Category Archives: Randomness

During my twenties, I lost my family. Not all of it, but at times, it felt like it. I was, for all intents and purposes, orphaned into the world, left to carry myself and make of my place in the world what I would. I graduated college, twice, better slow than never, and then left my home state and made a home and a life in Oregon. Adrift, but rooted, I carved out my own space in which to be.

When I turned thirty, I had achieved exactly one of the two goals I had set for myself. And I felt fine with that. And my parents floated back into my life, only days into the start of my fourth decade. Family became more than the friends I had built around me in my new life. My thirties, from the onset, felt like swimming, like a place to spread out and move, arm by arm by kick by kick. A place to move: half afloat, half pure kinesis.

Throughout the last ten years, some of them harder than any in my life before, I found old friends and gained more than one family. I waded through muck, both figurative and very very literal, until I found myself in another state, physically (but, also . . .), my life a picture of palm trees and small town urban life and big rig trucks. A life thirty year old me couldn’t see coming. Hundreds of images filed into the drawer marked ’30-39′, both obscene and divine.

And, at 40, I’m right where I should be – right. Exactly. I am fortunate enough to be immersed in love, surrounded by people who mean the world to me. To say something nebulous and unclear – I feel the most myself I think I ever have. It’s a good place.

But things are not easy. And as I get older, it seems that in some ways they get harder. At one point months ago, three women who meant something to me growing up (&still) were in the hospital and then my boyfriend’s mother was as well and I thought, this getting older thing is total bullshit. Total fucking bullshit. All of these women are still kicking, but some are in and out of the hospital regularly, a constant reminder of how fragile our bodies can be, how tenuous a hold there is between being and not.

One day, I was overwhelmed by imagining, from the perspective of one of these ‘old’ women, what it is like to bury more and more of the people you know (and love). What it must feel like to be standing, thankfully standing, but watching the life you have dwindle on one end and grow on another. More and more babies coming into your life as you feel the end of your own ramp up and taunt you – hospital tubes in the thin skin of your back hand, tubes in your nose and pulling air in, to speak, through lips lined and lined and lined with all the words you’ve said in the last eight or nine decades.

It’s as though I can feel time revving up around me. As friends of friends – some of them younger than me – have passed and others are facing chemotherapy or radiation or physical therapy to overcome unexpected and devastating injuries or illnesses, I feel acutely – painfully and with a particular core-deep low humming fear I hadn’t known yet – the numerous clichés we have for the way life can change, or leave, in a gut-busting second.

We only have today.Don’t take any moment for granted. You never know.Blah blah blah. On and on and on.

And my mother is a long-cast shadow in my life – my own guilt about our (non)relationship heavier than anything else and yet, still, I can’t bear doing anything more about it. I can feel the weight of that shadow in my life in a whole new way, as this somewhat arbitrary ‘big’ age looms larger and larger on the horizon. When madness comes to your mother disguised as a 50th birthday present, the landmark birthdays take on new weight.

And I’m walking into forty more disillusioned with people than I have been in a long time. I have been separating, slowly and intentionally, in small and big ways, from people in my life who don’t give enough, who mean well and who I love and care for, but who make life harder, in the ways that don’t end up evening out. I am pulling away from the people in my life for whom no matter what I do, it’s never the right thing, it’s never quite the right way. Life is hard enough and sometimes it is better to just ease back a little rather than force what is seemingly unbendable.

I trust fewer people (with those things in life that are real and important and sacred) than I have in years and years. With the exception of a (large enough) core of people in my life, I feel more isolated and protective than I have since my early twenties. During the seismic shift of the last half of my thirties, I came to trust new people with a naiveté I didn’t even have in my twenties, believing that age had done for them what it has done for me. Believing that people, at this age, mean what they say and are who they appear to be and tread lightly when it comes to another person’s confidences and trust. I have been wrong a few times in ways I thought I was too old for. I have relearned old lessons.

This locked-down place in my life is not a bad thing, but it is a space to be navigated and understood and to occupy with care and intention. After a swelling of people in the last half of my thirties, it is time to pull tight the doors and care, deeply, for the ones left inside.

It is yet another cliche, but I absolutely feel I am at a crossroads. Not a fork in the road, but a mass of avenues and I have to decide which ones are navigable. Which ones will be worth the inevitable disorientation and (even temporary) strandedness that comes with human relationships. Which ones.

I thought forty might freak me out. I knew it probably would. But what I thought would bother me is the start of your face sliding into something that, eventually, you won’t be able to recognize against younger pictures of yourself. Your whole identity shifting focus. And not because of the wrinkles, more because the face I’ve come to know will start to leave and in its place will be something that becomes blurred, less distinct – myself and others less likely to be able to see, in a baby picture, how I look like me.

Turns out I was wrong. Maybe I’ll freak out about that at fifty. Probably.

What is freaking me out right now is that staticky feeling of time revving up. Of the past starting to outnumber the present, or just the possibility that it already does. I’ve lived forty years. Forty fucking years. And before I know it, it will be fifty. Then sixty. And when I’m there, will it feel like only days before that I was worried about forty? About thirty?

In the same way that 25 felt serious, like a time to take stock and assess where I was going, so does 40. What do I want? What of that do I have? What do I not want? What of that do I have?

A dear friend recently said that forty definitelyfeels significant. And it does. It definitely definitely does. Numbers are not, ultimately, arbitrary. Numbers stand for time, for pounds, for pressure – one is not ten is not fifty.

If nothing else, forty is a mark to measure against – the life you have against the other ones: the one you thought you would have, the life you don’t have, the life you want.

Ten years is a long time, a seeming lifetime in some ways. But it is also a span to be held in the hand. So small I can rub my fingers over it and count the ridges. See the tremors in the rings. See the lines eeking out from the corners of my eyes and count the gray hairs that are, finally, tentatively daring to grow with real abandon.

I had a forty bucket list that I started at thirty-eight. I did some of it. I didn’t get to some of it. And that’s fine. I fell in love. I spent time with the little humans who keep on growing, no matter how much I want them to stay small enough to hold and carry and cradle to sleep against my chest until my arms ache with sleep. I don’t think I’ve wasted time, even when I was wasting time.

But what do I want of forty? What will I make of it?

I want to scuba. Finally.

I want to travel. More. For real.

I want to not fuck shit up. Too badly.

When I do, I want to fix it. I want to own up.

I want the people I love to know that I love them. How much I love them.

I want these gray hairs to chill the eff out. (Not really, I’ll probably dye my hair for forty more years, gray or not, so nevermind, scratch that)

I want to stay healthy long enough to see all of these amazing children in my life turn forty (and fifty and on).

I want to disappoint the people I love (and who love me) as little as possible.

I want those people to say, she was always there when I needed her.

I want those people to say, she made me laugh.

To say, we had so much fun, even if, especially when, things were tough.

Mostly, I don’t want the next forty to fly by, with my eyes half closed, while I pay half attention.

I will turn forty while sipping a mojito in Puerto Rico, a decision made on my 38th birthday that I am making a reality (at the expense of other things I could have or do instead) and when I wake up that day, I know I will be the same woman I was when I went to bed. But I will also be one day different. As we are every day.

I will kiss the man I love and lounge on the sand and put my feet and then my body and then my head into the ocean and say, OK, ominous fifth decade, what you got? And I will float on the salty water and probably, almost certainly, swallow some water as the waves roll under me. I will taste the thirst-making bitterness of that lukewarm, beautiful blue Caribbean water.

Forty is coming whether I want it to or not. So I will meet it at the shore. Where earth and air and water meet. I will meet it. I will. And then, right before I wrap my arms around her, I will tell that bitch that she better be nice. Or at least a little bit kind.

We were three women standing side by side – taller and older and far more weathered versions of the eleven-year-olds we were when we first met. Life, that bitch of a word, had happened in the last nearly thirty years. A lot of it, that two of us do not know about each other. The woman in the middle, the bride, had tied a string to both of us, held us close and far and close again, from half a world away, and so we were both here, as she started her life over, again, with a man who makes her smile in ways I remember from those years before high school, before the tight lips and drunken eyes of our black-clad teen years. But there was no wistful nostalgia in that three woman circle. Not for me. And so there was no group hug, no warm embrace to close the circle. Because of me. The one who would not budge.

If you know me at all – in real life or even just here – you know that I am an opinionated person. I believe certain things without waver. I am also able to see a thousand shades of gray and can understand the reasons behind mistreating each other. But seeing them does not make me forgive the ways we (myself included) wage war on each other day by day. I also believe, deeply, in being kind to people. In giving someone the benefit of the doubt, in knowing that I have no idea what they are facing, that very day, that may cause them to be short or rude or glib. And from arm’s length I will forgive that for almost everyone. But I will not be your friend if you think less of me than any other human on this planet. I will be civil (that loaded word of antiquity) but I will not have real conversations or share my life or act falsely happy to see you. I will be what I call real. What often just looks bitchy.

I am a compassionate person. And if you mean enough to me, if we have enough history, and the loss would be immense, I will fight tooth and nail to work out our differences, to find a place to meet, in the middle or just to the side of it – wherever need be – in order to stay connected. In order to be friends. But my face hides nothing. It is virtually impossible for me to pretend when it comes to real emotions (which, perhaps, makes holding to my convictions, if not easier, more necessary than for some people).

So when this long-ago friend came up to me as I was talking, for the first time that wedding day, to the bride – to the woman who links us both now – and acted happy to see me and put her arm around me and asked how I was, I answered, good, but I kept my arms at my side and my face neutral. Against accepted social order and politeness. Against expectation. It’s such a small thing really – what I did not do. I did not hug back. I also did not pull away. Or make a scene. I simply stood still, smiled a small upturn of my lip and let my arm remain at my side. And she said, oh, we don’t want a hug, do we? while she stood up and stiffened and looked me in the eyes.

What I did do, though, was keep my mouth shut except to say no, not really, but thanks. Out of respect for the bride and the moment and the space we all filled that day, one of love and lightness and laughing, I walked away while answering her last question, which included what to me sounded like a back-handed stab at the bride for having left this woman’s mother out of the festivities. I smiled at the bride and walked back to my table and my friends and those I love. Instead of saying what I wanted to say. Instead of saying what I would have said had the moment been different. Instead of defending myself, for that moment and all the ones before.

I sat down next to my boyfriend and told him that Sasha was in full effect. Sasha Beesh. What we call me when I am being, seriously or otherwise, a bitch. It is a pet name. But it is serious, too. I draw lines. When I need to, I will. And I will, if the situation is right and I think there is use in it, tell you why. And then I will think, sometimes say, that I am such a bitch. Wherein bitch is firm. Wherein bitch is rigid. Wherein bitch is honest.

Naming it that, naming myself a bitch is simultaneously a prayer to the sky that I do not react roughly unnecessarily and a slice through to the comic of life – look at me, bitching it up everywhere – don’t look at me, I’m just acting up over here. It is a way to hold it at arm’s length, this way I am, to stare at it and laugh at it until I know for sure, each time, if it was the right way to be.

It was but a few minutes in the almost seven hour event. But it is the kind of encounter that can leave me conflicted, that can take up brain space for hours, for days, until I decide how I feel about my own actions.

Instead, I let go of that moment and went on to have a fabulous time at the wedding. And this long-ago friend sat at the wedding party table throughout the night and was composed and dignified and reserved. While my friends and I were loud and rowdy and danced ridiculously and laughed so hard that my voice was hoarse by the end of the evening. We could not have had more different evenings, she and I, although I would guess that, my presence aside, she had a great time, too. In her way. Just as I did in mine.

What has stuck in my brain, what is getting turned around and around since that night last month, is the question of how I should have acted – by my standards, by anyone’s standards, by her standards – versus what really happened and how the gaps between those expectations define me. Moments like these, which happen not infrequently in my life, force me to look at myself and my ways of being and to try to walk the fine line of my own personal code, balance between my integrity and ethos and trying to still be polite in the ways that I define that word, while still minding that others define that word very differently than I do. I do not want to hurt people. I do not want to start fights. I do not want to make a big deal out of things that need not be enlarged. Mostly, I don’t want to be an asshole unless being an asshole is the only acceptable option.

If I feel that it is worth it, I will make a mountain out of what I feel is a sheet-covered mountain. I will call a spade a spade, to use another cliché. I will describe its outline and fill in that shape, mark it clearly as what it is, and then feel good about not having tiptoed around a delicate moment for the sake of propriety or decorum or civility.

If not, I will walk away. Let it go.

Sometimes, I will do the first and then decide later that I should have walked away.

And, you see, the details of why I won’t hug this woman or pretend to believe her joy at seeing me are as ridiculous and as serious as it gets. So my response to her greeting is both disproportionately gruff and entirely too kind. We reconnected more than a decade ago at an event I was hosting in grad school. Her husband was reading and I was shocked – and happy – to see her. I could tell, without knowing for sure at that time, that she had returned to the religion of her childhood – Mormonism. I introduced her to my girlfriend and assumed that I would never hear from her again. I wasn’t sure about that, but I would have been surprised to have her be positive about this aspect of my life. Still I was honest and knew that those who fall away need to – that secrecy is no way to handle these reunions in life.

Years and years later, she sought out being my friend on facebook. Ahhh, I thought, she is more open-minded than the majority of her Mormon cohorts. But she quietly and covertly unfriended me after enough time to realize who I was and what I stood for . . . I noticed when we both commented on the same thing and it gave me the tell-tale how-many-friends-in-common link below her name. And while it didn’t really matter, in the large scheme – I never figured we’d have a deep and meaningful relationship – it did stab. Why seek me out? Why make me think you knew me and still wanted in? Why do it so secretly? Why not just say, like a grown-up, that you found my views loud and offensive and judgmental and then I could say ok and we could be cordial in public because I believe what I believe and you believe what you believe and que sera sera. When I noticed online that she had unfriended me, we had a small group reunion coming up in a few weeks and I wondered how much awkwardness would be packed into that day and night if she did, in fact, show up.

