The last time I engaged in a protest was the first and only time I was arrested. I was sixteen, fresh from my first trip to Léon, Nicaragua, in the middle of that sham of a revolution; the contra war. We all know who the contras were really fighting for. Reagan was president. Fucker. Perhaps most importantly, I had fallen in adolescent, closeted, clumsy love with an 17-year old Nicaraguan boy named Alfredo during my trip; a boy who spoke no English, who would tell me stories through a language made up of the Spanish I knew (not much) and charades, of a sort.

Added to my confusion was a sense of disgust and displacement upon arriving back in the States from a Third World country, and all of our dizzying, neon-lit abundance. Barbara Kingsolver described it well in Adah’s return to the U.S. from Africa in The Poisonwood Bible:

It is impossible to describe the shock of return. I recall that I stood for the longest time staring at a neatly painted yellow line on a neatly formed cement curb. Yellow yellow line. I pondered the human industry, the paint, the cement truck and concrete forms, all the resources that had gone into that one curb. For what? I could not think of the answer. So that no car would park there? Are there so many cars that America must be divided into places with and places without them? Was it always so, or did they multiply vastly, along with telephones and new shoes and transistor radios and cellophane-wrapped tomatoes, in our absence?

I was immediately homesick, not for home, but for my exchange family in Léon, who had been far more affectionate than my own family. I spent my entire high school years looking to belong in something. I tried Nicaragua, I tried high school rebels, I even tried hanging on the outskirts of the Disciples street gang my senior year. Nothing would really quite fit until I left home, and came out of the closet. But I had felt a sense of belonging in Nicaragua. Add to that my first full-blown infatuation, and all I could think about, write about, talk about, was going back.

While I saved my money for the airfare, the U.S. continued to fuck things up down there. I had never met anyone in Nicaragua who felt like the contras were fighting for them. Everyone I knew had sons drafted into the war against the contras; they had dead sons and brothers and husbands. They all asked me, all of them, to come home and tell Reagan to please, mister, cut it out.

I did my best. I gave educational lectures in schools around the area…I had a slide show set to a Cat Stevens song (oh yes, I did) that made everyone cry.

I went to protests. There were so many that spring. After all, the U.S. was threatening direct intervention; they were going to set up camp in Honduras, right across the border from Nicaragua. They were going to save the world for democracy. They were going to save us from the socialists.

It was just another protest, for me. Downtown Minneapolis, after school one evening. A street blocked off in front of a federal building. Someone got carried away; a glass door was shattered, and within minutes a black line of police, clad in riot gear, stretched across the street a hundred yards away, like a line of poisonous insects. They advanced towards us, slowly, and who knows why I stayed there, with my friend Jenny, while all of our other friends drifted out of the way, up to the sidewalk. Someone grabbed my arm and we all linked together, and sat on the ground. I was in the first line of protesters, and the police were just a few feet away, riot sticks out. I watched, dumb-founded, as one cop struck me in the belly with his stick, as if in slow motion. Then chaos, me on my face on the street, hands looped together in a hard platic cord behind me, thrown into a dark van with others. Michael? Jenny called. Yeah, it’s me, I told her.

My father was not happy.

The world did not change after that. It only continued, and I learned a lot that spring and summer about politics and disillusionment, about feeling mute and powerless. Before my return trip to Léon, Alfredo was drafted into the war at the age of 17. During his first week his convoy was ambushed by the contras, and he was killed.

I had a hard time believing in protests after that. It was easier not to care.

I could have stayed home on Saturday, or gone to a movie. But I’ve been waking up every morning for awhile now and reading the headlines. Just when it seems like Bush has done the most outrageous offense ever, another morning comes and he ups the ante and everything is worse. And the papers and the news are all owned by the same three men, and we are being sold this war and told that if we don’t believe in it, then we are traitors. I don’t know yet what I can do, but I knew on Saturday that at least I could be a body. Someone I love said recently we are all needed, all of us.

And oh, how many bodies there were!

