When I Was A Punk

I was never a punk.

I've been threatened by punks. Rich punk kids were always the worst. There was one in my high school who decided I had "Weak Ass" printed on my forehead and tried to terrorize me. Truth be told I was absolutely not interested in being beat up, I was scared of her. I knew I wouldn't fight her. She would stalk up to me all crazy-eyed punk spikes in the eyes and tell me to move from where I was sitting so she could have my spot. For a long time I just went with it.

But I got tired of the whole play. It finally dawned on me that if I just got beat up the whole game would be over and we could all move on to something less tedious. So one day when she ordered me to do something or other I said "Look, Karen, I'm not going to fight you. You know I'm not going to fight you and I know it. If you want to beat me up just do it now and get it over with." She was a little non-plussed. What do you do with that?

This, oddly enough, won her unending respect and she decided to be my best friend. Which was so unfortunate because I really couldn't be friends with a person who had spent a couple of months trying to terrorize me. I only won her respect when I lost all fear. The fact that her character preyed on the weak made her a person I couldn't like. Still she somehow clung to my side for months. I am a diplomatic person, I don't like hurting people, so I didn't really know how to break it to her that her kind of person was like dog-vomit slime mold to me.

So I let her hang out with me and my friends, who I think must have only barely tolerated her, and eventually she really did get me beat up. One dark and stormy...just kidding...one night me, my friend Lisa*, and punk-ass Karen went to the city so Lisa and Karen could score some tabs. Or something else illegal. We were trolling up and down upper Haight Street kind of late at night when a drunken skinhead exited a bar whose door we were standing near. The drunken person in question was very loud and it became immediately clear that she was not a happy Fred Astaire type drunk. She started harassing us and wouldn't you know it? Karen, the punk, decided to give some attitude back. I knew this was a bad move the second I saw Karen's posture stiffen in the classic "I'm punk rock-hear me roar" stance.

I had had enough of Karen's stupid attitude and awful personality. I started walking away from what was clearly a foul wind-a-brewing. I must have gotten about 20 feet away before I looked behind me to see where my friends were when a fist came hurling towards me like a cartoon and went KER-PLOWY!!! into my face, splitting my lip and giving me a bloody nose.

Ouch!! Getting beat up is so much worse when it's done by someone you love. When it's a drunk skinhead who won't remember a thing in the morning it doesn't hurt nearly as much. The ho-bag turned around and laid into Karen, ripping out several sets of earrings. We tried to use the bathroom at the Rock-n-Bowl joint but they wouldn't let us skanky bloody teens in. Damn them classy joints! So we huddled into the bathroom at the nastiest McDonald's I've ever been in. A place that cockroaches make reservations with for fancy feasts in the city.

I believe I found the motivation to cut Karen loose after that. I felt kind of sorry for her in the end because she had adoring parents, a room every girl dreams of, the nicest house in the nicest neighborhood and unlike my fridge- hers had lots of food in it.

THAT WAS A TOTAL LIE. I didn't feel sorry for her. I was just happy to get her out of my life.

I was never punk. I also wasn't truly a death rocker. I wasn't exactly a superstar, and I wasn't really ever a "cool" kid. I didn't fit in anywhere. I had a few good friends though, which is all anyone really needs.

I loved this suit which I bought at the Salvation Army. I also loved this tie which belonged to my Dad in the 1970's and I wish I still had it. I have always loved wearing suits and ties and would do so still if it wouldn't make me look like an obese Mr. PotatoHeadGangsta Version. See the Madonna style bracelet wad? That is the only style I think I got directly from her. Believe that I was very upset when everyone started attributing the vintage clothes craze to her influence! What you can't see in these pictures very well is the really stylish rat's tail I had going on. I'm not embarrassed by very many styles in my past, I tend to continue to enjoy most of them...but this one always makes me cringe. It's not any different from having a mullet.

Seriously.

You know, this is all so different from another bully story I have. One where I had an opportunity to kick my bully while she was down. Such a classic moment in a gradeschooler's life. My tormentor was getting beat up and I was invited to join in. I couldn't resist. For two years I'd been scared shitless. I kicked her while she was down. I remember feeling a little sick in my gut as my foot made contact with her side. It was so wrong. It was dishonorable, for one thing, to kick anyone when down. I knew that.

But it also felt wrong on such a fundamental level, to administer pain to another being. I still, to this day, 27 years later, feel lousy that I did it. But I suppose it was a good lesson to me. It didn't matter that this same person had pushed me out of my school chair onto the floor. It didn't matter that she threatened to beat me up in the alley right across the street from the school on the way home at least once a week. I knew that committing violence on other people was wrong.

A couple years later, when the two of us (my tormentor and I) were in Junior High I had lost all fear of her. As I found confidence in my weird-ass self I seemed to care so much less about Erin. She was a wasp with a bright blond stinger but my skin had grown into leather. She knew it. We both could sense when the game was up. I still remember the day when she made the first friendly overtures to me that she'd ever made in the whole five years we'd gone to school together. I didn't need her. It was a great revelation. When I didn't have fear of her, she ceased to have power and she felt me take it away.

I took it away from her. I took it away from Karen.

I think about what's happened to these two unfortunate souls from time to time. I see Karen as a high powered Marin County lawyer with a husband named Biff and two children as spoiled as she was herself, and a coke habit as well as a lover named Biff. Yeah, I know, what are the chances? Erin I always like to think of as having retained only 64% of her original teeth, one divorce and six kids later she's washing dishes at Big Al's Diner.

My fantasy life is so much better than candy!






