Wednesday, October 21, 2015

I (don't) Want My MSNBC

Let’s get some disclosure out of the way:

For the majority of my adult life, I’ve been a card-carrying Democrat. The first election I was eligible to vote in was Clinton v. Dole in 1996, and I whole-heartedly voted for Clinton. I voted for Gore, Kerry, Obama and Obama, again, in that order. I am pro-choice, pro-social programs, pro-universal healthcare (because we are the only industrialized nation that doesn’t have it, for Pete’s sake). I have historically followed presidential campaigns the way normal people follow football or basketball, marking every skyrocket and dip in the polls. I know that Quinnipiac ain’t just a place in Connecticut, and I watch every debate, even the GOP debates, speculating all the variables.

This, however, is the first year since 2000 that I have not had cable in my house. It wasn’t an active decision; I moved into the apartment my husband rented in North Carolina while I was still in Missouri, and he never got cable, so we just inactively decided not to get it. We still watch our shows, though I limit myself to three shows at a time, because I’m supposed to be writing.

It’s the first year since I became a political superfan that I haven’t glutted myself on 24-hour news. I used to devour Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Mathews. Occasionally, I’d flip over to Fox to see what the competition had to say for themselves. My family was subject to a good three hours of political commentary every single night. Outside of the election season, I wasn’t so fanatic, but as soon as candidates started announcing, my eyes and/or ears were glued to what the talking heads were dispensing. I couldn’t help myself. Politico-news was my favorite drug. Just a little, just let Mommy have a tiny bit, just the first 20 minutes of Rachel Maddow, then I promise you can watch Spongebob, kids.

That isn’t to say that I’m completely cut off from what is happening during this election. I still actively seek out information from national news organizations. I know what Donald Trump has said about Mexicans, and Megyn Kelly’s ‘whatever’. I know that allegedly, Trump said he would run as a Republican if he ever ran because they were ‘the dumbest group of voters in the country. I bet my numbers would be terrific’ in People in 1998. I know that the news keeps saying Hillary is kicking tail, but I also know that almost every liberal I know, and that’s in the manys of many democrats, is Feeling the Bern, and that the whole thing makes my eyes narrow and my left brow arch up into a dubious question mark. I read about things as they happen. I might look up a video of something particularly compelling. However, I have forgone the hours-long shoveling of political commentary down my own throat like it was my last meal on death row.

I’ve learned a couple of significant things since I quit my cable news during an election season.

#1. Having ZERO campaign ads shoved in my face is more than absolutely delightful.

#2. I’m not nearly as pissed off at Republicans as I normally am this close to the Iowa caucuses. I haven’t been privy to all of the stupid things people say to get votes during an election. Likewise, I’m not as embarrassed of Democrats this season, for the same reason. I mean, c’mon Hillary of 2008, you landed in Bosnia in 1996 under sniper fire? As baller and General Patton as that sounds, I’m not biting.

Because I’m not watching programming that continuously reminds us of what we call Democrats and Republicans, I’ve nearly ceased my us vs. them thinking about other human beings. We’re so silly, us humans. We have to be able to identify something to understand it. The more labels and more specific the labels we have to describe someone, the better we think we can comprehend what happens inside that person’s head. This is almost never true. Sure, we can gain an understanding about that person’s position on certain issues, but we don’t know dick about that person really. You know this is true. Think about how weird it is when someone else uses just one of your labels to evaluate who you are. Think of times when you’ve met friends of friends, how they might know one thing about you, like the fact that you’re a professor  . . . and then the resulting meeting is so strange: “You don’t dress like a professor. You don’t look like a professor. What do you mean you haven’t read _________? I thought you were an English professor.” Even better, “You’re so smart, I can’t believe it, I thought you were a stripper.”

When we identify people by who they vote for in elections, we do everyone the disservice of believing we know who they are. And now that I’m not being an MSNBC glutton, I’ve pulled back considerably on my hyper-classification of who Republicans or Democrats are based on programmed information.

3. I’ve learned that there’s only so much information you need about the goings-on of the current campaign season, and you can fit it into 30 minutes of reading headlines and skimming articles, pretty much. News organizations need to fill those 24 hours with something, and a play by play of everything everyone did in every town across America does not make you more informed. It makes you more informed on shit that doesn’t matter.

4. And while we’re on shit that doesn’t matter: it doesn’t matter how much MSNBC I watch, the person who raises the most money in an election is the person who wins. The candidate who has raised the most money in presidential elections has won every time since 1960. We don’t have elections, we have auctions. With the introduction of Citizens United (such a strange contradictory name) we as individual Americans have no say whatsoever in who can win because we can never outspend a Super-PAC. We can never outspend the Koch Bros. or Michael Bloomberg or Sheldon Adelson. We can never outspend the pharmaceutical lobby, or the insurance lobby, or the gun lobby or whatever dumbass lobby is representing corporate interest.

What I’m saying is that I regret investing so much passion into something upon which I have no real influence. That one person-one vote thing they tell you about in school is not really true. We don’t live in a Democracy. Technically, we live in a Republic, but even closer to reality, we live in a Plutocracy. Wealth governs our country. It cannot be fixed under our current or any existing economic paradigm. The world as we exist in it is rudderless. So who you vote for means about as much as which team you pick for the Super Bowl win. All the rooting and tooting you do for that team has no effect on whether or not that team wins.

The news programming I gave up is part of that machine. The machine that needs us to continue to be separate from one another in order for it to continue to work. If we continue to be bamboozled by the system we’ve helped create, the world will continue to turn. We’ll pick our favorite teams and our favorite candidates, but we’ll have no real control over the world turning under us. I’m choosing not to be a part of it anymore. I believe we can do better. I believe we can all be human beings holding ourselves to a higher standard than the one we’re looking at right now. I have dear Republican friends who I have ceased to label as such because it gets us nowhere. It’s as useful as labeling someone a Seahawk or a Marlin or a Cowboy fan. It means nothing to real America.


I dare you to not let yourself be identified by what the existing political paradigm wants to call you. It’s destructively divisive. It only serves the people who wish to keep the system status quo. And I’m over it. I dare you to quit MSNBC or Fox News. I dare you to challenge your own party. I dare you to find a friend who has been labeled the opposite of your label, and discover 20 things you have in common. I dare you to imagine how much pants-shitting would happen if we collectively said "We quit your bullshit, American politics". It would be exceptionally filthy in Washington D.C. that day, and it would be glorious.

Saturday, October 3, 2015

I Made A Friend This One Weird Time

When I was still teaching Composition and Rhetoric, one of the ways I forced my students to think about research topics was to ask them a series of questions, which subversively pulled from the deep recesses of their brains some ideas about the cultural and societal issues that they care most about. It was always imperative that I helped them find a topic that wouldn’t become dull or overwhelming when I slapped that 15 page research paper assignment on them. The exercise served to help them think about issues they could spend an entire semester researching without losing their minds.

If you were President/Dictator etc. for one day, what laws would you enact or repeal?

If you were given a million dollars to create your own charitable foundation, what would it be and why?

And my favorite question, the one that most quietly reveals their priorities is this:
If there is some cataclysmic event, an apocalyptic happening that brought the society to which you’ve grown accustomed to a screaming halt, what would be the FIRST ITEM you would try to forage for? What store would you be looting?

The answers to that question are particularly revealing. My student with Type 1 Diabetes said she’d hit every pharmacy she could find to secure insulin. Some students head straight to the sporting goods store for guns and survival gear. Some hoard food, some make massive clothing hauls, some hit jewelry stores under the assumption that perhaps gold and silver would be of use in trade at some future point.

Back in 2010, I was asking these questions aloud during a Friday class, allowing the students a few minutes in between to fully articulate their answers. When I got to my favorite question about the cataclysmic event, a student in the front row with light brown hair and icy blue eyes, a Jennifer Lawrence look-somewhat-alike, shot her hand up Hermione Granger-style and asked: “Are there zombies?”

“Really?” I asked

“Yeah, my answer is different if there are.”

