Back to Books

I am finding some things out about my reading process; I like to be engaged with multiple books at the same time, a literary polygamist. When I am on my way to sleep or out in nature, I prefer fantasy or science-fi. I always need to be reading something that is non-fiction and preferably topical as this acts as a root in everyday life. I have grad plans, like reading all the classics, though those may have to wait until retirement.* In general, I prefer to hold a book, but will sometimes listen to one that has a particularly good narration, typically of the non-fiction genre.

*Retirement is not something I actually believe my generation will have the luxury of. When I say retirement, I mean when I decide to live my final days off the grid in a yurt. I’ll die in the way I want, by some means of a particularly harsh winter, perhaps buried in snow. My body stumbled upon by hikers in the spring, mostly decomposed, holding a note that reads, “Thank you for taking the time to bury me somewhere around here.

To sleep, I am on the second in the Dragonriders of Pern series, Dragonquest. It was recommended to me as a series that centers on a strong female character and that was true for the first couple chapters of the first book, but that character has faded into an idolized hero who is also suddenly subservient to her male leader partner and I am less than enthusiastic about that. It serves its purpose to put me to sleep and I keep reading, hoping her character comes back into the spotlight. I continue to chip away at Policy Paradox by Deborah Stone, our text from my class which I did not finish. It answers questions like, why do people vote against their own interests and what sorts of strategies to policy leaders use to get their agenda met. I am listening to The Yellow House, by Sarah M. Broom. It is a memoir rooted in not only in her experience as an African-American woman growing up in New Orleans East, but also in her research of city records, census data, archives and the multi-generational memories of her family. She is not much older than I, and the book makes undeniable the truth that we are not living in such different times, that systemic racism is still woven into nearly every aspect of this country’s founding, from schools to city planning and zoning, to policing.

I possess a compulsion to rearrange furniture in my house, typically when I am not feeling right in my brain. It used to be nearly constant, weekly, monthly, an effort to correct an inefficient use of space, to set things which we so constantly out of order, right. I told my therapist about this, and she said that when she works with kids who have been traumatized in play therapy they will often move the furniture around in the play house. I haven’t felt the compulsion since well before quarantine, its been months at home, feeling mostly settled despite the chaos around me. It is a signal that I have been mostly mentally stable, something I am proud of. I attribute this to a few stable and primary friendships, my unemployment claim, which thouh constantly facing has come through and to safe, stable and affordable housing. But I was ricked last week due to outside stress of the pandemic and the nearly complete loss of hope in our country and its systems, the conversations and strains that it has put on my friends and our relationships.

Preempting my need to rearrange was the indulgence of fantasy, of life different from mine. I went fully into the #hotgirlvintagervrebuildlife hole, complete with jealousy and insecurity. I let myself go all the way down and then, desperate, looked to my cat, Fabs who said with her eyes, “Me in an RV? Get real. Please don’t. I like it here.” I sat up, looked around and realized how right she was. We have a great apartment in the downtown area of a growing city, a block from the river with a view of the mountains and sunset from out patio. Plants and birds and green trees grace the outside space. This is really the best possible scenario right now what I needed was to remember that and give it a little care. So I moved a few things around, but it wasn’t the chaotic, disorganized, takes me three days and I end up with piles of stuff, rearrange like that of the past. It was medium tweaks, minor adjustments with a minimal amount of work and maximum intention, resulting in a deeper settling in.