And while there were moments where I winced: thirty-year old chants, patchouli, incense, Joan Baez singing in Arabic…there were other moments where I felt alive and not alone…not crazy. I saw Martin Sheen and Amy Brenneman and Bonnie Raitt and Barbara Lee. I saw no end to the mass of people surrounding me; I saw people in trees and helicopters circling and tables of free organic food, with everyone respectfully taking their turn in line. I saw people winding their way through the crowd to get closer to the stage, saying excuse me, excuse me. I saw goofy hand-made signs and cops on the surrounding rooftops. I saw women climb on the shoulders of their friends, look back at the crowds behind them, and say Oh my God! You should see this.

I’m not crazy, I’m not alone. I could risk it; I could care again.

We do matter, all of us.

Is Paula there?

- Um, I don’t think I’ve seen her yet today…

- That’s okay. I can just….I can just talk to you.

- Okay.

- I think I…(voice tightens)…I think I need to put my dog down today.

- Okay.

- I had been talking to Paula about him…we’ve tried everything, we’ve had him for three years and I…I just can’t trust him anymore.

- Okay.

- He bit me today. Twice. When I was trying to put him in the car.

- Did he break skin?

- He drew blood, yes.

- I’m sorry.

- And he’s never had any bad experiences in the car or anything…no trauma. My husband and I have tried for three years to help him, we’ve done everything. And I’ve had bites and scratches and bruises.

- …

- And I have a toddler and a new baby now.

- Yes.

- And….I don’t know why I am telling you all this…

- That’s okay.

- I was going to sign him up for class…I sent in a check. Can you tear it up? My name is___.

- Yes, no problem.

- Thank you.

- I’m sorry you had to make such a difficult decision, but it sounds to me like you made the right one.

- …(cries).

- …

- Thank you. Okay, bye.

- Bye.

///

I found her check and registration form in the mail that day. Her dog’s name? “Boo Kitty.”

Pull Up to My Bumper, baby

Ed. note: a dream lifted from a journal I was keeping 12 years ago, during college. Background provided for greater comprehension and enjoyment.

“…later, at the haunted house, which was, I think, in Miami Beach, I was being chased by Robert (my second boyfriend who had just broken my heart) who was in John’s (John was my best friend) body and had John’s voice and mannerisms, and he was running after me, yelling at me to “Emote! Emote!” Eventually he cornered me at a downward-spiraling slide (wonder why I have so many dreams of them?). The slide was really narrow, and I was worried that I would get stuck. A Grace Jones song was playing, and Robert was holding out his hand so I wouldn’t go down the slide.

“Grab my hand!” he said.
“No! I don’t trust you! You left me with no relationship in Minneapolis for three weeks. You hurt me!”
“There was never a relationship,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.

At this point Robert (in the body of John) pulls off a mask and reveals that he’s actually…Peter (the man Robert dumped me for)!! And had been Peter the entire time we were dating.

The scene changed, and Peter and I were walking to the hotel where the convention was being held. At the front desk we checked our mailboxes and inside mine were various flyers, Bruce Weber’s new book, and the autobiography I had written for my mother titled “Ride With the Wild One.” She had sent it back, edited, with all these red marks all over it.”

Mikey

I have been grappling with memories, overwhelmed with the need to write about a specific time in my life and trying so hard to find a way into it, each attempt thwarted because it seems I need to go further back, over and over. Each moment needing a chapter of background info so that the present emotion/image has the right resonance or power. And because it happened when I was 18 and 19 and was so young and naive and stupid and depressed and hopeful and because I seemed to fuck up nearly every friendship/relationship I touched that year I don’t want to write about it; I don’t want to re-visit those old hurts, those old insecurities which today seem so…pointless. I don’t want to commit those fumbling catastrophes to paper and see my younger self in black and white. “Mikey, buddy,” I want to tell my 18-year old self, “don’t do that, don’t do that to yourself. It’s all gonna be okay. Don’t settle for that, c’mon, stand up for yourself, don’t be so fucking quiet all the time, laugh more and hang on, everything you want is coming, just not today.” But Mikey can’t hear me. He’s pouting over a broken heart or a bruised ego. He’s doing stupid things for attention from stupid men. The least he could do is help me out a little, remind me of a good detail or a bit of dialogue or a small sequence of events. But apparently that’s too much to ask

And perhaps you should get youself spayed, while you’re at it

- (very whiny voice) Hi, I have a Pomeranian and I’d like to put it out for breeding and I was given this number because they said you could help tell me where to go.