*Neither Lisa B. nor Lisa E. I have had a lot of Lisas in my life. I don't understand it. I just go with it now. Obviously I like Lisas.

The Bay In Fistfuls Of Storm

My Others

The oil of bay carried itself like a queen on the fierce wet wind and I knew I was alone with it, hanging from a window catching fistfuls of storm and storing the rain up in my skin like a spirit sponge, the sharp oil clinging to the light of my mind like a clear voice and I knew I was alone with it. The whipping branches stole my voice as I tried to scream out for my sisters, my others, my brethren, my like...nothing coming out against that wild rushing of thick leaves in the dark. Except that I knew I was no different than the oil of bay, carried by the fierce wet wind beyond sound, beyond sight, to a place protected by invisible spectrums of care.

Sometimes I think that must have been the moment when I let loose my first airless primal scream, leaning out of my bedroom into the cold wet storm. The moment when I first knew I belonged more with the bay tree scratching at my windows that I did with the red plush carpet, the pink thin twin beds, and the dolls I pretended to be because it was less painful than admitting I was human and that my blood way type A and not an endless bottle of ketchup and would, in near years to come, flow more freely than my love. I inhaled that sharp bay scent like a dog devouring the thin evidence of prey on the air- deep into my lungs, still clean of smoke, and it was like drinking from a bridal cup; the scent of promise, pregnant with future portent.

I unfolded the promise slowly like a gift closed with a thousand strips of scotch tape and bundled in a deep nest of tissue papers and yet still enclosed in a baffling number of boxes getting ever smaller until there is nothing but a grain of sand in my palm and it is my present, my future, my death, my legacy, my eulogy, and my love all in this one tiny molecule of matter barely visible to the naked eye.

And this is my gift.

All the scotch tape, the deep tissue nests, the endless boxes within boxes: this is my mind and the minefield I must unwrap to reach my gift.

I keep trying to hand this grain to others, to say "take it", and give what small gift I have to them. And every time I give it away I have exactly the same grain of sand in my palm and I can't tell if it is being rejected or regenerated. I can't tell if it even matters.

I know I am different.

People keep saying to me "what is normal anyway?" and I have a response to that but I know it will frighten others because they genuinely don't understand how outside of their sphere of knowledge, their sphere of understanding another human being can fall. I come flying through the air at them, full speed, with my words and crush their certainty that "normal" is a myth and that no one is really "normal". I trap their smug words with semantics and I see the look finally cross their faces. The look of dawning realization, like lost innocence, like small horror.

I am a rider in the close velvety dark waving a flag of short light. I fill the air with my oil of bay and it finds my others who have been fighting with themselves in the old noise of human storms, waiting for their others too. I find them, I try to tell them that this sea of trouble, this acrid scent, sharp as a knife in the nose, fresh and astringent will cleanse them if they let it. I try to tell them that this tiny grain of sand in their hand is a gift, if they choose to use it so and will staunch the flow of their own blood.

I have spent more hours than any person should telling others that I am just like them. Except for the obsessive desire to be dead that has held onto my heels like an aggressive toddler in an endless tantrum because being dead is like a peaceful sleep and a rest from this infinitely uncomfortable business of living- although I eventually only chose to scrape and cut and rip at my own flesh, I am completely normal. If by "normal" one means: just like the average person. I am completely normal, I have explained, except for the hours I've spent twisting fabric around my fingers until they turn numb and calloused; except for the weeks of no sleep and the obsessive writing that I must do because I will die if I don't do it.

Yes. I 'm just like everyone else. It's true. Because we all find complete strangers in our own reflections and we all know when danger is close and bolt like wild animals keyed into the minute vibrations of earth and air when the slightest disturbance hits our flared nostrils. Is this you?

This is me. This is me. This is me.

But you won't see me as I really am because you will see yourself in me instead.

I am an infinite reflection of yourself.

Because I love. I love. I love.

My cloak of invisibility is my love, my goodwill, and my wish to protect others.

I will tell you who you really are. And you will hear me in your own voice and never know I was there with you in that brightest place in your mind; your point of origin. You will look right through me in my invisibility. I will visit you in your sleep and I will tell you why you need to live, to thrive, to love, to forgive, and to let go. It will come to you as a pungent scent like broken pine needles or bay in hot oil like your mother's soup, remembered in soft corners where is strikes an odd note, and bounces against the quiet, like living loud.

*********

It's been twenty five years since I've smelt the bay on the fierce wet wind outside my old window where I first knew that the agonizing sound I heard was the world roaring through my corporeal self like an impossible nightmare of solid matter passing through other solid matter. I smell it now when I put my freshly dried bay leaves in my soup pot with oil and onion and let it fill the house. It connects me with an ageless universe.

Sometimes the most potent gifts come in the smallest grains. Almost beyond sight.

But not beyond scent.

The Breakfast of Champions

Max recently asked me if he could get Lucky Charms cereal. I think Lucky Charms cereal belongs to a class of food in which you will also recognize sparkling greyish-white mirror lines of meth, cocaine, and crack. The real breakfast of champions!

I should know. I have a fairly checkered past. I can prove it by having dated a very short dread-locked Australian man who alarmed me dreadfully when stripped down to his briefs at which point I wondered what the hell I saw in him in the first place and the only answer I could conjure up was that he had looked quite fascinating in the strobe lights at the Underground Club. This was the only boyfriend I ever "cheated" on. I say "cheated" because we never actually decided we were going out for real. I confess that I was shocked when he expressed unhappiness at having found out I went out with another guy.

Considering that I didn't put out for him I figured he'd be just as happy being set free. Even though he was never really going out with me. Men are a fucking mystery. I am still frightened by the memory of him in his skivvies.

