Of demons, ambiguity, and the beauty of a web in The Amalgamated Aggromulator

From time to time . . . do you ever have the feeling that you are secretly attended by demons, who, just every now and then, do little natural-seeming interventions, nudges, to thwart developments that they do not want?

It’s an egocentric thought, for anyone. And my own flaky habits leave little room for demons to be needed. For a person who has made such thuddingly, tollingly elaborate studies of “good thinking” and its alternatives, in my actual concrete actions I am always doing simple one-dimensional unthinking strategies with no contingency plans, only adjusting course after I have actually hit an eminently foreseeable obstacle, and setting out again the same way, over and over. My moment-to-moment awareness is thin, thin.

(Maybe no one else would have set out trying to build such a verging-on-Turing-machine flow-chart of wisdom in the first place. Seeking, with unconscious desperation, a conception of smartness so perfect that one need not be smart.)

Like, long ago I used to lose entries that I was typing directly into Open Diary or other web forms. This trained me to compose in Wordpad or Notepad instead, saving frequently, and then copy/paste over at the end. I have kept this habit.

I just had a Blue Screen of Death, and I had something open in Wordpad – which I had not saved, and so I lost a couple of days of writing. What makes this fumbled continuation of habit particularly brainless is that what I was writing was an email . . . which I could have been typing directly into Yahoo Mail, which saves a backup in the Drafts folder, updated once every sixty seconds as you go. And, also, my other option was to do my composing in Microsoft Word itself, which I didn’t have in the old days, and which would have shown me the recovered file when I re-opened it.

But there was the Blue Screen of Death itself, that did happen to happen. The thought of intervening demons still occurs.

It’s not a new thought. There have been many derailings and avertings and divertings over the years, of the kind that strike this thought. (There have been occasions when I have suspected the behavior of my cats – my subtle interrupters.) They need not be final . . . this one won’t be; too much remains in place and easily accessible, I have it all bookmarked . . . but they require time and energy and impetus to overcome, and a fellow does not always have it.

A major derailing has been the essay I was writing, my grand attack on the “TERFs,” the “trans-exclusionary radical feminists.” A trans friend had discovered the TERFs (I had actually avoided referring to them because I didn’t want this friend to find out about them if she didn’t already know!) and voiced an angry desire to “drive them into the sea.” When she said that, I thought, I could help . . . I could help with a vengeance. Well, I took it up on a large scale indeed, in writing; I was actually thinking about crossing the Rubicon and getting it published – and it took much longer than I thought – and then, around year’s end, my computer was down and I sent it off to a friend to fix for what turned out to be a whole month and a half. That wasn’t the derailment I mean . . .

I was going to have this trans friend, and also a longer-standing great friend of mine, give me feedback on the draft and its content. That was as much a part of the original idea as the main import. Because it dealt with several sensitive areas, that I wanted to be sure I handled well.

Well – they are two of the cluster of friends who Blocked me without a word in late January or early February, where the only word I finally got was a cold request never to contact them ever again, even to ask for an explanation, or try to get through to them in any way. Since then, the essay idea and the over-half-completed first draft have been frozen solid – so far, my mind cringes away from the whole thought of going back to it. I should finish it. It’s worth doing. But I am . . . staggering.

And heartbroken, and in fact I have been driven mad in a low-level way by what happened. Every few days I come up with an entirely new theory about what happened. I fold and refold the past, compulsively. I re-analyze endless old exchanges and conversations and comments and absences of comments. I’ve come up with more and more theories of possible horrendous misunderstandings. Also, more and more theories of a slow, accumulating unexpressed rot in the friendships that on my side I never knew about. Also, more and more theories of ways in which they could be genuinely justified in seeing that I suck, in which I could have been heedless or in the wrong or despicable. Each hypothesis is fully developed and detailed and terribly convincing. There’s no danger of running out. And because there are no facts of the matter, there are no facts I can relax into; I can’t let it go. I am heartbroken and revving, and unfortunately revving is a strong point of mine.

The mad theory this week is a particularly bizarre one of actual sabotage, where someone who knew of me and didn’t like me (and who would have to have been more nasty and petty than I ever dreamed, and also more incomprehensibly focused on me) actually spoofed me and falsified things that I never said and would never say but that my shocked friends had no reason to disbelieve. Which would solve the puzzle of what the hell it could have been. This scenario is completely insane, but it’s fully developed in Technicolor, it temporarily has me in its grip, and I daydream helplessly about a situation – that will never happen – in which I discover the deception and am able to unmask it. To fit my opening conceit here, you could say this megrim has me blaming an actual malicious demon.

