I waver, I struggle, I rage, I hide, I justify — I have what musician Daniela Nardi calls “white hot moments” — where I collide against myself, and that tiny piece of the universe around me.  I want acceptance / I don’t care if I’m accepted.  I want understanding / It doesn’t matter if other people understand.  I want success / Success isn’t that meaningful.

Writers, particularly those who write fiction, hear no a lot more than they hear yes.  Rejection is far more common than acceptance, which imbues the rare acceptance letter with a joy that has no grounding whatsoever in common sense.  You mean you’ll print the story I spent weeks sweating over, and pay me absolutely nothing but a copy of the book?  Yay! It’s hard for non-writers to understand that kind of thrill, but it exists, and it has less to do with seeing one’s work in print than it does with knowing that someone thought you wrote a story worth telling.

Like me, most of the women writers I know have a deeply hermitic side — their own version of the bubble.  They thrive in solitude, and carve as many free hours out of a day as they can in order to be alone with their stories.  When the work is done though, the mood shifts and the desire changes.  A finished story isn’t meant to stay pristine and isolated — it’s meant to get dog-eared, creased, bookmarked, and highlighted.  It’s meant to get dirtied by critiques, loved by some readers, hated by others, passed around, or given away.  A story is meant to have a life of its own, quite apart from its creator.

When a story is stillborn — when it never knows life outside the bubble, or dies upon its first gasp of outside air — there’s sadness and a sense of loss.  Some writers are too cool to admit this, but I’m not.   I am not cool enough to be indifferent.   I’m not, as Jewel once sang, fashionably sensitive and too cool to care.   I get nervous when I submit my work to publishers, and even when I post a new story on my blog.  I get a huge rush of joy when I get an acceptance letter or feedback, and feel somewhat crushed when my work is rejected or met with silence.

So yes, I pulled a story from this site.  Eleven hours, 473 readers, and zero comments later, the silence was too sad for me.  Some wonderful women* wrote me letters afterward saying some really beautiful things, all of which were deeply appreciated but still….those eleven hours filled me with doubt.  I think I could have done better — I know I could have written something that was not as elusive or enigmatic.

I also wondered if it was too gay.   I know most of my readers are straight, but I really don’t think about my sexuality or other people’s when I write.  Being a lesbian is as natural for me as other people’s heterosexuality, so I tend not to explain it or qualify it in my stories.  I don’t think I’ve even used the words lesbian or gay in any story I’ve written.  Straight writers don’t mention they’re straight, they just write what comes naturally, and so do I.  Readers here know me though, and the ones who’ve stayed aren’t the homophobic kind.

I wanted to give the story another chance for life, so I submitted it to a gay literary site that on first glance seemed to be a good match for me.  Still Blue: More Writing By (For or About) Working Class Queers.  It was rejected less than 24 hours later.  The author’s bios are considerably more impressive than mine — MFA’s, lawyers, award and fellowship winners — a different kind of working class than where I come from, but the stories, as might be expected, are good.  There’s no expectation that working class equals poor language, or an inability to speak of anything outside of the slum.   I appreciate that.  Wendell Ricketts has an eye for stories.  I can’t hold it against him that mine wasn’t one of them.  Instead, it just confirmed for me that the story needed work.  It confirmed that there was silence for a reason.

A white hot moment can last for days, and they are almost always unexpected.  On some days, our bubbles just aren’t insulated enough — or we feel a need to challenge ourselves by bursting them open and seeing what happens.  Of course we never know what we’ll feel about the outcome until we’re facing the consequences — and the dichotomous, sometimes fractured, parts of ourselves that are more strongly felt in a crowd than in solitude.

—————-

*With special thanks to the wonderful women I feel so privileged to know.  Along with Daniela, you helped turn my white hot moment into a manageable glow.

Looking back on 2008, I feel like somebody needs to sing that song again while I’m sitting in some gaudy, artificial place.  I need to laugh until I’m heady, exhausted, and out of tears.  I need to stumble outside to the sidewalk and hail a cab, where I’ll laugh all the way home even though I’m not drunk.  I need that week afterwards, where friends and I can’t even look at each other without bursting into song and cracking each other up.

