feminist blogs

So the other day I walked into the kitchen, meaning to make myself some espresso. A soy latte, to be specific. Once there, something (now forgotten, naturally) distracted me; I either forgot why I’d walked in there, or some family member in another room said something I needed to respond to, or I heard something on the news that drew me back into the living room.

At some point I remembered, hey, I meant to make that latte. So I went back to the kitchen. Rinsed out a mug. And with one motion of my hand, flicked the remaining water from the bottom of the mug in the general direction of the sink, not really caring if any droplets landed elsewhere; after all, it was just water, and only a very minor amount of water at that. And I ground the beans and packed them into the machine. (Without forgetting what I was doing in between those two steps! Go, me!)

And I reached into the fridge, grabbed the soymilk, poured exactly the right amount into the mug, and waited for the espresso to finish brewing, so I could start steaming the soymilk. Then - once again - something intervened; a whining husband or child, our two cats brawling, a knock at the door, a text message on my phone. Something, who knows or cares what?

Finally I found myself back in the kitchen, ready to resume my task. The espresso was ready (if now lukewarm); all I had to do was steam the soymilk.

Except somehow, some loop in my cognition had been triggered, leading me to repeat one of the previous steps: namely, the flicking of the mug in the general direction of the sink. Only this time, of course, the mug did not contain merely a few drops of water, but rather, about 5 ounces of soymilk.

Of course this happened right as my husband walked into the kitchen, so what he saw was me throwing, for no apparent reason, a mostly-full mug of soymilk all over both sinks, the rack on the counter containing the (previously) clean dishes, the side of one cabinet on which various other mugs were hung, the toaster oven, the floor, and the iPod docking station and portable speaker that rests on the window sill behind the sink. (Which seems to have survived its impromptu soy-bath, thank God.)

I am ready to concede that going back on medication for ADD might not be a bad idea. (Of course, since the one psychiatrist in all of Richmond I trusted had the nerve to die recently, this means I have to find another one, which is, necessarily, a daunting prospect.)

Unless, of course, I can get espresso in IV-drip form, and someone else commits to administering it for me, since I probably couldn’t be trusted to get myself through that process without forgetting what I was doing in the midst of the endeavor, and, most likely, causing myself some kind of mortal wounding, or at minimum, making a giant mess.

On Monday it was my great fortune to have a coffee date with a new friend, one Ms. Jennifer Jane, a.k.a. @peeppeep, found via the social media wonder that is Twitter. (My profile: here.)

Allow me to provide you with a sampling of her posts on Twitter that quickly established her awesomeness, and made it clear to me we were actually going to have to meet in person. (Besides her reply to my message, “Beck’s ‘Lost Cause’ makes me feel better about being one,” with “that song got me through my last breakup. best played while lying in bed for the third day in a row.” So true, so true.)

• bought jelly shoes today. can’t wait until my sweaty feet make those farty noises. i am a sex bomb.
• @ the mall. Person in next dressing room either having sex or an asthma attack. Kind of worried.
• running only on caffeine and a bite of chocolate bunny. ears, natch.
• If you are one of my customers and i am rude to you today, i am sorry. It’s just that i hate you.
• is it okay to tell someone that you’ll have sex with them if they promise not to talk before during or after?
• my last customer was an old lady who totally farted while standing in my line.

See? Awesome.

So we arranged to meet on Monday, and predictably I was running late because I couldn’t find my ass with both hands, much less stuff like keys, driver’s license, and sunglasses. Once I finally found the first two, I gave up on the third and headed out the door. Of course it was incredibly bright outside, all the more so to me because I had just pulled a writing all nighter. (This post. Worth the effort, but still, oof.)

If you’re not in the habit of pulling writing all-nighters and then walking out into the blazing light of day, let me assure you it is an uncomfortable, squinty experience. Then, once in the car, I scrounged around to see if my husband had any abandoned sunglasses laying about. His head is unnaturally large, so whenever I do swipe his shades (like when I steal his socks; he has boats for feet), they tend to fall off me, but they’re better than nothing when I am in need. Alas, I found nothing.

What I did find, however, was one pair of 3D glasses from when my husband had taken the girls to Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds (in Disney Digital 3D! says the promo). At which time, blissfully, I had been writing, exempt from both the added expense (the tickets were $15 each!) and the emotional overwhelm (see this photo for some indication of how I felt about getting dragged to a Jonas Brothers concert during our last State Fair). See why I love my husband?

And while thinking persons might question the wisdom of wearing 3D glasses for driving, after an all-nighter in particular, I have to say they did the job just fine, tamping down the impossible glare, and enabling me to make it only ten minutes late to my coffee date.

And of course, I made a dashing first impression:

…And we went on to have one of the most pleasing conversations I have had with another human being in quite some time, the actual substance of which would be impossible to recreate here, but suffice it to say, we have enough bizarre stuff in common, and enough about our respective life experiences that is radically different, that we totally bonded, talking nonstop until I had to finally dash off to fetch the youngest girlchild from school. (Also, she has teenagers. All our local friends who finally decided to breed did it late enough in the game that my own teen is always the oldest kid in the crowd, when we have family-friendly parties. The idea of getting our respective offspring to hang out too is pretty fab.)

I go through a lot of angst over friendships, because so many of the people I love (outside the network of friends I pretty much married into) are largely out of state. When I meet people locally, so many of them have no context for the whacked out kind of life I’ve lived (geographically, politically, whatever). When I make connections online with people whom I might, ostensibly, meet face-to-face at some point, it’s much the same, with a few brilliant exceptions.

