LaurieWrites

June in Motion

I can tell already that this is going to be one of those rambly life review posts, but this has been a crazy couple of months, y'all. 

I don't even know how else to describe it except I've been in so many places -- my body and my suitcase and my as-ever hastily-assembled documents, as well as my heart and my mind -- that I'm losing track. I actually forgot how old I was the other day, although I can't remember why I wanted to remember in the first place. I just know I didn't know, that for a stretch of seconds I was ageless, which was nice, although my bones and my blood pressure disagree. 

Since the end of my job at the end of May, I've been to Seattle for a week, then home, then Charlotte for what amounted to almost a week. Now I'm home, and due to go to Philadelphia for a long weekend of work and hopefully some more exploration of the city. After that it's here again, and more work on this strange, confusing, and sometimes exhilarating trip into what's next. 

Seattle was a gift of a trip to a city that I loved from the first few minutes I got on the light rail from the airport to downtown ($2.75 and easy peasy -- nice!) and saw...well, I saw a lot of stuff, but pretty much all that stood out to me at first was trees. Trees everywhere, a sight for East Coast eyes, reaching feet and feet and feet up into the sky. I'd never been to the Pacific Northwest at all before, and every trip into a side of the country that is still so new to me after decades of going only as far west as Chicago opens my eyes and my heart to a landscape that still doesn't quite make sense to me outside of pictures. 

My pictures are gathered here. I took very few of the conference, because I wasn't working the event in that way, and a scant few of the several outstanding meals I had while I was there. Believe me when I say that I ate almost nonstop the entire time, and had not one single bad meal. It's a kickass food town, and I'd go back with that agenda in mind any day. Like, say, tomorrow. Would someone like to invite me back tomorrow? Because I will rearrange some things.

Elliott's Oyster House, for instance, had me at "frozen mignonette." 

That is not sorbet. Oh no. That is that glorious vinegar, shallot, wine oyster concoction that I love, except it is FROZEN. SUCH a good idea. I want more now. 

Anyway. Seattle was nice. I have a highlights post in my mind that I should be writing right now, except right now what I'm trying to do is make friends with  my blog again in sort of a conversational way. See how that's working for me? Yeah. 

If Seattle is my new girlfriend, North Carolina is my road girl, POLITICAL CHOICES NOTWITHSTANDING, and Charlotte has its moments. 

This weekend was unfortunately marred by an increasing struggle with hormones (hi, 41, thanks) that seems hell-bent on wrecking my body and my serenity for a week out of every month lately, but it also meant time with some friends I apparently really needed to see and feet back on streets with sights I completely understand, like wild roses in front yards and barbecue and sun that slants in a way that will always put my incorrigibly MidAtlantic soul most at ease.

This looks just like the way back of my grandmother's back yard, for instance. I saw so  many wild roses on this street, a time machine of wild roses, if you will, down to the little old lady I finally saw fanning herself on the front porch and watching me take pictures of her rose bushes. She nodded and smiled and said good morning, obviously sweetly proud when I told her what she knew, which is that they are so beautiful. 

I had luxurious time and meals and drinks with women who make me think better and want to write better, and who seem to see a better side of me (albeit filtered through the wires and tubes you're looking at) that I completely miss at almost all times when it's just me and a bathroom mirror and crushing self-assessment. (Thank you, Tanis. Thank you, Katherine. Thank you, Robin.) I had a beer in an Irish pub that doubles as a gay bar when it's not hosting Kenny Chesney concert pre-parties, served by a wrinkly dude in skinny jeans and a Guinness t-shirt and what you'd think would be an incongruent cowboy hat (however, no, it worked just fine) who seemed to delight in yelling at the myriad straight couples, "Don't say we're GAY FRIENDLY! We're totally NOT FRIENDLY!" And that is when he and I fell in conspiratorial love, so I ordered chicken fingers and stayed through all of the Hank Williams, Jr., on the jukebox to listen to him go on and on about the day.

I sat outside with Robin, who is simply put one of the best people who lives on this planet, and listened to insane boat horns on cruising hotrods. Every time they'd honk one of us would say something mildly funny, like, "Fuck you. No, really, fuck you this time again," and then we'd laugh and laugh. At one point I said "You know, I'd just maybe once like to have peace and contentment." She looked at me and immediately said "That is never. going. to. happen." and we laughed for minutes. It was, interestingly enough, one of the most useful things anyone has ever said to me, so I'm pretty sure that everything else is going to be fine from now on. 

The internet may suck sometimes in soundbites, but these friends I have. These friends. I can't imagine my life without two things the most that I've gotten from the internet. One is how it's helping me reshape my professional life, and the work I do every day and where I get to do it. But two, and the winner by a mile, is these FRIENDS. I am lucky cubed and squared, and I don't know math at all so I just made that up. 

A lot of other things have happened on and between these trips, things that have me catching my breath at things I read or see or experience, because I suddenly see myself anew in them or they touch a part of me now that hurts where it didn't use to or makes me smile bigger than it would have before. I have tears in my eyes most days, but it's good,  it's good, it's all working for good. It's also really hard, some work that I'm doing, so hard I cannot explain it yet, some growing into this better and ultimately most true self that I've come to decide was real along the way. It's amazing how even the most difficult things are way less than devastating when you know after years of gray and indecision that they are simply right. I'm learning that there's amazing relief and calm acceptance and even joy in some of what looks like suffering. 

And I know it's why I will look back at the details of this particular stretch of roaming a few cities as a necessary backdrop for the important stuff, as I've known it would be since I decided a few months back that I needed to do what I'm doing now. As much of a homebody as my heart can inherently be, my soul needs motion, to manage my anxiety. (I don't expect this to make sense to anyone.) Geographic cures may ultimately fail, but sometimes they don't, and there are those spaces in between that reassure me that I'm moving, that I will always have some access to my own particular kind of freedom. That how things had been for a very long time was simply not how they were supposed to be, something I always knew but wasn't sure how to really fix until now, in the physical shell and daily routine of this woman. And that every minute now of hyperventilating in public restroom stalls and wiping my eyes and stepping back out into the light and fixing my lipstick is in her better service. 

