This short piece, as the title implies, is an intro to a potentially larger work -- maybe a book, but most likely a collection of essays. It's also part of a larger, therapeutic exercise to reframe my past, and to honor the complex lives of the people who shaped me while I still can. It sounds morbid when I put it that way. Now that I've spoken about a larger project in a public way, maybe said public can help me follow through? Probably a lot to ask... At any rate, feedback is appreciated! “Those things that make us alive cannot be captured and held by the conventional means of remembering, for life surrenders only unto death, and death will concede to nothing else.” - T. Guzzio, “The Story of a Single Mother: A Case Study.” When my mother died, I got a necklace that had an anchor and a charm that said “memento mori” – remember death. Instead of focusing on the life of the woman who bore me, I reached to the rigging of my heart and hoisted a flag honoring what took her. I was doing my best to rationalize a loss I had already made peace with. During her last few years, Mom sunk into a sort of apathy I couldn’t understand and didn’t have patience for, especially since her chosen ignorance included people who were important to me, like her granddaughter and my wife. She spent her days smoking pot, watching tv, and doting over her chihuahua. When we talked, our conversations were both feather-light and hard to carry. The day after she died, I posted a copy of a 23 year old essay I wrote about her to Facebook. Written for a class on modern sociological theory, this paper told the story of a woman who leaned into herself and learned to stand up to and apart from the people – men, mostly – who made her feel less than. “Since this is my paper,” I wrote, “and since life for me is best expressed by the soundtrack that fills up those quiet spaces between trauma and joy, I will, from time to time, take liberty with lyric and verse.” And I did, too. My mother’s life, as I saw it up to that point, was a repudiation of Parsons and Bales’ functionalist theory on gender stratification, a claim I laid against lyrics from “Lady Madonna” by the Beatles, “How Men Are” by Aztec Camera, and “Hymn to Her” by the Pretenders (which I misquoted… It was pre-Google). It honored her hard won independence, while paving over the fact that my mutinous mother never learned to see herself as the captain of her own ship. I know now that Mom was a woman who wanted rescue more than she wanted freedom, and when the last man she called “husband” became terminal with cancer and died, it was as if my mother drowned – swept by a tidal wave of grief for a man she was considering leaving just months before his diagnosis. After his passing, instead of looking to the living, like a potential husband number five, or my daughter who had met Mom only once, or her other grandchildren, she spent her remaining years out on the widow’s walk, mourning for the one man who left her before she could leave him. Posting that essay was a lazy, performative attempt at bringing the memory of the woman it talked about to the present; to pause and reflect one more time before I moved on from my mom for good.
Something my parents taught me, albeit not intentionally, was to never look back. If you have no destination, or if you lack the skills to plot a course towards the one you do, you pick a direction and hope for the best. Sail, so long as it feels like forward. Face the sun. Travel light. I learned this not through words but through the rhythm of how we lived and survived. I didn’t realize how ingrained my need for perpetual motion was until my daughter chased me down. She wanted to know why I left her small hometown in the Adirondacks after her mom and I split up; why, if I loved her, had I put a day’s distance between us? As she and I talked around and about my choices, I started to realize that I was more like my parents than I was prepared to admit. That despite all of the “work” I had done to create a new version of myself outside of the wreckage my mother and father made of my childhood, I couldn’t help but carry the cargo they gave me. The choices my parents made stowawayed within me and reached out to a grandchild neither knew much about before they passed. Through me, they shaped her as if they were there. In her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit discusses the different meanings of the word “lost.” For instance, explorers were always lost because they had never been to the places they traveled to. Travelers today get lost not because they reach for the unknown, but because they don’t pay attention to or trust their instruments. For Virginia Wolf, Solnit notes, “getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity… to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.” For me, losing has always been a combination of the two. My conventional means of remembering have always centered on aggressively losing anything painful. In leaving behind the pain of my past, I’ve thrown out much of the good as well. Instead of holding onto the literal and figurative things that traveled with me from house to house and state to state, I burned it all in the name of transformation, forgetting that a Phoenix never rises from nothing; that life lives in those ashes.
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I remember a film called Three O’Clock High – mostly because I may have had a crush on Annie Ryan, the female lead. If I remember correctly, the story involves a new high school student – some glowering bully in a leather jacket with a larger than life reputation – deciding to beat up the resident nerd, and said nerd’s attempts to avoid being beaten up. It’s a film that explores and exploits the intricacies of a stereotypical high school trope: there’s gonna be a fight, news of which spreads throughout the school to everyone who breathes air and is not an adult. It reflects the two worlds that exist under a single roof in most schools: the world inhabited by teachers and staff, and the nebulous, dark waters precariously navigated by kids. I’m thinking about this movie because there was a fight at my school recently – a bad one – and an administrator trying to break it up was hit multiple times. So many adults were surprised by the fact that so many kids not only watched and cheered on the fight, but also recorded it on their phones as well. Our principal sent out a thoughtful response about how what happened is not consistent with “our values.” Hm. While I know that my school strives to be a safe place, what happened is a textbook example of how US schools reflect the broader American culture; a culture that has always commodified and capitalized on violence as a spectator sport and a way to solve problems. We do say something when we see something in America, and it’s usually “Fight! Fight! Fight!” There’s a large segment of society that applauded the rise of ultimate fighting, and professional slap fighting, just as previous generations celebrated boxing. We bemoan how athletes see their lives and careers shortened by the abuse they take, gasp when that violence spills out of the game and into their personal lives, then applaud these "warriors" week in and week out for laying their bodies on the line for our amusement.
