mystic_savage

Everything is blank and flat and slow. What do I mean by that? Nothing is sharp, except in writing. What is blank? I would continue to write until I got a clue about myself, but I could write for a thousand years and compile a billion clues and I still wouldn't have a self. Self must be an illusion, a construct, a god we've created to have an image that we can say is in our own. Double intended, this construct. Nothing I write or do or say or think makes any sense. Nothing is sharp, even in writing. Everything is -- I am -- blank and flat and slow. But even that is constructed. "Meaning" is meaningless. I could do this -- say anything about myself, and it would be simultaneously both true and untrue.

Must bring myself into focus.

Today I will be a person who likes hummingbirds and enjoys math. Someone who wears a too-bright hand-painted t-shirt her mother bought for her just because her mother bought it, not because she likes the t-shirt. Someone who wears tennis shoes and black twill pants and waddles over to the south campus center to read a book at lunch. Someone who will enjoy sorting mail and updating spreadsheets. Someone who would never think about stopping, who will not be halted by the blankness of a computer screen or overwhelmed by a list of a dozen tiny tasks.

Even in its graceful moments life is a disappointment. Even in sunshine, surrounded by greenery, in a quiet neighborhood in a moment when nothing is being asked of me, I feel tired. In the bath last night, relaxing, I looked at my toes and they seemed a continent away. The distance from my soul to my skin is unfathomable. I don't know why I'm in this body or how to stop. Nothing seems like an option and no place feels like home.

Not all dramas are large. Any NYU film student will tell you that. There is a theater to hands, for example. Watch people's hands and you can tell their stories.

Your hands tell me your story. You thumb the mouse alongside your keyboard and you are longing for connection. You massage your right wrist because you have been at the computer too long. You type slowly and make mistakes because you are tired. Your hands are generous, impatient and self-conscious. You are the person who will drop the quarter when you try to roll it across your fingers in the parking lot. You will say "whoops!" in case anyone is watching, but you will let the quarter go. This is how you regularly lose quarters.

My hands are stubby and square, made for practical things like changing diapers, but my secret hands are graceful. They play concertos on my keyboard and write symphonies for other people to hear. They smooth like silk across a stretch of skin and make a moment into a prayer of gratitude. They speak in their own sign language, asking you questions. Can you hear what they're whispering?

This morning I’m going to sit here and type and let the words take me wherever they will. Or, to be more accurate and less metaphysical, my imagination will take me where it will. The first place I always go is Paris, because desire and memory fuels imagination, and if I could go anywhere in the world today, it would be there. I wish I had the kind of money to travel on. I haven’t had what people call a “vacation” for a long, long time...maybe in all my adult life. No, wait. In the early 1990's I went to LA to clean-up after the riots–that would be 1992–and the next summer my parents paid for me to visit Shadowcliff in Grand Lake, Colorado with them and I ended up staying all summer as a volunteer. Shadowcliff is a retreat center and youth hostel. It was beautiful. So maybe I’d go back to Grand Lake, Colorado if I could go anywhere. Or maybe I’d go to Breitenbush in the Cascade Mountains in Oregon, or to Vancouver B.C., or to the Olympic Peninsula. Gosh, I guess I have travelled a bit. True, these are all places I’ve been on long weekends. Oh shit. I just remembered. I did go to Disneyworld with a guy I met through an ad in the Stranger. Now that was a miserable vacation. Disneyworld is like a concentration camp for rich people.

But guess when I say I haven’t been on a vacation, I mean that I haven’t been on the kind of vacation I used to go on with my family when I was a kid. You know, when you load up the station wagon or the borrowed camper and head out on the open road for ten days to stay at KOA campgrounds and in the occasional hotel and go to things like the Pueblo caves or Dodge City, or you stop to eat at Nickerson Farms, where they harvest their own honey (not bad for a chain) or Denny’s, and you fight with your brother in the car, but you have long hours talking to your Dad up front while the other two are asleep, and sure, you may get carsick and throw up on the foam rubber pad, but you also wander by yourself down a street in Taos and get lost in other people’s art for the first time. And the stars are incredible. And when you come back, your house feels like another planet, a dusty home port for your ship, a well-remembered place that is now quiet and new for awhile.

