This dispatch comes to you from a Starbucks parking lot, where I’m sitting in a very used car that’s leaking oil onto the cold pavement. I find myself in need of a thick wool sweater for outings like this, when I travel 10.5 miles to get free Wi-Fi and a cup of decent coffee. I’m also in need of a bottle of red wine (to take back to my hotel room), several trips to the dentist, and a reason not to jump off the tallest building I can find. Around here that would be Walmart, though, and I’d most likely survive the jump, which would prove not only anticlimactic but also rather pathetic.

Upon hearing the news that Simon & Schuster signed Snooki as an author, I felt the same kind of futile desperation that I did a decade ago when a roommate suddenly moved out and I had to take a low-paying temp assignment in a penile implant factory in order to cover my now-doubled rent. $7/hr. was not going to cut it but I figured it was better to ineffectually tread water than to drown altogether. I also figured it might make for a good story one day which is, perhaps regrettably, the basis for many decisions I’ve made in my life. I’m infinitely curious, even to my own detriment, and I couldn’t wait to see what awaited me on the penis assembly line.

My job, as it turned out, was to fill the implants with saline, pump them up until they were good and hard and then bend them back into softness before placing them in a sterile box. I dressed in surgical garb for this and five minutes of my ten-minute long breaks were spent getting in and out of uniform. The allure of my duties quickly wore off but I contented myself with the thought that as wretched and mind-numbing as the work was, I was contributing to the greater social good. 75 year-old men could now perform like studs because of something I did. FTM transgendered people would no longer have to get their penises out from a drawer. Porn stars like John Bobbitt wouldn’t have to worry about being inadequate on the job. And there were side-stories, like working beside a cagey woman who was a defendant in one of Minnesota’s most notorious daycare abuse cases. She claimed innocence but at the same time seemed pleased to be in the newspapers. Then there was the day we all got called to a sensitivity training meeting after a group of Hmong workers protested that the three sizes of implants were routinely called African, Caucasian, and Asian.

I’ve tried to keep my sense of humor although desperation has been a long-running theme in my life. I began praying to Martians and/or God and/or Mother Nature as a multi-theist toddler, begging one or all of them to take me home. I knew early on that I didn’t really belong to the strange group of humans that were my family. I didn’t care if I was sent to a fiery planet, became a chubby naked angel, or was reincarnated as a duck—I just wanted an out. The deities let me down though, so at 16 I hit the streets in search of the American Dream that had been pounded into my head by teachers, authors, and civil rights leaders. I found plenty of jobs (working at an ice cream shop, a burger joint, and a Silicon Valley stockroom), but I didn’t find inspiration, only a red-headed Cuban boy whose silence I mistook for depth. It turned out he just didn’t have much to say, even when he left me at 21 to raise two kids by myself.

I’ve lived in ghettos and suburbs. I’ve been a cocktail waitress, a radio sales person, a airplane parts greaser, a student, an advertising executive, a short-order cook, a factory worker, a bookkeeper, a copywriter, a counselor, and more. At last count, I’ve worked 42+ jobs—not because I love working, but because I’m a lousy employee. I was not meant to be a massage therapist, a media buyer, or a farmhand. I was meant to write stories. It’s the only talent I have, really, even it is highly subjective and often capricious, and not everything I write is well-polished or streamlined, including this rant. Then again,the kids in the car next to mine are screaming because their mom got them juice instead of Frappuccinos, and I’m worried that turning my engine on and off to stay warm is going to make the oil leak even more. Distractions, distractions, everywhere.

“Never give up,” the actress Ruth Gordon once said, “and never, under any circumstances, face the facts.” I’ve unwittingly spent a lifetime subscribing to Gordon’s philosophy if for no other reason than I have always preferred perpetual naïveté to the kind of angry cynicism that I feel when I’m forced to pay attention to the way the world actually works. My resilient sense of idealism has allowed me to keep putting one foot in front of the other even through the worst of circumstances. There are times, though, that such blinders simply do not work and this is one of those times.

Unlike Snooki, I have never aspired to be anything other than a writer. It’s not a a temporary infatuation or a quick way to cash in on fleeting celebrity status. I had my first two poems published in the school newspaper when I was 10. My mother set my newly minted works under a stew pot and threw them away after dinner. Still, I wasn’t discouraged. At 13, I had saved enough money from lawn cutting and babysitting to buy my first Smith Corona. I regurgitated the fucked-upness that was my childhood onto reams and reams of 20# bright white paper. I later wrote horrible rhyming poetry and stories that featured talking dogs, dead grandmas, and stilted dialogue. I did everything wrong for many, many years. Eventually, though, I became a “real” writer, trading in my wooden speech and the strings that were being pulled by authors I admired (and wanted to be like) for my own strong, authentic voice.