Because this is truer than it's ever been, from me to me, in this 41 years. I can finally say it, Robin. More than even still (all apologies to the Commodores), I think I finally know that I just do. 

To sing my song.

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

"The Laughing Heart" by Charles Bukowski

************************************************

I drove the old roads yesterday, as I rarely do anymore unless someone died, as someone had. Turning instinctively on numbered streets -- that party there, that unfortunate conversation on that street corner, I knew the sounds and the smells of the neighborhoods, felt the grit of the pavement and the echoes of so many voices up through the undercarriage of a car I never could have afforded then, can barely afford now. 

Road miles, they carry us, somehow.

Monday was PG County and a dead body in a Hawaiian shirt, unbearable grief and chicken joints and that school I went to once. I forgot about D's corner lot house, the irritation of the left turn. The shortcut through the 7-11 that I made still-instinctively after 20 years away made me want to smoke more than usual, an urge staved off mostly by the almost seven dollar price for a pack that made me smile big.

It's all so much the same, it's crazy how it stays that way when it seems like it ought not to, when you've been away and looking at so much other stuff. It's just so much more expensive in all ways now.

 ************************************************

you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.

 ***********************************************

I am afraid, I admit it. I said some horrible things a few days ago, things that came from the worst place, the most unpleasant, the most fearful and preemptively abandoned. I felt as worthless and pointless as I have in months, as incapable of...I don't know? Anything. It was bad, and it was at the same time, regardless of immediate outcome, immediately productive. Watersheds are few and far between in a life, really.

I had needed it for years and never saw it coming really. Idealism is a certain circle of hell, I'm here to tell. 

Yesterday on the highway Ramble On came up in the mix and I cried and smiled, Page and Plant's mix of hubris and brilliance (the darkest depths of Mordor. MORDOR.) what it needed to be as it always is bumped up against the simple, crucial declarative that defines the song. So much, so much, so much. I looked up at the roof upholstery at a red light, wiping my stupid weeping eyes, grateful for the familiarity, for the music, for the construct. I knew anew what I had to do, as I had when my feet hit the floor behind a heavy curtain in Tennessee two days prior. 

Now's the time. The time is now. 

 ************************************************

I will never be easy. I will always be difficult, sometimes the most in the times that I'm trying the hardest not to be. This is genetic, some of this, a design that I fight with every bit of good that I know I possess from competing genes and nurture and the sheer instruction of living kindly. I don't count on the same companions for the long haul so much anymore, because it's almost too much to ask in larger than small doses. I'm conversely coming upon the truth, however, that some greater consistency in this regard may be some of what I need for the longer run, and whether I think it's really possible or not, I will keep wrecking the prospect of ever having it if I don't fix me for real. 

I have been broken for a long time, in a variety of small and large ways, despite my progress, despite longstanding white-knuckled efforts to the contrary. I have the softest, brightest comprehension now though that I don't think I'm going to be for very long anymore, and regardless, I will no longer break you, not even a little if I can help it, no matter who you are. Unacceptable harsh words finished that story. The main answer -- surrender, no knuckles -- was long overdue. The time for so many (good and gentle, fun and interesting) things, the time for the real second half, is now. 

If I say I don't need anyone I can say these things to you.

The first time I sought psychological help, I was 29 years old. The man I had dated for almost a year broke up with me, three weeks before Christmas and my 30th birthday. 

He was the guy they tell you to wait for, the one who you immediately recognize as "the one," the one you build ideas and thoughts and plans around, even against your better judgment. And that was the first time (of what would turn out to be five, by the time it was all said and done) that he decided that I wasn't that for him. 

I flipped the fuck out. I lost it. I cried or was a second away from tears for days. I couldn't sleep. I felt close to insane, whatever that means, most of the time. I felt like the bottom had fallen out from under me. 

I remember coming home the night it happened, to my parents' house, where I was living since I'd come home from Ohio a year before. I knew that I just needed to get from the car to my room without any conversation, which is entirely possible with my father but not so much with my mother. 

I walked in the door and they were sifting through what they'd just purchased on what may be one of maybe five trips they've taken to the grocery store together in my 40 years. I don't know why they went together that night, why for one night of his life my father had channeled his father, a person whose sole purpose in retirement besides working at the rectory had seemed to be traveling from grocery to grocery within a ten-mile radius plus the Navy commissary to score ten cents off here, 20 cents off there, on staples -- beans, napkins, dishwashing liquid, cigarettes. My grandparents' basement would have been the perfect place to end up in a post-Apocalyptic world, Nirvana for that guy from The Road with his shopping cart, as long as he could get in through the window well. 

As soon as I walked through the door, I sat down on a 24 pack of toilet paper that sat atop a pallet of kidney beans in our small, dark foyer. And I cried, amid the passel of crap my parents had assembled at the Giant and the Shopper's Food Warehouse. I remember them both gaping at me, as I disrupted the unpacking and shelving. And then I remember my father talking to me for two hours while I sniveled on the kitchen table. And then I remember several weeks of hell. 

**************************************************

So don't chastise me
Or think I, I mean you harm
Of those that take you
Leave you strung out
Much too far

**************************************************

It was the first time I lost it for real, after years of losing it mildly. I'd always had an edgy, rarely satisfied sort of personality. I had periods of time where being upset was the norm, but I ascribed them to typical things -- school and work stress, relationship stuff, my weight and endless obsession and dissatisfaction with my body, social anxieties. 

But this time, I knew it was worse. This time I knew that the loss of this relationship had tripped a terrible cord. I felt crazy. I felt out of control. I felt like nothing would be okay again, and I knew that there were certain patterns in my life that weren't right. I came to understand that for a long time I'd been operating on a certain, shifting level of daily discontent, and that this was a final trigger. 