Outside of a a new President being elected, 2008 was just a horrible year. Or maybe I just read too much news, and it’s dawned on me that much of the world is stupid, insane, and willing to degrade life at every opportunity.  From raped babies to brainless religions to corrupt politics, 2008 offered up a particularly shameful and unevolved picture of the human race.

I’ll usher out the year with all the dignity it deserves — in a red vinyl booth,  underneath strobe lights,  while sipping some fruity concoction topped by a paper umbrella.  My friends have talked me into going to a seedy karaoke bar in Minneapolis, where melodramatic songs and off-key singers are  sure to bring a few laughs –- if people can refrain from killing each other.

Do you have a song to help usher in the new year?  Share it in the comments section and win your choice of two books from my library, or a fancy-schmancy “Rise Up and Create” t-shirt from my friends at Visual Chronicles. Winner chosen by random drawing Saturday, January 3rd.

UPDATE:  And the winner is….LJB!   LJB, please check your email. Thank you everyone for all the great songs!  – JD

There’s another mystery that’s nagging at me, though, not for any greater reason than curiosity. I’ve never liked unnamed things, and I believe that everything should have a name. A good name, too, a name that means something. It always bothers me at grave sites to see infants buried as Baby Boy or Baby Girl. I want to name those lost children. And no, there wouldn’t be an Olive, Rusty, Bronx or Buster in the mix. I think parents who purposely give their kids dreadful names ought to be forced to wear their own bad moniker. A mom wants to name her baby daughter Hank? Okay, but in the spirit of fairness, she should change her name to Arnold. Dad thinks it’s cute to name his son after a cartoon character? Fine, let Dad go by Eeyore for eighteen years and enjoy all the benefits of that cuteness for himself.

Yesterday, as I was getting the lump in my neck biopsied via a needle, I wasn’t worried or nervous about the results. There’s an 80% possibility the lump is benign. Even if it were cancerous, there’s an 80% survival rate for the kind of cancer indicated. I’m not fretting the results in either case. Even the remote possibility of death doesn’t cause me much stress. I’ve never been afraid of death – only of the pain that might lead up to the final exit.

No, the thing that’s really been stressing me out is not knowing the name of whatever I’ve got, and not knowing exactly why my body is trying on symptom after symptom as if looking for the perfect dysfunction to wear to a Merck costume party. First it was meningitis, then a maddening itch, face pain, sciatica, migraine, eye strain, weakness in the arms and legs, a feeling of dizziness, numbness, tingling, a few dots that look like mosquito bites, an overwhelming fatigue – I mean, come on, enough already. I have things to DO, not just things to FEEL.

In times of stress, my A.D.D. stages a coup and upends anything resembling a linear thought. So while my neck was getting prodded, I wasn’t thinking about me, or the names of illnesses, but about organic coconut cake, and how much I loved the smell of the original Herbal Essence shampoo. I wondered about the power of the FDA, and how they let infant formula laced with melamine into the market. I pondered my disappointment with Pelosi and Congress for failing to impeach Bush and his entire administration before he could exact more damage.

I thought about the recent actions of a woman I know, who continually insists that there are no accidents. I am convinced, after the last opportunity she blew, that she says this to justify her who-cares, shoulder-shrugging failures. It seems to me that she is afraid of the drains on her time and energy more success might bring, so she fails – half on-purpose (and because she can afford to) – while at the same time seeming to have made an effort. When the predictable outcome occurs, she brushes it off with a cosmic “there are no accidents”.  An easy out in a world of make-believe, but so cowardly, and so untrue.

When the biopsy is done, I get into an elevator with a man who gives me the creeps. I square my shoulders, plant my feet, and then almost laugh out loud. My head is foggy, my balance is off, my muscles feel like limp spaghetti and worse, I’m not even wearing real boots or shoes, but slippers that pass as clogs. Not only would have a defensive kick to his patella done no damage, I likely would have fallen over backwards trying to land one.

That, of course, gets me thinking about getaways, which leads me to thinking about a Ford F-150, which stirs the memory of an 84 m.p.g. car Mercedes developed but never brought to market, which makes me wonder about the chemical feminisation of fish , which brings me around to thinking about fairy tales and how we, as a species, often fail to learn even the simplest didactic lessons.

When the Empress is naked, tell her damn it. And hell yes, there are accidents, even if many of them are caused by being half-aware or negligent.

