Thanks Thom for the words. Difficult as they are!

The tremor in my voice is palpable as I try explaining how fearful I am.  My fear isn’t minute but rampant, stretching across my world  like a Christo presentation.

Oh you believe in the law of attraction, thinking positive thoughts, banishing negativity and everything toxic?  So did I my friend, so did I. Read more…

You’re given one word and one minute to write.  It was my first time.  Break please!

She walks into the water which is chang­ing col­ors from sum­mer teal to win­ter gray. The waves are tiny. How much longer must she walk before she gets caught in a riptide?

Thanks Thom for the words

“Mr Linky” is linking to this rather than this post

The Bronx, winter 1969

I don’t know where we are exactly. Some community with hills and old uncared for wood frame houses. Literally that’s what much of the Bronx looks like; the parts that aren’t all old apartment buildings in horrible condition, Riverdale, Country Club (the two very good areas) or Coop City the newish giant complex of buildings that all look exactly alike and unfortunately were built over Freedom Land–an amusement park on a map of the USA that I loved.

I’m not sure why I’m here either.  I convinced some friends to spend the night at Tricia Levy’s. She’s older than us.  Tough.   Shoots dope and hoops with equal vigor. She dropped out before I began the previous September.  Many of my school friends are drop outs.    Segal, student body president,  is in love with her.  He hates me for reasons I don’t understand.  He’s not with us.

Really I’m pissed at my off and on boyfriend, Noah, who set out to visit Tricia with some other friends that didn’t include me. I don’t understand why we break up every three weeks.  I found the secret to getting him back but I don’t share this info with anybody including myself.  It’s sort of subliminal.

We spend hours smoking dope.  Noah leaves with a few friends.  I stay with Jacy and Jake, her boyfriend, who I had convinced to come with me.  They go to sleep in a closet.  Jacy’s one of my crew of gorgeous girlfriends.  We all hang out with boys and happen to get along.  People type us girls as tight and I guess we’re as tight as any girls who only care about boys can be.

Noah’s best friend Henry who never smokes dope or does anything that wouldn’t be parent approved stays with me. I adore Henry who later I will hurt as I never hurt anybody before or since.  The guilt remains to this day.

The apartment has very little furniture but too much pop art consisting of straight lines, squiggly lines and neon for my taste.  I find a sleeping bag and get ready to go to sleep.  Henry takes a sleeping bag next to me.  Somebody hands me a glass of Kool Aid.  Too damn sweet but I’m thirsty so I drink the whole thing.

I wake up in the early morning.  The sun shimmers into the apartment.  The posters look immense.  Something’s wrong.  The lines are moving.  The colors are too bright. Everything’s moving. I feel as if I can’t stand or walk yet I do as well as I do normally.

I try telling Henry that something’s very wrong but I can barely talk.  Henry hates eating out, hates food really,  but for once in his life he wants to go to a restaurant.  I just want to go home and somehow convey that.

When I get back to school Segal finds me. He wants a full report on the night and morning.  I’m not sure how he knew I went to Tricia’s.   I’m better and beyond angry:

You want to know?  You really want to know?  I’m feeling the effect of Acid right now.  Acid that I didn’t f–king want.  Your f–king girlfriend. She gave me the Kool Aid.  I’m going to kill her.  Kill her if it’s the last thing I do.

Segal immediately becomes madder than hell at Tricia. He says he no longer loves her.  He falls in love or lust or something with me.  I let him take me out, take me to demonstrations in DC in his Jag, but I won’t sleep with him.  Never.

This is an excerpt that will expanded upon.

I was in the zoo at Grant Park, when a bee became at home between my fingers.  I frantically jerked my elbow and fingers.  The bee flew off but the stinger was inside me.

“CLo,” I screamed,  ” a bee bit me.”

She thought I was remarkably calm.  I was as I was in shock.