And on a practical, physical level? I couldn't sleep. If you want to feel crazy, easy peasy: don't sleep, not much if at all. And when I did, I'd wake up between 4 and 5 every morning and lie there crazy for two hours until I finally passed out from physical exhaustion just before my alarm was due to go off. I also experienced anxiety that made me long for any other state of physical or emotional being. I wrote a bad poem about it, the electrical impulses I felt shooting through my arms and out the bottoms of my feet and through the top of my head. This was real, excess energy trying to get out of my body. To top it off, this is when my dog who was the other center of my life started having epileptic seizures. And if you've never seen a living thing have a seizure in your fucking bedroom that is very lucky for you and I hope it never happens. Because yeah. 

I was so awake I felt like a tragic superhero, like I could lift a car or climb a mountain, but I didn't really want to do those things or to go anywhere so I just walked around the usual places. Somehow I still had to go to work, and I still had to figure out what to do. I knew this was a problem that was beyond my scope, and I was scared. So I took myself to therapy, and I went to my primary care doctor. My doctor gave me anti-depressants, the first ones I'd ever had after many years of Tom Cruisian-resistance to medication. I would have tried leeches at that point, I swear. I wasn't ready to kill myself and I didn't want to feel like I felt so I did things. Desperation is an alternately shitty and amazing motivator. 

The first wacko shrink I saw -- at her only available appointment, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, days after the breakup when I still couldn't speak of it or really speak at all without weeping -- told me after 10 minutes of discussion that I was probably bipolar. 

I should mention that I'm not a morning person. And that I was still crying nonstop. 

I knew even then as a counselor myself that throwing out diagnoses like that after knowing someone for ten minutes was extreme, particularly when I had told her that I was in crisis, essentially -- that I was dealing with an acute life situation and I needed to sort that out before I went any deeper. If a kid I've never met walks into my office I'm not all "Oh hey, ADHD yeah?", even if he can't sit still and can't complete a sentence but can go over and over the same concept one million times with surgical precision. It's not cool and it's not ethical and I don't know if he's had more Red Bull than usual this morning, right?  So I told her I didn't think I was bipolar, I satisfied the requirements of the visit, and I never went back. 

Somehow I dredged up the ability to find another therapist, a lady who challenged me mildly on some things but seemed more fascinated by my life and family history as a story she was reading for entertainment, rather than one she was helping me to sort out in the here and now. She dozed off a couple of times, as my appointments tended to be in the afternoon and the sun slanted just so over her chair. So essentially, looking back, I guess this lady was a house cat of a shrink and my visits were story time. She was in love with my genogram. She reminded me that I was 30, like I didn't know. She was nice enough -- better than the crazy fellowship student I saw in grad school who snapped her fingers in my face whenever I went off topic, which is a lot -- but nothing revolutionary happened. 

Nothing revolutionary has ever happened in my efforts to tend to the interiors of my mind that have such a tremendous effect, naturally, on the exterior that is my life. And typing that amazes me, how much we do in our culture to try to minimize the concept that what happens in there can go awry, that the things we see on the outside AREN'T profoundly affected every minute, second, hour by a seemingly random collection of chemicals and cells and nerves and impulses. 

We are animals. Fucked up crazy ass animals. We're all lucky we aren't walking around shooting off fireworks in public places, is what I'm saying.

**************************************************

I can turn on anyone
Just like I've turned on you
I've got a tongue like a razor
A sweet switchblade knife

**************************************************

It has been almost 11 years since my first serious problems surfaced, and over the course of that time I have had good times and bad times. I have been lucky and I have struggled. I have felt like I wanted to die and I have had moments, like one yesterday, where I walk outside in to the sunshine, look at the sky and think that this very space in time is perfect, that it makes all of the hard ones worth it. 

 The past few months have not been the good times, although within them there have been good times. They have been largely dark and frightening, on the worst , self-indulgent kind of existential level. They have been unattractive. 

And these are the worst kinds of times to acknowledge that I do not live this life in a vaccuum. I have friends and family around me sometimes, and a lot of people who care in various capacities. There are people who feel like they want to help me, and this is not my favorite thing. In fact, it is my worst, neurotic nightmare. When I am in the bell jar, I hate attention as much as I love it. I hate my interconnectedness with others, because I know that I can't trust myself. I know that I am wired to reject support and to expect everyone to leave me, because if I cannot even stand myself, how can anyone else? Why would they?  

My friend Jenny posted again this weekend about her most recent trip through what this is that some of us go through. And again, I read it and was moved to speak up because I don't think that we can do that enough, especially if we haven't done it at all. I admire her more than I can say. I admire myself not at all right now. It doesn't matter what I do with the information I'm given as long as I don't take other people down with me. There is nothing that makes me feel worse. 

I have friends in spite of myself. I have people who want to hang out with me and who continue to seek out my opinions even in the worst of times. I don't understand this. I have eaten more humble pie, as it were, in the last two months of my life than I maybe ever have, and it is gagging me as much as it is healing me. 

The sad truth is that by the time I get to this point, it's possible that I have ruined good things. I know that's true, and I know my propensity to either wallow completely in that knowledge or to ignore it and act like I don't care. 

This is the sentence of this particular chronic disease. This is the need to act like everything is fine because dealing with everything that's not fine is a killer for real. It's hard and it's time consuming and it's lonely fucking work. 

I am mean. I am impulsive. I am selfish. I am rude. 

I am the most loving person in the world. My empathy is off the charts. I will do anything for you if I love you or maybe even if I don't. 

I will break your heart and I will sweep it up off of your kitchen floor. I am a procrastinating asshole and I am the best of my worst on the worst possible days. I can pull a solution from anywhere when you lose your shit, and I will only hope that you forgive me for how forthright I can be in telling you that a solution is really, really important. 

I blame other people for my problems sometimes and yet I take full responsibility for everything from the immolation of Joan of Arc, the Afghan war, the death of the dictionary with the addition of fake words like LOL and gangsta and the bad day you had yesterday. 

