old things
Everything In Ecstatic Moderation
I had no idea I had so many old pieces, most of which are archived solely online at various defunct and abandoned sites of once-promising print and web periodicals. Strewn may be appropriate in this context.
Nor did I account for the amount of time it would take to locate said pieces, copy them, strip them of mudged old HTML, open my very first ever HTML editor and reformat them into clean(er), (vaguely more) cohesive code using my nascent hyper text markup language "skills", then upload them ("FTP them", as those in the know say, but I have no idea what the acronym means and therefore am a little shaky about even using it here) and make sure that the links all work and that I haven't instead inadvertently wired them, through the opaque mystery of technology, to a web camera of some type that auto-records and then streams in real time only when I am crying or changing a tampon.
The point being please be patient. And honestly, if you're that interested in what I wrote years ago you might have better luck with Google.
I admit to cringing once or twice (or forty-seven, or eighty times) as I find this old stuff and slowly reassemble it here. It's years (and years) old, most of it, and I like to think that while my writing may not have changed for the better (in fact has gotten progressively more tedious, elliptical and self-indulgent as I approach the gentle embrace of my impending forties and no longer have the energy to try very hard at most anything) my perspective on myself and the world has become vaguely more mature and (I hope. Fingers crossed!) a little bit kinder.
In one piece I found that I had used the word cunt in the pejorative. That simply is not acceptable and I replaced it with something else. I did some small something to another piece too but I can't recall what it was so meh, we'll all get over it. Other than that, in the interest of honesty (and journalistic integrity because I am but a humble chronicler of this life exactly as it happens and I never, ever exaggerate, stretch, conflate, confabulate or just plain make shit up. Ever.) I've tried very hard to leave them as they were originally published.
At the End of My Life
Because I Said So
Consider Your Very Favorite Muscle
Delighting In Details
Guide to Fear
Guide to Reclaiming Nice
How Not to Be a Jackass
Hot Time
Popular Decoding Fun
Shrinking Violet
Sophomore Slump
The Opposite of Happiness
Too Much, Not Enough
Unfit For Most Work
What Do You Love?
With Love
Yo Quiero
Your New Best Friend
There is so very much that can anchor a body in one place. Your average human might carry a home, a love relationship (or three, the cheeky monkey), family ties ranging from the merely combative to the utterly draining, wearisome coworkers, a handful of pets, a hobby, an exhausting commute to and from a ridiculous job, bad neighbors, a group of acquaintances (half of whom loathe each other, the other half of whom need to borrow fifty dollars until payday), a couple of best friends, two medical conditions (one real, one psychosomatic), a sprinkling of childhood trauma, seven bills (and one bank account to pay them from), a kid or three, one nemesis, four neuroses, three obsessions and one fetish, all at once. (Actually this would be more like your average North American or European. For much of the rest of the world maybe subtract the bank account, multiply by “starvation”, and add “potential to be disappeared by the local police/drug cartel/US military”).
The weight of the world is upon us, and we walk around with it in our heads. Also in our livers, and in our low backs. Our feet, our hearts, our very hair follicles ache with the load. Depression, allergies, ADHD, chronic fatigue syndrome, debilitating migraines, mysterious workday crying jags that are only solved by driving immediately home and crawling under the covers, (or a brisk crack across the mug, but that never really happens anymore. Or maybe it never really did, except in movies) – are we as a species suddenly physically, mentally, emotionally weaker than ever before? Are we inexplicably and rapidly devolving into some petulant race of fragile mollusk, only to end our turn at this evolutionary at-bat as needy, angry, indolent lumps burrowing ever deeper into the sad muck at the bottom of an oily puddle? Decidedly not. Probably. Let’s check back in a million years.
I think we do too much. (Also too little but we’ll cover that in a stitch). We do too much that wears on us, too much that wears us out. Too many stupid non-things on our plate and we develop laxity of the soul. We’re full of mean, empty garbage that renders us flabby in the head. Now I’m no doctor (how many times have I said that at a party?), but I wonder just how much staring at a computer monitor or saying “Yes, sir” to imbeciles one brain can absorb before it starts dropping critical bits of information in a frantic attempt to process, process, process. Have you ever in your life spent so much time surfing the internet, driving, gaping slack-jawed at cable, reading or watching or listening to ugly, superficial crap that you honestly have no interest in but it’s right there in front of your eyes/ears so why not kill a few minutes? Me neither. I know for a scientific fact that I personally drop one-fifth of an IQ point for every 30 minutes I spend reading internet forums. I do it anyway. I’ll wager there’s a Latin term for it.
Consider: if hypothetically our selves have room for a finite amount of data (‘data’ being experience, information, emotion, thought, memory, sensory input, and a nice wheel of not too goaty feta), what happens when we so rudely cram Paris Hilton, reality television, celebrity baby names, poor air quality, a venomous political climate and sixty hour work weeks in there? What happens to all of the lovely, genuine things we need to think about, remember and feel to stay sane? Correct, liebkind, they leak out from any one of our many cracks and fissures (literal and metaphorical), like so much pudding from a dry-cleaning bag. Each time the toxic stew goes down even easier and before you know it you’re actually hungry for Entertainment Tonight and thousand dollar handbags. You find the strangest things newly important, like the gravity of your own “issues”, or Fox News Network, or who your neighbors are having sex with. You hanker for escape and you believe that it lies in making more money, looking thinner/younger/better-preserved, or the increasingly popular Being On Oprah. (This is of course one-thousand percent incorrect. And by “incorrect” I mean “fucking creepy and sad” and also “incorrect”).
Simultaneous with doing/thinking/absorbing far too much of the crudely absurd (and absurdly crass), we partake in far, far too few of the cosmic necessities, primarily for lack of time but also because we’re creatures of habit, like donkeys, and once we wear our circle in the dirt we tend to return to it, walk it again and again, even when the lead breaks.
Let’s look at the numbers. There are 24 hours in each day, broken down as follows:
6-8 hours for sleep
2-4 hours for miscellaneous scratching, cuticle chewing, blinking, passing gas
13 hours: dreary, boring things
Leaving one paltry hour in each day for delusions of grandeur, flights of fancy, doing our art, smiling at babies and old people, self-pep-talking, making sweet, sweet love and/or entertaining dirty thoughts about Ian McShane. This is shameful.
There’s a song by Moby that I like very much, the title of which comes from the Bible, Genesis 1:2. “And the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters”. That’s not “God looked at the waters”, or “the Spirit of God did some thinking about the waters”. It’s the spirit of God, moving over the face of the waters. It’s the ineffable, the wondrous, in motion as it moves through space and in time.
Listen. Someone, somewhere, is walking through a city foreign to them with a pack on their back. Someone, somewhere, is sticking out their thumb to flag down something new. Somewhere in this world someone is going, their trajectory an arrow pointed precisely away from exactly where they’ve been. Someone is picking up a violin. Someone is picking up a pen. Someone is doing something they don’t know how to do but they’re, right now, going to try because just this moment their itch to do overcame the urge to not. Behind them is their television. Their awful marriage. Their boredom. They are pushing forward, toward and into something untested and maybe frightening. Something maybe wonderful. This should be us, every chance we get. If our lives are big goddamned elephants tearing a swath from where we were born to where we die, then we must be the mahouts. We have to choose, and do. We have to steer.
It’s that, or the mollusk thing.
[from Pure E Online, Like a Girl column]
• Don’t leave snippy notes. Ever. If you’re that peeved, say it in person. Passive-aggression leads people to believe that you are weak and stupid.
• Turn signals are there for a reason. That reason is not designed by the Man, for Getting You Down. They’re meant for the rest of us, so we won’t drive up your ass when you slow to a crawl, or smash you out of the fast lane when you whip directly into our path.
• You talk louder when you’re drunk. When you leave the bar, whisper. Better yet, shut your yap until you find the Hyundai or your front door- or we’re coming to bellow and shriek like herpetic water buffaloes under your window at three in the morning.
• Whining, pouting, bossing and declaring sassily in front of relative strangers what you will and won’t do are adorable when you’re under fourteen. After that, you’re just a fucking jerk. This is perhaps more easily understood via the following equation: -14 = Brat / 14 + = Asshole
• When you are throwing a hissy fit in a bank, restaurant or grocery store, unless your complaint is supremely reasonable and the employee’s behavior patently rude or incompetent, do not try to make sympathetic eye contact with us. We suddenly adore that clerk/ server/ checker. We despise you.