My finger felt rigid and hurt but I was breathing properly so we did touristy things.  OK I had never been in a Trader Joe’s before my trip to Atlanta.  That night we went with W to Piedmont Park where we saw The Eagles.  I began remembering different phases of my life–passing The Hotel California in Paris in my 20′s and wondering if the song had anything to do with that hotel–as The Memory Motel in Montauk inspired The Stones song–that was before I knew The Hotel California in Santa Monica.

I loved Miami Vice and always associate Glen Frey with it.  I had taken CLo’s sister and another friend to South Beach the year before and said “this will be the next big thing.”  They laughed.  I wish I had the courage to act on my beliefs–as in buying property.

I was young, and Miami Vice was a new type of show.  Glossy, showcased houses, a very hot actor (Don Johnson,) and great music.  “You belong to the city,” came from that show.  It was the first action series for the MTV generation and I guess I was part of the original MTV crowd.

Being a good New Yorker I was very familiar with Europe, the Eastern seaboard from The Cape and Boston to DC, then South Florida but had only been around the country several times.  I thought about this at the concert as I made a bucket lists of concerts I want to go to before I die or the group does.  My finger was throbbing.

The next day we went walking Piedmont Park and the surrounding areas–I think you can only learn a place on foot. It was weird that my body felt so stiff when we were continually walking.

That night I went to see one of my goddaughter’s–CLo’s daughter Thai who lives in CLo’s old loft, downtown.  CLo and W live in a stunning loft in Midtown.

Thai’s loft can only be compared to BUPPIE Friends.  She’s 40, her friends are all ages and in and out constantly.  We went to a Pan Asian food where you pick out the food and they cook it.  It’s a lot more adventurous than the Mongolian Grill in North Myrtle.

The thing about CLO, W, Thai and her assorted friends is that they’re all interesting.  Into books, politics, music, TV yes TV, all kinds of culture, good food and physical activity because it’s fun.  I so needed to be with people who care about the things I care about.

But by the time we got to dinner I was nauseous and I looked at my right hand.  It was all red and a third larger (all swollen than my left hand.)Thai gave me some Benadryl and the swelling went down.  It came back but is much better.  My body no longer feels stiff.

I was so happy to be in a city that wasn’t NY I never complained.  The only go to NY–Myrtle Beach, Myrtle Beach-NY, at least 20 times in the past three years curse is over.  I so needed to be around people from all over the world who aren’t suspicious of, even if just a bit, of people who don’t look or act exactly like them.   We all type people and I need “PBS lady,”  “former punk,”  “dark haired men with wry sardonic senses of humor,” “arty woman,”  “hippie dippie,” and more.  Oh I need to be accepted for me without reservation.  Here  I have to work too hard at being accepted and that’s never fun.

Especially for somebody who has spent much of her adult life being embraced by people, and still is by city people.  I can no longer be  quiet about my politics or agnostic but Jewish beliefs.  Yet it makes life so much easier.  But is it worth it?

I realize a lot of my focus on NLD the past year has been because I’ve been online too much.  I personally need  in person classes, book readings, and a whole lot of mental stimulation.And of course writing the book brings up all the bad stuff.  I think I can have that under control if I stay aware.

Oh I loved Atlanta and plan on going back frequently.  I’m not going to NY for any part of the Thanksgiving to New Years scene–I think.  I’ll be working on my book and I need a break from New York. I would love to see New York as a true tourist and just go too frequently. I know that is a problem many people would  love to have.

I probably will be posting excerpts or the sheet I thrashed out or threw out.

I had a facebook sticker of the Steven Colbert/Jon Stewart rally up.  A good friend here who should have known better asked if I was going to the Colbert march for anger.

I’m going to Jon Stewart’s rally tor sanity as I know first hand that sanity needs to be restored.  There’s way too much anger in this country.  I’m proud to be a Democrat in a Republican stronghold.  If you live in NY you have no excuse not to go as Ariana Huffington’s chartering free buses!!!!!!

I feel a zillion pounds lighter than I did last week.  And the bee inflammation is much better.  Itchy if you must know.

