The Last Apology

We always knew this was gonna be like clawing our way out of tombs. Nails breaking on the weather scrubbed stone. Skin scraping into the light; streaked with blood and the cold of our own breath. We could tell it was going to be a shit time long before we got here to the present.

I know you're pissed at me. Please don't look at me as though I was already dead.

There is no way to apologize to myself without sounding like I have lost my mind. Who cares? Self talk has always been a slightly unhinged affair and is, ironically, the main thing that has preserved my sanity the most over the years.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry that whenever it gets especially tough I make things worse by eating more cheese and drinking more beer. I'm sorry that I have let myself drink so much beer for so long that I can drink any Russian under the table without losing my shit for a second. I'm sorry that for the last three years I have let all my self discipline degrade under the weight of this stress and this never ending crisis our life has been. I know that it has led us here to where we are today. To this point of awful self loathing.

I'm sorry that I have let us gain over 75 pounds in the past three years. I know that it was natural to gain weight after breaking the hip and not walking for months. But I could have exerted more self control to prevent the mental damage this weight gain has created. I could have prevented this amount of weight gain.

I'm sorry that I have spent so much time telling everyone I'm sorry for things that couldn't possibly be my fault and all this time I have neglected myself.

I'm sorry I couldn't protect myself without also breaking myself. I'm sorry for so much.

I slip uncomfortably between the "me"s and the "us"s and the "you"s, all me, all the time. Plurals and singulars weaving in and out with no order.

I can't change what has already passed.

Things are closer than they appear in the rear view mirror.

Can you forgive me and allow us to move ahead? Will you let this awful neglect become the past that we have overcome?

Please believe that I wish I'd saved up all my inappropriate apologies and put them by like a dowry for your spirit. I wish I'd taken each one and layered them with ivory silk in a cedar trunk so that you could see that each one of those apologies I let slip into the air between me and other people were really for you because you deserved more apologies than you ever got. I wish I'd caught them like butterflies and pinned them to your hair because I know that you were too afraid to ask for them yourself.

There is only one left and you can ask for it now. Ask.

Take this apology and pin it to your throat like the jewel it is. Let it be your winter compass, snowbird- let it lead you into spring.

I am so sorry that I couldn't be our own parent, our own friend, our own knight in shining armor, or even our own comedienne. I'm sorry that I was too young to know how to be anything but a frightened child. I'm sorry that I was never able to grow up fast enough. I've never caught up. I'm still breathless from the ride.

But you see what love motivated me? It always looked like self loathing when really I just wanted some way to deflect the real danger from our flesh, from our spirit, because I felt love for this corporeal nightmare, this little light our spirit always had. It got so hard to keep the night light lit. We wanted to die anyway. But you see that it was love and care that made me try so hard? I just didn't know how to be the person we needed.

Looking through the telescoping past you can see that it was always love we wrote.

Come, let's light the path, others follow in the dark behind us.



Note: Next up is the plan to recover my body and bring it back into a healthy fold and it may take more than one post to lay that one out. This is all coming out fast and furious but not panicked or stressed. I want to string the path out before I cross into the new year. I want to uncover as many obstacles that I may find ahead before I get to them.

I think I have passed the darkest point now and I think anyone who keeps reading will find that I am excited and also in the middle of forgiving myself. I've already forgiven everyone needing forgiving for the abuse part of my past. I truly did that a very long time ago. I've been angry with myself though and I'm feeling it slip away now.

I hope that everyone else who has been through similar experiences as I have can do the same for themselves. And any time you see words from Blaize- pay attention! She is a wise lady. So, are you ready to start feeling the warmth and light that are stirring under the snow and ice? Winter protects life by holding it still until it is time for the sap to run. People are not much different.

Chameleon Made Of Words

The big question for me in this very minute at which I am seated at my desk in my recently rehabilitated writing room is: can music fix rifts between the body and the spirit?

Funny writer girl wears underwear made of words- sits at her desk which is nothing less than a 500 pound piece of laminate stripped and shipped from a British correctional institution or some kind of animal house where having unmovable furniture is a major bonus to the staff. Seems entirely fitting. This animal girl is stripped down to her skivvies now- a chain of letters on letters lost in unseemly layers and undulating rolls.

I was calling this room my sewing room but now that the giant drifts of self-propelling trash have been tamed it has drawn me in and seduced me with it's window high above the monastery garden like an Erie, a perch for an imagination. I have yet to sew in it but I write in it every day. I have always wanted and needed a room of my own, a quiet place of observation. A place in which to change my colors without an audience. A place to set down my own rules for living.

I don't know why it is so hard to do anything as simple as saying what one is with a single word. I have spent so much time trying to be so many things and there's only one thing I've ever been in my entire life:

Writer.

I have so many interests and adventures because I have to feed the words, they don't thrive without care. But I've only ever been one single thing:

Writer.

I'm a writer who became a wife. A writer who became a mother. A writer who took fencing. A writer who designed costumes.

I will be 39 years old in almost exactly three weeks. In all this time I have fought what is, I have tried to reshape what is, deny what is, wish for something that isn't, and it has wasted time. It has created obstacles and I have to wonder if any one's restart button is as worn down as mine?

When I was 23 years old I admitted to myself that I was first, before anything else, a poet. I realized that saying it wasn't arrogance because I am not a brilliant poet and never will be- but it is how my spirit sees the world. My head sees prose, my spirit sees a more distilled, succinct version caped with boundaries of time and urgency. That was a big moment for me. I was already a wife but I realized that being a wife was a role while being a poet was my skin.

Women have worked hard to bring the pride back into mothering- to make people respect mothering as a life choice and ever since I have become a mother I have tried hard to put "mother" first in the line of my personal descriptors. Because it felt as though putting it second to anything else was belittling the role I played as Max's mom. Maybe for some women being a mother is who they are, the threshold to their spirit, their heart, and the ultimate expression of who they are.

But not for me. Being a mother is another role. It is another mantle of responsibility I took on. Another layer of life I added. But it isn't who I am and every time I put "mother" first on my list of things I am it kicks me down a notch. It belittles what came with me into this world. It belittles my calling, my skin, my soul, and my heart of words.

Writer.

From today forward I will call myself the one thing I truly am: writer.

Not: "writer and wife and mother and urban homesteader....and the whole miserable etc."

