The Daily Write: All over the place (September 7, 2012)

All over the place

One step in and her exposed shins were covered with fleas. Not one or two, which would have been bad enough, but so many that she had patches of moving black dots all over. But the worst was the basement laundry of the 19th century apartment building on the lake. Swarms of them.

"It's not like we can just up and move, Cindi," her girlfriend argued with both sympathy and anger in her voice. A perpetual victim, she was always under attack from forces outside her control. And in this case, no amount of toxic and smelly flea-bombs would do the trick, not when the horrible itch-causing bugs were hopping in from the dingy carpet in the hallway.

Mariel turned away to scratch her leg and looked at their combined piles of crap. Cluttered, unorganized, crowded. They didn't have enough money between them to buy any decent furniture. Cindi was a college student and Mariel a low paid Office Manager working for a non-profit in San Francisco. And when they finally found an apartment that they could get without a credit report or references, it wasn't like they could turn it down. Plus, it had great art deco details.

It wasn't until after they moved in that they realized the building was infested. At first Mariel thought it was their cats who had brought the fleas in. Her third trip to the laundry changed that.

"Let's just leave and go to a motel for a couple of days," she pleaded, watching the welts grow on her legs and spread to her arms. But Cindi shook her head, "Hon, you know we don't have the money for that, and besides, they all want credit cards. And what would we do with the cats?"

"Fuck it then. I'm just going to live in the shower!" Mariel felt herself going somewhere bad; she couldn't help it. "I hope you're going shopping soon, we don't have any god damn groceries!" She swiped a clean towel off the pile on the now out-of-style four poster bed with decorative iron bars and slammed the door. Looking at herself in the mirror she felt disgusted: distorted face, blotchy skin and a curled lip like an angry dog.

She turned around, slid open the shower door and started the water which took five minutes to get warm, then turned back to herself in the mirror and got undressed, cursing at her own stupidity.

The Daily Write: Paradoxical (September 6, 2012)

Paradoxical

He wrote about my "perspicuous" transitions. I was impressed, although I had to look it up. Actually, I still do. I never remember what it means, but I always remember how it makes me feel. He was a tough teacher, Alan. He would hold the door closed if a student was late so they couldn't get in, and during lectures, pace around our small table breathing into the space over our heads and at our backs.

I once got up and paced along with him, never being the kind to accept power for its own sake.

The class was 1/2 Marxist Economics and 1/2 Method Acting. Really. And both were hard. For the former, we read tomes and wrote papers I'd have a hard time explaining now. Not without looking up words and concepts. I used Jaggar's Feminist Politics and Human Nature as my primary text and felt smart for doing so. I kept the book for years afterwards to marvel at my own notes in pink and blue on almost every page, in the margins, underlines, across the top. And the latter, we rehearsed, hard. He critiqued, forced that fourth wall up so we couldn't see through it, and demonstrated his own prowess by having us all come up to Ft. Lewis to watch him perform a lead in Death Trap.

Alan wasn't a particular funny man, and he was hard pressed to laugh at himself, which made him more difficult. His seriousness permeated everything he did and he expected the same from all of his students. But, we were a special group, drawn to this odd combination of theory and practice, and we kept up.

When I started college with only a G.E.D., I felt inferior. When I made it through Alan's class with a great evaluation and Marxist theory falling out of my mouth with ease, I felt smart and accomplished. He may have been an asshole, but he was a bad ass and I was better for it.

per·spic·u·ous/pərˈspikyo͞oəs/

Adjective:

(of an account or representation) Clearly expressed and easily understood; lucid. (of a person) Able to give an account or express an idea clearly.

The Daily Write: Explain your clothes (September 5, 2012)

Explain your clothes

The crossing guard had frizzy mouse-brown hair that came down to her shoulders. She was pudgy and short with wire frame glasses and a big smile, but not so big she'd let any of them kids get away with something. Not on her watch.

She acted like she owned that crosswalk at the intersection of a busy road that had old trucks and sedans driving to the left and fancy sports cars going straight ahead to the country club houses. Didn't matter to her where any of the kids lived. Except me. I think she took a liking to me more than most. It was on accounting of my unfortunate circumstances I heard her whisper once to Mr. Tuvvy's secretary. I was standing in the door to the office trying to get a whiff of the ditto machine ink one more time before I went to class. The popular girls, Martha and Vicky, got to work the machine around and around, cranking it to make flyers for the parents. I wished I could do that, but I didn't think to ask.

I'll admit, it made me a little sad when I heard them talking about me. The secretary was looking up from her cat's-eye glasses on a pretty chain at the crossing guard who was leaning in close over the secretary's desk. The worst part is when the secretary looked out of the corner of her all-knowing eye and saw me. She froze like a robot and that made me freeze and then I was so scared I wet my pants. Only I was wearing a dress and the pee dripped down right into the doorway.

