jennfrank.

dark night of the butthole

Well, the tenuous structure that has been holding my life together is falling apart, which means I’m supposed to be taking actionable steps1. Instead, I’m inert, paralyzed with fear. This is perhaps very relatable, but it’s simultaneously harrowing to witness from the outside. “Do something! Do anything!”

Due to a series of very unfortunate events, I don’t have cell service right now—a weird threepeat that I’m trying to accept is perhaps not the emergency it feels like it is. I’m supposed to be isolated right now; my main task ahead of me, maybe, is to keep my shit from leaking out on others. No witnesses, please.

At times like these, I try to sync up with the Ratatouille on my head2 for instruction. As a kid, I prayed, in the old-fashioned way, eventually accepting that God did not talk to me specifically. I think this is the direct route I took to becoming a bit of a daydreamer3 instead, and maybe you don’t realize that daydreaming—the little conversations you constantly have with yourself, the little plots you map out—is how you communicate with the Ratatouille on your head4.

I’m also trying to clean. Because I’m surrounded by emergencies, my best childhood friend’s mother’s best childhood friend is probably flying in right now. She, like me, is hypervigilant, which means she’s keyed-in to her environment, which means, if she notices dust or hair or iron deposits ringing the toilet, she will start cleaning, which I cannot tolerate5. Her very presence dissolves the myth of “good enough.”

This is, of course, how others feel around me—judged!—because I can’t help noticing little things and tackling them straightaway. I’m trying to get better at not pointing out every little thing I notice, or working on them, so that others might slightly enjoy being around me, might slightly feel like they can relax. I don’t know if you’ve ever been around a party host who cannot, will not, sit down. This is pointed out to me a lot—surprisingly often, in fact.

Well, that’s my update. I don’t have a better one because I am in it. We all are. I’m putting an end to this post because I need to go Swiff—although I definitely don’t want to. Okay, bye.

a brief cataloguing of brain worms

  1. “I just need to know you’ll be okay,” my best friend said, bursting into tears and sobbing.

    “I will be fine,” I assured her, resolved to action. “Take me off your plate.”

    But if I were talking to myself, I would grab myself by the shoulders and scream “I just need to know you’re going to be okay,” and I would scream back, “I know! I know! I don’t know! I just have no idea what I’m doing!” No assurances. But I can’t scream these words at my best friend, who is already having an unrelated panic attack. My own panic attack has to wait. My panic attack is undercover.

    I try to have compassion for my own panic, and also hers. I think about the title of Alan Watts’s book, ‘The Wisdom of Uncertainty’, and then I scoff. Easy for him to say!

    I read somewhere that women cannot live in a state of uncertainty like men can. I paused, thought about this. Of course there is an evo-psych idea behind this—men are obsessed with how many eggs someone might have left, obsessed with how long it takes to incubate a fertilized one, obsessed with treating certain bodies like hourglasses and timepieces, centering their own eventual wants and desires when contemplating the possibilities of a hypothetical stranger’s hypothetical body—and that’s all very obnoxious and it makes me very angry. My body does not keep your time. A younger, perkier body is not your time extension, fellas. Like, oh my god, go within.

    But I’d allow that there are sociological reasons some of us strugglebus harder with uncertainty, such as not working for 12 years and then being like oh shit I’m all alone in this without any safety nets. And I mean, that is by design. I’m supposed to panic and look around for rescue. That’s capitalism! I’m supposed to panic and then, in my panic, accept a shit deal.

    Take my phone, for example. I panic-purchased a Speedtalk SIM card. Speedtalk: the Spirit Airline of phones, if Spirit were using T-Mobile’s planes. But I didn’t activate the SIM right away; instead, I dilly-dallied, reading up on some Speedtalk reviews before making my move. A scam, people kept saying, they double-charged me, and reversing the charge was an administrative nightmare. Oh! I get it! They explicitly take advantage of a person in a vulnerable position. Yep, that’s just capitalism. Either I go without a phone until I find something better (difficult!!), or I roll with it until I find something better. Hmm, a real Sophie’s choice. I’ll decide soon, and you already know what I’ll probably choose—against my better judgment—because choosing to go without a phone, the phone already in my hands, is wild work.