She didn’t. And hasn’t. To anything until this wedding. Until she had to in order to be included in such an important day for such a close friend. And instead of standing tall and keeping her distance, she feigned excitement and emoted too much and then recoiled when I did what I felt was most honest in that moment – held back and stood firm.

And what bothers me most is multi-faceted, of course. Initially, I was and am insulted that she dumped me. Not out of some personal pride, really. I was and am most offended by the fact that I find her religion an affront to my very being. I am offended (and hurt) by the money and rhetoric her church spends on attempting to negate the lives of people like me and people I love. Over and over and over.

And yet.

And yet I could have stayed friends in that virtual way of these times. I could have, would have, been polite and respectful of her beliefs. I can not, though, – and did not – keep my mouth shut in my own little pocket of the internet universe. And that, apparently, is what she would have preferred. It is my virtual ramblings that sent her to the unfriend button, that made her tell a friend that I was judging her and trying to tell her what to think, that made her disappear instead of glossing over my words and standing firm in her own beliefs at the same time. It was her inability to hold that we can occupy space on opposite sides of the spectrum and still be friendly, if not friends.

The difference, though, between us lies exactly in that action and the encounter at the wedding. Where she shunned the confrontation of being honest and then acted against the honesty of just steering clear of me – where those things happen, where fake emotion replaces the truth of the matter is where I can not abide. I detest phoney – phoney smiles, phoney friendships, phoney greetings. Be real. Even if that might, to an onlooker, seem rude. I prefer to know exactly where I stand with you. And I will give you that same respect in return. Don’t give me that honesty and I will still react honestly. It’s how I know how to be. It’s the only way I will feel ok with myself later. Even if I wonder, in the moment, if I am being harsh. If I am being a bitch.

The chord that strikes in these kinds of social tangos is a deep one for me. I struggled, long and painfully, to fully rid myself of the shame and guilt and embarrassment of living a life that makes people unfriend you, that makes people leer at you in public, that makes people say they have nothing against you but a portion of their paycheck goes to proving otherwise. Landing outside of that ingrained shame means I have no patience for, no play with, no space in my life for people who do not have at least the decency to be real with me. Having fought that battle with myself, I am virtually incapable of playing along with some social song and dance in the name of ‘politeness’ when I know you’d rip the rug out from under me if you could – and, more than likely, you are trying to with every tithing and every political donation.

I can only suppose that, for her, feigning joy at seeing me felt right. It felt like the socially acceptable way to behave in the situation. That it felt like respect for the moment, for the bride, maybe even for me, as she sees me. I would suppose that there is a canyon between how she sees that moment play and the way I do.

I would guess that the biggest difference is this: my arms at my side was the most respectful thing I could do for her in that moment. Honesty is the kindest thing, for me, in moments like that. For her, even. Respect for her beliefs and freeing her from the fake smiles and inevitable questions that lead to answers she doesn’t care about and doesn’t want to hear. Where she probably sees my action as rude, I see it as kind, to us both.

To be fake would be an affront to my own beliefs, too. I would feel I was selling out the ethics and morals I stand for if I play kissy-face-greeting with someone who sees me as less than a full person. I would be saying: Sure, hate me, hate people I love, fight against our very being and I will still hold to decorum and embrace you as though there is anything real in this moment. As if when we part, you will not still wage war against me and those I love.

Bitchy? I guess so.

Polite? Not by most people’s standards.

But today, still, I feel ok with it. I wish I hadn’t been forced into opting out of that hug, into doing that with the bride between us. And I don’t hate her. I truly don’t. I have a lot of feelings about how isolating it is to move outside of the lines of religions like Mormonism, especially if you were raised in it. But understanding it, feeling for people whose whole lives rests within specific codes of conduct, knowing the loneliness of people who leave such religions behind – none of that changes what is right, for me.

I make up my own standard of conduct. In a way, I make it up as I go along. But it is guided by a deep and abiding sense of what is right – outside of religion and commandments and holy creeds – what is right and true, as a human, as someone who believes in the sanctity of each person’s right to be and be respected. Dear Abby and Emily Post have no sway with me. I am incapable, really, of rote social grace. My code is constantly assessed and evaluated, but I will do what I must to be true, to myself. To say what needs to be said and to swallow what does not.

To say, without saying (if the time is wrong to speak), that I won’t play along.

To say, when it needs to be said: I know what you think. And not only do I not agree. I am offended – as a human, as a one-time long-ago friend, as an adult you tricked into believing you felt different – and so I will not hug you. I will not kiss your cheek and make small talk. I will hold firm. And then walk away. Out of a sense of propriety. Out of my own code of civility. To be honest. With you. But mostly, with myself.

My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don’t really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don’t believe in God and they can prove He doesn’t exist, and there are some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who is smarter, and honestly I don’t care.

– Donald Miller

In educated circles, science is god. And by god, I really mean king, because if you are smart then you only believe in real people right in front of you who you can hear and see and smell and sense as their hands reach out to slap you across the face or their arms reach out to hold you or as their legs carry them right past you. You believe in logic and reason and that blood works through your body and water filters through the world in all of its stages to keep us all alive and that what a microscope can’t show us, then a computer can. If you can prove it, it exists. Logically then, if you can’t, it doesn’t.

It seems that being educated, unless you attend a religious college (which by regular college folks standards isn’t even the same thing), means having outgrown god, if you ever believed at all. God is a tool that is used to hold people down. God is a crutch for weak people. God is like a childhood blanket that you leave behind once you are big and strong and know better.

And in educated circles, we are beat up all of the time for who we are and what we believe by people who hide behind religion, who believe in ghosts and miracles and stories about yeast and sugar and flour becoming living breathing fish. Crazy stuff. Unbelievable stuff. Magic stuff. We are busy fighting off the mandates of people who tell us that God knows best. We are busy trying to live our own lives. As a woman, as a queer, as a person who believes that god and government should be separated, Religious People are like a clone army sent to shackle us all to their religious texts.

I get the aversion. I was so anti-religion in my teen years that I threatened to writhe on the floor of every classroom at the beginning of every period, ‘foaming’ out of my mouth directly under the crucifix, when my mother threatened to send me to a Catholic school.

I got older, though. And I encountered people who I greatly admired who were smarter than me, more informed than me, more brilliant. People I deeply respected as intellectuals. As liberals. As humanitarians. And some of them believed in God. With a big G. Even, sometimes, a Christian one – the one I held in the most contempt, personally. It was one of the loudest, most trembling moments of cognitive dissonance I have personally experienced. I could feel and hear and almost smell the heat and smoke and burn of cogs grinding together and locking up and motors starting to wrench themselves inoperable. In my own head. In my own heart.

Does. Not. Compute.

That’s when I started the slow and very personal journey of reconciling my own misguided notion that smart people aren’t religious. That educated people don’t believe in god. That to be rational and reasonable means you deny faith and, certainly, Religion. I listened to the ways that these smart people interpret their religious texts, to the way that they work to better their churches, really listened to what it is they believe and what it means to them.

It is a continual journey, really, in the way that we all need to be aware of and alert for the insidious ways that we fall back on old, weathered and mass-mentality notions of groups and cultures. That moment, though, shook loose the idea that one belief precedes the other on some sort of intelligence barometer and that the only way to move further along the path is to become educated. I lost the need to hold onto the idea that using your smarts and believing, in any god, were two particular stops on the same evolutionary line.

I have never been an Atheist. Even in my most angry, combative, anti-religion phases, I have found it impossible to believe that all that exists is what we can see. There is too much in life that is real that cannot be seen or touched or slid between two slides and studied. So I fall back on the term Agnostic. The shape of my agnosticism has morphed many times in the last two decades. All kinds of shapes and densities. It has veered remarkably close to sidling up to a notion of Jesus that has nothing to do with Pat Roberts or Fred Phelps or Al Sharpton but might startle anyone who knows me well. I don’t know where it will go in the decades to come, but I do know that it will be something my brain and heart work out together. I do know that intellect will not dictate the journey no matter how hard it tries.

You can talk to me of science and reality and make-believe and weakness. You can make a logical and rational case for atheism. And still I will know deep in my human body and brain and soul (yes, soul) that there is more, for me, than science. There is more to this world and universe and life than a human ant farm that just magically appeared out of space dust. And I could try to argue with you about that. I could try to sway you to believe, in anything at all, in any kind of force or nature or power besides science. But I don’t. I won’t. Because I don’t care if you think there’s nothing. If, deep in your core, you know that to be true. I don’t need evangelism. I recoil from it. I believe in something and you can believe in nothing. And I don’t gauge your intelligence by that difference. I don’t decide whether you are a good, caring and righteous person based on your non-belief.

But sometimes you do. Gauge my intelligence. If you are Atheist. If you also fancy yourself smart and rational and a good thinker. If you believe something must be proven in order to be true.

All kinds of religions judge me as well. But I care less about that. I am used to Baptists thinking I am going to Hell. I am fine with that idea – me as Toto in Dorothy’s bike basket headed straight for Satan’s lair. I am used to Mormons thinking I am dangerous and lost and misguided. I am used to the Bible being wielded like a sledgehammer against my right to live as I see fit.

But when my friends make blanket statements about the foolishness of believers. Of those who have faith. Say things that make us out to be small brained, developmentally retarded, delusional people who believe in caped crusaders for salvation – that hurts. And worse, it is insulting. To me. To more people on this planet than not. It is as belittling as being made out to be a child-molesting moral-less pervert for wanting to marry the person you love.

It hurts me, yes, but it also pains me on behalf of the people I know and love who are not robots, are not sheep, are not unthinking weaklings who forsake intelligent thought and critical thinking in favor of an easy how-to guide to life. Who do not use their faith as a weapon against anyone unlike them.

Election seasons are particularly rabid in this area and we have just weathered a doozy of an election season where the Religious Idiots were thick and loud and full of some of the most ridiculous and shockingly offensive misinformation. But they are to believers what they are to humans – cartoonish and extreme and not the mold. The Mitt Romneys and Pat Roberts and Ann Coulters create a compassionless vacuum into which falls the voices of people who I care about, who I believe care about me, saying believers are dumb and they’re all idiots or various versions of: faith and intellect are exact opposites.

These politically charged times create a climate in which the insults are thrown from both sides and to be an agnostic who fancies herself rather enlightened and intelligent and rational is to feel bruised from all sides. To feel as though your very core is being dismissed. Someone like that, like me, is drawn with loose pencil loops into a squat, awkward cartoon – a Mr. Magoo-like befuddled caricature who stumbles around reciting facts and data while going home to kneel at the altar of superman, offering rocks painted green that are set under a light to make them look like genuine gems. A bumbling idiot dressed as an intellectual.

It is to be called stupid, over and over and over. As though I have to make the choice between being smart and having faith. I must give up one to keep the other. I must denounce uncertainty to be considered wise.

It is not a large leap, in fact hardly a leap at all, for me to move from believing in love (all sorts, all types), that inexplicable, almost magical truth of life – to move from that to having faith that there are invisible, unnameable, unseen things at work in this world. The gap between those two things is smaller than the jump a single synapse makes in my brain. I feel things that cannot be quantified. I know things to be true that have no place in a lab. Even science, God to the Godless, is an imperfect thing. Is an evolving thing. Is a process in the process of becoming more and more useful and precise and fascinating.

I want to say: how is emphatically declaring that there is no god any different from a religious fanatic declaring there is one and you are wrong for not following? Is it simply because you are smarter? Because not believing proves that?

I believe in science. But I believe in other things, too. I have the ability to hold a variety of beliefs that, for me, do not preclude each other. As we all do. Two of the ones I can hold in one hand just happen to be two that a lot of my friends see as being at odds with each other. For me, though, one without the other makes me incomplete, unsettles me, leaves my world askew.

I find a very precise kind of beauty in letting go of reason, as a straight-jacket or a scaffolding or a restricting litmus test of real versus nonreal – in letting go of knowing if it’s true and allowing myself the space to believe that it just might be. There is a grace in it, and not the strict definition of religious grace, but a type of slope and swing and levity that makes my life better, that feels a lot like the look in someone’s eye who thinks you are lovely and brilliant and funny, a kind of thin cotton cloth that feels safe and soft, that feels like home.

I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me–that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns

– Anne Lamott

Sometimes I pray. And I can hear a voice in my head that says this might be useless. This might go nowhere. But it helps. And if that makes me weak – well, I am. But so are you. We all are. We all need. Different things. In different ways. If praying to something when I can’t even decide what it is makes me weak, I am fine with that. I really am.

But it does not make me stupid. Or uninformed. Or laughable. Certainly not dismissable. I analyze down to fine points. I see nuances and patterns and connections and if there is a way that I consistently think, it’s critically. To a fault, sometimes. And I am educated. More than some, less than others. I am smart. Not the smartest, not by a long shot. But I am one of the sharp tools, that is one thing I will not disavow, ever. And my faith that there is something beyond science and the dirt I can hold in my hand and press between my fingers, something more than the invisible (without technology) electrical impulses that shoot through my entire being – well, that doesn’t say shit about my intelligence. And if you think it does, you do yourself a disservice and underestimate not just me, but millions of other people, of all kinds of faithful persuasions.

