Reaching for the stars and shit...

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There is a generation here of broken down artists, of barristas and bartenders, babysitters and bachelors of the fine arts and I feel like its fat, flamboyant ringleader. 


The daughter of middle class baby boomers, I have no real fear of homelessness, bread lines or the depletion of Medicare. Instead, I run screaming from confining cardboard cubicles, menial labor, micromanaging managers and long term financial commitments. Like an arrogant protester who's really only on the picket line because he prefers his barbecue grill to the community copy machine, I am still (somewhat secretly) sitting on sidewalks striving for what I want: the life as a full time artist. This is a frightening fact because I am twenty-seven years old and can no longer, really, use my age as an excuse for drifting. Even my mother has begun giving me the "you can't do this forever" look... this stalling, fighting, falling.


It reminds me of an afternoon from when I was a young teenager. I dressed to go running and announced my plans to my parents. "Have fun." They told me. "Be safe!" But this response was not what I had expected nor hoped. They were supposed to tell me I was too small to be thinking of exercise that wasn't backyard play. 


It's scary when we grow up without noticing. 


Last spring, my friend Kelsey told me, "Do it now. Don't wait. It gets harder and harder to conceive as soon as you hit thirty." I imagined a thirtieth birthday party where my uterus falls out, my fallopian tubes retire and move to Florida and my little peach-colored utters start smelling of sour milk. Kelsey was right, I decided that day in the ice cream parlor, it was time I made myself a baby. 


I am very impressionable. 

Usually after visiting with my grandparents, who take pleasure in pontificating such phrases as "What are you waiting for?" and "You kids think you can plan everything!," I'll turn to my husband, Scott and say that it is time. Baby time. He has yet to accommodate such spontaneous suggestions. 


I didn't always accept myself as this self-involved idealist. Sure when I was a kid I believed in the cliches of dreams, rainbow slides and stars, but so did everybody. In the fourth grade, I wrote the words, "When I grow up I want to play basketball for the big leagues." Beside this carefully penned pipe dream, there was my school picture of florescent lasers, a wave of brown bangs and a turtleneck sweater ensemble. Once I got to high school I began seeing the common classroom posters of Michael Jordan, Bugs Bunny, Steve McQueen and Flipper the Dolphin as faded fanciful propaganda from the early 90s. The only one that really inspired me was the poster of the black smoker's lung beside the pink non-smoker's lung. The caption read "IMAGINE" or something and probably still hangs on the inside of the athletic director's door.


Toward the end of high school, I started seriously searching for my future career. Retreating to the computer lab often, I'd take several surveys. I was desperate to find any sort of personal passion that did not involve the arts. I thought about law,  government, psychology, but I couldn't imagine myself spending an entire adulthood pursuing any of these. I felt cursed. Years later, now perpetually stuck inside this realm rightly named "the real world", I still cannot enroll in any class or school to further myself as a professional business lady, nurse or landscaper. I hop jobs like bums board trains and I do not really see myself settling down to work forever anywhere. To be quite honest, I cannot completely comprehend how anyone can. How a young adult can say that he/she hopes to have the same job until retirement. To me, that job security looks more like a tediously tiring train ride in a warm windowless wagon. 

My mother is a principal for an elementary school. The union is meeting, she tells me. They're getting ready for a grievance. Of course they are, I think to myself. How could they possibly go day by day, year by year, working in the same building, sometimes the same classroom and be completely content? They're just looking for someone to blame for their boredom, their personal unhappiness, I tell her, don't take it personally, but she can't help it. When I see her Sunday, she drinks three cups of coffee before switching to white wine in the afternoon. My mother is a mover, but she can also commit when it is the right thing to do and, despite the conceived complaints of her employees, she knows that she is very good for her school. This is when I tell her that Scott is probably taking next year off teaching to see if teaching high school is really as horrible as it seems now. I want my health insurance and his bi-weekly pay checks, I tell her, but I am supporting his decision to choose his sanity over the security his job provides. Besides, despite my few semi-serious attempts to get pregnant, we still do not have children. This grants us a little more time for bad decisions. We think. And while Scott is searching his soul, I will be striving to still myself, linger longer in moments and apartments, towns and jobs. Maybe I'll wake up one day with a serious determination to sell tiny knick knack cat statues from a sidewalk cart or go back to school to be something other than an aging vagabond. 

Perhaps my problem is a lack of fear. Maybe a night dumpster diving; busking with my broken guitar; begging pedestrians for pennies and sleeping on a cot in a church basement is what I need to set up a future with reality in mind. I do sincerely wonder what it must be like to want to do something or be someone attainable.

A guided tour through my somewhat self-deprecating thoughts.