For example, there has been the wonderful Joriel, whom I first found via the Blogger listings for Richmond (before we both moved to Wordpress). Even without having a (by my standards) particularly insane personal history, she somehow understood me (because she is a real, honest-to-God serious writer, and that’s an altogether unique breed). But then she and her equally wonderful honey moved away, to the very place where so many of the people I already love and miss terribly live: Seattle.

And there is the equally brilliant Jane, with whom I have almost as much radically in common as I have radically not in common, which makes our interactions edifying, stimulating and fun (particularly given her wicked sense of humor). (Also, she is a kick-ass photographer. Go buy some of her Etsy stuff, seriously.) And while she is, at least, here in Virginia, she’s still far enough away that we have not yet been able to make good on our threats to go hog wild someday at Ikea¹. (Don’t ask me why this possibility appeals to me. It just does.)

But Jennifer? Not only gets me (a tall order for any human being, seriously), but she lives right here! Less than a ten-minute-drive away! And it makes my heart go pitter-patter, and feel significantly less angstful about my place in the universe.

Richmond just got a lot better.

___
¹There has also been a proposal that Jane and I might someday see Molly Hatchet together, but when the celestial bodies might properly align to make such a thing come to pass, I couldn’t possibly guess.

I got up ridiculously early this morning (a little after 3:30 AM), having caught up what felt like weeks of missed sleep, after the mixed blessing of having been knocked out so hard by Benadryl that I’d fallen asleep at the dinner table (in a restaurant, no less), following which we’d returned home, and I’d zonked out again almost immediately after noting said embarrassing fact. I’ve done three loads of dishes, one of which was required merely so that I could gain access to the espresso machine (no, I will not soon be nominated for any homemaker of the year award), and I’ve been catching up on a backlog of podcasts for The Writer’s Almanac.

Which was how I came to hear this wonderful poem, called Sestina for the Working Mother, which I hope my fellow mommybloggers (both those who’ve embraced that moniker and those who’ve distanced themselves from it, for understandable reasons, not least of which is the fact that it’s the descriptive label most often invoked by others when a decision has been made in advance that the ‘mommyblogger’ in question is not to be taken seriously) will enjoy; the poem “works” whether one falls under the “Stay at Home,” “Working,” or hybrid designations of the Mother identity.

This link should, in theory, should open the RealPlayer audio file, though it’s being persnickety for me, of course, now that I want to share it with you. At least you should be able to read it, either here (on a page transcribing a whole week’s worth of broadcasts) or, better yet, at McSweeney’s (where you won’t have to hunt for it among several other poems). It begins thusly:

No time for a sestina for the working mother.
Who has too much to do, from first thing in the morning
When she has to get herself dressed and the children
Too, when they tumble in the pillow pile rather than listening
To her exhortations about brushing teeth, making ready for the day;
They clamor with goodbyes and “up” hugs when she struggles out the door…

[click here to read poem in its entirety]

In the event this was you earlier tonight:

Accessing, specifically, 12 pages primarily in the Matriarchs and The Family Cactus categories, before I took my blog offline for awhile, please, for both our sakes, go away*. If I wanted to be in communication with you, I would be in communication with you. I’ve worked hard to make sure you can stay in touch with your granddaughters (and thankfully my husband is willing to serve as proxy in this matter), and I’m happy to send gifts at all the right holiday occasions (have you noticed I’m much better about that since we stopped speaking?), but there is a reason I haven’t been in touch since early in 2006 - it’s because I don’t want to talk to you.

I feel much better about, and emotionally generous toward our involuntarily shared history, when we’re not in touch. I like that. It helps me to remember the good stories. It helps me remember that I love you.

If you have some instinct to re-state, icily and indignantly, that you just don’t get it - what happened? why? - I’ve been explaining the what and the why for decades, and only clued into the fact that you would never hear me, much less change, a relatively short time ago.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly yet expecting different results, then consider this my declaration of significantly improved mental health.

Now it’s possible that wasn’t actually you tonight (in which case, apologies for the mysterious and now obstreperous behavior, everyone else), just as it’s possible it wasn’t my ex the other day, accessing 22 pages mostly in the Exes category from the ISP of the specific place I know she frequents (which may explain the other recent outage to others of you out there).

I know this is the internet, and I’m the one who put all of this out there. I get that.

But if you want to show me that you care about me at all (I am not, of course, counting on this), please respect my privacy anyway. Do me that favor, if you do nothing else for me.

You have two granddaughters, and yes, you usually only get to see them once a year or whenever a conference takes you to the mainland, but there were plenty of years of my childhood when I only saw you once a year, because that was how you wanted it.

You didn’t want me; you made that incredibly clear. I was the inconvenience standing between you and any number of adventures that were more exciting than childrearing. And yeah, there were fringe benefits for me (like riding out Hurricane David with you in a St. Thomas warehouse, what a vacation visit with my mother that was!).

But I don’t want anything like that kind of life for my daughters. Relative to my having attended in the range of eight schools between kindergarten and the second grade alone, my eight year old daughter still lives in the house where she was conceived. Ours is a run-down house, and a rental to boot, but I’m damned proud of the fact that I have now lived in one place for ten years - four years having been my previous record. (One reason why, though I only lived there from 1984-1988, after my dad and stepmom kicked me out and you had to take me back - I do, in my heart, regard Hawaiʻi as one of the places I can somewhat authentically think of as “home,” despite the acute postcolonial guilt I felt, even at thirteen, though you, of course, never did).

