Darkness Me Old Friend
Season 2026
What did you call me?
Time Blindness
That first time my brother was murdered...
by Mikhail M Hamilton
I apologize darkness for taking my time to update my entries to you. Some weeks and months, life is harder than others and we are all fighting a battle of some kind. I would promise to be better, but I don't want to lie to you or to me. I strive to do better though and I have so much to tell you. My life is constantly evolving. I want to share so much that THAT, in itself, makes it hard because I want to share what is in the now, what happened before, life lessons I picked up on - even a movie I just saw, catching up on shows. Sometimes I start watching something and just cannot continue because it is too much. Do you find yourself perceiving that some things are just too heavy? I watched a lot of heavier shows and movies as a youth but I find myself, as an older adult, wanting to watch things to escape the heaviness of the world more. This episode is a bit shorter than prior ones. I would like to be consistent with length but also try to stay focused on the subject's natural conclusion. I feel our names will all eventually crumble through time. Look at the Egyptians. Pharoah Khafre is believed to have altered many of the monuments throughout the kingdom during his lifetime in 2500 BCE. This was common practice among the rulers. Buildings and tombs crumble off those etched in names. Anyone who ever knew you eventually passes. I mention my grandparents on occasion and I have photos of them but I never had children to pass anything onto and most of my grandparents passed before I was born since my parents had me when they were both 38 years old. Longevity is much better now than it was during their lifetimes filled with smoking and no access to antibiotics. I wrote most of this episode at the beginning of Pride month (June) although it was not intended as a commentary based on that. Some of my favorite PRIDE memes, this year were that Pride is important because someone tonight still believes they're better off dead than being themselves. Another one, which goes into the funny: "My very religious but supportive elderly neighbor asked me what I'm giving up for Pride because I think she thinks it's like Lent and the pride parades are like Mardi Gras? Anyway...I panicked and said 'oatmeal'." Another meme, I found said: "Somebody asked me today why I was wearing a pride bracelet if I'm straight and I pointed out that their Red Sox cap doesn't mean that they are a member of the team." (THIS SERIOUSLY!!!!). And a final one, because I love to end with a giggle: "Happy Pride month to Home Depot for not selling a single straight piece of wood".
In 2000 a friend handed me their camera and I started randomly taking pictures. I found out that I loved it. I would mess around with rolls of black and white film. I did not have a lot of money since I would waste it frivolously. There was a local Goth Industrial email list a bunch of us local Portland weirdos subscribed to called the PIG List (Portland Industrial Goth). A guy who was the singer for a band posted that they were going to Seattle to open for VNV Nation and their photographer upped and quit. They needed a photographer which they defined as someone who could point and take a photo who had a pulse. Free ride, free show, free hotel room to share, a few drinks and all that... yes please. I really did not think I would get it but I did! I still like taking pictures and have never pretended to be good at it though I like them. When my dad heard me say I liked taking photos, he handed me his very choice camera and lenses so I started going more places specifically to take photos. This goose was snapped in 2001 at the Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden, in SE Portland (Eastmoreland neighborhood). Around Mother's Day is when it is at its peak. I have dealt with pretty severe OCD since I was around 8 years old. A primary trait of this fairly debilitating mental condition is the mind's desire that everything is the fate of the world. I realize that's not real, but that's why it's a mental illness. Anxiety is not my friend. Anxiety tells me that if I leave the house, I might not die but locusts... perhaps the carbon emissions from my car will cause a hole in the ozone layer therefore storms, perhaps a tornado. I might get in a horrific car accident and leave my cats to starve. I'm tempted, constantly, to tell friends that I may seem collected and calm to you. I assure you that is not true. As a volunteer at the National Suicide Hotline, I was teased by the others that I was the only person working that night who had never been shot. These volunteers had been victims to gun violence and survived. I have lost several people to gun violence which they did not know and those are all very different experiences. I was grateful at getting diagnosed. There is a lot of information online but a key fundamental which it took a professional to point out to me repeatedly was that the illness is self blame. I recently heard two very profound things. The first went something like, "Do not exhaust yourself explaining things to someone determined to not hear what you are saying." The second is that a Monk once said: "Imagine being bitten by a snake and instead of focusing on healing from the poison, you chase the snake to understand why it bit you and to prove that you didn't deserve it." Did you ever see a circus performer with a pole that he would set a ceramic plate on, giving it a spin. They would set up multiple poles with spinning plates on each. The momentum would slow on some and the performer would rush back to each plate, giving it a fresh spin while also adding new plates on poles creating an entire field of spinning plates. It's a lot to manage and to keep from breaking any you have to constantly monitor the whole field. If you lose a plate, you just replace it with a new one. As I age, I feel like each plate is much larger so I can manage less plates but each one is more difficult to get it to start spinning. It is also more difficult to keep spinning. To combat different OCD tics or navigate around them as well as I can I try to face them. From Psychology Today: OCD time blindness is a distortion in perceiving or managing time, often caused by becoming hyper fixated on obsessions or trapped in time-consuming compulsions. It results in losing track of time, difficulty estimating task duration, and chronic lateness, creating significant anxiety. It is a brain-based challenge where time feels fluid or disappears.
My parents were high school sweethearts in Woburn Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. At 17, my dad (lied about his age, in the era you could get away with that) joined the Air Force and lived in the Sahara Desert. By the time he came back, my mom married someone else and moved to the West Coast. My dad then also married someone else. My mom had two sons and a daughter with her husband. My dad had 3 sons and a daughter with his wife. Both marriages ended, sending both my dad and mom home to Boston Massachusetts. They got back together and had me, their one and only child together. Out of all my siblings, Bobby was closest to my age and he was ten years older than me when he died June 4, 1984. I still, over 40 years later, miss my brother and think of him often. Grief does not cease... it merely changes form.
My history of journals and their destruction which brings me here, to try that mess again. Why not do it in a public forum. I was inspired to start with a crazed story from my life leading to permanent PTSD around dating. It just kept going and going... The picture is of my bedroom when I was in my early 20's. I had a wrought iron sleigh bed my mom gifted me when I was in high school. It held a futon mattress. I loved that bed and had it for nearly ten years though when I moved into an apartment, I discovered putting it together solo was the pits. My bedding was also pretty great. I was in two decorating 'worlds'. In high school and then college, I loved black and white - my high school bedroom was gun metal grey exterior paint with black and white artwork in black gloss frames. Most of my furniture was black with touches of white and also red. I saved up money to buy an insanely large black and white photograph for my college apartment which had been sold by the time I had the money. I HAD to buy something. I looked in the bins of this shop and found a equally large scale print of Idyll by Gustav Klimt from 1884. This completely changed my style, slowly. In this photo was some of the artwork I loved. I still have that M.C. Escher print ('Drawing Hands, 1948) which is now set in a much better black mat wood frame behind the most beautiful burgundy mating with black core and prominently featured in one of my hallways. I hang it incorrectly, according to the experts but I approve. This photo also features a print I forgot I had long ago and gifted to a friend who probably destroyed it. Betty Boop herself as an Obsession, Calvin Klein perfume ad. It was pretty perfect in the bedroom of a gal in her 20's I feel.