Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2001-10-06 - 3:18 p.m.

(the first Diary Disclaimer: not to worry after reading, I'm fine, if you were worried, although if you know me you probably weren't.)

Gitch

I'm surrounded by it.

When life's details get a little too much for me, and I start sliding, I get more and more gitch in my life. Gitch is the stuff you don't want to think about, the places you don't want to go, the things you don't want to touch. The stuff you should have done a long time ago, you SAID you'd do it but you never did; the phone calls you said you'd make and really you tried but they weren't home, and then you forgot.

Gitch is mental pinball, where the stuff you're bouncing off has spikes. Not there, no, whoops not there either, eeek ouch. And the safe places get smaller and smaller until maybe there aren't any at all, except your bed.

This scares the hell out of me, because I know its name, we are intimate lifetime acquaintances, and I didn't ask depression to do lunch and catch up on old times or anything. It arrives unannounced, lets itself in, makes messes and complains about the food, runs up the phone bill and drops wet towels on the floor.

I know some ways to make it pack up and leave, but it's hard to get around to them when I'm busy picking up the wet towels.

One way is to kick a little gitch ass. Grit teeth and grab that first spiky thing and get RID of it. DO something. Take a bite out of the shit mountain. It makes the mountain smaller. And I will do this.

But it's easier to sit at the bottom right now with my oversized backpack and wish I had no mountain, imagine a mountainless life; imagine that others have hills and hummocks and moguls and that I, only I, am expected to drag a backpack full of grand piano up Zugspitz on a regular basis. Oh, woe.

I am the master of gitch-creation. I cultivate it, then run from what I've created. I can show you how each mess is of my own unique making, how if I'd only. But I didn't, and now it grows harder, with the lead apron on.

Chronic. Of time, we say.

This is not a timely story. It is not a breaking headline. I've told it before and God willing I'll tell it again. I tell it like a bedtime story, for you, because perhaps it is familiar, perhaps it is your Goodnight Moon, too.

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