As I write this, the tattered flag in front of my school sits at half-mast because of yet another school shooting. We light candles for victims of mass shootings and watch them burn out on the altar of the second amendment. We have no right to wring our hands after we’ve used them to build and applaud the violent institutions we celebrate. It’s disingenuous and hypocritical. Everyone has dreams about falling and flying. My flying dreams are comical because I clumsily flap, flap, flap, gliiiide. Never going too high or too fast, my arms don’t tire. It’s the aerial equivalent of coasting on a kick-scooter. Icarus could have learned from me. My falling dreams happen in the etherous greige between sleep and awake, I slowly roll over from one side to the other to find bed, wall, earth -- I never remember -- replaced by a sudden void reaching past me like a formless, sonic hug. My falling dreams seem to be disconnected from my flying ones. I never flap, flap, flap, faaaaaallll. But I’ve learned there’s a connection. In those flying dreams excitement and risk hit just hard enough to make life interesting, but not so dangerous that I couldn’t survive their impact. It’s controlled and correlated to my actions: I flap and I fly, but never higher than street lamp height on nondescript streets edged by nondescript houses in a nondescript neighborhood. The low cruising altitude lets me see a manageable amount of the world from a distance that’s just as manageable and safe, albeit just a little bit dangerous. What’s most frightening about my falling dreams isn’t that I’m falling, it’s that I can’t see what I’m falling into. There are no houses, no grass or asphalt rising up to meet me. It’s just a black flash into nothingness. Like my flying dreams, the action is still precipitated by my movement. I roll over and I fall, until my blinking eyes and fluttering heart beat me awake. Instead of trying to find out what the dreams say about the dreamer, I’m learning how the dreamer builds the dreams; about how the child I was influences how I fly or fall tonight. As life during COVID edges into a monotony that matches the Monopoly houses in my flying dreams, I understand how my need for safety – now and then – has been shaped by a broken frame. I was a kid who rebelled to, not against religion. My parents’ materialism and drug use drove me to church. My stepfather’s empty cocaine vials and my Sundays spent at worship became leverage when he would try to ground me for leaving the house with my bed unmade. When as a college freshman I fell out with the church, I didn’t cast myself as an Animal House extra, I got married at 19. Flap, flap, flap. Throwing myself into religion when other people my age were throwing footballs and standing up to say “I do” when I should’ve been doing keg-stands didn’t seem like falling at the time. I’ve told myself they were choices meant to give me anchors my childhood didn’t provide, but even that’s not right. I was a kid trying to build an identity out of a void I was afraid to fall into. I’m starting to get to know my inner child. I’m trying to understand who he is so I can give him the love and guidance he may have lacked and needed that I still need today. I’m going to find out who I was then, before parents and pastors and my own choices as a young adult left him awkwardly hovering over monotonous suburban streets when he should have been dreaming of jetpacks. This piece is a time-capsule from a time before COVID, and January 6th, and Putin's invasion. It's a sketch I wrote in August of 2018 and forgot about until I took a dive down the depths of my Google Drive. I will most likely work these thoughts into a larger piece (how can I not?). The metaphor is striking, given everything that came after August. All but this MTG image were anchored in the original piece. She's a great example of what this piece is about. A leader is the mask his or her followers wear. A 1999 study conducted by Mick Cooper of the University of Sussex revealed that wearing a mask can lead to “disinhibition, transformation, facilitation of the expression of aspects of the wearer’s Self, and various psycho-somatic changes.” That’s why I’m more afraid of the people who accept and apologize for President Trump than I am of Trump. Trump is the mask that gives “good people” who hold racist beliefs immunity. Their shouts spring from the shadows of the dark web and set places like Charlottesville and Portland alight with their hatred. He is the mask that enables Evangelicals to excuse his moral indiscretions and outright lies because of the transformative potential they think his presidency provides them. They will make a proverbial deal with the devil because Trump’s words and policies align with their long-held beliefs about how Americans should behave. Pornstars? Pay offs? Lies? Sure, that’s bad; but, think of the babies. Many in Congress who wear the mask follow similar logic. They are willing to overlook Trump’s many personal and moral failings, along with those of the people he surrounds himself with because they like his policies. Grab em by the pussy? Well, I wouldn’t do it; but, look at the tax cuts. Red-State America wears the mask because: Many white Middle-Americans erroneously feel they’ve been pushed to the economic edge by minorities. They seek to reassert their privilege by believing in the bogeymen of color Trump called out when he announced his bid for the presidency, as if building a wall will protect their prospects for a better future that will never come under Republican leaders (or motivate them to take one of the 368 thousand agricultural jobs currently held by illegal immigrants. Most experts, including Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development, don’t think so: "It appears that almost all U.S. workers prefer almost any labor-market outcome — including long periods of unemployment — to carrying out manual harvest and planting labor"). Fear of a deep state, to Pizzagate, faith in Q, and people who think that this is really something you should be doing because Alex Jones was banned from Facebook are all wearing masks that cover their mouths with the ridiculous words of people like this: They are the people who think a space force is a great idea, like these ones: While it’s easy to laugh at these people, or to believe that they are not representative of the nearly 63 million people who voted for President Trump in 2016, these faceless foot-soldiers of MAGA nation hold enough power to shape the trajectory of democracy in America; and, in some strange form of symbiosis, they are the mask for Trump.
writing is a swordfish desperate for catch and release
its rostrum dipped in ink not mightier than but equal to college drowning in small pools filled with shimmering fry searching for open oceans from which to speak and stand on ecstasy at Coachella with thirsty holograms swimming through smoke and sweat like Pac twelve years dead and gone and live on stage waiting for the next universe |
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March 2024
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