On the drive home, I realize why this woman’s casual failure is rankling me, and it’s not just about her barely-there effort, or the excuses that followed.  It’s because it’s cold outside, I feel like hell, I’m uninsured, and fuck –- one way or another, I’m going to die.   Probably not this time, but eventually, and when it happens all my thoughts and stories are likely to die with me.

I think, despite my rational protests, my interior self has held onto one of those cliches I detest so much. I think my heart must have held onto the belief that certain things (not all things) must happen for a reason, even though every bit of evidence I’ve personally amassed over the years indicates a much more chaotic and less logical design.  I think I held onto a shred of that cliched belief in the hopes that it would lend some higher meaning to my experiences – put them into some logical, organized package, where they might have value, and not just be the seedy stories from a lower-class life.

I wanted there to be a reason for the hundreds of broken people I’ve met, but more than that, I wanted a reason my mind couldn’t stop etching them into unforgettable memories. The Jesus freak waitress with the violent temper who wouldn’t serve customers who had tattoos because she thought they were the sign of the devil. The 16 year old anorexic who married the perverted 42 year old restaurant owner. The spoiled daughter who couldn’t stop stealing from her mother’s business. The two partners in a business who decided to humiliate an employee into quitting because they didn’t want to pay unemployment. The young mother who filled her infant’s bottle with Kool-Aid and fed him M&M’s, and who said she would rather have another baby than get a birth control shot or have to remember to take a pill everyday. The 400 pound heiress who couldn’t stop buying herself an ego.

That was just in one year, in one tiny town near the Canadian border.

The America I have known is seedy, punishing, backwards, and filled with animus – while at the same time being bright, inventive, rational, and compassionate. If America were a man, he’d be a philosophical gigolo. A world-class bastard with a heart, and a weakness for pretty and/or profitable things. He’d be a gold-chained slum lord, an ivory-towered philanthropist, an inventive profiteer, an Ivy League pirate with an affinity for mazes and loopholes.

That’s the America I’ve known, and while I don’t regret never having been invited into its marble-floored manses or towering institutions, I do regret that there was never much of a market for the disfigured guitarist who could play anything by ear, or the woman with the iron mark on her back who kept giving away everything she owned in the hopes of finding love, or the ragtag runaway nobody believed when he talked about the bodies he once saw being buried under construction sites. There’s really never been much of a market for the people I remember, especially when so few of them ever met a happy ending.

There was a market for the Empress, a huge one, and she shrugged. There’s so much waste in this world.

I am convinced that the most merciful thing one person can do for another is tell them the truth. Even when they don’t want to hear it – even when it’s messy, or inconvenient, or might get a person fired . Bad plus worse never equals good, and a lie is not an accident of the truth.

And there are so many preventable accidents, one might want to believe that there are deep, cosmic reasons for each of them, but it’s just not that mystical. We are flawed, we are human, we are often less than aware, and careless.

I’ve been told to call the doctor’s office Tuesday afternoon for the results of the biopsy, which likely means they’ll be available sometime Thursday or Friday. I fully expect that the results will show the mass to be benign. In the meantime, I’ll find my coat, appreciate the sky, name the possibilities, and when my mind emerges from the fog, I’ll reinvent the shrugging Empress in a story that’s less about her than about those who spared her the truth until she was left to flail alone and naked in front of a tougher crowd.

I feel like I should give some disclaimer to this piece, some explanation of why, not only because the topic is tough, but also because it’s become a cliche.  Writers, film makers, and students alike have been steered away from the topic of child abuse — it’s been done, the subject is stale, and every story that could be told has been told.

Yet, when I wrote the first version of Cousteau’s Daughter as a teenager, I didn’t care about any of these things.  I was just a girl who had been sent to California with an ex-babysitter and her husband, who spent the summer molesting and threatening me.  That experience was followed by being raped by a seventeen year old boy and a nineteen year old man.  There was no one I felt I could turn to, so I went where it had become natural for me to go — to the world of words, where I could spill my secrets, cleanse my spirit, and maybe make some sense of a world that, to me, was frightening and unpredictable. 

I have since eclipsed the experiences of my childhood, but have found that the responses to my writing about it range from sympathy to disgust.  There are those who, in their compassion, wish to offer some comfort to the child from long ago, or the woman who carries the memories.  Others find something revolting in the telling of the story, believing it signifies a propensity for being stuck in the past, an inability to “get over it”,  or even the making of “excuses” for this or that failure as an adult.  A few have even preached the gospel of forgiveness to me, as if I had the obligation to heal by way of acceptance, or by viewing my experiences as some sort of sideways, God-given blessing.