I want you to be with me and I never want to see you again, with all of the things you know and the way that I care about you and the ability you have to hurt me because of all of this.

I am the sum of my chemistry and in that  (some chemistry word here) there is the best of my DNA and the results of all of the ways I've been nurtured and neglected as well.

I am a sad fucking case and I am an absolute rock star on my best day. I don't know how else to describe it, except to say that as self-aware as I have prided myself on being, the past year has been mostly an exercise in denial and fear and self-loathing. And once it killed or tried to the two things that I love the most that is when I woke up, to a place so lonely it shone, to a silence I hadn't known in a very, very long time, and yet could identify from one of the saddest spaces in my history. 

It's really, really bright here.  

Shoot it down.

I'm so grateful to everyone who read for responding in the nicest possible way to my post about my grandmommy's house, and my reaction not only to it going away recently in its final sale, but to it in general, across my 40 years. It's a difficult topic for me and one that I'm not entirely proud of when it comes to my own responses and feelings. 

Regardless, it was a place I loved, representative also of much that I love, no matter how it looks or has looked or may seem in recent years. So in the final days I wanted resolution, both for myself and for whatever that could in turn give to the people who matter to me. For me these days that mostly means some kind of photographic record, so I went there on the day my mother closed the sale last week, and shot the property the way -- as it turns out -- I've always seen it. 

It's one of the most important things I've ever done as an adult, photographically or otherwise. I knew that I wanted to do it, but I wasn't sure until I was actually turning onto the street that it would actually be possible. My schedule is weird, and it turned out that I couldn't go during the day when there were no neighbors around and the new owners were involved in the closing.

If I could go then it would at least still be -- kind of -- Mom's right? That was what I figured, anyway.

But that's not how it worked out. As it happened I showed up on the verge of twilight, racing to get what I wanted, but pleased nonetheless with the light. I was interrupted a couple of times by the couple down the street, people my grandmother had connected to in the indiscriminate way she had, not really considering anything but the fact that they were there, they seemed nice enough, they paid attention. 

I need more. I need you, first of all, not to ask me why I'm there. I just kind of need you to deal with that in an abstract way and hang out, especially if that's not your business. 

I think I learned that from her -- I think I learned to be the opposite, by example. 

No matter who was there, no matter their questions, I went into the zone. I felt why I was there the whole time I was there, even the times when I was interrupted. I laid in the grass and felt eight years old. I wished the violets were blooming and missed the swing set that had long since been uprooted in the way back. I sat on the front steps in my silly, fancy flip flops, framing my feet on the peeling painted steps and thought deep thoughts about walking away and moving forward and how those chipped burgundy toenails tackled other kids for Easter eggs in white patent leather Mary Janes a few decades hence.

Everything happened there. Nothing would happen there anymore. It forms you, it informs you, you clean it out and you move on. When I peered into the front windows I saw nothing. When I went home there would be my bed and my couch and my computer. Everything moves, everything that was and matters and doesn't.

What I do know is that I've never wept uploading a group of pictures before. And that regardless of all the crazy and the bullshit and the words unable to be taken back, bodies unresurrected, sadness and whatnot, that I feel lucky to have been touched by a place and its people, to know that I'm alive in that way. 

I really wish we could have afforded to keep it, even just the yard. I could have done amazing things with that yard.  And I hope the new people make all of that corner better, and that they love it as much as it was, in so many ways, loved by all of us.

(All of this, really, is in memory of my great-grandfather William Wilkinson, who built this house. I never knew him, but from what I intuitively understand of him, I like to believe that he sat on that spot and loved it and knew that it was a great place to build a home.  He was correct.) 

Reubens of Unusual Size

Sarah and I were hungry after the Yankees game on the Sunday night after BlogHer, screwing around in Midtown looking for someplace that was open late.

I located a few late night possibilities on Yelp, including the Carnegie Deli. We decided to go there because it was really close, supposedly an institution that I had never visited before, and hey, a deli, why not?

As soon as we sat down there were half-done pickles, which always pleases me. But when the waiter told me that the only Reuben option was $24.95, I was less pleased. I don't know what I was expecting, a Reuben Happy Meal or what, but it seemed crazy even in this neighborhood where dollar bills seem to magically fall out of your pockets into the steam grates.

So I told him I'd take the Woody Allen, a corned beef and pastrami combo that was so very much more reasonable at, oh, 18 bucks or so.

In hindsight, the menu alone caused me to lose all sense of perspective. We also missed the part that said you could share for $3.00. We are very capable of sharing food. This was an unfortunate oversight, brought on no doubt by four days of limited sleep, not so much solid food and not a little bit of wine.

Sarah ordered a roast beef sandwich. I asked him for a Coke and prayed it wasn't ten dollars. Minutes later, this arrives on the table:

I can't even explain to you what happened in my brain when this pile of meat appeared. The pictures do not show how large this thing was. I didn't know whether to name it, apologize to it or get it its own table.

Sarah looked at the sandwich and at me and I looked at her and then the sandwich and I really wish I had video of the way we looked at each other over the plates that were somehow, ridiculously, on our table.

"Dude," she said, when she had words. "Your sandwich is STUPID."

And that is when I lost my mind. I started laughing, and she started laughing. We laughed so hard and so uncontrollably that I think it warranted a clinical diagnosis. We could not stop, for minutes, until we were crying. I am not a person who normally laughs until I cry, but I was weeping. And every time I stopped, we'd look at each other, or we would look at this,

(Pickle for perspective)

(The little pieces of bread make it look like PeeWee Herman with that bellboy hat on, or a giant wearing a beret.) 

And it would start all over again.

I looked around suspiciously at other diners. There were empty plates and beer bottles, people chatting like they weren't in a wackjob land of gargantuan food. The ladies next to me had had entrees that didn't look extraordinarily large, although they probably cost $37. Probably payday.