Thanks Thom for the words

The following isn’t my book but the side affects of it.  Or how my hair is turning gray at record rates because this book and life leaves me emotionally drained.  And when I try to get in touch with NLD groups and/or coaches nobody gets back to me or tells me I’m too old.  Funny but I thought this was supposed to be the prime of life. I didn’t mean for this post to be so all around the world with Pia.  I’m not a bad person or a bad writer and yet I’m back to feeling everybody else deserves more than I do–no matter what I say later in this post. it’s the outcome of years of trying too much yet being told I wasn’t trying at all and if I just did….I tried making this private as I didn’t want to trash it but don’t want to subject people to feeling they have to comment

I’m so tired.  Lord am I tired of trying.  I fear that my old age is going to come earlier than it should so I do everything I can to stave it off.  However how do I know that dementia or Parkinson’s or something akin to either one won’t happen?  I could appear demented at eighteen–hence the title Space Chick with the Electric Hair.

You make a mistake.  You get angry sometimes for a second then shrug it off.  I make a mistake.  I get angry then angrier.  How do I know it won’t happen again?  Sometimes it happens for the 20th million time or so it feels.  I can’t absolve myself of guilt, of fear, of so many ordinary things.  I can’t let go of stupid mistakes that anybody can and does make.

“Relax,” you say: “picture yourself relaxing on a beach…..”  Idiot!  I live at the beach and my problems aren’t in my head–they’re neurological.* Thanks Lillian, Bill for that sorta analogy.  Two more adults with non verbal learning disorder (NLD). *Actual brain malfunctions rather than emotional I should clarify.

No matter how much I relax I have to live in the real world and the real world isn’t relaxing.  I have to be on constant guard that my gait is good.  That I don’t look spacey.  That I do everything correctly.  That I don’t take too much time counting change or scanning in items in the store.  Little everyday things aren’t little to me.

Anxiety is a killer and I have high blood pressure to prove that.  Perfect blood tests.  No physical reason the doctors say.  But blood pressure that was off the roof because I wanted to go off Klonopin and no doctor would help me–I no longer have great health insurance.  Pre-existing conditions. ANXIETY.  The insurance company claimed I was lying about never being hospitalized.  But I haven’t been.  Yet I can’t prove a negative.  ANXIETY  can cover so much–high blood pressure, then anything to do with the heart or a stroke or I can go on and on.

I’m under insured (but pay double in premiums each month just to help me lose money, and because I’m too scared not to be insured ) doctors no longer find me “remarkable,” “hilarious in a good way,” or “wonderful.”  But a frigging charity case they probably hiss at when I leave.

Me, a charity case!  I can’t be.  I’m not the one that should be ridiculed.  We should ridicule a system that won’t stop pre-existing conditions for adults until 2014.  Of course health care might be overturned and then my premiums that cover so little could go up to the sky and I will be totally uninsured.  And it’s not fair for anybody including me who has paid into the system forever.

I never thought about these things when I was young.  Youth seemed endless.  True I could never absolve myself of the guilt I constantly felt.  Mea culpa, mea culpa!!!!!  I delighted it seemed in taking blame.  Used to make “funny” remarks about it.  “I would apologize to a street lamp.” OK I have!  I used to tell people I began World War Two. It seemed funny at the time considering I wasn’t born then.

I used humor, some sort of ability to make people like me and my personality as a cover.  I came of age in the late 60′s–70′s.  It was OK to be different.  It was more than OK; it was great.  I look back at the life I led in disbelief.  I can’t believe I was not only comfortable working in a huge room with 240 people but one of the stars.  I can’t believe I not only went to huge parties but had them twice a year.

I watch Hoarders and think “this could be me.”  For I don’t have an organizational bone in my body.  And I was messy.  Very messy.  I went through an entire relationship without once letting him into my apartment.  True he was my boss and I didn’t really like him.  True we went out to dinner one night and I got trashed.  Didn’t mean to but….Ended up in his bed and woke up from my black out screaming at him.  I ran from his apartment scared that I would run into somebody I knew for it felt like half my world lived in that building in the late 70′s–early 80′s.  People who played important parts in my life lived in The Atrium–which I later called the Melrose Place of the Village because it felt so interconnected and scandalous .  Though I have to say I was the scandal a third of the time.

