Square One

Earlier this evening, as we were driving home from a visit to my in-laws, I thought it would be funny if I posted this pathetic but true-to-life tip on Twitter:

Lifehack: Can’t afford repairs needed to pass inspection? Make sure you have washer fluid. Pass cop, wash windshield, sticker date obscured!

Within about ten minutes of sending that message, my cell phone rang. It was our houseguest, who had been borrowing our truck. He asked for my husband, so I handed the phone to him, then watched as Jeff’s facial expressions moved through various phases of alarm, and thought aw, fuck, what NOW?

Here’s what he was alarmed about:

Thus, my follow-up ‘tweets’ (1, 2) upon arriving home:

Fact: If you have 2 vehicles (one w/ valid inspection, one not), & you tweet about the one w/out the inspection? Guest will wreck other one.

ALSO, the vehicle that gets totaled (almost exactly as you were tweeting about the other one) will have just had $600 worth of repairs done.

At least the Henrico County cop at the scene did not find our friend (the houseguest who was borrowing it) at fault. (And, most importantly, he wasn’t hurt. Freaked out and terribly remorseful, but not hurt.) The insurance situation is still going to be a mess though.

Oh well, at least my husband’s unemployment checks finally started coming in.

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* UPDATE, TUESDAY JULY 22: And now the Jeep’s transmission has died. So other than my husband’s motorcycle (of which I am mortally terrified, and have never been on; nor have I been on any motorcycle in approximately a decade), we’re down to zero vehicles. No, I’m not kidding.

Last night, the second we’ve spent at the rental next door (we have until mid-month to give up the keys to this one), I had a fairly unnerving experience. I was cold, and my extra-warm comforter that has seen me through more than a decade of love and trauma was in the dryer. Probably, I’d reasoned at 1:30 AM, it was dry by then, and also wonderfully warm, so I’d hopped out of bed and went down to the basement to retrieve it.

At which point I looked at the northern basement wall, just past the dryer, and observed an approximately foot-long (including tail) rat scampering away from the dried soups which had been stored on our shelves down there.

After issuing the requisite blood-curdling scream, clearly while I was not at the height of my powers of articulation, I posted the following update to my Twitter page:

OMG there’s a motherfucking rat in the motherfucking basement of the house for which we just signed the motherfucking lease last week. FUCK!¹(link)

followed, after a bit of reflection (albeit still in a state of panic) by:

This isn’t psychologically transporting me back to experience of dealing w/ my hateful, schizophrenic grandmother’s rat-infested home AT ALL (link)

We’ve contacted the landlord, but as of this writing (7:47 PM) still haven’t heard back concerning what they intend to do about the situation. So right now, I’m attempting to wrap my head around the fact that we are heading into Night 2 of cognizantly cohabiting with motherfucking rats. And yes, I actually did consider moving all the furniture back into the old house, and or sleeping on the floor there until the crisis resolves, but it would be a logistical nightmare; also, the kids don’t know about Mr. Furry Disgustingness in the new basement, and I don’t need to infect them with my panic, so my solution right now is two-fold: 1) Raiding my old stash of clonazepam, reserved for only my most serious panic episodes, and 2) writing about it (while hoping today is not the day my also-fairly-high-strung teenager decides to read my blog).

And here’s the funny thing. A long time ago, I’d drafted a specifically rat-relevant blog entry which, if it ever was actually posted, it would have been years ago, at my very briefly anonymous blog, “Queen of the Bean” (where my love for caffeine, the bass player from the Butchies², and assorted mental health issues were discussed). In any event, the text file in which I found the draft has a last-saved date of December 15, 2005.

Here, then, are my metaphorically rat-specific ruminations from a few years ago:

I’ve taken the laptop with me to bed, with the idea that given its weak ass battery, I won’t be able to write for long, and so there will be some brake system to keep in check my typical inclination of late: to forgo sleep in favor of writing all night long. My will to do this is formidably strong, even though, by all rights, I should not (at least at this moment) possess it, given my very few hours of sleep last night, the long, wearying day that followed, and the fact that it’s approaching 1:00 A.M. of the next day as I begin this.

I had made a credible effort toward slumber, but upon becoming horizontal, my brain had begun its usual racing around its own self-defining tracks. I’d been batting about some stray thoughts about this process: embarking upon this recent effort toward maintaining some conscious awareness of my mental “features” (let’s be nice and not call them “impairments,” shall we?), ala the diagnostic categories of ADHD, PTSD, GAD, and now (are you tired of the inscrutable psychological acronym game yet?) this tentative diagnosis of underlying bipolar disorder (as discussed with shrink today), albeit a variety within the less extreme range of the spectrum (perhaps BP II, or this cyclothymia term that I have lately been puzzling over).