There are sheep. There are wolves. There are people who misuse religion for their own gain. There are people who are hungry to be told how to treat people, how to live, how to make meaning without having to work at it. There always have been and there always will be. And I pray, in silent and unorthodox and non-ritualized ways, that people will think for themselves. That each person will use their brain and their heart and not allow other people to tell them how to live or not to live.

I pray, in a hazy and shadowy way, that evangelism goes the way of Betamax.

I pray, sporadically and selfishly, that hate gets sliced clean from religion, a scalpel of intelligence and compassion rending it from faith like the slimy viscera of a chicken breast being cut and then ripped loose.

I pray that Fred Phelps’ family and his followers find themselves face to face with someone they should hate but, for some reason, for any reason, they cannot. And they then have to pull themselves out of that fabric long enough to see that god (big G, little g, whatever) doesn’t have to be venomous.

Sometimes, I pray that I never ever accidentally hear another Celine Dion song. (That alone should prove that faith and smarts are not mutually exclusive, right?)

The truth is that I will believe whether my book-smart or street-smart or punk rock friends think I should or not. I will continue to believe in something even if the religious right thinks I am unworthy. I will be who I am in all of the ways that I am, regardless, because it’s all I know how to do.

I get tired, though. Of being reminded that my friends either assume I have no faith (if they think I have brains) or think that I have a good deal less smarts than I do because I believe in something that cannot be proved. It is tiring, and heartbreaking, to feel that for friends to know the truth means they re-categorize you. Faith really is the Evil Gay of intellectual circles – the biggest academic closet. I am sure that you all have really smart friends who believe in God, whether they feel like telling you that or not. Who they pray to, whether they pray or not, is to their intelligence what atheism is to yours – a whole separate issue. Plenty of stupid people are atheists. Some really smart ones, too.

No matter what, I pray. Silent prayers like blades of grass pulled up mindlessly while sitting out in a park alone. That those I love are happy. That those who don’t love enough stay far enough away from me to let me live my life. That my family sleeps well and makes it through another day. That fewer people are sad tomorrow than today. That I do my best to be good. That I do my best not to hurt anyone. To remember that everyone has their shit. I send out words of thanks: for what I have found, for what I have survived, for the people I have in my life who stand with me and hold me up. And on and on.

But instead of dropping those prayers like blades of grass, letting them fall to the ground as I walk away, they float up and over and away from me: dark, messy, hopeful fragments of words. I am mostly unaware that I send out those filmy gray bubbles, wobbly and imperfect and unsure, permeable pockets of wishes and hopes and blessings. It is, at this point in my life, just like breathing or thinking or looking.

And whether you call it god or karma or positive energy or compassionate humanism doesn’t matter at all to me. We all send prayers out into the sky, we all send wishes and hopes and pleas. A prayer by any other name is still an invisible thing that can’t be dissected or graphed or filed. It is apart from intellect. Apart from science. Apart from learning. It is private and sacred and real, if only to the one saying it. I am smart enough to know that. Whether you see that in me or not.

This week it’s a spelling-impaired chicken. Last week it was a buffooning politician. Some time ago it was a red-faced talk show host. On and on and on. Ad nauseum. Gays, marriage, God and rights. Big abstract nouns. Big big umbrellas of words that house all kinds of tiny little specs of meaning, atoms and molecules and breath and heart that build the un-holdable mass of real people who make up any of those terms.

So let me break it down to one. Me. I’m in there. Right in there with all kinds of people I know and love as well as innumerable people I don’t know and/or don’t like. Me. So it’s personal. How you stand on this issue is not abstract or beside-the-point or separate-from-how-you-feel-about-me. It’s personal. Really fucking personal. It tells me exactly how you feel about me, whether you think it should or not.

And every time this topic swells up in the news and in social media – every time it becomes the super-heated topic du jour – my mind replays a two-scene drama that rips through my body like a swift and sharp electrical current. I feel it tell itself in my body. Every time.

There was a moment in time in the spring of 2004 in Portland, Oregon where some ‘rogue’ city commissioners started issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples because they couldn’t determine where in the law it said they couldn’t. There’s a lot to be read or written about the politics of that time, about the right and wrong, bureaucratically or otherwise, of that brief spell in Multnomah County’s history. But for me, personally, it was a magic moment in time – full of the giant wobbly iridescent bubble of hope and faith and electricity. Shiny and fragile and unbelievably weightless.

I am with a man now. In love deeply with a man. But back then, I was seven years into what I thought would be my life-long love. She was (is, still, to be sure) a woman. She. I pass as straight now. I passed as lesbian then. I am neither, really. But that point is adjacent to what I am trying to say here, which is, at least partly, that I am one of those people who were not (are not) allowed to get married.

When we saw on the news, on a Tuesday night, that licenses would be issued the next morning to any and all same-sex couples, I didn’t fully believe it. Hope is a tricky beast and social progress is always a dance more like the Hustle than the Tango. Sideways and one foot forward and one foot back, moving in a fluid square until you realize you’ve shifted enough from your original footing to be in a whole new place. I did not believe. I foresaw police and official decrees to cease and desist. I imagined broken up protests and folks sent home without that flimsy but powerful piece of paper.

When I showed up to work Wednesday morning, person after person looked at me and said, “What are you doing here?” And meanwhile, elsewhere in the city, as the day went on, more and more and more people were handed their license and sent on their way. Folks were getting married on the sidewalk. People were planning speedy weddings that made shotgun weddings look like Martha Stewart affairs. There was an energy and a hopefulness in the air along with a hurried kind of rush and panic. Let’s do this, quick, while we can, hurry, hurry, hurry before they take it away. The momentum was, literally, breathtaking.

So we made plans to try to go the next day. We were already married, in our hearts and in our minds, but we wanted not only to be part of this historical moment but to set up the safeguards that would guarantee that no one could legally wash away what we were to each other. Should one of us get sick. Should one of us die. Should anything happen where the legal flimsiness of our union could slam down on us like a dull guillotine blade.

We watched the news that night. We turned it on that next morning. We showed up to work for the first half of the day and then, when talk of a 3pm meeting that could shut it all down was being forewarned, our employers practically pushed us out the doors, saying go, go, go. We each drove to the county building and parked and met up on the sidewalk. Giddy. Nervous. Afraid we might be too late.

As I turned the corner onto Grand Avenue and I saw the giant brick building and the line, two people wide, down the sidewalk and around the corner and then down and around the corner again – as I heard people honk and cheer as they drove by, as I saw the countless people holding signs in support and nearly none in opposition – my skin became electrically charged, my chest ached and swelled, my eyes filled with tears and I wiped them from the corners of my eyes as we walked over to our place in the line. Last in line, but only for a minute, and then many behind us. I was floored by my own very physical reaction. This was big. Monumental. And not just as a historical moment. To me. For me. As a human. As a person.

And when we walked out of that building with that certificate, as we called our closest Portland friends and asked one friend’s husband to officiate, as we made plans to meet in a park in a tree filled neighborhood, I was awash in the headiest cocktail of emotions. What I can say now, after untangling all of the emotions, is that it was the first time I felt what it was to be suddenly validated. What it was to be told you were whole, even when you knew you were already – what it felt like to suddenly and completely realize the weight that had been pushing down on you telling you that you were less than at the exact same time that you feel the levity of it all disappearing in one swift swoosh.

I’ve never been a conventional girl. I wasn’t opposed to marriage, but never felt like I needed it to feel committed, to feel bound to someone by deep love. In the middle of saying my nearly impromptu vows, though, I lost my words. I lost the ability to say them. I wasn’t overwhelmed by social victory. I wasn’t overwhelmed with a feeling that the world liked who I was. I was nearly knocked over by something so personal and sacred and private, that space between two people who say, publicly and face to face, that they love each other and will be there for each other. Something no group has any place in deciding for me or for anyone else. No place.

There was a sequence of time where licenses were still being issued, but fights were being waged. The issuing stopped. There were campaigns about the sanctity of marriage. It dragged on for more than a year – what felt like a lengthy time and also just a blip. Because my body only fully remembers two polar moments: standing in that park that evening in March and then opening an envelope from the county more than a year later that had a $60 refund check and a note explaining that my marriage license was, after all, nothing. The moment my eyes saw that check, time collapsed and I had stood, weeping and speechless, in that park only seconds ago and that check’s invisible swift kick to my abdomen felt real and I bent slightly at the waist as I opened the letter accompanying the check. I cried while I held the edge of the counter, still slightly doubled-over from the impact.

I could spend hundreds of words on that moment, but I won’t, not here. I will only say that the giant fist of Fuck You was painful and crushing and infuriating. More than it would have been if they had yanked the license out of my hand before I had made any vows, because the voters had not only said I shouldn’t get married, but that I did and they still had the power and the right and the vindictiveness to take it away from me. Here: here’s your money, we’ll take all that love bullshit back because it’s not real, we won’t acknowledge it and you don’t deserve it.

So when anyone – people I don’t know, too, but especially people I do know and love – says that it’s not personal and they are entitled to their beliefs I say, Like hell it isn’t and sure you do, but . . . .

But, I am not telling you to get married or not.

But, I am not voting on the most personal and basic rights you should and do have by nature of merely being born.

But I am not voting for a man who wants to nullify you, I am not standing in a long line to eat fast food chikin in the name of free speech that says you are not a full person, I am not spending that dollar in the name of religious bigots having the right to inflict their bigotry on you . . .

But, but but but.

But, fuck you. Because it is personal. Very fucking personal. Painfully so.

And I don’t mean to be harsh. But someone denying me my most basic rights to choose who I live my life with and how protected I will or will not be based almost entirely on the genital combination of the couple in question – well, that’s fucking harsh. And it feels that way. Like a punch.

When I see people who say they care about me taking a ‘patriotic’ bite out of a sandwich whose profit is used to keep punching me, when a relative votes for a candidate who offers lower taxes but will fight to keep me fractional in the eyes of the law, they are saying that I am not worthy in their eyes. And when they say that I shouldn’t take it personally, they diminish me once more and I feel like a teenager bursting to rage against everyone. Fuck you – this is the most personal thing. The most. Personal.

I have the luxury of being able to marry the person I love, today, right now, in any number of places should we both decide that’s what we want. But not because I am a full human with full rights in the eyes of my nation. No, simply because I had the ‘good fortune’ to fall in love with a man. I am still as queer as I ever was – but I am monogamous and so, to all outside eyes, I am ‘normal’. I have rights. For now. The truth is that I am still one relationship away from being stripped of that option.

And even if I weren’t, even if I do end up with this man for the rest of my life, whether we choose to get married or not (what a luxury to get to ponder such a thing . . .) – even if that whole thirteen year ‘lesbian phase’ had never happened to me – I would stand up for a person’s inalienable right to be a full citizen bestowed with full rights. Because it’s right. It’s right. It is.

So sing your song and dance your steps that everyone is entitled to their beliefs and mine shouldn’t infringe on yours while you pump money into places that fund groups whose only goal is to slam their beliefs down on my rights. Mine. Maybe yours. Definitely your family and friends, whether you know it or not.

I want to repeat that: their only goal is to slam their self-righteous fist down on my right to be the person I am. Slam. Fist. Really – that’s how it feels.

So I take it very personally. Anyone fighting that fight is an affront to me. A danger to me. And to people I love. Lots of people I love.

Standing up for the people you love is about the most basic goodness we have as humans.

To say: I am here for you, not just to watch as you struggle, but to say that the struggle needs to end and that if you are struggling, then it is my struggle, too.
*
To say: I will not be blinded by fear and ignorance but I will say that even though my rights are just fine and dandy, I will make sure yours are, too.
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To say: I love you and I will stand right beside you to keep you safe.

None of this is abstract. None of it is merely political. Anyone who loves me needs to replace gays with my name, replace rights with my name, see my face anytime they see an ad or a protest or a picket sign that says One Man One Woman or God Hates Fags – because those last four letters are full of the letters in my name. And the person carrying that sign is talking to me, is hating me, is working to make my life not only less full, but miserable. And if that was your name on that sign, or in that politician’s mouth or in the donation check of that business owner, I would yell to be heard, to denounce, to scream.

I am closer to forty than twenty – by a long shot – and I am slower to angry, to that full-red, hot-cheeked, gasped-breath arguing and ranting of youth. Slower, but I can still get there. You have to truly earn it now, age having sheared away my hair-trigger. And while the routes to really mad are fewer, there are still deeply entrenched, well-worn ruts in the road that send my foot heavy on the pedal to pissed off before I can even get my hands on the wheel. Treat a human as less than. Hurt someone I love. Tell me what to do with my own life, my own body – try to own me in that way.

Anything else will simply force me to weigh out the worth of a debate or a discussion, weigh out the likelihood of my words having any value or any effect. I raise my voice regularly for what I believe in – without anger, without the heat of rage. It is a gift of mindfulness and age. I save my words for where they have a chance of mattering. (Yes, I do save words, ask anyone who knew me twenty years ago, I swear it’s true.)

I am almost forty. Staring it down. Far, far away from twenty. Thankfully. I am in possession of myself and my own body in a way that is worlds beyond where I was eighteen years ago. I know my body. I do love it – with reservation, with effort, but also in a completely organic and easy way. I trust it. I love what it does for me. I have earned this all with hard work and deep conversations with myself and others, with the kind of work we all have to do (especially as American women) to counteract the images and ideas that bombard us daily. I have this body and it has me and we have a lovely relationship now.

My body. Mine. No one else’s.

So when I finished reading Lisa Khoury’s article Why Put a Bumper Sticker on a Ferarri?, I lost my shit. Instantly. She hit the perfect nerve-centered intersection of arrogance and woman-hating and ideological force-feeding that will get me to red-hot Fuck-You in a heartbeat. It rolls right off my tongue and my hands curl into tight little balls of pissed off.

