I have been way, way up the ass of my current project. So far up it's ass that I fell into a stupor in front of the computer this afternoon, and had to go lie down. I had two source texts open, two maps, and was scrolling a set of manuscript images that I was enlarging. I was juggling seven different main questions and keeping two windows clear for incidental queries, and I got so wound up in all this shit that I began to be able to read Latin.
I am dead serious.
Not word for word, but I was getting the sense of it. I must have suddenly begun using all my subconscious crossword skills and figuring out word roots and prefixes and suffixes and tenses and shit.
However, when you begin to understand Latin, it is time to take a break. I don't understand Latin now, and somehow I am super relieved about that.
This is not humble bragging. Much. This is an indication of how much my ability to concentrate and focus has improved after experiencing a certain transformative event recently.
Shit I'm interesting. Right? I am so interesting.
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There are three subjects that get worse the more you read about them:
1. Jeff Daumer
2. Ed Gein
3. St. Catherine of Sienna
It seems like nobody wants to come right out and put down all the facts in one place. And maybe that's a good idea. Maybe that's why we have cops and medical specialists. We hire them to know these things so we don't have to. Of course, I am the exception to that rule.
I have read a lot of gross stuff in my time, but Daumer? Honestly it's enough to make you give up on humanity completely, some of the things that man did. Not just the stuff that everyone knows. That's just the tip of the iceberg. There's details that were never widely disseminated, and I seem to be on a mission to hunt them all down.*
Same goes for Ed Gein. At the very least, he had way, way too much time on his hands, did Eddie. Every time you think 'Dear God that's got to be it' though, you find out about another over the top, horrible...say, facet of his interior design philosophy. Or his fashion sense. Ahem.
Neither of them are a patch on St. Catherine of Sienna, though. St. Catherine of Sienna knew exactly what she was doing - and she was doing it to herself.
St. C of S was a perfect storm of time, place, intellect, mania, credulity, dissimulation dressed as grace, batshit insanity and circumstance. This woman was driven by things that modern medicine was invented to prevent, and driven hard, as though she was being run by terrible electrodes in her head. Everyone around her supported her behaviors, though, and encouraged them, and it all devolved into starvation, bleeding, crying, levitation, miraculous healings, extreme demonstrations of faith and obedience, and people handling the deceased and no no no no.
There was a secular book written in the 1980s that goes into her plight. It's called 'Holy Anorexia' but anorexia was the least of this woman's issues. Under the impression that God was constantly demanding that she humiliate herself in extreme ways to purify her soul, she resorted to, among other things, eating 'corrupt flesh and matter' and you know what, use your imagination.
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The last few weeks have been interesting like this. My back has been slowly releasing tension, and I am not the limping wreck I had been for the last five or so years. I had been developing a misers' squint in my right eye; that's going away. I swear to God my hair is beginning to come in thicker too. It's a trip, is what it is. I had been battling a few compulsive behaviors, nothing new in my depression/ADHD co-morbidity wonderland - those have gone away. I'd super like it if I spontaneously developed the ability to do math, or drive a stick shift.
I have lost 25 pounds.
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So why did I blow off a whole month? Where was my ass when I should have been blogging?
Out enjoying my newfound clarity. It's just amazing. I keep on expanding outward into life, squishy as that sounds.
I have worried that this is how dementia starts, and if I might have had a mini-stroke or something, honestly. If that's the case, I really like how it's turning out.
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*Why? This is such a chick thing! I'm being such a typical chick! I can't get enough of those true crime serial killers, the grosser the better! Ann Rule would understand.