- Uh, we don’t have information on breeders.

- Really? Because I was given this number.

- Right, and we don’t have that information.

- Can you connect me with your operator?

- They won’t be able to help you.

- Oh.

- Do you have Internet access? You could do a search for Pomeranian breeders in your area.

- No, I don’t.

- You could go to the library.

- Yeah, but you need to get up REALLY early in the morning and go all the way down there and wait for a computer and I don’t know how to use one, so that’s why I wanted to you to help me.

- Well, actually, ma’am, we strongly recommend spaying and neutering pets so we’re not the place to ask for information on breeders.

- Right.

- And it is my personal opinion that you shouldn’t raise a houseplant, much less a dog.

- Okay then.

- Good luck. Bye.

Pics from Lake Tahoe.

climb

There is the sense of language trapped like dank water caught in an old tire, or a swamp stagnating in the harsh sun….no mystery or energy rippling beneath its surface…and it will stay there unless you dig a small trench, with a shovel or even a thin, sturdy stick, from the pool towards a descending curve of the earth, gravity drawing the water gently, incessantly through the channel you’ve dug, a trickle turning to a steady stream, leaves caught in the current, turning one direction and then another, their green and yellow edges twisting, spinning, revealing the water’s intentions that flow beneath its surface.

There’s the new job, of course; the phone calls and the registration forms and the credit card numbers scrawled at the bottom of handwritten faxes. Vaccination records and adoption certificates copied and stapled. And then the names, all the names: Luna and Lulu and Marley and Tulley and Sammy and Jake and Booyah and Kayla and Titan and Oscar. Classes and dates, scrawled, crossed-out, underlined, last-minute pleadings we’re having an obedience emergency, please please can we get into the class tonight and Excel spreadsheets with fields copied, cut, pasted as the capricious nature of people and their dogs and their schedules demand.

And I’m tired; every new job leaves me tired, my worry of the small details, the folders and the receipts and the waiting lists and the voice mails. It takes time, to adjust, to streamline the chaos left by the former coordinator, to page through stacks of unreturned calls and expired credit cards and letters of complaint. To steel myself for each call, each voice a little world of worry or privilege or frustration. Every employer I’ve ever had has been damn lucky to have me.

But I’m happy when I’m busy…the laws of physics propelling me forward a body in motion stays in motion but to write I need to sit still, to have a few moments of silence.

And the doubt. Reading the words of other online journals, just one or two, here and there, the cynicism and the posturing…I absorb it, take it too seriously, too personally…like a drug injected, humming with the blood rushing through my veins. And one or two ruin it for me, just one or two detract from the brightness and the generosity all the others pour out. Resolution #1. Stop reading the one or two. Or better, don’t take it personally. Instead, go back, read the ones I love, and see in them their singular human flawed sacred life, all their own, see them write it down, see them try, each day, to say it, say their lives, their private vocabularies spinning language, sewing one word to the next, raising the tattered cloth on flagpoles that sing as the cords strike the metal and bounce back towards the sky. “All I can say” the emerald-eyed poet wrote, snapping pictures of the lights flying past her on the bridge.

You either get it or you don’t, the atomic monkey boy said, his voice brushing my ear though several states separated us. He meant, I think, that at least the two of us get it. I hope I get it, I hope I always get it. I hope I always have in my life those that get it.

But I do. And I will.

Tonight, stepping out of the cabin and into the dark; moonlight glowing across the snowdrifts, I hear…nothing. Silence; no hum of motors or city life. My ears buzzing with the absence of sound. My footsteps on the wooden staircase, the slush squeaking under my boots. I stop, stand still for the first time in days. I listen to the silence, drinking it in, pulling it around me. Then wind rushing through the tall pines and, in the moments of calm, the sound of wet snow falling in a clearing, a hundred feet away.