And really, it’s okay. Hell, I’m the one who gave you this book, a sympathetic memoir about a woman who’d left her children. Maybe in your perusals of this blog, before I turned the lights out earlier tonight, you got to this part:

A normal person would be able to move (construct a new bridge, repair the old one, navigate some other path across), but I have never been like that, nor has my mother been, or she would not have surrendered her custody of me, with no observed reluctance, on so many occasions when I was young - seeking new locales, lovers, and “lifestyles” as she saw fit.

I don’t begrudge her that, any more than I begrudge Maria Housden, author of Unraveled, who, after the death of one of her four children, stunned everyone she knew by seeking a divorce, granting full custody of her surviving kids to her ex-husband. She then struck out on her own, initially, for an artist’s colony, of all apparently self-indulgent sites. Her story placed in sharp relief the double-standards by which women are viewed as parents, relative to how fathers are judged. No one questions that men need identities beyond marriage and parenting. Housden got hers; so, too, did my mother.

My God, do you see how far I bend over backwards to find honorable, even feminist analogies via which to generously reconstruct my own childhood experience? Did Maria Housden share with her kids the joys of fishbowling when they were quite young? And then tell, at each Thanksgiving, the hilarious story about her young daughter being so stoned that she turned to the hippie next to her in the cramped car, and, after saying “I’m going to eat you up,” bit into the guy’s kneecap? I’m guessing not.

What’s even more curious? How you’d give up custody of me, more often than not, while simultaneously pursuing an option that would have given you custody of Lori Jo, your brother Billie’s daughter. Because he and his wife were alcoholics, and you were so much better than that. During one of my visits, you even showed me a draft of a children’s book, Evra, which in some fashion concerned Lori Jo. (Interesting how you always had a searingly sharp sense of irony, except when it was your behavior that was ironic; then you were just being rational and benevolent!)

You had a special kind of devotion to children’s issues, it’s true. But I was peculiarly excluded from this category, “children.” You made this even more clear when you took a nude picture of me (seated in the lap of one of your lovers from the period immediately following your leaving my father), and an artist’s reproduction made from that, and hung it from every one of the countless houses you lived in, while also sending copies to everyone we knew, and frequently discussing how, in the picture, I looked so sultry, beyond my years, etc. (Incidentally? Before his death, Billie told me about how he always thought that was inappropriate).

I’m not trying to get my childhood back. It’s gone, and that’s fine. But I’m not going to deprive my daughters of the intrinsic value of this time in their lives. Which is what would happen, to some degree, if you and I were in touch, because the effort is always uniquely draining.

Listen, I do care about you. And I’m really not obsessing on all of this stuff constantly. But you have no clue! And I doubt you can help it. You are, after all, your mother’s daughter (though God knows, you improved on that template).

And yes, I am yours. But I’m the one who did break the pattern of us. I’m the one who did not abandon her children at any number of points on the map whenever whimsy (in your case) or drunkenness (in your mothers) happened to strike.

The bottom line - that it’s my daughters who deserve and require my attention, not you - hasn’t changed from when (this most recent round in) our estrangement began. (And if they decide to become mothers, I hope they’ll do their part to improve on the generational template. No doubt, by the time they are grown, I will have given them plenty of things to legitimately complain about.)

You always joked how it was no accident, your moving all the way to Hawaiʻi, while your mother remained in Virginia. You don’t suppose it’s merely because airfare is expensive (although of course, there’s that too) that I haven’t been back to Hawaiʻi since 1993, and that I ultimately came back to Virginia, do you?

There may be a time when I’m ready to talk to you again. If you push it, it may never happen. And there is nothing I want less than I want that. (Re-read last sentence as needed. Now do you get it?)

I love you. Now please leave me alone.

__

* Or if you must read here, for the love of God, have the decency to use a feed reader.

Dear Dr. Gilliam,

I was stunned to learn only tonight of your passing. I had just worked up the nerve to make a new appointment after having not seen you for months; Linda Love from your office called with the news.

If I understand correctly (not a sure thing, as my sharp, jagged sobs punctuated that conversation), you were at Mardi Gras - one of your favorite celebrations in this world. You’d had a fine meal and some ice cream, followed by a third course of Massive Heart Attack. You died instantly, moving straight into the next mystery. (Your schedule always was pretty busy.) I can only imagine that realm’s cuisine and music and art. Or, if it’s too formless for that, then its textures and resonances, faintly echoing sound waves. Whatever it is that might characterize that place (or lack of place), I hope it’s rich, full of whimsy and depth.

If you found God, please verify for me that S/He has an offbeat sense of humor. S/He might appreciate, perhaps, that just above where I’ve written “I hope it’s rich, full of whimsy and depth,” that at first, I accidentally wrote “death” instead of “depth,” which would have been fairly horrifying to me had I inadvertently uploaded such text to the guestbook accompanying your obituary (we are so modern now we have online funerals!).

I want to say here that I’m grateful to you on quite a few counts:

• You were objective. When I told you about certain events, where you had knowledge of some parties involved, you did not let that knowledge color your judgment; you listened to me and you believed me. (Also, you’ll be proud of me: today I finally worked up the nerve to consult with a lawyer. This time, I’ll follow the process through, however far I still can, given the various statutes.)

• You didn’t try to cram the complexity of me into any kind of one-size-fits-all treatment model; you were fine with discarding what wasn’t working (for example, the course of Ambien that had me driving to Wal-Mart and making strange vegan casseroles in the night - not to mention leaving long, loopy voice mails for various friends and ex lovers), and adapting stuff that seemed like it might work. You gave me the space to work through things at my own speed.

