feminist blogs

Some time ago, I tweeted, “I really need to find a way to sort out which of the voices in my head I should be listening to, and which I should ignore.” Lest anyone imagine I was joking, I present the following, composed, yes, entirely on my blackberry this morning (with a few edits/link and file insertions) - or, shall I say, afternoon - after long, fitful dreams into which I could not, finally, collapse until well past dawn (the insomnia thing is killing me lately), because it was too important then, for me to wait for my computer to fire up. (Which is happening a lot lately. I swear I’m doing 80% of my writing entirely on my phone, and when I choose to share it, posting directly from there to my Medium Sized Blog - relative to the bloated largess of this one - on Tumblr.)

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Image: Tears spilled listening to Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers & reading email, taken with the crap phone I had back in June.

Pertains to a different album by The National than is referenced here, but image is still apt.

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Some notes on waking, early one Saturday afternoon

Why go to your shrink, when you have the song that’s been stuck in your head for going on 72 hours, which, even though you love the voice of the man who sings it, is getting excessive, so finally you Google the lyrics and then freeze, with a certain horror of recognition, on reading this (on your blackberry, while you are still on the potty)?: If I were a spy in the world inside your head/ Would I be your wife in the better life you led?¹

For context: In 1990, when I was first with my future husband (whom I’d first met when we were ages 3 and 4, respectively, and again in 1984, when I was 13), we had a romantic date at this Mongolian and Japanese restaurant in a strip mall, anchored by a K-Mart².

When we got our fortune cookies, his said “Friends long absent will be returning to you.” (Through the seven years following - through each of our insane girlfriends, which in my case included decidedly non-awesome confrontations with the law - he kept it in his wallet, along with a picture of me he’d taken of me, in the yard of my now-estranged aunt.)

We laughed then, on reading his fortune, because that was how it had always been with us: rotating in and out of each others’ orbits.

Then I opened mine, which read, “You and your wife will be happy in your lives together.” We laughed at that too, because I was entirely out then as “bisexual, erring on the side of women.”

Coming back to him, seven years later, was, among other things, an admission that my fortune had been very, very wrong.

It took awhile for us to figure out that perhaps our fortunes hadn’t been so much “wrong” as “switched.”

Even so, I’ve had moments of ambivalence, in which my brain takes leave of my body, aimlessly wandering its “less traveled” roads. (Or, perhaps more accurately: “roads traveled extensively, but finally abandoned out of dire necessity.”)

And that’s when I need to get back into my own head, cutting through the static of last night’s drinks and dreams, to figure out what that persistent melody is trying to tell me, so I can pull myself back from the detour, and remember “this is the person I married, for all kinds of good reasons stretching far beyond the necessity of abandoning those other failed, landmine-infested roads, and I truly love him.”

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¹ The song is Bitters & Absolut, by The National (from their eponymous record). You can hear it and read the lyrics here here, and/or buy the mp3 from Amazon. No, there’s no affiliate link giving me any kickback from purchases (not that I couldn’t use kickbacks! See pathetic note in column at right, unless you’re reading via RSS!), because I’m too lazy to figure that shit out.

² Said mall having been built over the literal rubble of one of my numerous, vaguely remembered childhood homes. Only clear memory from that address, on or near Williamsburg, Virginia’s Waller Mill road: when the stepfather I had for a brief period stepped on a nail in the yard, which may or may not have gone all the way through his foot, but there were weird and, considering his artistic rages and otherwise erratic behavior, nonsensical and scrambled allusions to Jesus that, still, I somehow associate with that moment. (And a further tangent: Since the restaurant still exists, we celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary there, in 2007.)

In case you don’t hear much from me over the next month, the reason - I mean, besides “the election, my children, and drowning in bills” - is as follows (as previously announced here). Word count shown here reflects only my first two days’ work, still quite short of the ideal average of 1,667 words per day (one “wins” if one crosses the finish line by November 30 with at least 50,000 words - see more on NaNoWriMo here), but cut me some slack, this is my first year!