In our teens, my two sisters and I discovered the comforting glory of food. "Anorexia starts tomorrow." We'd grumble, grasping our swollen stomachs after family feasts and $20 brunch buffets. My family doesn't do buffets, I tell people smiling, after their restaurant suggestions. We can't handle the pressure. 

photo by Patrick Cummings

Do I feel the faintest glimmer of hunger? I should get a coffee. Anybody wanna grab a beer? WHO THE F ATE THE REST OF MY COOKIES? Is my stomach hollow enough to justify filling it with hardly chewed food and gulped down drink? I am going to eat only vegetables. No more processed foods EVER. I need to cool it on the dairy. I should fill my grocery cart with only pickles, parsley and celery. No more corn. No sugar. No more wheat! Maybe I should do one of those lemon turmeric cleanses and send several interior inches out my back door. I know what to do: chew my food. Chew and chew until it is complete mush and slithers down my throat like a slug on a slip 'n slide. Or, simply, eat more like a bird and less like a dinosaur. I am the middle child of a mother who rarely made enough for everyone to have seconds. I was always first to the stove with an empty plate (except for frozen stir fry dinner nights where terribly bland teriyaki sauce drenched rubbery vegetables and wrinkly brown beef strips). To this day, I am still always the first to be finished. If I were a little bird, I would pick at my plate, daintily taking in a few crumbs at a time and sometimes, SOMETIMES I would even be that person who pushes her plate away with an expression that reads, I've lost interest in this laborious act of eating. I will sip my drink. I won't open my mouth like a curved bridge over a river, flooding my throat and insides as though I haven't drunk in days. I will sip, sifting the liquid through my teeth and bathing my tongue. I will stop looking at food as my drug. I will start doing real drugs. That will distract me. I won't be thinking about those avocados or bananas softening in the fruit bowl if all my brain power is used to figure out when I can pay my dealer for more drugs. I don't think cocaine addicts eat much. Actually, I'm pretty positive they're usually waif thin. I could be waif thin and sickly! Get a couple duffel bags under my eyes and frequent, unannounced bloody noses. Have my ribs show through my winter coat and watch as my skin stretches over my bones like a sheet on an old springy cot. I know, I know! I'll stop sitting entirely. Stand all the time. Wear one of those step counters and walk several miles every day. I'll lose those ten pounds and when I do, when those ten pounds are gone, I will be completely happy. I will be enormously successful and confident. Life will be grand, perfect even. No, of course that isn't true. It isn't that simple. My life will be perfect when I lose those ten pounds and when my skin clears up and when I can convince the skin below my neck that it is more Italian than Irish and English and should, therefore, turn golden in the sun rather than this blotchy pink.  Yes. When those ten pounds are gone, when my face is blemish free and the rest of my skin is more gold than silver, then, then I will be perfectly happy. No, I suppose that's not completely true. Really it's all that in addition to when I can get this toe nail fungus figured out and when some nerdy lab rat somewhere invents a pill to shrink my feet to an adorable size seven and my sausage fingers to the size they were when I was six. When I am thinner and prettier and when I'm wealthy and can afford a new wardrobe and earrings that don't turn my earlobes green then, then I will be happy. I will be incessantly hungry with a stomach full of diet pills and a strangely stiff airbrushed face full of botulism, but I will perfect and happy, just like those fucking magazines and movie screens.

If I survive to an ancient age, will I, by then, just be wishing for this fleshy figure back, for this moist oily skin again? For this flexibility to paint my own toenails? When I am old and retired to rocking chairs and crochet classes, will I read this and cry out, "Damn you! You were your own kind of beautiful and all you saw were what society classified as flaws."  I remember when I was thirteen, writing very similar sentences in diaries and along the mirrors of my conscious thoughts. "When I have contact lenses, when my skin clears up, when my braces are off, when I have boobs, when my body doesn't resemble a baby giraffe...then I will be beautiful." These days, I eat like a hungry hungry hippo whenever I am anxious, bored, feeling awkward around acquaintances or when I am home alone with corn chips wedged into the back corner of the cupboard, but besides this habit to pack my mouth like the tiny suitcase of a queen, I am extremely healthy. I am alive. I am happy. I am loved. I am my own kind of beautiful.  

Osama

This morning, Monday, May 2, 2011, at around 5:45 a.m., while walking my dog, Penny through the quiet beginning of another week here in Northampton, Massachusetts, I passed a collection of colorful newspaper stands. My eyes caught sight of the headlines like an ignorantly eager fish might bite bait and a hook. "Osama bin Laden Killed by U.S." I read. 