I didn't have an extra panties at school and cause I was bigger than most all the other girls, no one had any extra clothes they could lend me. The crossing guard went to the janitor's supply closet and got out an easel that he must've been fixing cause it was wobbly on one side and she told me to sit down while she aired out my panties.

I should have been more embarrassed but I was so happy to be in the office listening to the clicking and zipping of the secretary's dark green typewriter. It had a funny ball on it with letters that moved in jolts while she put in the words she was reading from a steno pad. At least, that's what I think it was called.

The crossing guard said she had an idea and that she would be back before the end of school. First she gave me a shiny dark apple with only a couple of bruises right off of Mr. Tuvvy's desk! Then she got me a carton of milk from the lunch ladies and, when the secretary was putting a master onto the drum of the ditto machine, she slipped me a 100% authentic butterscotch candy. I giggled as quietly as I could and then only unwrapped it when the secretary was sharpening pencils and lining them up in her special desk drawer.

When Mr. Tuvvy came back he looked at me kinda strange-like, but then his secretary pinched her pretty lips together and shook her head at him and he just walked right into his office like I wasn't even there! Right before the first last bell rang, she even let me turn the drum myself onto pale green paper - it was a flyer about the school holiday arts and crafts fair. I felt so proud that I got to do it all by myself!

I did get kinda worried when it was almost time to go. I could tell because the big hand on the clock started freezing and jumping like a cricket being stalked in tall grass. But I shouldn't have thought twice about it because do you know that lovely crossing guard came back in with a pair of genuine purple polyester pants that she said were her granddaughter's outgrown? She even put on two heart patches, one on a knee place that got worn down, she said, and one on the backside just cause it was pretty.

The Daily Write: Mistakes were made (September 4, 2012)

Mistakes were made

Ignoring the signs and eschewing Western doctors for midwives was probably not the best idea in my case being that I was 35, fat, didn't exercise regularly and had PCOS. Of course, none of this was clear to me until years later - after the pain of a difficult birth, a baby in the NICU and that ultimate insult, the lack of breast milk. Nothing could have prepared me for that. Not in my wildest dreams.

It's not that I grew up a hippie. Not like on a commune. That was my little brothers, after I left my mom's home. It's not that we went to traditional healers instead of doctors, or that my mother birthed any of us on her own hearth. It's not that my life was a made-up TV version of free love and wild children. The love didn't seem to be all that free, the children were sometimes wild and happy and sometimes in trouble and often scared. Yes, we wore capes made out of cut up sheets and Indian tapestries. Yes, our friends had a huge Great Dane in their jam-packed house (stuff, people, drums, pots, beans, ganja). Yes, the men tended toward Afros or long hair and the women smelled like patchouli.

But it wasn't the way they show it in the movies -stupid, mindless people who have given it all up to live, love, fuck and be free. Our mothers struggled, raised kids, some went to school, some worked at jobs. Me and my mom cleaned a house once a week in the summer. They had a great surname and a perfectly neat house. Nothing really needed cleaning which made it all the more fun. I got to wash the windows.

Mom and I did yoga together with the Golden Temple yogurt yogis in their brilliant white turbans and simple cotton clothes. I hated it. Too easy to get contorted into a painful position while the adult women looked on in envy, wishing themselves to be young again. Me and mom also did an Om group, that was more fun - making the sound reverberate like a magnetic force, humming tones, zapping, high pitched electrical charges.

But summers always came to an end. My brother and I always had to get back on the train and leave to go south, one reality melting into another as the miles went by. Once we hit Dunsmuir, it was all over. One world gone, another begun. From warmth to utter coldness. From the smells of hot outdoor  festivals held on dirt roads covered with hay and teeming with barely clad people to the austerity of everything in its place in an upscale bedroom community.

Hard times and longing are what make me appreciate those relics of my childhood now. I appreciate them for what they were then and for what they gave me. But sometimes I try, based on a little nostalgia, a little fear, a lot of fantasy, to be something I'm not. It was like that with the birth. I don't know how I thought I would pull it off. It's not like I got together with goddessy women before hand and did a belly cast. It's not that being a woman with earth mother intentions could have prepared me for that terrible, ripping pain at the small of my back. Suffering is not noble. Pain doesn't come naturally. And neither did my baby.

I should have known it would be so. I spent my young life between worlds, not fully in them.