Just for the record, and because I'd like to get this off my chest for posterity's sake- I had a total of fourteen boyfriends before I married Philip. I have only slept with four men. So you can see that I frustrated a lot of young men's fancies and drove a lot of balls to that quaint state of blueness so easily fixed by heartier gals than myself. I didn't tease men to be an ice queen nor did I think I was some precious china doll waiting for some perfect moment.

You know I wasn't waiting for God's approval either.

The ugly truth is that sex seemed like a serious invasion of my personal space and there are few things in life I have come to value quite as seriously as my personal space. It was one of the very first things I remember finding value in.

What interests me more than my early sex life is my history of drugs. Compared to people like Bill Clinton who never inhaled, I am like an old rock star. Compared to my immediate family I am like a pure unpoisoned angel of abstinence. What's deeply ironic is that while most of my immediate family were unabashed potheads, they seemed to have worried that I might have become a speed-freak. We discuss these things fairly freely amongst ourselves and there is no shame in having had, at any point, a relationship with narcotics, always supposing it isn't running us ragged or inspiring us to live a life of crime. I was surprised, never the less, to find that the general view at one time was that I was over the edge for speed.

It's true that I had more than my share of the stuff. Yet I have to say that most of the time I did it was either to help me pull all nighters in which I drafted patterns for school into the wee hours or because my friends had it. There was never a point at which I longed for it or sought it out because my blood ached. The only two narcotics I have ever had a weakness for are cigarettes and beer.

It is my belief that Lucky Charms cereal is a gateway drug.

First it's Lucky Charms with those brightly colored stiff weird "marshmallows" and the next thing you know you're dusting it with crack powder.

Max and his friend seemed to have had a disagreement about the damage capability of a nuclear missile. So Max wanted to know if you could blow up a car with one. So I explained that you could blow up a whole city with one and kill lots of people beyond the city as well through the heat and the acid rain and the awful fallout. It reminded me what terrible beings we humans can be. My boy is a warrior and he wants to know about these things. I am more like a monk or a Buddhist. It makes me wonder how a woman can give birth to a weapon wielding warrior? Surely that must be the eighth wonder of the world? It's weird enough that my body knows how to make a perfect penis in my womb without asking me to think about it at all. We can give birth to our opposites and, I suppose, our enemies. What torture it must be to stand across the line from her own son in war or political division.

Just like the torture it must be to see a daughter sold off to a country to quell rebellion.

He's going to remember that I wouldn't buy him Lucky Charms. I should know. My mom wouldn't buy them for me either. She might have agreed to buy me hemp cereal but there was no way she was going to pollute my body with kid-crack.

It is very late at night. I both love and hate this hour. I love it because so few people are awake. It's quiet out there in my hemisphere. When every one's awake I can hear them all. All the time. Loud like a thousand minor birds. I don't want to go to bed because it's the only time of day that no one needs anything from me. Husband sleeps. Child sleeps. I sit and ramble to self in the dark quiet hours. I have hated this time also because I have woken up so often at this time and been the only one awake in my unfading nightmare. I still have them. But they are exponentially worse when you have had very little sleep in many weeks. I hate being awake at this time when woken from a nightmare.

I am stealing some one's wireless connection. The only place in the house where we can steal the connection is at the top of the stairs. So that is where I am sitting. Most of you are asleep right now. Or awake, probably doing things I don't need to know about. Except Riana and Jo. They are probably waking up now. For them this is a time of crisp eastern light.

I like that our days cross at strange hours.

I would like lullabies to be sung to me at all times. Would you like fairy lights to be lit and a lilting song to be sung to you in your mother tongue with love, ripe with wishes and that peculiar warmth that only your mother's eyes and arms can impart?

Philip asked me if my recent nightmares have included any of the usual lions or leopards. My nightmares have nearly always featured really dubious bathroom situations or circling lions of which I am quite fearful. Or tests I haven't studied for. Or serial killers. A lot of serial killers. And hunts for me.

The nightmares have been different. But I can't tell what that means.

Right at this minute I am feeling all of your spirits out there. I am blowing kisses into your dreams. I am blowing peaceful thoughts across your brow.

Strike That Halo Down

I often wonder what kinds of things people imagine I keep secret? I often wonder if anyone wonders anything at all about me? I'm such a devious being. I hide nearly all my secrets in broad daylight. Right there in the middle of the street for all to see. I've mentioned this before now. I've admitted it. Out loud. I am a master at camouflage. I have had to be.

I hold so much in my heart and head that no one is ready to hear.

Or at least that's what I tell myself when I feel alone with it all and desperate to spill it but full of the fear of exposure.

I'd like to be a mysterious figure. The kind of woman that other people have a thousand questions about. I want to be unknowable to someone. I want to be an intriguing person, the kind of interesting person that floats through parties raising eyebrows, instantly loved and completely magnetic. Drifting questions behind me like a diaphanous scarf... where has she been? What has she seen? What kind of adventures has she had?

For that I guess I would have to actually attend parties which I prefer to avoid whenever possible.

I want you to wonder if I've ever been friends with boy prostitutes who turned tricks on the corner in front of the "Polk Gulch" in San Francisco. I want you to imagine for yourself what kind of deaths I've mourned? I want you to wonder if I know what erotic asphyxiation is. I want you to wonder if I have icicles in my heart. If I loved Paris. Because if you're wondering all the other things about me I think you will have already decided that I've been to Paris and had thoughts about it.