• There were, over the last 3-4 years, various gaps (sometimes lasting months) between our appointments. You pushed me in ways I needed to be pushed. And backed off when pushing wouldn’t have helped.

We speculated, once or twice, as to whether we might be some kind of distant kin, both our families having roots in the Appalachian segments of Virginia and Tennessee, and with the name of “Gilliam” having made at least one appearance in my own family tree. It may or may not have been, but it did not matter nearly so much as the fact that I felt safe with you, at a time in my life when I felt safe with almost no one. (Linda gave me a few names of other doctors to call. Already, I feel sorry for them, considering the tests I put you through.)

If you carry into the next world some C.V. concerning your accomplishments in this one, please feel free to include among the numerous details this item: that you helped to save my life. S/He can call anytime for a reference; I haven’t moved and am not likely to, until such time as my living here might also come to a natural rather than unduly hastened end. Perhaps also in the context of vacation. (The grammarian in me feels compelled to note, here, the root of ‘vacate’ in this word; damn if you didn’t take this most recent ‘vacation’ quite literally.)

Rest peacefully, Dr. Gilliam. My best, also, to your partner Roy (another fine and gentle soul), and to your children, friends, colleagues, and patients.

We were all quite fortunate to know you.

___

More on Dr. John Hilliard Gilliam:

Richmond Times-Dispatch: Obituary
Bipolarity: The mental health community has lost a hero
Dr. John Gilliam: Memorial page

Or: Not to worry, I’m as sick to death of my blog posts in the “Fragments” category as are you.

Or: An answer to the question, “Just what in the hell is this thing called Twitter?” (A feminist literary mama’s excavations of this technology’s relative merits.)

__

Hi there, I’ve been ensconced in the realm of Twitter for a while now (wherein users exchange messages of no more than 140 characters); if you know of what I speak, then you do (feel free to follow); if you don’t, go read Clive Thompson’s article in Wired, which will give you the gist.

Still with me? Cool.

__

Recently I characterized Twitter as being “like the alternately idealized & never-good-enough lover you can’t help but be infatuated with at all times.” On one level (I’ll get to the other level shortly), it’s genius: social media at its best, connecting people in variously casual and profound ways across all sorts of divisions of geography, politics, lifestyle, and identity. One thing I’ve been amazed by is the prevalence of moms on Twitter, which seems particularly apt. In the course of a day, a mama has to deal with a lot of crazy, inherently fragmenting stuff. That cliché about a woman’s work never being done? Well, it’s not a cliché; that shit is real.

So what are a mama’s options for staying in touch with the world, between the phone ringing and the baby crying and the husband whining and every other damn thing? (Note: sadly, this may apply almost as often to moms who work outside the home as to stay-at-home moms, given the unequal sharing of domestic duties between male and female partners, which persists despite the necessary gains of feminism and even when both partners have paid employment.) Maybe you don’t have the luxury of Virginia Woolf’s rightly-recommended “Room of One’s Own”; or maybe you had that room once, but then the baby came along and you had to make a nursery somewhere.

Now, it’s not impossible for a woman writer who is also a mother and who lacks certain resources (time, solitude, individual space, money, etc.) to develop engaged, sustained narrative; Ariel Gore, founder of hipMama, nails that truth in the first three sentences from How to be a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead:

Everybody knows it because Virginia Woolf said it: you need money and a room of your own if you’re going to write. But I’ve written five books, edited three anthologies, published hundreds of articles and short stories, and put out thirty-five issues of my zine without either one. If I’d waited for money and a room, I’d still be an unpublished welfare mom…”

So: not impossible, except in the existential, miraculous sense that for us mamas, everything can be pretty impossible, but we figure out ways to pull it off anyway. And we do it, every day.

And of course, we struggle. And much of what we struggle with is the matter of fragmentation. For the same reason that many women gravitate to poetry over prose, many of us, these days, gravitate toward mediums in which we can express ourselves (and connect with other mamas) even in the milliseconds between erupting crises - whether those crises are deemed “domestic,” e.g., involving the material needs of the bodies of those with whom we cohabit, and/or if they concern our broader engagements with the Body Politic. And Twitter is rapidly becoming that medium, to an even more influential extent than blogs individually.

This is true not least because, in Twitter, one may exchange not only individual, succinct observations, but one can also share links to more sustained narratives elsewhere: whether in blogs, online news media, or audio, video and photo sharing sites (not to mention “mashup” venues which braid such forms together, into fresh amalgamations which, when successful, are worth more in value, by far, than the face-value sums of their parts).

What Twitter does, for many of us, is create the possibility of an alternative to silence. People who have been reading this blog over the years, in its numerous incarnations (from “My So-Called Writer’s Life” in 2003 through “Perpetual Exile,” “Southern Discomfort,” “Vortex(t)” and now this most recent inscrutable moniker “Anachroclysmic“), through its umpteen template overhauls, usually only 25% realized (often with disclaimers posted about the run-down state of the thing, the ever-borked blogrolls and so forth): you know how I struggle with silence.

I might stay up for a few nights in a row, posting stuff that’s incredibly difficult, complex, huge.

Then I’ll shut down, and I won’t post anything for days, weeks, or even months.

Twitter is the technology that has been helping me to stay connected (and keep my sense of humor, which, if you only read my Deep and Serious posts here, you might not know I had) between those rare days of effusive, often brutally honest communiqués. Because, of course, life doesn’t stop just because one is (whether for internal or external reasons, or some combination of both) unable to write about it.

