hold in her mind, with a bearded father who dresses like a shepherd to lead children's ministry at our church. I buried myself within those hugs. It is not too far a stretch to extend that perfect love to the smiling man in a blue sash in my picture Bible. After all, Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so. Little ones to him belong. They are weak, but he is strong.

Here is where I wept. Me and church didn't always get along. I wonder if this is an extension of my own father and his struggle with humility, later discovered to be exacerbated by an iron deficiency. My father cannot believe in his own grace. He is the most beautiful human being I've had the blessing to know, and he refuses to acknowledge that anything good in him is his own. No, it must be Jesus. To be fair, he is justified in this. My dad was a raging asshole for a good chunk of my childhood. I remember more than once clinging to the iron banister at our stairwell, frozen in terror as he railed at my brother and I for being messy. Yes, the cardinal sin in our house was being disorganized.

Last night, exhausted from lack of sleep and shaking with nausea, I stood from my seat at our kitchen table and gathered up our dishes from the living room and the empty soda bottles next to the couch, tossed them in the trash and made sure to run some water in the bowls. After 90 minutes of blissful sleep under the deep blankets of Nyquil, I woke up and clawed through the cotton in my brain because clearly I had shit to do. I'm surprised I didn't run the vacuum. This is my crazy, learned from my father. Jesus loves you but it's your own ass if you don't pick up your toys.

When I was a child, I acted as a child. When I grew up, I put away childish things. I want to go back into storage and drag out the love of Jesus and the simple faith of a child who knew that someone beautiful loved her unconditionally, even when she made a mess, or hit her brother, or threw the cat down the stairs to see if he would land on his feet, or suffered nervous fits in her early teens and tore her hair and struck her head against the wall and felt too guilty to tell her mother, even when her favorite teacher asked her to. Because frankly, I was a shit. And love is never unconditional in this world.

Christianity is bullshit. It's a cultish faith tacked on to an older religion with more impressive guilt, evolved over hundreds of years by invaders and political agendas, practiced by ignorant fools who accept with sincerity the ridiculousness of folk stories and myth degraded by time and retelling as fact, and rise to any heights to defend it instead of bothering to strip the scales from their eyes and think, “Huh. Maybe the Christians lied about Jesus coming back from the dead to keep their already fractured and unsteady movement alive.” Considering Jesus didn't do anything remotely important after he defeated death itself is highly anticlimactic. The best way to seam up that issue is to pretend that Jesus wasn't a prophet cum martyr and instead SAVED OUR SOULS through some symbolic, grisly death, which also works retroactively in linear time to save the souls of those dudes who kicked it in the thousands of years before Jesus did.

As a storyteller, I feel the resurrection of Christ actually undercuts the sacrifice he made. I believe Jesus was a great man who didn't mean to start a cult. He shared a message of love and not being dicks to each other. He cared for a terrified people who carved a social identity of oppression and guilt. But he wasn't a soldier, he didn't raise an army to defeat the Romans and free the Jews, and he was just as much loved as he was reviled for it. So his people killed him. Way to go, douchebags.

I wasn't a Christian when I was a child. I believed in a greater love that loved me, too. Why did I ever put that away in favor of the complications of organized religion and the moodiness of people? This is my problem. Jesus I can get behind. Everyone else is just crazyfucks doing it wrong.

Of course, I'm also one of those crazyfucks. No, I don't throw my cat down the stairs anymore. I've got plenty of guilt riding me about that, thanks. But I still have fits and occasionally some hair gets pulled and I hide in my closet until Martin comes to find me. I'm nearly 32 and I can't possibly have all the answers, yet I am desperate to believe I know just a bit more than everyone else. And every day I gain new clarity that frees me from the shackles of the folk belief I adhered to in my youth. Yet I wish I knew where my Study Bible was buried in my storage unit back home because I can hear the rhythm of memorized verses in my head but I can't remember the words.

Christ.

Okay, Crazy. Did I say enough? Can I go back to bed now and actually sleep this time?