• Conversely, if we are waiting benignly for our money, food or goods please treat us nicely. While we understand that your job is demanding and probably beneath you, for the moment, you’re in it. If you can’t wait on us without sneering, snorting or rolling your eyes, quit. Otherwise, shut down the attitude and give us what we’re paying you for, you twit.
• Don’t wage a murky war in the name of imperialism. We know you’ve got your dad’s flaccidly evil track record to somehow redeem, but maybe you could take first place in a skeet-shooting contest or something. We’d respect that. Honest.
• Be cautious with your righteousness. No matter someone’s aesthetic, age, or apparent demographic, they just might not share your particular prejudice. Your bilious “get-a-load-of-these-guys-eh?”, whether against Republicans or ‘wetbacks’ only proves to us what a giant, assumptive asshole looks like.
• Vehicle? Or pedestrian? When on a bicycle, you must choose. In the crosswalk, at the red light, changing lanes, uphill, downhill. I don’t care what your little spandex buddies have told you - you must be one, not both. If you ride on the sidewalk, wait for the goddamn ‘walk’ signal like the other peds. If you ride in the street and do not halt like the rest of us at the congested five-way stop sign, someone is going to road-rage you down. Not me, maybe, but I’m just saying.
• Don’t take it all so seriously; bosses, lovers, friends, newspaper columnists – pretty much everyone is full of shit. Simultaneously, we all look rather fetching in an angora sweater and have tender hearts. Play nice.
[original to Tablet Magazine -Issue 54]
Careful there - anthrax in your mailbox. West Nile virus is buzzing steadily west and e coli’s swimming in your Swedish meatballs. That creep you dated twice is looking up your address as we speak, gonna pay you a little visit with some love poems and a hacksaw. It’s a banner year for pedophiles and child-snatchers. The guy in line behind you at the airport has a bomb in his shoe, box-cutters in his backpack, a condom full of coke up his ass. There are fifteen ways to die on the way to the bus stop; will it be a careening bus or an early morning drunk driver? Plane dropping on your head or an abused pit bull slipping his leash? Cracked-out mugger or your run of the mill off-his-meds-with-a-shotgun whackjob? Bad idea, cutting off that guy in the SUV; his trigger finger is itchy this morning, sucker.
And you’ll want to stay home from school today - that sophomore, with the retarded hair? He and his friends are getting themselves a little retri-fucking-bution today, oh yes, at lunch time when the cafeteria is packed. Should have invested in the hands-free headset even if it did make you look like a strolling mental patient; some brain tumor with that shake? Hands at ten and two on the wheel there, Speed Racer, it’s unanimous acquittal if the officer thinks you were reaching for something under the seat (though maybe your family will get money for the funeral in their civil suit, ha ha). Giant slices of glacier are sliding into the sea like wedding cake; is it warm in here?
Last year around this time at the beginning of fall, sky gone a little eerie and mean in the evenings and all my loveys busy and warm, my life was a train wreck. I was broke, abandoned and dangerously bored. I had panic attacks, went to bed every night at eight so I wouldn’t sit up all night sobbing into a throw pillow. I left the house in the mornings feeling flayed and eminently hateable. I was terrified all the time, half-wistfully. The horror being alive, of having to make it through the day upright, preoccupied me.
One instinct finally saved me. Things were so bleak, so stupid, I discovered that the smallest positive experience took on this sacred meaning to me. I found myself grateful. Every day some small gift would arrive. They’d probably been arriving all the time, tiny kindnesses; these otherwise mediocre or meaningless good things started to matter to me. One day it was a coworker who for no particular reason brought me a strawberry pastry dripping with pink icing. My dumb not-allowed-on-the-furniture dog leaped onto the couch and grunted on my head until I fell out laughing. I started saying ‘thank you, world’ out loud, in the car, under my breath, every time I remembered. Fear became boring, mediocre.
I can’t possibly protect myself from every awful, ugly thing that can happen in this world but I get braver every time I appreciate a miracle.
[original to Tablet Magazine -Issue 52]
No, sugar, not your booty. While it is fantastic and the rest of us would love nothing better than to give it a hearty squeeze, like juicing a fresh lime over a tasty plate of pad thai, you could, technically, go through life without it. Probably. Though taking stairs might be tough. And sitting. And skirts would probably hang in a not very flattering way. But with modern medicine and such you could likely get some sort of sleek prosthetic attachment to address these issues, with no one the wiser.
I’m talking about the most important muscle of all, the one that no one can live without (again, not your sweet, sweet ass, beguiling as it is). The heart, natch. Amazing in its design and function, it really is the unsung hero of existence, typically taking the back seat to the much sexier brain. Sure, the brain is wily and mysterious, essential and complex, but the heart is reliable, dependable; the heart is never late to an important meeting and it always returns phone calls. At the same time, it remains the metaphorical headquarters of love, the source of our romantic myths.
We count on it to carry out its assigned duties without complaint and we write volumes of questionable poetry in praise of it without once considering the excellence of its durable engineering. The average human heart beats about 100,000 times every 24 hours. This means that my sainted grandmother, at 93, has a heart that’s beaten over 3.3 billion times. That’s original Cuban equipment, folks.
The heart works ceaselessly, 24 hours a day seven days a week, year in and year out without pause. It suffers all the abuse we heap upon it- smoking, eating crap, watching local network news, ugly breakups, stifled anger, other freeway drivers, loneliness – all without a peep, usually. But even this little Titan of cardiovascular engineering has its limits- mistreat it for too long, tax it too much, put one too many stresses on it and bam!, it will, eventually, give up the ghost. Think about that the next time you have the urge to put on a Reagan mask and leap out of your mom’s linen closet, merry prankster.
One of the more fascinating things about the heart, to me, is its electrical nature. It runs on electrical impulse which originates in the wee sinoatrial node, triggering the whole atrium-to-ventricle lubdub thing. Seventy-ish times per minute a charge of electricity provokes the most vital muscle contraction in a body; allowing us one more moment, then one more moment, and another, then another.
From whence does that recurrent jolt originate? A doctor will tell you that sodium, calcium and potassium ions tickle the cardiac cell membranes into action but my theory is that it’s something else entirely. Now I’m no cardiologist, but any ninny knows that sodium comes on French fries, potassium from bananas and calcium is found in very dry, very delicious sharp cheddar cheese and while all that and a Bloody Mary may sound like a tasty hangover treat it surely can’t be the sole impetus for the miraculous and life-giving zap that differentiates a living being from, say, an Italian marble backsplash.
A question that even with tireless minutes of Googling I cannot find a satisfactory answer to is: where does the first charge come from? I mean, of course, the very first beat of the heart, the singular, practical beginning of one tiny mortal’s being. Knowing beyond a shadow of any doubt that a fetus has zero access to unadulterated fries, fruit and cheese slices the only logical conclusion is that there are forces at work here, forces that I refer to as magic, and sometimes mojo. (You, of course, may call these forces ‘God’. It’s okay, loads of people do. Other folks call it ‘biology’. Both are acceptable ).
It’s clearly mojo that takes us up and tosses us across the abyss from tiny clump of cells indistinguishable from what one regularly pumices from one’s feet (if one has the impeccable podiatric hygiene of yours truly) to cute little huggable embryo. From thing to being. It’s a damned shame that we don’t remember that moment. That infinitesimal second when our teeny tiny ticker switch was set to ‘on’. Bet we’d all act a little more civilized on the subway if each and every person was walking around with a clear and detailed recollection of the moment their tough little heart started chugging away.
But then we’d all act a little more civilized if any of a thousand things were different. I suppose the challenge is to be kind, to be decent, to “act right” as me old ma calls it, within the framework of what we’ve already got. If people were inherently terrific, if the world were a gentle, delicious place where lambs and wolverines gamboled happily together on diminutive green hillsides all over the place, it would get a little dull after a while. Just as if every day were a mild, sunny Saturday we’d all eventually fall into a numb torpor of tedious, self-indulgent bliss (this may explain quite a bit about Southern California).