I was a senior in high school when the country was attacked by al Qaida's traveling terrorists. That fall, my class's senior trip to Florida was cancelled, but not without a fight. We had an evening assembly. Passionate parents fought to keep the school trip. "We can't let the terrorist win!" I remember one mother saying in a sudden soliloquy. My mother and I sat in the back of the auditorium, leaning into one another, listening and keeping our comments to ourselves. "This is what they want! They want us to be afraid!" A father declared and a few people clapped in support, nodding their heads and saying things like, "He's right, you know, he's exactly right."  It was an awkward assembly (for no seventeen-year-old wants to be present when his/her parent is anything but silent and invisible). I remember my mother mumbling, "I'm not about to sacrifice my child to make a point." Logan International Airport had not yet regained her trust. That Spring, this same group of proactive parents organized and chaperoned the trip to Florida and I went. By then, my mother and father had decided that a quick trip to Disney World wouldn't, most likely, kill me.  


On September 11, 2001, I sat in the lunch room listening to incomplete and unintelligible stories as they spread around me like haze. Everyone leaned over their uneaten sandwiches. "Twin Towers," I heard. "Flew out of Logan," "New York City," "Pentagon" and "it was terrorists, terrorists hijacked the planes." I was nervous, uninformed. I didn't know where the Twin Towers were and I feared they might be in Boston. My father worked in Boston at the time. I didn't know where his office was in Boston, but I assumed it could be within the walls of one of these burning buildings everyone was whispering about. 


After lunch, in classrooms throughout the school, televisions and computers were turned on and tuned in. In smokey New York City streets, debris fell from the sky like dirty snow. Firefighters ran hoses. Police ran for survivors. Business men and woman ran around in heels and dark suits with faces distorted by horror and muddied by soot. Bodies fell from the sky. We watched bodies fall from the sky and planes crash into the New York City skyline. 


That night, President George W. Bush spoke on national television. "That poor bastard," I remember my mother murmuring when his sullen face appeared on the screen. For the following months, we watched the nightly news, wincing and choking up at the personal stories that began to play. Strangers stood before camera crews showing pictures of lost loved ones and crumpled tissues between their fingers as they rose them to their wet eyes. We watched footage of plastered walls of Missing Person papers in New York City bus stops and downtown subway stations. I remember when they stopped calling the work at Ground Zero, a rescue mission. I watched people in foreign city streets celebrate the attacks of September 11th. Dancing, parading and howling, these people publicly hailed the mass murdering martyrs. America, I learned in that moment, was like the rich, perfect, popular kid who one day got ambushed, defecated on, shoved into a locker and left over night to weep within darkness.  


I must admit that I do believe the murder of Osama bin Laden was extremely justified, however it is a peculiar, guilty joy or satisfaction that stems from the death of this person, even someone as corrupt and blatantly evil as he. Sunday night, after President Barack Obama announced the news, there were celebratory riots and prayer vigils across the country, particularly outside the White House and in New York City.  Across America, many people are smiling and sighing that justice has finally been served, but there are also many Americans shaking their heads and fingers, saying, an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind! and quotes by the renowned American pacifist, Martin Luther King Jr.  I can't say what I believe is right. My husband, Scott is disgusted by the excitement. This morning, while I made my bagged lunch, I compared Osama bin Laden to Adolph Hitler. He can't be alive, I said simply. He just shouldn't be alive. Of course, really, I don't know. Perhaps a formal trial would be interesting and just, but what possible sentence does one deserve for the massacre of thousands of innocent people? I know what my friend, Mark would say without even asking him. As I have written before, here, in an entry titled "Eye for an Eye", Mark would say that Osama bin Laden deserves to get what he did to others. He deserves to be raised high above a cement city street, to the height of the 110th floor of the Twin Towers, and thrown onto a burning ledge. He should be forced to choose between fire and a fall, a death by burning or a death by plummeting into the windy expanse of a fourteen hundred foot drop. 


Lucky for him, the Eighth Amendment of The United States Constitution would prevent such cruel and unusual punishment. However, no matter how he died, he is dead and whether you speculate, criticize or commend the actions of the United States in the raid and killing of this extremely powerful terrorist, all we can really do now is hope that Osama bin Laden does not escape Hell and hide in some hidden compound in Heaven.  

Street Shock

As we approach the small intersection where we will turn right, Scott and I pass a tall skinny white man with a long dark ponytail. From the sidewalk, the sullen stranger looks at me; lifts his right hand and adjusts his long fingers into the shape of a pistol. As we pass him, rolling toward the red light, he pulls the trigger of his middle finger and says, "yeah, ya freak." The yeah stretches between us as if he expects me to agree with him. Ya is plain and painfully general. Freak sticks into the air like a real bullet might. I stare at the man from inside a voiceless shock. I want to yell out my window that he is the freak. That he needs a haircut. That he can go fuck himself. But I can't. I am nauseous, numb and dumb. I look to Scott. He laughs. He probably mistook us for someone else, he says, but the gunman looked right at me for four or five full seconds, I tell him. Later, Scott retells the story to our roommates. "The guy was clearly crazy." He says and I laugh along while sharp shrapnel sinks into my flimsy skin. I am free of physical harm, but this particular brand of verbal violence lingers like a wet scab. 