As part of the process, I also re-arranged the books on my bookcase, this time by category.  These are long shelves; the bookcase stands waist high but about six feet in length and it sits under the mounted TV as mantel the cats like to la on. It’s wood is stained a tad darker than I would like, but sanding and retaining is a project for next year, perhaps. I got it off Craigslist. It lived previously in the children’s section of a library in Payette. On the top shelf, from left to right are novels and books of essays by contemporary authors, the ones I’ve read most recently, like Swing Time and The Dutch House. Then there is the Elena Ferrante series, and then comedy and writing, then cookbooks, and finally, my spiritual and metaphysical collection, complete with the Bible I probably will never get around to reading. These collections are separated by favorite books and ones with cool covers, in a way that Kate remarked looked like how books stores do, showing off the titles they’d like to sell. I have an old copy of Little Women, Oh The Places You’ll Go, Cookbooks from the Middle East, and the Profit. On the second shelf down there are less relevant reads- old stuff like Great Expectations and For Whom the Bell Tolls, To Kill a Mockingbird, a few Steinbecks and a couple Mark Twain’s. Next is my too small collection of poetry, some older novels I haven’t read yet, travel and adventure books and then public administration, course text books. Titles like Everything I Need to Know I Learned From my Cats, The Portrait of an Alcoholic, Idaho GPS Waypoints and White Fragility. I took my Harry Potter Collection, The Hobbit and the first Dragonriders book into the bedroom, where they belong. On the last shelf, because I don’t have enough books to take up all the shelves, are my yoga blocks, a basket of cat toys, scrabble, a ukulele and a tambourine.

Next to my desk, on the small red record stand, sits my Webster’s dictionary and vocabulary builder, alongside Bernie’s Our Revolution and Gail Collins’, When Everything Changed. These are symbolic next reads. There is a messy pile of postcards and letters I intend to send. As I write I realize how incredibly lucky I am to be here in this space. Beyond luck, really it feels like a full-blown miracle to live here, to have these things and to feel any measure of peace in todays times. Fabs seems to agree as she jumps on the desk, her fur between me and this page and licks my cheek.

Significance

I heard something like this from an Oprah video, “Significance and service equal success…” but in a more Oprah way and to inspiring instrumentals. The word significance grabbed me. I heard that word again, maybe the same day or perhaps the next, on a George Carlin interview. He was talking about when he started to find his voice in stand-up, he said that the times around him were changing, that they were significant. “You could feel it, you could feel it…” he said.

I went down many Youtube, “whats my life purpose?” rabbit holes while avoiding work for a three-week intensive summer session graduate class on public policy, I decided to get out of the way while unemployed. Focusing can be difficult. In the most desperate moment of distraction and self-deliberation, I watched a 45-minute interview with personal finance psycho, Robert Kiyosaki. Even now while writing, I am Youtube-ing #vanlife stories and seething with jealousy over a slim woman who lives in her self- refurbished motor home with her cats… cats! Two of them!

That class- the mountain of reading, weekly discussion board posts and papers was in a way a distraction itself from the commitment I made to sit here and write each day. Getting back to it is hard, discipline has been diffused. I cannot sit still my mind, age 2, severely underdeveloped.

For our final class project we had to create a policy brief- a two page document outlining a policy proposal. A brief is used to educate an official who might be voting on a policy but has likely not read it in its entirety. I took the creative vigilante angle and created a policy that would pay the rents and mortgages of people who live below the medium income through next year and the impending recession. It was originally titled 2020/2021 Zombie Apocalypse Prevention Act but in my class pitch, my professor said I should call it the WAR on something because invoking the word WAR is a strategy that gives unlimited power and spending, I mean its WAR for heavens sake!

This was the train that dropped me off at George Carlin; he appeared magically in the results when I searched, war on homelessness. “You never hear about a WAR of homelessness do you?” he asks. “That’s because there is no money in that problem… a home is an abstract idea… these people need are houses, physical, tangible structures.” So I called my policy, WAR on Houselessness and I posed a choice to imaginary officials- pay rents and mortgages or send millions into the streets and homeless shelters. This is also a political strategy, you give a sense that there are only two options and you make the one you want seem like the only acceptable one. I learned a lot in this class, almost too much. The subjectivity and value-driven nature of policies and the politics that come out of them, it turns out are rules, rather than exceptions. That knowledge, against the backdrop of a childhood in the system, and the fresh, fresh experience of the unemployment system was then in the last week, catalyzed by the most tragic of system failures- policy brutality and the murder of George Floyd.

