Stick to your post

I am increasingly intrigued by Facebook posts. Status posts, mostly. In an earlier blog I bemoaned the illusive, non-tonal world of texting. No nuance, no nothing, no answers. I think I am beginning to feel that way about Facebook.

Imagine that, a writer who despises the written world of emoticoms and IDKs and ROFL...you get the point. Insta-chat is hell, again because you just never know what the f*ck the chattee is really trying to say.
I guess, because I am approaching stubbornness like a fly moves to sh*t, that I'm just too old fashioned for these cold, technological devices which are supposed to convey major feelings like pain, joy, love, and sometimes hunger. The end result of texts and chats is basically indifference. Dangerous, unattached indifference to the world and the people living in it.

I like flesh. I like seeing the corners of eyes crinkle at fart jokes. I prefer the warm breath and the mangy morning hair to any beep I get on my phone. I am human, and so, because I live this mortal stasis that I was born into, I love human things.

However, and this is a big however, I do enjoy reading my friends' Facebook status reports. Again, they are obtuse, but there are some funny ones. They fall into loose categories; melancholy, obtuse, hysterical, and, my personal favorite, plain ridiculous. Who knows if these people posted it for the moment and forgot or continue to carry these odd thoughts for 19+ hours. I mean, "I love donkeys", what does that mean? Just seeing it is absurd and, of course, you gotta wonder...Also, "My nipples are hard" is a favorite so is "Checking out my new trim."

It's a field day out there people! Some of the comments I want to post would get me fired from any job and put on a list, I'm sure. But, man. I love, too that my 13-year-old nephew has changed his relationship status to "single." How the f*ck can you be single when you can't even drive or do laundry? Who knew?

FYI, as much as I am amused by the status updates there are two things you should never, ever, ever post because they are so annoying I want to PUNCH MYSELF in the face when I read them; song lyrics (especially cheese-ass love songs about pain and breaking up) and loooong spiritual paragraphs about what epiphany you had that day, and posts about being bored. That drives me nuts!

Poop is acceptable, especially when referencing food poisoning or a new baby in the house, so is self-deprecating sarcasm.

But never post the stripped down truth. That is crossing the line. That comes with weight and suddenly your little secret smile becomes a thing to glare at through aquarium glass.

But don't post that either.

The uproar

I had a friend in college, she was from Puerto Rico. She was about 5 feet tall on a good day, and at the time that I met her she was still a little round thing because the semester before she was nearly to term with the child she was carrying.

We met in a sociology class. Oh the irony...both of us waited until senior year to take a research credit, and here we were, last semester of undergrad, in a room full of bright-eyed freshmen who still carried backpacks to class. By senior year I knew to bring a toothbrush, condoms, and Maker's Mark. Priorities people...oh, and the Zippo my bother gave me. Maria had my number from the get-go. She saw the indifferent look on my face, smelled the booze that was still oozing through my pores, and knew, for some strange reason, to whisper to me in Spanish while I tried not to puke on my desk, either out of boredom or being hungover.

She told me about her one true love, Alejandro, with whom she had the baby. I told her every detail of my tumultuous engagement to a Pakistani physicist, and the subsequent rebound attempts at love. She listened to my crude tales, I was honest with her, had nothing to hide, and she just laughed at stories, mostly of the flagrant alcoholism and getting laid by men from every continent; how this one never drank, this one didn't have forks, that one cried like a woman...I told her everything. I had not yet learned, or perhaps I had dropped along the way, the idea that shame was something I had to keep with me. I did not believe in shame then. It was something other people had that kept them from having fun, from living.

Maria called me la jalea, the uproar. When I told this to my daughter tonite (just the uproar part, not that she, Anna, was indeed a product of all of this interesting living) she laughed so loud and with such honesty I started laughing.

"Mom, Mom, that's perfect!" She licked the chocolate ice cream from her messy lips.

"Why? Do you even know what it means?" I watched her new earrings glint in the dying light of the sun. She was almost a woman then. We were almost women together.

"Because, it's so true. You're a brainspeaker. Whatever happens in your brain goes straight to your mouth. Every single time."

"Is that a bad thing?" I licked the ice cream bowl we were sharing.

"It is if you don't like the f-word." At this I laughed.

"You are correct, Anna, and I'm working on it."

"I know. Besides, every time you use it, it's in some funny way. Just don't use it so much, Braintalker!" She howled at her little joke.

I wish Maria could have seen this. That there I was 10 years later, with the child of one of my bad men, somehow content, laughing about being utterly inappropriate like children often are.

I will, of course, continue to at least try to curb the f-bomb. A small price to pay for having left shame on the curb for the others to pick up.

Brain shells

Remember that old, cheesy story about footprints in the sand? You know, you can find the narrative on some shellacked slab of cheap pineboard. A picture of the sand with one set of footprints...they sell them at carnival stands and country fairs, and I think that my late grandmother had several variations of the story hanging in her tiny house, next to the velour Elvis rug and minuscule spoons from different states.

Yes, I agree, that is a story for another time.

In my more cynical days (I know what you're thinking, holy sh*t, she was actually MORE cynical!?) I thought that the footprint story was a load of religious garbage. The cheese factor was too much to even comprehend.