I’ve been home several times. That’s where my money and time and travel energy goes: to visit Grandma, and my parents and brother in Kansas City, and to my ex-partner’s family in Sacramento so the kids can visit their Nana. And this isn’t a vacation for me by a long stretch of imagination. The thing about being the mother of two toddlers on vacation is: you work a lot harder traveling than you do when you’re at home. The vacation is your normal life.

So I’d love to go back to Paris, by myself. Or travel with C and A and W to Wales. Or go visit K and A in Australia or K and J in Sweden. Maybe go on a writer’s retreat to Hedgebrook for several weeks and finish my novel.

I got the small envelope from the Artist’s Trust the other day–I didn’t get a GAP grant. It was a long shot, I knew that, but I was really hoping. I’ve got some other stuff out–the essay about being bald is out at BUST and a couple of other places; “You Know You Live in Community When...” is out at Communities Mag; I’m sending my picture book out to agents. And I’ve done this often enough to know that it’s like looking for a good job in the newspaper. You might land it. You might get an interview. But your chances of getting a job are better if the boss is your Uncle’s best friend from college. Same thing with publishing. All the national clips I have are from assignments that were handed to me by personal contacts. But it’s nice to have things in the mail anyway, because it’s an act of hope that gives my daily life just a little more flavor, like putting ginger in my favorite tofu recipe. It’s not necessary. But it is nice.

When E is weaned I’m going to go to a hotel by myself for a weekend. I live in one of the greatest cities of the world. Why wouldn’t I want to visit it as a tourist? I’m going to stay in the Edgewater or the Westin and I’m going to wander around Pike Place Market and catch the Van Gogh exhibit at the SAM. I’m going to have some kind of aromatherapy body wrap at Nordstrom’s day spa, and then I’m going to go to Elliot Bay Bookstore and write. And I might call up one of my friends and have them come meet me for a ferry ride to Bainbridge and Back. And at night, I’m going to watch t.v. from the hotel bed and eat corn chips and I won’t have someone in the room telling me all the ways that corn chips are bad for me and mocking my t.v. viewing habits. I might even catch 10 minutes of The Simple Life, as stupid as it is and as disgusted as I get watching it, because K won’t be telling me in his superior voice how stupid and disgusting it is as if he was sharing information I didn’t know. It’s not easy living with someone who has appointed himself your guru/motivational coach. So yeah. I could use a vacation.

I love mornings like this. I've been awake for an hour, but the rest of the family is sound asleep. It's cool, birds chirp outside my window, and I've just spent 45 minutes browsing images on the web and playing around with a paint program.

When I was in high school I used to get up at 4:30 in the morning just to have a long shower and some solace in the morning. I lived with nine people; the quietest times of day were right after school (when all the other kids had activities and I could watch Charlie's Angels at my leisure) and early, early in the morning. I used to make coffee, read for an hour, walk out into the garden after dawn to pick early peas and eat them right off the plant. We lived in the middle of 80 acres. The smell of earth and cows and pond frost and the patches of fresh mint one of our housemates had planted all mixed together to create morning. Morning was my favorite time of day.

Now. I don't see much of morning. I wake already surrounded by active little people with a busy to-do right in my forebrain: change E's diaper, make sure P gets on the potty, unload dishwasher, load diswasher, make toast for kids (P always insists on helping, so that involves pulling out the step stool and guiding her through the buttering process), make coffee--and usually somewhere in there the phone rings or a neighbor stops by or a fight erupts or someone's whining and it's a matter of blindly stumbling through all my tasks, while sleep deprived, while trying not to yell at anyone, while dealing with whatever comes up...and all I want to do is stop. Drink coffee. Read.

But today. Today is a wonderful morning. I got enough sleep, I've had time to write. I got nothing to complain about. Color me content.

Hapless, aimless, clumsy, dopey, and all the other dwarves spew forth from me, slow my steps as I wander into a neighbor's house. She's fighting with her daughter and it's not my fight and instead of retreating I stand there, haplessly, aimlessly, clumsily--well, you get the idea--with one of those goofy smiles on my face, hand extended, holding two books I'm returning to her, knowing I don't belong there at that moment but unable to turn my body around and move because I am caught by the molasses of my own agenda. So instead of nodding discreetly and backing out, I lumber my great head back and forth between them as if watching a tennis match in slow motion until she says "You can go now Virginia" and the spell is broken and I turn to go and can feel the blush come over my neck and up my bald scalp. Feeling 14 and stupid, rather than 38 and competent and experienced in life. Tonight, I exhibited all the social skills of a wounded duck.

TC