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Earlier today I could not get enough of listening to Bikini Kill’s 1994 album, Pussy Whipped. Specifically, I had to hear Rebel Girl over and over (I even stopped to tweet this fact), as well as Alien She, which includes these lyrics:

…She wants me
To put the pretty, pretty lipstick on
She wants me to be like her…
I want to kill her
But I’m afraid it might kill me
Feminist
Dyke whore
Pretty, pretty
Alien
And all I really wanted to know
Who was me and who is she
I guess I’ll never know…

For reasons that will be evident to some of my longtime readers (though I can’t refer you to past explanatory blog posts, which is just as well because all that material has gone back into the proverbial cauldron for its eventual repurposing), these lyrics are searingly relevant to me. Due, I will simply say, to a woman named Lee whom I met late in 1992, shortly after I’d left Olympia for Seattle (with a New York art colony sojourn between), and following which the course of my life was violently and inexorably altered - as indicated, perhaps most clearly, by my official status, with law enforcement in Washington state, as a “missing person” in the summer and autumn of 1993 (although police in two additional states, plus the FBI, also wound up tangentially involved).

And even if those particular lyrics weren’t so immediately relevant to my history, there is also the touchstone fact that I had been in Olympia at the same time Bikini Kill was emerging. The riot grrrl scene was an alternate universe against which my own was being played out; many nights in late 1990 and early 1991 had found me standing guard for my sociopath girlfriend, Amy, who, without the slightest sense of irony, was spraying graffiti around town protesting violence against women¹. (Note: she was not only a serial batterer of her lesbian partners - see her hometown’s newspaper for crap she would still be doing more than a decade later - she also claimed to have a juvenile record for attempted murder.)

So, while I stood guard (the alternative to which was: trust me, you wouldn’t want to know), Amy would be spraying Dead Men Don’t Rape across the facade of the furniture store downtown. Then we’d go around a corner and she’d be hoping to attack another surface with her hilariously inappropriate sloganeering (which I came to regard as her preemptive strike against the credibility of the women she’d battered and raped; by attaining, under false pretenses, her “folk hero” status among the radical feminists and lesbians in town), out of nowhere there’d be some fresh new graffiti up, saying only Bikini Kill. And we had no idea what the fuck Bikini Kill meant (only later learned it was a new punk band, which would go on to define the riot grrrl genre), we only knew they were taking up precious wall space and really kind of pissing Amy off.

Despite the radical life-interruption that was Amy, though, it was, most substantively, the prelude to what would follow, in Seattle, with Lee.

Which is why, perhaps, this morning I struggled for what seemed an eternity to wake from a certain, apparently chaotic dream, the meaning of which I could not discern until I had physically written it out, on paper (as is often the case with me; it’s like, with the action of pen on paper, puzzles can be put together in very clear ways, even when, at first, I had not known there was anything besides chaotic and, most likely, meaningless fragments in play).

To read the full-sized journal entry, click here, otherwise you may be able to make out the words as they appear below².

Nope - the past still isn’t dead.

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¹ The Olympian ran something or another in some crime or public complaint column about Amy’s exploits (not that anyone outside the lesbian community knew who was behind the graffiti); ironically, she’d had been an employee of the same newspaper when I met her in October of 1990. (Hey Olympian: check your HR records, if you have ‘em that far back. I can also tell you about the security guard she met there, with whom she committed robberies - or at least, so she was given to boasting while drunk.)

² Re-reading the bit about Pearl Jam’s song, Jeremy, coming on the radio as I was writing it, I think, inevitably, of where I once lived, on Jeremy Street, in a San Diego suburb, when I was thirteen. Then I go read the Wikipedia entry on that song, and I learn that one of the song’s inspirations was a disturbed junior high school student in San Diego. Um, wow.

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.

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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.

CAUTION: Those of you who read me via feminist blogs (and are also really uptight) might want to run along now. For the record, my dropping the b-bomb here has nothing to do with gender; had the lyin’ ass individual who is the subject of this post been a dude, I’d be calling him a lyin’ ass prick (or something similar). Anyhow, you’ve been warned.
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Every now and then I Google various of my past tormentors, because apparently the initial torment wasn’t enough. Now it turns out that the woman, formerly my close friend, who, in Olympia, Washington (1991? 1992?), swiped from me (on Christmas Day no less, which I spent without seeing another human being even in passing, while seriously contemplating suicide), my one decent girlfriend¹ (which is a gross simplification of the situation, whose full explication would require a book-length manuscript, so cut me some slack), is now, I shit you not…

A therapist (cough, hack, wheeze, gag, hurl, giggle, snnnnorrrrk²) listed on (are you sitting down?) a website for polyamorists³ as a “Poly-Friendly Professional.”

An edited version of her listing:

[Name & Certifications Redacted]; [Redacted] Counseling; [Redacted] (at) [Redacted] (dot) com; [Redacted], Seattle, WA. 206-[Redacted], http: [Redacted]. Individual counseling available to people of all sexuality and gender identifications using talk and art therapy. BDSM, D/s, and polyamory folks welcome. Specializes in anxiety, depression, life transitions and PTSD. Insurance excepted.

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And since, in addition to being a petty, backstabbing, heartbreaking, lyin’ ass bitch [would that a video were available on YouTube for Fishbone’s song that got me through that travesty of triangulation], the woman couldn’t spell to save her damned life, I’m pretty sure the last bit of the listing, “Insurance excepted” isn’t a typo on the part of the website owner.

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¹As many of you know, I have had, throughout my (now long since past) dating life, the most extraordinarily bad luck with women. That’s not why my spouse of the last seven years is a dude - but considering my track record of ex-girlfriends who tended to fall somewhere along the spectrum from “sociopath” to “ruinously hateful life-destroying plain old meanie, with only the occasional redeeming quality,” no one would really blame me if I had specifically fled from my dashed illusions of lesbian utopia into the arms of the nearest Big Hairy Man for that reason. (And yes, he is a Big Hairy Man, but he’s good to me, and I actually do love him, so whatevs.)
² I am so suckerpunched by the hilarity of this situation that I am forced to make up words.
³ No offense to the polyamory crowd. I’m not dissing you, I’m dissing this specific lyin’ ass bitch.

(In case y’all were wondering, What’s up with the new header graphic?)

After weeks of teeth-gnashing in an effort to get my installation of the K2 theme to work, I’m almost happy with the result, including the addition of the graphic you are now seeing above this text (unless of course you’re reading this via the feed, in which case, go ahead and click through, I won’t bite).

The picture is of the pond at Kate Millett’s art colony for women in Poughkeepsie, New York. It was taken on or around September 11, 1992 (always a red-letter day for me), right before I had to leave Poughkeepsie, to return to Seattle and to an incredibly uncertain future.

This is why the ‘nonfiction novel’ in progress is called After Poughkeepsie (subtitled: The Patty Hearst Years). The moment captured in the picture above was one of my last before entering the first in a series of hell-rings that would nearly cost me my life.

The yellow notepad contains a journal entry from that day, which I may eventually transcribe and post. The book below is my own copy of Kate’s book, The Loony Bin Trip. (Would that this detail were not material to the stories that followed… alas, it’s all too apt.)

Here, then, is another picture from that summer. I was helping to paint the farmhouse, when asked by another resident, the late, great Janet Melvin, to stop what I was doing and act fabulous.

It was a charmed summer, in its way.

From Poughkeepsie

Ultimately, everything I write is an effort to get back to this, the state of grace I once found natural. From there, my task is to do what Kafka recommends, using one hand to ward off despair, while with the other hand noting all that is still visible amid the ruins.