I tried as best as I could to conceal my annoyance, which isn’t always easy for me, but it’s most easy when I’m teaching.

“I guess if you want there to be zombies, then there are zombies. . . I don’t know. No, no zombies. Well, I don’t care . . . just answer the question however you want to.” This was before I began watching The Walking Dead. For the record, I have since decided it was a completely valid question.

I was probably getting ready to start my period, which, as a feminist, I realize is a shitty excuse, but as a fucking human, a completely authentic one. I went home at 2:00 pm and poured an over-sized glass of wine. My boyfriend, now husband, came over and I bitched for a straight hour about how annoyed I was.

“Come-the-fuck-on, are there zombies? What the fuck is this chick talking about?” I complained between gulps and not-quite-yet-husband poured me another glass. One of the reasons I knew he was the person I was supposed to marry is because when I’m a crazy, neurotic mess, he’s always calm, quiet, and focused.

“Did she just want to make a thing about what we were doing?” My vexation only exacerbated by the fact that I had to work in three hours. I had no time for a nap; the super-juggle of day job and night job paradigm, which only served to fuel my already irritated attitude.

No matter how bad I felt, no matter what daily exasperations entered into my world, no matter the hardships and problems of the real me, there was always something liberating about having the opportunity to change my identity and get paid for it. If I had a day like this day, difficult students or difficult situations, difficult children or difficult bills to pay, all of that strips away when I put on my fake eyelashes. When I tease and shellac my hair into a beauty queen coif, when I pull the strings on my corset so tight I feel like Scarlett O’Hara gripping a bed post, all of the outside goes away. The strip club is like a space ship. You enter and you are worlds away from the mundane hum-drum of regular life. That’s probably part of the appeal for customers, come to think of it. Not just the hot, topless girls who actually engage with patrons, but that otherworldly tone that permeates the club. No one feels like they’re in Kansas anymore.

I’d nearly forgotten my disgruntling afternoon when I plopped into a chair at the bar to bullshit with Mike, the manager, for a handful of minutes before I fully entered into the metamorphosis of Jackee the Caterpillar to Betty the Butterfly. I wasn’t paying close attention to the new girl he was talking to, new girls being a constant staple at the strip club. It seems cold, but I often didn’t bother to interact with new employees outside of introducing myself and allowing for the occasional small talk. Part of it was that my work time was so characterized by my motivation to make as much money in the shortest amount of time, and so I was often unobservant to the goings on of the employees around me.

The other reason for my initial distance was that the job, being a stripper, is far more difficult than pop culture would like you to believe, and even some of the most gorgeous, well-endowed in the chest, perfect-butted women cannot grasp that the job is not about being the prettiest. A myriad of factors enter into the success of a good exotic dancer, and general overall attractiveness is but a small sliver. This results in alarmingly high turnover. Girls come and work one night and never return. Some stay a week. Some stay for a collection of months, but give up. There were always new girls and at a certain point, they all started to look the same to me.

The new girl with whom Mike was chatting turned to walk away, lingering for the few seconds that I needed to sense some familiarity in her face. Who was that girl? I know that face. She looks like . . . but that couldn’t possibly be . . . no, I’m just still irritated about this afternoon and her face is in my brain.

After I was painted and coiffed and appropriately cinched in the right places, I climbed into the DJ booth to chat up my buddy, DJ Keller, and complain about my day to ears that understood. The new girl with the familiar face, who had chosen to call herself Bella, was on stage. I relayed the annoying afternoon, knowing that Keller would commiserate with me, and I casually mentioned that the girl on stage looked like the girl who’d annoyed me with the zombie business.

“OH. Bing, she does go to Stephens.”

My stomach sank. Of all the possible students, current and former, of all the predicaments I tend to find myself in, how in the actual fuck was I going to handle this one. I hadn’t been here the day she was hired, and though my rank may have influenced the choice to employ her, she was too pretty to not get a job at the club if she really wanted it.

“Keller, what the fuck am I gonna do? This is one of my current students. This is not good.”

I spent the first half of the night avoiding her, constantly ruminating on how I could possibly handle this situation, fretting over any unfortunate implications this might have for my other job, my real job. Sometime around midnight, after a few shots of whiskey courage, I found myself alone with her in the tiny area between the dressing room and the DJ booth, a small island of seclusion and respite for dancers to sneak a cigarette or take a quick break from exasperating customers.

“So this doesn’t have to be weird,” I said.

“Totally agree.” She responded. Nothing about zombies or how we’d survive, nothing about how we might handle this come Monday in class. It was an immediate mutual understanding. We just would keep the arenas separate and never speak of this again.

We managed to avoid one another for a few weeks, operating on the knowledge of mutually assured destruction should one of us get outta line. At work, we are cordial and largely avoid each other. At school, she comes to class and I teach it but there is little to no unnecessary interaction between us. But then one day we were almost alone in the VIP, me having just finished a dance and Bella just beginning one. I walked toward the exit when Bella’s customer shouted over to me . . .

“Hey, hey you! Can I get the next dance with both of you guys?”

Bella and Betty locked eyes, exchanging a glance that said so many wordless things: Oh God, do we have to? Oh fuck, yes we do. Oh sonofabitch, the customer is always right, Oh fucking fuckaduck, this has to happen. Oh shit we’re getting paid, but this is gonna be weird on Monday morning.

I hate it when worlds collide.

We did it. We smiled. We pretended to make out behind the curtains of our hair. We grabbed each other’s boobs and syrup-sweet talked this guy out of a tip. And when he was gone, and silence hung between us, Bella and I quietly dressing, she broke through the thick muted air:

“Well, that was fucking weird.”

And we laughed. And laughed harder. Laughed hard enough for a passerby to stop and peek in at us, thinking he was missing some stripper comedy show. And all the weird, awkward awful melted away.


Why am I telling you this? What is the moral to this stripper tale? I’ve always asserted that the strip club is a microcosm of the world at large. These stories that are essentially campfire fare, little anecdotes for curious friends and strangers who want to know all about the glamourous life of an exotic dancer, these tales are still applicable to life. I fell in complete platonic love with Bella. I count her among the best friends I made during that long, long period of my life when I was living as two people in one body. The story of us, of Bella and Betty, reminds me that your friends may not always start as your friends. Sometimes the people who annoy you with questions about zombies end up being some of the smartest, funniest, kindest people you meet. It serves as a reminder to unhinge your ego when it comes to petty irritants, because sometimes—perhaps even often—the people you love come in unexpected packages.

Sunday, September 20, 2015

Cheers to Strangers Saving The Day (or not, but whatever)

It is 12:30 on a Saturday night and I’m sitting alone at a karaoke bar in New Bern, North Carolina. I’m sober driving for my best bud, Barry, who is drunker than fourteen dollars and smoking his twentieth cigarette in the parking lot, while inside a man in sweatpants takes a seat on the stage to holler out his cover of Clarence Carter’s Strokin’.  A couple is seated at the other end of the bar, the woman and I make eye contact and smile, but everyone’s attention is soon diverted to sweatpants guy on stage:                            

I stroke it to the east
And I stroke it to the west
And I stroke it to the woman that I love the best
I be strokin'

Barry returns from his cigarette to catch the majority of the performance, and  the crowd has started cheering and dancing. This is what I love about dive-bar karaoke: nobody gives a single shit. I’ve been to karaoke nights where it seems like everyone is trying desperately to live out their long dormant fantasies of Broadway stardom while simultaneously trying to one-up or act shitty to the other performers . . . like people were going to get paid at the end of the night; like it's American Effing Idol. Better are the karaoke nights in small bars, patronized mostly by locals of all ages, where you can hear Salt-n-Peppa’s Shoop and then Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy, followed by Luck Be a Lady. The skill level varies from quite impressive (a matronly-looking lady rocked the shit out of When You’re Good to Mama) to so dreadful it loops around and boomerangs back to awesome somehow. When two tone deaf gals fumble through Don’t Stop Believin’ with unabashed bravado, you can’t help but root for them. Everyone is just there to have fun.