I have found it necessary to hide secrets in the open by exposing my heart to the elements so that anyone looking will feel they have seen my naked soul but will miss the hot pink elephant eating the hem of my dress. It's been necessary to employ this strange trickery to protect myself from the shadows that have threatened to engulf me. I need the smoke and mirrors.

By using such subterfuge to hide the knife edges that cut away at me, I give the illusion of being so open that there is nothing at all to wonder about. I am afraid that I have done my job so well that I go through the world almost invisible. Which makes me wonder if I will eventually camouflage myself so well that I will permanently disappear into the background of rhododendrons and Japanese maples that litter this landscape in which I exist.

I write to make sure that the stories are told the right way. I write to answer the questions that no one has asked me. I write to make sure that when the time comes for Max to know his mother better than I want him to know me, he will be less scared because I will have told him myself that it's alright to be who we are. As long as we don't abuse or eat other people. It's alright to be different. He needs to know that even if you have grown up in full shade you can bud out like bright roses and bear sweet fruit.

He is proof of that.

I write because if I don't tell my stories, who will? Will you? And if you did, what would you say? What could you say? Could you tell about the parking garages? The many many parking garages I spent time in doing various nefarious activities like guarding drunk friends while they vomit in the corners where the rats have already pissed? There was worse but you wouldn't want to say it. You couldn't say it, because I have not said it.

Everyone has secrets. You can be sure I've already wondered about yours. I don't ever meet a person and not wonder a million things about them. Everyone has secrets but most people are more openly holding theirs tight and I'm sitting here trying to make people believe I don't have any. Because I've already told them all. If it makes me feel safe, is it alright to lie?

Perhaps I figure that by the time I have finished writing, which will be the day I die, I will have told all my secrets and if it will be true in twenty years, isn't it kind of true already? A fait accomplis?

Eventually you will know about Jack the boy prostitute. Yes, I let a teenage boy-whore tell me a really long string of boring lies. We were comfortable with that until I got tired of being comfortable with that. He was gay, though he would never admit it, and we didn't have a romance, in case you were concerned for either of us. If you are my friend, if you are curious, you will probably eventually know all about that. If I remember to tell it.

There is so much to tell.

There is the scariest box I own that must be aired and...somehow I must figure out what to do with it and I believe I will require the help of other mentally ill people to help me know how to deal with it. I am still finding them. My tribe of people who can help me face the box. A box I opened for the first time in years this week. A box I cannot continue to keep. There are some proofs of our broken spirits that must never wait in dark corners to be found by the unwary. To be discovered by tender unsuspecting sane eyes. It's like Pandora's box, only it's mine.

I have been thinking a lot about the kind of questions Max will have. He's already asked some piercing questions that made me want to die because I would rather he had any mother than me at moments when he is asking about things like the scars on my arms. It fills me with incredible sorrow to know that telling my life to my son could make him look at me like I was someone undesirable. I know what potential power my secrets, both told and untold, have to make my own baby look at me like strangers have looked at me. With fear. With judgment.

No parent comes to parenting with a clean life slate. We are none of us wearing platinum halos. Maybe some parents can seal the past in hermetic boxes where children cannot pry without crow bars. But writers don't have that luxury or that capacity. We must open all the boxes. We must unwrap the ivy twine that twists itself around old past lives.

We are forever striking our own halos down.

A Retrospective

There are a lot of things I've worn that I wouldn't be caught dead in at this stage in my life, not because I'm fat now, but because, well- I mean...what the hell was I thinking?! Believe it or not, this outfit is not one of them. I would wear it minus the bridal-style veil and with slightly less dramatic make-up. I was seventeen in this picture and though I was headed for an epiphany which would save me from killing myself, I still didn't believe I would live to be thirty years old.

There weren't many things I felt confident about when I was seventeen, but my sense of style was something that caused me zero qualms. I remember the day my friend Carrie and I took these pictures in San Francisco and I remember feeling that the only powerful or commendable thing about me was the way I could wear almost anything and carry it off. Naturally there were about 180,000 San Franciscans who would have disagreed with me. But who the hell cares about them anyway? The point was how I felt about it. The point was that I could wrap this piece of Indian print cloth that my mom gave me around my hips, knot it, and call it a skirt. If I had the body for it now, I'd wear this outfit today.

Sometimes, it was getting dressed everyday that kept me going. The love of texture in clothes and makeup, the fun of making fun of fashion gave me pleasure. The colors that could be combined, the little pieces of theater my garments could inspire. I could be anything I wanted to if I dressed the part. For me, clothing always had the potential to confer power on the person wearing them. I could believe in myself when I dressed like a person who believed in herself.

I could get a PHD based on the power of clothing and how un-trivial it is to human beings on so many levels. In fact, the only thing trivial about clothing is the ridiculous industry of labels that has been built around our need for covering our bodies which has so much less to do with shame and so much more to do with protection from the elements and a celebration of ourselves.

St. Andrews graveyard, Scotland, 1995

I didn't actually sit down to write a discourse on clothing. This is the end of the year. It is not my wont to look back with longing on the past. I don't enjoy aching for what didn't come to pass or mourning what did. As a person who has suffered life long depression, it might be easy to suppose this would be my normal mode: to regret, to be sad for the past, to worry at the unsatisfying fraying corners of life. It is absolutely because I deal with depression every day that I work harder than most (I believe) not to become enmeshed in self pity, sorrow, or mourning.