In 1996, I moved to a small town near the Canadian border. I lived in the cement basement of a restaurant, on a cot next to an ice machine. The owner of the restaurant was a 36-year-old man who looked like Wolfman Jack. His girlfriend was a 16 year old who spent hours studying for her GED at the lunch counter, wearing striped tube socks and cut-offs. There was a Pentecostal waitress there who had five different children by three different men, but who warned tattooed customers that they were going to hell for marring the temples of flesh that God gave them. One day, she cornered me in a freezer and threatened to kill me for cutting a pie the wrong way. The next night, she showed up in a purple mini skirt and black boots and asked me if I wanted to go dancing. It was a crazy place, filled with too many out-there characters and absolutely no peace, but then I found a tiny cabin on Lake Superior to call my own for a few months.

I thought I was a good enough writer by then to submit my work to literary publications. I spent a small fortune on subscriptions, printing, and postage. I had a file cabinet full of short stories that no one had ever read. I took them out, polished them off, and began submitting: 298 times in all. In the course of that year, I received three acceptance letters, all from journals so small that they weren’t even listed in the Writer’s Market. In total, I received $75 for my efforts.

I was so dispirited that I didn’t write for a year. The rejections weren’t the only factor that made me feel hopeless; it was the quality of work that was chosen over mine. I distinctly remember sending one of my best pieces off to Peregrine, the literary journal of Amherst College. The editor rejected it immediately. When I received the publication the next season, it was rife with horrible writing.  “Dis poem be bad, ‘dis poem be da bomb….”. “Petunia red, I love you…. let me roll over into your morning dew.” I was stunned.  Nothing I have ever written, not even when I was 16 and trying to be the next Maxine Hong Kingston—not even my most tongue-tied and bloody Gothic poetry—approached that level of awful. I was stunned and I was disgusted. I wanted to throw away everything I’d ever written and in a despondent fit, I did. I wiped my slate, and my file cabinet, clean.

Eventually, I got over my panicked sense of futility and began writing again. When I felt confident enough, I started a blog, writing about everything from politics to love. Encouraged by readers and friends, I even managed to swallow my trepidation and began submitting work to literary journals again. When nothing came of that—and after I got sidelined by a long lasting illness—I decided to go on a year long road trip. During the trip I realized that what I really needed to write was a memoir and a few novels. My reservoir of experiences was overflowing and I believed they would be better told in whole books rather than piecemeal, in short stories.

When I ended my trip I was poorer than usual, jobless, and car-less, but the friends I’d gathered across the U.S. were supportive, and I began writing the story of my journey in-between searching for jobs and an inexpensive place to live. I thought the story would be easy to tell, but it hasn’t been easy at all. There are parts that are so difficult to write that I have to get up twenty times and smoke twenty cigarettes in-between paragraphs. Author Nadine Gordimer nailed it when she said, “Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.”  In the process of writing, I’ve had to try to make sense of some really painful, senseless things that ache to be told nonetheless.

I felt like I was making progress even if slow, but more than that I had the “this is it” feeling that only comes when I know I’m writing from the rawest, most deeply connected part of myself. That feeling was expansive enough to lead me to believe that I might have a shot with one of the major publishers.

Then came news of Snooki’s book deal with Simon & Schuster. It was like sticking a hot knife into old scar tissue, and dredging up every rejection letter I’ve ever received and all the palm-sweating, missed-it-by-a-hair, we-changed-our minds and wish-you-luck moments I’ve ever known. Snooki is an “author” who giddily admits to having read only two books in her short adult life. A “writer” whose entire life experience can be encapsulated in a single, shallow paragraph. Really, Simon & Schuster, I want to scream, really? Why not just shoot all actual writers point blank and be done with it? What’s next, a ghostwritten memoir from one of the Gosselin kids?

Yes, I am as bitter as I sound. The news of Snooki’s book deal made something in me want to curl up into a self-comforting ball and die. This is more painful than when my jaw was broken in juvenile hall, or spending most of my 20’s plagued with a head-to-toe skin disease caused by stress. It’s worse than when my millionaire boss gave me a $10 Christmas bonus when I was on the verge of homelessness, or when I found out that the one great love of my life didn’t love me at all. It’s worse than when my mother shaved my head for stealing a candy bar at six years old, and it’s even worse than when a well-known personality came to my blog to offer me a regular spot on her radio show and then never contacted me again. (I was sure my tide was going to turn on that opportunity and so were my readers. We were wrong).

The news of Snooki’s book deal frustrates me even more than when a comfortably situated stay-home housewife who dabbles in scrapbooking and blog writing tells me in superior tones that it shouldn’t matter—that she writes for the love of writing, because she needs to, because it’s a calling. Snooki’s book deal doesn’t matter to her because she doesn’t need to be published to make a living. She has a partner who doesn’t care what she dabbles in between soup and sex, as long as the soup is hot and the sex is willing.