    I also realize everyone is not working right now—but I’ve been not-working for way, way longer, which makes putting one foot in front of the other impressively difficult, and yeah, that can often be a gendered socioeconomic disadvantage, although not always.

    I’m sure Alan Watts would tell me to just trust—trust in the metacognitive Ratatouille on my head—and that’s very easy for him to say, as a spiritual expert, a gainfully-employed, book-publishing role model who is also deceased. He isn’t scrambling to pay for his own subscription-based existence, with a monthly health insurance premium and annual Dropbox fee. He isn’t scrambling to retrieve his photos and contact list out of iCloud+.

    So just fuck off with your self-righteous know-it-all bullshit, Alan Watts. You don’t know me, you old dead white guy, in linen pants and a string of mala beads around your neck, you absolute weirdo. God. I bet he got laid all the time, especially if he ever visited the Haight. I love Alan Watts, but he is suspect. FOH.↩

  2. A friendly acquaintance semi-regularly posts, to social media, screenshots of unhinged posts from Threads. His latest screenshot was some lady proclaiming, in public for all to see, that she was married to Jesus now, and that He’d removed a 26-foot snake from her head. Praise!

    I was very startled by this, and then I contemplated her post. Guess she found her own personal Jesus, I thought to myself wryly. Then I got lost wondering if she’d spontaneously experienced what another, very different faith tradition might call a kundalini awakening: a physical nervous-system reset, ketaminesque, that feels like a divine intervention. It would be an experience that does not graft itself tidily onto an evangelical Christian framework, and it would involve thicc 26-foot snakes—although whether they’re coming or going is hard to say.

    Point taken. Rather than continuing to dwell on all this, I nodded and wordlessly unpublished my own post that had gently alluded, couched away in a footnote, to enormous space noodles. (Also, “married in my heart,” “married to the feeling of the sun on my face,” the experience of nunning down your own path, finding your own priest and confessional booth within, the veil torn in half, etc etc.) Because maybe we shouldn’t share everything, especially if we don’t have the exact right language, yet, or ever, for what is happening to us.

    Look, basic self-integration is gonna look like psychosis for a hot minute or two. Jung had sense enough to do it in private. He left a lot of notes to himself, too, but they were not on a blog. He was also a dude, a doctor, a therapist: if he explained his freakout very meticulously, using all the vocabulary already available to him, no one was gonna throw him in a cell, because he was already the brain-experience expert. He also had a very supportive wife, at least as far as I can tell.

    “How do you save the soul of a billionaire,” I put to a friend and spiritual adviser semi-recently. “Take away all his money. How do you save the soul of a self-righteous know-it-all? Give her ontological shock.”

    My friend roared with laughter.

    This is the hubris of certainty—of being sooooo sure you already know how the whole universe works—because the universe, or the Ratatouille on your head, is not above punching you in the face, right in the glasses. When you zig, the universe zags. “Why are we fighting,” you eventually sob, sinking to your knees. The universe, an ocean, smirks at you. “You started it,” the ocean whispers.

    When people are so certain—too certain about science, too certain about metaphysics, too certain about empirical data, damn all the anecdotal anomalies—and when those same people are telling me how certain they are, I have a tendency to cringe. I cannot help but warn them. “I think you don’t realize what you’re asking for right now,” I will whisper. “I used to be this way,” I might tack on. And then I will get very sad. Every minor judgment you ever have, you are just begging to go there, to be put in it—to get recast, essentially, which is not what you ultimately want.

    Ah! We can be such gluttons for punishment. The universe, a cosmic ocean, really does whisper FAFO to us, invitingly and knowingly. We bite. We huff and puff, “I’d never go about it that way—” The universe smiles. Then it flexes and stretches its long fingers and writes us a fresh scene, a fresh new pathway. “Oh? What would you do,” the universe purrs at us, “because I’d really like to know.” Oops, you piqued the universe’s interest, made her curious again. The only way to regain control of your life, perhaps, is by judging not. Because you will find yourself on the same path, and only now can you say, “Okay! I guess I could’ve just taken her word for it!” Every side-quest is a fact-finding mission, I guess.

    Hmm. Did I ever judge people for not having it all together? A transient state, a passing phase: having one’s shit together, I mean. Enjoy it while it lasts! And then other people—friends, usually, the friends most notorious for not having it together—take great delight in being condescending, in doing a gleeful little jig on your grave. I see you jigging, you little imp. When I get it together again, man, watch out.

