11/5/2022

Coming back from Ocean County I was listening to a podcast called The Hidden Brain because it's always enlightening when it comes to human nature. The episode in question is part of their Relationships 2.0 series entitled "How To Keep Conflict From Spiraling". The podcast began with a premise based upon a study with the hypothesis of people who have differing opinions may moderate them or avoid conflict altogether if they kept eye contact. Eye contact is vital for relationships and they cited mothers and children engaging in eye contact, lovers using eye contact, and so forth. In a moment I realized one of the reasons why Edna LaMontagne Voegele made such a huge impact on me.

During our time bookkeeping, while she was staying for days at a time at the house, I would fall into a funk or feel defeated after interacting with Leah. To the best of my recollection Edna caught me in those moments and forced me to look her in the eyes.
Funny thing is that recollection was combined with the many times where I didn't look Leah in the eyes. How I mostly avoided her gaze, looking at her forehead or mouth rather than into her eyes. Something about looking Leah in the eyes was scary, perhaps I felt too vulnerable. Doubling down was my fear that somehow I'd let slip more ammunition for "Leah's gun" to use against me at a later date.
Oh god, I have to explain that weird metaphor. "Leah's gun" I just made up off the top of my head, but I always told my therapist how Leah has a penchant to collect factoids, trivia, and facts often given in confidence only to use them against the person who shared them at a later date during a fight. Those bits of trivia, facts, and whatnot were ammunition and today ammunition is for a gun. Nowadays I hold my cards close to my chest even though I'm sure Leah will happily say, "Oh you just think you're holding them close to your chest. I know everything and I'll call you on your bullshit" or something along that vein.

Yet Edna LaMontagne Voegele made a point of making me look her in the eyes. Centering me. Grounding me. Looking in the face of someone who gave me kindness that I rarely experienced in my life. Someone who cared enough about my state of mind to put forth that effort, without judgement, to calm me down without using the irredeemably stupid act of telling someone to calm down. Fucking hell, that was like (I presume) trying heroin then never getting another hit again. Sure there might be weed or alcohol or sugar, but they won't get down to the nitty gritty basic functions of delivering pleasure like heroin. Now I'm thinking of Sweet's "Love Is Like Oxygen" and the lyrics "Love is like oxygen, you get too much, you get too high, not enough and you're gonna die. Love gets you high". How did I get this far without that kind of love and affection? Especially the kind which felt selfless and done solely for my sake.
Jesus Christ, Edna LaMontagne Voegele knew how to speak my language and everyone around me has been speaking Greek since the day I was born. Some might've spoke a dialect or knew a pidgin, yet Edna LaMontagne Voegele was better than a denaskulino because her actions were spoken from the heart and not the mouth.

Maybe I figured out a bit of that puzzle and can throw off this heartbroken obsession with a wonderful woman who gave me everything I needed since birth, but I could only smell it cooking in the kitchen but never, ever allowed to eat it.

Oh yeah, as for that study which began that episode of the Hidden Brain? The researchers discovered how eye contact only intensified the enmity between those holding differing opinions.

Whoops.

an old dream from 11/5/2011

The past week, Hallowe'en until today has been a challenge for me. In a rash moment I believed deleting everything from my website was the correct decision to make in my life. This was facilitated because everything's already backed up on an external hard drive.

I've continued dreaming and the last two dreams have had a central theme: patricide.

In the first dream my father was laying on the ground, I walked up to him and put a bullet in his head. A definite nightmare and I was glad to have awakened after that mess.

More recently I dreamt that he was trying to get me to fuck his friend Liz so he could jerk off to us. I tackled him, twisted his neck until I felt a snap. Woke up a few minutes later and tried to shake off the oneiric trauma.