No more milling around with half truths. You, those readers of mine who comment, have often commended me on my honesty, my willingness to tell the truth- mine at least, if not yours. Yet I have not been honest. I have not told you all the truth because I feel scared to have one calling. I am scared to name it because I will probably fail. I can't fail in life if I have ten callings, surely I'll succeed at something if I increase the odds? But all I do by dividing my energy into a thousand fractions is dilute the power I was given for this one thing.

What's funny is that I knew what I had to do when I was sixteen and fresh from not killing myself. It was suddenly so clear to me, making friends cry with clumsy emotional poetry, that there was something living through my pen, however clumsy it was; living and shedding something tangible for others to grab at; like a life raft in the middle of the ocean. I felt it inside like something with a dangerously sharp edge it cut through the summer of dread and didn't hurt til later the way razors cut skin noiselessly first and hurt almost as an afterthought. I felt this blade reflecting light and I knew that it was the words that kept me from jumping off the cliffs. From impaling myself on the alter of my family's collective despair.

What I've found out is that what you are will never not be what you are. So you can bury it under a whole lot of snow and ice, under the dark cover of other lives, and you can run, but you cannot shake it. Maybe you never get famous, maybe you never win awards, maybe you never get a record deal-book deal- studio show-movie role-or even make money at it. That's immaterial. So you do what you have to do to pay the bills but you still are what you are and if you don't own it, do it, and honor it, you dishonor yourself worse than any other person on earth is capable of.

I believe, with my whole self, that we each know what we are without thinking about it. The answer has always been there. It doesn't have to be glamorous, heroic, exciting, or even original. But you know what it is and if you're still running from it or trying to change it- stop. I promise you that you can't. No power on this earth can change your alchemy.

This week I am redesigning my intentions. I have one week until the new year. One week to tell myself how it's going to be this year. I have one year until I'm forty and it seems as good a time as any to step into my own god damn shoes and embrace what I already am and slough off the dead weight I carry.

Everything I do in my life feeds the words. Everything comes second to writing and it isn't something I can change nor is it a choice to make. The only choice I have to make is to use what I have or trash it. I have a choice in how I balance my life so that the writing doesn't hurt my husband and child. But the writing cannot come last ever again. It's the whole reason for breathing.

It is my breathing.

So this week is about redesigning the minutiae of my life. It's about finding ways to recover self discipline. To recover my physical self respect. It's about redrawing boundaries for the three of us so that we will all feel more fulfilled and happy. We are all crazy creative beings in need of daily exercise, better nutrition, and more daily structure. I'm not sure if it's more funny or more sad that we are a wee family of completely obsessive compulsive people. We all thrash against our own restraints when there is achievable order for us.

But today is the second step. The first was to let go of disappointments and sorrows. To let go of what didn't work out, what wasn't meant to be, so that I can move forward with new intention. Today is the second step; to admit what I am and accept the single word that is my everything:

Writer.

I am a writer.

Period.

***********

If you, like me, have experienced similar struggles then I implore you to do as I did and first write out all of your disappointments and sorrows- then do what you need to to let them go. You can print them out and burn them or, if you're afraid of fire, you can bury them, or if just writing them allows you to let go- do it. DO IT.

Then acknowledge who/what you are. You know what it is. Maybe you are a healer and you work as an RN but keep looking for some other answer because you want more glamour- just say it "I am a healer" I am a nurse. And then make yourself into a glamorous one. But don't look away. Look at yourself: say it. Say it. Say it again. Set your course of intention to honor who you are. No more excuses. Are you a singer? Don't worry if you're already 65 and there's no sexy life on stage for you (though, who knows?): you must say it- "I am a singer." And embrace that, honor it, and do it. Even if you only do it every single day in your favorite room. Give it the honor it deserves. Who and what we are isn't about recognition from others, it's about recognizing ourselves and if we use these gifts of ours, whatever they are, it will flood into the lives all around you and the people you love. You will only become more powerful in everything.

So do it with me if you need to and feel free to tell me about it in the comments because I DO want to hear. I want to know.

But don't worry, if all is silent out there, I won't mind either. I move forward regardless of the world of people around me.

What She Wrote

In spite of my urge to destroy all of my journals because I believe they possess spirits of their own and are haunting me, I cannot set them aflame. Tonight I decided to open one up and see what bits of wisdom might be gleaned from its pages. I was twenty seven years old. I was in an agony trying to quit smoking. Endlessly. I would not figure out for another several years that the only thing I could do to quit smoking was to medicate my brain properly. My poetry, though never excellent, was experiencing a growth of maturity. Some years I go through several journals, but in 1997 there was just this one.

I used this journal like an oracle. I stole phrases, scraps, and thoughts and pasted them here like answers to questions I haven't yet asked. Maybe some of your questions will be answered too.

What She Wrote:



Each Day tomorrow loomed like a big fresh scar on the tissue of life, not healing, glowing in the lamplight of today.

I saw death in the mirror at seventeen. Ten years later I look back with compassion at the girl who was not afraid to see god in the devil. To see her own soul pass through the light of the sun.

I will let my hands absorb the cold. I will let my fingers numb in the coming frost. I will let my nose gather the whole winter into its round planes, for the sake of another cigarette. It's the smoking that matters.

I learned that to be blameless you must be perfect and only other people are perfect.

How do I know that other people are better at judging my capabilities or my faults than I am? Don't I know myself better than all? And if I am good enough to say that I am bad at anything, aren't I also good enough, and fair enough, to say that I am good at some things?

In my own cage I have forgotten that I am remembered outside of it.

I want to find all those threads that bind human beings together. I want to find those common factors that transcend race, creed, and background. I want to explore people's differences to find our sameness.

I want to study the people who study people.

And it reminds me of the French tragedies where every one dies beautifully, clutching at heaving breasts, bruised in black and white.

Is there a pit yet dug for me at the edge of this moment?

If I knew repent for living perhaps I would fall to my knees. With exhaustion, I would gladly do so. But I know not repent. I told someone once that I was on a ship that had no stops. How true I cry! The lesson here is to live each moment for the sake of each moment.

Self self self. Sick of self. Sick of sick self.

They were, I think, afraid of being afraid of me and for me.

