LaurieWrites

Tastes Like Chicken But It's Mostly Not

You see cities banning a chicken joint and I see a piece by Mark Morford in my mind again, and I google "Mark Morford best time be alive" and there it is a few hits down on Google, which still feels to me like a minor miracle, more than a decade after the first time it happened. 

I also feel grossed out by pictures of Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum taking the easy opportunity  to propagate their smarmy brand of hatred and weak and manipulative jingoism, but that makes me uncomfortable for no good reason, so I turn back to Mark. 

All the Dead People Say Yes ran in his SFGate column in May, and like many things he's written over the years, it took me on a frenetic roller coaster of thought and feeling and images of beautiful things like equality and sex and intelligence and wine and song, juxtaposed with some things I don't like to think about, too, but that is the point.

And then the end came and I thought again that he was the most brilliant person in the world, which is what I think about most people who can take the detritus of competing generalities and use a true talent for stringing words together to pull out the central theme, the thing to pay attention to. He is my more poetic Parker and Stone, Maddow's essayist brother, a teensy bit of Whitman and, oddly, my yoga teacher. Perfect combination. 

You may see a city shoving its political clout and big mouth on top of the rights of private business, and what I see is an unavoidable, overdue, revolution he describes way better than I can. 

I'm still trying to write about the AIDS quilt experience I had last weekend. I don't feel worthy, and that is one of the many reasons this is all so heavy on my mind, the arrogant claim that politics and social justic and commerce have never collided to hurt anyone but the people who are just trying to sell their chicken and pursue their American dream, stop quit it, the ridiculous and yet entirely American juxtaposition of fast food and gay rights, of a political agenda and capitalism and free speech and sweet tea people go there on purpose to get even if they're not eating solid food. 

I'm still trying to talk about how all of this pertains to me, what's happening around me in the culture, in the politics, in the daily back and forth of gender and sexuality and health care and the right to eat and shoot a deer or a theater to death, to sleep with but mostly just live and love alongside whomever (what do you CARE? What is this to YOU? Check your head.) and how that applies at all to the daily grind of trying to work out a life in this collection of states and borders. For the life of me I mostly can't, but it's early yet, for me. I think I was mostly asleep for my 30s. Survival takes energy and time. 

But today I wanted to share how the San Francisco mayor's message to a fast food chicken place brought the words of a resident creative in that city  to mind. I didn't want to do it on Twitter, where it would slide by like the millions of words do there every day. I didn't want to do it on Facebook, where people could either knee-jerk like it or silently judge me or unfriend me or, worse yet, bait me in the comments. Because it's not about you being wrong or me being wrong or anyone being anything but, I guess, who they broadcast themselves to be through the snipes and altered photos and memes. 

And Mark Morford already stated my perspective better, because I didn't even know it until I read it in his words. 

"And the dead very much wish they could be you, right now, no matter how much you are bitching about the issues of the day, no matter how much you think you got it bad.

You do not have it so bad. The dead just sigh, shake their ghostly heads. "You think you got problems? Player, please."

The citizens of all bygone eras would like you to know: There has never been a better time to be gay, lesbian, black, a sexually awake female, independent minded, free thinking, kinky, weird, unique, artsy, progressive, open minded, curious, a little feral, a lot sly and winking and ready for what's next."

There has never been a better time not to eat chicken, either, if you don't want to, or to haul your ass there to make a point of eating it, to show them, because then I really know who you are. Conor Gaughan did a nice job expressing this, too, the sad, bold move of supporting the donation of millions of dollars in waffle fries (and that tasty, brutal technicolor buffalo sauce that I love in spite of its poisonous dye nature but will never eat again) because you don't have a better way to support your version of the first amendment, I guess. Or maybe you just like the chicken, and it's not that deep for you. You make it a more difficult conversation for me, like the person who didn't really do anything wrong but I have to break up with you anyway sort of thing, you know? 

I don't, really. I just know that I agree that there has never been a better time -- or a more ridiculously difficult time, too, because that's a different issue -- to be who you are. Because it all appears to be coming down. It could be the beginning or the end, but it's not like it was, and I, for one, can't look away. 

Use Your Words

Last night there was confusion in a concert aisle.

The usher sent me down the wrong row, and, trusting him, I believed myself to be in the right spot, and the angry man in front of me to be in the wrong one. 

He wasn't, and I didn't understand that at first, but we didn't clear it up right away. Voices were raised out of necessity, because it was already loud. Then he stepped too close to me regardless, jabbing his ticket and his thumb in my face, calling me stupid, telling me to shut up. I was honestly afraid from his body language and my wacko gift of fear that he would hit me. The guy  next to him started yelling profanity, telling us both to shut up and move along. He wasn't exactly right, either, but he was righter. I've been there, trying to have my own good time, while two assholes near me couldn't figure out their situation and it wrecked mine. It's never good. Nobody wins in the orbit of pointless conflict.