I feel more deflated by the news that Snooki is now to be a published writer than when readers and friends tell me to hang in there, my day will come, my ship will come in, and that there’s a reason for everything under the sun, we just don’t know what it is yet. They mean well, but they have no idea how many closed doors, rejections, and broken dreams I’ve had to absorb over the last two decades.

And there is no reason for Snooki to have a book deal outside of the ugly turn the star-making machinery has taken—turning the basest, most talentless spectacles into hope-draining, logic-defying, space-sucking, how-low-can-we-go before the public screams foul celebrities. There’s no reason that Simon & Schuster signed Snooki (and I can only assume a ghostwriter) other than to hop a ride on the reality television train which, no matter how hideous or freakish, still manages to gather fans and steam.

That’s mortifyingly sad to me and probably thousands of other writers who’ve spent years collecting stories that we were sure would one day be retrieved from the slush pile and read by someone who actually likes to read and who might be excited by the prospect of finding new literary talent, instead of just waiting like a scavenger to throw lipstick on the latest pig to come out of the celebrity barn.

“Write what you know.”
“In order to write about life, you have to have lived.”
“Writers are not born, they are created through experience.”

Everything I’ve ever been led to believe about writing and publishing has been corrupted by Simon & Schuster’s book deal with Snooki. I now find myself in need of a warm sweater, some hope, and a cabin in the middle of nowhere where I might be able to stop thinking about jumping off of a cliff long enough to repair my threadbare blinders.

I also need my car to last through 2011, and a sense of redemption—or at least the kind of apathetic acceptance that will somehow make it okay that even my best stories may never find their way to a book that’s not self-published. That, instead, they will be left to the archives of a blog that a handful of kind people read and just as quickly forget. A blog is not a book after all—it does not get dog-eared and taken from the shelf to be read again on a rainy night. And the internet is not Barnes & Noble. In cyberspace everything is free and everyone is a writer. Including me. It’s just not the kind of writer I ever dreamed of being.

A 23 year old with big hair, a spray-on tan, and no discernible history of ever having to actually work for the riches she’s received will be signing books while I’m rifling my car for change to buy my next cup of coffee. If dreams could be stolen, Simon & Schuster would be guiltier than Snooki could ever be. They’ve shamelessly contributed another piece of shit to the cultural cesspool that places even the most perverse kind of fame over talent and experience.

The only fitting punishment would be if no one bought Snooki’s book, but given the popularity of reality TV, with its blight of spoiled kids, teen moms, and rich housewives I’m sure Snooki’s novel will do far better than it should in any rational world, although perhaps not as well as the book Lisa Vanderpump’s Pomeranian is sure to write one day soon.

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Some things really never do change. I’ve imagined the same room since I was nine years old.

I also fell in love with Vincent Van Gogh in grade school, and I still get lost in his night skies and fields of flowers. There’s something about his heavy-handed painting that makes me ache — that makes me want to jump into the scene and find comfort in the company of the Potato Eaters, or to reminisce alone under the awning of the Night Café.

I didn’t know then that Vincent and I shared a birthday. When I found out, it felt like an eerie, beautiful connection — even if one that was created out of nothing more than my want for a brother who could light a night sky with yellow swirls and ease the lines of weathered faces. Warren Beatty could never do that, even though he was also born on March 30th. I wonder if my mother remembered that detail from some horoscope section somewhere – I can’t imagine any other reason she would have picked Warren’s name when, in fourth grade, I asked who my father was. I actually believed her for two months, and read everything I could find about the actor and his sister Shirley at the Washoe County Library. I was such an idiot when it came to my mother. She never stopped lying, and I never stopped wanting to believe her.

In Minnesota today, it’s some ungodly number of degrees below zero. The wind is whipping up snow in cold swirls, the lights are flickering on and off, and I’m feeling the type of restlessness that comes from wanting to be somewhere else, not just in winter but in life.

However, like the room of my own, the dream of “somewhere else” is elusive. At 46, I still feel my desperate teen days of walking the highways and scrounging for food and friends in bus stops too viscerally to ever want to repeat the experience. Through four states and countless cities, I’ve learned – there’s more to leaving than merely being gone. There has to be a safe harbor, money to make it through the rough spots, a plan, a job. And right now, realistically, I’m at least three or four years away from making all of those things come together.

So I stand where I stand. And there’s a gnawing in my gut that won’t go away, no matter how many yellow swirls I imagine in my night skies, or how many weathered faces I seek to ease.