Did you forget I wrote the winter? In weeds of faded black. It's almost time, my love, to ask the springtime back. Did you forget I wrote the springtime? In the lightest whitest lawn. It's almost time, my love, for the springtime to be gone. Did you forget I wrote the summer? In the shade of the old plum tree. It's almost time, my love, for your return to me. Did you forget I wrote the autumn? In wool lit with setting golden sun. It's almost time, my love...for winter has begun.

Strength Between The Pages

Max and I made a horrible discovery today. We saw something no human should ever have to see. Especially humans who rarely come in contact with meat-type items. I got flea medicine for the animals today and the one for the dog now comes in a chewable tablet form. My dog will generally eat anything and when I say that I mean to say that an open litter box is her candy store. However, for some reason she was suspicious of these tablets so I got out those meaty soft chewy thingies you can put dog pills into so that they will take nasty medicine. I pulled one out. But it looked wrong.

It looked wrong somehow. So I looked in the bag and almost hurled right there and then.

Oh god.

So I made some kind of choking noise and held the bag away from me and Max asked what the noise was about and I told him there were worms in the dog treat bag. So he had to see.

Maggots.

Maggots.

He decided not to eat any more food until someone invents a brainwashing machine so he could get that image of the maggots out of his head. I totally understood. I am squeamish about them too. I would have made a terrible sailor in the age of salt pork and maggoty bread.

Our computer caught itself a nasty little virus that could have (but didn't) result in us having to shut down all of our credit card accounts. Watch out for any insistent button that shows up on your computer suddenly claiming you need to buy the windows 2009 version of the spyware that will get rid of the virus your computer has supposedly just caught. That is the virus. Don't buy the spyware. We didn't. Because it seemed suspicious. Because it was.

Magic has happened that I think cancels out the maggots and the virus... my kid has said he loves reading. MY KID. The one who resisted it for so long. The one who's main passion is video games and playing spies. He treated reading like a chore until this past summer when he was staying up to read his TinTin comics. He got into Calvin and Hobbs too. And then Bone. And then he and Philip read a chapter book together. Of course, most of the books he loves the best are comics and graphic novels. I don't care. That's not what matters. What matters is that he'll bury his restless head in them and get lost. Like I did when I was his age.

In so many ways parenting hasn't been what I expected. Things I thought were going to be easy have nearly wasted me and other things I thought would be hard have turned out to be nothing. My kid is who he is and nothing I can do is really going to shape his most decided spirit. Yet I can see the influence of love and care in him. I can see him finding his way but also finding ours. I can see that he is discovering the magic of books and it's something that gives me a great deal of reassurance. If the kid loves to read, is there really anything he might not be capable of? Or anything he can't get himself through?

It reminds me of all the time I spent reading while I lived by myself in the upper tenderloin with a brick view. I worked hard all week and then, lacking a social life, I would read all week-end. I would get so engrossed in books that I would put off peeing until it nearly became a medical emergency. I would drink about a billion cups of coffee (before I got old and developed delicate problems like heart palpitations) and not eat much food. Reading got me through loneliness and fuelled my imagination so that I had a very rich life just on my own.

I was still trying to write fiction back then too. I try to be kind to myself. Every writer starts off thinking that the only way to legitimize their calling and prove themselves is to write the great American novel. At that time I didn't realize I could write creative non-fiction. So I typed out really bad fiction after reading books that set me on fire. I knew I had the language in me, I just didn't realize I lacked the stories. Self and words are same. I can't write a character who isn't me or someone I know.

What is still fresh for me is the urgent need to always be writing. All the time. I would be thinking of what I could be writing if I wasn't at work while I worked. Poetry would sift through my brain as I packed boxes full of funky lycra garments. For some reason heavy manual labor sparks my need to write more than most other things. That's the only way I can explain why I seemed to drift into words whenever I used the industrial steam iron to the point where I couldn't really hear whatever else was going on around me.

I also wore boots. I think work boots are magic and maybe that's what's been wrong with me for the last few years- I haven't worn work boots in a long time.

I haven't been reading much. My reading life has been mostly limited to non-fiction and mysteries in the last few years. If and when I actually read. You might say I'm stuck in a desert. Or maybe for the first time since I was a kid it's important not to pollute my head with too much influence from other writers. Maybe this is the moment when I really find my way, my reason (if there is one), why I come here every single day, sometimes two or three times, to write.

I long for more conversation with other writers. I want to get into their heads and know what moves them, stops them, and what kind of an island they've built for themselves. I wish I could ask some of my favorite authors questions. Questions that interviewers either never ask or ask but then don't pursue in detail. I want to have dinner with a room full of writers.

Who are writers? Anyone who writes? Anyone who keeps a journal?

Anyone who has to write or else burn up like onion skin and float away into the atmosphere. A writer is someone who, above all other things, must write.

A person who coughs words.

I've learned not to take anything for granted in parenthood. It is often a dark place for me but seeing my kid devour new words, understand irony, and forget I'm in the room because he's so absorbed in a printed story is like seeing him get baptized. For a lot of people out there God is the direction you turn to in tough times, but for me it has always been the public library. It has always been to books. Books and the buildings that house them. So hearing my kid say he loves reading is like watching him find something greater than himself, that he can turn to for his whole adult life.

It's in moments like this that being a parent is exciting. I can relax for a brief while and watch my kid find his words and his feet. It's at these rare junctions that I feel like it all might turn out alright after all.

Butcher, Baker, Candle Stick Maker

When I woke up, late, this morning at 6:15am I was a headline editor. I had grammar intact, an intellect sharp, and diplomacy beating like blood with coffee in my veins. My mind grasps words like art, I correct writing in my head not just for spelling but for grace because I want to feel it in every one's prose. I see the budding voice and I don't want to squash it, I want to move it, encourage it, and blow a little gold dust into it. Help it evolve, transform, and become more than it is. Because words have kept me alive. Words alone have kept the dark lit and the razors from dermatological contact. In words I have found everything a human heart needs most: hope.