And one of these batted-about ideas was the notion that I have begun to feel like I am my own personal lab rat; that I am creating certain obstacle courses for my own use, then blindfolding myself, then running around the various courses in a mad panic to get out. It all seems so goddamned self-indulgent. (Though at least with this blog not being in my name, I can desist with the usual pattern of self-condemnation: that anything I write, particularly when it concerns the inevitable stuff around inner life, that it is all mere self-aggrandizement.)

And then I laughed out loud (poor husband: he is used to such unexplained, late night outbursts from me), with the following phrase ringing in a distinctly operatic (yet off-key) fashion, in my head: “Rat! Torturing my BRAIN!”

What I was recalling was a certain poem by the inimitable and wondrous Sharon Olds. It goes like this:

The Try-Outs

“Rat! Torturing my BRAIN!” is the aria
my mother sang, trying out to be a singer
in a downtown theater. All month, she had practiced,
“Rat! leaping out in sharp coloratura
from that mouth that drew back from kissing my father,
her mouth I kissed as if it were sacred,
“Rat!” suddenly in the pantry, and then the pause, then
torturing and my run together in a
slurred mutter, then that radical, stridulating
high, off-key note, “BRAIN!”
–this was how a woman tried
to enter the world, Rat torturing my
brain vacuuming, rat torturing my
brain doing the dishes, atonal
shriek like choir gone wrong, or as if
the housework, itself, screamed, matter
and dirt-on-matter squealing, the dust-rings of
Saturn grating on each other. Backstage,
the folds of a massive curtain, and the mothers were
going behind its lank volutes,
one by one, and trying out,
Rat torturing my brain, I could tell
my mother by her pitch, about an eighth of an
inch below the note, and by
the way my skin tightened, and rose, and I
cried, when she sang. I would stop making
the paper Easter basket, and shudder
till another mother sang. At least I thought they were all mothers,
those grown-up women, although I was the only
child, there, cutting strips of
construction paper in the bad light
down at the base of the blackout aurora,
cloak of a potentate, where you wait
to be born, where your mother prays to be famous.
I never wondered just how the rat
tortured her brain, I cut out bunnies and
chickens and stood them up inside a basket
by bending them hard at the ankles, and taping
their feet to the floor. My jaws moved
with the scissors, chewing - it was a sort
of eating, that making, a having by pouring
forth, hearing from the dark the soprano
off-key cries of my kind.

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Naturally, the very fact that the self-made rat scampering about, past the midnight hour, in the self-made torture chamber of my brain had reminded me of the poem, next forced me to go rifling about upstairs for the book in which I had first read it (Blood, Tin, Straw, New York: Knopf, 2001, pages 67-68), because I knew that I would have to transcribe it, and, well, now I’ve done that, and my battery is on empty and I should have taken my fucking Ambien three hours ago but I didn’t, so maybe I can get in a few solid hours of sleep tonight, in spite of rats… torturing my brain.

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¹ In response to which one friend stated, “I’m glad you took the time to tweet that. I wouldn’t have the presence of mind to do that,” to which I added the clarification, “Well, first I screamed my head off.”

² Title of that post was, if memory serves, 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. (Someday I’ll dig it up and retro-post it.)

Found in the farthest corner my underwear drawer, amid the ruins of the recently excavated bedroom (as we’ve been in the process of moving to the more-spacious rental next door): my shirt from Olympia, Washington’s first ever Queer Pride march (of which I was a primary organizer) in 1991. We put the damn thing together so quickly (the idea having been hatched one night while I was talking with my roommate, the filmmaker and AIDS activist Tod Streater (RIP Tod, I miss you every day), about 3 weeks in advance of Seattle’s Pride event, when we recalled that at 1990’s march, there had been enough of an Olympia contingent that we could have had our own.

So we threw it all together in less than three weeks, all the while terrified that no one would show up for fear of being, I dunno, murdered by loggers? (Olympia, it then seemed to me, was about 1/3 uber-liberal college students and/or musicians, 1/3 state legislators and workers, & 1/3 loggers and related timber-industry folks: for sure, a curious mix.) There was barely enough time to secure the requisite permits, much less have T-shirts formally made, so in the living room of The Dreary Biscuit (the house I shared with Tod and a few others), some of us got together before the event and made these shirts ¹ using a stencil and some spray paint type stuff. (I can’t remember if the idea was Dana Schuerholz’s or that of another of my roommates, Judith Samuels/Kahan, but they were both there and actively involved, and, along with Dana’s partner Sarah Wright, also covered the event for This Way Out.) We didn’t even have adequate supplies there, because the shirt I got was a size small, and uh, well, I have boobs, so to make room for everything I ended up cutting off sleeves and turning it into a raggedy-edged tank top.