I’ve written a lot of crap lately, and I apologize to those who come to this blog looking for something better. The restlessness has gotten to me, and there’s a feeling of being torn between a world where I need the support of people, specifically you, and my turbulent interior world, where the story of Mila is scratching to get out – but I’m so afraid of spending/wasting more time writing another rejected novel. There are only so many years left, and the roads are narrowing with each one that passes.

And I’m not oblivious, although I often wish I could be. A hurt world is seeking humor and finding relief in comedy. Even bathroom comedy is more welcome than reality right now. When there is a drama, people want a happy ending. They want the slumdogs to miraculously become millionaires. They want the child actors to be lifted up out of poverty in a day, in a month, and they are willing to suspend every other truth in order to create a scene that’s as simple as good vs. evil – and where good, in all of its innocence, ultimately triumphs. Life is just not that clear-cut, but that’s another story.

This story is about standing where I stand, and knowing that there’s no solid foundation under my feet, and no room of my own or redemption on the horizon. And somehow, ironically, I have to make peace with that.

Starry, starry night.
Paint your palette blue and grey,
Look out on a summer’s day,
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul.

Swirling clouds in violet haze — swirling clouds of snow. And somewhere, someplace, someday. . .a room of my own.

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“Zucchini?”

“Yeah man, vegetables. Look around, half the world is there. They’re planted in their shit gardens, sucking in whatever nutrients they need to survive, but they’re not living, man. They’ve ceased to have ideas bigger than the vine they’re clinging to, whether it’s religion, academics, the rat-race, or something else. Whatever else you do, beware of that. Don’t become a fuckin’ zucchini.”

Most of the people I’ve met aren’t remembered, at least not vividly. Although I only knew him for a couple of years, Bill stuck with me. I’ve spent thirty years with the zucchini analogy branded in my brain, and have done my best to avoid becoming a clinging, myopic vegetable – which wasn’t nearly as easy as I thought it would be. There’s something about being hurt, struggling, overwhelmed, or frustrated that seems to stop life on a macro level. The world of ideas becomes less important than the need for a Band-Aid, a break, or an immediate solution – even if the solution is temporary, or detrimental in the long-run.

I’ve managed to keep myself out of the shit garden for the most part, if only because I love the idea of potential. I love knowing that, barring death or a cruel disease of the mind, the human brain can keep on learning, thinking, and creating up until the last of its neurons are fired and its gray matter grows cold. I get a special thrill out of stories about 70 year-olds graduating college or middle-aged artists having their first art show. Stories like that stoke hope, no matter how slim, that it really never is too late – not for a degree, for talent, for love, for dreams – not for anything.

I wonder, though, if it’s not too late to change America back to the innovative, thriving power it once was. I can’t be the only Democrat who believes that the bank bailout, and now the $900B(+) Economic Stimulus Plan, is like the governmental version of a shit garden. After browsing through the 1071 page document, I’m convinced that we are fertilizing soil for the benefit of the vegetables among us.

Bureaucracy is often a self-perpetuating monster, and the collective greed of big corporations has been well-documented. These are the major beneficiaries of spending in the bailout and stimulus packages, and for decades into the future, taxpayers will have the noose of this debt wrapped around their collective necks.

This stimulus package is just one humongous gambling marker, and the ideas within it seem to have sprung from the same kind of mentality that compels chronic gamblers to throw good money after bad, hoping that if they spend enough, Lady Luck will grace them with a winning streak. It’s irrational, it has no grounding in reality, but even otherwise smart people will rub their lucky pennies, throw a pinch of salt over their shoulder, or appeal to the fates when they’re losing.

The ideas contained in the bailout and stimulus plans cater to the chronic spenders and vegetables in our midst – there’s not an original thought or innovative, long-term approach within either package.

America didn’t become a superpower due to its government bailouts. We got there with revolutionary inventions – by the creation and manufacturing of goods no other country had, or could produce as well as we did. We got there by being innovative, competitive, and tireless in our search for ways to improve life for people here and around the globe. We got there by opening doors of opportunity, paying decent wages, making housing affordable, and being willing to challenge traditions and social policies that impeded human potential.

Greed and avarice overtook America during the Bush years, particularly in the corporate and banking sectors. It seems to me that the way back to greatness isn’t going to be found in borrowed money, mass bailouts, or by reviving sagging bureaucracies, but in a new vision that incorporates and rewards innovation, attempts new strategies, and insists on ethics.

Instead, we’ve just tilled a massive shit garden, and I think many working class Americans understand that, even if they don’t have a degree in economics. Most of us are aware that if someone stood out on the street tomorrow handing out $10 bills, people would take them, regardless of need. Free money is free money. There’s no innovation there, and no incentive to spend it wisely, or with the long-range interests of the country in mind. The zucchinis will plant themselves quickly enough, sucking up everything they can until the garden is dry.