Again, word count in screen capture is as of late Sunday night. Work in progress title is tentative. For the live page at NaNoWriMo, see the “Novel Info” tab here. And if you want to support the organization by pledging a buck or more (modest, first timer pledge goal for me is $1 per every 1000 words written), click here.

This time last year, I gave up meat. (Although there were two instances in which I broke down and had clam chowder, one moment when I accidentally had some vegetable dip I didn’t realize was clam-based, and then, after one particularly stressful day when it seemed that all was lost, I numbly chewed through one piece of pepperoni pizza. For the record, it was disgusting and I’m not interested in doing it again, no matter what misfortunes I might encounter, unless the alternative is actual starvation.)

This November, I am giving up sloth. For years I’ve kind of made fun of the idea behind National Novel Writing Month, on the theory that all one could possibly produce in one month - the race ending once you’ve generated 50,000 words - would have to be crap, because I believe in extensive self-editing.

Well, that’s all very fine and good, but before you can edit, you really do have to get out the words, and what the hell, I can’t knock what I haven’t tried yet.

Plus, I turn 38 this month - the age at which one of my literary heroes, Thomas Wolfe, died. I really do lie awake at night, worrying that I’ll die before I get my work done - it petrifies me.

And I need something, anything, to draw my attention away from the madness that is these waning days of the 2008 Presidential Election. (Capsule version: Damn right I’m voting for Obama, and Damn right, these women speak my own mind when it comes to the bizarre internecine warfare that has erupted among feminists with regard to the candidacies of Hillary Clinton - whom I still respect enormously, and have great hopes for - and Sarah Palin - who can kiss my fat feminist ass. See also, of course, the Feminist Majority’s page on supporting Obama: feministsforobama.org)

Once Obama wins - and he will win, barring extreme fraud on the part of the Republican party - I should be at least 5,000- to 6,000 words into my manuscript. I’ll take a break to cry with relief and hug my children and my husband and my neighbors (even my Republican neighbors, if they’re willing)… and then I’ll get back to the book.

You may notice the “Firstgiving - Sponsor Me Now” button now in my sidebar. (And also in the bottom of this post, for the benefit of those accessing my posts through a feed reader.) If you click on that, you’ll be taken to a page with information on how you can donate to the literary organization that coordinates National Novel Writing Month in honor of my effort. (I’ve set a modest fundraising goal: $1 for each 1,000 words I’ve sworn to turn in by November 30th - so even if $1 is all you have to spare, that is sincerely welcomed, and will be taken as inspiration!)

Be aware, however, that donations received through my far-right sidebar under “Groceries and Rent,” first put there when my husband was laid off from his job six months ago (yes, he is still looking, and yes, thank God, we’re still eligible for Unemployment benefits, but that won’t last forever), would not go to the literary organization discussed here.

Donations to either the organization or to our family are welcome but also totally unnecessary. What would be awesome though? Fuss at me from time to time (I accept “fussing” in comments, email, text messaging, postal mail, carrier pigeon, whatever!) to make sure my ass is still on track with this NaNoWriMo thing.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Oh, and lookie! This post has 563 words so far. Now see, if I’d been pouring those words into the book instead, I’d have about a third of my raw, mostly unedited verbiage quota made for today!

But as it is I need to catch a few winks now, then attend to children once they’re awake, then squeeze in some serious writing time… somewhere.

Wish me luck!

While avoiding packing for my trip to Greensboro tomorrow (though - crap - it’s now 4:11 AM, so let’s call it “today”), I ended up watching a movie called Heaven which I found interesting enough to look up on IMDB, leading me to a distracted series of link-clicks until I ended up at a completely unrelated (and true) story from the late ’60s, which completely blew my mind.