The police estimate for the number of attendees (none of whom were murdered by loggers, although I did get some death threats via voice mail in advance of the event, and I found one of our hastily put together posters with a bomb threat scrawled on it) was in the 300 range; some activists in attendance put it at 500; I’m sure the truth was somewhere in between. In any case, it was incredible to have been a part of that moment in history.

And I’m happy to say that while I left Olympia, the annual Pride celebration I helped to establish did not; the legendary Anna Schlecht, among others (she was also one of the speakers at that first event, was there at the only formal planning meeting we had time to hold, and convinced huge numbers of people to attend; it could not have been done without her) has helped to keep it alive; see the website for Capital City Pride for more.

(Many more stories from that march to tell when I’m not still in the midst of packing insanity!)

¹ Loosely based on the logo for Olympia Beer. Which utter swill few of us actually deigned to drink, but hell, it rhymed with Queer, so how could we not make use of it?

UPDATE: An excerpt of this post was picked up by a really cool Olympia community blog here, check ‘em out.

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.

So, as I have griped previously (no surprise that it should be in a post concerning a specific book), we are moving. Yes, it is only to the house next door (same landlord, has a bit more space, better insulation, etc.), but damn is it ever stressful right now. Particularly for me as I try to weed through the 1,000+ book collection I have amassed over the last decade at this address. In the last 48 hours, via the “keep your stuff out of landfills at all costs” project, Freecycle, I have given away something in the neighborhood of 300 books. Of my efforts to organize the surviving volumes, earlier this afternoon, I remarked on Twitter:

Screw alphabetical order. Books shall have 2 categories: ‘Yucky’ (sad/scary nonfiction/reference) & ‘Yummy’ (best of fiction/memoir/poetry).

(and then, later:)

(And don’t remind me that there’s plenty of crossover between the categories! Today I have *zero* tolerance for ambiguity, despite the bio¹.)

So, as if I don’t have enough diversions that enable my slacking off on the packing, I thought I’d take a moment to distinguish what I mean by the “Yummy” and “Yucky” delineations. Mind you, I only had my crappy camera phone with me when I snapped these shots in what will soon be my new office next door (also: what appears in the two shots still doesn’t include all the books, even after the purges of the last two days). I’ve made some little notes on the Flickr pages (click through to read) for some titles of note.

Books that are yummy (click through for notes on individual titles):

Books that are yucky (click through for description below picture; photo’s too grainy to really make out any of the titles, which is just as well, but my reasons for classifying them in the “yucky” category are best explained on the Flickr page):

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¹ At the moment, my bio on my Twitter page reads as follows:

Suspiciously tolerant of ambiguity. Owner of “colorful” history. Eviscerates sacred cows. Sometimes devastating, sometimes funny. (NOT for the faint of heart.)

It’s been a weird week. Sunday, I saw what was, perhaps, the best show of my entire life: The National (playing, as it were, at the Richmond venue called The National). That show deserves its own post (delayed though it may be), but what I want to convey here, as efficiently as possible, is what happened afterward.

Namely, I kind of fell apart, for a laundry list of reasons I won’t elaborate on here, except to say that for me, extraordinarily awesome moments are often followed by the sense of getting bitch-slapped by the Universe (sorry, I mean Universe). Also, I become excruciatingly aware that certain of my (mostly verbal) excesses can attract strangers, while alienating friends.

That’s always going to be a hard thing for me to wrap my head around, but on Monday, after deciding to go on a week-long hiatus from Twitter (where most of my excess verbiage gets spilled), I started keeping a running list of things I wasn’t “tweeting” (in the peculiar parlance of the medium).

Perhaps not surprisingly, the list of things I wasn’t posting there became far more unmanageable than if I’d been posting them as I went along. In a way it was good, because while I have certainly erred on the side of non-self-censorship on Twitter, there were some things that were really freaking me out (some of them devastatingly sad, others just as devastatingly - and inappropriately - hilarious) which even I wouldn’t have been comfortable with posting publicly. That stuff had to go somewhere, or I was gonna lose it.

I made it all of two days into my intended week-long “hiatus” before realizing it had been rather ridiculous of me to even try. So, after a few friends had seen the crude list (crude in the sense of raw, but, yeah, there was certainly the other crude, too), I came back, I’m pretty sure, for good. I hope that in doing so I don’t alienate or overwhelm the people I care about most (on and off Twitter), but if that does happen, I’ll be a big girl about it and just deal.

And now, thanks to my pal Mogrify (@mogrify on Twitter, main website here), I have discovered Wordle, a tool via which I can share with you (at least a visualization of) the 74 things I didn’t post to Twitter. Without, you know, actually saying what all those things were, and causing all sorts of undeserved discomfort for the people I love.