I vacillate between youtube videos of political commentary and comedy, podcasts, series, audio books, social media outcries, any and all media to educate myself and also fantasies about living in a RV with my cats. My mind is on a stretcher; the thoughts I have are larger than my ability to hold them. I’ve taken to Ukulele, for real this time and, well now I have done this. Im still flirting with the idea of recommitting to a daily writing practice.

I am circling around the idea that in looking for a life of significance, the opposite occurs. There is nothing significant in looking for significance. Significance seems to exit independent of intention or wanting or even work, though all those things may bring you to its door step, it doesn’t permit entry. Significance is a momentary thing, like a warm blast of air on the river. You enter into it by chance and pass through. Love seems like to be that too, unable to be held… on the outside anyways.

I woke up 6:30am (by alarm) today, thinking last night, “I’ll wake up at sunrise and I’ll be a writer. It’s been a cloudy cold morning, my IBS is acting up and my long distance lover has disconnected. So all I have actually have done is watch John Stewart and John Oliver videos, eaten waffles and had a self-righteous slight weep, to Billie Eilish. Do writers take baths before noon?

On Choice

I forgot the sun rises before 9am. Im not sure if it was my IBS or the poison oak rash burning my thigh that woke me up at 4am but it was certainly my thoughts that kept me awake this morning. The sexiest way to start, I know. The cats encouraged me to stay in bed as long as possible, so I read the rest of Swing Time and a Patreon post from fellow trauma survivor, comedian friend, Emma Arnold. The two pieces, together, coalesced with my thoughts- the needing of rest, the having of time. The cats. The end of an empty life.

Each time my fantasies about life, in the most general terms (career, kids) detours, I get a little closer to laughing at myself. This nauseating process of indecision has plagued me almost to the point of comic exasperation. Yesterday I interviewed, no wait, excuse me, I had a “discovery conversation” with a company that sells, mostly life insurance and ironically, a sense of security. “Are you ready to start your career as a financial advisor?” Um… its May, I haven’t done my taxes, am currently on unemployment and this is the most money I’ve made my entire “career,” so yeah, 5 out of 5, very interested!

It is not for lack of opportunity or inspiration that I have ended up in this life eddy, approaching 35 with a blog and paddle board to show for it. My long time, older and much wiser friend Nancy and I talk about children. She is one of the only people bold enough to ask me about how I feel about having them, a kind of intimacy in conversation I only realize I crave when she calls. Nancy has two daughters, each have two children of their own and she is in love with all of them.

She’s brought this one moment up many times in this conversation. “I’ll never forget when I first asked you about children, you said, ‘I don’t know if I could share my body like that.’” I think that moment stuck with me in part because her reaction to it was so strong, maybe she sucked her breath in or paused, startled or stopped the constant motion she is in when bustling around the kitchen. Somehow she manages to impreganate the smallest moments between activities and logistics with meaningful converation. I think it also stuck with me because sometimes what comes out of my mouth when I talk to her, or to any rare soul who really listens, can shock me in its raw honesty. Like I turn around to see who said that, like I didn’t know I had it in me, or didn’t even know I thought that or felt that until I heard myself say it in a voice that comes out so much more confident than the one in my head.

I initially interpreted her reaction to that statement as a shock. That it was an unnatural thing to say and I felt shame about it for a long time. I didn’t understand what I said, I didn’t know why the idea of a living being inside of me, seemed so foreign.  I imagined everyone else seemed to feel that for women, having children was the most natural, primal thing your body could do so the fact that it didn’t feel right meant there was something wrong with me.

When I was with my former partner, we visited Nancy. She could see he loved me, unconditionally, told me that, asked me again about children while we drank cold white wine on her back porch and he made us blackened fish tacos. She said she’d come help me take care of the baby, “I love babies,” she said with a giddiness I felt too when I held one. That offer made the idea almost bearable and deliciously tempting. A mother, to teach me to be a mother? What a heartbreaking illusion. I didn’t have anything honest or clear to say then, I was just coming to terms with my inability to securely attach in any relationship, and was far away from being able to make my own decisions.