So the world is fraught with random cruelty and disturbing weirdness to keep us on our toes. People are prickly, unpredictable, cranky, to make things more engaging. That’s what I tell my significant other, at any rate- we can’t have him suffering existential ennui because I’m too easy to get along with, now can we? Life should be interesting; conflict is interesting. Discord makes us think, forces us to stretch our sexy brains, gives the dear heart a workout. Even emotional pain can be fertilizer for our spiritual chutzpah. I don’t wish pain or discord upon any of us, of course, but we experience it whether we like it or not – why not chew on it, use it to fuel our slow crawl toward enlightenment?
If some ineffable cosmic force is going to go through all the trouble of turning us from a lump of carbon compounds into a gorgeous wad of livingness, well by George it’s our job to live up to the favor. We ought to treat our own hearts (literal and metaphorical) and the hearts of others with a gentleness normally reserved for premature infants and expensive sunglasses. We can be both strong and tender, like a good paper towel. Let the slings and arrows of a weird, cruel world fall upon us – we’ll bob and weave, duck and dodge and if one (or twenty) should happen to stick we’ll learn from it, grow from it, and take it as a yet another lesson on how to stop flinging hurtful things of our own. The big mojo wouldn’t have it any other way.
[from Pure E online, Like a Girl column]
I’m the sort of person who has very few friends. A scant (if beloved) handful, really. Though much of the world seems to be able to keep a village, a cell phone or an address book’s worth of fast friends, drinking companions, nodding acquaintances, amiable coworkers and just-entertaining-enough relative strangers, not since junior high have I had more than three people to call should I find myself at loose ends or inadvertently fallen down a well. Wait, untrue; I also enjoy an unwholesomely functional and devoted relationship with my stellar mother, so make that four individuals whose names I could call out from a gurney.
If I were to obfuscate and play coy or channel my inner goth, I would tell you that I’m a loner through intention; that I am just misanthropically blessed with a cultivated eye for only the very highest of quality in other humans. I could peevishly claim that most people are stupid and boring and while this would be true, it’s not the real reason behind my lifelong dearth of pals.
I’m just shy. Bashful, retiring, timid or dull- whatever you want to call it, bubba, that’s what I am. I’m miserable at parties, shifty and dumb when introduced to anyone at all and I will pass out if forced to address more than two other humans at any given point in time. Nicely dovetailing with my Anxiety Lite, at its worst my shyness has compelled me to turn around and drive home rather than brave parallel parking in front of a sidewalk full of people. Multiple times. And while I used to blush maroon and stammer helpfully so that my handicap was obvious, somewhere along the way (likely after breeding; nothing like toting a squalling chimpanzee around for years to burn the blush reflex right out of you) I outgrew those social indicators and for years now have been mistaken as aloof, cold, detached, imbecilic or, on more than one occasion, arrogant.
So those of you who would rather bellycrawl through a field of punji sticks than get behind a lectern, who would rather eat your own gallbladder than attempt unchaperoned conversation with a stranger, I’m feeling you, compadre. What can be done? Not a whole hell of a lot, tell you what. I’ve tried most everything short of Toastmasters, and that is just never going to happen.
Best I’ve come up with so far is a complex cabalistic methodology called ‘faking it’. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? Goes something like this:
• Deep breaths
• Eye contact. Yes eye contact.
• Take up space, like you own the room- arm over the back of your chair, legs loosely crossed. Get those cuticles out of your teeth.
• Vividly picture everyone in the room as a group of mellow dogs. Perhaps they’re playing a friendly game of Baccarat, or smoking happy blunts. They’re all fuzzy and mild, wanting only to benignly ignore you or exchange a few ass sniffs. Indulge them. If you’re dog-phobic, make it wombats.
I’m pulling for you. Quietly.
[original to Tablet Magazine -Issue 90]
Oh, I’m having one of those weeks again. You’d think that between the five days in Barcelona and the unholy amounts of hurty yellow ball in the sky I’d be feeling downright groovy. But no, I’m extra cranky of late. I feel misplaced in my skin; angry when I should be sleepy, frustrated when I should be serene, wrong when I should be feeling mighty mighty right. I have angst, in all the wrong places. I’m itching existentially and I don’t like it one bit. Why can’t I just shut up and be happy?
The answer’s simple, of course. Because life is hard. And tedious. Mostly tedious. And sometimes, I think, we’re meant to be uncomfortable. The First Noble Truth of Buddhism says that life is suffering. That I can dig, if by suffering our pal Siddhartha meant ‘long, numbing periods of boredom and wrenching emotional pain interspersed with brief, small moments of joy’. Of course Buddha didn’t mean that at all; he meant that life is suffering and suffering is desire and cessation of desire is the key, really, to evolving and ascending and levitating a couple of feet off the floor while you sit lotus and not-think about non-attachment and all that, but who’s got the time to meditate when life is just so goddamned full of things to be mad about? Not me.
I try to be nice, really I do. I am patient with children and the elderly. I don’t make rude noises or roll my eyes when I stand in line waiting for an excruciatingly slow checker to finish up her important conversation, not even when I have to pee. I don’t ever call Animal Control about my neighbor’s Rottweiler when it’s off leash in our shared yard, again, snarling and snapping and giving us all the howling fantods about going out the front door. I don’t step on ants or get crazy on the horn in rush hour or unleash my extensive kung fu training on the lesbian who fucked my (now ex-) husband numerous times. I carry spiders, living, to the porch where they are free to live out the remainder of their lives. I love many people, and like even more.
We all try, right, to be pleasant and pleasing, to be tolerant and compassionate. We try to appreciate the tiny gifts that we’re given. Things like a generous boss, a clear sky on a Saturday morning, a good nap under a comforter with the windows thrown open wide. We work hard-ish and we call our friends when they’re feeling blue, even when we know we’ll get 47 minutes of their melodrama and seventeen seconds of actual dialogue. We should all be doing our damnedest to give help to those who can’t live their way out of a wet paper bag; we should all be generous and we should all be grateful.
Only sometimes, we’re not. Sometimes getting through yet another fucking day feels like figuring complicated mathematical algorithms in your head while being poked with white hot paperclips. On a tightrope. Blindfolded. Pretty hard to feel grateful when it’s all you can do to not kill everyone, really. This is probably just as it should be, too. Who says happiness is the goal, anyway? What makes serenity, enlightenment or inner peace inherently superior to doubt, resentment or disquiet? Don’t discomfort and unhappiness spur us to change our stupid, stupid ways; to fix our stupid, stupid lives? Doesn’t misery get us up and moving a whole hell of a lot faster than somnambulistic good cheer?
My chronic discontent makes me a better person. My eagerness to avoid pain, shame, torpor and sorrow has me scooting through this old world like a nasty little June bug – busy misanthropy here, unfulfilled desire there. The ferocious dream I have of stringing together brief, small moments of joy, one after another after another until I have a few weeks, or months, or a decade of contentedness is all that gets me out of bed some mornings. So maybe I am grateful; I’m glad that life is hard. Believe you me, if I were a happy person I’d never leave the house at all.
[original to Tablet Magazine -Issue 102]
Adverts
Yeah yeah, we know what you don’t love: boredom, loneliness, frustration, being taken advantage of, friends who don’t call and friends who call too often. Feeling stymied, feeling stuck, feeling stale, mates who cheat, mates who ignore you, mates who say “yes” when you ask “Does this make me look fat/ugly/like a whore?”, not having a mate, looking for a mate, elevator farters, moving, staying in one place and flossing. That awkward pause when you’ve run out of things to say to yet another tedious person at a party, drivers with road rage, drivers who don’t signal turns, drivers who signal turns for miles and miles, passive aggression, aggressive aggression, loud children in expensive restaurants, loud children on airplanes and loud children with goo of indeterminate origin on their hands who touch your knees (that’s silk, junior!) at public functions.
You don’t appreciate clerks who roll their eyes at you, customers who yell at you, sinus headaches, caffeine headaches, hangover headaches, menstrual headaches, headaches from crying too much or too little. Working, being unemployed, your boss, being the boss, mopping around the toilet, waking at 5am unable to go back to sleep for please God just. One. More. Hour. Men who leer at you, men who don’t leer at you, girlfriends who insist on competing as though we’re all stuck in a permanent twilight zone of all that was abhorrent about the 8th grade, and refried beans that leap from their tortilla onto your new sweater on the way to something important. I’m with you on most of these, muffin (though I don’t mind so much the flossing).