Speaking of my mind, here’s a (rather embarrassing) glimpse at how mine operates - I am drawn to stories involving high-stakes adventures, wherein one seeks catharsis after experiences of trauma, from the (actually fairly implausible) story told in Heaven, to the story at which I finally landed later on, through this chain:

1. IMDB listing for Heaven, to
2. IMDB listing for co-leading actor Giovanni Ribisi, to
3. Wikipedia listing for the same dude (who, it turns out, is a Scientologist), to
4. Wikipedia entry for Scientology, to
5. Section on the organization’s past illegal activities (where I read about how they tried to ruin the life of a journalist named Paulette Cooper, whom they’d targeted as a so-called “Suppressive Person” for her 1970 book, The Scandal of Scientology), to
6. Wikipedia page for Paulette Cooper (where I was interested to note that she’d gone from fairly intense works, like the one that got her into trouble with the Scientologists, to “fluffier,” co-authored books like The Most Romantic Resorts for Destination Weddings, Marriage Renewals & Honeymoons), to
7. A story by Cooper about the Scientology fiasco, hosted on her own site, to
8. A story hosted at the website for the Ocean Liner Museum about how she’d once been a stowaway.

Paulette Cooper, in 1967

Here, finally, is the paragraph from that story that grabbed my attention (in light of details I’d read on Wikipedia about her early life, to which I’ll return momentarily):

…And now, for some armchair psychiatry (aka “projecting”):

Why, indeed, did she do it?

As someone who knows some of the more bizarre contours of intergenerationally as well as directly acquired PTSD, it’s impossible for me to discount another aspect of her story, mentioned in the ‘early life’ section of her Wikipedia page: that she was born in Auschwitz, where her parents were murdered. She is compelled to act out a high-stakes drama involving intense hypervigilance and hiding, passing among others, surviving without access to basic resources, etc - as her parents may have attempted, but failed to do (while her own life was spared, so she has that ’survivor guilt’ thing happening as well).

On that cruise ship, though - a site of incongruous splendor, for its being a site for a Holocaust survivor’s subconscious exercise in re-enacting trauma - she could at least feel assured that even though she faced certain dangers (indeed, her risk of being sexually assaulted is a primary focus of the piece), she could never be in the same ‘neighborhood’ of risk that she was, on some level, remembering.

This, then, is the only interpretation that makes any sense to me: That her adventure was a creative, albeit risky way of scratching at the lingering ‘itch’ left behind for years - sometimes for decades, or even generations - following extreme trauma.

I could be wrong, of course - hers is not my experience to judge, whatever (wildly uneven) parallels I may find between certain aspects of our experiences.

Of course, it is not lost on me here that I strongly prefer to analyze others’ traumas, rather than my own. (Distancing, anyone?) Or that I went from compulsively watching a film about one kind of catharsis-seeking-after-trauma, through a random assortment of links, until I found a completely separate story of catharsis-seeking-after-trauma: lather, rinse, repeat - ad infinitum.

What is most sad, here, is that on any given day, I go through scenarios much like this. Maybe I’m reading a book instead of watching a movie, or talking with a friend about his past trauma rather than compulsively clicking through link after link until I find some random trauma narrative online to which I can, on some level, relate. The stories are different, but they always repeat some element of the catharsis-seeking-after-trauma script.

Of course, the more constructive thing for me to do would be to get back to writing my own stories, because they will either corrode me to death from the inside, or they will be allowed out, and perhaps even be permitted to do “good” of some kind out there in the world.

In my defense, I have been doing that much more lately - but the closer I get to the really, really difficult material, the more I have these episodes of freakout behavior, wasting hours upon hours soaking in the variously helpful and distracting narratives of strangers.

I’ll close with some especially apt George Orwell:

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows, that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention.

(qtd. in The Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays, and Reportage, p. 395)

In the middle ground between tweeting and blogging, there is, apparently, tumblr-ing - so in case people had wondered whether I still formed thoughts outside 140 character increments and the occasional hellishly long post here, this is where I’m doing that. It’s nothing much, but it’s more than nothing. If I were a smart girl, I’d stop here and figure out a way to integrate the tumblr posts with this space. (Okay, it’s less an issue of ’smart’ than it is one of ‘I just don’t have time to research that,’ but whatever.)