A break up, a couple years and a one new partner later, she brought it up again. You’d think the idea, that having children was the best possible thing, would have cemented in her mind after watching the birth of a couple more grandchildren but Nancy surprised me. She wasn’t stuck on the idea, she was turning it over, looking at it from a different angle. “Do you remember when you said…” I told her she wouldn’t let me forget. She talked about someone else she knew, who didn’t want children, who had had some trauma in her childhood but whose partner really wanted children and now she was pregnant and coming around to the idea. I told her what I relief I’d felt when Sam, within 12 hours of arriving back in the state for the season, made clear that he didn’t want children in a process that felt like vetting. That he found it fundamentally and immediately important that we agree, less go our separate way, gave me some relief. I told him it was complicated, said I didn’t know if I wanted children or not but that I didn’t think I could handle the experience, mentally or physically. I cried and lamented the premature loss of the fundamental and awesome right of motherhood, as a woman while he held me and seemed to accept that as good enough.

Nancy said it was refreshing to see so many women in my generation making the choice. That what was important was that it was a choice. That it was our choice. That statement is the one that sticks with me now, replaces the previous one about the shadows in my body. I flashed back on the feeling of relief I’d had when Sam made clear his terms. I thought then that it was because I felt suddenly relieved of the burden of having children but now I think maybe it was the relief of having to make the choice.

I can’t imagine selling life insurance as a career. It would mean asking potential clients, multiple times per day, “Is there anyone in your life you would like to be taken care of after you pass?” And when they say yes, faking the ability to relate. If someone asked me that, I’d say no. Just the cats. I don’t mind the idea of being a spinster cat lady, but I don’t want to end up one. I have to choose it. What’s important is to choose a life you can bear. The narrator in Swing Time had no children. The two women whose lives she lived through, her employer and her friend, each had many and the book ends with a simple image of her friend and her friends children dancing on a balcony while she stares up, empty from a place below.

Happy belated Mother's Day

I wrote this last Friday:

I always forget that this weekend can be hard. Maybe thats what is behind the insecurity bubbing from the bottom of my belly. A pattern, a cellular memory of all those years of Mother’s Days. Maybe thats why I am itching to be only in my body this weekend. On the river, on the river, on the river. The years between and the years within. Im not sure what she thinks but I think she thinks that my life is better off without her. I suspect that’s what she has always believed. That’s how she was able to leave and live with herself. But thats a cop out. It always was.

Can one ever quite learn how to mother ones’ self, completely?

It’s a huge weight to bear, like motherhood itself, I suppose. I guess its why I can’t ever quite let go of the hope that she’ll come back. Why part of me is still stuck waiting. Trapped in a home without a heart. How excruciating it has been to carry on without it.

This is the cry that was rumbling from deep down in this rejecting uterus. Its the sadness there that makes me not want to carry another human in it. I don’t want to bear another human into this. Thank God for the cat on my lap and for the albums I have for this (Bridget Kearney~ Won’t Let You Down)

I forget that this weekend can be hard. It’s Friday and I am glad I have remembered. Glad I have remembered to take a break. To get a little space, to spend time with myself today. To sing and clean, spend some time in my heart. Its really the only place to go, though my mind would like to go to the what ifs and the wondering. It’s tempting to go back.

I want to scoop the baby I was up and just take things from there. I look into my young mother’s face. Her tired eyes and swollen breasts, too big for her child’s frame. Long beautiful hands wrap easily around me in gentle contradiction. Her blond hair picks up the light. Her knee easily propped on a pillow, she looks at once comfortable and not in her new role. The picture is intrusive and you can see it in her eyes.

I wrote this today:

I had the best Mother’s Day.

I felt loved past the point of what I could comprehend or expect or feel like I did or didn’t deserve. I was loved past myself, past the point of over-flow. I felt so loved that I could hold both the sadness of not having a mother and the love I have for my mother at the same time. You can love someone who doesn’t love you, or who isn’t able to love you in the way you need to be loved, I’ve learned. Maybe she loves me or she thinks she does. Maybe she doesn't, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the love I have for her. Because thats how love works.