It reminds me of a day in the year we lived in New York City.  I went to cross a street in midtown. I didn't have the walk signal, but there were no cars coming so I did what I always did and began to cross. When I reached a quarter of the way to the other side of this massive street, I noticed a yellow taxi driving toward me. It'll slow down, I thought to myself, but it didn't and after two more timid steps, I began to retreat, turning and running back to the curb. Once safely on the sidewalk, I watched the cab speed by. There was no time to give the driver my favorite finger gesture, only fleeting eye contact. As he passed by, the driver glared at me, grimaced even. He wanted to strike me dead in the middle of the street, I knew. He wanted hit me and drive away, aiming his wheels to squish my skin and crunch my bones into the hot mid-afternoon city cement. As my body laid flat and bloodied, my guts torn out by black rubber tires and plastic windshield wipers, the driver would successfully flee the scene (for a yellow taxi in New York City is like a blond in Los Angeles: they are everywhere and they all look the same.) Shame on me. Such unessessary judgement against a particularly pretty demographic. But my shallow aggression toward blonds derives entirely from dull, imature insecurities where big boobied blond Barbies stand on the tip toes of my childhood bedrooms anxiously waiting for their next costume change, haircut, or private make-out session with Ken. It is nothing compared to the contageous hatred that festers in the puckered eyes of these grown men. 


Was the driver's day so bad, filled with so many mindless jaywalkers that he just wanted to hit one of them to revenge himself against every person who had ever caused him to tap his break pedal since the day he started driving the New York City's streets for tips? Was he caught inside the enchanting thrill of a death threat? At the time, I couldn't help but think the dark skinned taxi driver wanted to hit me because he saw me as a self-entitled white girl tramping across the street like a glutonous Goldilocks, trespassing and stealing the property of strangers, but that's racist to think and embarrassing to admit. Besides, my locks, as I have previously implied, are not gold. Was the man with the imaginary gun angry because we were driving an old beige Toyota Camry? Was he jealous of how openly we flaunt our fortune?  I knew we never should have gotten those spinning diamond rims, gold leafed license plates or that slammin' sound system. 



Perhaps the problem is that most of us fill our bellies with 20 ounce bottles of carbonated anger and any one little thing can tip them over, causing enormous amounts of emotion to spew out of us in unexpecteded explosions. I think that probably was the case of the cab driver. Yet when it comes to the man on the side of the road, I am still somewhat speechless. I have decided that he is crazy. Yet the real scary thing is that this man might be eligible to purchase a real weapon one day. Actually, he might already own one. The cab driver had a weapon, his yellow taxi. When his bottles tipped and broke, he tried to kill me with his car, or at least that's what it felt like. What if the man with the ponytail is packing a real pistol one day and I pass him again and for some reason my eye contact causes some kind of chemical reaction in his body and he draws a real gun on me and all I can do is stare back at him in a silent shock? 

Corned Beef, Cabbage and The Apocalypse

Corned beef and cabbage sits simmering on the stove. The smell wraps us in warm beefy blankets as we set the table and talk. Around 8:00 p.m., Amy's two friends, Tyler and Katie, arrive with beer and a garden salad. By 9:30, six of us sit for a late night Irish feast.

By midnight, our bellies brim over our buckled belts. I sit slightly slumped as the dining room spins from the beer I've drunk. In the kitchen, Mark mixes, bakes, and slices brownies. I stay seated, picking out chunks of cold soft carrots to eat with my fingers from the nearly naked serving bowl before me. Then the conversation turns from light cordial chatter to a discussion about current international news. Japan's earthquake shakes and sinks onto the chests of our newly leaden bodies and our voices shift into new tones. We trade what we know about the tsunami damage and ongoing fires at the nuclear power plant. Radiation levels are rising, I learn, spreading like the cancer it will cause.  Tyler says she's read about world wide radiation levels taken during different times of nuclear testing. It spreads, she tells us. It cannot truly be contained. She then tells us about a memoir she's read about a tragic town where nearly every citizen, except for the lactose intolerant author, is diagnosed with cancer. Radiation from a nearby nuclear plant seeped into the water and into the grass that the local dairy cows ate. Because nearly everyone in the town drank the milk, they all, cows included, digested radiation regularly.

