Show the World

“…and then I saw another plane veer and crash into the second building, and I knew then that the person I loved was not going to get out because I counted the floors and when I got to seventy-seven I knew because they were on the ninety-third and I knew there was no way they were getting out of there so I turned and started to run because the buildings were going up like Roman Candles and as I ran my foot turned and I stumbled and looked down and their was a finger with a wedding band and then I turned and looked to the right and there was a row of four airplane seats with four bodies in them on the ground and someone said look and I looked up in the trees and there were people’s innards hanging from the branches and I kept running over feet and hands and…”

It seems both wrong and necessary to hear it; exploitative and crucial all at once.

I’ve never really said it out loud, but that day and the ones that followed were like watching the world catch up with, well, me.

The two years and three months that stretched between my mother’s terminal diagnosis and her death were a surreal vacation in a parallel universe; I saw the world go on around me as it always had, now tantalizingly out of my reach. A plane of glass encircled my family, and within that space we walked in a stunned silence and I wondered what the fuck everyone was always laughing about. Like nobody else in the world understood that death walks hand-in-hand with life. America has no space for the sick or the dying; we shut them up in homes and institutions while all around us Britney Spears rotates her navel on a million screens of pixilated light. There’s no space between J-Lo’s endless marriages for the dying so the dying and those lives touched by the dying don’t exist. It was terminal and cure-less so I waited for that moment in the future while desperately pretending the moment wasn’t everything. We have to live, we can’t just shut down.

So when the country began to mourn, began to discover the things that really mattered; began to leave their dumb jobs for school and volunteering and quality time with the kids I thought yeah, well, I did that a year ago and when everyone became tense and depressed and talked about 2001 being so fucked-up I thought welcome to the club. I felt impatient and somehow, sickeningly, justified.

Once when I was visiting home I went to the Mall of America (or “The Mothership”, as my friend used to call it) and nearly vomited when I saw a “9-11 Store”. Yes, they did. I stood in that foul-smelling shrine of consumerism and hated everything this country stood for, hated the smarmy ubiquitous capitalization of tragedy and death, hated the NYFD t-shirts and flag pins and “we will never forget” stickers. Around me ugly white families clad in matching track suits that barely covered their sloping stomachs and hips ambled with shopping bags and baby strollers, so perfectly at-home and righteous in this horrifying place. I couldn’t leave fast enough.

So AOL says “Light a virtual candle and show the world we’ll never forget” and I just stare blankly at the screen thinking what idiot sat down at a computer and composed that vacant sentiment? Show the world? Like they’d notice.

Your fucking virtual candles aren’t good enough. They only clutter up the universe with more trite, empty symbols; candles that don’t illuminate anything except pretty American Idols.

I can’t live like that. I need something to get me out of bed in the morning. Something contained in the people I love, something that continually defies my expectations. Something mysterious that I can’t examine too closely because it’s the mystery I love and because any examination only reveals false conclusions; expectations that are thwarted or surpassed over and over. An awakening in a hotel conference room. An infatuation turned inside-out. A lover? Ha! No, dear, that’s not what we had in mind. Just bring him to a meeting and like, chill.

Enlightenment, if that’s what this is, kinda sucks. Can’t I just be selfish, just for a little while? Can’t I screw friendship and fuck the boy? Can’t I escape this sweetness, burrow into the bed, cry for my mom?

Yeah, I can. And then I can’t.

So just cry for a little while. Fuck the symbols and the prayers and the closure. You can’t find the ending to this, you can’t shut if off. It follows you home and eats your shoes, a mangy dog looking for love.

And that has made all the difference

Dear Jon-Jon,

Yes, I did smile, and it helped.

Is it too much to ask that all my decisions be so clearly labeled? I usually need the extra assistance.

Round Eight

I thought that I would wait to Love Bomb her, save it for some special occasion, some rainy day of the soul, but hell, I just adore her so much I wanna do it now. Go get Jennie. Show her the awesome love and laughter you contain, the stuff she reflects back on the world. She’s a gold dust woman.

Pictures

Here and here.

Say it again

My initial reaction to the bearded man on MUNI, the one who called us “faggots” and followed us off the train, was not fear or anger but rather shame laced with idignation; I don’t really look like a fag, do I?

///

That weekend in Palm Springs I saw a couple I knew from San Francisco, though I didn’t know them as a couple; rather, I thought they were the same man. Until I saw them together. Their similarity was eerie, their desire one I don’t understand. I’m not my own type. A man similar in physical appearance to myself sparks no desire. There is a certain suspension of disbelief when I realize a man finds me attractive. When he leans in for the first kiss I supress an urge to push a hand against his chest and ask “You sure you picked the right guy?”

///

“I remember so vividly a day in early spring when my whole reality gave out on me. Although it was before I had heard any Buddhist teachings, it was what some would call a genuine spiritual experience. It happened when my husband told me he was having an affair. We lived in northern New Mexico. I was standing in front of our adobe house drinking a cup of tea. I heard the car drive up and the door bang shut. Then he walked around the corner, and without warning he told me that he was having an affair and wanted a divorce.

“I remember the sky and how huge it was. I remember the sound of the river and the steam rising up from my tea. There was no time, no thought, there was nothing- just the light and a profound, limitless silence. Then I regrouped and picked up a stone and threw it at him.

“When anyone asks me how I got involved in Buddhism, I always say it was because I was so angry with my husband. The truth is that he saved my life. When that marriage fell apart, I tried very hard- very, very hard- to go back to some kind of comfort, some kind of security, some kind of familiar resting place. Fortunately for me, I could never pull it off. Instinctively I knew that annihilation of my old dependent, clinging self was the only way to go.”

-Pema Chodron, “When Things Fall Apart”

///

I went to Glide again this morning, to hear the music, to try and participate in something beyond myself. I couldn’t quite shake my gray mood. Before the service I looked down at the end of the pew and my heart stopped short. I saw my mother there. But of course it wasn’t her. It was a woman in a wheelchair, her headrest supporting her where her neck was failing, her thin arms wrapped in wrist braces, her mouth open, slack-jawed, a sliver of drool hanging to her chest. It was the exact way my mother looked in the months before she died; even this woman’s face, pale and flushed with pink, was familiar and unsettling. I couldn’t stop staring at her, watching her eyes travel over the room. I wanted to see her in them, wanted to see some kind of recognition flash there, wanted to see her arms rise up towards me as they had so many times before, offering a weak embrace.

///

One of the good things about being single is that I can go for a three-hour car trip to Sea Ranch and indulge my obsessive need to listen to the same two songs the whole way there. And back.

My first road trip

I’m off to a cabin with the Studly Couple and the dogs for a couple of days. I’ll write if I can. Go bomb Brent.

Feel the torque

Yes, the rumors are true. I am Subaru’s new lesbian spokesmodel.

Round Seven

Um, okay, so if you just read his latest post you can see why I want y’all to Love Bomb Brent. That, and he’s a good writer with a good soul. Let him know there are lots of other good souls out there on our lonely planet. Do me proud. Or, just do me.