I still struggle to be free, every day, with my own body. To not be upset with it, to not wish it were something else. I don’t take lightly my own willingness to be seen, at this near-middle-age, in public in a bikini. It is a revolutionary act, one my twenty and thirty year old self would not do. I do it now as an act of strength. As proof to myself that I am beautiful, even if what I see in pictures will be that place on my thighs that I wish was smaller, the hue to my skin that I wish was darker. Even if I still see, disproportionately, the flaws. I accept my imperfections and try to focus on what is right with my body and step out with my belly bared to say Fuck you, world. This is me. My body, my way. And I look fine, perfectly fine.

Photo by Cesy Mitchell

When Lisa says that tattoos on women instantly degrade the merchandise, I want to stop, straighten my spine and rail into whoever is around me – yell to the sky that this is some Class A Bullshit. I read her article while walking down the sidewalk and I was so riled that I had to stop in the middle of a long, gloriously sunny walk to find a bench and write down some of my reactions so I could let them go, keep them from bouncing in my head – so I could keep enjoying my day. So I wouldn’t start ranting out loud and end up in the holding tank before I could even get home.

She hates tattoos on women. She probably hates them in general, but particularly on women. Not because we look like outlaws. Not because we look like criminals. But because they make us less beautiful. Classless. Not feminine. Incapable of teaching or representing morals and values.

Let’s just ignore, for the purpose of keeping this short(ish), the anti-feminist, heterosexist, shamelessly pro-capitalist assumptions informing her view – that in fact riddle her short article like shrapnel. I can get lost in deconstructing all of that. And that is worth it, for sure (in fact, here is one article doing just that). But what I am more interested in is the intense anger she mucked up in me. It’s not a common thing these days. She had me really pissed off. Super irritated. Muscle-twitching, itchy-fisted and ready-to-swing mad. Instantly.

I am tattooed. To some, heavily. To people I know who are truly ‘heavily’ tattooed, moderately. I could count how many I have, but it will take me a minute. I would have to plan and make a conscious decision to cover them all up and then work hard to do it – my newest tattoos are right behind my ear lobes and I would have to carefully style my long hair and not touch it all night to not be found out. I can imagine no instance in my life where I would need to do that. I have absolutely no shame or embarrassment about any of my ink. And the people who love me know who I am. They love me as is. Even if they would never, ever choose to ink themselves at all. Even if they don’t think tattoos are ever pretty.

I know many, many beautiful women. Many tattooed. Many not. They all have class. They all carry themselves with grace and intelligence and will stiffen with the strength of a nation when and if they need to defend themselves or someone they love. There are women I admire greatly who have none or one or a hundred tattoos. There are too many un-inked women to count who I would consider ‘classless’ and without respect for themselves or anyone else – ugly in the only way that matters. I’m pretty sure the link between tattoo and class would fall completely apart under the microscope of even the softest sciences.

My first truly visible tattoo was in my thirties. My first ever was at eighteen (if you don’t count that failed attempt to tattoo my own hand at fourteen which only resulted in three faint dots near my thumb). But I hedged my bets in my early twenties and ended up with a handful of tattoos that were under my clothes. In my early thirties I tattooed my right upper arm. As a conscious decision to embrace a part of my body I have always struggled to like. To say: Not only do I want this tattoo, have wanted it for years and years, but I will stop waiting until I have lost weight, stop waiting until I have shaped my arm into something it is not and will never be. I will make this commitment to this arm I have. I will adorn it and stop hiding it. I will come to like my body more and accept it for what it is. It worked. My relationship to my body shifted, perceptibly, on that day. It worked.

So . . . first, Lisa, I want to say this to you: Not only did I learn something about myself in the deciding to get tattooed, again – I positively affected my life by putting a bumper sticker on this Ferarri. Something no amount of mall shopping had done. In a particular way that no amount of time at a hair salon had changed (& believe me, I’ve logged a lot of hours under the care of a stylist). Something no trendy clothes or gym time or dieting would have ever done. I know. I spent my time in that world, too.

Second, Lisa, I want to say this: So fucking what if it hadn’t – if I hadn’t learned a damn thing from that tattoo. It is mine. On my body. No one else’s. I think it’s beautiful. I don’t actually care if anyone else does. I really, truly don’t. And you know what? I’ve had no shortage of men acting interested in my body. No drop in the number of men who will, as you say, drool over us. Or women, but I’m sure that carries you so far out of your comfort zone that you may just put your fingers in your ears and start humming. And I say that not as a stab, but as what I surmise to be true. If you have resorted to such archaic notions of femininity and beauty, then I feel safe in assuming my notions of fluid sexuality have a decent chance of curling you up into a fetal ball before I can get to any sort of lurid details and fill your head with such images.

My anger at the notion that we are not lovely, we tattooed women, that we are not with our very own type of class, is well-earned and deep. As it is for so many women I know. I have inked myself more in the last six years than in my whole adult life prior. And each time, I don’t look to learn anything. I learn in all kinds of ways all of the time, but not under the needle. Some people do, despite your sweeping generalization. What I do, with each new tattoo, is become more of myself. I more fully become the woman, the human, I am meant to be. This is right, for me. Undeniably. Nothing you say can or will change what I know to be true.

But your ideas and your notions and the ways that you fire them off as fact and gospel do hurt people. As a budding journalist, it is your job to take very seriously the weight of your words and the responsibility of what you say. Words are powerful and your assault on the female form can hurt women. Not so much me. I’m confident. I’m too old (mentally, emotionally, physically) to have your words change my sense of self. But your words may have hurt twenty-year-old me. They certainly would have hurt twelve-year-old me.

I am a feminist. Among all kinds of other things that I am. It’s a dirty word now. Always has been, really, but now it’s dirty in some sort of post-feminist, post-everything way. But I claim that F-word. I always will, even (especially) when it is obsolete.

I spent my twenties struggling with what that word meant. If I believe in fighting the patriarchy, then I can’t be beautiful. I have to denounce all of those things. It’s the stereotype. The hairy-legged, clean-faced, braless, lesbian-prone Feminist. You have to choose one or the other: beautiful or powerful. It’s a very real struggle for many. It was for me. If I put on lipstick, am I undermining my politics? If I like dresses and heels and curling my hair, am I selling out my gender? If I have wire in my bra, am I failing to represent?

There’s an Ani Difranco song lyric that I love about ‘calling the girl police’ while she and a friend are trying on ridiculous outfits at a store. It’s more than funny, though, if you are a woman who actually likes some of the ‘feminine’ stuff and also raises your fist against the archaic sexism that still threads through our culture and our world. More than funny if you are a woman hell-bent on claiming the rewards of feminism: deciding for yourself who you will be and how that will look.

Feminism – or the more generic F-word that means the same thing to me: freedom – means (among other things) defining femininity and gender and beauty for yourself. Whether it’s something lots of people agree with you on or not. Especially when it’s a blend of accepted and not-accepted. Especially. A beauty buffet, if you will. The freedom to be exactly who you want to be when you want to be it.

I have visible tattoos. I shave my legs. I paint my nails, blue or green or grey. I wear heels. I wear man boots. I love dresses and, right now, I love having long hair that I can curl should the mood strike me. I work and support myself. I have an innate maternal sense that won’t quit. I am childless by choice. I cook and sew. I use power tools. I wear make-up. I won’t have plastic surgery. I wear bras, pretty ones. I do what I want when I want as long as it hurts no one else. I have arrived at a place of acceptance, however murky my own desires and wants turn out to be on any given day.

I still struggle with where the line is, though. Maybe that’s part of why the bitter bile of anger rises so easy on this subject. I see protests about female genital surgeries like labia reconstruction that include protesting any current trend in the downstairs grooming and I spend hours un-threading my reluctance to join in without reservation. If I want to shave my pubic hair into a heart and dye it pink, that should be my right. But if you tell me you’re going to have surgery to make your labia more symmetrical, I will beg you not to, I will rail against the porn industry and its altered, sanitized, unrealistic portrayal of female genitalia.

Ultimately, I will say do what you feel you need to do to your body. But I will hope that one day you will come to love your body as it is, as it will be, without reservation or disgust. And I will fight against any shame the world throws on our bodies as they are, in their natural state. Always, though, I will celebrate our right to alter our bodies as we see fit – cut, dye, adorn, don’t. Wave your freak flag. But do it to be something, not to avoid being something else. Don’t be ashamed. Be the best version of yourself, always. Don’t let the world decide what that will be. Decide for yourself and be unafraid.

Lisa, I want to challenge you. Not to a duel, although that could be funny (& a blast) if it was all in good fun and for charity. I don’t want to attack you or resort to the kinds of arguments I would find offensive in any arena. The interweb has already been cruel to you in unnecessary ways. You have become the target for hurtful and juvenile ways to express the ire that your article invokes. You may have pissed me off, but I don’t hate you or want to lash out at you personally. Just the idea you chose to put out in the public eye.

What I challenge you to do is this: look at what you wrote and think about cracking it open. Think about how tightly wound that rope is around the giant amorphous thing that is beauty, that is class or elegance. Real shift in perspective probably won’t happen now, though. You sound sure of yourself. Even your quickly pennedapology rings hollow, a sort of hands-up I-didn’t-really-mean-it-like-that distancing from your own typed-up and proofread and then published words. And all of these rebuttals are sure to raise your defenses. And many people who are tattooed have only reinforced your notions of us by calling you retarded and saying vile things at or about you.

I challenge you to reread your article at thirty. And then again at forty. And write another one. Answer yourself. I want to know how your views will have changed. I want you to own them or not. I want to know how time has changed you. I know how it has changed me.

I sincerely hope that with age you will unzip and crawl out of your very narrow, rigid notions of beauty and femininity because whether you see it or not right now, you are cutting off your own circulation. The air outside of those ropes is much clearer, more abundant and fills your lungs in ways you can’t even imagine from where you are standing.

But I don’t care if you ever get a tattoo. I don’t even care if you ever think we tattooed ladies are the sexy beasts that we are. I only care that you keep your own restrictions restricted to yourself. I only care that you keep your elegance clear of my body.

Photo by Jolie Griffin

Because I hold all of these truths to be self-evident:

My body is a temple. My temple.

My body does hold power to make men (and women) drool. Tattooed or not. Trust me. Those times it doesn’t, those people immune to it – who cares. It really is one of the most ridiculously easy things to do if you’re doing it indiscriminately and/or for sport.

My body holds a lot of powers that are more powerful than its ability to invoke desire. And tattoos hinder none of those things.

I would be less happy if I listened to people like you. I would be less the person I was intended to be.

I am beautiful. Less than some, more than others – all depending on who you ask.

I don’t care if you think I’m beautiful. I don’t care if you see the kind of class I have. But if you tell me what to do with my own body, you best be ready to verbally go round and round with one pissed off, articulate, classless lady.

I have earned every drop of ink in this body. I have earned the sincere joy I feel at seeing the art my body is in the process of still becoming. Honestly, these tattoos make me smile often and wide, bring me a unique kind of happiness. I have also earned every wrinkle. Every dimpled spot on my thigh. Every crease in my brow and every scar from toddlerhood to now.

I have earned the way I feel about all of that, too. With no help from people like you, Lisa. Despite people like you. Against the odds of this day and age and its target-practice shots at the female body as a beautiful thing in all of its forms. I claim this peace I have with my body as a trophy in the middle stretch of a long race full of potholes and man-made obstacles. I win, already.

So in the name of the women who are still becoming, in the name of the girls who are struggling to be themselves – whether that means a pink prom dress or green hair – I call you out. I ask you to think, carefully, about the danger of your proclamations and statements – about the casual way you throw around such big notions and lasso them around anyone within your reach.

Mandating to others takes big cojones. Telling women with ink that we are less than beautiful and have made the poorest of choices, though, is a whole new kind of big-balls. Because us tattooed broads aren’t ones to shy away, usually. We aren’t afraid to be seen or heard. We’ve crafted ourselves into this thing we are and we, generally, love it. We have decided and acted and made ourselves into something instead of shrinking away from it. We are, really, a class all unto our own. Whether you like it or not.

I know what you must be saying to yourselves.
If that’s the way she feels about it why doesn’t she just end it all?
Oh, no. Not me. I’m in no hurry for that final disappointment – Is That All There Is?, Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller

I heard the PJ Harvey version of Is That All There Is? in 1996. It’s toward the end of her first collaboration album with John Parish, Dance Hall at Louse Point, and I listened to the whole album, honestly, hundreds and hundreds of times during my second semester back in college – on a Discman(!) while walking to and from campus every day. The whole album transported me and I was obsessed with it for at least two months. To say that album is moody is like saying Tom Waits has a kind-of scratchy voice. I even used that album as a model for the multi-media/creative final project for the literature class that made me decide to take my first real creative writing class.

It never even occurred to me that any of the songs on that album could be covers. I’m sure that I thought it was sufficiently dark and moody enough to be a PJ/Parish original. But also, as a young woman, that it was too dark and melancholy to be a standard. I mean, what old songstress could carry that song off, big band and all? Those ladies of old might have been heartbroken or sexy or sassy – but so melancholy and morbid? Call it my child-of-the-late-20th-century naiveté, but sometimes I forget that people, for all of time, have been vulgar and promiscuous and dark.