"Why would anyone want to have children these days?" I ask.  "The world is probably going to end soon, right? Isn't it really only a matter of time?" Katie needs another drink. I feel doll size and lifeless. Scott says he thinks it'd be cool to have kids who are among the last humans. I suppose there were probably pregnancies during the Cuban Missile Crisis, World War I and II, The Great Depression, The American Civil War and even during the times of Small Pox and the Plague. I must remember perspective. There is, has always been and will always be threat.

This is when we all notice how visibly exhilarated Mark is by the prospect of living in a world much like his post-apocalyptic video games where every moment stands on a wobbly balance beam between life and death. Where every character carries massive machetes and stolen rations, stalking the barren wastelands of Earth, killing to survive.

Katie says she'd rather everyone died at once, like in a flash. Taken by surprise, she says. It would be much too terrifying to hear about different parts of the world blowing up or melting or evaporating, she says. She doesn't want to sit around waiting for death. Scott disagrees. He would prefer a heads up. To know he only had a week, day, or hour to live. It'd give him time to tie up loose ends, he explains, say good bye to people, eat some really good food.

I can't decide what I'd prefer. I guess if everything went dark, if the electricity we so depend on suddenly went dead one day and we heard rumors that throughout the world communities were being targeted and eaten up by radiation, cannibalistic terrorists or a vengeful God's wrath, I'd want to see how long I could survive. Perhaps I would go find my family. Bike the hundred miles of back roads between my apartment and my parents' front door. Along the way, I could stay out of sight, hoping, praying and wishing that the authorities I have voted for and the armed forces I have hid behind will step up and save me. I could paint my face with green and brown stage makeup and sleep under leaves in the woods. Hunt down abandoned grocery marts and liquor stores. Stitch blankets out of found roadkill fur. Get really good at climbing trees. Finally lose those stubborn seven pounds. Really, it does sound like quite the adventure, certainly something to write about, but it does not give me the glee that it gives Mark. The end of the world and/or the end of humanity would devastate me. For as much as I criticize people's ways, I do agree with what Anne Frank wrote. "Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart."

We, civilized humans, have done an incredible amount of development. This history we have made and the relics we use to preserve the old: books, films, newspapers, libraries and museums. When stretched before you in an organized fashion, it's inspiring to see our progression. From candles to light bulbs. Caves to huts to houses. From feather pens to letter presses to typewriters and to laptop computers. From airplanes to rocket ships. From corn to pop corn to corn syrup. It is the result of uninhibited determination for the development of science, societal progression, and individual betterment.

This celebratory boiled feast we have just enjoyed in a warm, furnished apartment is all thanks to history, to years of infamous potato famines, long boat rides across the Atlantic Ocean, oppression. And the preservation of this history is thanks to years of corn beef and cabbage dinners and drunken parades of Irish pride, hand waving girl scouts, leprechauns and tacky paper mache

Maybe we will have the opportunity to join as humans and fight for the future of people on this planet. If that's the case, I wonder how humans will do.  It has been a very long time since we developed our instincts for fight or flight. We aren't cavemen anymore, most of us. Back then, the weak died quickly. Today we have them hooked up to heart monitors, feeding tubes and on prescriptions of permanent bed rest. We no longer need to be healthy to survive. We just need to sign the right waver and have decent health insurance. We no longer need to run from dinosaurs, cheetahs or woolly mammoths. We don't need to hunt buffalo or farm fields. We can sit in wide rolly chairs all day every day, typing numbers, sending emails, and talking our way through meetings. We have a new way of hunting. Instead of spears, fishing poles or guns, we have credit cards to gather food from grocery stores, restaurants, donut shops and pizza parlors. We've developed so far intellectually that we no longer need to have bodies that are physically strong. As long as we're breathing and drugged up enough to not feel the pain of our neglect, everything is fine. Perhaps this is the downfall of our development.

Currently fighting the war on fat is a widespread revolution in fitness and health. Folks everywhere are joining gyms; running on sidewalks; hiking mountain trails; taking yoga classes and seeking out organic produce and meat. Quite conceivably the fitness gurus and healthy eaters will be the ones to survive, starting the human race over again with the fittest men and women alive. My brother works in fitness now and is big. Muscly, I mean. He and his workout buddies pick up tires and put them back down again. They run with parachutes and friends strapped to their backs. They jump over wooden boxes and can clap between push ups. It is an intense club of muscled meat eaters. One day I asked my big big brother what he and his friends were all doing with their muscles. What good were they? One can be healthy without bulging biceps and thick necks, I told him. He didn't really have an answer, but now I do. If the day comes that the human race has been threatened with extinction, these buff babes will stop lifting tires and start ripping trees from their roots to rebuild houses and bridges. They will tackle deer, ducks and cows when they are hungry. They will dive into oceans, gathering lobsters and salmon to eat and whales to turn into peppermint scented candles for the newly built toilet huts. And while they are grunting, swearing and sweating through their labor, my yoga friends and I will be meditating in the nearest meadow. When we're done with our sun salutations, gentle back bends and peaceful warrior poses, we'll gather wild berries, nuts and edible leaves for the evening's salad. Then I'd ask my brother to pass the bear meat.