Drive by life update, then:

• Still pretty wrapped up in election news (to wit, frequent page refreshes of http://fivethirtyeight.com), and yes, still refusing to blog about it (other than peripherally), because I exist in a precarious state balanced between hope and rage which I find difficult to manage. There is more I will write about the election, once it’s over. Right now it’s just too volatile. Suffice it to say, like most thinking feminists, I am supporting the candidacy of Barack Obama. (Note: Comments taking me to task on this “thinking feminists” bit will simply be deleted. Scurry off to your own blogs and whine about what an Obamabot you think I am, if you find that sort of activity rewarding.)
• I recently read an extremely thought-provoking book, David Carr’s Night of the Gun. Highly recommended, will post a review as soon as possible.
• In between tweeting, tumblring, politics-obsessing, and reading, I’ve also been getting some mad writing done. Nothing very blog-suitable, but stories. Mostly from the early 80s, with forays into the mid-90s when I can bear the anxiety of doing so. (Even more so than the early 80s, the mid-90s were rough.) Also, I’m finally sending out work again. Go, me.
• Was thrilled to finally meet baby Sagan, son of my friends Joriel and Ben back in Richmond for a visit this week.
• The kids are doing great. The eight year old is as wildly energetic as ever, and writes quite imaginatively for her age. (Has some attention span issues though. Wonder where she got that from?) Meanwhile, her straight-As earning, honors program-enrolled teenage sister attended her first homecoming dance last night, and looked spectacular, as did her equally nerdy boyfriend, of whom I completely approve. (So far. A mother can never be too vigilant, right?)
• Wishing a happy birthday to Claudine O’Leary, the smartest person I know on issues confronting youth in the sex trade (among many other difficult topics), and a dear friend.

That’s all for now.

So I’ve changed my blog title from Square One (which had only been intended as a placeholder anyway, after my blog-nukage back in April) back to one I used for a while in 2006, Southern Discomfort. I guess it’s the only title I ever truly loved, so there you go.

At the time, I explained the title thusly to the lovely, brilliant, insanely (and usually inappropriately) funny savoytruffle:

…For one thing, [Southern Discomfort is] the first book I ever read by Rita Mae Brown. (My, but that was interesting to my fourteen-year-old eyes.) For another, I am, in fact, named after a whiskey heiress (the granddaughter of the founder of Southern Comfort) - yet I can’t abide by the stuff; my sociopath ex, Amy (the one with the record for attempted murder) rather ruined that for me.

Another title I considered was Scotch and Prune Juice, for this quote from Sarah Schulman’s The Sophie Horowitz Story:

Lesbian liberation and the Mafia mix like scotch and prune juice. You don’t try it unless you have to.

But I figured that might be a tad obscure, and/or that it would imply a fondness for either scotch or prune juice, when indeed, I am a fan of neither.

What I am a fan of, though: stories. (So one of my own stories, which indeed involves a “lesbian liberation” narrative as well as a fleeting interaction with Mafia - curiously, around the same time I last saw Kate Millett - must eventually be written.) The more improbable and true, the better.

Which is not to say I don’t love fiction, too. I just have enough true material to work with that it’s impossible for me to imagine working in that medium, even if I do borrow from fiction’s forms.

…while I am battling insomnia.

Now that I’m a few days into serious work on a story (notes toward which may be found here), I find myself reverting to an old habit: breaking up the intensity by jumping up every so often, wandering aimlessly through the house until, inevitably, I find myself in the kitchen. Then I end up eating something, usually not because I’m hungry, but because it’s the activity that most obviously corresponds with finding myself in a kitchen. (Needless to say, this isn’t a particularly well thought out process; I’m in something of a fugue state, largely unaware of my actions outside of what I’ve been feverishly writing.)

It strikes me that this is a good way to get fat again, fast. (Or fatter. In recent years, about 1/3 of the weight I’d lost in 2002 has crept back. It’s sneaky like that.) This is not so much an aesthetic issue as a health issue; for instance, the heavier I’ve been, the worse my asthma has been. So yeah, I’m not particularly interested in gaining weight now, even if it is something of a relief to finally be back in a decent creative groove again.