At some point earlier this year when I was revisiting the PJ Harvey version, I realized it was a cover. And then, as I was unpacking my long-awaited boxed-up vinyl collection this summer, I discovered that I owned Peggy Lee’s Is That All There Is?. I looked at the sketched out face on the bare white cover and had one of those I didn’t even know I had this moments. But I had a lot of those after having lived nearly a year with a good portion of my belongings packed up and in storage (nevermind that I hadn’t owned a functioning record player in nearly a decade so I had barely touched my albums in all of that time). I shuffled it away, tucked it in with the rest of my albums, until I could connect my record player. And then I forgot all about it, again. But just last week, I was in my dining room working on a project and needed sound, needed music. I was avoiding my iPod like it was biologically contaminated because it seemed to be filled with emotional landmines, so I dug around in my record collection.

I put on an old Prince album. I put on the Blues for Strippers album I had bought years ago and hadn’t listened to yet. I put on The Motels. And then I put on Peggy Lee’s Is That All There Is?. I wasn’t even thinking of that song so much as playing some standards – something to sing along with that wasn’t those overtly heartbroken women I love . . . like Aretha and Billie and Etta. I just wanted something to keep me from crying that at the same time could provide enough background noise to keep my mind from obsessing on all the sadness and missing, on all the thoughts I was trying not to have. I gently dropped the needle down in that wide smooth space at the outside of the album. The first song on the first side is the title song. She starts speaking before you even hear the music.

And there I was. Lost in Peggy’s voice. Right from the get-go. Wrapped up. By the time she had finished the first verse, I was singing and dancing, slowly making a sort-of-waltz around my dining and living rooms. Whisked away in the slow circus sound of the band, in the odd crashing sound of the cymbals, in the horns that sound both too fast and too slow all at once. In the words coming out of Peggy’s mouth in a talk-sing. All night and the next day and on into the week – I couldn’t get the song out of my head (or keep it from coming out of my mouth).

Then one day, he went away. And I thought I’d die — but I didn’t.
And when I didn’t I said to myself, “Is that all there is to love?”

Is that all there is, is that all there is
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancingLet’s break out the booze and have a ballIf that’s all there is

I’m guessing I had heard Peggy’s version before, probably more than once. But that didn’t change how mesmerized I was from the very first note. Peggy’s voice and cadence carried me away. I pictured her in a dark West Berlin bar singing to people who may not even understand her words. A few weary faces staring up at her standing behind a mic stand on a tiny stage. Her diction so proper in certain words and the music so drippy and laden with the kind of late-night energy you find as everyone leaves a high school dance – the lights still low, the band dismantling and packing up the instruments, a few torn streamers flailing in the air, swayed by the still active ventilation system, all the expectations of the night strewn all over the floor like dislodged body glitter.

There’s a way she sings that song that feels so very different from the PJ Harvey version – it rings in my bones differently. Barely into that first listen, I discovered that I can’t hear her version of the song without wanting to take wide sweeping steps while swinging my arms out and twirling around as she sings to me, as she tells me over and over to bust out the booze and have a ball. I imagine I am holding a dark green, mostly empty champagne bottle in one hand and that I have a flask peeking out of the bustline of my dress. I can instantly transport myself into the middle of some generic wartime movie image lodged in my brain and I am twirling in a mostly empty dance hall during WWII and the band is still playing even though there’s almost no one left on the dance floor because who in their right mind chooses this song as the one to get you up and out of the chair to finally move? There is a tangible, carbon-based mix of sadness and joy and resignation and acceptance in the song – such a whiskey-burned sound to Peggy’s voice at the same time that she can drawl out the chorus like it’s made of honey and then carry you away on the words before you even notice that your toes have lost touch with the ground.

When I looked up the song in order to find out who had written it and who else had covered it, I discovered that it is based on Thomas Mann’s short story Disillusionment. According to Wikipedia, in fact, the lyrics are lifted nearly word for word. But, not shockingly, Wikipedia is wrong on the latter point. The song is clearly built out of that story. No doubt. And some of the lines are almost word for word out of his story. But the song veers from it, makes its own scenes and then makes its own meaning.

Where the narrator in Mann’s story tells his tale of total disillusionment to a stranger via a long list of tragedies and woes and then uses those to illustrate how disappointing life is, why he expects so little – Leiber and Stoller’s song takes that disillusionment and lays it out on the floor, sizes it up and then dances all over it. Nowhere in Mann’s story does the narrator advise us to bust out the booze. Or to have a ball. Or to keep on dancing. Reading the original story made me see the song more like a response to the story as opposed to a musical retelling of it. As though the songwriters were engaging Mann in a creative call and response. They were offering up another way to see life’s disappointments. Singing the answer that Mann’s narrator never gives to the stranger, one that literally commands you to dance in response to the destruction.

The heart of the song, for me, is in the chorus. That’s actually the darkest and most amazing and poignant part of it all. It’s what turns the devastation of disillusionment into the worm-ridden apple pie with the flaky crust and the slightly melted ice cream and then invites us in to eat, this, what we have. To feed ourselves with it. To say – is this what you’ve got world, because I can take this and I still want to dance. To say – is this all there is to heartbreak, to burning down my house, to the spectacle of a woman suspended by an almost invisible wire two stories above my head? Because I’m going to pour myself a drink and listen to this band and watch the draped fabric of my gown spin out and out and around and around as I make my way across the floor, my feet gliding, barely lifting from the floor as I move all of the air around me, as I clear the invisible space around me and move. Because, if it is, then I’m going to throw a motherfucking ball and we are all going to motherfucking dance. Yeah. We’re going to dance.

We’re not going to keep crying and complaining. We’re not going to expect more out of life than it can give. But we’re not settling either. The question – is that all there is? – is not a defeatist one in the context of the song. It is a celebration of still standing. It is a slow, defiant head shake to the fucked-up things of life, a big giant middle finger wearing a sparkly ring and a painted nail. Yes, life, you are a tricky bitch. And I still love you enough to let the band play while I do my best Bette Davis, as I try to carry myself in my most statuesque Joan Crawford pose, while I imagine myself a more dishevelled and tattooed Peggy Lee, as I drop the needle down one more time onto the smooth spot right before the first groove of this song.

As I dance. Really, I dance. Not figuratively, not as a metaphor, not yet. First, I just really dance. And I feel good. I feel my skin and my limbs and the pattern I can make around my furniture. The path that can be made without clearing the room. Because who has time for that? The song is short and I have to make it back to the record player to drop the needle again before song two begins and ruins this momentum. So I can keep dancing.

And that, right there, the moment when you can be lost in a few minutes of sound and movement and an understanding that happens outside of real thought . . . that’s where the secret of this song lives. It’s not really a secret, though, of course. It’s not a new story. It’s been said before. So many times. In all kinds of ways. The common truth of it makes it no less sacred, steals none of the glory of that song, of that line, of what it does. If that’s all there is, then let’s keep dancing. Our lives, the daily act of living, is in that mid-sized, comma-sliced sentence. In those steps. In the sound of the music moving you, one foot over the other and then around and around and around before you make a backward step to spin and turn yourself and replay it all again.

Verse after verse after verse, you come out the back-end of something you’ve been dreading and there you are, looking at it. Right there on the floor, in the air all around you. It hurts, physically. It really does. But not so bad that you can’t walk. Not so bad that you can’t dance. Not so bad.

And so you live your life. Your real life. Not some sad, couch-sacked, bed-ridden, teary-eyed version of it. You fucking live. Not just breath, not just food, not just water or vodka or coffee. You paint and write and cook and sew. You take classes. You sign up to volunteer. You do everything you were going to do anyway. You do more. You learn a new hair style with this abundance of time suddenly on your hands. You paint a wall and hang some shelves. You go new places. You go to the old ones. Even the ones that seem haunted now. You re-envision places you don’t want to give up, you make new memories there.

You make new friends. You make room for that. You drag out the old ones, literally, tugging their arms to go out one more night, just one more band, just one more, promise. You stay home and read and listen to the quiet where the noise used to be. Then you make noise, everywhere. You have a fucking ball. Even if the music is sad – because it is so thick and lovely and booming that you’d be a real asshole to just ignore it. Even if you’re not sure that music will ever sound the same again. Even if the Bee Gees (for fuck’s sake) almost make you cry. Even if the silence of your phone, your very own doing, hums loudly in your ear.

Even if you aren’t quite yourself. Your friends know. Your family can certainly tell. Your laugh is a little slower, less quick to the draw and also full of syllables not quite as clipped. Your answers are shorter, your words fewer, parceled out and protected. You are slightly muted, a watercolor version of yourself. That you can’t help. All you can do is do. So you do. You break out the booze and gather your friends. You hang invisible streamers and fill the punch bowls and stack up the records and plan a goddammed ball. You keep dancing.

You climb out of your head and your heart and the intangible parts of yourself to make your muscles move. To sweep your arm, to swing your leg, to shake your hip to the beat-beat-beat of the drum. To make a fist and then open your palm and raise your hand up and up before snapping it back to rest again on your hip.

In those moments, in the middle of that song, in the middle of not thinking – you know what Peggy knows. What Thomas Mann’s character didn’t: it’s the music that matters most, it’s what you do with that music as you take a sweeping glance at the ash of the house you were in, that you wanted to live forever in, that you wished you hadn’t had to carry yourself out of. Look. And listen. To the music of your own body moving. Of your own hands making. Of your muscles un-unmaking, recreating, touching the fleshy part of your fingertips to the stuff that is matter. The music of your skin against the air, in motion, past emotion. Hold off that final disappointment. Choose to push it away with your swinging arms and sweeping legs. Keep on dancing. Until the music sounds better. Until your feet don’t hurt. And then dance some more.

I was driving north on 880, heading toward and about to pass the Oakland Coliseum (whose corporate name I refuse to use) when I remembered my longtime friend, K, acting like a complete spaz while we were stuck in pre-concert traffic for U2 in 1992. She was probably wearing overalls and may have even had a beret on. She was screaming at a high pitch and slamming her open hands against the felt-upholstered ceiling of my Civic hatchback. I was laughing hysterically and telling her that she was hurting my ears. U2 was her favorite band and to say she was excited was, obviously, an understatement.

She was one of my newest close friends and I adored her. She made me laugh and she was brilliant and we were both taking a literature class together. Our Tuesday reenactments of SNL were the highlights to my academic week. Our professor had to tell us to keep quiet on a weekly basis and we could lose our composure over something as ridiculous as Sprockets or sit and talk about the images in Ellison’s Invisible Man. We had a lot in common but she was also less experienced in the trouble-making that had filled my life and my high school friends’ lives. I was charmed by her seeming innocence at the same time that I knew she was no saint, as I could see the devil winking just behind her eyes. From the beginning, one of the things I instantly loved about her (& still do) is that she was unafraid to be excited, to be loud, to make a scene if a scene was called for . . . and she was just so damn cute freaking out over a concert while we sat inching along in my car. That forgotten image made me smile in that out-loud way, mumbled words slipping out of my mouth even though I was alone, because I was that surprised by how vivid and unexpected that memory was while I was simply driving home from work.

The perspective necessary to get even a glimpse into how this memory struck me in the here and now is this: K is now (still) brilliant and wise in the ways of the world and self-possessed and gorgeous and a classic beauty and hilarious and very well-heeled. She has style. Several of us now call her our Cruise Director and when you go out about the town with her in Fresno, it seems that she knows everyone or, actually, that they all know her – she is unforgettable and magnetic. She was already becoming this woman when I met her and to see her now is to not see who she was in 1991, at all, unless you knew her then. This particular memory, on this particular day, was like a stage light shining directly on the contrast between who she was at 19 or 20 and who she is now, at 38. And by extension, between who I was and who I am. And the same for all of my other long-ago, still-friends who made up our ragtag tribe of super smart burnouts.

For the rest of the night, my mind traveled through a whole string of anything-but-free associations . . . one memory leading to another and then another. To a long ago night with J – one of the worst nights of my life were I to judge it based solely on bad decisions – where she saw me at my craziest, at my most lovesick, at my most desperately angry and heart-hurt and vengeful. Among an embarrassing armful of moments over those three days, the one image that consistently stands out is of me sitting on the passenger-side window-ledge of my own car while J drove at least sixty miles per hour down a quiet road as we crossed town at one in the morning – my hair thrown back by the wind and my hands on the roof of the car and my voice screaming something (who knows what) constantly and me leaning into the car to make myself heard as she drove and drove and laughed. We had called the police on a party as a vendetta and we were on our way to pick up a very sweet man/boy and I was as drunk as I ever have been in my life. She and I spent the whole holiday weekend together – the two of us wandering through days with her family and my family and a whole mix of friends and near-strangers.

It was a bad weekend for both of us, even more so for her. Really bad. But sometimes I can just remember that image of me in that car and simultaneously cringe for the girl who could have died that night while I can also appreciate that we were Thelma and Louise: set loose on the road, there for each other, keeping pace with each other, barreling full-force ahead into bad decisions and good decisions and getting through and offering each other aspirin every late, late morning of that long weekend when we would shake our heads and tip-toe through those first waking moments of yet another day of what might be funny if it weren’t so gawd-awful.

To know J now is to know someone who is caring and thoughtful and responsible (and, of course, as are all of my close friends – hilarious and brilliant and sharp sharp sharp). She is a mother and a student and is a real adult charged with caring for an energetic boy, a woman who takes that role so very seriously – and yet she will still take that late night drive with me, more safely and definitely sober, should I need for her to drive me far away ever again. We have known each other since we were twelve and so there is no way to pretend, to ourselves or each other, that we are really as cool as we might try to act on a day-to-day basis. And don’t get me wrong. We are cool. All of us. Really fucking cool. And smart and funny. Really really funny. But we are also those girls from junior high lunch period who accidentally let a boy find a letter that talks about him and the girls whose faces turned red and whose giggles were so nervous and who only a year later, ditched class and mouthed off to administration and passed out on the sidewalk during lunch. We are all of these girls to each other even while we are the women we are today, right now, right here.