By 11am I was a freelance photographer. I snapped grapes getting dumped into industrial vats for making wine. I stood high and looked low. I invaded the everyday work place of people whose job it is to feed yeast, to punch down the grapes, to wash and wash and wash an endless parade of dirty bins big enough to hold twenty dead bodies. My technology watched and wormed into private work moments, the sweat of ordinary men watched. I realized that the longer you stand with an apparatus to your eye the less weird those around you find it. But I take this role gingerly. I am naturally shy. I pretend often that I'm not. I bluster and chatter my way through everything. But being the eye, the great watching eye is uncomfortable. Photographers often talk about the comfort and anonymity of the camera but I find it makes me stand out more and I feel like a heel. Yet as I find my opportunities I lose myself eventually because others do too.

By 12pm I was a metal grinder. My hands forced weld to smooth. My hands took matter and made it different. I shaped and smoothed acres of weld into smoother joints that hands might grip without pain, without incident. Metal on metal makes directional fire that you must manipulate away from your own skin, your own hairs. Missing, I smell singed hair. Not sure if it's hair on my head, my chest, or my arms that have burnt. Body matter changes as you use muscles that remember nothing at first. In all these actions there is a deeper memory that eventually everyone remembers. The fires of early man being stoked with wood; hot breath on chilled open air, the clang clang of hard steel being hammered into swords to make mothers weep.

My eye has seen it all. My blood hammers through my veins like a mantra of faith. I have been here before. You have been here before too. These rituals of living. Rituals of survival. Of art seen through arteries of everyday life. So many people seek answers in the divine, yet all the answers are written everywhere if you look. You need no epiphany to know who you are. You need no express note from god to see magic when all the time it is reflected in your own cornea.

When I woke up this morning, late, all I thought was that I had some jobs to do, on a Sunday. I didn't know I was going to be so many people and bend so much matter. That at the end of the day my hands would ache from gripping a metal grinder for hours, that my cameras would be so full of hopeful apertures, that my inbox would be so full of words to translate and send back out into the ether. I merely woke as a simple human with the simple hope that this day would have a rhythm.

All day I kept remembering my nightmare. One of those boomerang dreams in which everything you never wanted to express for fear that if you did the whole world would explode gets expressed to its fullest ugly extent. It was full of moving, which I never want to do again, and my parents who never divorced twenty years ago*, and my brother and sister, all of us in a trailer, plus the girl my parents decided to adopt. I can't hold it together and I become the family bomb that makes an enormous explosion by imploding. I scream like a shrew, accusing everyone of everything I've ever imagined accusing them of, I am betrayed, alone, my lap full of crumbs. My family abandons me and I keep seeing them everywhere. We intersect at a Scottish inn that isn't in Scotland. I am ugly, shrill, and unbending. Except that when I'm in the inn I am seen for the person I thought I was, not the person I have become. It is a haven.

I don't know, when I wake up, how my family really sees me. Maybe I never will. Do they know what color my spirit is and what coat I wear when no one is looking? Do they know that today I was three people? That I can be an editing eye, precise with words, intent, and execution? That I can find the truth behind the eye of a shutter? That I can talk to wine makers about their craft and know enough about the process to not get lost? Do they know that I ended my day covered in grit from grinding metal smooth for a welder?

At any given time we are all many people. I know that my mother has spoken disparagingly of her tendency to be a "jack of all trades and a master of none" as though this was some kind of shortcoming. Better to be a master of one thing? I don't think so. I think it's pretty amazing to be a renaissance person. It fulfills so many needs, so many desires. It taps into something so much older than "career paths" and vocational dedication.

What all of us are when we are necessary.

It's 10:47 pm now. I came down here to bleed words. Even as I need sleep. I needed to channel this rhythm into something more tangible. It always comes back to words for me. I will vomit them in my sleep. I exude them. They leak from me and evanesce from my atmosphere. They drip from my fingers and seep into my shoes. It always comes back to words. A hammer of words that drive through my head like a grave digger's shovel in dirt.

I am afraid to stop. To quiet down. To stem the flow of thoughts. I wonder if I might bleed internally if I cut the line now and crawl into bed. Everything comes to me in sharp contrast. I feel so young and so old as though my spirit is suspended in some place just out of spitting distance of reality.

Sometimes I feel like a conduit of information. Like a fortune telling idiot savant for sleepers. Sometimes it feels like I know what is going to happen to everyone. I have looked at people and seen their spirits suspended brightly above their bodies, like hovering ghosts. I have felt my bones tingle and my hackles rise with these moments like I am a guest at a table of bodiless souls.

It has never scared me. Except when I try to pretend it isn't real. I hear what others might hear if they bothered to listen. That is all.

That is all.

And now I hunger for that silent embrace in sleep. That anonymous protective set of arms that finds me when I'm abandoned at train stations. The spirit that crouches close to the breaking point and softens the corners of madness; the spirit that kept hope alive when I was six years old and irreparably damaged. I hope that whatever guardian of sleep it is that visits me will visit me tonight, like it often does when I feel so small I might pass through the eye of a needle.

Take these words. Please hold what I was close to the fire and to your warm skin. Please don't let go until the light of early morning shivers through the air and breathes new ghosts into clouds. Please protect what still believes.

That is all.

I am butcher, baker, and candlestick maker.

That is everything.



*They really did.

A Life In Narrative

My feelings frequently tangle as they reach towards the light, looking for the nourishment of expression, aching for water to quench the drying instrument of connection. In so many ways keeping this blog has been the best life preserver, the best sanity preserver. For two years I have spewed here. Let go here. Risked a great deal here. Let myself bleed freely and mostly honestly. Before I put it here it all had to go somewhere.

It went into notebooks. Fervently written in the night hours just as I sometimes do here. Religiously written in the morning over coffee as I usually do here. Spilling and spilling and spilling as though there was a limitless supply of words and guts. I have no idea where it all comes from or why the flow so rarely stems. Why if I get the slightest bit moved by something I see, hear, read, or touch it must be regurgitated in a thousand thoughts reaching out from the core like little independent branches cutting into the skyline.

I never run dry. I never run out. Though I can be dragging my physical bones through the required actions of life, the brain never sleeps. My brain never sleeps. Never pauses for breath. If I don't write here it must go elsewhere. I have layers of handwritten words. Typewritten pages in which I barely bothered to correct typos because to do so would impede the urgency of the moment.