The Daily Write: A beautiful stillness (September 5, 2012)

A beautiful stillness

He stood in the crowded lobby all in black: boots, jeans, button down shirt, some kind of dark shawl, hair, sunglasses. The cane he leaned on, a Gothic black and silver, expensive. Women rushed to the restroom to freshen their million dollar faces and others swarmed around each other playing the game of who's the bigger celebrity.

Because he was so still and everyone else was so fast. Because he was quiet and they were loud. Because he seemed calm and almost careless with his fame. He was appealing in the same way a crucifix might be, or a statue of the Buddha. It's almost like he stopped time, or at least stopped me as I looked upon him with interest, wholly unseen with no danger of being found out.

Back in the auditorium after the commercial break the buzz was all around me, from the A-list sitting up in the spotlights at the front to the B-list in the rows immediately around me. That I was one row forward of Kathy Griffin seemed less significant than it does now that she has recreated her celebrity as someone who is never first choice.

Me, I got there for one reason only, money. Not mine, of course. The corporation's. I was representing a high profile sponsor, and although I, myself, was on the C-list on the company side, I had fun pretending to be somebody important. Not quite high enough on the food chain to avoid being kicked out of Madonna's closed rehearsal (we simply moved upstairs and slid into the dark balcony), but integral enough to the event to have earned a place at the wildly extravagant and globally televised private affair.

Everything about me, of course, was wrong - too eager, too fat, too poorly dressed, too self-conscious, too uncool, too unconnected. Still, it was fun to watch the buzzing and imagine for just a second that I was one of the bees.

The Daily Write: Photo #6 (September 1, 2012)

Photo #6

It was the last time I walked straight into a plate glass window, the last time I lived on the water and the last time I dug clams. I probably haven't fallen in love with my best friend again since, nor listened to Anita Baker crooning "You Bring Me Joy."

The house was an old oyster processing plant built over the tides on creosote soaked wooden pilings on the Puget Sound. Down a steep gravel and dirt driveway lined with evergreens, around a bend by a rambling red house and at the very bottom next to the beach, the house was nothing short of a miracle. L shaped, two separate places - one for me and my roommates, and one inhabited by my landlady, a painter, and her cranky old man. Our  house, the one I lived in with various roommates over a two year period, had two living rooms, two bathrooms, three bedrooms, two wood stoves (our only source of heat) and a small greenhouse I used as a bedroom my first year there. Lying under the glass during a Northwest downpour was like being in the middle of a storm on a ship, or so I imagined.

Things got bad sometimes there, the way they might for any college student struggling with schoolwork, friendships and unrequited love. But then there was the salt water tide coming in and out, sometimes gently and sometimes in a stormy cauldron of inlet waves. On a clear day, Mt. Rainer hung in the distance of the horizon over the edges of the trees. On a rainy day, one just knew it was there.

The beach was made not from sand or rocks, but millions of weather and water bleached oyster shells. In the sun they were almost too white to look at, on a dreary day, they reflected the dark clouds. And out on the dilapidated dock, no more than a few pilings and some boards, cormorants would pose still, wings spread, sunning themselves on warm days.

The second year we were there, my friend and roommate and I filled the old rowboat next to the deck with dirt and planted flowers with names like Fried Egg, Lobelia, Allysum. She taught me about flowers and I made her laugh. A golden time.

The Daily Write: A new way (August 31, 2012)

A new way

Squinting at the screen without my glasses, willing myself to see. Easier than getting up to clean the smudges. I don't have many wrinkles, but the ones I do seem to be related to the lifelong squint. Between my brows, in creases on either corner of my eyes.

I also have a perpetually raised eyebrow. I think it makes me look incredulous. It certainly doesn't allow me to blend in. Hard to hide the arched look, even with huge face-obscuring sunglasses.

These things are unlikely to change. But telling myself I'm going to make today the day I start exercising again, and then getting all the way through the long day without having broken a sweat - well, yeah. Nothing new there. I'm not one for New Year's Day declarations. I do like making an audacious commitment. Easier when I've got something to prove. Less easy to do day in and day out without the big goal.

You'd think living a long and healthy life would be enough, but that's not as immediate as raising money for the SF AIDS Foundation, or the Women's Cancer Resource Center. Problem is, these days, everybody and their mother is participating in a charity event, and every third person has a Kickstarter campaign. We've become inured to requests for sponsorship, and accepted that this is the only way to fund urgent causes. But too many, too much - especially in an election year when every other email is a strangely casual call for $13 for Obama, which naturally I give, out of fear for what happens otherwise, all the while bitter that money is the be all and end all.

I find it ironic that I'm exhausted by doing nothing except viewing and responding to, or ignoring pleas for action. Everything these days seems to be between the finger tips and the squinting eyes. The body is almost immaterial.