I have more than a handful of these people that I have now known for over twenty years (some, even, close to thirty years now). That makes me feel old and is sometimes so hard to believe – that I have been an adult that long. What else it does, though, is ground me. I am not who I am right now. And neither is K or J or any of my other ‘old’ friends. I am also who you knew me to be then. And you are who I knew you to be. The mere existence of these people in my life is like a tether to earth when I feel like I am filling with helium and losing touch with gravity. They are each a loving lead weight tied to the curled-end ribbon of my life.

One of the friends I have known for more than twenty years – who has been the most constant presence in my adult life, whether we go a week or a year without talking – is the first call I made when I realized I was about to start a serious dismantling of my life, before even my partner knew the depth of what was happening for me. E was the voice I longed for when I knew – knew before I could even articulate it – that I was making decisions that were going to unravel it all. It was her I needed to hear say you are not crazy – it’s ok – how does it feel?. I couldn’t have told you then, but I know now, that the history we share is why it could only be her, why it could only be someone who knows the long list of your life and can measure the gray against all of the shades of your growing up and living, not just the you standing in that moment: lost and sure and terrified.

It’s somewhat like those of us who have been friends that long have bookends to hold ourselves together: the then us & the now us, everything in between is the stuff we are really made of and will continue to make ourselves out of, day by day by day. I stand in the middle while what these friends have known me and still know me to be pushes against both sides of me, pressing me into myself, reminding me of where it all touches, of how hard some of it pushes, compressing us, writing in the margins to remind us who we really are, scribbled notes and messages from all sorts of past version of ourselves filling the story of our lives as they happen.

And I believe I do that for them. You are not just the woman married to the man you love now. I was there for your first wedding. I was there when you knew that marriage was over. I held your hair, in the most literal and figurative of ways, when you were figuring out how to bear the world around you and then you did the same for me. I drove you home and stayed with you when neither of us were sure if morning would ever really happen, the melodrama of youth an epoch we both traveled through together . It’s not so much a mirror we hold up for each other as much as a ghostly reach into the ribcage where we can put our hands on each other’s pumping hearts and remind each other of all of the blood that’s passed through it. Remind us that blood will still pump through it no matter how strained that muscle feels – see, right there, just like that.

These friends and I still make mistakes – together and alone – and we still work them out together. Say what we think: yes, I heard you all say I would end up heartbroken. And also say what needs to be said when all of that first saying is done and gone: you will be fine – you’ll better than fine, in fact – I know you will. And we believe each other in a way that is unique (at least I do) because we have seen each other be broken and then fixed over and over again. We’ve witnessed the surviving that newer friends have only heard about.

I trust you because you saw me before. You saw me risk my life because I didn’t value it enough to hold it closer. You saw me petty and bitter and loving and dumb. And you saw me pick up from all of that and go on living and I saw you do the same. We will have grown-up dinners and such grown-up conversations and we are, really, just a bunch of grown-ups who still love each other and care about the small stuff. Whether we remember our twelve-year-old selves or not. We like who we are now, too. Whether we’re talking about where to buy boots or how much daycare costs or how little time we have after cleaning and working and all of that grown-up stuff. Especially if we are talking about death and sickness and the way that life just keeps handing you this stuff you don’t want. Certainly when we are jumping up and reenacting the most bizarre movie scenes or ad-libbing demented songs or plotting for one-woman shows and podcasts and coffee table books.

I am blessed with ‘new’ friends – who I’ve known a year or ten or twelve – and I love them fiercely. They have been there for me in ways I could have never lived without and hope to never have to go without. There’s a whole other value in people who have only known you as an adult – a way that they see you that helps you through, a liberating sense of being just who you are now, free from the details of the past. Then there are also these ‘old’ friends who quite literally knew me before I had breasts, before I could drive, before I could see an R-rated movie all by myself, before I knew just how much I deserve. The span of our friendships has hit me hard in the last year – as I realize I am old enough to know someone for that long. The luck of it all has washed over me, too.

There are a lot of things to love and value in friendships that have lasted this long, that have spanned from that bra-less and brace-faced time in life to now (and hopefully beyond). What I’m in love with right now, though, is that there is something so unique and entirely necessary in facing people who knew you then: when you were awkward and clumsy and full of self-doubt and just figuring out who it is you were going to grow up to be. It’s true that I’ve been a lot of different versions of grown-up and probably will continue to morph and change as I continue to age. I have a sense of self now, though, that 19-year-old me would have killed for. I have a faith in my own strength and brains and beauty (whatever that word means to any of us) that teenage me longed for in a deeply physical way. And I am sure all of my friends feel the same. No matter how much we still struggle with life and self-doubt and hard times – there is a whole laundry list of things that make us infinitely stronger, infinitely cooler, outrageously more self-assured than we were twenty years ago.

When we face each other, we sometimes see those young selves. We might even have a slight tinge of embarrassment when we picture those young faces, remember those young actions. So if I’m having a day where I feel pretty fucking awesome and like a hot 38-year-old rock star version of myself, I just need to remember the me that shared way too much about an upcoming surgery with a guy I was hoping to date while slightly drunk at a party at our flat in the Outer Richmond and the fact that he never ever did call me and I was sure it was that bit about the exploratory intestinal surgery that killed any hotness he might have thought I had. And my friends were there to witness it, to hear me recount it the next day, to laugh at me and learn that life lesson of dating right along with me – never share too much or the wrong things too early. I can’t ever fully convince myself that I’m that cool when I have someone around to remind me that I’m really just the same fumbling idiot I was in 1991.

But when we see those young selves through the face that hangs from our skull now, we also see how much we’ve grown, in all the right ways. When those memories are set right next to the friend we know now, who will still be loud and ridiculous in public with me – but does it with a grace I knew, even then, she had inside of her – then we know what it is we’ve earned in life. Our now selves are made more real, more striking, by having someone who can hold up the old self and laugh at it with us. Remember the sincerity of that lost girl and everything she had the potential of becoming – and did. Remember the way that hurt and how much we still managed to laugh at it all. Remind us of things we may have even forgotten – yes, I did do that, didn’t I? Bring us back to ourselves, over and over and over. They know our past in ways not even our families do – so intimately and lovingly and implicitly.

They are the red against our green, making us a more vivid emerald color than we would be alone. They are the amplifier to our stereo sound. They are the backlight that pushes through the canvas and shows us the texture over which the paint is laid. There is so much to appreciate in decades-long friendships, but today I love you ladies (and awesome men) I knew back then because you know me, in a deeply embarrassing way, and still love me, still see me for who I am and who I was. You know me in ways no one else can ever know me – with layers and layers that stack up to this top image. Me. And I know you in the same ways. Ridiculous. Fabulous. And grown.

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

–Dear Sugar #64, rumpus.net

I have recently become enamored of the Dear Sugar column on Rumpus.net. Maybe it’s at least partially because I’m a rambly writer that I find her seemingly wayward, anecdote and detail laced, but always exactly on target and wholeheartedly focused answers to be like that perfect afternoon snack – exactly what you needed when you had no idea what you wanted. Lately, when I’m feeling restless but unable to focus on anything large – be it a book or a project or an email – I pull up an old column from the archive and, inevitably, at least one sentence or phrase will radiate for me all day. She takes her readers so seriously and yet she calls them Sweet Pea – which normally might make me want to vomit, but somehow feels just right in her particular tonal lilt. She cuts right to the chase at the same time that she is holding them, softly, in the cradling palms of her hands. Her perspective is so personal and specific and yet so rife with the kind of universally effervescent, glowing metaphors that writers (and readers) love, the kind that help us understand things in the clearest, most visceral sense.

A column that I recently readwas a meditative answer to this question that a reader sent to her: Now that you are in your 40s, what would you say to your 20-something self?It’s not a new question or a new idea. There’s nothing novel about it. But her answer was so lovely and specific and bare naked that I spent days pondering what my answer would be if, as she did, I broke it down to such potentially embarrassing specifics without losing the general arch of the span between then and now. What might I see or understand differently if I looked back from this very moment and thought of the life that has happened, the one that 19 year old me could never see coming?

I think and process the world and make sense of everything around me in terms of relations, in connections, in looking at the ways that things intersect – so in any given meditation on my life now or at any number of thens, I see the differences between who I was and who I am and I can’t help but see the ways that I am exactly the same. But I’ve never sat down to take the me I am right now, in this moment, on this day, in this particular precipice of life, and spoken only to the half-me: the woman at the crease if I could fold the paper of my life in half, the woman floating inside if I were to put a hammer and a chisel right in the center of my life-so-far and crack it open.

So here it is: what I would say to 19 year old me. Now that I know so much more and so, so much less.

~

Life will never be this specific kind of intense again but it will always be equally intense. Even when it bores you. Don’t believe in settledor easy as a right of age and maturity, except in those moments that you need to believe (falsely) in those things in order to get up and move and live. Life will not just give you these things that you think full-fledged adults have. Those adults you see? They don’t have it, either.

That little voice in your head that says these are supposed to be the best days of your life is full of shit. There are tons of amazing times ahead. And, yes, some really shitty ones, too. But let go of believing that you will never look better or feel better or love better. Quit being disappointed; quit fretting that the current you should be better since it’s all downhill from here. That’s all bullshit. I swear.

That boy you will pose for pictures with while smirking and laughing (pictures that are full of expressions that insinuate a million different things even beyond what really happened), he will end up being a small footnote in your life, a tiny one really. But those pictures will survive and echo into the virtual age. You will laugh at them then, too, so don’t worry and don’t sweat. But you will (still) always cringe a little at how far you can be pushed into a dare. Keep that in mind. Carry that with you everywhere.

It’s true that your parents don’t really understand you – and in a lot of ways, they never ever will. But the love you have for each other is achingly real despite that fact. I know you will lose sight of that several more times in your life but I also know you will always, always remember it. It may be the biggest chasm in your life – what you expect of them and what they give – but not in any of the ways you can anticipate. Love them. It’s that easy.

You are not fat, or chubby or even close to it. And it doesn’t really matter – but you know that. You will be those things shortly, but still you will not be what you see in the mirror. You are not built to be 120 pounds even though you weighed that just a year ago. Remember right now that even then you were insecure and critical of your body. Even then. You will find a place in life where you do what you yearn to do – actually love and appreciate what it is your body is . . . at a number of weights, with a number of flaws, moving in your best and worst moments. Get over it. Fast. Save yourself some years of anguish over it. Let go of your feminist guilt for even worrying about it. Focus elsewhere, pronto.

Always be who you were when you walked into that virtual stranger’s house and saw an oiled-up picture of him in a gold speedo flexing his weightlifter muscles – snarky and repulsed, but polite. Always be that girl you were when he offered to be your personal trainer and whip you into shape and talked about boiled chicken and rice three meals a day, who you were when you left his house without a kiss or hug goodbye but also without the biting criticism and well-earned indignation that you had swirling all around your head that wanted desperately to reach out of your mouth and into his ears – always be that woman: clear and concise and confident and considerate of his own flaws, his own insecurities, the things you couldn’t possibly know about his life. Rest assured that you will never regret your kind silence.

Don’t ever again be the girl that went to his house. Or went to another boy’s house and hid behind a curtain while you worried that the woman he was ducking from had a gun. Stop trying to find the answers in another set of lips and arms and hands. Stop before you find yourself where you will be in a few years – shocked and lost and crying and paused. Real love is coming. I promise. The kind you can hang your whole self onto and use to float above everything else. And you don’t find it with any of those men. But you know that already, don’t you?

When you are in a close friend’s apartment and are offered large plastic cup after large plastic cup of Southern Comfort and Mountain Dew – turn down at least two of those. And then smile at that cute Coast Guard guy and walk over to someone else. Start several new conversations instead of digging deeper into the one you had with him. You will not so much regret your time with him as you will wish, only weeks later when you discover your first real love, that you didn’t need to untangle from him or have to live with the bruised head and war-torn body of a woman who was searching for any kind of torrid adventure, who was deep in the mythos of the necessity of a period of oats-sewing. The consequences will last for you and what you gain will be minimal. Moderation, young me, moderation – at least on that one night.

Your melodrama is part of who you are and you will figure out how to hold it and name it and live it. For now, know that what you worry you have built too big in your own mind is not – it is everything that counts. Everything that matters to you today will matter to you for decades more, will matter even more, will distill down into what you think matters most in life. Kiss hard, love hard, talk hard and forgive yourself when you are soft. You will always struggle with the poles as well as the million possible places to land in between. It is your most worthy struggle.

These friends you have now, that you can’t imagine living without, will be gone. And you will live just fine. You will make new, sturdy, deep friends at ages when you don’t think that happens anymore. But these childhood friends, they will be back. The ones that matter will return to you, later. Have faith and love them. Don’t regret that love when you notice it is gone. It counted, even if it never comes back.

What you think you know about family and about love and about friendship is exactly right and embarrassingly wrong. You will never figure out any of those things. But you will try, always. And in that trying you will discover some of the most beautiful things about life. And the most painful. You will lose a lot of people and notions and ideas in the next few years. Right now, you can not imagine bearing those kinds of losses. You can’t really understand the ways in which people who love each other can fail to reach out or receive that reach or find a way to touch even the smallest part of a fingertip in the midst of deep deep pain. You will come to understand it, to reconcile the ways of love and grief and hurt.

When you think you weren’t built for college, weren’t built for that one-true-love stuff, weren’t built for normal society – for career and kids and the white picket fence – you’re right. Never lose that trust you have in yourself. You know. But know, too, that you will still find your way without going off the grid, off the rails, off your rocker. What you need will be there. Always. Look for it.