My friend Bill was right. We are a world built on ideas, and the finest ideas aren’t contained in any one school of thought. Beyond every other consideration, our humanity, and our common desire for better circumstances, binds us.

“Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn’t, it is of no use.” – Carlos Castaneda

“Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man’s nature and of life’s potential.” – Ayn Rand

I’m not sure what any one person can do at this point to avoid shit garden economics, but as a nation of newly invigorated citizens I hope we demand accountability from all of those who seek to plant themselves there, and insist that those who show signs of wasting their handouts be plucked from the program.

And, of course, we have do whatever it takes to keep new ideas from flowing out of the hemisphere and into the vacuum of apathy.

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That’s all true, and enough of a reason to feel a little queasy on February 14th, but my complaint about Valentine’s Day is that it’s not more like the 4th of July.

There are no great expectations on July 4th.  You can have a picnic, fire up the BBQ, or stay at home.  You can eat off paper plates,  have desert or skip it, and no one thinks you’re doing it all wrong or missing the point.

You can take some wine up to the roof, or go lay out on a blanket under the stars to watch the fireworks — you can even go to bed early, hoping to fall asleep before the thunderous claps hit the sky–  and no one wonders what your choice really means.   No one feels compelled to have a deep, meaningful talk about where this relationship is heading, or asks whether you’d be open to adopting babies from a third-world country sometime in the near future like, say, this time next year.   The green-eyed monster of insecurity is less likely to bite on the 4th of July than on a day that’s  all wrapped up in lace, lingerie, and love.

And if you start dating someone on July 1st, it’s unlikely that you’ll hurt their  feelings if you say you already have plans for the 4th.  You can even say you’re just not into the 4th of July without provoking a silent warning flag, which will come out waving on the next date, when you’re hit with all sorts of questions meant to determine your romantic proclivities.  Do you like long walks on the beach?  In the rain?  How do you feel about cats?   Tiffany’s?  Cuddling?  Would you get a tattoo of my name if we were together a year?   Bring me breakfast in bed?

Valentine’s Day is romantic hell for daters.  It’s sitting by candlelight and being waylaid by questions like, “What’s the longest you’ve ever dated someone, and why did you break up?”   It’s hearing stories about boundaries and broken hearts, or (and this really did happen to me once) getting a mini-lecture on why tiger lilies were a bad choice, because they were  living things with feelings and didn’t deserve to be killed.  It’s having someone try to decipher what you meant by signing your card “fondly”, when what you really meant was “fondly”.

A day about love — in fact any beautiful day –  should be more like the 4th of July.  No heady expectations, no heart shaped boxes, no long-winded declarations, but a picnic basket under a warm summer sky.  A chain of wildflowers placed around a naked neck.  A barefoot slow dance in the grass.  A long kiss, bare legs entwined, under the the moon and fireworks.   Or a casual night at home, with a roaring fireplace, or with all the windows open and a slight breeze blowing, soft blues tunes filling the house as a favorite meal is made or a warm bath is run.

Lovers shouldn’t need a special holiday to be loving, romantic, or particularly good to one other, especially a day that isn’t spontaneous, but  dictated by tradition.  Personally,  I don’t find Valentine’s Day to be all that romantic, but a barefoot, casual, starlit 4th of July?  That’s just beautiful any day of the year.

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The laughter in my throat was stilled by the heavy clomp of her boots in the mud. She was angry at her truck for running out of gas, angry at the rain, and angry at the whole world it seemed. She muttered and cussed, and insisted that I thought she must be a real fuck-up. What I was really wondering was how an empty gas tank could trigger what amounted to a self-flagellating tantrum.

“What a great start to your trip, huh? You must think I’m a real idiot.
“That fucking gauge was above E. You saw that right? That it wasn’t below E?
“I bet you’re regretting being here.
“I’m tired of shit like this always happening to me.”

After the third or fourth reassurance, I realized it didn’t matter what I said. Eloise was determined to be miserable. Her hostility was easily tapped, and there was a black hole to her being that she catered to as if it contained the only precious truth left in the world.

A mile-long walk left us standing on her porch, rain soaked and muddy, and I couldn’t help but think that with someone else, this might be a fun occasion. Leah would run for the wine glasses, Sheila would challenge me to wrestle in the mud, Jen would tell jokes, and then laugh so hard she’d have to stop walking. None of them would have done what Eloise did next –- which was to take off her boots and throw them against the garage wall.

“Never mind that those were my favorite boots,” she seethed to the mud-streaked plaster.

Later, I sat on a couch in her living room, listening to a litany of trivial, wine-soaked complaints. Her parents loved her, but not well enough. She had a stellar education, but not Ivy League. She had many friends, but no one who really understood her deep complexity. She had a trust fund, but it wasn’t enough to quit working. There were lovers that used, and lovers that left, and a sense of never being appreciated.