But what do you love? What experience, what ideals, what stuff, do you feel a poignant and happy passion for? This is the tough one for yours truly. Just off the top of my head all I can really come up with is 1) cheese and 2) cigarettes. Maybe it’s age; I’m apparently suffering through some sort of really boring mid-thirties crisis wherein I’m too old to have that boundless, thrilling hope of my own future greatness but too young to crochet a nice afghan and settle onto the couch for the duration with my just-okay job and my just-okay love life and my just-okay mental health, quietly drinking room temperature tea and perusing my stock portfolio.
If hard pressed I suppose I can muster a little more than affection for aged dairy products and smoking – I am moved by my anger. Anger at the lowbrow theatre we’ve come to know as American politics. Anger at the elevation of pig-headed ignorance over thoughtful debate. Anger at the vapidity of advertising and the idea that nothing is ‘real’ unless and until it’s broadcast on television. Anger at the broader strokes, the global bugaboos we can all so easily decry: starvation, injustice, violence, poverty. These things I feel profoundly about, and I do my meager best, in my lazy, ego-riddled, I’m-only-one-person-and-a-broke-person-at-that way, to combat them. But anger as a personal motivator, as a spiritual divining rod about where to point my energy and time only goes so far (and anger + cheese + cigarettes = a fast track to dreary, unattractive things like heart disease and an early death).
Having read far too many articles of the self-help variety and watched untold hours of the Public Broadcasting Service, you and I both know that all we need to do is do what we love and the money will follow. Or just follow our bliss. Or leap and the net will appear. (I’ve been leaping my ever-loving ass off and nothing, NOTHING, has presented itself as a cure for these existential blues, I’ll tell you what).
Of course some of you have found your bliss. You’ve traversed the arid deserts of Why Am I Here; you’ve conquered the twin demons of What Should I Do With My Life and If God Has A Plan For Me Why Can’t I Get Just One Peek At The Bloody Manual; your glorious ducks are in a glorious row and each new day to you is merely another opportunity to shine. To you I say hallelujah sisters and brothers, go on now with your fine selves. Also, bugger off - we late bloomers are talking and can’t be distracted by your vile enlightenment. Perhaps you could dig an irrigation ditch in Ghana or adopt a few legless orphans while you wait, maybe work up your life story into a speaking tour with accompanying VHS tape and paperback series – we do so like watching you during the PBS fund raisers. Very inspiring.
The rest of us will be mulling. Moodily mulling and sighing expressively whenever a friend of a friend finishes her novel or lands an opening at a swank new gallery or quits his day job because he’s just sold his hundredth ingeniously hand-crafted something-or-other through his web site. And we will wake every morning (because we must), make ourselves presentable (because it’s a quick and slippery slope from ‘unkempt’ to ‘frightening the nice people at the bus stop’), drag ourselves to work (because having one’s very soul mercilessly sucked out bit by bit, day by day, is preferable to sleeping in filched refrigerator boxes under a highway overpass), and stumble home at night addled and numb, wondering how/when/by what miracle of design or circumstance we’ll discover the one true thing that we love, that will both complete and save us from the horrors of boredom and mediocrity.
But there is hope, of course. One small, shining splinter of potential loveliness in all this absurdity is our sheer numbers. Excepting you aforementioned success stories (who really should be quite busy right now pulling grandmothers from Middle Eastern rubble or working on your next award-winning screenplay), there are more of us who are cosmically unsettled and chronically displeased than there are those who are serene and fulfilled. This means that we’re the norm. Us angst-filled, ennui-suffering perfecters of slack are everywhere. We are legion. And we tend to befriend one another, as relationships between the temperamentally disgruntled and the beatifically tranquil never seem to work out (though the sex can be invigorating for a while, in a this-is-doomed-but-isn’t-it-terribly-hot-for-just-that-reason kind of way).
We ought to help each other. In an ideal world, we would. We’d hold weekly meetings; throw networking brunches in upscale hotels with cantaloupe, croissants and Power Point presentations on the overheads. We’d create entire businesses, build whole communities, around the central theme of utter cluelessness about how to spend our (decidedly finite) days. We could become the Illuminati of the Uncertain, the Masons of Doubt!
Or we could just start small: listen, really listen, to each other when the sadness and loneliness spill out. We could push ourselves a hair past convenience when someone we care for is a complete mess. We could devote a few more minutes to compassion and a few less to brooding introspection. We could sincerely encourage the tiniest sprouts of growth in ourselves and in those we care about (rather than the eye-rolling or hollow cheerleading that we like to call pragmatism but which is really cynicism, a mean little trait that we should core out from ourselves like a malignant tumor). Don’t get me wrong - we don’t have to sit in a circle and sing ‘kumbaya’. But the least we can do is hold hands.
[from Pure E Online, Like a Girl column]
Adverts
The likelihood of me ever realizing a couple of dreams decreases incrementally with each passing year. Things like:
• Spending a decade on the Khaudom Game Reserve in Namibia becoming one with the elephants—the beautiful, beautiful elephants
• Having a number one on the college charts
• Pillaging through clubs night after night in coke-fueled, entourage-fabulous, rock star bliss (subheading: incriminating video on “Celebrities Uncensored”)
• Winning the Indy 500
• Master puppeteering for the Jim Henson Company
• Heading up the New Yorker
• Eloping with Eddie Vedder
• Discovering a cure for clinical depression
Is this aging? Is it, holy god, surrender? Possible, but unlikely. I’m still full enough of angst and outrage, neuroses and passions, that it feels more like pragmatic acceptance. Why boohoo about my lack of a New York loft when I never did like taking the subway? Why rue the absence of pachyderms in my professional life when I’ve got a dog, a cat and four finches who are as dear to me as my spouse? (Well, the cat and the dog are; the birds I could live without, little shitting machines.)
If a tattooed progressive takes on a mortgage and there’s no one around to point and laugh, does it make a sound? Is there a discernible difference between growing up and selling out? Does it matter, after 30 or so, if there is? If you learn to love and admire softer things, things on a much less ambitious scale; if your focus on the amazing becomes affection for the attainable, have you lost something precious and wild or gained something soothing and profound? I just don’t know.
I’m slowly coming to terms with this grief—and it is grief, even if the dreams are pure whimsy. But it’s a small grief, the sort that accompanies having a crooked nose, or being tone deaf, or having four fingers on each hand when all you ever wanted to do was devote your life to opening jar lids for orphans. Certain things in the universe are immutable, utterly impossible or thoroughly inevitable. Either way, it takes some getting used to, but as there’s no one to blame or write outraged letters to, the soul does, finally, acquiesce. Rage, raging against the dying of the light is invigorating and all, but after enough time you realize the quiet importance of your own temperament and paying the phone bill on time and the redemptive properties of a good night’s sleep.
If I crosscheck all I ever thought I would need, in my most high-blown of daydreams, against what I have here and now, most every item gets a resounding “yup.” Friends, interests, love and experiences—yes, yes, yes and yes. Full belly, shoes with sturdy soles, a handsome someone to throw a hump in me when my oxytocin level drops, all of the above. Family, check. Shelter, check. Mobility, check. Physical health, check. Sound mental health, well, let’s pencil that one in.
The issue now becomes wants. And those, We’ve got plenty of mojo left to manifest.
[original to Tablet Magazine -Issue 86]
Adverts
It’s that time again, sugar. You thought maybe this year you’d get away with lurking in the house and office until the sun went down, venturing out to 7-11 for beer and jerky only under the cover of darkness. You’d hoped that you could find yourself a project at work, preferably something requiring long visits to the server closet or the basement file room, wherein you could log 70 hours a week in overtime and spend your leisure time at home reformatting your Very Important Database and not returning phone calls. Not gonna happen. This season, like all summers that have come before it, will draw you out of your fusty little cave and into the light. Barbecues with quivering potato salad, other people’s dogs (“Her name is Misha! She only bites if you hold her gaze for too long!”), careening toddlers and tipsy, sunburned friends of friends mispronouncing your name are in your immediate future. Saturday afternoons at (or on, if you’ve got a swell friend with the wherewithal to have procured themselves a genuine craft of some sort) a lake and balmy nights roaming the streets in tank tops and absurd open-toed shoes are your destiny.