Barry sits next to me, quotes something from Strangers With Candy, tells me about some idea he has for a YouTube channel. I try to listen to what he’s saying, but a twenty-something kid in a bow tie is on stage belting out Hungry Eyes, and I really want to sing along, and I’m having trouble keeping up with both forms of entertainment. This is when I notice the couple at the end of the bar again, each separately peeking over their shoulders at me.

I drink another water, Barry orders another beer, someone sings Margaritaville.

“Does that couple at the end of the bar keep looking back at us?” Barry asks.

“Yes, I thought I was being paranoid, but they are,” I tell him.

Then the woman looks back again, turns toward us and approaches. She comes in close and I’m worried I should know her and know that I do not.

“Hey do you want to come do a shot?”

I tell her no, I’m not drinking, but thank her.

“Do you wanna come do a shot of water then?”

I think this is the weirdest request ever, but maybe this is a thing. Maybe people do shots of not-alcohol and I just didn’t know about it. I can hardly refuse, because to say no at this point would be just stand-offish and I don’t have enough friends in North Carolina to afford being a big B to anyone.
So I agree to the water shot, tell Barry to watch my purse, and walk down the length of the bar with this blonde woman I’ve never seen before. As we approach her husband, she leans in and asks me: 

“Hey are you ok? You looked like you needed to be rescued from that guy.”

Now the water shot makes sense, their concerned looks make sense. They first noticed me when I was sitting alone at the bar, and they saw Barry come in after a cigarette. They assumed he had just arrived and was now putting the moves on me. I was probably making confused and unpleasant faces because Barry’s drunk-talking and the karaoke music were both drowning one another out and this couple saw a woman, alone, who’s accidentally snagged an admirer who couldn’t stop talking her ear off.

I laugh and tell her the real story. Barry is my best friend in North Carolina, Barry is my neighbor and a friend of my husband, and Barry is very, very gay. His name is Barry Gay.  Despite my feminine wiles, I am definitely not Barry’s type. We have a chuckle over their misinterpretation and they buy Barry a Fireball shot.

As we’re leaving, once we exit the bar and start walking toward Barry’s Lincoln, I finally have the opportunity to explain the mishap.

“Those MOTHER FUCKERS!” Surprisingly enough, to me anyway, the assumption by the couple that Barry was creepin’ on some chick infuriates him.

I feel exactly the opposite. A little shred of my faith in humanity was restored by that couple’s decision to say something when a situation looked weird. They couldn’t know that Barry was Barry and not some rapey creepazoid. If more people behaved that way, if more people took the time to be observant, to not be afraid to interfere or risk offending someone, then maybe at least some actual scary, creepy, rapey situations could be avoided.

“Barry, doesn’t it make you feel comforted in knowing that there are people out there who, if I were actually in that situation, would come to my rescue?”

“No, actually it doesn’t make me feel better. They had me tried and convicted before they even met me.”

I told him that at least their intentions were good, that he might be taking it personally. He pouted the whole way home.

I want to say thank you, strange couple at the bar, that had no vested interest in my well-being other than I looked like a gal in an uncomfortable situation. I wish everyone was like you.

And for guys who might be reading this . . . I imagine it has to be difficult for men to toe the line between meeting girls and coming across like a Creepy McGee. It sucks that there has to be an active awareness of potential dangers to women’s safety. It sucks that even a gay guy can look like he’s ready to slip a roofie into a gal’s drink. It sucks for men, but to be fair, that environment exists because of men. The most noble way, I think, of someone doing their part to rectify a sense of human decency is looking out for strangers. When men, like the husband of the couple, choose to intervene, even though it’s none of their business, even though he could be so wrong, it does a little bit to diminish the rape culture that permeates American society. It tells a stranger that there are good people, good men out there. It makes a woman who has spent a lot of time thinking about patriarchy feel hope for humankind.

Thank you, again, Mara and Justin Something-or-Other. I appreciate you.

Barry, however, is still pissed.


Saturday, September 12, 2015

A Value Tale: The Story of Nukky

I spent the first three to four years of my life deeply in love with my pacifier. Yes, I was one of those children who held firmly to that natural comfort of a nipple in my mouth for long after it was appropriate. In retrospect, it doesn’t seem all that strange. There are a great many adults who still, either subconsciously or consciously, walk around looking for nipples to put in their mouths, so the few years that I was overdue for a weaning don’t seem so serious anymore.

But damn . . . was it serious back then.

I have memories reaching as far back as my second year of life, the first clear, brilliant recollection being a moment when my mom sat my tiny toddler body on our classically 1970’s orange kitchen counter top, her standing closely by, as we watched the gold-domed popcorn-maker stir its long metal arm in a circle until the kernels inside began to explode into white puffs. I remember laughing hysterically at this. Had I been born in 2007 instead of 1977, it was a scene that my parents may have recorded with their smartphones and posted to YouTube. You’ve seen them—clips of dads and moms repeatedly doing something like making a fart noises with their lips and the young toddler belly-laughing uncontrollably and then waiting in anticipation for the noise to come again. This is a testament to how little I must have been, small enough to roar in comedic delight at the popping of corn kernels. I asked my mother once, many years later if she recalled this event. And while I don’t think she remembered it happening, I saw her eyes widen in disbelief and shock that my memories extended so far and with such exquisite detail. She claims I couldn’t have been more than two years old, and that seems about right to me. I thought the subject might make her feel nostalgic, but the astonishment on her face seemed less like reflective musing and more like grave concern. It suggested my mother was thinking, “If she remembers THAT, what else does she remember?”

I remember everything I’ve chosen to remember. And my memory is long.

My parents hated that pacifier. I loved my Nukky. I loved it so much. I loved gently biting it and shifting my teeth around to make squeaky sounds of rubber-on-rubber. Nukky made me feel happy when I was sad. Nukky served as the calmer of my frustrations, the crutch to my shyness, and I wasn’t the only kid who had a ‘thing’ they carried with them all the time. No one got mad at my best bud, Tonya, when she took her blankie everywhere. And while I was admittedly too old for something most certainly intended for infants, I didn’t understand why everyone was so pissed off about it. I just knew that they were.

At home, Nukky was more of a tolerated annoyance. He’d occasionally be put in Nukky jail if I got in trouble or if I left him unattended somewhere, but I’d always find him, pop him back into my mouth, and go on with whatever kid-plans I had for the day.

A spirited debate about Nukky would most often occur when we were going somewhere and I insisted on taking him along. Nukky in public was the thing that drove them over the edge. See, it wasn’t so much that I loved and wanted Nukky all the time, it was the notion of people in town catching sight of a three-year-old marching confidently down the grocery aisle, pacifier planted firmly between her lips, which dripped deep humiliation into my parents. I suspect my mother imagined the entire township of Plattsburg whispering behind their hands: “Is that Franz and Patti’s kid? Isn’t she too old for that? How strange. Why don’t they just take it away from her?”

Outings were the catalyst for all-out Nukky battles, which most often ended in the terrifying threat that Nukky would meet his end soon, and most often that end was death by toilet flush.

That was when true distress would set in. I knew that things that went down the toilet never, ever, EVER came back again. It served me to allow the parents to put Nukky in hiding, in Nukky-jail, where I knew I could stealthily retrieve him later. They weren’t very creative about his imprisonment, and for the most part, I could find him in one of about four places, most often the cabinet nearest the entrance to the kitchen from the living room. And if that earliest childhood memory of the popping corn taught me anything, it was that interesting shit happened on the kitchen counter, and so I had since learned to climb up there myself.

“I’m gonna flush that Nukky down the toilet!” I still see my mother’s furrowed brow, eyes piercing through me, her lips tight in condescension, her finger pointed at Nukky clenched tightly between my teeth.

Don’t worry, Nukky. I got you. They can’t get you out of my mouth if I bite really, really hard. No one will take you away from me.