And the feature of the WordPress plugin I use - Twitter Tools - enables me to post a digest of each day’s Twitter entries (”tweets”) in the form of a bulleted list.

The good news: This does, indeed, fill in significant gaps between my other writings here. And, perhaps, gives you a fuller sense of who I am. I’ve had my share of miserable fuckwits take a passing glance at some of the very volatile issues I write about (particularly those pertinent to the sex trade) and make flabbergastingly inaccurate and bizarre assumptions about me which, depending on the extent of their fuckwittedness, they otherwise might not be quite so quick to make. That is, if they understood that the woman here who writes, occasionally, about pimps who are richly deserving of some very swift comeuppance (if not in the form of a prostituted woman personally dispensing righteous justice, then courtesy of the perpetually-imperfect Law), is the same woman who writes joyously and unapologetically about what is, after all, her absolutely marvelous sex life. (Or, alternately, complains bitterly if she’s not getting any.)

Which is not to say that I owe anybody - least of all the pro-sexcapitalism fuckwits - any explanation.

But, just as I am driven apeshit by people who, for example, assume that because I’ve had female partners in the past and am now married to a man that this:

• Means I consciously switched “teams” (no, I just happened to fall back in love with this one crazy guy, who is also the most loyal human being I’ve ever known), and/or
• Means I no longer care about or have a personal stake in GLBT rights issues (far from it, although it’s obviously true that I now benefit from heterosexual privilege, in the same way I also benefit from white privilege, that is to say, involuntarily and without condoning the systems that privilege some identities over others), and/or
• Means I am no longer attracted to women (this is certainly not the case, as might be evidenced in past blog entry titles such as There is Nothing Wrong With Me that a Few Shots of Tequila, a Slightly Darkened Room, and the Bass Player from the Butchies Couldn’t Fix*), and/or
• Means that I embrace the “bisexual” identity without ambivalence or qualification (actually, I prefer the term “undeclared” - which is not the same thing as not having made up my mind; that - being “undeclared” - is my final answer to the question), and/or
• Means that my marriage is a sham and/or that I “swing” (Nope, we are 100% monogamous, so don’t even ask)

…So to am I driven apeshit by people who make other sorts of baseless (sometimes quite innocent, but at other times quite malicious and misogynist) assumptions about me.

So, with these accumulated “tweets,” whoever is still reading this blog (all 4 of you, I think it is) have some opportunity to have a clearer sense of where I’m coming from.

And here’s another merit: It’s a wonderful, fun, geeky challenge to see just how much meaning one can pack into 140 characters. Indeed, a game called “Twooshing” has developed among the particularly hardcore Twitter users, wherein the challenge is to express oneself in precisely 140 characters; yours truly is, at this moment, at the top of the Twoosh Boards. There is levity and, of course, significant triviality being indulged with this activity, but the compressing challenge of the form - as with strict poetry forms - can also lend itself, sometimes, to art. (No, really! I’m completely serious.)

And, it’s good practice; one becomes extremely proficient in cutting away whatever is extraneous in narrative, so that even when one is writing something of more length and complexity, it has a better chance of packing a nice, walloping punch. (And then, whatever adjectives you do choose are like precious delicacies, distributed with care throughout one’s prose which has already been trimmed down enough to convey descriptions well.)

And sometimes the 140-character form is just wonderfully pragmatic. For instance, I recently went to see Cloverfield. I wouldn’t have been emotionally invested enough afterward to write a substantive review of the film - but I did want to weigh in with something, given its present popularity. So, while still in the theater (using my cell phone), I did:

Shorter Cloverfield: Post-9/11 anxiety + generalized fear of unknown + patriotic iconography + fuzzy dialogue/ barf-inducing film technique.

(And really, that’s about all you need to know about that film, in my humble opinion.)

And now, the bad news: (the above-referenced other level): If you’re not on Twitter, some of what gets posted (particularly the items beginning with @[username]) in this manner isn’t going to make a lick of sense to you. (And if you are on Twitter, then you’d probably rather follow all that stuff via Twitter’s own UI, and reading anything here is a bit redundant.) And of course, because individually these “tweets” can only pack in so much in the way of nuanced communication, I do run the risk of being seen as suddenly trivial and light (me!) when I’m writing about certain issues. Do I wish, for example, I’d had more time to develop a fully-realized essay on why I’m supporting Barack Obama’s candidacy for the Democratic Party’s nomination? Of course. But if you were reading here and trying to ferret out the basis of that support, you might not be particularly moved by 140-character crystallizations that, necessarily, can only communicate so much.

So that’s it, my imperfect system du jour. (Which I may well turn upside-down tomorrow.)

Tweetcha l8r.

__

*This was on a short-lived blog called Queen of the Bean; someday I’ll recover and make some substantive use of the old posts.

So, long time, no post. Lots going on. And a monster of a post is percolating quietly in the background, trust me. Meantime, the only stuff posted here in some time has been via the feed from my twitter. Which I realize is kind of annoying. Ah well.

But I just wanted to share a quick, kind of wacky observation. Some background first: As those of you who have known me for awhile are already aware, I deal with sometimes debilitating PTSD and depression issues. It’s terribly unfun and unglamorous, and I don’t talk much about it, because the very nature of it revolves, for me, around silences. Once I can articulate something that’s going on, then by definition the fog of the depression has lifted.