What so, you suddenly look at your life that YOU have been living and suddenly you're supposed to believe that the time where you see one set of footprints, the times where you thought, no, you wished that the Great Earth would swallow you whole just so that you would not have to face another brutal day in this f*cked up coil, those are the times that god carried your (my) sorry ass? Who in their right mind would stop by a pile of sh*t on the beach and decide to pick it up and lug it around until it transformed into something of worth?

Exactly, right? Apparently, god, Mother, Father, the Great Spirit, whatever you want to call it, is quite the mechanic and picking up junkers is just part of the fun of the job. Of course, this still does not account for the misery that you (I) dragged ourselves through, knowing we were entirely alone, waiting for the sand that we were sobbing in to finally be engulfed by the merciful sea.

No such luck. The great hobo of fate managed to sling all of that weight over his shoulders and keep walking down the beach, whether we liked it or not. That's not to say that we were carried gingerly or with any kind of maternal care. I'm fairly certain being lugged around was not Cinderella's carriage ride, but what the hell, it's better than nothing, right. We're breathing, right?

With reluctance, and still cynical, I have to believe that this is all true. Last night (actually all day yesterday) I fretted and prayed over my son. The boy who doesn't even sit still long enough to eat ice cream lay lethargic for the entire day, rattled by fever and dehydration. I finally took him to the emergency room, carrying his limp little body in. He was shaking with fever.

I was shaking with fear. It was an alone moment. Very dark, very scary, very decisive. You know what happens then...I began to beg. Just a small voice repeating the same thing over and over again, "Please heal him. It's not time yet. Please heal him. Let him be ok. I'm not ready."

Over and over and over. Because nothing else exists in that moment. Lucian survived, I survived. We finally went home, both crawled into bed exhausted, and listened with fear and some comfort to the other breathing in the dark.

The 49 percent

I had a massage yesterday. Oil, hot rocks, deep tissue, you name it, I had it. The masseuse was a tiny woman, probably half my size, clothes the size of sandwich bags. But, man, did she have some tough little hands. Of course, as always, my neck was of great concern to her. Or maybe even grave concern.
"Oh my god," she said, slathering jojoba on the damaged terrain of my non-sloping, non-feminine shoulders, "are you a lawyer?"
I laughed through the ripples of pain shooting up through my head. "No, I'm a writer."

"Ahhh." I could feel her nodding her head vigorously. "A writer. So that means you're broke most of the time and you can't get out of your own way."

"Exactly."

I live my life twice. First in the actual events, second, in the retelling of fragments of events. It is in the retelling, fictional or not, that there is a grain of hope. No sprout, no water, just a grain needing earth to germinate. At times, it seems dishonest, writing a character from my real life. All of the true details are there; hard working, hard living, Marlboro smoking, angry man with a past that no historian would want to uncover. He (and this could be any man in my family, and some friends) is hopeless in the real world, unable to get out of his own f*cked up way. But in a story, maybe in a closing chapter, he redeems himself, even just a little bit. Maybe he quits drinking, or maybe he brushes his daughter's hair or tells his son that he's proud of him.

Maybe if I write it, it will happen.

You are probably gagging by now, on the naivete of this chain of thoughts. But why not live in the maybe, the part of maybe that exposes a horizon much deeper in color and texture than we ever thought possible in real life. Why the f*ck not?

I was ripped out of my thoughts by another question. Apparently, in a half sleep and high on peppermint oil fumes, I said something about never wanting to be married again, about how I was bad at it, and how I am VERY done wanting to have children.

"So, are you a man-hater?" She set a scalding rock on the back of my neck. It sizzled for just a second.

Hmmm.

"No," I said flatly. "I love men. I understand them. More than I do women, sometimes. It's the ones who've got no b*lls that I have trouble with. The ones with no integrity, the ones who don't keep their word."

"Well, maybe you could write the gutless ones into better people."

"I wouldn't even know what they would look like as stronger people," I said with a tinge a bitterness.

"Maybe they would look like you," she laughed.

"God, I hope not," I said.

The fine line

I'm not sure if it's a result of becoming a bit (note: I did say a bit) older and maybe wiser (again, a bit) but I am having a little trouble distinguishing between what I think is stupid and what I think is brave.
Who knew that there was such an intimate relationship between stupidity and bravery?

Stupidity is the act of having little to no quickness of the mind, due esp. to lack of sense or knowledge.
Bravery is the act of facing something courageously, and enduring it.

Now, you tell me that these two aren't intrinsically related!? It would seem you would need one in order to have the other, at least in any circumstance that involved major risk, such as, let's pull from an old classic, falling in love.

Yeah, you heard me. I went there; falling in love.

More specifically, falling in love at my age after several disastrous relationships with infidel academics (oh yes, people, I did find the panties under the bed, condom wrapper, you name it. I guess he thought that since I was 5 months pregnant I couldn't see the floor), one self-immolating marriage, and groping around at the bottom of a bottomless swamp for the last 10 months. Giant cliched walls have gone up, there are no doors for folks to get through, the windows are too high to really see what's going on inside, the mama bear is foaming at the mouth trying to protect her cubs at all costs, food is scarce, you get the point. In a place like this, love is a luxury.