Here’s the thing. Most writers have oral fixations, right? Certainly lots of us smoke. Outside of the one month I resided with Evelina Giobbe in St. Paul, MN and was literally compelled to do so (can you say “long story”?), I never have, and I find the habit personally abhorrent (even if it wouldn’t aggravate my asthma).

Okay, so some of us drink alcohol. Certainly, I like to drink sometimes, but at this moment it’s not the most feasible habit to take up (not least of all because I’m not much interested in becoming an alcoholic).

There’s coffee, of course, but even I can only drink so much of that; as it is, I take in enough caffeine every 24 hours to kill a moose. I drink either espresso or extremely strong coffee, so it’s concentrated - consumed in smaller amounts, less frequently - and thus doesn’t really satisfy the oral fixation thing, which is a sort of weird, nagging constant. (And drinking weaker coffee in greater quantity would be yucky; drinking decaf, somehow sacrilegious.)

Well, there’s herbal tea, right? But… eh. Something about being raised (at times) in hippie houses seems to have burned me out on the phenomenon.

Water? Doable, but boring. I need something that at least offers a modicum of stimulation outside the stuff I’m writing so I don’t go nuts from it. (If you knew how complicated the piece in question is, you wouldn’t doubt this.)

Besides foods which would fatten me, that leaves… what? Chewing gum? Okay, but the problem with chewing gum is there’s nothing you have to do with your hands at the same time as you’re chewing. (Go ahead and giggle… weirdos.)

So having ruled out food, alcohol, smoking, coffee, tea, water, and chewing gum, I am left with… flossing, unless I can think of something better.

Thoughts?

Last night, after hanging for awhile at Randy’s, my husband dropped his cell phone from his motorcycle, while going (he claims¹) 65 mph. Evidently, after paying a toll on the Powhite Parkway, he’d forgotten to re-attach the Velcro strap of the bag in which both his change and his phone had been stored, so a little while later, the phone tumbled out.

This won’t be the highest quality image of what’s left of said phone, as I’m too lazy to find my own camera and deal with memory cards, etc. I used my phone to capture the image, which takes shitty pictures relative to, well, my husband’s, which had included a 2-Megapixel camera:

(And no, he hadn’t uploaded any of the 50-odd pictures and videos from the phone to Sprint’s website before the phone went boom. Fuck.)

Naturally, he was pretty bummed by the time he got home (not least of all because Mark had texted him while he was at Randy’s asking what he was up to; Jeff had replied and was awaiting Mark’s reply at the time the phone took its fall). Whereas I’d been hoping to be next in line for a new phone under our family plan (we have a few phones on staggered 2-year contracts, one contract of which has expired, making us eligible for the ‘new customer’ price on a new phone with contract renewal), that’s clearly going to be deferred for awhile, as Jeff’s phone is irreparably damaged.

So, late last night, as Jeff was checking out his replacement phone options, he decided to look at our last several months of bills, to investigate some overcharges and other irregularities.

That was when he made the startling discovery that in the last billing cycle, the total number of both incoming and outgoing text messages from my phone alone (which, thankfully, is on an unlimited text message plan) exceeded 5,000.

That excessive message count is chiefly owing to my use of Twitter, via the following functions:

1. Having SMS alerts set up for those users I find most amusing (the collective lot of which can generate more than 50 text messages a day);
2. My own rather obstreperous output;
3. The fact that I’ve gotten sucked into an elaborate ritual of “favoriting” others’ messages (due to the obnoxiously addictive wonder that is Dean Allen’s Favrd, a kind of “Greatest Hits of Twitter”), which one can do by sending a text message “fav username” to Twitter, which will attach the requisite gold star to the the last update of the user in question, which effectively counts as one’s “vote” for that message, so that if at least two others’ “fav” the same “tweet,” it will appear on the aforementioned website; and
4. Sending and receiving direct messages (via the Twitter command “d username”) to and from individuals, which can be quite handy. (For instance last night, when, at the grocery store, I was able to read an email from my pal FarkerPeaceboy on my phone. On my phone’s gmail app, it’s far easier to read than reply to messages, but I could, at least, send him a quick reply via Twitter’s direct messaging function.)