As some of you also may know, it is generally believed now not just that depression can be the result of chronic illness and pain, but also that the reverse can be true - that depression itself can cause pain. Well, I’ve gone through enough of that - days of feeling so utterly sucker-punched by my own psyche’s resident demons that it literally hurt like hell to move. That whole business about being bedridden by the blues has everything to do with this. It can feel, sometimes, as if I’ve just run a marathon (only I never got the endorphin high), and the idea that I should walk across the room to get a glass of water, or answer the doorbell, or anything else is laughable. (Only, you know, not at all funny, so not ‘laughable’.)

Well, today has been shaping up to be one of those days. I’ve been languishing on the couch, and when I have gotten up to try to get some work done upstairs or get a glass of water or whatever, I’ve found myself wincing with that very old, familiar pain.

Then it dawned on me: Yesterday I actually got my butt to gym for once. So the pain I’ve been in is from working out. My body’s Pavlovian response, “Oh, I’m having this pain, I associate this pain with depression, I must be depressed!” is kind of funny. Had it occurred to me earlier, I might have short-circuited this reaction by reminding myself, many hours ago, that I actually earned this muscle-soreness, dammit!

But the nature of the depressive beast (whether it’s triggered by memory, chemistry, or confusion over one’s own bodily state as has been the case today) is to obfuscate: Since I felt soreness, I assumed malaise; since I felt malaise, I assumed depression; since I felt depression, I assumed it would be futile to even make a cup of coffee and the whole day was as good as lost; since I didn’t get any caffeine, I became even more muddled and sluggish, which contributes to feeling depressed - and so forth.

Which is a lengthy way of saying, I’m going to make some coffee now.

And maybe not push myself quite so hard next time I go to the gym.

There are lots of reasons for my relative silence of late. If I could explain them - well, I guess I wouldn’t be silent then, right? It’s all I can do right now to move from day to day, occupying my variously contradictory and emotionally draining roles - writer, mother, daughter, wife, etc*.

I’ll be okay. And honestly, there’s a lot about my life right now that is going right. But this whole struggling- for- integration- amid- perpetual- sources- of- dissonance situation that afflicts, I think, most women writers (or writers, period) is an incorrigible beast - one I live with every day, and have even made peace with to some extent.

So, for whichever among my blogospheric friends might still be reading me (and who may be rightly offended that I’m so off the grid that I’m no longer reading them, much less posting any viable material here; sorry, right now it just cannot be helped), please know there is nothing to worry about.

That said, I’ll proceed with what I actually sat down to post.

–

The following began as a response to, of all things, an early 90s pop video posted on YouTube. Wisely, that site’s designers forbid commenters from posting messages in excess of 500 characters, so when my little comment became utterly unwieldy (but was too obviously relevant for me to just delete), I had to put it some place.

The song is Ooh Child, and in the video it is covered by some band called ‘Dino.’ (In my internet wanderings tonight, I’ve discovered this song’s been covered by countless artists; this blogger has the lyrics for a recent Beth Orton version; the original, as best I can tell, as explained further below, was performed by the Five Stairsteps.)

Now, I can’t embed the video for Dino’s version (that feature was disabled by the guy who uploaded it - one ‘eightiesdood’), but those curious may view it by clicking here. (For some indication of its obscurity in the ensuing years, Wikipedia’s ‘disambiguation’ page for Dino, as of this moment, lists a total of twenty four things or people the term can refer to, among which this band is not one.)

Here’s what I would have posted, space permitting:

–

Good Lord. This song figures in a (true) story I’ve been trying to write, and stumbling upon this answers a question that had been nagging at me. It was, indeed, 1993, and this song had been on the radio while I was living with my girlfriend at the time in Fargo, ND. I liked it, but my girlfriend found it offensively trite. Too “pop.” And I got her point. But I still quietly hummed along to it whenever it came on the radio.

We had a really miserable existence there - we’d moved to Fargo, in a huge rush, from Seattle because of some explicitly life-imperiling trouble she was in, which I was trying desperately to get her out of. Alas, said “trouble” followed us there, too, and on one mad July night we had to flee our apartment. We took refuge at this scary shelter downtown, where we didn’t know if we would be safe or not for the night - we were sort of holding our breath. The agency was going to try to get us tickets on the Greyhound to Minneapolis, though they weren’t sure, yet, how soon it could happen, since it was already late at night.

After we got settled in, we had this huge fight (the kind of fight two people have when they love each other but they’re trapped in a completely impossible and terrifying situation), which ended with me telling her that I didn’t know how or why, but we were going to get out of that mess - we were going to make it to Minneapolis alive, and we were going to shake this bad situation for good - eventually.

Then we started walking around the facility - being too scared to sleep, while we waited to see if indeed this agency was going to follow through with getting us the bus tickets. The hallways were dark and we were tip-toeing, trying not to wake any other of the emergency guests, and we saw light coming from a door. As we walked toward it, we could hear music coming from the room, growing louder as we approached, until we could make out the song.

It was, of course, “Ooh Child.” But NOT the goofy 90s version that had been on the radio weeks before, the lyrics for which I’d quite liked (for obvious reasons, I guess), while its execution in that format had been found so reprehensible by my girlfriend (who fancied herself to be an R&B aficionado**). It was clearly a different version, a truly soulful version, and (having no awareness of the original, as performed by the Five Stairsteps, as I figured out only tonight from Wikipedia), I wondered if I was having some sort of auditory hallucination - interpreting both our current circumstances and the music we were hearing in wishful ways which, objectively speaking, were wholly unwarranted.