Coming here is like an anchor. Using a voice that speaks intimately to a person, to you, makes it feel all a little less crazy. Because before I had this blog, I was still writing to you. Yes, YOU. I don't even know who you are.* Wouldn't it be a tremendous bust in the gut if "you" turned out to not exist at all? It doesn't really matter. I'd just go back to writing narratives to myself and to the ethereal others out there who I imagine are waiting to listen. Who are up at night as I am, plying their own version of words, in paint, or food, or photographs, or other words. Wrapping their stamp around the universe to say "hello". And again "hello, you."

Pictures have turned into words too. Tonight I was reading about roses. Then I was watching the last of the first season of The Tudors and it was causing brain collisions. Pageantry. The egotism of monarchy which is only slightly more honest in its egotism than modern government. Roses, blossoms, wedding beds, marriage, castles, castle light, and all the years that have accumulated history around us all. Flowers with names like "maiden's thigh" (Cuisse de Nymphe) speak of our most intimate moments. All of this reminded me that I have touched the thick walls of real castles. That I have felt the sea wind whipping my hair across my eyes where cannons have been fired. I have seen the light changing by the seconds across a parade of minutiae and tasted how gorgeous it is, this spec of remembrance, this fleeting connectedness we all share.

I am never happier than when I'm alone, but only when I have a very secure sense of belonging.

These pictures are what flashed through my head when I was watching the Tudors, feeling something come loose in my heart, it was the heady clear air of these pictures I took on my trip to Scotland that I needed to see because they remind me of feeling good, of feeling sure of who I am, that I have a place in history, that I am part of this world. More than that they remind me of how it feels to walk alone, with family close by, family that seems to love me even though I am not the same as I used to be, even though I have shown myself to be vulnerable and irrational at times, and larger than life really allows. And large.

In these pictures I am alone in body, enjoying the sound of the wind, the crisp sunshine on my cheek, the way the light floods the tiny daisies in the grass in front of the cannons, but I carry with me the weight of the love of my family. My sister and my dad who are hanging out drinking coffee together just a few hundred feet from me. My brother who is several miles away enjoying some time by himself too. My mother who always seems to be with me in spirit, though in actuality she was a few thousand miles away. My father (biological) loves me too and even though we fight and carry on with arguments...I carry his love with me too in these pictures. And of course, no one, no one has ever loved me more than my dear Philip and my acerbic wonderful son.

When I look at these pictures I see what a little freedom feels like to a loved person. I love to be away from my family. I love to wander off, to think alone, to absorb light into my eyes and memorize hillsides. To speak with the flora and fauna in that unlanguage we know from when we first crawled out of the sludge of water from whence we came. I remember what it feels like to do everything not knowing I had any love at all. Feeling completely alone. It's so different then. Empty and slick like cold metal, reflecting-not absorbing-light.

I think Henry VIII was an ass. And an asshole. I think he was a self serving nasty piece of work. In case anyone is concerned that I am being swayed by TELEVISION and its evil lies...I've actually read non-fiction about this time period and Henry the VIII and the fictional book called "Anne Of The Thousand Days". When you behead several wives that's what we modern folk like to call a serial killer. But, whatever. I am caught up in the story.

It makes me think of flowers. Of light on stone walls. It makes me think of how people thought and acted in courts that were, by necessity, lit with candles. It makes me think of the details that set well known history into action. It reminds me that I am happy to be a peasant-type person. It makes me realize how I don't like anyone losing their face. I don't like that anyone has to lose. This reminds me that my Grandfather and my dad (the one I grew up with) saying that I'm too soft. That I will never succeed if I can't handle the hard truth: people lose. Try not to let it be you.

Try not to let it be me.

They're right, of course. And I resent it. My father, I think, would also agree.

Well, my only retaliation is that I was made this way. My shadows and my light were all there the moment I came out looking like a wrinkled old man. Which is what I'm starting to look like again. Ashes to ashes and all that. I hear the dead, I hear the dying, I hear the sorrow, I hear the losing and it all whistles through my own soul like my own voice. There is no separation between me and them. We come from the same source, the same life slurry.

Tonight I am thinking of happy light. The kind of light that goes through your eyes and into your spirit in a pageant of color. These pictures here are punctuation for my words. They reflect a joy in aloneness while leaning on togetherness. Tonight I wish for everyone to have (and to recognize, however flawed) the pool of love that has been reserved for them. Go out into the light and drink it.

See those tangles of stems and flowers reaching for the sky without reserve? Be those flowers and stamens unashamedly flaunting what nature gives. Have your hour of light. Or your minute. Take what you get and treasure it. File it away safely so that in dark hours you can pull it out and relive it, again and again. That's why we take pictures. The clematis climbs itself joyfully into the light.

You must do so too.

Yes, YOU.

I'm speaking to whomever has their ears open tonight.

*Well, I do actually know some of you.

Not A Foot Fetishist

I do not have a foot fetish and this is definitely not some Shakespearean moment where I doth protest too much. sometimes life conspires to make us appear to others- other than we really are. For a budding photographer who has yet to master the fine art of the self timer feature or tripods, one's own feet provide easy access to personal moments. Like a quick line in a diary dashed off while riding the 80 from Sonoma to Marin County reading Jessica Mitford's brilliant book "The American Way Of Death" -

"Funeral business very funny. Corrupt. Passing Petaluma's wet fields now, always rippling under water. Man next to me just hocked up a loogie. Gross. May have shoved his hand in his pants too. I love buses."

I also love shoes. It is so fortunate for me that my feet are triple wide, high arched, short, pains in the asses that hit the "special needs" shoe department a long time ago rendering me incapable of wearing anything besides thick wide sexy "orthopedic" numbers, or else I would be the next Imelda.

When I was a kid, laid up in bed with a sore throat, I would balance my typewriter on my lap in and amuse myself typing up long lists of names to use in writing soap operas. I would list names like "Biff" thinking they were such funny names that no one was ever really named. I also made up names (something that has spread like wildfire amongst parents across our nation. Witness: "Latisha".) and I would imagine all the people in the world with such names.

The day I discovered that some women really are named "Missy" I thought life could hold no greater surprises. Until the day I found out that "Cookie" is also a real name. Cookie. Just like that. It opens up a universe of bizarre possibilities. I could name someone "Aspic" if I wanted to! Or how about "Nipple Junior"?

It was only a slight relief when I observed that most women named "Missy" and "Cookie" are from the East Coast. I think this weird tradition has yet to gain momentum west of the Mississippi.

