Head Trauma

There is a giant club swinging at my head. Who can I thank for this gift of mucus and sore throat and this head that feels as though it has been clubbed and then stuffed with cotton batting? Perhaps the girl with the soft ball size tonsils that sat on Philip's lap* at the toy store this week-end? Just when I thought I was in the clear to work my ass off in semi-comfort this whole week I have to come down with a doozie of a cold. There's no time to stop. Life does not wait for colds. Life runs right through them and often will bless you with a secondary cold just for the fun of it.

I was up until two am last night sewing. Aprons. Although I love aprons I sometimes hate them. I hate them when I have to sew the same one four hundred times. I want to make the new one but am not sure I have time to find out it's total crap. I am doing the Crafty Wonderland Holiday Sale in Portland this coming week-end and suddenly find I need to sew a ton of shit for it. What the hell have I been doing in the last few weeks? And how can I know what will sell? What to focus on? Angela says to make lots of Peace aprons. OK, but what about the pin-up fabric aprons? I would think those would do very well in Portland. I have limited time. And a cold. What to do?

Philip has a cold too. Max doesn't have a cold.

Incidentally, the gingerbread house making went quite well. The kids had lots of fun making them and only one of Philip's eyes is permanently crossed from all the frosting negotiations. My kitchen is a total wreck though. Oh well. The kids had fun. That counts for a lot. They will remember this kind of thing when they grow up. (Because I will remind them nonstop.)

I have been wondering this week what kind of a response I would get in this town if I told everyone I was Muslim? My mom thinks I need a religious alias to keep the proselytizing Christians from trying to save me. (Oh yes, there has been some "save this bitch from Satan" activity going on of late.) She says that they give up trying to help her find her way to Jesus when she tells them she's a Buddhist (which she is, mostly). She suggested that I could tell them I'm a Buddhist too, or a Muslim. I immediately had a vision of me being lynched. There are plenty of open minded people in my community who welcome people of all faiths, but those aren't the people I would worry about. It has recently come to my attention that McMinnville is truly the Bible Belt of the Pacific Northwest. Not being Christian here is like being a pagan in the deep south.

There is always the obvious path to take when you are the bright red bird in a sea of black crows: keep your mouth shut and try to blend in. I could do that.

No I couldn't! When standing around with a bunch of people talking church talk (it happens more often than you would suppose) it is impossible for me to just blend in. I don't even want to blend in. I don't want to live my life in the shadows, discreetly, like a lone Jew in a Nazi town. This is the United States and if there's one thing I am supposed be able to do here, besides carry dangerous weapons, it is the freedom to not go to church. Or share the same religion with my neighbors.

The truth is that I am fascinated by religion and I love to talk about it with people and I don't want to become a person who is unwilling to hear other perspectives at all just because there's always the risk that someone will mistake my curiosity for an interest in being converted. And they do. They do. Something about me and my openness makes naive Christians cherish a false hope that I am a lost soul just waiting to discover a jealous** God with a martyr for a son.

I've thought a lot about my inability to keep quiet about the things I think, the questions I have, the topics I open in public and how I could be making different choices. In the end I have to bring it all up. To hold it back would be like trying to hold the tide. So I will have to take the heat for it.

Time for work.

*aka: Santa's lap. Yep, Philip dressed up as Santa for the toy store this week-end.

**Jealousy and martyrdom being two of the least attractive of human traits.

Paper Blood

I am in that lovely stage of a cold when my chest has constant offerings, my nose is raw from blowing, and I've used up an entire tree in tissues. I wonder if I should plant a tree every time I have a cold, just to offer balance to our resources? I couldn't help but think about how it used to be before there were widely available tissues for nose blowing. How many loads of wash would you have to do of handkerchiefs a day? How much more gross would having a cold have been in the eighteen hundreds? Not to mention the whole problem of being more likely to die from a cold or flu. I mean, not that people always did, but certainly you would never imagine dying from one in this day and age.

Another thought is that there are lots of places on this earth right now where tissues are not widely available. What do people unspoiled by fancy resources do about their snot? I don't feel all that proud of being an American these days, but I am thankful for the tissues. I really am. I am also thankful for toilet paper.

The picture above of my mom and me was taken sometime in 1989. I was nineteen years old and visiting my mom in the armpit of California. That outfit is not a costume. I was either just about to graduate or had just graduated from FIDM (Fashion Institute Of Design And Merchandising) in San Francisco. That was back when I was still absolutely certain that it was just a matter of time before I would prove my designing genius and end up in Vogue magazine, shown with pins in my mouth industriously hemming the dresses about to head out on the runway of my own show. I would also be holding a cigarette at all times and have a whole gaggle of gay friends waiting in the wings to reassure me that all the men I fancied were actually gay. Because, as you must know already, all men are.

My mother says I wanted to be a fashion designer from my birth. What I remember is being thirteen years old and deciding that I was going to be in Vogue. Now my only chance of ever being in Vogue is if I get photographed for an article about obesity striking all failed fashion designers. It's funny to have been so focused for so long on one single prize and to have ended up nowhere near it at this point in my life. I am a firm believer in late career changes, but for some reason I feel like to make your mark as a fashion designer you have to start young. Writing feels like an ageless career, but fashion design is so youth oriented it seems that if I was to start now I could not get a foot in.

