So, after Vienna I went to London, New York, Boston, upstate New York, Orange County and Honolulu. There were ups, there were downs, I came home with a tan, it was all so long ago now that the thought 'I really need a holiday' pops into my head not infrequently.
Anyway, this blog's number 1 fan (hi Mum!) wanted to know why I hadn't blogged in a while and I've been thinking about it a bit and I've come to two conclusions.
Number 1 is that I'm a little bit over always thinking about how my bipolar stuff is intersecting with my life stuff, particularly now that my life stuff is getting a lot more play than my bipolar stuff. I'm back to doing normal things like catching up with friends and plucking my eyebrows and thinking about dating and wondering if I should change jobs. And sure, my bipolar stuff still influences the life stuff in a big way but I feel like I'm really more concerned with dealing with my life stuff and really, that's all kind of boring because you're all already doing that stuff yourselves so there doesn't seem much point in me telling you about it!
Number 2 is that I have legitimately started writing words for purposes other than this blog and shopping lists. I'm writing a book in fact. I think it would fall into the category of creative non-fiction, although I'm having a whale of a time with the embellishing (which an author of memoirs at the Melbourne Writers Festival gave the green light on, so I feel a lot more okay about doing it now.)
I'm enjoying writing creatively again and if I get the chance to sit down and write that's what I want to be writing. Both those reasons are actually great reasons for this blog to fizzle out, or at least take a sabbatical, but I thought I should let you know.
I also thought that since you've been kind enough to read my babble over the years I would treat you to a little taste of what I am writing. It's still at first draft stage so please do what I do and just assume it will have to get better somehow. Anyway, this is one of the opening passages to my book. I hope you enjoy it and if it's the last thing of mine that you read, well thank you all the same for reading my words and for sticking by me through sickness and in health.
Love Katie
"Sometimes when I’m around colleagues or friends of friends and I feel the conversation wheeling around to anything that might connect to that episode, and I can always feel it coming by the way my heart makes a violent leap into my throat before plummeting to my bowels with the force of a cartoon anvil, I tell the story about coming home one evening to find my driveway on fire. It’s what I consider a boundary story, one of the ones that anyone may hear and feel like they’re getting a peak into my inner life and the trouble they have heard hangs around me. Meanwhile I can tell it and maintain my good humour. Sometimes if that story goes down well I follow it up with a story from the same apartment when the police had been called out to a domestic dispute at the block of flats next door.
I was
standing on my balcony, which is what I called the concrete between my
apartment and the balustrade; it was in fact a communal walkway, though one
only frequented by me and the neighbour to my right, ours being the apartments
furthest back from the street. I watched as a beaten up, old Holden Commodore
turned the corner into my street. It stopped, the driver seeing the cop car.
Then it started to back up. I wondered if it was a paranoid ice dealer who was
trying to back away quickly, the way one does when they inadvertently enter a
room to just hear the snippet of a sentence that could only be about them self.
However
The Commodore was not making a hasty retreat. No, once the Commodore had backed
up about twenty-five metres, the sound of rusted parts scraping and a fan belt
in need of palliative care squealing, then the Commodore sped forth, ramming
into the police car. The Commodore reversed again, only a few metres this time
and slowly. It waited a moment. Then it took another run at the police car but
this time giving it not more than a gentle nudge, the way you might poke an
animal with a stick after bludgeoning it with a club, just to check it's
actually dead.
Then for my encore I casually mention that a man was shot outside my apartment in Brooklyn, a great way to bring to the conversation for anyone who didn’t already know, the fact that I once lived in New York. And a shooting in Brooklyn is so dramatic and so foreign to us here in Melbourne that instantly by comparison the goings on at the Footscray apartment seem minor, trivial, un-noteworthy, laughable, insignificant, minimal, small-fry. Just unimportant! (Which of course they weren’t since all of the bad stuff that happened is connected to that geographical location and came, subsequent, if not partly consequently, of those events.)
Somebody then usually remarks something along the lines of, 'So you lived in New York? How was that?'
And I say,
‘Indescribable!’ Because honestly, even I, who love words and take great
satisfaction in turning them into smartly turned out phrases can’t find the
right ones to answer that question succinctly.
What I will never mention, not to them, not to a person who is barely an acquaintance, is the night somebody stood at the door of my Footscray apartment and smashed every one of my pot plants. That they then violently shook the door to see if it would come off its shoddily attached hinges and when it wouldn't how they cracked a full dozen eggs on the outside of the door. I won't mention that somebody dismantled my chained up bike, that they didn't actually steal any of the parts, they just scattered them down the street, despite there being two other bikes within a metre of mine of equal worth that were not chained up at the time. I don't mention that first it was a tea towel, then two t-shirts and then one day all my underwear that went missing from the apartment block's communal washing line until I took to draping all my wet clothes across a clothes dryer or the backs of chairs inside my apartment, unable to afford any further pilferings from my few possessions.
And the mail. I won't talk about that. About the book ordered online that never came, about the power being cut off because the bill which hadn't arrived hadn't been paid, about the nonappearance of even one letter from my most faithful correspondent, the bank. The total absence of anything in my letter box. I considered removing the 'No Junk Mail' plaque just to yield a sense of satisfaction when opening the metal hatch. But who knows, perhaps the glossy catalogues full of pictures of half-price margarine and cheaply printed A5 flyers for gutter cleaners would not be there either, even though they spewed forth from every neighbouring letterbox in damp and decaying piles.
I won’t
talk about those things. And of course, I won’t talk about the episode."