“It would be nice if even just once I got back 10% of what I gave to others, but I guess I’m screwed on that. Everybody I ever meet is so selfish.”

For four nights, I sat like a cypher in Eloise’s smoky living room, willing myself into stillness as I watched the stars through the skylights. She was an unlikely Scheherazade, a steely, bitter-eyed woman who seemed to have spent her life creating conflict so she would have an outlet for her combativeness. With every story, she seemed to grow fresh scars, counting and recounting the wrongs committed against her until there was no good will, and no right thing left in the world.

Instead of bolting, I found my curiosity turning morbid. There was a sour aftertaste to our one-sided conversations that was all at once revolting and intriguing. My incredulousness was stretched but not yet sated, not even when she told me the story about driving drunk, and the massive damages done to her lover’s face when she drove into a ditch going 80 mph. Even in that story, Eloise reigned as the ultimate victim. The lover sued, Eloise received a suspended jail sentence, and when the story hit the local newspaper it was humiliating.

“So her face – did they manage to fix it?”

“What? Oh. She lost most of her lower jaw and lower lip, but had lots of reconstructive surgery. Between the insurance company and me, she made out pretty well. I ended up having to go to treatment, though, which was stupid because I wasn’t an alcoholic — but who cares, right? I paid through the nose for that night. There are still people in this town who hate me…”.

On the morning I left, I woke up early and walked through the house, and for the first time noticed how beautiful it really was. Stained glass French doors led to a wrap-around patio. The floors were a dark walnut wood, and there was an exquisitely patterned red Persian rug in the living room. Abstract art hung neatly from clean white walls, lit from below with key lights. In four nights, I hadn’t noticed the antique chairs, covered in cobalt blue velvet, that framed the fireplace, or the soft white chenille of the couches. Either Eloise’s misery had sucked all the color and light out of the room, or I was so enchanted by it that I turned blind to everything else. In the pale yellow light of morning, I was reminded of a song by Sara McLachlan – “you live in a church where you sleep with voodoo dolls, and you won’t give up the search for the ghosts in the halls”. Eloise’s home was like a tainted church, a sanctuary lost to the cause of both old and ongoing wars.

In front of the airport terminal, Eloise handed me a folded up piece of paper and told me to read it on the plane. It’s just a poem I wrote, she said, something I wanted you to have.

Nobody heard her, the dead woman,
but still she lay in the abyss moaning.
I was much further out than you thought, she said,
and not waving, but drowning.

As if there were not enough reams of torment in her own life, Eloise resorted to stealing the tragic words of others. The poem was written by British poet Stevie Smith, and only slightly changed by Eloise’s interpretation.

I might have never known, but I discovered Not Waving, But Drowning in the county library when I was nine years old, and ran home to read it to my mother –- a woman who was drowning in an unhappiness I was powerless to change. I was always looking for words she would recognize –- that would move her in some way, or that let her know that while I didn’t understand everything, I did understand that she felt I was to blame in some way, and that I was sorry, sorry, sorry. For three decades, I waited for the day my mother’s secrets would spill, and we could forgive each other for the darkness. The right combination of words were never found. There was no grand rescue, no heroic act of forgiveness, no chance of saving either one of us from wanting what we could never have.

Yet, years after her death, I found myself drawn to sitting silently in the darkest shadows of other women, waiting for a hint, a revelation, or some epiphany. When I wasn’t actively seeking out the most brooding people I could find, they seemed to find me.

And the only thing I ever really learned from all those years of shadow sitting is that misery can travel beyond time and circumstance, and become a black hole that voids all light and swallows any possibility of good. There really is no mystery to the the forever-lost, the fucked-up, the hateful, or the chronically bitter. We move in this universe on differing parallels –- some paths are rife with danger and difficulty, and some are so easy that they seem supernaturally preordained, but most are a mix of challenges, habits, and celebrations. Sometimes there are choices, and sometimes there are unmitigable circumstances. We fall as often as we get pushed. We embrace each other, or we stand apart. We scar, berate, and rail against each other, or extend our compassion and love. We kick each other, or help each other up.

We are the secret, the key, the magical, elusive meaning of things that we search for in the clouds, ancient books, and new-age gurus. There is really no major mystery to who we are. We are what helps creates the other. In the largest picture, we are the source of each other’s love, misery, happiness, anger, regret, support, hope, longing, and despair.

Eloise and my mother were partially created by others on their path, as surely as Beethoven, Curie, and Van Gogh were.  But instead of gathering love, they nurtured grudges. Instead of striving for happiness, they chose to lash out in anger and bitterness.

