Cabaret

We didn’t even get a degenerate art era like Weimar did.

We didn’t even get a degenerate art era like Weimar did. No cabaret. I’m despondent and rage-filled. It’s spilling over onto the pages, at least.

My personal Weimar era, embracing wildness and all the tempests within me as the end draws near- before I report to get my uniform, my assignment to the regimes “arbeit macht frei” (what will they translate it into in American English? We already have a society that associates work and wage-slavery with freedom) program or do I get a pink slip from life and orders to report to the Tierstrasse 4 vans immediately?

I’m waiting to see which patches (unmerit badges earned in my life) I’ll be issued marking me as a deviant, a thought-criminal, an intellectual woman who doesn’t make for a good houseplant/housewife/good breeding stock/past my sell-by date expired bitch.

I think of all the times my schizophrenic arsonist ex (once again a guest of a County Hilton for three hots and a cot) who kept me prisoner for 8 1/2 years by reminding me every time I would call him out on something stupid or was dangerous (to me directly or vicariously, collateral damage never registered in his head) that he did by saying “If you ever leave me I’ll wind up homeless on the streets of Atlanta” and me, being unable to live with that guilt, being selectively naïve, and not realizing it was a self-fulfilling prophecy and that I was only preventing the inevitable by not leaving, called me an “ivory Tower elitist” it’s a little bit of a good chuckle and I always wondered why being called an “ivory tower elitist”, well, it felt like I’d endured a thousand paper cuts and the mental and emotional equivalent of being ridden hard and put up wet, which if you know me well, is one of my ideas of a good time. (I’m am a bluestocking wearing black seam Cuban heels in my garter belt!)

Once upon a time, my idea of a good time was seeing sunrises every weekend and doing bumps in the half-bathroom, ironically euphemized “powder room” with two or three friends. I was lucky, I could walk away easily from that. Some people I knew were carried out by pallbearers. I hated being a DJ but loved the music so much.

I remember one night standing in the line waiting to use the ladies room before my set at a club and a go-go dancer was in front of me in line. She turned to me looked down at me, because she was at least half a foot or more taller than me, not counting the boots, and asked me “What are you doing here?”

I wasn’t in the 21 to 25 age bracket. I was no longer beautiful. My body wasn’t sponsored by methamphetamine, MDMA, ketamine, and energy drinks. And I looked up at her and her saucer-like pupils and said “I am a DJ“ as if it was something to be proud of - that I would get an envelope with anywhere between $50-$100 cash that night and I would consider it a good night.

Of course, there was always some college girl who would put her phone on the DJ booth edge and asked me to “watch it” for her. I would watch the phones -literally watching them— and they never did anything but sit there. I would report this to them, as they stopped kissing strangers and grinding on randoms, and turn back for their phone “I watched it, but it didn’t do anything!” with abject dissapointment in my scream at them, and saw a brief flicker of terror and discomfort flash over their faces like a strobe light. I loved the moment of frisson.

Of course, there were also the nights when people thought their beer bottles belonged perched on DJ booth and depending on how aggro, spun out, drunk, or in my case, not willing to let my Roland AIRA set up suffer the risk of a Bud Light baptism, the beer would be knocked to the concrete floor. Some shattered immediately, glass and beer foam bombs. Someone would appear, like a magic fairy godfather, in a white tshirt and workboots with a dustpan and broom to clean the dance floor of glass and overpriced beer.

I guess the county jail doesn’t give frequent flyer miles and rewards points for loyalty like Marriott or Hyatt rewards programs. You can’t get free nights, upgrades to a deluxe cell suite or opt for fine dining or spa services if you’re a frequent user of their hospitality. He’d have racked up some major rewards as a repeat offender by now. He can’t really help it. He’s a paranoid schizophrenic. He believes he’s being gangstalked. An internet and social media transmitted disease. He wanted so much to be special he believes he’s a victim of energy weapons and is full tinfoil hat nutter. He’s not a targeted individual, he’s an attention-seeker on the autism spectrum with attribution error, persecution delusions, and sees patterns and behaviors where there none. He needs antipsychotics and housing.

I have only encountered four delusional self identified “TI’s”. Only one of them was a good person before they declined and went into the rabbit hole of paranoia. Of the four I’ve had the weird misfortune to cross paths with, two of them have been downright borderline sociopaths. One a possible psychopath. Two believed I was targeted as well, which proved it was a social contagious mental illness to me, and these were paranoid typhoid Mary’s trying to convince others they were also victims of gangstalking. They’re like Jehovahs Witnesses. I needed protection from them, not their imaginary persecutors. All of them had either self-medicated or refused medication.