I don't really feel sad about it. Yet, like the writing I do, I never stop designing clothes in my head. It's funny because I do it all day long, every day. Right along with the writing that never stops running it's course, shedding pages in every corner of my brain, all day long I imagine new clothes, new shoes, new hats, and new fabrics. This is why I could never become an investment banker. There is no room for numbers in my head. My life is spent trying to get all the busyness in my brain out on paper so that I can at least pretend to be somewhat sane and not scare people. I'm like Bartholomew Cubbins with the five hundred hats.

I have paper blood and cloth organs.

A chronicle of tastelessness

My cold is rapidly cycling itself through my system. I'm done with the sore throat. Yesterday was all about the non-stop runny nose, which isn't too bad because at least stuff is still moving around in my head. Today it's been getting a little tight in my chest and the head is slowing up which means I'm headed for the worst torture on earth:

Losing my sense of smell and taste.

OK. I admit that it would be much worse to have both my arms amputated. Or to get mauled by a pissed off grizzly bear, which they tell me are extinct, but which I suspect are still out there waiting for me to stumble into them. Still, I used to want to kill myself every time I couldn't smell or taste because it's not only disorienting, but it means you can't taste your food.

Food is something I take pretty seriously. Not being able to taste it makes me not want to eat. Food becomes nothing but texture. This may surprise people who have never lost their ability to taste, but texture all on it's own is not particularly pleasant. You become acutely aware of the whole mastication process. (Very romantic, by the way) You start off with something that should be pleasing, and normally you would be tasting it's goodness as you experience it's texture. Now you are just aware of chewing tasteless cud.

Philip used to fear my colds; the inevitable pounding of fists into the walls; the screaming obscenities "God, why the F%*& have you deserted me A-G-A-I-N?? GAAAAAWWWWWWWW!"; the eventual resignation to cruel fate. Sort of. More like a passive aggressive stab at resignation. "Fine. I'll eat. But I'm not happy about this. You should stop eating so I don't have to see you enjoy your food. That's just mean."

If I had to choose between losing my hearing, my eyesight, or my sense of smell and taste? I'd choose to lose my sight. I love the beauty of vision. I don't take it for granted at all. But I couldn't live without music. I can learn to live in a dangerous world without sight. If my world was suddenly deprived of scent and taste I would become a pale shadow of myself. My instinct is more strongly connected to my sense of smell and my hearing. I can usually tell if someone is trying to bullshit me with my eyes closed. But how would I know the snow was coming if I couldn't hear the hush that precedes it? How could my spirit know how close we are to spring without that softer greener smell in the air that announces sap rising?

We all close our eyes to sleep. To rest in the warm sun. We all must rest our vision. We must shut out stimulation in order to hear ourselves against the din of the world. No one ever shuts off their hearing. Not really. We can limit sound to our own choice by putting headphones on. But there is no point in our entire lives that our ears are not hearing. We live with an incessant stream of sound. Without it we can't hear how far our predators are. Our ears are hearing while we sleep. We don't notice it, but they never stop. It reminds me of how close we still are to our earlier feral selves.

Some of us hear deeper than sound. This may explain why I have had so much trouble sleeping in my life. Sometimes I think I hear the turning of the earth, like the background ticking of a pendulum clock. Quietly counting the minutes of our lives underneath the mayhem. Steady. Sometimes I think I hear the heat of the sun.

Other than my constant fear of being violently murdered or finding murdered bodies, which a part of me believes is premonition, the thing I fear the most is getting tinnitus. Maybe it sounds silly to you. But crazy people like me hang onto our sanity by thinner threads than everyone else. A little thing like a constant ringing in our ears for the rest of our lives sounds like a great way to send me over the edge. I spend so much time trying to tune out irritating noises. What if you had an unpleasant noise in your head that nothing on earth besides death could silence? It would be spiritually exhausting. It would be hard for me to concentrate on anything outside my head.

So last night I spent in dreamy contemplation of my spring garden. I whittled down my seed choices to only 50% of everything Seeds Of Change is selling. It's hard to pick just five lettuce varieties when there are about thirty of them, all with intriguing names like: Sandrina, Bronze Mingonette, Red Deer Tongue, Brune D'Hiver, and Forellenschluss. My pulse quickens when I imagine all that is possible for my little patch of acid clay.

If you can't imagine yourself poring over seed catalogs debating the relative merits of one hundred different varieties of tomatoes, then you need to hightail it over to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's website to find out what an idiot you've been for having missed out for so long.

Food becomes something magical and an extension of your own flesh when you grow and make it yourself. That sounds disgusting. Which is why you should let Hugh tell you why you should be growing vegetables. BECAUSE IT'S FUN. What the long range benefits are. THE BEST FOOD YOU'LL EVER EAT; BETTER THAN DRUGS. How easy it is. EASIER AND LESS STUPID THAN GOLF. And what it means for the environment. WHO CARES WHEN IT TASTES SO MUCH BETTER THAN THAT SWILL SAFEWAY IS SELLING YOU? Plus you won't feel as powerless in this big bad world. You'll feel capable and strong. You will have connected yourself to your heritage as a human. Because the only thing that separates us from most other animals is our ability to use tools, and to use tools to cultivate the earth. Without agriculture, you're just another monkey pissing in a tree.



Note: I just found out about Hugh's website from Jo from French Knots. I got all excited when I read his argument for growing vegetables because I'm a garden geek, but also because he says it so well I feel sure that anyone reading it will feel inspired.