And then we were at the door, surreptitiously peeking through it. And there was this old man there, the janitor, quietly mopping the floor. And he had a little radio plugged in on the counter behind him, so little it didn’t seem like that rich sound could possibly be coming from it, yet it was. And we just stood there, listening and watching.

He never saw us, but his presence that night somehow made us feel less alone and terrified. And a little while later our tickets came through, and we got the hell out of Fargo. (Needless to say, I’ve never been back.)

Since that night - most of which I still can’t write about, even though more than fourteen years have passed; it is to me as Dresden was to Kurt Vonnegut - I’ve heard the R&B original “Ooh Child” on several occasions, but never, somehow, the particular version that had played in our apartment earlier, which for whatever reason my girlfriend and I had bitterly argued over. Thus, while in that shelter in July of 1993, I wondered if I’d lost my mind at hearing the original for the first time, I later questioned my memory as to whether the cheesy remake I’d heard first was something I’d imagined. Because when we as human beings endure terror, every bit of sensory input passes through that terror’s filter, coloring it inexorably. In the weeks before we’d had to flee (with almost nothing save for ID, a negligible amount of cash, and the clothes on our backs), things were so tense between us, we would have fought over anything, real or imagined.

Finding this song tonight helps me to put a few puzzle pieces together. Maybe one day I’ll be able to write the rest of what happened that night, and over the ensuing weeks - which we did, both, survive, although not unscarred.

That idealistic “Ooh-oo child, things are gonna get easier/ Ooh-oo child, things’ll be brighter” lyric - with its apparently Providential timing and grace - helped to get us through the worst night of our lives. It wasn’t enough to keep us together forever (walking “in the rays of a beautiful sun”), but it served as a bridge, from the near-inevitability of a certain torturous hell (the trouble she was in, by all rights, should have gotten us both killed that night) through to a series of subsequent purgatories, before we finally split four years later.

It’s a magnificent song. Even when delivered by early 90s pop stars not heard from previously or since.

–

* Notice I am not currently listing ‘activist.’ That term would imply, you know, a state of being active, which, for reasons truly beyond my control right now (and which I did not forsee when I was embarking upon the Ohio conference, which I do have thoughts about that I will eventually share), I cannot presently engage.

** Translation: She had, on occasion, lived with black folks.

Somewhere in the overflowing boxes upstairs I have a poem, from which I can only remember the following two lines:

Revising poetry while driving
is not recommended.

Perhaps it should go without saying that I figured this out through direct experience; that is, I came perilously close to taking out a stop sign once, because the poem I’d been working on for weeks just couldn’t wait until I got back home for its latest minor revision. (Most of my poems go through a minumum of 20-30 drafts; each individual draft will undergo countless tweaks such as the one that nearly resulted in the plowing over of the aforementioned stop sign.)

This, in any case, is why I take such delight in the following excerpt from Ariel Gore’s How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead:

I write while I’m driving. This is probably rather dangerous. Worse than being on the cell phone, really. But I try to be careful. I write in my head and then I speak it out loud so I won’t forget and then I jot it down at red lights. This is why I do not take the freeway.

I should mention here that I’ve been reading Ariel Gore for years now, starting with her articles in the publication she started, hip Mama: the parenting ‘zine, but I have yet to get my mitts on this latest book, a situation I must soon remedy, particularly after the above excerpt, as well as this one: 

Everybody knows it because Virginia Woolf said it: You need money and a room of your own if you’re going to write. But I’ve written five books, edited three anthologies, published hundreds of articles and short stories, and put out 37 issues of my zine without either one. If I’d waited for money and room, I’d still be an unpublished welfare mom–except they would have cut off my welfare by now. It might be nice to have money and a room–or it might be suicidally depressing, who knows?–but all you need is a blank page, a pen, and a little bit of time. [emphasis added]

I needed to read this. Because the fact is, I haven’t had ‘a room of my own’ (much less money!) for nearly two decades, and it’s not at all likely that situation will be remedied any time soon. I have distractions galore; in fact, my distractions beget their own distractions, and so forth until my insides want to collapse; I am in the vice-grip of so many silent pressures and pressuring silences. Enough.

The direction of my life - and thereby, the direction of this blog - has got to change. When I first went online, I had a homepage where I occasionally posted updates that were directly relevant to matters of publication and craft; I’d announce readings I’d been invited to and publications I’d  be appearing in. I saw the internet as a tool like any other, rather than as a medium unto itself.

Since then, I’ve fallen in and out of love with blogging as its own peculiar form. One week will find me falling down the rabbit-hole of interblog wars and the like, while the next week I’m swearing off the whole mess (and usually, threatening to nuke my own blog in the process). Needless to say, throughout this torrid blog-affair, I’ve forgotten all about actually sending out work to existing (print or online) publications.

Well, fuck that. I have to come up with a means of embracing the available technologies without getting swallowed up in the process. The benefits of blogging are the same as its drawbacks: the instantly available audience, the capacity for developing community among readers and writers.  The commenting functions, link-exchanges, and pingbacks which facilitate connectivity between bloggers and their readers serve, often quite gloriously, to lessen individuals’ loneliness. This makes the blogging medium difficult to resist, but the fact is, works of more sustained narrative really require loneliness - or at least, a lack of dependence upon constant external validation, such as bloggers find in the form of site traffic statistics and, especially, comments.

In the blogging medium, nascent thoughts one might otherwise develop into fully-realized stories, articles, poems, or even books, become mere “blog entries,” blips in one’s ultimately disposable data-stream. Or so it seems, at least, when one has not yet mastered the art of balancing the separate demands of each form. Which, obviously, I haven’t.