Tonight, when we all decide we're too tired to go on discussing such sad and enormous matters, Katie and Tyler say goodnight. After they leave, my roommates and I go into the kitchen. There we see that the sink is clogged. We'll fix it in the morning, we say, leaving plates in piles and pots in stacks. It can all wait until morning.

My God

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I was raised by smart, strong-minded folks who took me to a Roman Catholic Church with baggies of Cheerios when I was a girl. Told me to sit tight and listen. I would. I remember watching my father charismatically project the Old and New Testaments from the lectern, his slight Boston accent peeking through his diction.  I remember the veteran in the parking lot who sold Tootsie Rolls for $1 after mass. I remember running across the parking lot to the parish hall for free fruit punch and glazed doughnuts.  When the public schools went to shit in my town, I remember my parents gathering all the money they could to enroll my three siblings and I in a small Catholic grade School. Twenty years later, I cannot help but believe that God is out there or in here or everywhere and I just need to look a little harder.

This past Christmas Eve, I went to church with my family. It was the first mass I had attended since the previous Christmas Eve. I went for tradition and I went in hope of finding peace and/or truth. Within the privacy of my pressed palms, I did find peace, but never much truth. Instead I felt like an impostor, an outsider, silently refusing to accept the common Catholic vows extended and reminded to me by the robed priest on his decorated altar. At the last minute, I even decided to stay seated beside my Jewish husband during Communion, which caused my sister to cast strange looks upon me as she climbed over my knees to reach the aisle.

The little truth I did find was in the brief moment of Peace (the part of mass when everyone in the congregation is instructed to turn toward one another with extended hands and say, "Peace be with you.") When this happened on Christmas Eve, everyone in the church suddenly awoke from their nearly sleeping states and began to look around them. Fathers began kissing the foreheads and cheeks of their daughters, children sillily shook the hands of other children, and elders gently clasped hands with other elders. But then, as quickly as the energy entered the church, it escaped. The entire congregation returned their bodies to stiff solitude, looking to the man on the altar for his next instruction to sit, stand, kneel or pray. 

That spark is all I care to study and experience. My God is that fading spark, those invisible strings, that human connection that ties us all together. For what, if not human connection, is more invasive and more vital to humans than air? I fear I live in a world of belligerently selfish zombies where fried food, hallucinogenic drugs and cheap alcohol are taking the place of real relationships. Glazed eyes, drowning livers, and hardening hearts are steering the barely living into ditches of dazed existences leaving me surrounded by holes. My moments pile and topple around me, filling my heart with memories of emotions that feel more real than buildings, armies and screaming teapots. And I know that if everyone could clearly see the moments that become their lives, which in turn become their human contribution to the atmosphere's emotional layer (which is perhaps the most holey of all layers), everyone would all feel an incredible obligation to wake up and contribute to the human race rather than continue to separate themselves from it.  

For thousands of years people have been classifying themselves through religion, occupation, family name, nationality, race and/or political stance. With our intelligent feelings, we want to understand our life and we often start by trying to understand and organize our personal traits. I believe this is all quite natural. Or at least, I hope it is, for as you can see I write memoir essays and would classify myself as a continuously curious self-classifier. In fact, I've attempted to know myself so much that I can no longer attempt classification because I know that it is all irrelevant unless I know the context, who my company is. For instance, in some company, I can be a boisterous comedian while in other company, I am a shy, shifty-eyed social diver. I don’t know where this urge comes from to simplify everything. To say who I am, how I am, or what I am. To put my poor personality quirks into categorized boxes like medical records or doughnuts. But I know that it is part of what makes me human. I went to church as a kid. That information goes in the box labeled FAITH. Many people had folks who took them to a Catholic Church as well, while many others were brought to a Mosque, Temple or to Grandmas for a weekly Sunday brunch. Everyone is on their own quest to know who their god is, if they want to believe in the presence of a higher power, and it is no one's place to convert anyone who is not looking to be converted. Besides your God is not my God and my God is most certainly not your God. This discussion isn't even something to be right about. It’s all so subjective. My God is made up of invisible ribbons. You can't tell me that isn't true. It's what I believe. And anyone’s accusations that someone is worshiping the "wrong" god is in need of a deep exploration of his or her own prejudices.