Around this same time, I developed a deep interest in a series of books someone had gifted me. They were called Value Tales, by Value Communications Publishers in LaJolla, California. This was the height of the Time Life series days, when people bought sets of books about World War II or the animals of the earth or the Old West, before the internet dropped everything we would ever want to know about anything into our magic boxes.

 The Value Tales were children’s books which depicted a biographical sketch of a famous person while focusing on some moral or value exemplified by that historical figure’s life. Helen Keller’s story was The Value of Determination. The Value of Leadership told the tale of Winston Churchill. But my favorite of the series was The Value of Believing in Yourself: The Story of Louis Pasteur.

The fact that this was my favorite, as a look back with my adult(-ish) brain, highlights something specifically peculiar about my personality. I absolutely adore being terrified. I’ve been exposed to some of the most sophisticated writing in history, but when it comes time for me to read something for sheer delight, or if I have a long road trip requiring an audiobook for entertainment, Stephen King is my author of choice. I have always been the one to vote to watch the horror movie over the romantic comedy, and always been the one who laid in bed later that night, startling at every creak of the floor board or howl of the wind outside. And the Louis Pasteur story was DARK. I don’t know if it was a reflection of the sullen, jaded, psychedelic hangover that was the 1970’s, the kind of winsome charm with a sleeping creeping sensation just beneath the surface that movies like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory exemplified. I have always liked scary things, and this was the first thing that genuinely whipped up the heebie-jeebies in me.

The French chemist Louis Pasteur is best known for his development of the Pasteurization process of milk and wine, prohibiting bacterial contamination. But the Value Tale focused primarily on his development of the cure for rabies. Now because things like microscopic germs were entirely subjective to the minds of the children reading this Value Tale, the ‘invisible enemy’ of the rabies germ is illustrated thusly:



As a child listening to my parents read this story, as the pages turned one by one, my heart would quicken, knowing that the Rabies were coming.  With each turn of those pages, I was getting closer and closer to the moment when I would come face to face with the demons that would haunt me long after I’d been tucked in and the light was turned out. And yet, I selected this title over and over again. Tossing aside the books featuring the biographies of Nelly Bly and Johnny Appleseed, I would go back to one title that would keep me nicely chilled for a long night in a dark room.

I never got desensitized to the Rabies. I always knew they were coming and I always knew what they looked like, but each time was like the first time. I couldn’t look, and then I couldn’t look away. The closer they came, the harder sucked on my Nukky, biting down on him, squeaking him between my teeth.  In fact, the only reason I could make it through the book each time was knowing that I had Nukky there with me. I knew I’d be scared, and that I would kinda like it, and it was alright because Nukky was there.

Having grown more and more careless of his whereabouts, my parents had more frequent opportunities to lock Nukky away somewhere. If it took me longer than a few minutes to find him, a dread would set in, an ever-creeping fear that she’d DONE it, she’d finally gone and done IT, she’d flushed Nukky down the toilet and I’d never, ever see him again! The more panicked I became, the more adrenaline pumped into my little child body, and the more I wanted him there between my teeth to squeaky-squeaky-squeak and tell me everything was ok. When I would find him, the relief would be tenfold when I would pop him in my mouth . . . oh, Nukky I thought you were lost forever.

Dark days don’t often start so dark, and I remember feeling happy, not-yet frenzied in my Nukky hunt. I hadn’t seen him in some time. While I recall these events with sparkling clarity, I have trouble determining time in measurements, because an hour to a child feels like years, and a year feels like decades. So while I feel like I hadn’t seen Nukky in a few days, it could have been as little as a few hours. I’d checked obvious places . . . Dad’s bathroom shaving drawer was the easiest cell to spring Nukky from, but he wasn’t there. I walked into the kitchen, to the cabinet that Nukky had to go to when Mom and Dad were super pissed at me, because of the effort involved in the jail break.
Sun shone through the kitchen windows, the afternoon still blooming with promise of some adventure for me to embark on, just as soon as I found Nukky. I could go out and play under the weeping willow, or watch the horses in the pasture from the backyard, or jump on my bed and dance and listen to Paul Revere and the Raiders, for whom I’d developed an intense liking. 

My confidence soared when I started to pull the kitchen chair from its place at the table over to the counter, because the ruckus it made usually drew attention to my illicit activity. Sometimes my plans to bust Nukky outta jail were foiled by the downfalls of being a tiny human, having to bang things around and exert effort that wouldn’t be necessary if I were just a little bit taller, just a little bit bigger. But Dad was right there in the living room, balls deep into some western on one of the three channels we had way back then.

He can’t hear me. Ha ha ha. Nukky, I’m coming to save you and then we’ll spend the whole day together.

I climbed from the floor to the seat of the chair, from the seat of the chair to that orange countertop where I’d had my first belly laugh at the popping popcorn, so proud no one had caught me getting Nukky, so happy that the moment was almost here. My fingers gripped the round, brass handle on the cabinet and I slowly pulled it toward me, inching open the door as a shaft of light peeked through and illuminated the dishes inside. I looked around, making sure no one was coming, then swung the door wide. I saw Nukky, tucked into the corner. But standing in front of him, guarding him from our reunion, was a giant RABIES demon.



I screamed, nearly falling from the counter, I screamed. I screamed and didn’t stop and then my world turned hazy and black. Behind my screams was the disbelief that my one true terror had somehow leapt from the pages of that book, conspired with my parents to take Nukky away from me, another true terror. The only thing worse than Nukky being flushed down the toilet was Nukky in jail with one of the rabies. That hideous thing was standing there so far from the world it belonged in, invaded my house, and was keeping Nukky prisoner.  While I’m sure I didn’t actually faint, my soul darkened for a time and I felt nothing but terror, and the events of the rest of the day—until later that evening—are a bleak fog. I retreated somewhere to cope with the distressing and ghastly events that had befallen me.

It couldn’t be possible, you’re thinking to yourself, right? These are the nightmarish machinations of a child doing something wrong and manifesting an imaginary bad guy to scare her out of committing the infraction of reclaiming Nukky, you think? No. That monstrous representation of a once incurable disease, that caricature that I simply called ‘Rabie’, was real.

Rabie entering my three-dimensional world demonstrates the difference between my mother and my father. My mother yelled and shamed and tried to humiliate me away from Nukky, and when none of that worked, threatened to flush Nukky down the toilet. My father’s approach was quiet, deliberate, a scheming saved for a high reward—a shock-and-awe style of parenting that would have made Dick Cheney proud. My father hand-sketched an oversized duplicate of that Rabie. He took time to shadow lines beneath its eyes, sharpened the Rabie’s teeth into fine, razor points; he narrowed Rabie’s fingers into claws. A man who preferred the sciences to the arts, a man who, to the best of my knowledge, never drew anything before or since, focused immense artistic energy and pizazz into a drawing intended to scare the ever-loving shit out of his kid.

Sometime in the post-terror darkness, I realized he must have heard me from the living room as I was making my approach. My father must have heard me dragging the chair across the kitchen, heard the clamoring of my efforts to climb onto the counter. He knew my clandestine adventure would end as soon as I opened that cabinet door. I thought that the cowboys on television had distracted him enough for me to make my move, but he knew the whole time what was in store for me. Did Mom know, too? Did they plan this together? How long did they know before it happened, and why on earth would they scare me like that?

My parents delighted in the series of events. I heard my mother recounting the afternoon to someone on the phone, laughing at Franz’s clever plot, snickering at my despair. At some point, they must have felt guilty because they gave Nukky back to me and stopped talking about it. Or at least, stopped talking about it with such gusto.

After darkness fell (and in my memory it seems like the same evening, but it may have been a few days later . . . again, child sense of time is strange) I found myself curled on my bed, Nukky in my mouth, a squeak and a squeak and a squeak between my teeth, and I knew what to do.
Heartbroken, I walked to the bathroom.