The end of the year, for me, is a pleasurable opportunity to assess my life's progress. Mostly it's an opportunity to measure how far I've come away from the trenches. I like to laugh at myself a little, learn from my stumblings, and think about how I want to move forward as the new year dawns. I'm not the only one getting introspective. Alice at FutureGirl is also looking inward as well as forward. A long time ago I used to scoff at the idea that a new year meant anything. I saw time (or thought I did) as a continuous ongoing never ending collection of days into nights into weeks into years. What makes tomorrow a fresh start? Why do we draw the line every year at the 365th day and say "tomorrow is a new year, a fresh start!"?

It's just tomorrow.

I'm not sure when I started feeling the renewal at the new year's approach. I think it started catching me in 1998. (The year I predicted in a journal that I would have one boy child and no other children.) Ten years ago. I started feeling the lifting of the spirit at the prospect of a clean slate. I started making resolutions, even though I don't really believe in punishing one's self when resolutions don't work out.

I like resolutions because they are powered by hope. Hope is something none of us can live completely without. One universal factor in suicides is that they've lost all hope. I think of resolutions as a great declaration of hope. Making resolutions is about voicing intentions, seeing how we want to be and coming up with a plan for manifesting positive change. When you are at the bottom of the dark, you don't make resolutions because there's no point. If you don't think you will live another ten years what difference does it make if you keep smoking, keep eating crap, and become obese? It makes no difference. Why should you stop hurting yourself if you have no future?

January is my month. The month I was born. A month of renewal. It's a time when all of nature shows it's bones. Pestilence is killed by the cold (unless you live in the south or California, or Australia) We all have a chance to rebuild. I love January best of all months. It seems that everyone spends January in quiet meditation.

I have a lot of work to do this year. I wanted to end this post with a current picture of myself. But I can't. I can't bear to do it. I will leave it blank. The blank represents what I can achieve in the next twelve months to reclaim myself physically and mentally. For two years I have been living in fear. I am going to walk away from that now.

Ten Years Ago

"What I want to know is why God comes into the picture so much when I haven't got the smokes? It's not like I'm looking for God. I think I just keep hoping to find out that God smokes too."

Journal entry January 11, 1998.

Ten years ago....

"Hello new year.

Hello my month.

I will be twenty eight in six days. I have always looked forward to twenty eight. I don't actually have a lot of expectations about it. It's just a feeling I have. I like the number, it's attractive to look at, its curves...its potential.

Hello new year.

I am the dark one.

With your permission I think I will embrace my melancholy soul. It is what it is. So why fight it? I know what I was born to be. I know what crosses I have nailed to my own back. It's up to me to un-nail myself. I can do it.

Hellfire and damnation! Am I, after all, feeling the magic of renewal? Has the turning of the year affected me? Yes, it's time to embrace the journey and stop obsessing about the goal. I will get to where I am supposed to be. But I want to be free enough to enjoy getting there.

I have so much.

It is cold. I waited all year for the bracing breath of winter and I am loving its presence. I am satisfied. I have been braced.

I really want to know, was Jesus really a Capricorn or was he really born in the springtime as many claim?

Hello new year.

I don't want to go to sleep. I want to keep enjoying this totally unexpected feeling of renewal. I don't want to have to wake up tomorrow with that dreadful Sunday feeling. People all over will be waking up to pounding headaches, bad breath, and sour dispositions. I just don't want to go to sleep. I've got the energy of the spinning earth in my blood. And God knows what else.

I am the dark one. I wonder why I don't cry more often than I do. I only cried half as much as I needed to this year which was about four times as often as usual. I wonder why I wasn't born to shed sunshine all over the place? Are cheerleaders happier than me? I always wanted to be a ravishing beauty with a stunningly sweet personality and winning smiling beguiling ways. I am not, and as a result, I generally dislike people of this description. Obviously out of an acute sense of jealousy. I never had the knees of a cheerleader. It's just as well. No sense in bemoaning what we haven't got, is there?

I wonder what Jesus is doing right now?

Is Santa Clause a deputy of God's that he has the inside line on who's been good and who has not? Let's not talk about Santa Clause- a toadier troll I have never seen. And word has it he's a pedophile. (Oh come now, that can't be a shocking intelligence!)

Hello January! You saw me into this world and have I not been a faithful January minion? My fingers ache with the cold and I'm duly thankful for it.

I think I need to visit a church soon. Oh no...I'm sorry if I gave you the wrong idea Jesus...it's not for your singular charms that I feel I need to plant myself in some pews. My apologies if I gave you the wrong idea- a false impression of piety. I seek the peace that permeates some churches. I find comfort in the gloomy gruesome icons depicting a perishing Christ. Solemn virgin mamas with unnaturally quiet babies. Serene wives of God.

I soak up piety like a vampire soaks up blood-without possessing any of my own.

Remember me? I am the dark one. I like the quiet dry incense smell of stone churches. We don't have a stone church in our town but perhaps the Catholic church has the peace I seek. I will go and seek the mercy of its quietude like an outlawed Christian. In private. In silence. In respect.

Hello self. I know you. Right now in this moment, I know you and this is the only minute in time that counts for anything at all. I love this sleeping minute. I am the lullaby. Don't be afraid to breath. Breath until you don't breath any longer. Don't be afraid. My darkness is your light. That's what I have been trying to say all day since the minute I woke. Breath peace.

My darkness is your light.

Good night new year.

My darkness will be my light too."

Journal entry January 1, 1998

This Isn't Deneuve's Life, Is It?

Your Grief

Your grief is like a broken stopwatch
tarnished gold filigree
ticking the same
minute to death.