I appreciate the compassion given the child, but at the same time wish people to know that for the woman, the pain from events that happened almost thirty years ago is distant.  I hesitate to use the word “healed” because I’m not sure what it means in this context.  I don’t know who I might have been or how I may have felt had I not gone through this particular pain as a child.  No experience, much less one that is traumatic, gets to sit outside the tapestry of one’s life, where all things fuse together to create character and personality.  My way of “getting over it” has always been to tell the stories, my own and and those of other children — even in times of resistance.  As for forgiveness, I have none for those who would lay a violent hand upon children, no matter what their backstory may be.  There is no abuse I would ever consider a blessing, no matter what poetic justice might follow.

All that said, Cousteau’s Daughter is still an important piece to me, not because it’s personally cathartic any longer, but because it was written so close to the events.  It is a child’s story, written by a child who, even in pain and turmoil, loved poetry and words, the oceanic world of Jacques Cousteau, and Lucky Charms cereal.

Some of the phrasing was cleaned up as I got older, but not much.  All the elements, including the length, have remained intact.  The length, as well as the subject matter, prevented this piece from being published in literary magazines, but I always wondered if it wouldn’t work better as a visual piece.  A while ago, I put out the call for a videographer on this site, and Elaine Charbonneau stepped up to make it happen.  I thank her for her patience, her care, and the hours she gave to this project.  My friend, artist and photographer Linda Woods, saw my vision even better than I did, and provided photographs to tell the tale.  The only thing lacking was a professional narrator, but I thank my local radio station, KQSP-AM, for allowing me to use their studio.

Stop it Now! is an organization which has done much to bring attention to the issue of child abuse, and I am happy to dedicate this video to them, as well as to all of those who have had to grow up too soon.  The child in me also holds onto some scant hope that someone who is thinking of molesting might watch this, and seek help before they act.  The sexual invasion of a child is not just a physical act, but one that causes long-term emotional devastation.

Does it matter?  Is one more tale of child abuse even relevant?  I don’t know.  I only know that the story of Cousteau’s Daughter has long been in my heart to tell — and now it’s been told.

If it’s relevant to you, or others you may know, please share it.  And please do visit the Stop it Now! website to learn more about what you can do to help prevent child abuse.

After the devastating thing happened, I took a walk down the shoulder of one highway and up the incline of another. It was rush hour, and cars zoomed past me going 70, 80 miles per hour. I could feel the speeding wind at my back — an unnatural sensation that ebbed and flowed according to some stop light that I had already passed miles ago. I wasn’t prepared for this walk, I was wearing the wrong shoes and carrying the wrong kind of load, and I could feel the blisters forming and the muscles in my back starting to rebel. I pressed on, the devastating thing still coursing through my veins, impelling one foot in front of the other, as whole other layers of myself cracked and broke.

I could have waited for a ride. I could have stood – there. Except I couldn’t stand – there. I couldn’t. I needed to move. As far away as possible, and quickly.

There is so much death on a highway. Broken turtle shells, flattened birds, the decaying bodies of stray cats and squirrels. In the decades since I last walked on the shoulder of a busy road, I had forgotten the smell of exhaust fumes, tar, and sunbaked corpses. I had forgotten what it feels like to walk such a dangerous line, where every breath is a gift from the person behind you, who may or may not be paying attention as they eat their burgers, reprimand their kids, or fiddle with their radios. Thirty-six inches is all that separated them from me and the guard rail, and beyond that, the dark and murky Mississippi River, where a lone fisherman sat on a hollowed-out log casting his line .

There have been occasions in life when I’ve felt like a warrior. When I have fought through the muck and mire of circumstance or people, and stood my ground – when pride and strength and a sense of rightness propelled me forward, willing to face any consequence, no matter how harsh. At 16, with nothing but a Greyhound bus ticket and $4 in my pocket, I made it to California, where I walked the highways in sandaled feet, carrying a suitcase full of music and poetry, and a couple of pairs of jeans. I had nothing, but I was strong and determined, and my fear of the unknown was less frightening than what I left behind.