These days, I am rarely inside Roman Catholic Churches and yet I feel beholden to my parents for dressing me in those precious girly dresses and patent leather shoes, giving me bags of cereal and telling me to sit tight and listen. I did. I won’t forget. Maybe one day I’ll regret these hippy dippy religious bullshit words from my twenties, but for now and in this company, a hippy dippy bullshitter is how I want to classify myself. 

Peace be with you.

Bodies

After a local music show, my friends and I stand outside the club, crunching our shoulders in the cold and saying good-byes with high fives when a muscly meathead with a cigarette wedged within his mouth speedily swaggers by. Behind him, hobbling on high heels, a young woman hounds him. “Oh shit, you gonna do it?” She asks. “That’s my boy’s girl.” He says over his shoulder before descending upon two forty-something adults macking on one another. The meathead attacks, verbally, shouting, “Are you fuckin’ him? You fuckin’ him? You’re my boy’s girl and you’re fuckin’ him!” Yanked from the privacy of their plastered states, the man, a scrawny leather faced guy, backs away from the woman, a chub with black mascara smeared in circles beneath her eyes. Without waiting for any sort of response, for this performance was clearly all he wanted, the accuser turns and begins swaggering away. Then suddenly, behind him, his “boy’s girl” attacks the “oh shit, you gonna do it” girl, causing both sloshed sluts to crash clumsily to the cement. Then all four belligerent boneheads are rolling around on the sidewalk, bumping into parking meters and slurring nervous nonsense. Then the doors to the club open and three security guards rush out and pull apart the fight. My friends and I watch, stepping back slightly toward the curb. The security guards appear to know the man with the leather face and with the fury of fully extended arms, they scold him like a child. “Go home, Kenny! GO. HOME.” Once all four fighters are finally gone, the guards are blazing with the same self-importance that the swaggering meathead had.  Like somehow this all mattered: this drunken brawl outside a crappy club.

I currently cannot help but feel that life and the living of it is not much more than simply passing time surviving until our predestined deaths. It is a drab one-sided discussion, a temporary clarity that will soon fog with the fleeting distractions of laughter, trivial traffic aggravations and trips to the grocery store, but for now all I can see are bodies. Legs, livers, ears, eyes, mouths, genitalia and belly buttons, nipples, necks, toenails and knees, ankles and elbows. In one foreign city, there are protests, bodies screaming for citizen rights, cursing political leaders on cardboard and running from police brutality. In another foreign city, suicide bombers are blowing up the bodies of innocent bystanders. And in American cities, drive by gang shootings are terminating teenage bodies while heart disease murders everyone else. Rows of ribs, lined shoulders and hairlines, eyebrows and thumbs, cuticles and tongues. 

In the middle of my world, my body stands with the narrow end of a hollow cone up to my eye, pointing it up and out. Giraffish ankles stand atop the long crooked bones of my flat feet and toes and my reddened elephant skin knees swing my calves and shins forward and back while I walk and I run. Hidden beneath my underwear, I have my pink doughy thighs, a bristly black lap, a fleshy stomach and two little white wine water balloon breasts. A shallow shelf of shoulder bones is mounted below my rounded shoulder tops, while on my sides, long strong arms lead to fingers built for piano playing, but left, instead, to the typing of stories and thoughts onto computer keys. A slender neck with a pin-top freckle on its middle holds my head, which is covered with dark wavy hair and a pale pink face where my lips are like a peach colored pullout couch for my soft squishy tongue and pearly round teeth.  My body's skeleton of calcium and marrow matter is made like other bodies and my thin pale skin is freckled by the same sun, yet I am still myself unique. I may appear not much different from anyone else, but to me I am familiar and therefore complexly distinct.

My friends, Mark and Amy, my husband, Scott, and I recently moved into an apartment in a two-family house, taking the place of a quiet old woman and her cat. On our move-in day last week, the downstairs tenant, a single mother of a twelve-year old boy, meets us all in the back stairway to say, "Ahhh… so this is why he made me sign a four month lease." Referring to the landlord and his decision to allow us, four young adults, to move into the two-bedroom apartment above her. I’ve never felt so unwelcome. Even after she practically declares that our move into her territory will lead to the demise of her happiness, the four of us remain unrequitedly respectful. "I'd like the parking spot that Analee used because I'm the oldest." She says, dividing her from us like the big kid on the kickball field, spouting out made up rules and uneven team lineups. We, all still very excited to move into our new place, agree.