Last week, another show, a girl used the men's room in desperation that only a beer bladder gets you. When she came out, a guy standing against the wall said, "You tuck it, tranny?" in a sick, mean voice. She was steps past him and doubled back.

"TUCK WHAT? MY VAGINA? WHAT?"

Silence, the kind you get when someone expected no response.

TUCK.

WHAT?

MY.

VAGINA?"

He wasn't expecting this, clearly. He wasn't expecting her to do anything but keep walking, and when he was wrong he lost his internal tape. Her rage lit him up, though, and he yelled back in that uncomfortable combination of indignation and ignorance, with misplaced and/or ugly words like tranny and dude and lesbian and who the fuck are you?

His tone was different than it was at first, though, and she tired of it quickly, and walked away. His friends emerged, with more verbal garbage -- haha, lesbian, haha, tranny, haha things that are not like the other and don't have anything to do with anything, really -- disproportionate in every way to the initial trigger, as is usually the case.

After last night's incident, I moved through an irritated row of people, shaking, scared indeed from the skin-level feeling that the paunchy, curly-haired man with the blinking, tiny wife would have hit me. I have never been struck in the face, but on the few occasions where I've felt it was possible I've had the same reaction. It's weird and hard for me, probably a buried reaction to endless years of mouth surgeries. Because please, whatever you do, don't fuck up my mouth. Don't hit me where it was broken. It was too expensive and it hurt too much to fix it. It would be and would again, and now, I don't have the time or resolve or money.

 I made it to the end of the row, wondering what I should do, unwilling to disrupt the correct row in front of me, full of dancing people. A very nice usher lady brought me a chair. She sensed my distress, as I screeched into her headset that I'd been in the wrong row, that there'd be a bad interaction, that a man there had threatened me. She didn't ask any questions. She just seemed to know I was legit, that something had gone really wrong. She said I could sit there the whole time, and, beyond the call, that if I couldn't see, she would see to it that I could move farther up the slope.

I started crying out of nowhere, because this didn't already suck hard enough, embarrassed, wondering how I'd gotten to the point that I couldn't handle a show, that I'd left a situation bowed that years prior I'd have laughed at, that I'd have settled in no time, and never been afraid.

I think, honestly, that I am just tired, my heart and my mind need a break, just want to have fun, don't have the correct resources to handle much beyond that. But I cried too, from the kindness, the knowledge that for every person who might hit you in the face, there is often an equal and opposite intuitive, a person who can smell upset, who will help you. Maybe this is what gets more important when you're older, I don't know.

Last week I didn't intervene when that girl got into it with the guy. She didn't need me to, and I am always working on where I should butt in and where I should stay out, my feelings percolating as they do, just beneath my skin. My visceral reactions have not dulled with time, my big mouth has not shut. There is a reason for this hypertension, beyond the salt and wine and stressful job. There is a reason why my colossal reactions to the need and want and pain around me constantly swirl the way they do.

There is a reason why when  a dirtbag asks a girl if she's a "tranny who had to tuck it", that I swivel my head and have something to say that I may or may not actually say. I am learning, still always learning, to use my words, when and not just how, at what volume and velocity, in what corners, at what level of disclosure. It's a wonder we can do it well at all, really. It is so tricky. There are so many maps and changes of venue and burnt out lights at busy intersections. There are so many ways to do it wrong, so many hearts in danger of hurting, so many heads maybe confused.

I don't know. It gets harder before it gets easier, sometimes, I guess.  And I know it's not enough to have good intentions if what you leave behind you isn't. But when the alternative is doing nothing at all, I feel like I have to find the balance somewhere. What I did the other night was sit in the chair that lovely lady brought me for one and a half songs, before I realized that hey, I'd paid for that ticket, I had earned my spot up close, so I got up and launched myself into the right row, apologizing to everyone  half-stepped on, a little bit afraid my previous nemesis would be right behind me.

He was. It didn't make any difference to me, except I did notice out of the corner of my eye that he left a few songs later. I don't know why. I don't really care, which is unusual. I can only thank him for further exposition of what matters, of how I have to act in stressful situations. 

For helping me learn better how to use -- and not use -- my words. 

Traveling Mercies

I sat on a beach the other day under sun so hot I could barely breathe, sweat running into my eyes, the 80-proof sunscreen I'd sprayed all over myself barely working, I'm sure, except for it was there so at least I tried.

Intelligence is sadly hard to find when it comes down to me and a beach, and it was brutal and kind of stupid to sit there in that kind of situation, but I didn't care. I needed some stuff baked out of me.