I think of those days, when I was hungry and penniless, and sharp-eyed and full of hope, and I don’t romanticize them. The gnawing feeling of an empty belly, the rains that fell, and the clothes that never seemed to dry, the sticking heat, the chapped skin, the chronic cough, the sleeplessness – they were not Halcyon days, but days of survival, sustained by dreams and quickly made friends on the streets. We traded stories and cigarettes and dire warnings, and then mostly forgot about each other as we went our separate ways. I remember few of their names, but I remember their stories. We were the unwanted children. The often brutalized never-should-have-beens. Our stories were full of anger, sadness and confusion. We trucked in despair and longing and nervous laughter, each of us looking for a niche – a people, a place, or a thing to call our own. Some of us found something to hold onto, others did not. I was one of those who did.

Thirty years later, I walk down a highway, the smell of death in my face, danger at my back, and I wonder if I could do it again. I wonder whether this devastating thing, coming on the heels of lesser others, should be a call to a different kind of battle. One that involves shedding everything that’s familiar, but wounding — omnipresent and unrelieved. The battle of running away from something and not just towards something else.

I know about the bootstrap bromides that would have me stand where I am, facing down adversity, eventually rising with more character or personal strength than ever before. I don’t feel in need of any more character or painful life lessons — particularly of the variety that causes the religious to want to pray for me, or to tell me that God will never give me more than I can handle.

Anyone who is breathing “handles” what they’re dealt. If you’re hit by a tsunami and live, you’re forced to handle the aftermath. If you’re a train hopping drifter surviving on cigarette butts and Listerine, you may stink to high heaven and be half-mad, but still – if you’re waking up every day or two, you’ll handle your life, for better or worse, because until your heart stops beating, you don’t really have a choice. The mere handling of life is not necessarily joyful or fulfilling. It’s a biological imperative – a hardwired response that leaves even the catatonic and brain damaged breathing in and out.

The fight or flight response is also built-in, and as I walk over the broken shells and torn feathers on Hwy. 101, my instinct is to run. Far and fast, past the smell of rot, the certain dangers, and the spirit that’s splintering with every step closer to more of the same.

I doubt my instinct to run, and question its rationality. I have stood so long, and so stubbornly, wielding every type of self-preserving weapon in defense of my right to eclipse the workaday survivor that others wanted me to be. I have built sanctuaries wherever I was, and nurtured dreams, and tendered the words that beat in my chest like a second heartbeat.

It may be that the sanctuaries were made of straw and the dreams were made of impossible things. That the words were just words after all, to be replicated and repeated by any of the thousands of brick-and-mortar writers who are far better qualified and more substantially connected than me – but joy can be found even in a squatter’s paradise, as long as it’s safe.

I no longer feel safe. My sanctuary has been torn apart, the footsteps of predators have shattered my peace, and the ground beneath my feet has grown shaky.

Run run run. Fast and far into the unknown, risking everything for the chance to feel unviolated and whole. Or stay, and take the blows, and count down the years it will take to recover – yet again. Neither choice is easy, and there are no ready-made answers.

There are feet, itching to run,
and a spirit that’s breaking.

There’s a falling in, and a falling apart,
and a want for something miraculous,
or at least attainable.

There are doors that need to be shut
and windows that need to be opened &
a sense that I’ve been here too many times before,
pressing my luck against the jagged glass
until scars felt like good fortune.

I know how to survive. Breathe in, breathe out, put one foot in front of the other, and whether running or staying, don’t give up. Look forward, not back. Hang onto some hope, even if it’s tenuous or temporary.

What I don’t know how to do is build an inviolate sanctuary – one made of bricks and steel, and far removed from mayhem. Tonight, as I stretched out under the light of the moon, it seemed to me that one moment the stars were showing me a blueprint, and the next, Orion was offering me his sword. Even the constellations aren’t clear. I took a deep breath, folded my hands under my head, and closed my eyes — my foot tapping to some ancient drum, my heart pounding against its anchors.

One of the blobs I recall came from a philosophy class, in the form of a particularly stubborn student who sought support for his shapeshifting opinion. “Reality is all just what we believe,” he said. “If I didn’t believe this Pepsi can existed, then it wouldn’t exist.” No matter how others argued that the Pepsi can was a material fact that existed independently of his thoughts – that it would exist with or without his belief in it – the student persisted in a type of egotistical thinking that left him in charge not only of objects in his own path, but that gave him the God-like ability to change matter into non-matter.