You will lose a lot of things you thought your life would become, things we all grow up believing in and expecting – you will lose them in knee-jerk moments of clarity as well as in long tortuous struggles with yourself. Let them go. You need to lose them. To make room for the life you will have. Loss will come to define so much of your young adult life. You will bear it. You absolutely will. You will also keep and regain so much. Keep your arm stretched out and your palm open for those things.

All of the things you’re doing will sustain you later – all of that weirdness. You will still make weird, costumed videos at 38 – you will just be less drunk. You will still say wildly inappropriate things – you will simply know that it is who you are and that real friends take all of you and laugh with you when you need it and cry with you when you can’t help it. You will always be the girl who will make a scene if it will make your friends laugh. Even at an age you can’t possibly imagine will not be pathetic and sad. You will still be a highly recognizable version of yourself – so enjoy these things and know that you always will. Stop worrying that growing up will mean letting all of that fall away.

There is no grown-up. Not for you. Not for most of your friends. Even if some of the world seems grown-up, you and your friends are living your own versions of adulthood – loud and funny and clumsy and passionate and deliberate. It’s what you will come to know, maybe the only thing you will really know about yourself – that you are a lovely, passionate mess of a woman who can’t really be quiet. You are learning this even now but you are afraid of what that will mean or look like at my age. Let go of that. You simply will be this mess – with deliberate introspection and hard work and lots of love, you will become this mess instead of all of the uglier versions you could have been.

When you realize that the boy who was pursuing you for months and months and months might be the love of your life – do exactly what you did. Give him your number, again, and answer when he calls. He will, after all, be the love of your life. In a way you can’t possibly foresee. You are not making a mountain out of a mole hill. You are learning to believe your own body and brain and heart – hearing it surprisingly crystal clear even from the beginning.

When he breaks your heart, in a few weeks, over the next year, in a few years – know that you are doing exactly what you must. When your friends tell you not to answer his calls. When you push him to be more. When he can’t be. When you realize how close you are to breaking. When you have to become invisible from him in order to live. When you walk away, don’t fear that the future-you will regret it. She doesn’t. She knows what you had to do and loves you for doing it when you did – not any later and not any sooner. You know, already, that she will be your harshest critic – but she will also be your most compassionate and understanding friend. She, of all people, knows.

When you worry that you will never know what he thought back then, when you were suddenly just not there, when that wonder softly tears at you for years after, especially if you are reminded of his smell or a particular sound or you think of canned menudo or ivory soap or a stranded car outside of Motel Casa Grande at 4am – stop. You will know, eventually, many many years later, exactly what he was thinking. It will be everything your aching heart hoped and feared and you are better off not knowing it until you have lived enough life to bear it. And you will get the apology you didn’t even realize you were waiting so many years for, you will be able to release that decades-long held breath and finally sigh. Life will surprise you like this over and over and over. In the best and the worst of ways.

When you do leave him, though, don’t go to that bodybuilder’s house or into the arms of the Snoop-Dogg lookalike or the guy who calls himself Money and offers to split his Mickey’s with you or end up in a room with a man who you want to say no to but don’t because you are afraid of what will happen next if you do utter that tiny little word. Don’t even go out way too many times with that nice guy you had to force yourself to kiss because you really needed to try to like the good guy, for once. You will cherish some of these stories and they will make people laugh for years to come, but you don’t need those stories. The tiniest of moments from that year will haunt you years later. You can learn a lot of what you know without those people or places. Walk away from them. Close your door and think and paint and write instead. Edit that part of the story out before you even save the draft.

In that moment in a laundromat after a twelve hour platonic date and two hours of sleep and then a long day with a pre-teen and then family and then a work-out and then the straightening up that precedes a full-on laundry trip – when you sit and weep and write in that laundromat as the noise of the swishing washers and air-soaked dryers and that Hmong woman softly snoring folds in around you – when you write the words down that you think you might be falling in love with her – know that it is absolutely true despite how crazy and fast and unexpected it is. You will love her a long time. You will lose and gain all kinds of things in the years you are in love with her. Always be that brave and headstrong and heart-driven. Always be that sure of yourself. Always trust your ability to know the truth. Even in the moments it costs the most. You will never regret any of the decisions that come from that place.

When you worry that you romanticize loneliness and melancholy and sadness, you are worrying exactly what you should – to keep you from diving off the edge into despair, to keep you anchored to the real world. But you will also discover that your ability to see these things with a certain kind of aching loveliness will save you a thousand times in life – will allow you that pinhole view into the beauty of an otherwise hideous moment. You are macabre and impolite and sentimental – these are good things, hold onto to them.

When you open care packages from your mom and they contain notes on Post-its and no other writing, no gushing admissions of love and motherly loss, no hearts or swirls or happy faces – save a few. These will stand as some of the sweetest and most mom-like things from this first year away from home. You will come to see them for what they are and you will love them with an intensity that is defied by their 3×3 size, with an attachment you would laugh at now. Words, all words, will become even more important to you, even more part of your pores and your soul and your lungs than you already know they are. Savor those handfuls of words from her as you read them, not just later. You will miss those kinds of notes more than you can possibly envision.

Everything you sweat, everything you worry, everything you laugh about is building who it is you are growing into, so there’s no use telling you not to worry these things – just know that your worry makes a difference. Whether your friend is in a cult (yes, she is, you know that – but she will be fine, more than fine, with the help of her friends). Whether your parents love you unconditionally (yes – but love and support are two things you will learn to surgically separate from each other). Whether you will ever find one thing to be passionate about (you will, but you will find a hundred more to be just slightly less passionate about). Whether you cling too long to love (you do, but it’s what you do, it is something you refuse to change, for good reason).

Whether you are a coward (you are not, even though you will always see a bit of the Oz lion in yourself, you will often surprise yourself with your quick and clear and correct decisions to move in the scariest and most necessary direction). Whether you will let fear hold you back (you ultimately won’t – you will fail and fail and fail and still risk and risk and risk, over and over and over – and you will succeed enough to make it all worthwhile). Whether you drink too much (you do, at this age, but you will not at other ages). Whether you will survive this time in your life (you will, with more grace than you thought possible and with more fumbling than you wish was necessary). All of these things and everything else you sweat about will polish and carve out the woman you become – the woman who is always becoming, always figuring it out and sweating it out and trying really hard to understand and love and make sense.

You will be fine. Better than fine. You will love and be loved, with a vengeance. You will cry and cry and laugh. Just like now. On into the future. Trust yourself. Even in your dumbest moments, you are so much smarter than you think you are.

All alone at the end of the eveningand the bright lights have faded to blueI was thinking ’bout a woman who might haveloved me but I never knewYou know I’ve always been a dreamer(spent my life runnin’ around)And it’s so hard to change(Can’t seem to settle down)But the dreams I’ve seen latelyKeep on turning out and burning outAnd turning out the same. – from Take it to the Limit by The Eagles

This summer, I had a last minute opportunity to see Prince live – one of those bucket list artists that I somehow made it through my childhood without seeing. How can that be? Oh, right. I was a kid. I didn’t have money and I couldn’t drive. And I lived in Fresno.

Oddly enough, even though I live near San Francisco now, I drove to Fresno to see him. My dad has standing tickets at the ‘new’ arena in Fresno (read: built since I last moved away ten years ago) and called me the day before the show to say he had two tickets for me and a friend if we wanted to go. Um, yeah. Hell yeah. I contacted my friend immediately and she threatened to pee her pants she was so excited.

This friend and I and a few other friends used to listen to Prince a lot when we lived in SF in the early to mid-90s. We loved his music in earnest, but also loved it in a slightly ironic way for its cheesiness and often horribly fabulous lyrics. I mean, really – you can’t beat Gett Off or Scarlet Pussy for ridiculously ingenious, quotable lyrics:

Before I digress too far off to the side of my point, though – the set-up above is just to set the stage for my drive to Fresno. Only hours after getting off the phone with my dad, I loaded every Prince song I have onto my ipod. Most came from the 1993 three-disc set that was on constant rotation in that flat in the Outer Richmond district in 1994 (we listened to that set so much that when it was stolen from my car in 1994, I saved my tips to replace it – a steep $49.99 at the time – because we couldn’t imagine living without it). The rest of the music I loaded onto my ipod came from the first three or four Prince albums. His true musical genius, in my humble opinion, happened in those early years – Paisley Park and before.

Twenty-four hours of listening to nothing but Prince took me back – to being nine, to being twelve, to being twenty-two. I sang along, loudly, and remembered jokes we made about particular songs, certain refrains we sang over and over and over at home, dances and hand gestures that accompanied certain verses. I remembered the way my friends and I would run around the house and make kissy faces and screeching sounds to Kiss, the way we would choreograph hilarious and intentionally awful moves for Sexy MF, the way we would make ironic ‘duck-face’ expressions to Irresistible Bitch before we even knew what that face was called. I was amped up and reminiscing for the whole drive.

I guess I should’ve known by the way you parked your car sidewaysThat it wouldn’t lastSee, U’re the kinda person that believes in making out onceLove ’em and leave ’em fast. (3)

Somewhere between Modesto and Merced I was struck by the overall image of women that permeates Prince songs. And I’m not talking objectification – of which there is plenty, of men and women, really – but more the prevalent female sexuality in his songs. In songs like Little Red Corvette and Darling Nikki and Raspberry Beret, the woman is the aggressor, the one to be careful of, the one who will do the loving and leaving. In a lot of his songs this is true. He’s always up for the challenge, but he’s never really the one in control. I realized I thought of that as something that came much later in my life, musically. As though it hadn’t been present in music I had listened to at such a young age.

This got me thinking about how that might have influenced a young me. What of who I am can be traced back to the music I was drawn to in those years that I started to first really come into myself as a girl who wanted to kiss boys? The MTV 80s were a colorful and synthesized and ‘phony’ time by a lot of standards. But there were also a lot of female singers who seemed, at least to my pre-teen self, strong and in possession of their own bodies: Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Joan Jett. Nevermind that my earliest strong female musician role model, Pat Benatar, sold her hard-rocking tank-top wearing self down the river for some rag-tag dresses and awful shoulder dancing by the time MTV took over the world. I still clung to Heartbreaker Pat and just added these other women to the mix.

A body like yours oughta be in jailCuz it’s on the verge of being obsceneMove over, baby, gimme the keysI’m gonna try 2 tame your little red love machine. (3)

I also started thinking about how Prince, in his songs, related to these women. He knew the rules. He wasn’t afraid and he didn’t expect more than what it was. He was actually drawn to these women. He didn’t write songs about coy girls who waited for him to make a move. He didn’t write about taking these women to dinner and hoping they might kiss him goodnight. This was what he wanted. It’s what they wanted. He really was, in a lot of stereotypical ways, the girl. But even he was a bold, sex-crazed girl.

A composite woman started to form in my mind – this sort of fifty foot woman of 80s music – like Madonna and Cyndi and Pat and Prince’s Corvette got pressed together and then submerged in water until she outgrew the glass. A giant sponge woman come to life. An overarching prototype of what I was shown a woman could be. Before I knew who Gloria Steinem was. Before I knew who Susie Sprinkle was. Before I had any inkling of the impending noise of Seven Year Bitch. Before I could even really incorporate all of this into my life – I was, after all, still twelve and only then just about to have my first, gasp, french kiss. I wasn’t these women. But they were in my head. As a girl. As a girl thinking about what it would mean to be a woman.

Not long after my Prince excursion, I started to nearly overdose on old Eagles albums. I was feeling nostalgic for the music that I heard in my childhood home but I was also trying to learn some songs for a character I was working on. She loves her some Eagles. So I acquired some of the albums I remember my parents having and set about to listen enough to understand this character who was forming in my mind.

What happened, though, is I couldn’t stop listening. The early songs really resonated with me right then. In ways I didn’t expect. In all of their near-country and cheesy glory, I was loving me some Eagles. I just couldn’t stop. It was almost like I had starved myself for years and suddenly found my most favorite childhood food. Those songs became the soundtrack to a crazy four or five weeks of my life.

You look in her eyes; the music begins to playhopeless romantics, here we go againBut after a while, you’re lookin the other wayIt’s those restless hearts that never mend. (4)

I drove across the Bay Bridge late one night to have the kind of fight with someone I love that would devolve into hysterical crying at two in the morning and I was singing Heartache Tonight as I took the exit of of 280 to see him and listening to Victim of Love as I made my way back home, trying to remember to breathe. I was listening to Take it to the Limit as I drove back across the bridge at 3am on my way to stand in his face and convince him I wasn’t going anywhere and listening to New Kid in Town as I drove back home at ten in the morning, swollen eyed and hopeful.

During that time, the songs followed me everywhere. I was driving to Fresno to visit family and I was belting out Desperado. I was driving in Oakland extolling the virtues of Witchy Woman to a disbeliever. I was fighting falling apart listening to Tequila Sunrise on the 880 at eight in the morning. I was driving back to the East Bay on the San Mateo bridge almost crying as I sang Lyin’ Eyes. Embarrassing to admit. But true. I was unraveling to the songs of some of my earliest memories.

There are a lot of reasons these albums were hitting me this way. Several had to do with being caught between two people I cared for – one I wished I loved more and one I wished I loved less. Worrying that I was becoming this thing I didn’t want to really be – a manipulator, a liar, a careless woman. I didn’t want to leave a trail of Freys and Henleys behind me. I didn’t want to be the woman in the songs at the same time that I did.