///

Three years ago, when my mother was still alive, when I had moved back to Minneapolis for a few months, I was talking with her partner, Lee…someplace, in some room. The kitchen (the warm center of their warm house)? Or a waiting room at the hospital? There were two surgeries during those six months. When the muscles that controlled her swallowing failed, she had a stomach tube implanted. Yes, that was it. I was still staying in their house, a week or two before I moved into the little studio apartment on Franklin Avenue. Mom had stayed at the hospital the night before, and Lee and I were to join her in the morning, and wait through the surgery. I woke early; a dark, cold, winter morning, and I could hear the shower running in the bathroom down the hall. And I could hear Lee crying in the shower, her sobs not quite covered by the water, and the sound filled me with dread.

Later, in the waiting room; the florescent lights buzzing overhead and the orange-upholstered chairs we sat in; old copies of People and Reader’s Digest piled on the table beside me. Lee told me about the previous year, when she first knew. They were in Orlando with friends. In the hotel room on the morning of their departure, Mom had started to pack her bag for the return trip to Minneapolis. But she was packing her clothes into Lee’s bag.

“What are you doing, Susan? That’s my bag,” Lee had said.

My mother stopped for a moment and stood there, her face empty. Lee could see the machinery of my mother’s thoughts groan and shudder.

“And my heart just fell,” Lee told me.

What may have been just a small incident to anyone else was, for Lee, a dark omen of the terrible future rushing towards them. Lee, a retired nurse and my mother’s companion for twenty years, knew it meant trouble.

///

I had wanted to be alone for the weekend, to fulfill the romantic notion of a writer in a cabin, surrounded by snow and trees. But Tahoe isn’t cheap, and the cabin is shared by five of us for the winter, and at the last minute my former boss’ boyfriend asked if he could tag along. I was disappointed but said yes. After all, I’m learning, or trying, to accept what life offers, rather than say no when my expectations aren’t met.

During the four-hour car trip I realized that I hadn’t been around a straight man in a very long time. Everyone I know in San Francisco is either a gay man or a woman. But we managed just fine. We had Veronica in common, and there were movies to discuss. The traffic was slow but steady. Rain showers fell the whole way, and though I expected it to turn to snow as we neared the lake, the rain only flirted with the cold; a few fat, wet flakes struck the windshield as the light drained from the sky. I was grateful for my Subaru and I was grateful for Mike as I drove us around the curves in the dark; he knew where to turn, and where the cabin sat waiting for us. He also knew where to find the light switch as we stumbled in with our bags and groceries.

“As you can see,” Mike said, gesturing to the living room, “It’s decorated in Early Butt-Ugly.” Indeed. Brown pile carpeting, strangely-shaped orange couches, a clock fashioned from a piece of varnished wood. I took Louie back outside. He hadn’t seen snow since we left Minneapolis over five years ago and he trotted nervously along the snowbanks in the driveway, unsure of where to pee.

He was a different dog the next morning. Mike and I strapped on snowshoes and set off on a trail that led from the back of the cabin up into the woods, and Louie charged ahead, his tail wagging, alert and excited. The trees were frosted with snow, and some were covered in a pale green moss that grew despite the cold. It was a mild winter morning; I stuck my gloves into my back pocket and shuffled after Mike, who was much better equipped with appropriate hiking gear. He had one of those backpacks with a plastic tube that snaked out of the zippered enclosure and over his shoulder, offering a cool supply of water. He even had two walkie-talkies, in case of…well, just in case.

The only sound in the woods was the muffled crunching of our shoes along the trail, and the snow melting and dripping from the branches around us. I shuffled along, as Veronica had suggested. My inclination was to raise my feet high off the ground, but the raised lip of the snowshoe’s toe seemed to thwart any potential face-falls. We followed the trail up the side of the hill, pausing to snap pictures here and there. After an hour or so we reached a spot that offered views of the mountain peaks and the pale grey surface of the lake. Mike was ready to turn back, but I wanted to climb higher. We parted company, and I promised to call on the walkie-talkie should I get lost.