Outside of that class, I had never run across people who were prone to believe that a Pepsi can – or any objective fact – couldn’t really exist without their permission. They may have had differentiating opinions and beliefs, but they were based on some part of reality, even if cherry-picked to meet a personal need, belief, or preference.

For instance, I once had a neighbor who was enthralled with Tammy Faye Baker. For reasons that escaped me, he just adored the heavily made-up Queen of PTL and religious scandal. When I brought up issues like 24K gold bathrooms, “seeds of faith”, and vulnerable, workaday investors, he didn’t deny the facts – he simply hand-picked which ones were more important to him. She was funny, and charismatic, and he thought she had paid enough for her crimes. He chose beliefs that best met his personal concept.

And we all do that to some extent, particularly for people we love or admire, or even hate. We often magnify either the good or the bad, until the good is shined to a heroic luster, or the bad is blown up to villainous infamy. Reams of poetry are written for new lovers, who are coddled in the glow of novelty, while scathing diatribes are written about former lovers, who became stale, hurtful, or disappointing in some way.

In the world of shape-shifting reality though, Tammy Faye Baker might be Mother Theresa in same-sex drag. Maybe those tears she shed were really the sweat of Jesus and his twelve drag afficionados.

Lovers, past or present, may be wiped from existence with the stroke of a new memory. Maybe that drunken one night stand didn’t really happen. Maybe people just woke up naked together because they were recreating Rodan’s The Kiss for artistic reasons when they were suddenly felled by the sleeping disease African trypanosomiasis. Maybe, too, the lover in question wasn’t really a human being, but a sex-starved ghost like the one who visited Anna Nicole.

After living through The Year that Blew My Mind, I gathered up my gray matter to ask a singular question about the shapeshifters: Why? The singular answer that came back to me was Motive.

As complex creatures, we are connected to each other not only by DNA, but by story, opinion, and belief. We lack no opportunities to hand-pick facts and beliefs that best fit our individual paradigms. We can overlook bad traits in those we love because their love makes us feel great, and feeling great is more important than finding fault. When the bloom falls off the rose, and love lessens, then the bad thing we once ignored suddenly overwhelms everything else. The wet towels left on the floor become a symbol of disrespect – the forgotten anniversary becomes evidence that he or she never cared in the first place. Opportunities to connect or disconnect abound, and are most often reasonable, even if often exaggerated. Wet towels and forgotten anniversaries are annoying, and can be symptomatic of a larger problem.

The question in the shape-shifting world, though, is why people seek to change material fact or create whole new matter altogether. The answers are as varied as the motives.

Recently, I heard a story about two friends who had a private conversation. One of those friends then went and shared that conversation with another friend. That friend then made their conversation public, and a joke was taken wildly out of context and used as ammunition against friends #1 and #2. People formed strong opinions based on misunderstood third-hand evidence, but no one – not a single person – thought to question the motives of friend #3, whose actions had a rolling stone effect of harm and damages. There’s little doubt that she knew it would, as the resulting fallout proved, yet the major role she played in creating strife went unchecked. Motive? To create drama and gain attention. Mission accomplished.

Closer to home, The Bastard continues to make up rules as he goes along, leaving devastation and despair in his wake. His motive is to feel more powerful, and to exert what power he does have in ways that buoys his flagging ego. Mission accomplished.

Bush, Cheney, and Company continue to reorder matter and facts in their Invisible Pepsi Can world, where an “axis of evil” exists against the backdrop of the All-Mighty, All-Good, All-Powerful capitalist structure of America. WMD’s exist, then they don’t. Soldiers die, but it’s not all that sad if they hide the coffins from public view. It’s not about the oil, but then it is – oil companies who haven’t been in Iraq for 36 years now have no-bid contracts. The mission is really, finally accomplished.

Those of us who believe in objective truth can’t let ourselves be undone by those who believe that the world spins on an shape-shifting, make-believe axis. The truth of both fact and matter will eventually bear out, no matter how many people choose to create blobs of something else.

The shapeshifters are frustrating (and even frightening when they hold power), but by examining their motives – by asking just that one question – we can better understand the world they live in and avoid getting caught up in their crazy-making blobs.