    Oho, I see it now. Who does this remind me of? I need to forgive myself for not having it all together. Then and only then will I, in turn, be able to forgive my biological father: by pawning off my own belongings in desperation, walking a long, sad road in his shoes, taking the easy way out by self-destructing once enough people have withdrawn their faith and support. Yeah, I see it now, universe, thanks. You’re right: I could’ve just taken his word for it.↩

  3. “She’s very organized,” my best friend was telling me, of someone I don’t know, “in a way that I will never be.” We both snickered.

    “Well,” I teased, “in the end, an organizer without a doer is really just a dreamer.” Then, to clarify: “Without you, the whole operation would fall apart.”

    I try to spur myself into being both for myself—I’m the jockey, but I’m also the tired horse underneath—but there are factual limits to just how organized or motivated I can pretend to be. “God, I just need a carrot,” I whisper, begging God to put some life into this old horse.↩

  4. Some time ago, someone I consider a wise and good friend told me it was time for me to learn how to meditate.

    Since then, lying in bed at all hours, staring at the ceiling, I’ve thought to myself gee! She would be so excited to hear that I’ve been meditating! Then I will wonder, hmm, does this count? Then I will think, stop it, of course this counts. You are meditating supine, that’s all.

    But mostly what I think to myself is show me what I’m supposed to see. And then I wait. If my mind wanders, I don’t always return to the present moment; I let myself wander, seeing where the path leads. Maybe it leads nowhere. That’s okay, too. Nothing is supposed to happen, I repeat to myself for relief—a mantra I used to mentally repeat on ketamine, reminding myself that it’s pointless to try to control the brain’s own experience of itself. (Too much light makes the baby go blind is another mantra I repeat, if it starts to feel like maybe I’ve gone way too far down any particular mental pathway.)

    When this happens—when I can notice that a particular pathway of thought is overgrown or diseased—my meditation sesh might turn into a repentance prayer. I’ll go, “I forgive myself for being this way,” or thinking this way, or having the inbuilt or learned instinct to do something a particular way. Then I think, “I repent. I don’t know how to fix this. Please rewire me.”

    Maybe this is a little like AA—ceding to a metacognitive ‘higher power’—except that the founder of AA failed to reveal to his adherents that he’d “found God” on monumental amounts of psilocybin. In my version of AA, all-or-nothing thinking is forbidden, because if you ever get to Heaven and discover it’s only so merry because there’s wine there, you’ll have to learn how to be chill about it. Otherwise, their Heaven becomes your Hell, just like the Got Milk commercial about giant fluffy cookies. Get it? Very simple.

    Anyway. At this stage of repentance—surrender—I might allow myself to nod off, take a little nap, so that the Ratatouille on my head can rummage around and reorganize or prune the accumulated mess in there. Will I wake up hours later, all “eureka”? Probably not. This is a quiet, galling process. Does this count as meditation? Are we meditating yet? Probably not. It’s my personal healing process, is all. Perhaps one day I will retire to meditate and find nothing rattling around loose in there, every cog and gear reseated. What a lovely day that will be. Heaven.

    The male caregiver, Laz, was recently describing studying, studying, studying, no time to enjoy passing each milestone, no fruits, no payoff. He’s making constant progress, but the experience of the journey itself is a little demoralizing for him.

    “Can I tell you what I do?” I asked him. Okay, go ahead, he said. “I go, God, gimme a wink. Just to let me know I’m not all alone in this.” I just need the Universe to give me something, throw me a bone. I’ll know the bone when I see it.

    Laz was delighted. “I like that!” he said, beaming. “A wink,” he pondered.

    At one point I stuttered before treacherously referring to God as “he,” having decided that, while my creator, provider, teacher, and/or clockmaker might be gender-neutral and multidimensional, the god Laz prays to is probably a dude. Meanwhile—thieving a bit of inner-psychology trivia I picked up in an airport bar earlier this year—I pray to God the Father, God the Divine Mother, God the Cosmic Baby from 2001: a Space Odyssey. Put them all together: shaken, not stirred.↩

  5. To be clear, I feel great peace when she is around, at total ease. It’s just that it is not her job to re-clean the toilet I just cleaned.↩