Vomit: Further Explorations in Human and Canine Suffering

Is this the Chronicles of Narnia? NO, SUCKER, this is the chronicles of SUFFERING. I sorta have to laugh at myself over the last 2 months. Like, we really making a substack about how some white dude is suffering. Like wut? But, alas, I am here again to tell you the stories of the vomit, both my own and Winstonthe steel tummy’s. Like everyone else’s substack is all buttoned up, has well thought out ideas, and great take home messages. What is my take home? Well, this week I learned that vomiting my brains out two days after staying up with Winston to take him to the emergency vet after he vomited five times in a 24 hour period is not a peak experience. 10/10 would not recommend. That and the increase in work at the day job is enough life for me to be living. Like, can we turn the fire hose off for a minute? Like I am really LIVING people. This is what art is about, right? Translating the message from my own vomit and the faded red plastic I found in Winston’s vomit into something someone can take away. I am at a loss. It’s pure experience. It’s just a cosmic joke. 

And yet, like clockwork, I wake up to the same three week loop over and over. I am Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, trying to make sense of the cycle I am locked in. The toddler illness, the addict brother in law still doing his thing, a problem with the car or house, lily and I get sick. Vomit, poop, bills, bullshit, shower, eat, repeat. It’s like a well choreographed machine. Yet, I don’t got that weird desire to escape like ole Bill did when he drove his car off a cliff with Puxatawney Phil, threw himself in front of a truck, or threw a toaster into his bath. Dude is stupid. Mutants like us were born to live forever, so we just let the firehouse of experience wash us clean of any grand ideas we have about philosophy or deliverance.

This reminds me of the hilarious exchange I have with my therapist pretty often. Of course, dear reader, I turn the firehouse of my own raw, unfiltered experience on a paid professional. On one such occasion, my therapist in a very matter of fact tone noted, “yeah, it’s hard, isn’t it?” Boom, case closed. Congrats, therapist! You have done it. You have taken my $180 dollars today and gifted me the insight that indeed my laundry list of shitty experience are indeed hard. I don’t know why it pissed me off. It was just sorta like the moment where I didn’t need to be told, “yeah, it’s hard.” And yet, this moment too has happened over and over again. Maybe I will say something to them about it or just keep writing about it instead.

I have these moments where I think that bat shit emotional teenage James had something figured out. I was depressed, living in a cultural backwater in post 9/11 America. I was deathly afraid of failing and getting stuck there. My life was stuck between two people who had some real shit they were dealing with. Stuck, Stuck, Stuck. My response was just to be an emotional wreck. I listened to depressing music. I read dark books. I watched sad, complicated movies. I felt it fully. I was one with it. At some point, I stopped doing that and now I have a therapist who I pay to tell me that suffering and difficulty are the way things are sometimes.

Look, that’s not to say that I haven’t found some use in that therapeutic modality. Its been tremendously helpful for not getting stuck in Obsessive Compulsive Loops. Its been helpful to do the hard work of learning behavioral health skills like boundaries and re-learning how to feel things. Yet, it feels like I am coming up against the limits of what that modality can teach me or help me explore. Like sociology, its a methodology that’s good at directing you to the right questions to explore when not being treated for some disorder, but it doesn’t have the answers to bigger existential questions that plague humans. I wouldn’t say it even pretends to have all the answers to those. Yet, this realization is helpful for me to think through. Do I really need to pay someone $180 dollars to explain to her how the same 5 things f#ckin’ suck? That’s what I am wrestling with now in the background.

I feel like I am writing my way back into connection with teenage me. Teenage James would ducking dig this prose I’m writing. It’s horror. It’s politics. It’s philosophy. Yet, most importantly, I think he would appreciate that some ordinary person continually showed up to talking about their experience of being an animate meat sack in a world of make believe. This isn’t to say that all I have read, listened to, and experienced hasn’t been important.  No, that’s not the case dear reader. The problem is that our culture grinds that natural emotional response out of us. I feel like I am writing my way back into connection with that more volatile version of myself, letting go of the buttoned up consultant who spoke in front of a governor more each day.

Nowadays, that’s what I need. More than therapy and more than spirituality, I need to just be in and with my own emotional response to the stuff I am going through. Like, get the gurus outta here. Get the spiritual influencers outta here. Take your fountains and mindfulness breathing exercises outta here, Hoss. I mean, this is mostly just me telling old versions of myself to take a hike, ‘cause I was like that. It was embarrassing. If I am not with my daughter, I can just be broody and angry. I save my emotional energy for them. I can just stop pretending that everything is good and I got the answers. Cause hell no, I do not have the answers. As I often repeat, I am an animate meat sack tethered to a planet by magnetism that is hurtling around a dying star, surrounded by people bent on sending us to the next ice age. That shit is awful. All this made up stuff is awful. So, can we just stop pretending we got answers for why this occurred and just mourn and grieve that we gotta deal with it? I dunno. I am working on it.

Thanks for reading A Quiet Practice! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

“Horror covers all the heath,

Clouds of carnage blot the sun.

Sisters, weave the web of death;

Sisters cease, the work is done.”

Thomas Gray — “The Fatal Sisters: an Ode” quoted in Allyson Shaw’s Ashes & Stones: A Scottish Journey in Search of Witches and Witness

This is the sort of death-drenched depiction of weaving that meets the reality that I find at the loom. Speaking of Gray’s 8th century poem, Shaw notes that weaving need not just be thought of as “quiet, methodical women’s craft.” Weaving can also “take on an epic scale, ominous with violence and portent.” I laid, in the dark, enraptured in Shaw’s description of Gray’s poem:

“In it, a group of Valkyries weave the ‘crimson web of war’ on the ‘great loom of hell,’ which is made of lances. The shuttles of their loom are spears, the warp is made of entrails, and the weft is weighted with the heads of slain warriors. The Fatal Sisters order the chaos of battle and arrange destinies in a bloody tapestry.”1

As weaver, drenched in death, this has what my understanding of tapestry has come to. I came to weaving as an unknowing disciple of this great lineage of the bloody tapestry. Yet, to all weavers, the bloody tapestry becomes known in their work. For we are the world builders that use the plant fibers and sheep fleece, rendered into form from the blood, sweat, and tears of this earth, and weave our own renditions of the one great bloody tapestry web. All Hail the Great Bloody Threads That Tie Us Together.

No record is better for weaving in the lineage of the great and true blood tapestry than Isis’ Oceanic. Each song unfurls into a grandiose exploration of the tectonic power of our existence and the magic in our hands. I seriously have my own stories for each of the songs and what it means. I have never even read the lyrics and have listened to it over a hundred times. The growls tell of the anguish of the this mortal coil and the driving reign of the guitars summon your attention to powers much greater than ourselves. I like to think this is the soundtrack to the great, grinding nature of our existences. I am gonna try to listen to it while I weave, envisioning I am hanging with the Fatal Sisters and their skull weighted looms.

Until next time, dear reader,

James

Thanks for reading A Quiet Practice! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.