A Few Rationalizations

I watched my mother drive over the curb as she pulled away from the Mobil station at Exit 20 off I-87 in Lake George, N.Y. yesterday, with my three kids in the back.

And since then I have been listening to bull frogs, reading magazines in the hammock, and picking my nose. It's been a wonderful thing and I think I'll do it until Thursday at 2 p.m. when I have to go pick them back up. I might have to throw some weeding in there, but we'll see.

However, all this quiet time has my mind meandering in and out of self pity. You see, I'm herxing. I'm a herxer. I'm having a Herxeimer Reaction. Which supposedly is all good. It's a sign that my antibiotics are working and that I'm killing all those f-ing spirochetes swimming around in my brain. Besides my friend dizziness, I'm feeling a tingling sensation in the back of my head starting to introduce herself. And the feeling puts me back to a night I spent with the Goddess Who Is Gone, who wasn't at the time gone, but almost gone.

We were at the dark and smoky bar The Green Room. It wasn't smoky, but it would have been if there wasn't the no smoking law in restaurants. I wasn't looking that sexy, but I would have been if I wasn't sitting next to the Goddess, who sat right under the hanging spotlight over the bar. It highlighted the golden waves in her hair and her thin wrists and the way she held her martini glass like it was an extension of her hand. As she was talking in her enrapturing manner, I sat drinking my beer looking slumpy, but listening so very intently to her stories. She told of a visit to N.Y.C. to see her friend Michael where she competed in and won a competition involving a banana and her mouth and some embellishment. Ironically, she had just left her husband for a woman. She had turned her life upside down for love and blow job competitions.

And I was in awe. And she went on. And I drank more beer. Lately, I've been recalling her description of what if felt like to have an orgasm (sorry if this is too much information for people...stop reading now and hang a left to your nearest safe blog) with her new girlfriend. I still remember how she held her hands up in the air to help me visualize the feeling. She said how it started in her spine and slowly moved up the back of her neck and then at climax the tingling sensation exited her body at the back of her head. She lost words to describe it and became speechless.

I've never experienced that kind of orgasm, but now when I'm using visualization to get rid of the dead and dying spirochetes in my head, I think of the Goddess Who is Gone lying on her back with her custom-made red leather strap-on on and I picture those fuckers exiting my body in an out of this world, orgasmic way. All for the sake of love.

But I've also when wondering WHY? Why this happened to me? I think it's a normal reaction when someone gets sick. I have to find something I can take away from all this later. I'm looking for an answer. Most people turn to God. But I've got no formal training in that. I've only got four leaf clovers and my innate sense of trying rationalize everything.

Here are some of my attempts at rationalization:
1. I've worked for a family the last couple of months as a doula. He is a Buddhist. So they, very naturally, asked each and every carpenter ant who marched across their floors during an infestation to, "please, kindly leave." I tried not to let them see me squash them as they came down my path. But it made me think about all the insects I've killed in my lifetime and how as a little girl I would be woken up by the buzzing in my ear of the mosquitoes in my room. And how I would get up to shut my door to trap them and turn on the light to see them and then how I would smash them so hard against the wall that it would leave a blood splatter any crime scene investigator would be excited about. I would leave the dead carcasses there so the mosquitoes at the screen buzzing to come in might smell their dead brothers. Or, as of late, I've thought about the number of leeches I've killed in the pond and how I don't stop to apologize to any of them before slipping them into my salt water death bath. Or how I've actually considered making a high-end fertilizer to sell from their dead and decaying bodies. All of this done, without once showing remorse or regret, which the Buddhist's think might save your soul if you happen to take one, under foot, by accident. I am doomed.

2. This happened to me because I would have been really really sad if it happened to anyone else in my family. That's including my dogs.

3. This happened to me because I need to learn that beer is not that good for you and that I need to start really taking care of my body (thinking about what I put into it) and being healthy (exercising a little more)...as I (hmpf) approach 40.

4. This happened to me because once when I was in 5th grade I stole some notecards and pens from the supply closet.

5. Mostly though, I think this happened to me so that I can learn, once again (albeit a little hard), that I can't control the world even though I think I can.


However, I still have my palm, which was read in the summer of 1992 by that salty mystical lady on the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, N.J.in her cave of an office and which says "I will be healthy."