I loved Nukky. No part of me wanted to do what I had to do, but Mom and Dad would never stop trying to take him away from me. At such a tender age, I learned what happened when two horrifying, but seemingly separate fears suddenly collided, inciting a despair too big for me to handle. I never wanted to lose Nukky, but if they would put him in the cabinet with that Rabie, what would they do next? How would they try to scare me away from him? They’d already manifested the most terrifying thing my child mind could imagine; what horrors await me if I keep him?

I remembered a story my uncles, who were teenagers at the time, told about flushing a baby alligator down the toilet and it turning into a giant alligator. This oddly gave me hope. If an alligator can go down the toilet and grow up and live, maybe Nukky can go out to the water where the toilet water ends up. Maybe Nukky can find me, or some other kid to comfort . . . but hopefully me. If he stays here, I don’t know what will happen. Maybe some time when I’m down by the lake next to our house, my Nukky will come floating up to me, my lost friend who would certainly come back to me if he could.

My brain holds this memory in vibrant Technicolor—my standing next to the toilet, my little feet shoulder-width apart, my palm stretched flat, and in the center was my Nukky. He was yellow, his plastic roughened by too many years of providing security I so needed, his orange-brown nipple pocked with tiny teeth marks. I gazed down at him, overcome by sorrow. I felt fat tears growing on my lids, and I feel silly that thirty years later, I feel those same tears welling up for a little girl who just loved something, was brought peace by something silly and infantile, but who would have likely grown out of it in her own time.

I dropped Nukky into the toilet and flushed. I watched him circle the bowl with the tornado of water, a clockwise waving of goodbye to a girl who loved him so much. I told myself I was a big girl. That Nukkys were for babies. That I couldn’t take Nukky to kindergarten with me when I went. That my new baby sister couldn’t learn how to be a big girl if I were still a baby myself with a stupid baby Nukky. I wiped tears from my face and walked to the living room.

“Mom, Dad. I’m a big girl. I’m not going to use my Nukky anymore.”

They looked pleased for one second, my mother relieved that the battles were finally over, my father justified that his very elaborate scheme had worked. I realized this was who I was in this family. That they would be nicer to me if I just did what they said.

“I did it. I flushed him down the toilet.”

Their parental pride evaporated.

My mother’s mouth dropped open, releasing a “WHAT?!?!?” that was more of an exclamation than a question. My father flew up from his chair and ran to the bathroom, and I could hear him making sucking noises and splashing the toilet water, saying the f-word and the s-word back and forth.

“Why ON EARTH did you flush him down the toilet, Jackee?” Mom asked.

“That’s what you told me you were going to do.” And so that’s what I did. That’s what grownups do, I imagined. They flush shit they can’t use anymore down the toilet.

“Ok, well from now on don’t flush anything except peepee and poopoo down the toilet.”

I sulked back to my room, despaired over my lost Nukky, disillusioned that the one thing I thought I could do that would make my parents proud resulted in more frustration and annoyance, and I think maybe a call to a plumber, but definitely a few rounds of hearty plunger uses.

If this were my Value Tale, it would be called “The Value of Thinking of Your Children as Human Beings with Their Own Wants, Needs, and Emotional Guidance Systems: The Jackee Marceau Story”. I don’t think I ever fully trusted either of my parents after the Nukky incident. It’s a cautionary value tale. The things you think aren’t important, the forgettable daily events and irritations and annoyances that children conjure in their parents aren’t so forgettable for the children who have yet to learn to navigate the absolute weirdness of our world. Children remember, even if you don’t. It’s a lesson in learning to acknowledge the needs of people who don’t have a say in the decisions made for them. It applies to people who aren’t parents, but who have to deal with people that may have a very different perspective from you.

Or maybe I just wanted to holler my parents out for scaring the shit out of me. The Value of Telling an Entertaining Story That Might Demonstrate Something or Other.

R.I.P. Nukky

1977-1980somethingorother

Friday, August 28, 2015

On Race (or, White People are Awkward)

In North Carolina, people are going to talk to you in line at the grocery store. This is a form of communication that I once abhorred, small talking with strangers about the contents of my cart. I’ve gotten over it. In the South, strangers are not so strange when they feel like they have something to share. I was buying a half a watermelon at the Piggly Wiggly when an older couple behind me asked the price. I told them it was three dollars, and the woman said, “Oh no, child, you need to go get you one of the whole ones. They’re just four dollars.” Before I could object, the man took my half watermelon and high-tailed it to the produce section to replace it with a whole. He returned in 30 seconds with a huge watermelon, rolled it gently into my cradling arms.

“Thanks,” I said. “Jeez, I don’t know if I’ll be able to eat this whole thing by myself before it goes bad.”

The woman said, “Oh heck, just share it with your neighbors or your friends at church.”

I nodded, filed this idea somewhere in my mind and came home and hacked the sucker in half. I recalled the suggestion of the couple in line, just share it with your neighbors, and thought, “Yeah, that’s a really nice thing to do. I’ll do that. I’ll share this with my neighbors.”

I live on the second floor of a building that was constructed sometime in the 1930’s, with two mirror-image renovated apartments upstairs, Clay and I occupying one and our best gay husband, Barry, living in the other.

Below us in a rear apartment lives a guy who doesn’t often speak to me, but does talk to Clay and Barry. For the record, his unwillingness to speak to me seems to have less to do with any sort of contempt or disregard for women, but rather, he seems like the kind of youngish-man who is still sort of scared to talk to girls, which is fine with me. He wears camo every day (unless he’s going shirtless), talks about being a professional boxer, thinks people are breaking into our building all the time (as evidenced by his calling the police so many times for imagined reasons that I heard them once firmly ask that he stop calling them. And, yes, I was totally eavesdropping from my deck), and it was his chew spit can that spilled all over me when I took out his recycling. He’s a polite odd fellow who I wave at, who returns the wave, but that’s largely the extent of our interaction.

The street-facing space in our building is a beauty shop called Natural Creations catering largely to African-American clientele, owned and operated by a lovely woman named Pam, who is always friendly and warm when I see her. 

During the day, when I’m at home being a starving artist, the building is largely quiet save the soft music from Pam’s beauty shop, which sometimes drifts from her door up through the open windows of my apartment. And since it was mid-day, and since I could faintly hear music and conversation from outside drifting into my window, and everyone else was at work, I thought, “Share with your neighbors, yeah, great idea . . . who’s home? Pam’s working downstairs. I’ll take this half watermelon down to Pam.”

I covered the exposed half of watermelon with plastic, put the whole thing in a grocery bag, and made it half way down the stairs before I stopped mid-step.

Am I seriously about to walk into a black-lady beauty shop with a half a watermelon and say, ‘Hey, I thought you’d like this.’?? Pam doesn’t know me very well, and who knows how many customers she has in there, and am I really gonna be a white person walking into an African-American owned business with half a watermelon and nothing else to say for myself? I can’t share this watermelon like that!

This is a testament to how fucking awkward white people are, even very progressive, very supportive, very informed about race, white people. I sat in my kitchen thinking about how awkward I was being about this fucking watermelon.  I love black people. I love black music, I love black art. I love thinking about race in terms of politics and culture and society and history. This is my thing! I teach African-American Literature, for jangus’s sake. I’ve kept a race journal and made my students keep a race journal, documenting for a period of time each instance that the issue of race is brought to their attention. I own books by Cornell West and Michael Eric Dyson and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and I’ve actually read them. Why am I being so god-damned weird about this half a watermelon?

A few days later, Barry mentioned a vehicle he saw while making his commute from nearby USMC- Cherry Point, where he teaches an English course. “It was one-a those big ol things, those big trucks that are extra wide and extra loud. And in the back there was a big American flag on one side of the bed, and just as prominently, a Confederate flag on the other side.”

“Why does that surprise you?” I asked.

“Because they’re Marines. They’re supposed to all be brothers. Closer than brothers. It just doesn’t make sense to me.”

“It’s because they don’t know any better.” I said.

“How can people not know any better, in this day and age?” he asked.

This is what I told him. This is what I’m telling you, readers, this is what I’m telling myself and this is what you need to know, perhaps not what you want to know.