So is stupidity.

And yet, we do it. Over and over again, stepping over the burning damage of the last wrecked boat (maybe reciting a Blake poem), looking for the near-open rose on the battlefield. And this is where stupidity takes a front seat...or bravery. It is the thing that tells us, when we see the rose, our scars throbbing as we approach it, to set down the gun. To take the helmet off in deference to the sight before us. To untether the magazines from our chest and breath.

I guess, in that moment, it is neither brave nor stupid. What determines either is what happens directly after that. If you get 45 rounds to the chest, I suppose it's stupidity. If sniper fire whizzes by your head and the Claymore goes off just near enough to splatter mud on your face...and then you retrieve the rose, it must be bravery.

The risk, every single time, is in the not-knowing.

Turning the light on

I took my father to "A Prairie Home Companion" at Tanglewood last night. Now, my experiences at Tanglewood have almost always involved negotiating the lawn, rain or shine, hefting coolers of food and booze, warding off selective swarms of mosquitoes (and sometimes drunken men in golf shirts and boat shoes who have no idea that I'm stone sober and won't even look at a guy without ink).

And, of course, illicit activities in the maze, always.

I've never had a problem with my Tanglewood experience. The masses sit on the lawn and get loaded and watch their kids run around, the rich people sit in the shed on the hard ass wooden seats and thank god they are protected from the rain.

Well, last night, the tables were definitely turned...sort of. Dad and I were dressed the part, that's for sure. He even had the boat shoes ('course his red/brown leather skin and corn cob pipe detracted heavily from middle class milk toast guy). I wore a linen skirt, how "summer in the Berkshires."

But, we are who we are.

First stop on the way up to Stockbridge--the Clown. Yeah, you heard me, we hit McD's right out of the starting gate. After downing a million fries, half of which ended up on the floor of the van because of a "sharp" turn Dad took on the straightaway, we swung into Housy, quick stop at Aberdale's, and voila, Schmirnoff lemonade for all. Sipping the sickeningly sweet poison, we both lit up, he his pipe, me one of my last cigarettes ever (I am cold turkey as of tomorrow, god help us all) and he talked of a time, in the now ungraspable past, that he was young, and reckless, and lived just for the sake of filling his lungs with air.

After the stories were told (many of them I've heard at least 59 times, one for every year of my father's life), after we shifted into our wooden shed seats and guffawed at Garrison Keillor's wit and the melancholy chords of The Wailin' Jennys. After the show I finally took off my 4-inch wedge heels and strolled injun foot around the grounds, after all of that mixing and pretending and remembering, my dad turned to me. He looked almost like he felt sorry for me.
"You know, Chole, what the bitch about your thirties is?"
"I can probably guess at a few things," I said, taking a ridiculously endearing drag. "What is THE bitch, though?"
"In your thirties, you finally might know what you want. The bitch of it is, it takes so goddamn long to get it."
I didn't dare ask him how long. He's almost sixty. I didn't want to know. I still don't.
I told my friend the Sisco kid about this little piece of wisdom. He stopped short in his tracks, and suddenly, his face became wise like my father's. Leathered and wise.
"Well yeah," he said, casually flipping his cigarette in the air, "Because in your twenties you're just fumbling around in the dark, you don't even f*cking care what you run into, or that there's bottles all over the floor. But in your thirties, you're still f*cking tripping on things, bumping into things, the only difference is the light is on, and you still can't make your way around the room without hurting yourself."
I nodded my head, took a very, very long drag and shook my head at the truth of it all.

My choice

Yeats, in his more meditative days wrote "The Choice."

"The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story's finished, what's the news?
In luck or out, the toil has left its mark;
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse."

I am at a place where I am forced to choose. And, knowing what I know of myself, right now, on this quiet, humid morning, I know what I've always known.

I choose the life, every single time.
I've tried the other, oh trust me. The work...I work all of the time. Day and night, my mind goes to the work. But my heart, my heart is never there. It is always with the bloody, messy, stained, broken, and glorious life that is put before me every day.
The choice is not an easy one, or maybe it is. I relish freedom, I breathe the air in so deeply these days that it is part of my human diet. I cast out lines for hours, never disappointed that I haven't caught a thing because with me is the breeze, the radiating sun on my skin, the sound of birds, the feel of mud between my toes.
I guess that is why I have always been the wild child. The one who strips down to nothing in the middle of the woods and submerges myself into a cold pool of water. The one who pulls over to the side of the road and writes poems on bank receipts, the one who laughs to the point of pain.
The wild child.
No one envies me, I can tell you that. They see the chaos of my life, they see the children in varying states of skin color and cleanliness, barefoot, eating cookies and perusing the knife collection at the farmer's market, and they must think how crazy is their mama.
Not crazy. I've just made a choice; the empty purse.
Leave the day's vanity to other folks. They'll never have to clean the mud off their feet because their floors are too nice for mud. They'll never have to scramble and scrounge to make a meal.
And they'll never know that the cure for all ills, all evils, all brokenness, is right outside, waiting to heal them.
I choose the life.