"No one else is acting like this is weird at all. Look at them," she said. "We sound high The last time I laughed like this for this long I was in my college cafeteria at 7 a.m. and I hadn't slept in a long time."

"I feel high," I said. And I did. It was an almost out-of-body Willy Wonka kind of deal.

Lick the walls! They taste like corned beef and dusty picture frames! I swear, you'll love it! Everything's just really BIG here.

And for the most recent time, I wondered where the hidden cameras were.

The Carnegie Deli's walls are covered with 8x10 autographed photos of a variety of famous visitors who may or may not order the Woody Allen or even eat anything at all. I actually think they are all lying if they say they do. We had several photographs on the wall right next to us. Because I was concerned that the tears in Sarah's eyes were actually those of distress and not hysterical laughter, I decided to focus on what we could control.

"Hey," I said, because I am observant. "We have company. Look, you get to eat with Ryan Seacrest."

That cheered her up.

What did not cheer her up? Or me either for that matter? The fact that these insane piles of meat are held together by (in her case) a brick of cheese and those teensy beensy pieces of bread -- no vegetables, no condiments, nothing. The waiter walked by and Sarah said, "Excuse me? Could I get some...mayonnaise?"

And swear to God dude looked at us like we'd asked for fish tacos in a deli.

You know? Mayonnaise? That spoonful of saturated fat that helps one choke down a side of beef? DUDE.

Ahem. Back to the wall gallery. We had calmed down some. Sarah was pissed off at the wasteful nature of this establishment, what with the pound -- probably more, come to think of it -- of corned beef and pastrami on my plate that was so overwhelming to me (and, quite frankly, dry, minus the six bucks worth of sauerkraut, dressing and cheese that I totally would have sprung for if I had a time machine. I didn't bother to ask for mustard.) She was scowling, occasionally gnawing on her meat, and worst of all, neither of us had a beer to soften the blow. I looked to my right, at this guy.

I thought I knew who he was, but I couldn't remember his name, just that he wanted me to "Save room for the awegfaergvaergaerawgr," to which I say, "Right on."

"Who is that?" I wondered aloud.

And in a version of her voice that I wish I could share with you in an audio file, she said, and you are in no way going to think this is as funny as I do,

"Ooooooaaaaatttttteeeesssss."

As in "John." As in "Hall and."

Yeah, no. I decided to eat with this other guy anyway.

Done. Done. Absolutely done and done and done. Please keep in mind that Sarah makes me laugh harder than just about anyone I know on a regular basis so this was like that experience, except dosed and off the rails.

I started laughing again and did not stop completely until we left the building. Every time I thought this would stop being funny, something insane would happen. For instance, the jolly ladies next to me were not finished when their plates were cleared, oh no. Minutes later, pieces of pie or cheesecake arrived in front of them that were approximately a foot tall, like this:

(I found this on the Internet. It is ostensibly from the Carnegie Deli, and because it looks like the food of Gulliver on the island or an insane person in Wonderland, I can only surmise that it is, in fact, from their dessert case. If I had seen it in person, I would have laughed longer, because, pecan roll on cheesecake? Right.)

I mean, hey, eat what you want, but where do you PUT IT? I was still flailing intermittently at my meat with a fork and getting nowhere. It was like I ate it with my eyes.

Also, Ooooooaaaaatttttteeeesssss was still with me. One or the other or both of us would say it about every thirty seconds, because it turns out that once you start that shit up it's difficult to stop.

It's really, really difficult to stop, or maybe just if you are us.

I do know that there is some kind of joke inherent in leaving a place like this and being hungry and slightly nauseous because I just really couldn't eat what was put in front of me, because just how oh how do you even take that seriously? I couldn't, and when the guy asked me if I wanted it boxed to go I was very fortunate that I did not hurl on the table.

I'm sure that there are people who go there and enjoy it. I think I would have if I'd stuck with maybe six more pickles and a Coke and that's all, a blintz maybe, and giggled at the photos. I'm sure there are people who would call me an idiot -- didn't you KNOW? It's the Carnegie DELI, it's KNOWN for its enormous sandwiches, you imbecile.

But I didn't, or if I'd been told -- if it was the question to a Jeopardy answer or a passage in a travel article -- I forgot. I can only hold so many references in my head at once, or for a lifetime, you guys.

But I can tell you two things. One is that if you're going to have any kind of friend at all with whom you voluntarily spend a significant amount of time it should be the kind who can laugh with you until you cry, damn whomever's around. Because as ridiculous as this may have been and as much as that pile of meat could've fed several hungry people, I know that when I look back on my life I will remember this in technicolor, and it will never not make me smile.

And the other is that I have the tragicomic kind of life where when I opened the refrigerator at my parents' house the next day when I came home, this is what I saw.

And I made myself a Reuben of totally usual size, and it was really good.

(Frying pan and stove for totally normal perspective.)

And I texted Sarah and lost my shit laughing again, and the circle was unbroken.

The end.

Except, you know. Ooooooaaaaatttttteeeesssss.

Untethered.

Last night I left somewhere where I am very comfortable with people who make me laugh and make me happy. And I made a right turn somewhere in suburbia and I shifted internally, like the wheels came off, I don't know. And I didn't want to be here anymore, didn't want to do these things, didn't want to have to keep figuring things out. I felt again like whereas I certainly don't want to die by my own hand, or at all, I wanted the world to stop so I can get off.

I didn't want to do this anymore.  

It's so confusing. It's utterly involuntary and it happens that fast, that rudely. One minute, when you're unfortunately wired like this, you feel as happy as you reasonably can in your current state and the next you feel untethered, disconnected from the center of everything, like the world stretches forward for days into nothing and nothing will ever make you feel as okay as you felt five minutes ago. And how could you have felt so okay five minutes ago? Did you, really? Just denial, delay of the inevitable.