I watched groups of friends and families, united  in that peculiar tribal beach vacation way. Sandwiches. Contraband beers. Rafts and castles, burning-sand running, blown-over umbrellas, fussing and kissing and trying to drown each other, as you do. 

I sat in the middle half-reading, half-watching, piecing together in my head my versions of the stories around me. I was jealous of some of the togetherness I saw, I admit it, and some of it made me twitchy and just as happy that it wasn't mine. I travel alone often, and popping up in crowds like this is less odd than it used to be, on this weird trip I'm on of filling in so many of my own blanks. Solitary and solitude aren't necessarily the same, for reasons I can tell you maybe, someday. Suffice to say that I'm learning what I've been missing on some fundamental counts, identifying reasons I've always felt other, how I can fix it, and, the more bummer part, how I can't. 

It's not like I'm always alone, though -- quite the opposite -- but some things I have to do for myself so I can set my head straight, so I can come back better, present myself to the people closest in a way that helps them know that I'm working on it, a touch of hands in an odd, odd, relay, and then  off again. 

I am wearing a bathing suit here. I swear. Also I am holding my arm up so my hat doesn't blow off, not because I'm a toolbag. No photo should require this much explanation. 

I'm a strange combination of hopeful and crazed with change, relaxing into true things and nervewracked about others. I'm an open book to a very few people relative to all of the ones I know, major chapters ripped out for the rest, because that is just how it is right now. Have you ever told truth to people after a long time of not, not because you didn't want to, but just because you hadn't figured it out?

It's interesting, and not even anything that remarkable, when it comes down to it. The real truth of our lives is a very quiet thing, really, sacred, if you go for that word. For me it's a shifting in perception, in how I've approached life, in what I intend to do (as best as I can even imagine now) with the rest of it.

It's blowing me away how a person can get to 40 without telling most of her story to herself, even if I thought that was what was happening all along. I think I was hearing mostly Muzak, honestly, with some garden variety self-help thrown in, and in my case an overpowering super ego, the cliched hated darling that I had to partially kill to get anywhere before I cash out in this particular body.

Also? And this is important, so pay attention: everyone else's annotations aren't the main point, but they can start to seem that way if you let them.  It is really, really important not to let them. 

A group of four intense women played beach football in front of me the other day when I wasn't thinking about any of this deep stuff, knocking each other down with great joy in the water with targeted, fast, balls. At the same time I read the phrase "traveling mercies" in my book, and it brought unexpected, burning sunscreen tears to my eyes and down my nose and into my not-so-much-hot-as-damp bathing suit cleavage, because nothing is ever that graceful in the end around here. I've always loved the idea behind that term. Traveling mercies. It's just in the way it sounds, gentle and progressive at the same time, and in a secular sense that is what I want, what I know we all need to carry us through. 

Change is a bitch sometimes, and not in the ways you'd expect. While the surface can stay the same, it's more the tectonic plates of our emotions and intellectual processes that jack it up, which is where I am now, I think. There is so much happening I just think and act in the moment and feel the effects later. Not all of it is stressful, but a lot of it, yeah. But there are some things I've apparently learned that I didn't realize until now, that I'm turning over and over in my mind, that are as new as they are obvious. 

Grasping never got me anywhere. 

My feelings may hurt and freak me out and make me say embarrassing things and feel completely knocked off my rocker, but they will not kill me. I will not die of the feelings. 

This shouldn't be a revelation, I know, as simple as it is, but it is. It took me a really long time to understand it, and I am making very good friends with this idea now in spite of its late arrival, because it's saving me. My friend Debbie said on Twitter the other night, "Our disoriented now is our oriented later," and I liked that too. Basically I will pay cash money for some specificity here.  

Anyway, this is all blahblahblah now, right? And the end of the story is that I finally got up out of my chair because the patch of my knee that always burns bright red regardless of how much I spray it or cover it was burning bright red, and it looks really stupid, and I was hungry, and there was just a little too much sunscreen in my eyes for me to handle. I burned my feet on the way to the car, and that was that. 

Not all moving is running, and nor is it progress, necessarily. Not all staying is settling, either, although sometimes it's not smart either for a variety of reasons, particularly if your knee is burning all to hell or maybe if you're just extremely bored or irritated, or aren't learning anything, which is an underrated problem. Sometimes when you leave you think you're going to burn off the bottoms of your feet walking across sand to the car, and generally that doesn't happen either. All of a sudden you're driving again and yelling along to some Bruce Springsteen song (his new cd is really good, it's kind of my soundtrack this summer) and you know that on some cellular level and also many others it is all going to be okay. Traveling mercies, please, but anyway, it'll all come together somehow. 