The worst monsters and tyrants in the world only exist by collective permission, as do the greatest thinkers, pianists, artists, and inventors. We don’t always agree with the collective, and often lack the power to enforce our differing will, but many of us accede our personal ethics as if our singular thoughts, ideals, or dollars had little value at all. We sit in the shadows of corruption, perverse politics, bad will, unjust laws, and miserable people until we are numb and feel them as inevitable.

And perhaps they are, at least until the collective masses experience a new call to enlightenment, but we don’t have to sit in the shadows and wait. We don’t have to sleep with voodoo dolls, or taint our sanctuaries with totems of death and misery. We can, instead, consciously choose to live in a way that honors our highest ideals.

We can stand and speak clearly instead of moaning. We can wave, and refuse to let ourselves be drowned.

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I’ve tried to get behind the Democratic nominee, even though he was not my first choice.  Maybe, I think, Obama’s two year campaign for the nomination while in the Senate wasn’t as calculated as it seems.  Perhaps he was right when he said he couldn’t accomplish what he wanted politically while in Congress.  Maybe his lack of national and international experience isn’t such a bad thing.  In any case, as a lower class, gay, liberty-loving, pro-choice, pro-peace, uninsured Democrat who is swimming upstream in this corrupt, leaden economy – and who doesn’t want her government, courts, and schools ruled by religious dogma – Barack Obama became the only choice I could make, regardless of my reservations.

I knew that, so I un-bookmarked my favorite news sites, determining that outside of casting my vote there was not much else for me to do.  The professional pundits would have their say a million times over, darts would be thrown and re-thrown, minds would be made-up fairly early, but barring another voting disaster like the one that was created in 2000, we would know who our future President was in November.  I had, and still have, confidence that it will be Barack Obama.

Then again, I remember the polls which had Gore leading significantly, and I will never forget that we ended up with a President who did not win the popular vote.  There was  corruption at some polling places, problems with machines, and disputes over absentee ballots.  The hanging chad debacle in Florida brought us televised images of Republican thugs, looming over vote counters like second-rate Mario Puzo characters.  In the end, it was an “activist court” – the same kind of court Republicans say they despise – that handed George his imperialist crown, and allowed him to bring this country to where it is now – on the brink of a major meltdown across every board.  Still, the vote was close enough to be in dispute.  It was close enough to leave delegates and the courts breathing room.

As I drive around the wealthy suburbs in the heartland of Minnesota, I see the McCain-Palin signs that those living closer to the city don’t see in any appreciable number. It worries me, but more than that, it leaves me feeling angry in a way that maybe only someone else who has really struggled in the past eight years can understand.

I watched Sarah Palin and Joe Biden politely dance with each other last night.  Her folksy charm, his bleached smile. Her giddy smile, his gentlemanly charm.  Her soccer moms and “Joe Six Packs” to his Scranton coffee shops and gas stations.  It was an easy debate, mellow and slowly paced, and from where I sit – in the living room of my rented apartment (where I’m a month behind on rent since my hours got cut) – passionless.  Neither candidate exhibited a sense of urgency over any of the issues facing us today, and both seemed out of touch with a large portion of middle America – who aren’t just worried about sending Billy and Suzy  to college, but about being able to provide them with essential basics, like food and shelter.

Yet the increasingly poor working and middle classes weren’t really addressed in the debate – except that Palin wants to make sure that they can’t declare bankruptcy.  Here in Minnesota, bankruptcy reform included a provision stating that attorneys must be paid their fees up-front before the paperwork is filed, at an average cost of $1600.  It’s a law that allows wealthier filers immediate relief, and that prevents those who are living in poverty from filing at all.  That was the Republican solution to what they perceived as massive bankruptcy fraud – to give richer Americans an out while further crippling the poor, whose jobs are the first to go, who are the least likely to have medical or disability insurance, and who cannot afford to stop judgments and wage and tax garnishments against them.

Palin said there were some “good lessons” to be found in these corrupt, predatory, pro-wealthy, anti-poor times.  People, she said, shouldn’t live above their means.  They shouldn’t buy a $300,000 house when they can only afford a $100,000 house.  Which might be good advice, if a $100,000 house truly existed as anywhere near the average anymore.  Instead, a vastly inflated real estate market has left Minnesotans with $230,000 “starter homes”, and in some new developments, the tiny tract of land those homes are on aren’t even included, but are to be bought after the home mortgage is paid off.  This was one of tactics used in order to create the appearance of “affordable” housing, which, in actuality, has ceased to exist.  A two-bedroom rental apartment in the Twin Cities metro runs about $1200 without utilities.  My daughter’s first mortgage, on a three bedroom town home, is $1600 and that doesn’t include the association fees.