I don't understand it, even after all of the years of which I am conscious of that feeling and the ones before it where I'm sure I felt it but have blocked it out. I don't remember many specifics of my childhood emotions. I know I had them, I know some things for sure, just not that many. 

I know what I really want in those times even more than usual is for things to be better, and there's hope in that. Sometimes it's just hard to see beyond how tiring it is, though. Sometimes it feels just a touch too much, in spite of all that you know you have. A lot of it's not rational. But it still feels real.

*********************************************************

Designer Alexander McQueen killed himself in February. Boner from Growing Pains, a sort of stupid yet endearing 1980s television show, killed himself in a Vancouver park last week. Marie Osmond's son jumped from a window yesterday. David Foster Wallace hanged himself in 2008. Virginia Woolf put rocks in her pockets and walked into a river sixty years ago. The sadnesses of the celebrated always seem to wake up the public consciousness for a minute, to carry a lot of weight in this culture. Even if a person was famous for a shining moment years before, it gives us a common understanding of a universal experience, because it touches someone we collectively saw once upon a time last week or several decades past. Or maybe we just knew who they were, whatever.

Of course it happens closer to home too. My distant cousin jumped from a building too, a few years back. Another man I knew well shot himself in his garage. Others have committed slow suicide with alcohol, unable to stop the daily drama of starting and stopping and starting and finally not stopping until organs failed or they fell, in one case, into a kitchen counter and literally busted a skull, the tracks from the IV still visible, after a cab ride escape from the hospital.

A colleague I only knew of shot himself at home, straightened up his apartment and went and sat in a corner, leaving his glasses and notebook neatly stacked on the computer table. No note, just a schedule for a kayaking club tacked to the wall, dishes in the drainer, like it was all going to start up again tomorrow. I was so touched by his story that I went to his apartment a few weeks later and helped other co-workers sell his belongings for a fundraiser to cover expenses, a three-by-three foot square of carpet in the corner ripped out and a new piece covering the only faded sign of a mess. 

I don't know what drives people to it, honestly. I don't know what the final straw is. I've read a lot of words, some of them very eloquent, in the past week since the actor Andrew Koenig's body was discovered, about the sadness of suicide, about the assault it is on family and friends and what about the necessity of holding on, of understanding that when you choose to leave this life you are willfully hurting people who love you, who you supposedly love. You are choosing to take them down with you, maybe, when someone, anyone, would have gladly made a difference, made that not happen and tried to help you out. 

And I do believe that to a point. The effect on others would be one of my fundamental concerns if I felt I was at all capable of physically ending my life, which I will reiterate that I really don't and thus am only gifted with the potential of waves of this bottomless ground-opening-beneath-me bullshit for the rest of my life and isn't that fabulous too? It's a real party around here. 

But I think until you know what is truly in the mind and heart of a profoundly depressed or psychotic or somehow-damaged human being who decides that this earthly plain is not something they are able to navigate anymore, I don't think it's really right to judge it as an act of selfishness or evil (at its worst) either. And that really means that it's something you can't ever judge, because true minds and hearts, particularly their dark places, are things that no matter how much psychology you study, no matter how bonded you feel to the other human beings who inhabit your world, that you can ever truly, fully know.

I think you can be hurt, yes. Disappointed that someone did not choose another way. And I am sure it takes years, potentially a lifetime to sift back through it and reach a place if you ever can where it's understandable. Maybe it never is. Some things aren't.

And as a person familiar with the sharp, horrifying edges of a brain and body's chemical revolution, I have to say that I don't know what I'd do in their shoes, if my malfunctions took a turn and shifted just far enough south of manageable, to the point where ending daily suffering seemed more important than anything else. Love from others, even, can morph into scary things in the dark, the opposite of its intention. It is relatively easy to feel like a burden. We live our lives with even our closest on parallel tracks, close but not touching, sometimes completely disconnected, it seems and not always knowing when it's okay to reach out. And sometimes in the depths of depression (that loves isolation, that wants to be alone, most of the time) at your most vulnerable, the last thing it seems possible or advisable to do is to tell anyone. The last thing that seems right or manageable is to say these words (for most of us, again, and again.) Sometimes the exhaustion sets in from all of the mental work and makes it feel almost physically impossible to speak. The welcome mats aren't always visible, even when they are so, so there.

It's hard to tell someone who wants nothing more from you than to feel better that you don't. There is nothing worse for a loved one than a seemingly unsolvable, boundary-less problem.

And I guess what I'm trying to say is that if someone feels bad enough about himself and his life to end it, I don't think it's a rational process that necessarily leads to sensible problem solving.  I think that as much as it might seem the worst possible slight to someone who loves us to choose to bail, particularly in a violent or seemingly squalid way, that I can fundamentally understand, even if I think it's a horrible and hurtful idea, even as I wish that no one should ever have to go through it on either side.

As much as I want to reach into the lives of people I care about and fix them, as much as I sometimes wish that someone would do that for me, I'm honestly well aware that sometimes it's just not possible. It is a horror show. It is a sad song.

And what I keep coming back to is that right and wrong isn't always so simple. What I'm saying is that no matter what, I can kind of understand.

(Don't) Let Her Sing

The other night I was driving and recorded myself trying to sing Sheryl Crow until I got disgusted with Soak Up the Sun and stopped. I have been encouraged to share the results here. You do not have to click play. In fact, I recommend that you do not.

But if you came here to hear my Darius Rucker impersonation as it segues into a deconstruction of Kickstart My Heart by Motley Crue (WOAH! YEAH! I TOTALLY FORGOT MOST OF THE WORDS EMEFFER WOAH YEAH!) you are totally in luck. 

If you didn't, all I can tell you is that I like to drive, a lot, when traffic is not a consideration, and I like to sing, when talent is not a consideration. I have no problem driving relatively long distances alone. I'm into back roads and road signs, and pretty much anywhere you put me I want to cruise around and check it out and listen to music.