You will participate, like it or not. It’s in the blood; vitamin D (which does nice things like protect you against osteoporosis, osteoarthritis and breast and bowel cancer) is most efficiently produced vis-‡-vis that hurty yellow ball in the sky shining directly onto your sallow hide. Moderate doses of sun or ultraviolet light enhance immune system function, ratchet up your serotonin (nature’s synaptic hot cocoa and cookies) levels and augment a whole host of biological functions, including ovulation. (Infertile? Throw on that bikini and toss yourself on a towel, mama. You never know.) Lying in the sun taking great gasps of fresh air was the treatment of choice for tuberculosis in the 1930s, before antibiotics were discovered. Our bodies were made for sucking up sunlight. Yes, even you, my lily-white friends; you may fry like a shucked oyster in extra-virgin too long under its rays, but without the glorious sun you’d likely be a histrionic pile of pale, suicidal rags.
And with the sun comes a mingling and muddling around with the heat-stroked hoi polloi. Hot tub parties, outdoor music, the aforementioned meat-grilling extravaganzas, frisbee-tossing, drum circles, skinny-dipping, gardening and strolling around your block at sundown to ogle acres of lumpy American flesh are all value-neutral byproducts of our intrinsic need to get as naked as possible and turn our cranky faces to the sky. So maybe other people’s thongs (both kinds) and fountain-dancing aren’t your cup of tea. Maybe you prefer online gaming or late nights locked inside the sweltering apartment with your good friends Misters Waits and Beam. You’ll still have to hazard a foray into society once in a while, to cash the unemployment check or score some blue velvet. While you’re out there, take a great big gasp of fresh air and thank your lucky stars it isn’t November yet. That month is murderous.
[original to Tablet Magazine -Issue 89]
As the parent of a teenager (don’t act so surprised- you know I’m startlingly kittenish for my age), life has become a series of teaching moments. Nearly every day my darling progeny comes to me wide-eyed and earnest, shyly seeking my wisdom on the big questions about love and life. We laugh and we cry, we care and we share. Dinnertime at our house is just like a Norman Rockwell painting, only with dreadlocks and sticky linoleum.
More lies. Does my dissembling never end? In all honesty I wouldn’t know a teaching moment if it leapt up and chewed my face off. And these days the thirteen year old eschews the whole caring and sharing thing in favor of charming new habits like yawning sullenness and open hostility; it’s just a matter of time, really, before I ship him off to a rigorous boot camp for naughty boys (like the ones featured on the Montel Williams show, before he got all soft with MS).
Some things I might tell him though, if he asked:
• Never, ever run from the police. Law enforcement officers get angry (the short-sighted or cynical might call it ‘vindictive’) when their blood pressure goes up. Chasing people gets their blood pressure up. Don’t make them chase you. Istanbul or Detroit, in a car or on foot, no matter your race or age, no matter your relative guilt or innocence, if you run from them, when they catch you (and they will catch you) they will find a way to discreetly beat you senseless. As with loose Rottweilers, stand perfectly still and avoid eye contact.
• If someone loves you and you don’t love them back you are required to tell them. Be quick about it, be gentle; then leave them be, for good. No fucking around.
• Every landlord you ever have will try to screw you. For the sake of your karma, be a good tenant. Get everything in writing. Follow your lease to the letter and leave the place cleaner when you move out than when you moved in. They’ll still screw you; it’s just business.
• If you become a landlord, every tenant you ever have will try to screw you. For the sake of your karma, keep the plumbing in good working order, welcome large dogs and remember that when a property owner returns a whole security deposit, somewhere in heaven a sweet widdle angel gets its wings.
• Re: your credit rating. Mistakes are forever. Pay everything off in full. Absolutely. Everything. And if you can’t afford it, don’t buy it.
• At some point in your life you may find yourself partaking of something every day. If you discover that you’re willing to lie, steal, cheat, make lame excuses or hide in order to be able to partake of said something every day; if you catch yourself attempting to regulate, monitor, inhibit, cut back or cut down, get yourself to a meeting, sugar. There are Twelve Steps for everything these days.
• Conversely, at some point in your life you may find yourself ass over teakettle in love with an addict. Feel free to attempt to scream, cry, curse, threaten, demand, beg, order, cajole, wheedle, implore or berate them into sobriety if it makes you feel productive. It won’t work, of course, but sometimes it’s fun to try. Then get your own ass to a meeting.
• In general, parents won’t expect you to pay back loans. Siblings will. And Thanksgiving will be a seething, passive-aggressive hell until you do.
• Don’t ask questions that you don’t want to hear the answers for. Some examples: Do you love me? Am I fat/boring/shallow?
• Statistically speaking, 99% of the humans you encounter will have been abandoned by their fathers. 92% will have deep-rooted, high-intensity feelings about their mothers. Remember this when you begin dating.
• While you will undoubtedly love, and likely breed with, an individual that you later discover to be a filthy, crazy, selfish sack of crap, don’t take it personally. If this happens more than once, however, you’ll want to take a good hard look at the common denominator. That would be you.
• No one can make you work. Ditto for paying bills, keeping appointments, building up savings, honoring promises, following through, discovering your true passions and getting enough sleep. These are things you’ll have to do yourself.
Now give us a kiss.
[original to Tablet Magazine -Issue 101]
Given my druthers I'd never have a hostile or ugly thought in my pretty little head; only rainbow flags, big-eyed brown and white babies, and those wee adorable hybrid cars would fill my every waking thought. I'd prance rather than stumble, chirp rather than snarl, bound gaily from one scrumptious endeavor to another. Like Snow White (Disney version, natch), I would magnetically draw robins and woodchucks to me; rather than kicking them and screaming in fear, I'd sing them a lilting song in my glass-shattering tremolo. Life would be good.
Okay, that's all just a big fat lie. You see how I am? What I mean is this: There are beautiful, moving things in this world and very often we get so caught up in tweaking our own miserable nipples that we forget to take a look around. I know, sweet pea, our particular suffering is pretty goddamned charming. Personally, I've spent at least 20 of the last 33 years being mesmerized by my unwholesome lust for neuroses, self-pity, angry hysterics, crappy self-inflicted consequences, and high-stakes melodrama. But lordhavemercy it gets old, doesn't it?
If the goal is to reach enlightenment, to evolve and ascend and all that, I think we should spend a whole lot less time dissecting our every individual 'issue,' stop weepily reporting to our support groups for something called 'validation,' stop viewing experiences as 'baggage,' and just shut our psychic yaps for a good long time. Let's look outward for a while, cast our gaze on something we never really knew existed or something we used to love but completely forgot about because we were too busy masturbating with our pain (or anger or bitterness or envy or garden variety messed-upness). Consider the lilies of the field, yeah? How they grow; they toil not, neither do they so on and so forth.
~ Chincherinchee, love lies bleeding, sweet william, sugarbush and love-in-a-mist are all names of flowers.
~The human heart weighs about 10 ounces. About as big as an adult fist, it pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood every day, beating about 100,000 times every 24 hours.
~More than 400 trees on the planet come from seeds carried into space by the Apollo 14 mission. They're called moon trees.
~The bee hummingbird is 2.24 inches long and weighs less than half an ounce.
~Designers used to sketch random pictures on unused portions of microchips: itty-bitty graffiti.
~Marmosets typically are born in twin pairs.
~Elements present in interpersonal love (according to wikipedia.org): affection, attachment, reciprocation, commitment, emotional intimacy, kinship, passion, physical intimacy, self-interest, and service.
~Mooshika is Sanskrit for 'mouse.'
~Lidwina of Shiedam is the patron saint of prolonged suffering, sickness, bodily ills, roller skaters, and ice skating. (Her memorial day is April 14.)
Don't you feel better already? Your homework, and mine, is to keep looking. The world expands when you start to explore its ridiculous, amazing details. And it's really hard to be surly when you're investigating marmosets and moon trees. Trust me.
[from Utne Reader, May/June 05. Original to Tablet]
Nice isn’t such a good thing, is it? ‘Nice’ is mawkish, it’s precious, ‘nice’ is saccharine. ‘Nice’ means mild but mediocre, sweet but banal. There’s nothing seductive, sublime or vigorous about it. People are too nice for their own good. It’s sinister: a little TOO nice, if you ask me. Landscaping is nice, khaki pants are nice, soccer moms are nice (until they get behind the wheel of that Explorer, cell phone in hand. Jesus, ladies, spare the rest of us your “I’m-not-chattel-I-drive-a-TANK-to-play dates” acting-out, okay?). Those calendars of babies dressed up like bumblebees are very nice. Julia Roberts seems exceedingly nice. So scratch that. Screw ‘nice’. Let’s shoot for ‘kind’, maybe. ‘Good’ is a good one.