In the meantime, the minimum wage is still less than $7 in most states, Target employees are still starting off at $8.00-$10.00  per hour, and bus drivers make $10-$12.  The starting pay for a public school teacher in Minnesota averages $29,907.  Factoring in 30% for taxes, and the cost of health insurance (if available) it is easy to see how and why so many Americans are living “above their means”.  It’s the economy, stupid, and buying a cheaper brand of toilet paper and clipping coupons isn’t going to get the average working class American out of the downward spiral of debt.

The myopic Palin, though, doesn’t wish to “point the finger of blame” or “look back”.  Which is odd, considering the blunders and transgressions of the Bush/Cheney administration, and the level of corporate corruption and political underhandedness during their reign.  An unwillingness to admit these issues even exist doesn’t exactly bode well for a future of tackling them head-on.  (Where are those missing Halliburton millions by the way?)

Someone will, I’m sure, take the time to count the number of times Palin said the word “maverick”.  I lost count.  McCain may have once had some maverick ideas, but his ideas today, on everything from health insurance to troop withdrawal, are ineffectual and stale, promising nothing more to the working and middle classes of this country than more of the same, for longer.

Then again, what we have from Barack Obama and Joe Biden is hope, and I feel scant little of that, particularly after Obama (and McCain and Clinton) voted yes on a (now) $800B bailout, filled with pork barrel spending, that EXCLUDED consumer protections that were part of original bill.  Taxpayers will now not only be helping some of the most corrupt and predatory lenders on Wall Street, but they’ll also be shelling out $478M to the film industry for making movies in America, and $192M in rebates to rum producers in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

“It is completely unacceptable for any kind of earmarks to be included in this bill,” said McCain the week before he voted on the bill.  Later, he said he “had to” support the plan because the country is “on the brink of economic disaster.”  Eschewing Palin’s advice, McCain looked back and pointed a congratulatory finger at himself.  “There were plenty of other bills that I fought against, voted against” because of pork, he said.   This one, though, which takes corporate welfare to a whole new level, and which is the most massive gamble in U.S. economic history, McCain helped pass.

And Barack Obama voted right along with him, as did the majority of Congress, even while the public’s phone calls to Senate offices were running about 100-1 against.  What can be said about politicians who ignore the will of their constituents, and who refuse to rise above the din of political panic to fight for what’s right, just, and proper?  Even if one was to believe a bailout was the solution, there was no logical reason for the pork barrel earmarks, or the exclusion of consumer protections.  I find it ironic that the two men who are promising to bring change to Washington – to end “business as usual”–  have failed to do this as Senators.  Instead, lesser known mavericks from both parties, willing to risk Wall Street’s disfavor and unpopularity among their peers, were the ones who stood up against the tide and said no.

There were no mavericks in last night’s debate and sadly it appears there are none on the horizon.  There’s Obama-Biden and McCain-Palin –  some hope for change, or more of the same. There are all the usual cliches from both sides, a disconcerting lack of substance, an unwillingness to fight the good fight, and there’s been no sense of urgency about anything other than Wall Street’s financial institutions.

As for the war, and spending for the war, I am amazed by the misleading rhetoric.  Funding for the military has not just gone towards armor and equipment for the troops, it has gone to enormously expensive contracts for giant private entities like Halliburton.  Voting against “funding the troops” isn’t always about the troops, but about who we’re choosing to rebuild parts of countries we have demolished, how much we’re willing to pay, and how accountable we wish to hold them.

Patriotically baiting one-liners such as “brave men and women who have died for our freedom” continue to be used to chill dissent.  The awful truth is that many of our dead soldiers did not to save our freedom.  Our freedom was not in danger of being taken away.  While 9-11 was an unparalleled disaster on American soil, it was not an attack from another country, but from a group of Muslim extremists, most of whom hailed from our government’s ally, Saudi Arabia.  Our freedom from terrorist attacks since that event can be attributed more to tightened security at our own borders than waging war abroad.  Very few of the major extremists, including Bin-Laden, have been caught and even if they were, the destructive bane of radical Islam would not stop with their capture.  Further, even if America and her allies could force democracy on Islamic states, there is no guarantee – and more than a strong likelihood – that it would be temporary. Islam does not separate the political from the religious, and Sharia law, which Muslims subscribe to as part of their faith, is at odds with American-style democracy.

Our want (and greed) of oil from these regions has, in so many ways, hampered the evolution of the Middle East. We have propped up dictators and made multi-billionaires out of royal families.  We have funded madrassas, educated their scientists, and given technology and weaponry to oppressive armies.  Our worries that the religious extremists in the Middle East will go nuclear are not without basis – yet we continue to pour money and other resources into the region for the sake of oil.  At the same time, we have failed miserably in developing, producing, and promoting other forms of energy.

I am angry.  Disgusted.  Disappointed.

But I’ll vote for hope, even if scant and waning, because the alternative is just too frightening to consider.

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