I think MOST people are not racist in their hearts. There are obvious exceptions . . . the Klan, Neo-Nazis . . . but those people aren’t reading my blog anyway. MOST people aren’t racist, but MANY people do and say racist things because they don’t know any better. They’ve never had cause or occasion to seriously consider the experience of people outside their own race. In fact, most people don’t frequently consider the human experience for most people outside their own tribe . . . immediate family, extended family, family friends, church families, and so on in concentric circles outside of one individual.

When white people say things like “C’mon, the Civil War ended a hundred and fifty years ago. Slavery is not an excuse for trouble in the black community.” I have always been the first to jump in and try to correct them: What about the legacy of slavery? What about the post-Civil War removal of Union troops that resulted in demoralizing and humiliating and unjust Jim Crow laws that affected every black citizen? What about lynchings? What about church bombings? What about poll taxes and voting exams? What about contemporary redistricting? What about continued police brutality? What about the exploitation of blacks in the entertainment industry?

These types of rebuttals frequently fall on deaf white ears, and I never understood that until recently. Why can’t the average white person take all of this information and develop a greater understanding for the experience of people of color who are living right beside them? The answer is this: they don’t HAVE to. The system is constructed in such a way that white people don’t often have to consider the experience of people of color, because they’re taught to believe that all people are equal but are given no further information. Honestly, try hard to recollect the middle and high school lectures and units we studied on the Civil War. One or perhaps two days are spent on the subject of slavery, and that’s it . . . moving on . . . in fact, let’s just skip ahead to WWI. (P.S. I have a similar argument regarding Vietnam, but that’s a story for another blog.)

I don’t want to sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist, even though to some degree, I probably am, but I suspect sometime in the very near future, Americans are going to have no choice but to get it together. We have lived in an infinite growth culture in an environment based on finite resources for far too long. This is the end of the American Empire as we know it, and soon, the things that keep us divided are going to have to evaporate, or we’re not gonna make it.

And white people in particular (god love em and I am one) are going to need a crash course in how to empathize with people of color. And we all need a lesson in patience and a desire to connect instead of isolate ourselves and our tribes from one another.

I want America to consider this: Think about our country and the people in it as one family. That sounds really woo-woo and hippy-ish, but wait, I’m not finished yet. Imagine that within our family, there was a deep, dark, dirty secret. Imagine that long ago, Daddy used to beat his kids, beat his wife, keep them locked up, separated us from one another, made us do things we didn’t want to do, made us work for no pay, had sex with his daughters and sired children with them. Imagine he set up rules that applied to only some of his children, not all, and that those rules denied the children their basic human rights. Imagine your brothers and sisters were hung from trees for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Imagine all of these horrors and THEN imagine that suddenly the family says, “Ok, all that is over, and we just aren’t going to talk about it.” Imagine how fundamentally fucked up that family would be, having experienced unimaginable horrors for generations that they aren’t allowed to talk about or consider relevant. Imagine, as a family, that we just didn’t talk about all that shit that went down, all the things that continue to go down as a direct result. Generations of the family would briefly mention the subject, but only when absolutely necessary, and expect that everyone in the family should abide by this example.

After some time, those least affected by the horrors of the past will forget them. It will not be part of their family narrative. After some time, that family history will be distilled down to ‘America had slaves, it was horrible, Lincoln freed the slaves, Martin Luther King fought for Civil Rights, and Obama is president.’

But for the members of our family who were MOST affected by the horrors of the past, the legacy is different. Legalized slavery may have ended in 1865, but we have continued to foster the unbalanced power between whites and minorities through systemic inequalities. That is an inarguable fact. If you are a white person reading this and you’re seeking an argument that illustrates somehow that there aren’t systemic inequalities in American culture, then please ask yourself why you would like to believe that there aren’t.

We need to stop talking about ‘colorblindness’ with regard to race. I question whether or not the phenomenon actually exists in a racial context, but even if it does, colorblindness is just another form of blindness. And who wants to be blind? We need to LOOK. Look at what we’ve done to ourselves. Acknowledge our shared history. See what happened within our family over the last three hundred years or so and say, “Wow, we really fucked up.” Examine our past and our present with open, color-filled eyes. Take it in. Cease to be a fearful bystander in a community that is flawed. Enter into your own discomfort and come out a more thorough person on the other side.

And black sisters and brothers, know this. . .  most white people don’t know any better. They just don’t. It is easy to be exasperated with us. We ask you stupid questions and do stupid things like try to touch your hair. Please try to be patient with us. Most white people have a vague understanding of the black experience, at best, and know that when people do and say racist things that it may not mean that they ARE racist. More likely, no one has ever explained HOW the thing they said or did WAS racist. The guy with the Confederate flag on his truck might not have any sort of prejudicial feelings toward minorities, but has been the recipient of largely awful sources of information. It is certainly not the job of enlightened people to teach the ignorant, but in an effort to make America a better place, we’re all gonna have to do some time connecting with people who just haven’t had occasion to consider the experience of other human beings.

We’ve spent centuries creating little divider tabs for ourselves. We are woman or man, we are religious or not, we are white or black or Asian or Native or Latino, we are democrats or republicans, we are feminists or anti-feminist, we are Jews or gentiles, and of those gentiles, there are like 200 sub-categories: Methodist, Catholic, Baptist, Episcopal. Or we are Muslim or Hindu or any other of the various underrepresented religions in America. We are pro-life or pro-choice. We are athletes, or cosplayers, strippers, or gamers, potheads or rockabilly rude boys. A time is coming when we have to start putting ourselves back together instead of ceaselessly dividing, a time when we need to stop senseless divisions and open our eyes to the richness around us, a time for us to stop being a problem-based culture constantly seeking to place blame on one group or another, and begin a cultural shift based on solutions and shared pursuit of happiness. It’s coming fast, and soon there will be no time to dissolve the fences between us. Better we become truly united by each of us making a concerted effort to see, to look into the faces of everyone and feel connected by our shared experience, with all its failings and flaws, and still support one another and help one another and re-establish an idea of neighborhood and know that we are all part of the same tribe.





Thursday, August 20, 2015

A View: a Mini-Trenches Manifesto

I was going to go for a walk, no destination in mind, those kind of childhood walks we took before someone taught us that everything should only be done for a particular purpose. One of the spiritual gurus I fan-girl out on sometimes, Teal Swan, is a big proponent of these walks, and she looks fabulous all time. In New Bern, one doesn’t have to walk far to encounter something pleasing to the eye, or haunting to the eye, or otherwise notable to the eye. This place was founded in 1710. It’s got some old bones to rattle.

 I pulled on shoes and sunglasses and set out for a walk with the following rule in mind: I will not predetermine my destination. But somewhere in the recesses of my noggin, I knew I’d probably walk down Pollack St. and poke through the English and French gardens at Tryon Palace (North Carolina’s colonial capital), maybe snake through quaint downtown storefronts and restaurants, peek in at galleries (of which there are an unusually large number for a town of 29,000 people), poke around graves in the 18th century cemetery, end up down at the waterfront and read clever names of boats passing by, or look for turtles sunning themselves on the rocks, or try to get close enough to the mallards to see the colors of the feathers on their heads up close, because its iridescence reminds me of gasoline floating in puddles and it weirds me out that something found in nature could remind me of something so unnatural. Or I could watch seagulls eat something disgusting washed up in the pools on the banks of the place where the Trent and Neuse Rivers meet and make way to the Atlantic Ocean some miles east. It’s not a bad place, aesthetically speaking.