The point is to Do Unto Them:
Dial a phone number at random. Crow, “This world is more wonderful just because you’re in it!” to whomever answers. Hang up.
Tape notes to your coworkers’ backs: “Kiss me.” “Witty” “Fresh, minty breath.” “I rock at Boggle.”
Forgive a fight: in the midst of one recurring battle with your squeezie over yet another irreconcilable difference, shut it. Just give it up. Stop screeching, grab them up in your arms and tell them how adorable and amazing they are.
Tip outrageously those not normally gratuitized: Metro drivers, the recycling guy, the mail carrier, Traffic Enforcement, your shrink.
Suppress that “I won’t look because they’re not looking and won’t it be awkward if..” urge and wave heartily to your neighbors. “Ahoy there, mateys!”
Thank the busser each and every time they refill your water glass.
Send a love poem to the maker of your favorite sweater/novel/cheese-food-product thanking them for what they do. (Occasional bonus: coupons!)
Tell one gorgeous stranger (either gender, single or paired, snooty or shy) in the elevator, the bathroom at Linda’s or on the bus, how beautiful they are. [VITAL exercise for straight women: many of us would rather gouge out our own eyes with a spork than tell a pretty girl that she’s pretty – “She hardly needs MORE attention. Grumble, snipe, snark.” – but try it. It feels better than you’d think.]
Make or buy ten postcards (NOT letters: precarious times, these; no need to invite the FBI over for peppermint chai and a tour of your hard drive). Mail them to ten strangers in ten different states (Internet white pages, Clever Britches) with messages along the lines of: “You’re terrific!” Avoid potentially stalker-esque ambiguities like “I’ve got your back.”, “Someone loves you.” and “You are not alone”.
Tell one friend each day how happy it makes you to know them.
Wink at someone over 70.
And Do Unto You:
Leave yourself voicemail listing your five most enchanting qualities. Listen daily. (Excellent for surviving protracted breakups wherein your ego has been trampled and your heart sucker-punched.)
Call in sick: sleep late, laze around in the sunshine and repeat this mantra 516 times while nibbling truffles: “I am delectable, brilliant and good. I love the world and the world loves me. Sho' nuff.”
Write me one letter detailing your heart’s desire. (All replies 100% not nice, gauran-damn-teed.)
[original to Tablet Magazine -Issue 45]
There are so many things that I often wish I’d do less of. Smoking cigarettes, natch, but also my sweet demon bride caffeine (without her I’m nothing. Or at least a vicious bitch). And of course there’s the self-flagellation- over fairly immutable things, like laziness, my nasty penchant for conflict-avoidance, the size of my ass- that never seems to get old. And self-flagellation’s evil twin, insufferable pomposity; I’m an old hand at that. And the constant cursing and voodoo hexing of other drivers as they dare to drive on the same roads as myself (though this may fall under insufferable pomposity; I’ll have one of my peons look into it at my next therapy session).
But the yardstick these days is At The End Of My Life. The proverbial “on my deathbed” is a great gauge of the true importance of things, an excellent winnower of the trivial, the false, and the just plain dumb. At the end of my life, will I honestly regret all the overeating of phad thai? Will I truly rue the gallons of coffee, the years of oversleeping, the months of time-wasting humping? Will I loathe myself for all the poor choices, the obvious missteps, the near-constant fuckups and the lifetime of walking around with a big fat fanny? Right down at the very mortal end of this corpus’ perfectly interesting tour of duty, will I really beat my breast and rend my hospital robes, crying “mea culpa, mea culpa, I wish I’d spent less time in mediocre restaurants”? You and I both know that I will not. Neither will you.
What we will wish is that we’d done more; more loving, more adventuring, more trying, more risking, more, just more. It’s not the things I’ve done that bother me there At The End Of My Life, but the things undone.
Not enough kissing, I know that for damn sure; I already know that I’ll regret not devoting a full six or eight consecutive months to gently mashing mouth and tongue with someone I adore. Imagine it- a kissing sabbatical; “Sorry boss, I need to devote myself to the delectable art of making out; see you in October”. And other sweet precursors to sex, while I’m at it: hand-holding, eye-gazing, hairline stroking, holding, holding and more holding. Sex itself, sure- we can always use more of that.
What else? I want to have spent maximum time saying ‘yes’ to things I’m deathly afraid of. Not that I’m asked to do terrifying things too terribly often, but when it happens, I want to be ready. And considering the fact that a party invitation or having to talk to two or more strangers makes me pee myself, this is very brave of me, and of you. I also want to say ‘yes’ to things that make me uncomfortable or that sound strange, boring or stupid at the outset. I don’t know what these things are but again, I’m ready. (I do know for sure, however, that these things do not include becoming a Scientologist or having sex with you and your girlfriend so please stop asking, on both counts).
I‘d also like to tell the truth more. I’m not a weaselly sort of liar, nor a pathological one; I tend to lie through omission, mostly to make people feel all nice inside or to keep them from bothering me, which makes me feel all nice inside (see above: conflict avoidance). There’s also the awful lying-by-omission that I do about lovely things, which I find so bizarre as to be without a doubt some kind of pathology; who lies about GOOD THINGS? I do, apparently. I’ve not told someone that I love them when I really did love them; I don’t know why. I’ve not told someone how glad I was to know them or another person how beautiful I thought they were or another how cool it was to be in the same room with them or how that one thing they said almost brought me to tears of recognition; I don’t know why. To be composed, I suppose. To be cool and collected, mostly cool. I kick myself for these things now. Telling the truth is sometimes really fucking hard and it’s a cruel and unjust universe that requires it of us. Still, it’s one of those things you simply can’t refute; I’ll do it more if you will.
So there it is; to really do ourselves proud At The End Of Our Lives we should be risk-taking baboons who walk around being honest, saying “yes” and “I love you” whenever the urge strikes. And kissing. Lots and lots of kissing. Sounds just like heaven, you ask me.
[original to Tablet Magazine - Issue 98]
I love you. No really, I do. Not you in the specific, as you may or may not be some kind of dog-kicking, child-beating, elderly-dementia-sufferer-fucking nursing home aide (or a Republican) but in the general, plum, I love the hell out of you.
A goal of mine is to fill my life only with those I cherish; as I hardly ever leave the house these days lest I miss a very special episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (™ ABC, Inc) I’m a little short on new people to dote on and thusly have to mash swoonily all over those I already know. Not just like, not only admire or feel a little fond of but balls-out adoration. Head-over-heels, heart-squeezing, moony-eyed and droopy-drawered lurve.
Everything feels better with a little love up in it. A phone call ends best with “love you”. So does prayer. A friendship without love is just ride-sharing. Food made without love “tastes of window” (™ Gabriel Garcia Marquez). A marriage without love is just laundry. Ego without self-love is just a personality disorder. A job without love is, well, just a job. And sex without love is not much more than swollen pink bits slapping together until someone has a bus to catch.
Am I saying that we should all be In Love with those we fuck? Gracious no, sugar- as a freshly-minted gay divorcee I’m the very last twit to wish the sack of vicious pit vipers that is commitment and monogamy on any of you chumps. What’s good for you ganders goes for this goose; I’ve filed a restraining order against commitment and monogamy. Fifty yards at all times, you know. (Confidential to E.Vedder: this doesn’t apply to you, sweetness. Call me- we’ll have coffee, maybe go for a drive, get married in Versailles and make twelve earnest rockstar babies. Something fun.)
But fucking with love? With respectful adoration? With utterly blissful infatuation and abandon? Amen and pass the KY. Listen, my turtledoves, I want you to get righteously on down and filthy dirty with how much you love your humpy partner, piecemeal and whole cloth, part and parcel, stück und gestalt. I want you to spend the next twelve hours just worshipping their elbows (their gorgeous little elbows!). I said elbows, damn you. If not elbows then that soft, sweaty spot behind each knee. Their kissably furry (or lickably bare) armpits. Their eyelashes, and how they curl just so under each brow. Each astonishing brow. Contemplate the color of one delightful eye versus the unmatched beauty of the other. Their earlobes like delectable wedges of fresh cantaloupe (or chocolate, or matzo, or brie). The miniature valley of each lovely clavicle, where you can lay your head (or your spanky) and feel safe and quiet for a while. How many absolutely flawless toes does humpy have? Count them, kiss them, pinch them, treasure them; those toes are the foundation for the exquisite brick house you are currently fortunate enough to be touching with your own naked self.