I drove to North Carolina and back last weekend and left my iPod radio adapter at home. I didn't realize it until I had left and the Aquia, Virginia, Target (a ritual stopping place for me on 95 South, every single time for reasons beyond my understanding) did not turn up a clearance or even sale-priced replacement that I could justify buying to have around as a second string. So I was relegated to the radio and the weird assortment of cds I've jammed into the slot on my car door, plus a few I had in my laptop bag that I'd picked up at Best Buy (Nirvana-Nirvana, Alice In Chains-Facelift and, um, Def Leppard-Vault, hahaha) that clearly out the grunge/metal/whatever the hell roots that I have no idea I cling to so hard until I'm in front of a rack of $7.99 cds and I end up buying stuff I used to have a long time ago before someone moved and took it or I crushed it under my car seat or gave it to someone to copy and they never gave it back or any of the myriad reasons why I'm currently destitute because I spent most of my late teens and 20s buying cds multiple times.

As much money as I toss into the iTunes black hole, I still probably come out ahead, seriously.

Long story short I listened to Appetite for Destruction five times nearly in a row with some breaks to scan through country stations and Christian pop stuff that I cannot stand regardless of its message and the stations that seem to cycle through that Ke$ha character and the new Britney single and FloRiDa's hot new song, Low, which is not really new but at least it's not that "You're a Jerk" "song."

By the time I got home I had perfected my rendition of G'nR's Rocket Queen, which, if you are not aware, is one of the best songs recorded by anyone, anywhere, I swear. And I had also thoroughly revisited the therapeutic practice of singing while driving, and drew a few conclusions, some rules for singing in the car, if you will. 

The first rule of the singing in the car club is that there are no rules.

Obviously. That is why Hoobastank suddenly seems like a really great idea. And no I don't know how I know all the words either. Shut up.

And no, I did not hack off the end. I'm not editing this stuff. Why are you watching this anyway? Why don't you go read a book.

The second rule of the singing in the car club is that you do not have to know all the words. I mean, it's nice if you do, but who's policing you? It's also totally fine to make embarrassing noises that approximate the sounds of the instruments. This is the musical equivalent of mooing at cows or bleating at goats when you see them in fields by the side of the road.

What, you don't do that either? What is wrong with you?

And actually, bleating might not be far off of the mark.

I just remembered that my best friend in high school and I had a strange ritual where a song would come on that we didn't like and we'd go, "I hate this! Let's turn it up!" And we'd sing it.

I know, I'm not sure either.

The third rule of the singing in the car club is that talking back to the radio and/or the artist performing the song is not a sign of instability but rather an indication that you are fully engaging with your entertainment source. This includes habitual accusations, such as when I say "You are so not from Philly" to Elton John without fail whenever "Philadelphia Freedom" comes on, or statements of need, such as "I wish I was in New York RIGHT NOW OMG I LOVE NEW YORK" when I hear "Empire State of Mind." It may also simply signal a profound need to pull over for a Frosty, but that is perhaps my particular evaluation of this behavior.

Fourth and final rule? (I think. I'm making this up as I go along, totally) is that no genre of music or performance deemed unpleasant (i.e., "not cool") in normal circumstances is off-limits in the car. This is why I know the words to some of the worst songs ever recorded in their entirety, including "Fancy" by Reba McEntire, and why I generally don't turn off any 70s light rock song, which is one of my specialty genres.

This is also why the clip below features me impersonating Darius Rucker singing a song that I have sung approximately 237 times in my car at various times in my life, with some color commentary and Hootified trash talk. Then the clip segues into the aforementioned Kickstart My Heart ridiculosity which, you know I don't even know. It had been eight hours at that point.

Honestly, I don't even know why I'm posting this, except that the stupidity below makes me laugh so hard for some reason that I cry. And it is not funny. It is not really funny like "Pants on the ground" isn't funny to me. And yet I laugh.

This is all very self-serving.

[Oh, and editor's note: As Kerry pointed out in the comments, this clip is almost eight minutes long. I don't expect my mother to watch it. Please don't. My "work" here is done, as noted below.]

And with this post I need never post myself singing on the Internet again. Or maybe I'll do it all the time, or just do a special Run DMC post, because I can perform Raisin' Hell in its entirety, and also still get a daily dose of inspiration from Rev. Run on Twitter, true story.

On forgetting whether or not I ever told my blog that I danced to I'm Every Woman with Jane Fonda.

Seriously. 

I'm going through my photo archives for another day in a row, putting together some images for a friend of mine, and wow. The things you don't really forget but don't actively remember. Like this: 

That's my mother on the far right in this one. She looks like we all felt.

 

This is what happens when you follow Dylan McDermott into the W hotel in New Orleans because you figure that's where the party is because his stepmother just happens to be throwing it. And then somehow you end up in the party yourself (**coughpresspasscough**) standing a few feet away from an open bar and Rosario Dawson. 

 

 Dudes this is still funny, almost two years later.

 

That will never not be funny to me. That ain't no On Golden Pond. 

I have no idea what I said exactly to get us in those doors but I will never be sorry. Like Ferris said, life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. 

Whole set here. Fabulous trip. 

Blind

One afternoon in late September, 2002, I picked my grandmother up at her suburban Maryland assisted living and drove her the very short distance to the strip mall in front of it. We went to Starbucks and I probably got a latte of some sort and she probably had a hot chocolate or an iced tea. Oddly for us, only because we weren't in the habit of doing so and most everything we did seems in retrospect to have been a habitual thing, we sat at a table outside and finished our drinks and chatted.

Maybe a week later, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo drove through that strip mall parking lot and shot and killed a woman - Sarah Ramos, mid-30s, if I've sifted back through the reports correctly - who was sitting on a bench near the Crisp & Juicy Peruvian chicken place and the Honey Baked Ham Store and the post office, just feet away from where my grandmother and I sat that day.

Muhammad and Malvo struck three times in that few-mile radius of the Aspen Hill neighborhood, killing a Metrobus driver at a bus stop right next to the cemetery where my grandmother is buried now and a man pumping gas at a station up the road. 