Here, then, are some of the relevant words that arose (from which y’all had best not infer any particular thing or things)*:

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* You can also click here for a larger image with easier to read words.

Walking my dog today, while feeling especially weighed down by impossible questions, I slipped back into a mode I haven’t much occupied in recent years: what can only be called prayer.

If asked to explain my faith, I could only tell you, entirely in earnest, that it is first and foremost inexplicable. (Because it’s faith.) And that there is a level at which it feels specifically sacrilegious to so much as try. I could tell you that I am influenced by paganism and Buddhism and Christianity (most specifically, Quakerism), but this, to me, is also like trying to explain my musical proclivities. I listen to everything from Nina Simone to The National (going to a show tonight) to Queen and Lamb of God and Ella Fitzgerald and Otep and Maria Muldaur and the Distillers and The Pixies and Stevie Ray Vaughan and Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash and Ani DiFranco and Suicidal Tendencies and after all that, would you be able to come up with a handy category for my tastes? Of course not. So, too, it is for me and faith.

So I was praying, in my way, asking for some kind of sign, as I have lately been feeling myself to be at a crossroads. (I was also at a literal crossroads as all this was forming, in its necessarily inchoate way.)

Then I looked down, and saw this (click through to either image as hosted on Flickr for further ruminations, if desired):

And then, no sooner than I had uploaded the image from my phone, this:

Okay, Universe… next time I’ll try to be more specific in my questioning. But thanks for this, the images are resonant; the dollar bill will undoubtedly be spent, and hopefully the bird will find its way to wherever it was going, and I will find mine.

Folks, at the end of this month we will be, I’m afraid, moving.

Granted, it will only be next door, to a house owned by the same landlord (with marginally more room, so finally the girls will have separate rooms and, therefore, can hopefully avoid killing each other), so there will be no specific inconvenience or expense of a moving truck, for example.

However, we’ve been living here for a decade now, and the amount of life’s accumulated detritus is positively staggering. Efforts to pare down the loads of completely useless crap we own are… floundering.

But every now and then, going through boxes, I find some super awesome prizeworthy shit. Like this children’s book, an acquisition from Diversity Thrift (where the cool people in Richmond shop, thank you very much). (Coincidentally, I am of the thinking that the “cool” contingency of Richmond consists of broke ass people like us.)

(Click through to Flickr for larger images/detail)

As anyone following me on Twitter will be all too keenly aware, I’ve been listening to an awful lot of The National lately.

So, I’ll understand if no one believes me, that the title of this post actually didn’t start out as a reference to Daughters Of the SoHo Riots, a track from their 2005 release, Alligator. I will confess though: I just spent the last ten minutes at SongMeanings.net, reading through various folks’ speculations about just what in the hell that song is “really” about. I still don’t know (a video was pretty, although the opposite of illuminating), but it’s still a gorgeous song, and these lines are certainly resonant:

Everything I can remember
I remember wrong
How can anybody know
How they got to be this way…

And while it’s quite possible I’ve had this album in such heavy rotation, that the suggestion to write something involving “daughters” and “riots” was thereby embedded in my consciousness, the fact is I’ve been staring, for sixteen years now, at a very different piece of media involving daughters and one very literal riot. Namely, this one:

From the AP Caption:

Elvira Evers, who was 38 weeks pregnant when shot in the abdomen in the Los Angeles riots, has given birth by Cesarean section to Jessica. The bullet struck the baby in the abdomen.

When the LA riots happened, it was this particular image and news item, out of the enormous number I absorbed, that I found most difficult to shake. Knowing that this particular human being’s entrance into the world had been so literally, viscerally marked was something I couldn’t get over. I clipped the image from the newspaper, slipped it into a Mylar sleeve, and somehow, through a million moves and traumas in which I’ve lost the vast majority of my worldly possessions, I managed to hold onto it.

The original clipping remains on my office wall. Whenever I get stuck with my writing, thinking about my own difficult origins, or those of my own daughter, who came into the world in her own uniquely traumatic fashion in July of 1994, I look at young Jessica Evers. She’d be a teenager now, not much older than my girl, who starts high school next year.

And I wonder where she and her mama are today, and how they are doing.

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Blurred portrait of my father with Edgar Allen Poe action figure in foreground, April 10, 2005, Ashland Coffee & Tea. Click through to image as hosted on Flickr for further notes.

I have mixed feelings concerning writing about him, as well as not writing about him, beyond fragments sometimes embedded in photographs, infrequently shared.

Whatever. He’s my dad, and he gave me (among other things) a love for writing, without which I’d have been dead a long time ago.