While I had no good reason for my walk, no appointment to make, no errand for which I was responsible, I know that when I take off on these spontaneous wanderings, I’m going to think about writing. More likely, I’m going to think about things that I want to write about. Most likely, I’m going to think about my life as if I weren’t the one living it, but the biographer of the person living it . . . the one making a distant observation of this character that is living this life. This is a characteristic I’ve finally realized about myself. I feel like my life has been lived and simultaneously constantly observed by two different people. I’ve probably said this before, and it’s something I’ve certainly examined in my writing for years, but something human I’ve learned this go around is that I should be trying to reconcile the person who gets up in the morning and does the things she does and the voice in my head that is constantly remarking on those doings. On my walks, I ultimately start thinking about my daily living while concurrently constructing some story around it to discern some grander meaning of life. If at this point in my explanation, you find yourself wondering: “What the hell is Jacks going on about now?”, rest assured, you’re not alone. These thinkin’ walks sometimes turn my head into an MC Escher drawing. My brain, examining my brain, and from a distance also designing some story that makes my brain connect to the brains of everyone in the universe. There’s some brain-on-brain criticism that goes on, a lot of RenĂ© Descartes I think, therefore I am happening.

Thinkin’ walks tend to start with an itch in my soul, something I need to let percolate without the distractions of housework or cat poop or mail-to-be-opened nonsense that I typically allow to interfere with my creative life. And today marks the 4th day characterized by my sitting around waiting for the phone to ring, waiting on news from a job interview last week. I feel like a homely, hope-filled gal waiting for a prom date to call. If I could get out of the house, I could stop feeling that way. I could also shift my focus from how deeply silent my apartment is, void of the children chattering, the background blue buzz of the television, the sound of Clay’s guitar from the porch. I’ve been here for almost a year, and still haven’t grown accustomed to the quiet. I miss my kids, who are starting another year of school in Columbia tomorrow, and I’m shattered inside that Mommy isn’t there to be a part of that. I miss my husband, who is surely sleeping in a Marine Corps barracks in Iwakuni, Japan right now, our time difference being exactly 13 hours. He’ll call when I’m nearly asleep, when he’s just beginning his day. 

His deployment came as quite a surprise, although it certainly shouldn’t have, and it somewhat derailed a lot of our plans—moving to a larger place, kids relocating out here before the school year began. At the same time, a lot of these plans have been delayed by my inability to find a full-time job in Eastern North Carolina. The closest large city, Wilmington, is still an hour and a half away. This region of the country is speckled with small, old coastal settlements, most of which haven’t grown much past the 50,000 mark in terms of population. New Bern is probably called “the city” by residents of the numerous tiny towns that surround it, most of which have populations under 1000. There aren’t a gaggle of opportunities for employment for a gal like me. I’ve been working in higher education in one way or another since 2002. I’ve been teaching since 2007. I know books. I know literature. I know writing and love and music and people and world events and pop culture and joie de vivre, but that’s about where my skill sets end. It’s been a struggle. The thinkin’ walks help me avoid an overly-critical shame spiral that ultimately results in my needing a glass of wine and a soft bed to just sleep through a real sad patch of time, call a mulligan on that day and start over again the next.

I miss my girlfriends and having people to go to lunch with, I miss my writer friends, who remind me why I call myself a writer, and why I hold onto that identifier.  I miss having a garden, I miss my backyard and my bathtub. And if I had to stay in this apartment one more second, I was going to veritably lose my shit. I had to scratch this nagging at my ear, the pulling of my shirt tail to the world outside to get out of my inside headspace and into my outside headspace.

 I made it to the stairs leading to the ground floor of the building and remembered that tomorrow was trash day, so I retreated to the kitchen again to swing the bag over my shoulder as I headed downstairs. I figured as long as I was taking my trash down, I should roll the city garbage cans to the curb. And while rolling them to the curb, sweat already beading on my forehead in the Carolina August heat, I thought that while I was taking the garbage out, I should take the recycling out, too, just to get it out of the way. Certainly after a long, sweaty walk, the last thing I would want to do is take the recycling out. So I consolidated the recycling materials in the three different bins our building is allocated. And while I was dumping my neighbor’s bin, one of his chew-spit cans tumbled out of the bin and spilled down my leg, gooey brown slime sinking into my shoe and between my toes. I gagged and ran back upstairs, hiking my leg up into the kitchen sink, shoe and all, to scrub his chewing tobacco refuse off my toes.

Those who know me intimately know that sometimes I get the gags from things that gross me out. Bear Grylls eating giant grubs and drinking liquid squeezed from elephant poop have sent me to the toilet for a vomitus review of my lunch. A story a girl told me once about a Japanese porn involving eels and a funnel and her words made me ralph, sight unseen. . . I threw up just imagining the image. I could watch someone having brain surgery or a hip replacement, I can stomach blood and guts and gore, but there are things in this world that are just Jackee-Bugaboos, and it turns out that having the contents of a spit can splashed on me is one of them. While I upturned the whole bottle of dish soap, indiscriminately squeezing it on my foot and lower leg, the underlying aroma of sun-baked tobacco spit hit my nose and pressed my bugaboo button, and I leaned forward and puked into the sink.
I was hot and sweaty and dirty and I’d already puked, and I hadn’t even left the house yet. This is when that veritable shit-loosing happened. 

In a cranky temper-tantrum fit, I dried off my leg and ripped off the dress I was wearing. It wasn’t likely sullied with the spitty mix, but I didn’t even want to chance smelling that smell again. I pitched it into the laundry and flopped face-down on my bed in my underpants. The brain I had planned on having a hearty think with started in on me . . . everything sucks, I miss everyone, I hate this town, I’m sad, I’m lonely, I miss my family, I can’t get a job, my education is useless, I’m impoverished, I’m a terrible mother,  I’ve made so many mistakes, I’m a shitty person, I regret being a shitty person, I can’t do anything right, I’ve failed at everything, I’m an idiot, I can’t even go on a thinkin’ walk without it getting all screwed up. . . you get the idea.

I folded my hands on my pillow, rested my chin on top of them, and stared out the window. This vista from my little apartment gives the onlooker a view of the Mexican Bakery across the street, and the AT&T cell phone tower just beyond it. I noticed that if I squinted my eyes, the tower’s design could look like that of any other tower. If my eyes crop a little square of that otherwise ugly thing (and sometimes reminder that everyone everywhere is spending way too much time on their phones), my brain could pretend it was a much cooler tower. And then I remembered something: A few years ago I spent a couple of hours on a Parisian real estate site, gazing through the monitor at quirky studio apartments in neighborhoods like Montmartre, imagining how amazing it would be to have just six months of peace and quiet in one of those little domiciles, a place of peace and quiet where I could get some real writing done for just a little while.


It’s representative of how my life seems sometimes like a giant practical joke I’m always playing on myself. Back when my life seemed ‘normal’—house, kids, husband, groceries, garden, school activities, and work and work and work—I longed for just some time to get my shit legit, to richly wallow in my writey-hole, to have no other responsibilities to tend to so I could just dive into the world that surfaces when I sit down with a pen (or keyboard, whatever) and let things unfold for me. Here I was, suffering myself the slings and arrows of my own relentless criticism, and it’s like the universe was telling me, “But remember that little Parisian apartment you wanted with a view of the Eiffel Tower? Remember that time you wished you could just write for a while without distraction?”

I got an email from the kindly hiring committee. They said I nailed the interview. They said it was a delight to have met me. However they have chosen a candidate with more experience with non-profit accounting. The thing is, I knew this already. I just knew that though I’d pretty much smoked that interview like I was getting paid for it, I knew that it wasn’t right for me. Besides, I’d read my tarot cards three times, each time getting the same answer that this particular job is not for me, and that I knew that I should be doing something else. 

Prior to the interview, I’d written a Facebook post saying something like: “Dream Job Interview. Wish me luck.” But to tell the truth, no job is my dream job. I dream about not struggling financially, I dream about finally having all of my family in one place, I dream about being fulfilled by the way that I spend my days . . . but that job, that’s not my dream. I don’t dream about a one-hour commute to-and-fro every day, I don’t dream making sure my tattoos are covered lest someone think I’m some sort of trollop, I don’t dream about spending 40+ hours a week working to just have some leisure time, none of which would be spent on writing. These are not my dreams. I dream about getting paid to be myself, I dream about saying things, writing things that people find meaningful. I dream about wearing whatever I feel like wearing that day. I dream about work and pleasure not having such a definitive border between them.