I want you to fervently, and conscientiously, lap, lick, caress, stroke, tickle, taunt, tease, and tousle each and every centimeter of the sublime creature you’ve got in front of you. (If it’s just you and the mirror, lamby, it all applies.) Carefully. Fondly. As though you cannot get enough of their delicious, delicious stuff. Nibble their fingertips. Hell, nibble their fingernails. Does their lustrous hair (or ambrosial bald head) smell more like fresh milk or clover honey? Can you comfort someone, soothe someone, as you nail them to the bed (or back seat, or bathroom wall) like a runaway freight train? Of course you can.
Scritchy scratch their itchy parts, pitty pat their hurting parts, tenderly kiss everything that you don’t know what else to do with. Have you ever felt a cheekbone so perfectly perfect under your happy palm? You have not. Their knees like lemon meringue, their ass like a dream. Their lips and their skin and their smell, the sweet (bitter, salty, sour) taste of them and the little (or outrageous) sounds that they make when you hit their sweet spot just right. Take a break their on their wonderfully soft (or edibly taut) belly; rest there, cuddle up, press your ear against their chest. Hear that? That’s their heart. You are loving on someone, lusting on someone, thrusting in someone, with a heart. Be careful with that.
[original to Tablet Magazine - Valentine's Issue, #96]
I don’t know about you but I am unfit for most work. I’m sullen and lazy, too sleepy, too cranky and particular for the majority of positions that provide funds for things necessary to survival in this our United States of America: rent, flavored creamer, a high speed internet connection. I require daily naps (or at least the leisure to partake of them even if I opt most times to chain smoke and watch Oprah). I tend to dislike, and am bashful about interacting with, most other humans.
I become sociopathic left too long under fluorescent lighting. I’m peevish and spoiled, terrible with numbers. I’m only really fully functional between the hours of 11am and 2pm Pacific Standard Time, so long as I’ve had at least 12 ounces of coffee and two mentholated cigarettes. I am constitutionally helpless to prevent the ill-mannered rolling of my eyes when the doing of just that is most detrimental to amiable social interaction, and office shoes hurt my bunions. It takes a special sort of easy/hard occupation to suit my tedious and exacting vocational needs; luckily I’ve managed to secure day jobs that meet most of my completely arbitrary standards and thus have not driven off a bridge, been committed or pushed an admin down an elevator shaft just to break up a slow Wednesday afternoon. So far.
I don’t know how we do it. To those of you doing the hard work of fetching coffee for bossy britches, sitting in meetings with awful, pompous people, making nice and looking busy day in and day out at moot jobs that make your teeth grind and your hair hurt, I salute you. Assfarming a cubicle was never our dream, honey, and we know that about each other. We all understand. And those of you in really tough places – scrubbing toilets, fellating strangers, moving heavy, stupid things from one container to another day in and day out until your shoulders feel like battered sides of beef just so you can have your place in this world, so you and your kids can sleep under a roof, wear good shoes and eat a meal in a restaurant once in a while, well, good goddamn my darlings, if I could give you some ease, some luxury and peace of mind (and a million dollars. And a hug) I would.
There’s something so creepy and wrong about having to do something you at best tolerate and at worst loathe four or five or six days out of seven. Why must we engage in boring, irritating activity that’s contrary to our very biology for so many hours each day for so many years? I don’t know. I’m not the boss up in this piece. Why can’t we just wake every morning when we’ve gotten the perfect amount of rest, eat some toast, pat down our wild hair and then leap into our freshest creative dream, enchanted and productive, challenged and fulfilled until it’s time to rest again? What’s with the dreary, lifelong, work-related misery of so many of us? I suspect a design flaw in the socio-religious-economic product but I’m not sure where to send my letter of complaint. Maybe I’ll type up a note to our ancestors and send it back to prehistoric times in a time machine; maybe pictographs on mammoth hide, something snappy and to the point: “Don’t ever give up the agrarian life, honey. The alternative sucks”. “Forget the wheel, stick with hunting/gathering”. “Evolution is bad for children and other growing things”.
Of course, I do like me some Sopranos on DVD. And central air. And penicillin is nice. So I suppose we’re just where we’re supposed to be, developmentally - our behavior is age-appropriate. And along with the right to download pornography comes the responsibility of earning the shekels to pay the light bill. It’s not fun, it’s not necessarily even right, but it is so. (Unless you want to move to the bush and live completely off the land and off the grid- good luck with that. Godspeed, and mind the grizzly bears).
And if one looks hard enough for up sides to working (if one is inclined toward seeking out the positive in all things - rose colored glasses, Little Mary Sunshine, and all that), presumably one could find them. Things like productivity and constructivity are reportedly good for the moral fiber (though not all ivities are good for you; prolonged passivity, for example will give you stomach trouble and polyps of the innermost delicates, and chronic sensitivity is a friendship repellant).
Financial reimbursement is also a perk to toiling somewhere through an entire pay cycle. If you make enough dough that wretched, nagging sense of something having been forgotten - like a burner left on or an envelope that you know you forgot to lick dropped into a mailbox - that feeling goes away for most of your waking hours. And some potential bed or business partners may view your income level as an accurate gauge of your fuckability or fitness for inclusion in various ventures like condo development or rebuilding countries we’ve bombed into gravel. If you’re wealthy, American and particularly charmless chances are good you’ll end up with your own reality television program.
Me, I’m not so beguiled by a really large bank account. I am unimpressed by money as a factor in whether someone is a worthwhile, interesting or successful human being. It's like being impressed by beautiful bodies- they're nice, and can take very hard work, but much of it is the luck of the draw and doesn't say anything about the inside of a person. (Conversely I don’t buy for one second that abject poverty confers nobility. If you truly believe that little chestnut I’ll wager my next four paychecks that you are a product of an expensive and liberal private school education. You may send me my winnings c/o this fine periodical).
What else about work is worthwhile? Leaving the house every day certainly factors into sound mental health. I stayed home for almost two years when my kiddo was born and Jesus Mary and Joseph was I ever loony by the end of it. After eighteen months of baby, the walls and my neurotic, boring self I would have chewed my own leg off to get back to work. Even now, safe years and years away from the stay-at-home horrors, I still get a little odd when I loaf around the homestead for too long. The occasional three day weekend is acceptable, and of course a going-somewhere vacation is always a kick in the pants but more than 48 hours home with no agenda and suddenly I’m a dreary, listless pile of rags on the floor, weeping for Monday morning to come, please just come.
Work teaches us valuable interpersonal skills as well. Socialization, which some of you apparently never received, is good for all of us. Chewing with our mouths closed, making eye contact, using indoor voices, not biting or spitting on the other children when their annual bonuses are bigger than ours; all important tools in the journey toward enlightenment. (Though some of you need a bit less of the making friends and a bit more of the slaps to the head: something like 60% of people who have extramarital affairs are banging their coworkers. To you I say get gone. You heard me, go on now. Quit your job, move somewhere remote, isolated and painfully rural; raise 2 or 3 hundred head of cattle, or wildebeests, or dingoes or something; and spend every night for the rest of your life trying to make amends for your embarrassing behavior. You may join us again when you’re better at keeping your hands [and etceteras] to yourself. If you ever are).
I suppose the act of working is better, in the end, than its possible alternatives: unemployment, disability, planning charity lunches and making sure the help isn’t stealing the good silver, death. I think we should call it something else though, something lighter and more upbeat. Like kissing. Or twaddling.
Off to twaddle. See you there.
[from Pure E Online, Like a Girl column]
If you’re anything like me (and you’re probably not because I am particularly maladapted, in a terrible, boring sort of way) you do anything and everything you can to coax yourself through this tedious, ridiculous business of being upright. I try my damnedest to pamper and please myself without guilt, or a second thought, on a semi-regular basis. This is not because I am A) wealthy B) shallow or C) egocentric (okay, maybe a hair B and C, but it’s okay, my mom wrote me a note). It’s because life (as we’ve noted before) is one hard motherfucker of a thing to do and I deserve every blessed treat, surprise, gift, break, side trip and trinket that my heart desires if it keeps me from harming myself or others.