So yeah, all that adds up to a lot of goddamned messages.

Which got me to thinking about something scary: Word count.

Only two days ago, I’d added this “tweet” of Merlin Mann’s to my favorites:

Because I read tons more nonfiction and poetry than fiction, I’ve not read much of King’s outside of his memoir On Writing. But holy crap do I ever respect the man’s work ethic. (And for that matter, Mann’s; he’s a goddamned machine of lucid, socially and technologically relevant creativity.)

So between the insane number of text messages sent and received on my phone, and the Mann/King anecdote about writing productivity, I was not-very-gently reminded of the fact that outside of Twitter (and only the occasional, generally lackluster blog post), I haven’t been producing shit in terms of actual word count.

Yes, I have literally thousands of pages of work towards several books, and there was a point when I was actually sending out work to, and actually publishing in, some worthwhile print- and online publications².

But my output in recent months, outside of Twitter, has been negligible.

Of course, there’s a reason for that: The inherently fragmented (140-characters-or-less) medium of Twitter is well suited to the fragmentation of my own stories. There are things which, outside of the generally inane jokes that occasionally land me on Favrd, I’ve been able to articulate within that medium which I’m not sure I’d have had the strength to do outside those paradoxically liberating confines.

For example, I’m absolutely not ready to write the whole story behind this anecdote:

But I am glad I could get that particular fragment out of my consciousness, where it had been (as it were) poisonously lodged. Its articulation is one step in a greater process of assembling a much more sustained narrative. It is a piece of my puzzle, the dimensions of which would be overwhelming but for the ability to realize its individual elements, one by one, even if it has been at an excruciatingly slow pace.

So last night was a wake-up call: I really need to start making the transition from fragmentation to sustained narrative, even if (no, especially since) that terrifies me.

Thus I made what will be my last post³ to Twitter for at least the next few days:

Not because that particular work-in-progress is especially relevant to the more obviously dramatic meta-narrative of my past which includes crap like bullets. (Although, now that I think of it, it does involve one armed private investigator/former City of Richmond cop, now that I think about it… hmmm.) It’s mostly a fun story, a means for me to re-enter the serious, sustained creative process without scaring myself to death (and thus, retreating back into the fragmentation of Twitter). And it has enough relevance to matters of cultural and political concern to me (for instance 9/11, the Iraq War, and Islamophobia) that I won’t feel (despite its sillier details, concerning my variously sordid experiences working in Richmond restaurants) that I’m wasting my time on something frivolous.

Those who follow me will likely doubt my capacity to restrain myself both from posting to, and reading others’ assemblages of characters (where the meaning of “character” is both literary, referring to those whose actions are described in our creative works, and computational, referring to a “grapheme-like unit or symbol,” of which Twitter limits one to 140 in any given message), on Twitter.

And for good reason, since, almost immediately after sending in that last tweet, I compulsively checked my feed to see if my message had successfully posted. It had, and already there was one response from my pal Abby:

In response to which I allowed myself one final direct message for the night:

And now, I have a story to write.
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¹ I’m always suspicious he drives faster when I’m not there to fuss at him. Which, because I am petrified of motorcycles, I never am when he’s on the bike.

² My best writing concerns things of which I’m least proud. This, perhaps, explains why I stopped sending out work, right as I’d started to publish well.

³ I’ve totally stolen “see if I don’t” from my pal Jane at Hillbilly, Please.

Yesterday, the ever snarkful (& smart, so, what - can I now invent ’smarkful’ in addition to ’snarkful,’ also not an actual word?) Simon Goetz offered the following, um, pearl of wisdom with regard to incipient Fourth of July celebrations:

Guys are prematurely shooting their colorful loads of Freedom all over the sky’s face. It’s scary and gross.

That effectively summarizes my feelings about the gaudiness factor of the present holiday. I hate its noise, its slobbering drunks running around with variously dangerous explosives, its crowded parking lots and jockeying for fireworks-watching spots at various parks (when I cannot find a way to plead out of the activity, and/or I’m guilted into going because the kids love it and they’ll be sad without me there), and, of course, its inevitable July 5th sob stories about unsupervised children who blew off their limbs the night before.