The impetus of starting a blog was to just write the things about the human experience that I notice, to tell the same stories that I would tell to my friends or whoever is willing to listen. It was writing I could do between bigger writing projects. I feel like at this point I owe you an explanation about the title of this blog: Hot in the Trenches. I've been asked, but never really publicly addressed it. 

 “In the trenches”, draws upon the connotation of battle, because it seemed everyone I knew was fighting some kind of battle, enduring some long war with themselves and with the lives that they are living or the choices they make, and I thought that my own battles, my own ongoing war, might resonate with someone. When someone says: “It’s hot in the trenches” they’re indicating that the battle is raging, that heavy fire breathes down the necks of the grunts on the forefront. We are the grunts on the forefront, trying to figure it out as we go along. But I hope to evoke the double-meaning of the word ‘hot’. Hot like sizzling, hot like sexy, hot like “I know it’s shitty in here, but we all still look fabulous.” 

I want the entries of this blog to remind everyone that though we are all in battle of some kind or another, we can still be fabulous. We can still be who we are. We can still feel joy, and wonder, and marvel at the sheer humanity of everything around us. We can find delight in things just outside our window, even if they weren’t the things we expected. That’s what I want to do with these little things I share with you. Despite the heat and humidity, despite the tobacco spit running down my leg, despite the fact that my long thinkin’ walk didn’t get me past the end of my driveway and that my once fantasized-about apartment doesn’t overlook the Eiffel Tower, but an AT&T cell phone tower, despite the fact that I’m still unemployed, I somehow manage to delight in the absolute weirdness being a human allows.

When I’m feeling bad about myself, particularly if I’m feeling bad about myself as an artist, I watch “The Mindscape of Alan Moore.” If you haven’t seen it, even if you aren’t a typical fan of the graphic novel genre, I still highly recommend watching it, especially if you are a writer or artist of some kind. It serves as a much needed pep talk in those dark nights of the soul we all traverse.
With regard to traditional employment, Moore says this: “I found myself working at a skinning yard and tannery . . . I got expelled from that job after a couple of weeks for smoking dope in the men’s room, which wasn’t improving my career curve any. The next job I was able to get was that of a toilet cleaner at a hotel, and it more or less went downhill from there until I finally ended up as a comics writer.”


This took the sting of the job-rejection away, a little. Moreover, it’s an encouraging reminder that entering into an endeavor like being a writer might look like a battle. But I have a room of my own, with a hilariously gross misrepresentation of the Eiffel Tower just beyond, a constant reminder that I can create my own reality and play practical jokes on myself from somewhere in the ether. I have nothing but time to write until something else happens. So keep reading, I’ll keep writing. And remember that despite your battles (and you have them because we all have them), stay fabulous. Stay hot. Let it roll over us in so many waves, reminding us we’re alive.

Thursday, July 16, 2015

Fill a Blank Page (Jacks Talks to Herself)

Editor's Note: Upon reflection, I probably should've given this a few passes before hitting the 'publish' button, but I'm a glass of Scotch in and, in the spirit of fuckitry, Ima leave it as it is.



There’s nothing more disheartening to a writer than an unfillable blank page. For hours I’d sit and watch that stupid cursor line blinking in and out, in and out, in and out, thinking ‘this used to come so easily to me, what is wrong with me, why can’t I do this anymore?’
I fucked up somewhere along the way and forgot something very important—I think it was in graduate school, because it was there  that the act of writing became something that I was frequently doing entirely for other people—and I forgot, rather, entirely suffocated the single most important member of my original audience. More clearly stated, I forgot that my first audience was me. I forgot that what I loved most about writing, my real impetus for writing as a young person, was that the true act of writing was always initially a dialogue with myself. More importantly, writing stopped being a device through which I talked to myself and started being a device through which I talked to other people. I realized that almost every written endeavor in the last five or so years has been an attempt at dialogue with someone else and not first a dialogue with myself.
Oddly enough, the only written creative projects that have been moderately successful are essays I’ve written spontaneously—all of which were fueled by some need inside to have a hard come-to-Jesus talk with myself. That handful of largely off-the-cuff (although certainly later edited and proofed) stories I’ve HAD to just get out or I’d explode have been the stories that have engaged others in a way that good art is supposed to engage people. Frankly, everything else I’ve done in the past five years is shit.
I don’t even feel bad about it, only grateful for the insight. Things went awry. A compounding of unmet desire to spend my life as a writer and the pressure to keep producing work, and keep producing work that was as well-received as the last bit of work I produced, keep ‘em mesmerized. Then top it off with everything that comes with being an ‘emerging writer’: all the advice from professors and other writers grad school colleagues and agents and publishers merged and made a bleak fog in my head so god damned murky that the act of writing became an act of production. I gotta tell you, I started to fucking hate it. I hated it because I forgot how it all started in the first place.
It started because I was a nineteen year old girl about to marry a guy I didn’t love and I wrote a little story about another girl who was set to get married to a guy she didn’t love. I wrote it after visiting my betrothed who was doing an internship in Florida. We fought the whole time. He made me miserable. But I was young, and silly, and I had a one year old to think about and my mother said “This is the best opportunity of your life” and I suppose I didn’t want to disappoint her. I boarded a plane in West Palm Beach and pulled blue, celestial themed writing paper from my carry-on. By the time I changed planes in Nashville, I’d written a thinly veiled story about a girl who was marrying a guy because he was sensible, and not her longtime love, who was not sensible. It was probably a really shit story in retrospect, but still, from Nashville to Kansas City, I combed over the draft, adding details and changing phrasing. The older woman seated next to me asked: “Am I sitting next to a writer?” and I answered yes, though I really hadn’t thought about it before that moment. I never stopped thinking about that woman. I think of her more often than the boyfriend-turned-husband-turned-ex-husband a month later (. . . you can read all about that in the book, when available.)
I forgot this all started because I need to have a dialogue with myself. So much of the body of work I’ve created is nonfiction, focusing on my roles as both main character and omnipresent narrator, who are sometimes at odds with one another. Sometimes, the narrator has to talk to the main character and vice versa. To put it in more universal, metaphysical, non-writer terms: sometimes my soul has to have a talk with my earthbound ego, sometimes my conscious thinker has to talk to my unconscious thinker.
 Writing stopped being a communication device for me, and started being something like a job. All that talk from those in the industry (Who is your target audience? What are you writing this for? Why are they gonna care? Oh that writing style isn’t trendy anymore. Oh this subject matter is popularly published, why don’t you write something about that?)  it muddied my muse river.
The pressure I place on myself is by far the biggest impediment because there came a time when the pressure from the world became so loud, a stadium-sized chant of do-it do-it do-it, and my inside said no no no and all became too much for me.

There’s nothing more disheartening to a writer than an unfillable blank page.

Somehow, and without my noticing it consciously, the thing I did to make sense of the world became something I did to satisfy the needs of other people and not my own need to understand myself. This is not a manifesto shouting ‘fuck what other people think’, although that’s pretty decent advice, generally. The point I’m so circuitously trying to arrive at is that art shouldn’t be made with a lust for what will come of it when it’s finished. Great art is made for the sake of itself. It is first a dialogue with the artist and the muse. I lost all connection to inspiration when I forced myself to think about what would come of my work when it was finished. I stopped talking to myself when I started thinking: Who will read this? Which literary magazine should I send this to? Which essay fits with which thematic publication this deadline cycle?
I’ve talked to so many aspiring writers over the last several years, and so many of them asked the same questions: how can I get my stuff published, do I need an agent, where should I send this, and I wish I could go back and amend every conversation with this advice: Don’t worry about it. Write it. Make it good. Make it make you feel good. Make the words resonate with your soul. Match the emotional with the intellect and let your work tell you what it wants to be.
Let your art first be a conversation with yourself. Fill a page with the words the universe gives you.