The thought that just flitted through my brain two minutes ago is "What would Deneuve have done in my place?". I wonder if she has conducted all her relationships with as much class as I imagine? The thought that is going through my head right this very second like a hot poker is "Did mother Theresa ever have a toxic friendship in her life, and if so, what the hell did she do about it?" I thought this because I strive to be a person with both class and grace. I think "class" is a misleading word though because it smacks of social order which is where the expression "having class" comes from. The idea of me having grace is a bit hard to swallow too, because there is nothing bumbling about it, nothing out of bounce, out of rhythm, or silly.

I am at least three of those things.

But I won't say which ones.

I believe that even the craziest and goofiest individual is capable of having spiritual grace. To me this has absolutely nothing to do with a person's relationship with God (though if one is religious it certainly would apply). Grace, as I perceive it is a state of being in which your spirit has a quiet flow and flexibility. It's about not needing to seek retribution. It's about healing. It's about walking softly and loving loudly. It's about being pliant without being weak. It's about allowing every person you meet a chance to impress the crap out of you and not minding if they don't.

I have not been a completely brave girl. Even now I am frightened of the shadows of the past. How long can they possibly nick me in the heels? When I keep so few secrets, what power does it hold over me? Things come rushing back to me tonight. Not my own grief or sorrow. Other people's. First cups of coffee. I am remembering my first cup of coffee and the hundredth crush I ever felt. Sixteen and still alive. Like a miracle I ought to have lit a candle for in the Notre Dame. I smell clove cigarettes, (not mine). I smell rice powder for Kabuki faces.

Did I see myself in the mirror or not? Was there any part of me then that knew I would be looking back through time at who I was, did we send each other glances in that ever elastic mental world from which we both sprang? What would I tell my old self now if she could hear me? Some sweet letter of love and nostalgic ultimatums to enjoy youth while I have it and not to squander it on sorrow or madness or another pack of cigarettes? Would I suggest that I have sex a little more often like everyone else? Would I tell myself to relax, that I'm just fine sitting here at my desk in 2007, not yet dead? See how it all worked out? See how much time you waste on investing in death?

I think I used to know who I was going to become back when I was sixteen, saw myself aged in the mirror, how much lighter I was with life in my eyes in the reflection, and I think I didn't recognize myself at the exact same time. Who, looking into the future, recognizes their own corpse?

I would like to dine with Dylan and Deneuve tonight. I have questions that I imagine only they can answer. The poet and the grace. Both of them with the kind of cheekbones that make people fall over themselves to touch. To consume. I don't know which one of them is more beautiful to me. Which one is more deliciously iconic.

Metal edges come naturally to me. Like my skin is magnetic. Attracting all the metal shop shavings. They come and I didn't always walk away.

Sometimes I am my own secretary, secretary to the crazy boss upstairs who dictates while my pen screeches across imaginary pages. I am my own Girl Friday. Where's my pencil skirt and scarlet lips? You are present on my tablet. A rare glimpse of a mind in full motion. Evaluating itself in real time.

Is there a ship sailing out there on the high seas full of every person I've cut loose? Do they sit around eating maggoty bread while setting their hair afire with gin like voodoo demons throwing darts at my likeness against the moon? Am I on someone else's ship of cut loose souls? Are we all organized according to whose ship of demons we are scouring with our metal brushes and our locks full of crows?

Has someone cut Deneuve loose? Will we pass each other under dark waves and white froth? Will she still be wearing her lipstick? Will her hair still be perfect? Will we throw each other biscuits across the planks?

I know plenty of people have cut Dylan loose. You can't write like that, sing like that, live like that, without ending up on some one's ship of cut loose souls. I love him for his words. Because he said what no one else was saying until he was saying it.

Sometimes you have to ask yourself who you really want to be: Dylan or Deneuve? And then you have to know who you really are. I have always wanted to be Deneuve. I have always been like Dylan, only without the cheekbones or a voice that reaches Viet Nam from here. If I crawl down the barrel of someone else's gun, please tell Dylan to write my eulogy. He's the only one who can do it. He'll tell you how it really was. He never lets the common man fade into anonymity.

I used to ask the universe what was waiting for me on the other side of youth. What the hell was the point in staying alive when soul-ache threatened to eviscerate me anyway? Why walk across that great big wasteland of my nightmare to the boundary where I can't see past? What makes all the pain worth enduring? I no longer ask this question. The answer is in the living. The answer is breathtakingly simple. You walk across the wasteland of your nightmare because on the other side you will find wine, bread, and pesto. You traverse those dark distances because the most simple joys will heal. Because everyone has love to put out there, if they choose, and if you put love out there you will taste the world as though it was all inside of you.

And you can still crack wildly inappropriate jokes. If you really love not only yourself, (and first yourself), and then as many people as you can. Love being the most open smile you can flash at a complete stranger. Love being able to look in any human being's eyes and see what is human in them and see that even if they are unlovable now they weren't always that way and may not always be that way. Love being a great walk in the pouring rain and a face turned to the prettiest angle of the sun. It's everywhere when you cross that wasteland. If you keep your expectations low but your hopes high you will find it everywhere. How can you not find it everywhere if you are throwing it into the air yourself like a flock of magic doves?

At the end of all these thoughts is this last one:

This isn't Deneuve's life, is it?

Looking Back

Is that a squash in your patch or are you just happy to see me?
(That turned out to sound dirtier than I intended.)

The last time we were this poor was when we lived in our Sutter Street apartment in San Francisco. I was pretty thin and stylish back then, but not on meds and must admit to having been a pretty moody chain-smoking gin swilling writer type. Yes, I was writing all the time; very serious work like poetry. I was submitting work to publications and had a very well highlighted-bookmarked-dogeared copy of "Poetry Market". I'm not sure how we ever afforded gin but I suppose part of it was due to the fact that we ate a lot of potatoes.