On the other hand, there’s the inherent sweetness of the way my teenager woke me up this morning: “Happy Independence Day, Mom!”

Which got me thinking about some stuff.

As I’ve mentioned recently, we’re moving. Only next door, but it feels much huger than that, because it involves going through the accumulated detritus of a decade, giving stuff away, figuring out what’s important, making proactive decisions about what happens next.

When I moved here, I was getting out of an extremely bad situation. I didn’t have the luxury of making such proactive decisions about the way I did want to live; I was only clear on the matter of how I didn’t want to live - how I couldn’t live, for one more damned moment.

A poem I wrote around then (ca. 1998), addresses some of this quandary. It’s called How the Exile Came to Love the Foreign Land. It concerns, among other things, the complexity of sexual identity, the ways in which our “choices” can be simultaneously products of bona find “agency” and of coercion (even where such coercion is entirely accidental and circumstantial). I had been living for years as a lesbian, and I was making the radical life change of going back to men (or rather, to one man, with whom I’d been lovers during the summer of 1990), and my reasons for doing so ran the gamut from genuine desire (despite my best efforts to compartmentalize and disown my previous heterosexual experience - and specifically, mine with him - I’d never stopped loving him) to dire necessity (I had to get myself, and, more importantly, my child, out of our miserable, dead end situation in Minnesota, and I had nowhere else to go). It wasn’t, shall we say, the smoothest path via which one could hope to enter into what would eventually (in 2001) become our married life.

And because everyone I’ve shared it with (including, most generously, the above-referenced Simon’s conspirator in copywriting and much more, Ainsley Drew) keeps telling me it’s some of my best work, and since my slacker ass still hasn’t made any sincere effort to publish it (or anything else, since 2004 when I stopped sending out work, just when I’d started “publishing well” - which is another topic for another day), I won’t use the whole thing here. But I will use an excerpt, from its closing stanza:

Guarantor of my asylum:
I wish I could be uncomplicated
adopt your customs without question,
happily digest your food.
All I can pledge is my allegiance
rendered honestly
with a broken tongue.

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As I finish this post (begun hours ago, then deferred while we went to a July 4th party, then came home, where on the basis of a developing migraine, I begged out of going back out again to go see fireworks and took a nap instead), my husband is out with our girls and some of our friends, and judging from the sounds outside, the fireworks have finally stopped. They’ll be home soon, and I’ll be happy to see them, glad as I was to be able to pull away from them for part of this evening, to disengage from the annual ritual of explosives which still holds little excitement for me (though in past years, I’d done my best to “just go along” with it, and many other essentially alien customs, instead).

It’s not that I’m ungrateful for what we have here. But in recent months, I have been coming to terms with the fact that I’m not entirely happy with how I’ve been living. So I’ve been taking certain baby steps toward my own assertions of independence, from going back, as I did last November, to being a vegetarian (so, no longer simply “[adopting his]customs without question/ happily [digesting his] food”), to embracing new music (when I married an especially well-connected metalhead, I eventually came around to certain hardcore genres which had been alien to me in the past; this is not to say I’d lost my hunger for other sorts of sounds, most recently as evidenced by my falling wildly and almost inappropriately in love with The National), to traveling on my own to North Carolina every 4-6 weeks to visit my best friend from my early high school years (we write well together, and have a brilliantly good time). Individually, these steps may not seem very substantive, but cumulatively, they represent something of a sea change for me, long overdue.

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And as I wrote the above words, “a sea change for me, long overdue,” two things happened simultaneously: midnight arrived, and my husband came home with our daughters. (Apparently, there was quite a delay with the fireworks, something about a baseball game going into extra innings? Whatever.) Seems fitting.

Now, when I tuck my tired kids into their beds, I’ll be able to say I hope they had a fantastic Independence Day, without any ironic twitching. That, to me, seems worth some very sincere celebration.