On our first trash day, two days after moving in, she comes up to our kitchen door. She doesn’t knock, but stares down at Penny, our dog, who barks at her scowling face through the door's glass. The barking brings me out of my bedroom, where I am dressing, and I grab Penny by the collar and tell her to be quiet. When I unlock and open the door, I say a friendly hello. "Do you live here now too?" She asks with a sharp smirk. "I met you the other day." I tell her. “I’m Rachel.” "Oh" she says, avoiding apologies, "I didn't recognize you." "I just took a shower." I explain, shuffling my bangs to convince her. The trash barrel needs to go out, she tells me. “We’ll take it out.” I tell her. “It needs to go out tonight and it's almost dark.” She says. Is the trash truck coming in the middle of the night? I wonder. Couldn’t this wait? We have to leave for rehearsal in ten minutes and my hair is still wet. Scott takes over, telling her we are going to do it later that night and that she can put her trash in the barrel and that we'd take it all out when we got home later. “But the trash needs to go out Monday night.” She repeats. Scott surrenders to their inability to communicate clearly and goes to the basement to fetch the woman her barrel.

On our drive up to Greenfield for dinner, I tell my roommates that this is what racism must feel like (on a supremely smaller scale). They laugh, but I mean it. We, young adults, move into this high-class neighborhood and instead of being welcomed with fruitcake and smiles, we are shunned, despised unnecessarily for our age. I feel like we're being blamed for this woman’s divorce. Like we’re the reason she has to pay rent instead of a monthly mortgage payment. 


The woman from downstairs is unfamiliar to me. A stranger leaving me contradictory sticky notes on the door to the basement. A stranger shutting her shades from the world around it, enclosing herself with blinds and cotton curtains so that no one can see that she knows vulnerability. Upstairs, Amy’s pretty positive Bill from across the street has already seen her boobs several times, but she just laughs about how awkward he was when she introduced herself to him at the end of our driveway. 

(click on the photo to read)

It is difficult to feel remorse or any sort of emotion toward crowds or individual persons with unfamiliar faces because, I think, the soul is only visible when it is inside some sort of familiarity, causing the real struggle to be not judging strangers, not assuming others are meatheads, sluts or young irresponsible tenants who will probably scream profanities at dawn; vomit cheap beer on the front porch; host techno dance parties on Monday nights and invite drunken hobos to live in the entryway on cold and rainy nights. It is difficult to look past unfamiliar flesh, fingernails, eyeballs, noses and ears, hairstyles, legs and feet to something closer to souls. 


Scott suggests we have the woman and her son over for dinner. Amy and I refuse. “I don’t want to make her dinner just so that she can criticize my or Rachel’s cooking.” Amy says. “And I don’t want to spend an awkward evening with the woman.”  I say. “Yeah and her son creeps me out. He'll probably try to kill us.” Yet Scott is probably right. Having the woman over for dinner could reduce her judgments by making us familiar to her. However, it might also ripen her discrimination, giving her more material to hate us. Why do they have an anchor on the wall, a deer skull in a pretty serving bowl and a Muhammad Ali poster over the stove that reads, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”? What weirdos they are with their action figures posed on secondhand spice racks, comic books stacked behind the toilet bowl and was that Darth Vader climbing up the back of the knife block? Yes. 

But must familiarity be present to feel compassion or connection? Is it necessary in order for one to look at tragedy and actually see it? To look at a pile of naked skin and see souls. To look at a woman’s body and see a mother of three with green glassy eyes, endearingly crooked teeth, and a remarkable talent for making the neighborhood children laugh. To look at a man’s body and see the local pub's storyteller, an expert builder and a lover of many. To look at the body of a child and see an eight-year-old girl with dirty blond hair, fantastic cursive writing and a fear of loud sounds. What if the world were as small as many say it is after accidental meetings with old friends in unexpected places? Oh my, what a small world. Would the lady downstairs have given us a chance to show her how responsible and respectful we are? Would I not have immediately hated those drunken sidewalk fighters? I doubt it.

I sometimes feel damaged by my inability to think of life in simple terms. To look at white bread and not see its artificial coloring and forty count ingredient list. I can only wonder what it might be like to live without unending observations and assumptions about the meaning or lack of meaning in people, life and reproduction. To see Earth differently from an ant farm in a universe of giants. 


I have recently given up caffeine. Beautiful black cups of coffee and steamy chai tea lattes are the prime suspects to the recent murder of my clear skin, it seems, and until I can prove otherwise, caffeine is locked up in a cupboard. I say this because I believe this withdrawal is partially to blame for my recent lack of hope in humanity. It is also the dead of February and the ice and snow are conspiring, convincing me that spring and summer are just figments of my busy imagination. Tired and frozen, my body is learning how to generate organic optimism and until I catch up with this fleeing feeling, I am pounding computer keys like the nose of a mouse in a maze. 




I am not heartless, just unfamiliar to and from it all.