I am reminded, now, of some fairly bold statements I made more than three years ago, right here on this blog:

I’m not going to prioritize publicity-mongering over my website’s content, any more than I will prioritize my website’s content over the actual books I am laboring to create: out of my own dire necessity, and a fierce love for the work itself.

Surely, in the three years since I wrote that, I might have created some actual books. But noooo, I’ve only been blogging (and sometimes, I haven’t even been doing that.) What gives?

Yes, I’ve had a number of material crises, from the loss of a certain job (under especially egregious and illegal circumstances) to a complete falling-out with my mother, such that I am no longer on speaking terms with her. There have been been physical as well as emotional health problems that have been mutually exascerbating. There has been palpable economic strife, and countless other stressors. 

But, really, so what? 

When I was a teenager, I had this poster on my wall, featuring a Zimbabwean proverb: If you can walk you can dance; if you can talk, you can sing:

What strength I took from this proverb at the time, I desperately needed; in fact, I would go so far as to say this notion helped to keep me alive. It resonates still.

I’ve been blogging since 2003, and writing for most of my life before that; surely I can also finish writing the books I’ve had in various stages of development over the last decade. If you can blog, you can write a book. Or at least, you can try, and you have nothing (least of all, a room of your own) to lose, so why the hell not?

***

To read more from Ariel Gore’s book, click here.

Reading today about the I-35W bridge collapse, I am reeling with memories. It’s been years since I left, but I specifically associated that particular area, near the border between St. Paul and Minneapolis, with freedom.

At the time, I was hunkered down with Lee at Job Corps in St. Paul, where the idea was to stay there until her ex-pimp who wanted her (and by extension, me) dead, lost interest in stalking us (or at least, became convinced that she wasn’t going to rat out said pimp’s criminal networks over specific murders in Chicago and Wisconsin about which she had knowledge). The place had the feel of a prison, with various of its practices modeled on corrections systems and/or the military… I can recall the signs up that barked, “Every day is inspection day!” and language like “KP” (for kitchen patrol).

But we welcomed it because it meant we were locked in almost all the time, and anybody who stepped on the grounds would be immediately descended upon by security. If anybody suspected us of using that place as a de facto battered women’s shelter (since of course none of the actual “feminist” battered women’s shelters would take us, as our situation wasn’t the standard hetero DV situation, and plus, we were lesbians) - or of us being dykes - their suspicions were eased significantly when I turned up pregnant, as a result of what had happened to me (involuntarily) at the notorious 410 homeless shelter in downtown Minneapolis right before we got into Job Corps. Sometimes we laughed about the subversiveness of it all - being two scrappy, radical young lesbian feminists using The Man to get away from The (even more overtly oppressive and murderous) Man. And meanwhile, miraculously growing a new life. (I could have had an abortion, but I didn’t want one. More on that here.) But mostly we festered in our respective post-traumatic states.

But there was one small bit of relief for me, when I managed to get a little side job as a housekeeper for a woman, Kathie Simon-Frank, who happened to be the director of academic advising for the department of Sociology for the University of Minnesota. I’d take the bus from Job Corps in St. Paul to Minneapolis and would set to work cleaning her toilets and whatever, then afterwards we’d end up talking about poetry and social justice and whatnot. An awkward situation, to be sure, but Kathie was a genuinely kind woman, and the fact that I got to - not had to - leave Job Corps once a week all by myself (in the process, getting away from Lee who was taking out all her terror on me*), in order to clean this nice woman’s house and have sane conversations that didn’t involve any of the underground insanity I was embroiled in, was a gift**. To the best of my recollection, the bus route I took didn’t specifically cross that bridge, but where Kathie lived was fairly close to it (within 2 miles), and today has found me scrambling for her contact information to make sure she and her family are okay. (I’ll update this post later with anything I learn… meanwhile I was very grateful to learn that a dear friend of mine, whom I actually knew from back in San Diego and who later moved to the Twin Cities, was not directly affected.)

I’ve been thinking today about these lyrics from an Indigo Girls song, Ghost:

And the Mississippi’s mighty
But it starts in Minnesota
At a place that you could walk across
With five steps down
And I guess thats how you started
Like a pinprick to my heart
But at this point you rush right through me
And I start to drown

And I am struck by how, for me, so much literally begins in Minnesota; the place where that bridge fell is like a nerve center for me, and now the whole nation as we look on in horror for the victims, hope for the survivors; I am haunted both because of my individual experience and because of this broader, collectively traumatic experience.

Those able to help please donate to the Twin Cities chapter of the American Red Cross.

*For more, see my poem “How the Fugitives - Two Women Writers - Tried to Love Each Other and Survive,” in Violence Against Women: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 6, No. 11 (November 2000).

**In a bizarre twist, Kathie later ended up being an adviser to Kelly Holsopple in her controversial report, Stripclubs According to Strippers: Exposing Workplace Sexual Violence. (Which, of course, later appeared in an anthology along with some of my own work, a fact I rather regret, but that’s another story.) Kelly, of course, was the plaintiff in the sexual harassment lawsuit against Evelina Giobbe (scroll down to ‘public domain’ subheading on this page) - a suit to which Lee and I contributed supporting documentation, since of course Lee was Giobbe’s former foster child, and she had lots of memories to share like being sent by her “wonderful anti-prostitution activist foster mother” on drug runs and the like, all the while Evelina crowed at how rad it was to be collecting money from the state for all her trouble - it was a better gig, she maintained in so many words, than actual, overt pimping.