I could not adequately explain for you if I tried what it was like to live here then. The first night of the shootings, October 3, 2002, I was on duty at the counseling center at the school where I work, and we were on lockdown, not allowed to leave. For the next few weeks, as the two traveled around Maryland and Virginia picking people off at shopping centers and gas stations, things went crazy, for lack of a better word.

Witnesses saw white box trucks near the scenes, the police spokespeople said, and let me tell you, if you want to notice that every other vehicle on the road fits the description of a basic white box truck, assume that that sort of vehicle may contain a person aiming a gun right at you, for no reason you can comprehend because no reason exists. We were told to move in zigzags on our way into and out of everywhere, and given that daily activities could not stop due to two lunatics with high-powered rifles terrorizing your region, everywhere you went people were running from doors to vehicles and vice versa in purposeful zigzag or circular motions, crouching down by their cars willing the gas to flow faster into the tank at gas stations, never certain if anything could be enough to dodge unseen bullets.

Just try to stay away from trees, just try. All of a sudden there are forests everywhere, woods edging every parking lot.

A woman died in a Home Depot parking lot. Another while she vacuumed her car, again at a damned gas station. What the hell with the gas stations? A man died cutting his grass, another in a parking lot after buying food for his church at a grocery store. A kid was shot by the side of the road and survived. 

Charles Moose, former Montgomery County police chief, updated constantly, all the time. He was to this for me what Peter Jennings was to 9/11. I would have done whatever he said, square dance box steps in parking lots, yoga poses to avoid windows and trees. Whatever. 

And I still would have known the whole time that no matter what machinations I went through to avoid it, if someone with a rifle had me in his sights I would have absolutely no idea until it hit me, and then it would be too late. I would have just zigged when he did, not when he zagged.

When the snipers were finally caught, it wasn't in a box truck at all. It was in a late-model sedan, with a hole drilled through the trunk to fit a rifle.

John Muhammad died last night, executed in Jarratt, Va., by lethal injection. I've been thinking about this pretty solid for three days now, when I realized what was happening and why his ex-wife was making the tv rounds, shopping a book she wrote about what was understandably the horror of living with him, claiming a stint in the Gulf War caused the shift in his brain that brought the crazy, the post-traumatic stress that she alleges made him murderous, made him propose to Malvo a utopian community in Canada where only certain people could live. 

I wonder if it's possible for a city to have post-traumatic stress disorder, at least the collective that lived here for that period of time in 2002, because for the past few days I've been thinking back to how it felt to be afraid out in the open of an unseen assailant, mindful that I could be killed just by going about my daily business. Because really, even though Muhammad has been incarcerated for years, once you have the knowledge of such a threat you can never not have it. I am weary of violence, in a generation where it seems the mass shooting is a cultural marker, although never done in this piecemeal fashion over a period of weeks like it was when the snipers were roaming around killing people here.

It's insane, it's absurd. It is as weird and terrifying a situation as I hope I ever have to live through.

Gertrude Stein said one of my favorite things: "Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening." Or everything is, depending on how you look at it. I don't remember much about the aftermath of this experience, but I know it was a relief not to be so hypervigilant about my surroundings, to go back to a vague concept of the unseen, unpublicized everyday dangers that still make me case out my fellow customers at the post office or the 7-11, even in the light of day. I'm not really very trusting of others, given all I've seen and heard and read, but I go about my business. There are very few places I won't go, very few places of which I'm actively afraid, but I am always, always aware of my surroundings and who inhabits them, and I will quietly adjust my circumstances if I feel uncomfortable. What good it'll ever do me I have no idea, but it's learned behavior.

I feel so deeply for the people who lost people they loved at that time, like I feel so deeply for the people who lost people at Ft. Hood, for the people of the base who I'm sure now know what it is like to feel unsafe in a place they never dreamed would feel so. I leave the mourning and the right to a reaction to those people, most of all.

All the same, I read some really nasty words yesterday about the execution and I can't bring myself to revel in the death of any human being, to write a profane tweet about it or to otherwise think it has anything to do with me, even as a citizen of the area most affected by his behavior. I don't know how I'd feel if fate had led Muhammad and Malvo to me and my grandmother, who I loved more than almost any other human being on the planet, and if I would have driven myself to Jarratt to watch him die if he'd killed her.

I don't really think I would have, but I don't know, although I like to think I know myself pretty well. This isn't because of anything Jesus is reported to have said about compassion any more than it would have been if the "eye for an eye" approach resonated for me instead. I don't think my feelings about it are anyone's business any more than anyone else's are mine. The person is dead, sure, but the circumstances are different and I just do not think I would feel the sort of closure I may expect going in, but again, I don't know. I cannot put myself in the shoes of those people. I can't feel their pain or their anger or any potential need for revenge. 

I think living for some people is worse than dying. I think some people kill and then kill themselves because they are so deeply damaged, and others kill and think it's their right or decree and then stay alive because they are equally damaged in different ways. That some people are evil for reasons no one can understand and that we all live with the fallout to varying degrees of tragedy and pain.

All I keep thinking is that it's sad that it happened at all, that nothing prevented it before so many lives were taken and that nothing can make it better now, not even capital punishment. I wish for good, I wish for better all the time and I'm so despairing when what happens is the opposite that sometimes I think I don't know how to process it at all, that maybe I should be more resolute, more comfortable with an eye for an eye.

I don't even know how to end this, except to say that I feel like things get grayer all the time, and I am so, so sorry for all of those people who took the fall for the rest of us who lived here then, who were lucky enough to dodge the bullets, to be in places where they were not, because that's really what it came down to. I don't have to revel in the death of their killer to wish them peace. I don't have to combine the two in my head at all, and I think that is what I really need to accept, for my own peace of mind, no matter what I think anyone else might think about it.

It's hard to hold a candle.

Fort Hood. Orlando.

I'm not sure where to find it. I guess you just do.