I am the only one who knows my fancies and yens; who better to provide me with them? I deeply, truly care about my own well-being and am willing to do one measly, infinitesimal sweet thing for myself each and every moment of each and every day because it feels nice, because I can, because it’s fun and funny. I am my own dearest darling and I believe that I’m worthy, delightful and cute enough to give in to every single time. It doesn’t matter if it’s true; it keeps me sane and that’s saying a lot. I desperately want you to believe the same of yourself (mostly so you’ll stop flipping me off in traffic and voting for religious freaks but also just because you should).
Why is it so easy (for some of you) to berate yourselves, overload yourselves, abuse, neglect, and torment yourselves over the smallest of mistakes yet tending to your own bodies and minds comes so hard? There are so many things that you forget to do for yourself. You always mean to do little things just for you—soft, tender, fun things—but usually ignore the urge, or claim to be too broke or too busy, or unconsciously move them down the priority list until they languish undone somewhere between “buy new oven mitts” and “colonic the dog.”
Knock it off, right now. It isn’t going to get any easier up in here and honestly, sugar, if you don’t start doting on yourself, who will? Sure, partners and parents are good for a hand-holding here, a luxury there, but it’s wearisome when they have to prop you up and pet you every time you hit a snag. That’s what YOU’RE for (or did you think you were only good for guilt, self-loathing and chronic fatigue syndrome? Yeah, I know. But that’s a lie and it bores the crap out of all of us).
This right here is your permission, if that’s what it takes. Permission to buy a glass-blowing class instead of eight 12-packs of Costco underwear. Permission to sleep late. Permission to nap properly, to get a weekly massage instead of donating to PBS, to once in a while eat something deep-fried instead of broiled in organic lemon juice. Stop using stolen ballpoints that were out of ink a month ago and cough up the $3.49 for a spectacular Uni-ball.
Throw away everything you own that’s broken, uncomfortable or ugly; if this is everything you own, do it anyway—nature abhors a vacuum and another toaster will manifest shortly, I promise. You must drop everything when you’re hungry and eat; eat what you’re hungry for. Put bubbles in your bathwater, be late to work every day because the long route is prettier and start saying “no” to things that bore or hurt you. You’re hereby ordered to stop eating shit because you think it will get you something, somewhere or someone of value; it won’t.
This isn’t a Spartan contest wherein whomever has the least has the most. Unless you’re some kind of ascetic, suffering and self-flagellation are not a means to an end—they’re what you do to yourself when there are no flies around to pull the wings from. Are you afraid of becoming spoiled? Personally, I wouldn’t leave a squalling infant in its crib—“Stupid baby, suck it up.” And that’s all we are, really—big hairy babies who deserve to be picked up and cooed at, every single time. A need is a need—needing comfort or rest, something cozy, goofy, delicious or frivolous is still a need. It’s not spoiling; it’s good parenting.
[original to Tablet Magazine - Final Issue]
Popular Decoding Fun For the Addict’s Friends and Family
Or
Enough’s Enough, Sugar
There’s nothing uglier than knowing you’re murdering yourself, your relationships, your own soul, with the crap you’re virtually compelled to shovel into your body to quell old pains - unless it’s loving someone who does it. But take heart, befuddled enablers: following is an abridged compendium of phrases commonly used by the alcoholic, the junkie, the pill-popper, the whirly-eyed coke snorter. Soon you’ll be interpreting with ease even the most unintelligible of gurgles issuing from their sleepy spot beside the toilet.
Phrase:
I’ll be back in a few minutes.
I don't lie to you.
You don't trust me.
I want you to trust me
You’re so bitter.
You’re always angry with me.
You always bring up the past.
It’s just recreation/ sociability.
It’s just recreation/ sociability.
I'm going to the store
I'm going to meet a friend
I need time to myself.
I forgot to call
It was too late to call.
I'm too tired to talk about this.
I'm tired.
I'm sick.
I overslept.
But I don't keep it in the house.
I'm still young.
I'm an adult.
I only had one.
You're just jealous of my fun.
Should I sit home every minute?
What I do doesn't affect you.
What I do shouldn't affect you.
It's never gotten me in trouble.
I know I have a problem; I'll quit.
I know I have a problem; I'll quit. |
Translation:
I’ll be back in three or more hours.
I only omit the parts you'd be angry about.
I haven't totally destroyed our relationship.
I want you to ignore my behavior.
I was happier when you ignored my behavior.
I don’t want you to talk about my behavior.
Forget everything but the last two sober hours.
If I enjoy it, it can’t be addiction.
Using is my hobby.
I'm going out to use.
I'm going to use with a friend.
I feel guilty when you see me use.
I felt too guilty to call.
I was too wasted to call.
I'm passing out now to avoid you.
I'm hungover.
I'm hungover.
I'm hungover.
I prefer to use elsewhere.
I'm not completely debilitated from using yet.
Using makes me feel audacious and free.
Three.
Your concern makes me feel guilty and angry.
My constant sleeping and vicious mood swings don't satisfy you?
I show little interest in anything you do; reciprocate.
My life is easier when we ignore anything negative.
Our disintegrating relationship doesn't qualify as 'trouble'.
I'll wait a day or two to use.
Are you kidding? It's your problem.
|
Everyone’s taken the “never again” vow after one wicked night or another. This is different. One day you have to quit and stay quit. That, or it’s a humiliating and wretched death by OD (slow or sudden). Which sort of defeats the whole purpose of trying to medicate that hurt away, doesn’t it?
Go on now, with your bad self.
For families/friends of:
Al-Anon Family Groups
Nar-Anon Family Groups
For the addict:
Alcoholics Anonymous
Narcotics Anonymous
[original to Tablet Magazine - Issue 48]
We’re not nineteen anymore, and that’s the damn truth. No more all-nighters, no more firm and naïve and fresh. Gone are the two-week romances (mostly) and the discovering of universal truths for the first time and being so enamored with our nascent enlightenment that we bore our friends to exhausted tears with 6 hour coffee-fueled expositions on Truth, Organized Religion and Modern Day Feminism (the upside being that we no longer have to listen to our equally inflamed peers expound tirelessly on the Meaning of Life, Love and Suffering). I miss the ability to stay up for thirty hours straight and still make it to work the next day but it’s nice to not breast-beat or rend my garments anymore. Viva la raza, sure, but I’m sleepy.
What does thirty-and-then-some mean? Primarily it means that one’s gluteal region does some really freaky shit. No joke; I looked for my jolly, chubby old can in the mirror the other day and was shocked and frightened to discover a stranger’s ass peering back at me. It was flat! It was downcast! Morose and weary, by god it was my mother’s lackluster junk right there in my trunk. Mocking me. I won’t be looking again.
We also get to observe the world and ourselves with a fragile new clarity. Our sixty year-old friends and parents may laugh at us, but 30ish to 40ish is a particularly interesting vantage point. If we’re lucky, we’ve got the basics figured out- love, fundamental vehicle maintenance, children or no children, money and how to make it. Of course, I don’t know too terribly many folks like this, but I believe that they’re out there, snug in their lucrative careers and fulfilling avocations. They have no trouble paying the phone bill or navigating their healthy and productive long-term relationships; keep it up, soldiers, we’re counting on you.
The rest of us have the clarity but haven’t actually made it to the restful side of having all of our fucking ducks in a row. We know the rules but they’re not working for us, or don’t quite yet apply. We’re a little stuck, or stalled, or in the middle of some seismic change that has us in limbo midway between Knowing Absolutely Everything and Doing What It Takes to Get It. It’s not torture, mind you; most of us have food in the fridge and know precisely what we want to be, do and feel for the rest of our days- we just haven’t encountered the right combination of serendipity and endeavor to sit pretty.
One thing that helps is solidarity. Nothing makes you feel like less of a late-blooming wanker than having brilliant, restless friends in the very same boat. Share your pain, then ease someone else’s. Offer some existential comfort, you self-obsessed beast. Stop mooning around sighing- sadly, no one’s going to rescue you. Put out feelers- one of us just may know someone who knows someone who has a friend who can hook you up. Make your art, damn you.
Hook me up?
[original to Tablet Magazine - Issue 93]