I have not forgotten about the magazine. I am detailing the subjects and figuring out which friends I will impose on for content first. In case you were worried.

I know that each of us is born with our own gifts, that we must untie those gifts in our lives if we can, and appreciate them as they are revealed...but I confess that sometimes I wish I had Leonard Cohen's gifts. I don't think he would like me so much if we met. I am all over the place with "Dudes!" and "Hairy Balls!"* and spazzy excitement over canning and living la vide fatso, while he is ascetic, plain cell chic, and fucking brilliant.

Bastard.

Leonard taught me that poetry can be honest, hard at the corners, and coarse, yet still make a person almost weep for its beauty. I have no gurus, I have no named god, I have no specific religion, but I do feel that excellent writing is like prayer. Like meditation. Like connecting all the dots, speaking math at the same time as speaking art. Leonard taught me that a song and its lyrics can be so compelling that you need to listen to them like an addict needs heroine to hit the veins at specific rhythmic intervals. He taught me that you can use real language (as opposed to poncey high-falutin' lacy language tricks) to say what you mean and that the simplicity of it can haunt you forever in the best possible way.

Only Leonard can make blow jobs sound like still lifes.

Feet are pretty important.

My days have become impossibly compacted. Too too too much. I feel like I am always running. Good thing I have such wide feet or I might fall over.

Sometimes I think I only write because I am obsessed with the tools of the trade. I become attached to certain pens and use them exclusively for years until I discover the love of a new or different pen. Almost always fine tipped felt though a very satisfying blue ball point can really hit me in the sternum with its excellence. I really loathe using any other color of ball point. There have been a few black inked ones that were good but I confess that the blue ones are just the best. But it can't be fashionable blue. It must be the classic formula for Bic pen ink. Classic ball point blue.

The worst WORST is pink, purple, green, orange, or red ball point ink. I'd rather gnaw on a strip of rawhide than have to put them in my hands and connect them to paper. It's like a sacrilege. If there can be such a thing allowed in a writer's manifesto.

I have spent many hours of my life writing for the simple sake of feeling how the pen releases its ink into the fibers of the paper, how the tip wears down at such a pleasing angle that letters become distinctive. I have spent hours learning to write in different cursive styles, heavily slanted in either direction, or straight up like a soldier with a pole up his butt, or lilting gently like Camille sliding endlessly down her sick couch. I have written just for the sound of the ink penetrating the paper.

It took me a moronically long period of time to decide that writing on a computer was acceptable. Mostly its not. I still prefer a typewriter for the soul quenching "thunking" of keys hitting the paper and the return noise announcing new sentences or a pen gliding like magic across page after page of highly individual text making light scritching noise that only the insects and myself can hear.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) I got fat enough that my hands go numb when I try to write by hand now. I haven't been able to write by hand for sustained periods of time for over two years. So you must know that making grocery lists is like a delicious past time.

A few years ago I found the perfect paper (holy shit-it's been ten!) and I almost never write on anything else. It is thick enough that I can use Papermate felt tip pens on it and it won't leak through the other side, it's silky, smooth, and buttery. It has narrow ruled lines and calls to me in my sleep.

Often I come to the computer now for the "real" writing and keep the notebooks for my notes and lists and organizing my head.

It is late and I should go to sleep. I resent sleep. It takes alone time away from me.

Tomorrow I go to "One Green World" to taste strange fruit. I will report back here.

Then Sunday I learn to cut metal with a metal saw.

Somewhere in there I also have to juice a gift of pomegranates and process apples.

I think I'll go watch Grissom and Sidle not get together for yet another episode.

Sleep well my little cabbages.



*Oh yeah, I keep meaning to mention this. Oh well, another time.

The Customer is Always High Right
a role reprised

I walk into the job like a character actor walks onto a familiar stage: with my role in my mouth, my lines in my head like crackling lights I catch between breaths, and I bring with me my spontaneous passion for unfurling my anti-nature beneath the heat of the unforgiving Klieg lights that follow each expression with conscious shadows. Work is a show. Work is a place for which I must turn on my character who is affable, quirky, rarely dark (only in thin unexpected shafts of needle truth sent out to surprise the unwary- never enough to lose my grasp on the play) and so cheerful. Always full of light. Full of genuine desire to bring everyone else into the play.

No hint that I often look at large groups of people and see them as collections of penises and vaginas. A collection of animals with gender and hormones dancing around each other like so many cats strutting underneath a full moon. No hint that I strip all people into their elemental parts as an instinct. It isn't something that comes to me in a thought bubble or in a philosophical moment. It's instantaneous and flashes across my mind like a hot bolt of electricity before I can stop it. I always assess people first as an animal does, with my nose and eyes and vibrations in the air.

Going to my work orientation felt like sliding back through all the years to when I had so much less skin. So much less of everything. I am back in my Radio Shack costume working the evening shift with the older Filipino palm reader, wondering how her life brought her into the orbit of the cheap and cheesy electronic retail circuit. How did our lives manage to bisect for one evening just so I could always wonder if palms really do tell our futures, because looking back, I have to say that she told the truth even though she only knew me for six hours:

She told me I would marry an American man, even though I hoped to marry someone from another country. (How did she see in my secret dreams?) She assured me that we would travel together. (We have.) She said that in the middle of my life I would experience a big break in health, but I would come through it and live longer. (My thirties have been marked by so much physical trauma- childbirth, constant colds, new allergies, broken hip...)

I still think of her. Her papery skin over a typically thin frame with a shock of dark hair. Her retail costume as ill suited to her as mine was to me. We were such a great pair of misfits. I adored her. She was all brisk intelligence.

I thought that I had hung up my retail badge when I had a child. I believed that my life had taken a finite turn. That all those days of being trashed on by pinched frugal righteous consumers were over. That in life we move up, ever up, and at some point we take flight from these humble first steps. I believed with all my heart that these hours I put into soothing the frayed infantile nerves of the PEOPLE WITH MONEY was like paying my dues: once paid you keep moving forward and away.

I saw today what I often see from a different angle: that for the majority of my countrymen and women, this is it, you never stop paying. This is the great epiphany. There isn't a place beyond this. Money is the true god of my country and customer service is its greatest disciple.