Because of his flat affect, when my ex first told me he thought our room was bugged by our roommate in April 2018, I honestly thought he was making a joke. I thought it was a one line joke and didn’t even register it. He was just being weird as usual. He made lots of bad jokes that fell flat or were insane statements delivered deadpan so I ignored the first tell of him losing his mind and being actively psychotic.

It wasn’t until our computers were on fire, as he put all of our hard drives on the gas grill and a 2012 MacBook Pro and let them burn up, that I realized, after a three hour police stand off, that he truly believed he was special and “they”, whoever “they” were, were after him and he had to protect me, something about a murder, and to this day I have no idea what the fuck was going on other than our hard drives were crispy critters and I was begging the police to just take him away and he never came home -because I sure as hell was not allowing that kind of crazy in my life.

The Great Harddrive BBQ of 2018

Long before we even came to the police standoff break up and the several months of me screaming no contact and lots of unfun, crazy ex and I were already hot bunking. He slept all day and I slept at night. We were not a couple. We appeared as a couple. We were strangers who passed in the hallway. I had checked out already for my mental health. He had done something unforgivable and then done more things that were unforgivable and even my therapist at that time, whom I hated, said I needed to have a “exit plan“. That term rubbed me the wrong way and sounded like a suicide plan. I was having a major depressive episode but I was not ready for an “exit plan”. I’ve survived through my various “exit plans”.  Major depressive disorder and anxiety. I liked exit plans to be quiet and dignified. The end was fiery. I could peacefully live without the guilt that had trapped me with him.

I was not ready for his little barbecue either, but when push came to shove and he was carried off by the police, the exit came to my door, and unfortunately to the doors of all of my neighbors on that private street, my new roommate, my old-new-again roommate who was like a brother to me, and worst of all, the suddenly disapproving new landlord.

His stalking of me, unfortunately, is well-documented and provable, unlike his gangstalking. Over five years after breaking up, he insists on using my phone number as next of kin and who to call whenever he gets arrested and I refuse to change my phone number because it’s letting a bastard win. He is now stalking other people and if I find out or I hear about it, in my old demi-monde circles, I give them a heads up. Infrequently they come to me to report that they heard from crazy ex and if I could give them any advice. My advice is to always avoid him and maintain a safe distance. It’s why I like when I find out he’s in jail because at least then I know where he is. I cannot count all the times and ways I have told him to fuck off.

So yes, I have had and continue to have an interesting life, and this is only one piece of it and this is just a tip of an iceberg ,and I’m not going to open up my closets and unpack my baggage and bring out my dead because I have a lot of dead. More death than alive, really. Even in high school and at age 17, I had no living relatives that were immediate family- no aunts or uncles even, nor anyone who is not closer related than my mother’s first cousin on this planet. I was an orphan.

I have lived and I have loved and I have hated and I have gotten myself over-educated, and I have gotten cancer and I wear an artificial pancreas and despite all of this shit, I have no regrets. “No regerts”, either, or bad tattoos even.

I am having my own Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht Kander/Ebb dark little musical here and the songs change depending on my mood and luckily, it’s been a while since I’ve had to sing “Mein Herr”. I hope I never sing it again, frankly. It’s a rollicking good tune but I’m more likely to have a noose around my neck and be pushed off of that very lucky chair instead of using it in a Bob Fosse choreography under the second Trump regime administration.

The 1973 Polish Film Poster! Nightmare Fuel for you too?

SO-

Viva the creators of the night! Raise the glass, raise the roof, raise your voices! Prost! Salut! L’chaim! Cheers! Sláinte Mhaith! Bottoms Up!

We shall endure these days and nights. After all, there are so many petards and so very many people  too eager to hoist themselves up on their own. Those proverbial imaginary bootstraps (dunking stools, nooses, pyres, etc) or one’s own petard, ultimately as a trained historian, I know they are one and the same. They all are similar things and end the same if petard or worse upon to hoist!

We writers will write. There will be art. There shall be poetry. There shall be music. There shall be joy and gallows humor.

Let us revel!

Save me the last waltz, lovely one!!!

Neil Innes “The Slaves of Freedom “ Warning: Contains Ecdysiasts- NSFW

(Click on video at own risk- contains topless bored, apparently tired, mature veteran female ecdysiasts (strippers) from the 1970’s from Bristol, England. From “The Innes Book of Records” and Neil Innes’ Best Performance of this piece, IMHO!)