Most of the time my apartment was half-decent. I love having company, and don’t buy because it fulfill needs.  I bought because I had no place to do laundry.  I bought because I loved the way I looked in clothes and lived near many interesting stores.

I loved the use of candles instead of lights so people couldn’t see too closely.  My apartment was built in the 20′s and hadn’t been renovated since then.  When I moved in the fridge was one step up from an ice box.  I bought a new one.  But the apartment had no amenities, was hard to clean for anybody, and not walking distance from a Laundromat. What it had was pre-war charm (without light), 12 and a half foot ceilings, a huge archway, and a renter who would get everybody drunk or stoned when they walked in–lighten up it was the 70′s and uh 80′s.  I also cooked in those days and nobody turned down my food.  Most of the time I went out.  Most of all it had location–just off Fifth Avenue in the East 60′s.   I loved that apartment and would probably have waited to be bought out if there hadn’t been five floods in three weeks that destroyed it–and building management wouldn’t do a thing.  I of course thought the aftermath of the floods somehow my fault and didn’t press too hard for them to fix everything.  Idiot!!!!!

I taught myself organizational skills.  It didn’t come easy and I let a dresser draw and part of a closet be disorganized.  Places where I can just throw things to later put them in order.  But my kitchen, bathrooms, living room, and guest room are all immaculate.  Even my study is always “company ready.”  Honestly I have myself convinced that the Horry County police are going to come in at any moment.  I know how irrational that is.  But here people just stop over and almost demand entree.

I bought my apartment on Riverside Drive because I could see its potential for organization.  It was the first time in my life I organized an apartment or anything rather than have it control me.  I do consider an every two week cleaning woman one of life’s necessities for me.  In the city Zobedia understood me and was incredible.  Here my cleaning woman does the minimum but I pay her much less and love her politics and wit–not too many white women voted for Obama in my small beach city.

*******

A friend asked in a post “who reads blogs anymore?”  It feels, to me, that there are hundreds of blogging associations most of which think you should put your personal blog to bed and blog solely for them. Never!

At the same time I like facebook for socializing and yes linking my posts. Twitter scares me as it entails looking for subjects and more.  Honestly I just want to write.  I don’t want to do all the periphery stuff but I will if it means an old fashioned book contract.  I know I’m not organized enough to self-publish.  So why do I think I’m organized enough to be published?  I waver on that one but believe that not enough is known about a disability that has affected every aspect of my life.  As I said I don’t know if it will affect my mind–in different and worse ways than it has already.  Though it can be argued that people with NLD have poor judgment, I have always been known for basically having excellent judgment and I’m not going to argue with a lifetime of assessments. More than anything I fear my judgment going.

I read yesterday that people with NLD can’t focus on books and get fidgety when read to.  They were talking about kids.  Knock me over with a spoon and some codeine.  I loved being read to and taught myself to read before entering Kindergarten.  My older by a year boy cousin couldn’t believe I could read so fast so he  tested me with a boy book he knew I had never read.  Yes I really could read both fast and with perfect comprehension.  I’m sorry if this doesn’t jive with some for profit learning center for kids and people with dementia but uh….

I’m not being vain when I say there are few adults who admit to having NLD and fewer that can write like I can.  I really want to write edgy fiction.  But I feel compelled to get my story out there.  And honestly when people without NLD write about it they generalize or get subtle things wrong.  When parents write they write from their perspective.  Which is OK.  But I am a writer.  I have a compelling story.  I hate pitching it.  I hate having to sell myself on FB, Twitter etc.  It feels like much clutter being added to my day.

I realize we live in the era of shameless self-promotion.  I’m good at having a bold facade–something I always was in real life too.  Distracts from the mess inside and I was vain.  It ends there.  I stopped reading blogs looking for “followers” on networked blogs–and if you said you were a follower of mine rather than a reader I would hand you the Kool Aide. Anyway, people promote blogs–that they sound proud of and have nothing to be proud of, IMHO.