Slapboxing with June

I hit a wall yesterday. 

I laid my head against a wall in a hotel shower because I suddenly got tired like the tired of a million years, and I wasn't sure that I could move. I wish I were being dramatic about this, but that is how it felt, like I was going to live in conjoined twinness with that wall until I died or someone pried me off, which I'm glad no one had to do because in retrospect it wasn't pretty at all. Somehow, though, the water was at the perfect angle and that felt good, plus crying in the shower is so much more expedient, because, well, besides the energy release, it all goes down the drain.

I said to myself, look, self, this is not working out. You feel like crap and you look like crap. This whole running to stand still business is doing nothing but wearing out shoes and neurons. The groove is not grooving. This is a spiritual crisis of some sort happening here. It is a dicey situation and you have got to stop trying to fix it.

(Yes, that reads correctly. And if you don't talk to yourself you're probably assuming this is a summary of thoughts that ran through my head. That is very sweet of you.) 

I don't know why it was so shocking to me, how bad I felt or the fact that I face-planted on tile. It's like I went to the store in May and bought all the high dollar crap that goes into the blue-ribbon-winner recipe for a breakdown, and ate it every day at the appointed time like a magical goddamned apple breakdown pie. And now I was looking around in adorable bewilderment in an uninspiring shower wondering what hit me.  

I don't know what I think will happen every new time I kick my own ass in response to a life change, why I think it'll be any better this time than it was the past 87 times I did it. But when I changed my job and therefore my daily routine, instead of sitting even the littlest bit still with that choice and transition, and sitting on my couch for a few days and sorting my markers and eating snack foods, or going on a real vacation not at all tied to an event or a mission of any kind like I promised myself I would, I set myself up on a schedule of events that I thought would be in the service of my future. Because I'm figuring out now that inherently I still felt like I'd wrecked it up, based on old, outdated notions of that, of course, but still. I'm so programmed.

Here are the real things I had planned to do once my job ended: 

I wanted another tattoo. (I did not say these were all high-level, well-thought-out plans.) I didn't get it. 

I wanted to go sit by the ocean for a few days. I didn't do that either. 

I wanted to start walking again, maybe go back to yoga. Nope. 

 I wanted to set up a fully functional organizational system in my house, so that I would work better and eat better and generally live better in my space for this next new big phase. Big no, there, unless you consider half-packed or unpacked suitcases and over-filled recycling bags essential to feng shui principles.

I was not entirely wrong about the schedule I had planned. There were things I knew that I needed to do now, based on timing of ideas and opportunities, and some great things have happened. It is not all angst and tiredness and bad road food and one more dumb plastic key that hopefully turns the door light green when my hands are full. 

But when I say I'm tired, I think I just mean that my brain is on overload. I didn't give myself any chance to know what hit me, and the truth is that a lot has, even though it was my choice. And when I'm not really writing through it, it piles up in my head like...well, a bunch of junk piled up in my head. It's not pretty and I get cranky, I overreact and I panic and worry. My ability to cope with transitions is at toddler level. Until I get to the point that finally happened yesterday, where I feel like every word out of my mouth is wrong and awkward, that I can't complete any task successfully and surely this isn't the way things are supposed to get done by a competent person. All the things seem bad. 

I do not focus on self-actualizing behavior, in other words. 

I sometimes specialize in slapboxing with truth, really hard, no mat, for pointless rounds and rounds, until in its always ultimate wisdom it suddenly quits hitting me back and sits down hard on the ground in front of me, where I have to look at it. And because I really am a lover, not a fighter, I always wonder then why I got into duking it out in the first place, and I work my brain around it again. 

Thursday night I wandered Philadelphia. I didn't think about who I had to interview or who was going to be anywhere, because I was by myself in a place that I like and I really needed to check out for a few hours. So I talked to a lady knitting in the night market about what yarn bombing was, which surprised me by fascinating me. I ate what I believe were poisonous tacos out of a food truck, walked around and took a bunch of pictures just for fun like I hardly ever do anymore, and then I went back to my room. 

I have been here for three days that have felt like three weeks. I am going to go home tomorrow, and although I have a lot of work to do, I'm going to try not to work so hard at existing at the center of it, so the work itself becomes impossible, so the feelings feel so heavy I can't breathe, so I keep myself on the wrong track. My shower self needs a break, and what I think amounts to some kindness. That's the vague and ultimately unexciting outline of the only next thing I know. 

(*I actually didn't go home, or remember to post this, so welcome to three days ago. I learned that I'd have no power for a few more days at least, because of the storms at home, so I came to the beach where a friend offered a place to stay. Of all of the lyrics I've ever internalized, John Lennon's "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans" stick with me the most for the most consistent reasons.)