Anyway, that’s what’s in the background lately, and is likely to remain.
(Oh, Mariel. How in blazes did we go from “I’ve never known you to truly lose the thread” to “please don’t contact me again, ever” with almost no conversations in between???)

(I do not even know if I could want the friendship back now, or if I would be able to take up my end of a rekindling – because a close friend is someone whom you, their close friend, can trust, most particularly trust not to throw you in the garbage without a word, and because real friendship for me is communication, open lines, “you can talk to me about anything,” sometimes damn near communion, and that sure seems to have died, almost certainly sometime before I knew. You can’t pick up such a thing one-sided. But I can’t even know or judge this, at all, unless and until I know what it was about, what the reason was, what to weigh. I don’t know. And so even that thought will remain hanging in agonized suspension.)

. . . Anyway.

Meanwhile, a demon, or some other force of fate, has touched a friend of mine much more harshly and directly.

My close friend Christy, close friend to both me and Gwen, was having a commitment ceremony with her partner John. A polyamorous partner, so not an official wedding, but a full-blown serious thing. Rented hall, families, written vows, everything. Christy has, to her own surprise, found herself deep in essentially wedding planning. Well, the event came off a few days ago. I wish I could have been there. I hear it was lovely.

She had invited her mother to the ceremony. On the face of it a long shot, and a high wire act in relationship ways – her mother is a devout Christian, and here was a commitment ceremony with a serious man who also has a wife who would also be at the ceremony? do you have adventurous family conversations in your life? – but her mom did come! She flew from Nebraska to Philadelphia, her first jet flight in decades. And she enjoyed the ceremony and the reception, and she met John and liked him, and everything was great.

What do you know.

It was great.

Well, after the ceremony, John and Christy were at Christy’s apartment to get some stuff, and her mother said she was stepping out for a minor reason, nothing important.

They found her sitting confused, covered in blood, in a giant pool of blood, on the very brutally solid stone front stoop of the building. She must have tripped . . . or miscounted the steps . . . or something.

At the hospital she was taken immediately into surgery to have a hematoma drained – but she has an unusual, relatively non-serious form of leukemia, which meant that her blood did not clot right or something, which meant that her head was open for three full hours.

She is now mostly unresponsive. And what they have told Christy, who sat all night in the hospital in her wedding dress, is that her mom has a thirty percent chance of survival . . . at best.

There is no way that Christy can know anything about what to make of this, in any way. In any way.

Christy’s father had a degenerative brain disorder for years, so Christy is also thinking about the whole spectrum of versions of her mother that could “recover”. Which she can’t know either. (And will, or won’t, she be dealing in the next few days and weeks with the disposition of her mom’s estate and possessions in Nebraska?) I told Christy she suddenly has Schrodinger’s Cat for a mother; mercifully Christy understands my language and laughed and said “exactly”. (We learned together when Gwen died how essential awful, morbid jokes are when dealing with horror. She says she and John have been joking endlessly, endlessly.) We talked about how the terrible ambiguity with her mom is a match with the terrible ambiguity of my lost-friends brooding . . . the lack of any way to put anything down.

And Christy, an atheist, had to wonder to John if this was God’s way of telling them He didn’t approve of polyamory.

Or, contrariwise, if this was somehow the best thing that could have happened.

Or anything.

Such thoughts are just there, undismissible. At such times they are. The message idea makes me wonder angrily about a God who is really bad at communicating. “What, I should have used comprehensible words and sentences? I sent an angel with a hammer . . .” More disturbingly nagging for me are the thoughts of a guiding force who is artistic – a God like the Weaver spiders in Perdido Street Station, who see only a higher-dimensional view of reality as a giant Web, who feed only on pure beauty, and who therefore do everything they do – prosaic, horrific, insane – in order to make the web prettier. I read once of an Eastern guru or holy man of some description who was asked, if God was all-determining and benign, why there was evil, and who answered after a pause to think: “To thicken the plot.” Could a divine artist have thought, “So, Christy thinks she has a vision of her ceremony and her life – I’ll add some depth”? Could the web be prettier with Gwen and Christy’s mother dead?

(I have thought that the real hook of religious belief is not the times when it seems that God has answered prayers . . . the real hook is when it seems that God says, “HA!”)

And, of course, her mother was there, in Philadelphia, on those steps, because of the ceremony.

Why does Christy have to have this . . . curse upon the happy memory?

Demons. Derailments. Rerouting. Interventions . . . I return to these narrative framings because I really, totally, do not know what to say further.

Anyway, that lays out the not really happy background weather here on this end. I hope to be saying something more useful soon.

Last updated April 06, 2016