I do yet I have so much trouble being a part of this whole new world—and I was here long before many or most bloggers.  Not just in the regular world but in the blogging world.  I feel as if I missed my chance.  I missed it because I was too overwhelmed.  Now I’m ready yet is the world still ready for me?  I feel weird posting this.  It’s as if I can’t absolve myself of sins real and imagined.  I hiss at myself and both ridicule me and hold myself up to ridicule.  But I’m as worthy as any mother of any child with Asperger’s (the disorder de jour) or person with bipolar disorder–another disorder that gets much play in the blogosphere probably because it’s easy to understand!  I want to make NLD easy to understand and I almost promise to keep the posts shorter as I was until last week.  I’m tired of having to explain NLD.  I’m tired of writing about it but being obsessive….

I’m sorry well maybe a little for the length of this. I’m going away tomorrow for a long weekend and have much to do so if you comment on this I won’t be around until Tuesday at the earliest

Tomorrow is the ninth anniversary of my Mom’s death.  Sunday would have been her birthday.  It would have been nice to celebrate on 10/10/10.  This is my Mom in her later years.

Yeah if you didn’t know it before I’m over 30.  Of course you knew it.  That’s why you read me.  Well it’s partially the reason.

I will never call readers “followers” which I learned last night is the new word for reader.  That’s really why you read me.  I don’t follow the pack. That’s not why you read me.  Well maybe a little.  I’m the anti-mommy blogger.  Not that there’s anything wrong with being a mommy.  I would just like some company to offer me free cleaning supplies since guess what?  I’m messier than five kids.  Not really but I clean a lot.

This isn’t a post.  I’m off to drink chocovine with CLo in my yard.  Post to follow

Thanks Thom for the 3 Word Wednesday words!  And hope your year move to the East Harlem/Harlem border is everything you dreamed and more.  Me a bit jealous.  I will return part time within the next five years!

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

I was twelve that Halloween in 1962 when our family left the garden apartments in Beech Hills, Douglaston to live fifteen minutes northeast in East Birchwood, Jericho LI.  Fifteen minutes on the Long Island Expressway (LIE) or Grand Central/Northern State Parkway, but a world apart.  Exits 41N & S had just opened on the LIE, and East Birchwood was almost directly off it.

I called us “Expressway followers” as we had moved to the garden apartments when the exit to it was built eight years earlier.  My father needed quick easy access to the city. He played poker one night a week in a game I imagined to be like Felix and Oscar’s but with the players were mostly in the arts, and took endless classes at The New School another night.  We were going to live in the suburbs but not shaped by them if we lived the life of my father’s almost dream.  He really wanted to live on Fifth or Park but didn’t believe in private school and most city schools weren’t what they are now.  I had passed almost every test to get into Hunter, (Hunter’s ed department’s school–the only “gifted” coed school then but bombed at the finish line.

The house was unlike any we had been looking at in Great Neck or Lake Success.  Later my father would take me to the see the house we almost bought in Lake Success.  It had its own pond.  But there was a recession in 62 and we were a stock market family.  Almost everything about our lives was shaped by the market but my sister and I didn’t really realize that then.  Our father loved to tease us with hints of what could have been.  But my sister and I spent our childhoods and most of our teens thinking we were middle class then just slightly more.  Our parents didn’t want to take the sheen off our lives by bothering us with money problems or explaining how sometime we had more money than most people in Jericho.

Our house was an eight room four level split.  I loved it.  I loved how modern it was, and not really lived in.  The family that had lived in it before us kept it in pristine condition.  Their only concession to bad taste was a caricature of their family with their name on the mirror in the bar in the rec room.  We kept it for the tackiness factor in the house that was to become, in my opinion, overly decorated.  But we were the first people I knew not to have a couch in the living room but five chairs and a love seat.

I loved the house for all the reasons I was to hate it  as I grew into my teens.