Anyway, I remember looking out of our window from which I could see the city lights flicker on in the early evening, while typing very important works of creative nonfiction (I didn't know that that's what it was called back then). I remember thinking how amazing it would be to own a shop and a house. It's the same common fantasy that almost everyone has. You're either dreaming of having your own little shop or you're dreaming of starting your own quaint bed and breakfast. I would ask myself why I bothered writing because I was never going to be published anyway, why not start a little shop and be cool shop owners?

I also imagined how it would feel to live in a house without cockroaches and mice and not be surrounded by people we didn't know and were reasonably certain we didn't want to know judging by the noises coming from the adjoining walls. All of these fantasies seemed so impossible then. It's great stuff to chat about at the pub over Guinness. We are great dreamers. We are colorful people.

Back then, fourteen and a half centuries years ago, we had everything to work towards. We were two bundles of pure unrealized potential. Philip wanted to be the next Disney. He said this to me one day while we were lying in bed imagining what our future might look like. I remember being a little surprised since he knew NOTHING about computer art. He was a fine artist. It's amazing to remember these times because it illustrates how far we have come. Although Philip has yet to become the next Disney (and I think he's changed course a little since then) he taught himself all the things he needed to know in order to land himself the kind of jobs that could teach him the rest.

I never did get published. Bukowski kept getting published in all the poetry zines I was trying to get into. Damn him. It's possible, I will admit, that that's because he was a better poet than I will ever be. I ended up publishing my own little zine. One printing, one issue. I made fifty of them and it was all typed by me, illustrated by me, copied at Kinko's by me, and handed out to all kinds of unwitting victims, by me. I included a little index card with a postage stamp on it in each copy asking the readers to please send me their critiques, their thoughts, and their opinions about my little publication. I called my printing company "Soapbox".

What young hopefuls we were. We never would have made enough money to save up to buy a house. We bought a house by benefiting from my family's tendency to fall out with each other. My Grandfather, without meaning to, made it possible for us to buy our first home. Because we did so well with our home choices we were able to fund the store adventure with proceeds from our last house. But still, not without going into debt, because of decisions made blindly.

So here we are. We still have equity in the house, though whether anyone will refinance it for us to help us out of this mess is questionable. Yesterday I felt like we had landed right where we were fourteen years ago. Just starting out. I mean, Philip is once again earning what he was way back then. As though he never had a job that paid him almost $80,000 a year. I have been frozen in time by staying home all these years. I never did earn more than $10 per hour and it seems that most of what I'm qualified to do will earn me $8.00. You can't blame me for feeling like we've had all our progress erased.

But if I'm going to be honest here, which I try to do, I have to admit that there are a lot of material differences between now and then. We do still, for now, own our home. That's an asset we didn't have back then. If need be, we can sell it and go back to renting. I can't tell you how desperately I want to avoid that, but at least we have that to fall back on. We had no assets fourteen years ago. I said I still haven't been published, and that's not really true. No, no one has gotten excited about my fiction or my poetry, because that's not what I'm particularly good at writing. But I've been publishing this blog for a year and can't deny that some people have become regular readers. That's not nothing.

But in addition to that, there's my little spot in the apron book coming out in the future. Even though it doesn't pay much, it's quite an honor and it was super fun to participate. I'll always have that to be happy about. Plus, that's more legitimate than self publishing. You know it is. To get picked out of a bunch of talent to be included in someone else's project is more impressive than to write a blog every single day and press "publish" with your pinkie.

Philip may be earning what he was fourteen years ago, but he's working with a very cool company with the potential to earn much more in the future. That's something he didn't have all those years ago. Not only that, he got an illustration published in one of his favorite bicycle magazines. So he's been published too.

We also have a kid. In spite of the fact that I don't think I'm a particularly good mom, I do my very best with it. I can't exactly change who I am for my kid's sake. I'm never going to be a woman who is really jazzed by caring for children. I love my kid. I love that we are a family. But I don't sit around feeling deep satisfaction with motherhood. I feel like it's the trickiest hardest thing I've ever chosen to do. The biggest difference having a child makes on revisiting this whole poor gig is that now I have to worry about providing for an extra person. It makes it much more emotional.

You know what I love about my kid though? He's a real sweetie sometimes. I have tried to keep our troubles from Max over the years because children shouldn't have to worry about the same things their parents are worried about. So I try not to cry in front of him. I failed miserably yesterday. Mostly he didn't notice because he was on the play station all day long, but near the end he saw me crying and heard me telling Philip what our options were and he came up to me and said:

"Mama, you can have all my money if you want. I have a lot of money saved. I have hundreds of pennies. You can have it all mama."

Jesus, it's in moments like that when you really get to enjoy the innate sweetness of children. Mine is as delicious as they come.

A Shroud Of Words

This is the very first diary I ever kept, given to me by someone on my tenth birthday. It is unfortunate that it is peppered with fervent religious sentiments; this was kept during my very serious year of seeking God. I was attending a Born Again Christian church with my best friend until they told me I had to get baptised to keep coming, which my mom refused to let me do until I turned 18. At which point I realized how ridiculous it is to depend on being dipped in water in a symbolic "cleansing" in order for God to love his children. Shit, can you imagine if I refused to love my son if he didn't prove his love for me by doing the dishes, or eating a strip of leather.

I have never been so earnest, honest, and exposed as I am in this broken backed tome of painful childishness. The worst part is all that I am not saying. The spelling is pretty atrocious which makes it even more poignant. Would destroying this diary erase who I am? No. But would it free me to not remember just how awfully hard I tried, even back then, to find the love. The good. The happy. When I think of what was really going on in my life it makes me kind of sick to see how I believed that a diary isn't for telling the dark stuff but for finding the light. In a way it is, but as the years wore on I would find that it was through releasing the dark that the light could shine.