I remember many adults that came through my life as a child, questioned that. “How could you love her after what she did to you?” I understand now that sometimes love has limits. Maybe they were trying to protect me? When she was back in my life for seven or so years a couple years ago, I loved her like a little girl. I loved her like a small child who depends on an adult for their sense of security and so would do anything for them, even wait an entire lifetime. I just wanted her to come back and I loved her at the expense of myself. I loved her and trusted her completely, like a child who doesn’t know the costs of trusting someone who doesn’t understand the consequences of breaking it. I was still the keeper of her burdens then, and our relationship was an inappropriate expression, like walking on broken glass, too awkward and bright and dishonest to look at directly. I hadn’t grown up. I hadn’t felt the rage I needed to feel. I didn't know how to protect myself. I hadn’t healed. I wasn’t a woman, then.

I can love her without expectation of a response. I can give her love, in my mind without compromising my heart. I think I am starting to forgive her.

I spent the weekend on the river. I spent everyday on the river from Thursday through Monday. I felt loved all those days and none more than on Sunday. My lover made me a breakfast fit for a mother of queen cats. He came on the river with me for the second full day that weekend. I thought about all my friends who were mothers and their children who are growing up loved and I wished them a happy day. I heard a song, I thought about my mother. I sent it to her and then I moved on with the day. I moved on down the river all day.

Womanhood is overwhelming

Backyard comedy was so fun. When coronavirus quarantine started my first reaction was, “well, guess I am done with comedy!” Any excuse to abandon something I love, right? We all kept our distance, the group had some real good laughers and the birthday honoree, was a top shelf heckler. It felt like work- like real work! Crowd control, in the zone, riff heavy, practically a roast, work. You can’t kick someone out of their own backyard. I was surprised at how easy it was to transition to doing garbage art in a beautiful place. The smell of lilacs and sounds of birds chirping, and even the innocence of children playing with baby chickens in the background, didn’t compromise the affect of Montana’s consensual butt sex jokes one bit.

Yesterday felt like a day of reach, a stretching and holding of contrasts larger than I knew if I could handle. There was great productivity and also great overwhelm. I got books for kids who can’t go to Camp Opp for the first session this year! I felt so full and happy to have brokered that deal but also new worry seeded. Will non-profit egotism and politics getting in the way of this attempt like the last one? It’s incredibly disheartening when that happens and in the back of my mind I fear that camp administrators will rebuke the offer. They don’t know how crushing it is. The other thing I am following through on is an online comedy show fundraiser for Idaho Voices for Children, as my part of the board contribution. All parties are on a-go, including my headliner! But I have to set up a zoom account, figure out how those shows work, set up a ticketing site, make a flyer- Agaan, extremely exciting but overwhelming. Then there is this other project I had started last week, that is a bit of larger in scale and closer to my heart and another process I am unfamiliar with. There is the grad school 3-week summer intensive I will be starting next week. I got a job interview for a 9:30-6:00 M-F, the thought of which is overwhelming in and of itself. Then there are the feelings I have for my skydiving lover, which make my heart overflow, make me want to cry with joy and the next retreat as insecurity and fear of loss come with it. Last night I wanted to cry and dance and sleep and mastrubate- all at the same time. I wanted to take a bath AND a shower. I wanted to be alone and I wanted company. I ate steak AND quinoa. What I am trying to say is, ugh its coronavirus menstruation part three.

Yup. Two periods ago, I was closing the club down on a Saturday night! Last period I was doing this blog and that was it and this period I feel like I am doing everything and why do I do this to myself? It doesn’t all need to get done this week but it sure feels like it. I even put pressure on myself to finish Swing Time this week, but that was how I knew I was just fueling the first of overwhelm, egging it on. Next weeks posts may be a little public policy making heavy and I might cheat and post a couple of my papers. For now I think Ill go for a walk and try to focus on just one thing, just whatever is right in front of me at that moment. This has helped.