These songs were also so woven into my childhood that I could almost smell the ghost of my mother sitting in the backseat of my car. I could hear the echo of her telling me that if I liked the Eagles, I should just give up and admit I would like most country music. I could also hear me telling her, still and for always – no, Mom, not true, I will not admit that. I could hear the traffic outside the living room window of my childhood home and the smell of Pledge as we cleaned the house on a Saturday while the self-titled album played. These songs were my parents, were my chubby-cheeked blonde-haired baby brother, were seven year old me dancing around the room with a lemon-scented old cloth diaper in my hand, with my mom in the next room, doing the same.

In a summer of new ghosts and old ghosts and an imbalance in my own body that threatened at every turn to toss me over the edge – I craved these songs like a malnourished woman picking paint chips off the window sill and slipping them into my mouth.

Victim of love, I see a broken heart

You got your stories to tell

Victim of love, it’s such an easy part

and you know how to play it well. (5)

Listening over and over and over, I started to absorb the lyrics instead of just hear them. I started to notice ways in which I am like or unlike the women in these songs. I started to see similarities in how the women were portrayed. The ways that those Eagles boys had been burned, over and over, by women. They seemed surprised by that at the same time that they were trying to understand and sympathize with the brazen women in their songs.

Well I know you want a lover,let me tell you brother, she’s been sleeping in the devill’s bed.And there’s some rumor going roundsomeone’s undergroundshe can rock you in the nighttime ’til your skin turns red. (6)

Those Eagles women are not sidekicks, they are not side-notes, they are not gentle and demure. They are strong, driven and often heartless. But they are do-ers, as a friend recently nicknamed me. Someone who makes things happen. Who sees what they want, who thinks it up and then sets out to make it a fact. My friend is partly joking about this – I want way more than I make happen – but it has been a shorthand for me (both true and untrue, simultaneously good and bad). I was recently introduced to a friend of hers as a do-er and now he calls me that. I didn’t even realize for weeks that he knew my real name because he just shouts “Hey Do-er” when he sees me. I saw the women in these songs as the kind of women who don’t sit and wait for things to happen. Who stand up and walk toward what it is they want. Whether it’s a good idea or not.

These women, much like the women I would come to know in Prince songs years later, had desires and urges and the gumption to go for them. And sometimes, often it seems in the Frey/Henley world, they aren’t so concerned about hurting men to get there. I was trying to make sense of this woman who kept breaking their hearts, kept trying to find where I was like them and where I was not at the same time that I was trying to do anything but think about that. I was busy being unable to look too deep into any of that while the songs just kept reminding me that I needed to see it, needed to think about it. My mind kept turning the lyrics around and over and side to side, building an image to work with, set up a sort of virtual sculpting lab in my brain forming the physical image of their woman.

There was one moment, driving south on Highway 99 toward Fresno in the oppressive summer heat that radiates in through your window even though the a/c is on – your left arm warming on the outer edge while that soft tender skin of your inner arm has small, almost imperceptible goosebumps – where I saw this composite woman from the Eagles’ songs as the very same woman from Prince’s music. The giant sponge woman who eats men up had spent plenty of time in the Eagles tour bus. The difference, though, was that where Prince knew exactly what he was in for – those poor Eagles boys just kept knocking on her bedroom door and convincing themselves that this time, finally, she would love them and settle down.

It was a hilarious image in my mind – this supersized, almost Kelly LeBrock-like woman traveling through all songs, entering all musical worlds and smirking at the number of songs, at the sheer difference in their tone and tenor, at the way that her hunger and need made different men fall apart differently.

Come on, baby, don’t say maybeI gotta know if you’re sweet love is gonna save meWe may lose and we may winthough we will never be here again. (8)

I started to see it as being all about expectations. Prince signed up for exactly what this sexy, bossy, love ’em and leave ’em lady was. The Eagles kept meaning to date the girl next door. Or at least expected that hot witchy woman to turn into one once she had a taste of their good lovin’. I thought, haven’t you dudes ever heard the most often shouted mantra for women in any self-help book or from any number of the thousands of talk shows teaching women how to respect themselves and expect better? You can’t change him. He’s not a project.

So she tells him she must go out for the eveningto comfort an old friend who’s feeling downBut he knows where she’s going as she’s leavin’She is headed for the cheatin’ side of town. (9)

And I started to think that even before Prince, even before Pat Benatar (who, really, I have come to terms with the fact is most responsible for how tough I knew a broad could be by the age of nine), before Madonna and the riot grrls and the Ani Difrancos – before all of that, the Eagles had taught me that a woman could be in control, could want, could need, and could crush someone with those needs if she wasn’t careful.

And I don’t mean in some power of the vagina kind of way or some kind of holding sex over a man’s head to get what you want way. I mean in a fully self-possessed and self-aware kind of way, in the way that you hear your own wants and needs and don’t shy away from them, in the way that women don’t pretend that we are not bodies as well as hearts and minds. I started to see the ways that this image – unformed, hazy, living just below the surface of my young mind’s conscious thoughts – had built a prototype of one way to live in the world, one way to love, one of the many ways we can turn out to be. A possibility in the midst of many. But a much more attractive one to me than the Patsy Clines (who I love, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want to be that heartbroken all the time), more interesting to me than the Debbie Boones or Crystal Gayles or even Patty Smyths.

I wanted to be Joan Jett (ha- how much more like her I became than my twelve year old self would have ever imagined). I wanted to be Madonna. I wanted to walk in through the out door. I wanted to open doors with just a smile. I wanted to have raven hair and ruby lips. I wanted sparks to shoot out of my fingertips. I wanted to stand there, tall and imposing, and then walk in with flair, with a wink and a smile and be loud and clear and unafraid. I didn’t want to break anyone. But I wanted to be unbreakable.

Later, of course, by the time I was in my twenties, I knew, for sure, I was breakable. And I knew music, by women and men, about women who were tough as fucking nails and broken in all kinds of ways – vulnerable and honest and unapologetic. I adjusted who I wanted to be, who I was, who I had come to know myself to be – fit it in a more realistic image, one that has changed throughout my life, a more malleable image of bad-assedness. I was nowhere near the superhero woman of any of these songs and didn’t actually want to be, really. But some of that had trickled in – some of what my young brain filtered out of those songs gave me that possibility, made me aware of that particular strength and danger.

What kind of love have you got?

You should be home, but you’re not

A room full of noise and dangerous boys

still makes you thirsty and hot

I heard about you and that man

There’s just one thing you must understand

You say he’s a liar and he put out your fire

How come you still got his gun in your hand? (5)

Ultimately, any train of thought on this track ends up in the chicken or the egg trap. Was I drawn to the Joan Jetts and Pat Benatars because I was already built to be this type of woman? Did Prince or the Eagles really have any influence or am I seeing in those songs what I would have grown up to be whether I had hijacked my father’s Hotel California cassette or not? Would I have wanted to be Corvette or the beret girl without being able to call them that if I had never listened to Prince? Who knows. I’m sure that having those images as a young girl made real a possibility that otherwise would have gone unnamed. Did it actually change who I am? Probably not. But I can’t really know. I can only keep seeing this giant song woman roaming through the albums of my childhood.

Raven hair and ruby lips

sparks fly from her fingertips

echoed voices in the night

she’s a restless spirit on an endless flight. (6)

I am haunted, in the best of ways, by that porous, overgrown woman stepping out of one song and into another. By the idea of Prince calling up Glenn Frey to say, hey dude, you shoulda known, I mean, look at her. By the vision of her sneaking on and off of the tour bus, of Prince meeting her in a club and following her home. I can get lost in the notion of Prince sneaking out midmorning, while she still sleeps, because he knows she probably didn’t even want him to spend the night. By the picture I can paint in my mind of Don Henley and Glenn Frey sitting at the edge of a couch cushion, guitars on their knees, strumming experimental chord combinations as they each think of their time with her, as they wonder if she’ll call again, as they worry that she liked the other one of them better. I want to say, you know, boys, she don’t mean you no harm, she never promised to marry you. I want to say, take her for what she is. Mostly, I just want to watch as she sidesteps in and out of songs, tilting the world of each one – tall, brassy, unapologetic and make-believe. A self-possessed Get Around Sue who doesn’t discriminate. A real-life woman boiled down to a one-dimensional powerhouse of desire. A part of what’s possible. A beacon and a warning. If only Prince had known in time to warn Glenn and Don.

Searching through ten year old floppy disks, I came across a short piece I wrote for a graduate school themed reading event. The theme? Trash. And believe it or not, none of this is fiction. Almost ten years later, my love for the tot remains the same – even if the contents (and the frost level) of my freezer have changed. Enjoy.

Montage duTater Tot

April 2001

In my freezer, right now, at this very moment, you will find a resealable bag of Ore-Ida Tater Tots. It will be coated in white ice crystals, as my landlord didn’t feel compelled to purchase a frost-free refrigerator for this apartment. I reach around the bag to take out my Tully’s Sumatran Coffee every morning.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not an old bag of tater tots. After all, it’s a very recent innovation that these bags are now resealable. I used to fasten the bag securely with a rubber band – twisting and twisting to fight off freezer burn. But it seems that as an adult — whether my refrigerator is stocked with Newcastle, brie, or rice milk — my freezer seems more like home to me with a bag of tater tots.

_________

An early memory:

My mother walks over to our heavy oak dining table with a cookie sheet in one hand and a spatula in the other. She starts to slide the last few tater tots onto her plate. I don’t remember what starts it – the scene plays like a silent movie – my mother and step-father mute – mouths moving and tater tots flickering lovingly on the screen. It is the first fight I remember witnessing. Who took the last tater tot?

No – go ahead – take it – fine.

Oh no. If you want it – have it.

No. Take it.

I think maybe the spatula ended up on the floor. I don’t remember. I just know that the first – and one of the only fights my parents ever had in front of us – was about tater tots.

Now before you totally nurse your pity for this tragic scene, my parents are still together. And as an adult, having weathered arguments sparked by what seem like totally ridiculous things – I can understand that the tater tot was not the meat of the argument. Seasoned potato treats were not what they were really fighting about. But as a seven year old, the tater tot had suddenly become a very powerful thing.

__________

Ore-Ida describes Tater Tots as “seasoned, shredded potato”. But if any of you out there are not too ashamed to admit a love for the perfectly cooked tater tot – I believe you’ll agree with me when I say they are wrong. Hash browns are shredded potato. Potato pancakes are made out of shredded potatoes.

Tater Tots are like perfect little pellets of potatoes pressed into perfect little cylinders. They are chunks of potatoes, they are little cubes of potatoes, they are industrially chopped bits of potato. They are not shredded. Look it up, Ore-Ida.

__________

Another memory:

I am nine or ten and visiting my father’s family for Thanksgiving.

My grandparents lived in an older two bedroom house near McLane high school. One of those older neighborhoods left behind by northward expansion, but a neighborhood held together by the older couples like my grandparents – whose children moved into homes only blocks away and whose holiday celebrations and parties spill onto the front lawn and end well after dark – usually by someone chasing a car as it peels out onto the road, yells heard at least a block away and a spouse left to sleep on Grandma and Grandpa’s couch until they can go home and apologize in the morning.

I say all this with love. Compared to the more mellow holidays with my other families, my biologically paternal family always offered excitement. The friendly chaos was a little like a dirtier, realer, more drunken Disneyland.

I remember walking outside to sit with my cousins sometime before sundown that Thanksgiving. I carried my Chinette paper plate like a palette. The slices of turkey and Brown N’Serve rolls were doused in canned gravy. The cranberry ‘sauce’ – a misnomer if ever there was one – jiggled on my plate – it was a kool-aid colored food I never ate, but it always ended up on my plate anyways. There were five olives – enough for each finger on my left hand. There were tater tots instead of mashed potatoes. This wasn’t normal – even for this family. I suppose now that maybe someone screwed up the potatoes and tater tots were substitutes – but whatever happened to the potatoes was overshadowed by my cousin and his newest girlfriend.

My grandparents kept their camper parked in front of their house – metal poles holding it up where there should’ve been a pick-up truck. My aunt Artie and uncle Frank had six kids – their oldest son Frankie was 16. Again, details were lost on my ten year old self, but suffice to say that I learned “Don’t come a knockin’ if the trailer’s a rockin’” was much more than a funny thing for grown-ups to say. My family laughed and made jokes and I sat there, turning my last tater tot over and over, rolling it across my plate.

_________

“The cafeteria” a couple of my friends said, “that’s where I was first introduced to the tater tot.” But that, I tell them, is sad. School cafeterias never leave them in the oven long enough. They always ended up soggy in the rush to fill tray after tray.

“The perfect tater tot,” I say, “is so well done, so golden brown on the outside, so wonderfully crunchy – that the inside is practically hollow. A properly cooked tater tot defies modern science, chunks of potato literally disappear, vanish like dutiful servants willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the whole, delicious crunchy tater tot.”

__________

I have friends, who shocking as it may seem to some, share my affinity for meatloaf and sloppy joes and who value the comfort of canned corn and Ore-Ida tater tots.

They have invited me over for delicacies such as cow shaped meatloaf – and even once a meatloaf of a perfectly formed D in honor of my name. Because of this, I can share my newest tater tot concoctions without fear of ridicule or disgust. I tell them that one afternoon, craving chili-fries, but having no fries or raw potatoes in my home – I became, once again, a tater tot inventor.

“Only in your house,” one of my friends says, “would you take something already trailer and kick it up a notch.”

But I tell her that, while perhaps hard for her to believe, tater tots made better chili fries than any french fry could ever dream of. The magic little tots stayed crunchy. Broken-up and disassembled as they were — even doused in chili and cheese and all else – they stood there, drowning and proud.

And I think to myself, who wouldn’t risk breaking up a marriage for the last tater tot?