I have hundreds of notebooks, journals, sheets of typed writing, and it all records who I have been; they have preserved me more perfectly than a pool of amber could. They have come through fire (literally) and haunt me every single day. If anyone really wanted to know how I came through life, alive, how I got through years of mostly wanting to die, years of having a tortured mind, how I managed to come through the other side, it's all right here in this pile. And several others.

Diaries become like your shadow self. Everyone has different diary styles: some tell all the nitty gritty mind numbing details of their every day life that historians will have orgasms over in another hundred years when we've all become a mystery; some write only what they feel is worth recording for posterity-important events for example-a very edited style of record; some write from their imaginations, letting fiction and fact mingle in a huge eternal question mark; some write completely honestly; some write only the dark stuff; and some use their diaries to find all the good stuff in the bad. I have done it all. What you record, no matter your journal writing style, is in some way absolutely true to some part of you and lives it's own life. They breath in the dark of your drawers and boxes, in the shadows where you have packed them away to mature.

I am a writer. I became a writer the day I started keeping that diary. I have been on this writing journey for twenty seven years and just might be the most prolific unpublished writer alive. I have spent more hours of my life writing than I have spent it doing anything else besides sleeping and working for wages. I have tried to cross a threshold with words that is still solid. It is this line I am unable to cross between fact and fiction. Whenever I try to make things up based on true experiences I am bound to the absolute honest truth because my conscious mind knows the truth is written. I can't unwrite what is written. Can the bible be unwritten? If you have been keeping a meticulous record of living, how can you unwrite it?

Why would one want to? Because I have put all of myself into those notebooks and journals and while those diaries live, there's a part of me trapped in them too. A part of me that needs to be released in order to rewrite some of the past. I need to be able to forget some of the things I felt as a teen, some of the rawness of being a powerless ten years old.

For years I have been wanting to burn them. Destroy them. I am one of those people who loves to read dead people's journals and letters that are published into books. I love that kind of intimacy with the past. With other people's pasts. I used to hang onto those journals because I thought "Here is an unedited view of what it's like to be a mentally ill youth trying to live. Won't that be great for someone to read in a hundred years? It's history that I'm littering the earth with. Proof. Proof."

Now I ask myself if I want everyone to know all the intimate details of my early life. Is that what I want to contribute? My writing, over the years, has become so much better. What I have to say now is so much more important than what I had to say then. I have always wanted to have a gift to give the world. Something really worthy to leave behind for others to gather courage from. I want that gift to be worthy.

All of those journals were like a safe cocoon I was spinning around myself for protection. A cocoon in which I could grow privately, out of the public view. It was like a nest high in the trees, full of magpie scraps of life shoved in the the crevices for warmth against a winter that lasted for many years. A bird has to leave its nest. A butterfly cannot live life in its cocoon or it will die. When the bird leaves the nest the nest slowly decays with disuse. Or it is borrowed by new birds. The nest is just a vehicle. Sometimes we find them shattered on the ground and pick them up with all the care and awe we save for the most delicious artifacts. Do butterflies come back to visit their discarded cocoons in a reverent display of nostalgia? They do not. Cocoons drift away in the wind.

You emerge from life. You do it in whatever way you need to, but all the shadows of past selves, all the ghosts we carry around only weigh us down. I emerged from my nest, but it's as though I have been carrying it around on my head for years. How ridiculous to see a bird cross the Atlantic with last spring's nest when it is headed for new trees, new meadows, and new adventures in which the old nest is nearly useless.

Why do we hang on? Do you think my first diary is something precious? Let me share an unedited passage with you which makes me sound like a hit man approaching my first job:

"Dear Diary, I had I good day today. I got my packet done. I want to find a secret garden of my own. it would be fun. I am getting rid of Kim Kay Keyser! but I don't really know how but I will figure it out."

Or how about this sweet gem of psychic content:

"Dear Diary, Today was Bad! Bad! Bad! Horrible! Horrible! Horrible! Sally got away! Our best bunny! Sally! our broun French Lop bunny rabbit!!! My mom and dad are arguing a bunch! It is so bad I ran up to my bedroom and cried and cried. I think they might get in divorce!!! I hope not! I pray God not. Amen."

I know you're curious to read one of my very early poems. On August 18 of (I think) 1980 I wrote this very deep poem called "Life is hard":

Life is hard sometimes,
work to be done,
children to watch,
races to be run,
bills to be filled,
pears to be chilled,
yes life is hard,
but you can make the best of it,
do what has to be done,
and there will always be time to sit,
yes it's something you've got to admit.

Alice of Future Girl has given me courage to do something with these old early diaries and journals of mine. I haven't yet been able to bring myself to burn them. I keep feeling like there's got to be a more poetic way to strip myself of this shroud of words. I need to fly. In this particularly lean point of time in my life I feel it would benefit me to shed the weights my spirit has been carrying. I need a lot of courage right now. So I'm going to make a wish box papered in those journals. And I will put them in my shop too. A box you can give to anyone needing to set themselves free, needing the courage to move forward, to make change, to rise from the ashes with a new set of wings.

Dammit. I can't say it without sounding amazingly cliched. So I will have to show you. I am going to go into my (now) set up studio and make the first one. Then I'll show you my little box of courage. Perhaps if I give other people little pieces of myself I will grow lighter. Perhaps others can take that piece of me to buoy themselves against a rough time.