On the one hand there's a part of me that enjoys this strange exchange between people- like all great actors I relish a meaty role- and for me there's nothing meatier than trying to satisfy the needs of shoppers, to be the person that brings some light to their empty search for product satisfaction, to be the one that gives that extra dose of genuine thoughtful human interaction...

But the dark side is exhausting. Those people trying to squeeze every last cent from their purchases and who will sell their soul to the devil just to get one extra penny from you whether or not you will get fired for losing that penny into their capacious appetite for "good deals", those people are exhausting.

I become uncomfortably aware of social chasms between myself and others. It is evident in how we expect our lives to unfold. It is evident in the things we aim for. I saw myself in all these roles as the starlet who was putting in time until the big break comes.

This may explain my amazing affinity for those popular movies in the thirties like "Stage Door" in which our heroine is always going to make it on a much larger stage than the one on which she gets her start as the understudy.

I always had such big plans for myself. Like all good dreamers, I saw my life open into an endless field of poppies like an inevitability. I never questioned whether or not I would end up doing something extraordinary, even if it meant I died young in an incredible combustion of life-meets-fire. Even if I died young I knew it was going to be spectacular. Isn't that the epitome of youthful hope and ambition? You burn bright.

What I have been coming to realize is that that isn't the epitome of all of youth. There are so many young people in our country who never see beyond the customer service career. They don't have stars in their eyes, they don't have a fool heart aiming for love or bust. They consider themselves lucky to land a position as Radio Shack's newest salesperson. They might, if they are very ambitious, set their sights on management. This work I have always considered the stepping stone that will sink into the ocean of my opportunity as I move forward, is the pearl in a lot of people's professional life. It is the actual prize.

Now that I am here again I can't help but feel the sting of my previous arrogance that I had hoped I would be remembered for my poetry. That I might find my place on the book shelf next to Bukowski, who I've slammed so many times in spite of the fact that I would consider it an incredible honor to have anyone compare my work favorably to his*. Who says that it is less noble or memorable to be an excellent employee in a customer service related job than to write something well?

A life well lived has as many meanings as there are people.

I first look at people as animals with gender and appetites. I first look at life as an epithet on a grave. What will be written on your stone when you're dead? What is the essence for which you will be remembered?

I have to believe that it doesn't matter what you do with your life as much as it matters how much you shine just because you have the gift to shine. I have to believe that in the end it matters less if you achieve honor in a public forum; that at the end of the day what matters most is that you let every ounce of light you have shine on the person who came to you from nowhere, with no name, and needed your light to keep on living.





*I will have to write about naked drunk people a whole lot more for this to happen. I will have to really own sexual filth like a second skin. Want me to try?

Middle Aged

(no longer the future, not quite the past)

There were a couple of admonishments I heard quite often as a kid. The first (and most annoying because it's so obviously untrue) was "Don't be so melodramatic!". The second and almost as annoying (because it was indisputably true) was "Don't take everything so literally!". My insistence on using a literal interpretation for nearly all encounters with other human beings was steadfast. My dad once told me to vacuum the lawn and you didn't sit around and quibble about such things with my dad. You did it.

So I did it. What kind of nuance can one derive from such a demand? Is vacuuming the lawn a metaphor for some other kind of activity? Is it a euphemism for something else?

My dad was so nonplussed that I actually vacuumed the lawn that he let out the longest stream of swear words I'd ever heard before and explained to me how what he really meant was for me to vacuum the ROCKS that border the lawn.

Yeah. OK Dad. Because that makes so much more sense.

So semantics became an early passion for me. I really love it when people say what they mean and mean what they say. I do. I am also a writer and one of the most important tools a writer can develop is the ability to say something very distinct without having to come right out and literally say it.

I lead a double life.

It felt safer as a kid to take life literally than risk the truly turbulent unsafe waters of misunderstanding other people and the repercussions of getting it all wrong. In school I was so scared of being wrong that I would not allow myself to sense or articulate the symbolism in the books we were reading in class which is why so many of my teachers thought I was a complete dolt. Inside my mind all kinds of connections were being forged between words and life, life and the impossible task of telling it to others. I was alive with symbolism and seeing into people. I still see into people. I'm not afraid anymore to get it wrong. I have long since learned to trust myself. I understand people much better than they ever think I do.

Which clearly gives me an edge.

I am middle aged now. Yes, and if you're my age then you are also middle aged. (I'm 38 years old). I know that I am middle aged because unless I expect to live longer than the average life expectancy of 77.5 years, which I don't, then I'm just about smack dab in the middle of life. I may be lucky and live longer but considering that I smoked heavily for sixteen years, I'm thinking 77.5 might be a pretty good run. You're not supposed to talk about this because so many people (women especially) think that to be middle aged is some kind of awful sentence and is almost the same as being a corpse.

You can call middle age whatever you want. You can say that "seventy is the new middle age" if you want to. It won't be true, but you can tell yourself whatever keeps you off the bridge. I like the literal interpretation of middle age. I like it because it makes sense when you think about it. It isn't the same as being half dead. I love Wikipedia's definition of it: the period of life beyond young adulthood, but before the onset of old age.

What's so bad about that?

When I was a housewife women would constantly try to redefine that word for me. They did it because they were uncomfortable with the word "housewife". They constantly implied that calling myself a housewife was a crime against the great feminist sisterhood. And there I was thinking the great feminist sisterhood was all about giving women the choice to live the life they wanted to. I enjoyed calling myself a housewife. I enjoyed the literalness of it. I was a wife who took care of my house. I wasn't bored, abused, misused, unappreciated, suppressed, or a drudge. I had an excellent quality of life and a whole lot of happiness.

What's so bad about that?

I'm duplicitous. Can you tell when I'm leaning on semantics or when I've gone off the map to uncharted linguistic territory? When I debate about issues I am stubborn about semantics. I stick to my guns because words have meaning and the only way we can communicate with each other at all is that there is a certain level of agreement amongst us all about the meaning of words and the meaning of things. As I was reading about semantics I have to admit that I was thinking that some people need to get out of their academic bat-caves and live life a little more and argue over the meaning of the meaning of things a little less.

Then I sit down to write and I'm constantly stretching the boundaries of how words can be used and still be understood. I test the pliability of meaning and unravel the rules until they loop out behind me like the messy entrails of an eviscerated beast. When I'm writing I work myself out of the literal universe and into something more flexible and amorphous.