There were four or five developments in the Jericho school system, parts of Brookville, Old Westbury, Muttontown, and South Jericho which was near Hicksville, now regular then lower middle class I think,  and thus never talked about.  I didn’t know until years later that South Jericho was famous for houses built from Sears catalogues but I could tell you all about the Quaker cemetery, meeting house, The Milleridge Inn which is the oldest continuously operated restaurant in America as is the old portion of the Jericho Middle/Senior High School.

I always tell people I grew up in  a school district not a town because everything revolved around school.  Even then Jericho was considered one of the best schools in the country.  I had been in the Special Progress (SP) classes in the city; I could have done Seventh and Eighth Grades in one year or taken enriched classes because I passed a years worth of tests.  My parents felt they had to give me the choice so over the summer when my sister and I were at camp they did serious house hunting.  It was the first time we weren’t actively involved in the process. My parents were moving for other reasons one being all my friends had stopped talking to me the year before.  I had gone from being everybody’s friend to an outcast.  But in my new Junior High I had been making friends, rich girls who lived on the right side of the Expressway and were in the SP.  My parents assumed I had been going through a stage and would continue making many new friends.  So did I.

I had my first boyfriend and my first kisses.  Well a bit more than that.  They didn’t call him Hot Fingers in the final skit because he was good on the guitar.  David went to Bronx Science and I was in love with everything Bronx.  I wanted to be a cool girl and cool girls didn’t come from Queens.  Having a boyfriend, coincidentally also from a garden apartment area of Queens seemed to be as close to the Bronx as I could get.  I didn’t lust for him; I’m not sure I even liked him but he was there.

My first day of school was November 1st.  Somehow my records hadn’t arrived, and I was put in a regular class.  Not just regular but the “A”s to “F”s when I’m an “S.”  That bothered me more than it should have.  I thought I looked cute.  My dress was a red and white checked shirtwaist with a large red patent leather belt.  My brunette flecked with red and blond hair was brushed to a sheen, tied in a pony tail and my mother had let me wear a hint of red lipstick.  I wanted to die when I walked into my first class, English, and saw all the girls dressed in Villager Oxford shirts and ugly A lined wool skirts.  Almost no girl had make up on.  The ones who did had eyeliner!  They weren’t cool but bad.  I knew the difference from my intimate study of older girls in the garden apartments, books, magazines, movies and TV.

I sat next to Anne Feigenbaum, an obvious bad girl.  She began talking to me and I perked up for a second.

“See that boy who is staring at you?”

Actually I hadn’t noticed Steve Miller but he was about the cutest boy I had ever seen.  My heart flip flopped.

“Yes.”

“Don’t you ever talk to him.  That girl sitting next to him?  That’s Bev Cantor, his girlfriend and my best friend.  Get it?  She’s my best friend, and I swear I will punch you out if you so much as look at him.

Anne was big.  She looked like she could knock me off the ground.  I believed everything that she said.  Somehow I lost the voice that had been so vocal my first six weeks of Junior High.  I gained 35 pounds in the next six weeks.  When my parents would ask about my day I would mumble something.  I wanted to cry but couldn’t.  The only people I could talk to and wouldn’t really talk but yell when I wasn’t mumbling were my parents and my sister.

I did horribly in school.  The subjects that had seemed so easy in the advanced classes in Queens seemed like Greek in Jericho.  When my records arrived the guidance counselor asked me not my parents if I wanted to be in the Honors Class.  I said no because I thought that’s what he wanted me to say.  It didn’t occur to me to tell my parents.

I was officially weird again.  Every morning I would tremble as I went to the bus stop because, several times a month–I never knew when,  Joan Hoffman would tell Gary Stein to throw me into the bushes, and he would. They found it funny.  It went on for about two years.

I did nothing to stop them.  I did nothing to make myself likable.  I couldn’t even say hello to people. My gait was off.  To this day I couldn’t tell you how to play field hockey. Not that I have ever needed to know that.  I couldn’t learn Spanish.  The rules of grammar eluded me.  I knew I wasn’t stupid but I felt it.  I hated who I was.   But inside me I knew there was a popular funny smart girl waiting to come out.