It feels like stripping off the skin of youth and growing into a new body. Like shaking off layers that have grown papery and fragile to reveal a foundation that is stronger. Writing feels like setting an old small mind in a baby's coffin to rest, loved but finished, and letting a newer mind open up into a larger space. One that is unafraid to find out that the universe is limitless.

Is This Still A Freudian World?

(plus a pretty picture of liquid sunshine)

What my friend Lisa B. says is true. I worry altogether too much that I'm going to alienate people. It's a funny juxtaposition to be in: desperate need to shake uncomfortable thoughts from myself like water from a dog's back but to constantly fear the consequences of where the water will land. People have a lot of layers and I would say, from experience, that we generally hide more than we show. Not to be sneaky and deceitful but to be self protective. I have some childish aspects to my personality and as Lisa also pointed out, so does she. While not everyone is going to admit that (and thank you, my friend, for fessing up!) I think many people do.

Another very old friend of mine, Carrie, suggested that my initial feelings about people having more babies probably stems from being five and dealing with my feelings about having siblings. This is probably true and tiresomely common of me to be holding onto feelings left over from being five. I could lay on the psychologist's couch now and feel confident that I am bringing with me classic childhood issues. I don't like it when the past makes crank calls on the present.

I have arrogantly believed that I no longer have issues rooted in the past; that I am now only dealing with my mental illness in the present; feelings and issues that have sprouted fresh from the soil of my current life. After all, there's plenty of fodder for psychological fun in the here and now, why go digging for it?

Why is it that the past seems to answer so many questions? I am annoyed with the past. Let go already! Leave me be! I want to be moving forward in a fluid motion, with grace, with elegant disregard for the lanky echoes from other rooms.

What if I turned out to be nothing more than a classic Freudian sample of a human being when I have liked to think I am a new breed of nutty person. I have liked to think I have some measure of originality in my mental chaos.

What if, in the end, all that's really wrong with me is that I secretly wish I had a penis?

Truthfully though, I think I can safely say that even when I was a teen and was surrounded with gender bending people and I myself would sometimes dress in men's suits from the Goodwill I never really wanted to be a boy so much as I didn't particularly wish to be a girl.

I got over that just like I got over a lot of things like seven bouts of tonsillitis and listening to The Cure which, even now, depresses the flipping pants off of me to hear. There's no happy nostalgia in listening to: The Cure, Sisters Of Mercy, Bauhaus, The Psychedelic Furs, or Tones On Tail. When I hear any of those bands it reminds me of one of the very worst moments in my entire life.

Curious how some music, played during the same period, has come through time without wearing the taint of bad times. I can always listen to David Bowie, especially his albums "Young Americans" and "Ziggy Stardust" and the music has always served (and still does) as a padded cell for the mind. The music itself is like a buffer, a soft surface against which to fall, or rest. I can always listen to Cat Stevens (who cares if he's Muslim now?), Cab Calloway, Frank Sinatra, The Beatles, Tina Turner, and Madonna.

It is really stupid, but I believe that my worries about alienating people with my opinions and thoughts comes straight from the past as well. How tedious of me. I don't know how it is that I don't actually alienate people very often, I'm not sure what magic is afoot in this, but in the past I have done some great work making people edge away from me at parties or hurting other people by sharing (apparently injudiciously) my thoughts about things. I have driven people from me with frankness. I have driven them from me with honesty, which, in spite of protestations to the contrary, is not necessarily what every friend and family member pines for. Honesty, if it is to be appreciated, must always come suitably coated in democratic language for it to not sting the recipient.

The writing life has always suited me because a page is a perfect sponge for truth. Ink is a whip easily tempered by the endless empty fibers. When you've had enough of it you can close the pages with satisfying smack! Blogs are a little different, obviously. They are a living book. A moving journal that grows every week and collects and drops readers along it's path. If my blog was a book you would read it and either you would hate it and tell everyone you know how much you hate it and why, or you would enjoy it and share it with friends. But for the most part you would not know me, unless you knew me.

But because this is a living thing, with a person at the helm every day, a person who communicates directly with you (the readers), you are more likely to be personally hurt if I put what's on my mind out here. Friends and family come here and read. People who will become friends come here to read. So I am not presenting to you a tome which you may open and close and feel safely at a distance from the author enough to not be offended by his/her audacious opinions. We are constantly engaging in an open conversation.

So I worry more about hurting feelings and being misunderstood by people I've come to care about. But I am still, as a writer, constrained to tell the truth. Which is often awkward. Or unfortunate. Certainly subjective. And changing all the time.

Usually the goal for every writer is to publish their own book. I can never wrap myself around that concept. I always assumed I would write one when I started writing at ten years of age. I spent many hours at my desk "seriously" writing stories that sucked so royally I would shrivel up in mortification if you ever got your mitts on one of them now and read what I thought of as the beginning of my serious writing career. I also wrote soap operas (yes, because I LOVE them. I don't think a lot of you actually know that because I don't have television and can't indulge.) I tried so hard to write good fiction. I'm not a fiction writer.

I am a poet, though. But not a very good one.

So what would a book of mine be filled with and why would anyone buy it? A book must have a central theme, does it not? The beauty of my blog is that I can write what interests me today. And tomorrow what interests me may be extremely different because I had an intense nightmare the night before and I can write about that. When I asked why everyone comes here to read, I think I wondered what subjects you found the most interesting. The central reason that most people (according to yourselves) come back here again and again, is for the honesty. But not necessarily for any particular subject. Most blogs have a specific focus.

I suppose my focus is life itself and all it's vagaries.

And that would make great copy, right? Yeah, I'm not so sure. Does a serious writer have to publish a book to be taken seriously? In writing a book I could possibly be freer to not worry about alienating people (at least not right away) but I often wonder if my blog isn't the perfect writing medium for me. I don't think I have a great American novel in me, just a whole lot of volatile chatter.

I wonder what kind of value there is in books that you can't get in a blog. Permanence? If I ever wrote a book it would probably be like my blog and how would a bookstore classify that? Part memoir (I am so tediously common today), part cookbook, part satire, part political essayist, part gardening...

These are idle thoughts. I am waiting for a fresh pot of coffee, and must return to my technical writing job which has a rather urgent deadline.