Louie and I continued up. The trail was thinning out; fewer hikers and skiiers had come this far recently. The snow grew lighter and my shoes plunged through the powder. Finally, after another thirty minutes, we reached the top of the ridge, and I turned to see the panorama of Lake Tahoe and the winter woods below us. It was good to be alone, just me and my dog, and to have accomplished something. I followed the ridge till all traces of the trail vanished and it was just fresh, deep powder ahead. Louie lay in the snow, ears cocked, scanning the horizon like a king surveying his land. I stopped to listen again to the silence, the air still, the trees dripping. My breath was shallow, under my clothes a layer of sweat clung to me. I looked around at the surrounding mountains and the low clouds hanging just across the way, no higher than where I stood, panting.

I know, I know…I have been a lame blogger this week…so few posts. I seem to have hit a patch of self-doubt or something. I’m hoping a weekend up at Tahoe at a cabin in the snow will help. Read some old dogpoet or check out my list of links to other fine bloggers. Be back Sunday.

Oh, Sharon Stone came into the shelter today. But then she had an allergic reaction and left.

But honestly the hours aren’t the problem. Or rather, they are, but not in the sense that Viriginia Woolf implied. Instead of enduring the hours, I can’t seem to get enough. Where the hell did they go, all those hours? Was that really me, a year ago, playing Tomb Raider for days at a time? My God, what waste. There’s so much to do, 48 voicemails to return, a new (read: merely super-expanded-without-pay) job to wrassle to the ground; my blog surfing cut short, exquisite e-mails from strangers to answer, sponsees to meet, steps to discuss, the gym because I must look good, a freelance writing gig for a friend due tomorrow, errands to run (a paper towell wedged into the coffee maker now that the filters ran out) , six half-read books at bed-side, two magazines at toilet-side, laundry accumulating, the dog (oh yeah, the dog) to walk, kill the television, send back Sopranos season 2 to Netflix, watch Bjork lose her sight sometime this week, start the new writing class Wednesday night, and blog, yes, we must blog, must always blog and have something interesting to say, and said artfully, speaking of art wander dazed, chilled, laughing through the Richter show, dodging docent tours while wishing the monkey boy was here, oh need that form notarized and that check dropped and draw some blood and get eight hours of sleep.

I am sharing a cabin up at Tahoe this winter. I think it’s empty this weekend, I’m gonna go.

The sandy cliffs are carpeted with ice plants; we descend slowly, the hills crumbling beneath our feet, mist hanging in the air. Louie sniffs at the ground, lagging behind, but as we reach the crest of the final hill he charges down the steep grade onto the thin strip of beach, startling a flock of sandpipers into flight. The high winter tide plays with us; waves sweep across the full expanse of beach and up to the edge of the cliffs. We run together, try to climb the eroding cliffs as the waves rush towards us, water pooling and churning around our feet, soft clay sucking us in. Louie gets ahead of me, and my heart catches for a second as the waves wrap themselves around his body, his head turning towards me as he’s carried back towards the ocean. He struggles free and with a moment of empty beach we run together towards a wider section, the waves chasing us.

Later, after the gym, I sit in my car in the parking garage, biting into a ripe mango, the juice running down my chin and fingers. My body reacts as if I’ve never eaten; I devour the fruit, sucking it down.

The 10:25 showing of The Hours, I sit alone near the back, moving my legs as couples pass my seat. I hunch down as the lights dim, clutching a cup of coffee.

Strange, how I react sometimes. When an author I’ve loved for years, whose books I’ve read and held onto through several moves, when his work begins to reach a wider audience. I wanted Michael Cunningham to win the Pulitzer, but I also wanted to keep him all to myself. And his characters, from all three books, have lived a little in me, or maybe I’ve lived through them. And it is exhilirating to see them lit from within on a giant screen in the dark, inhabited by actors and actresses I love. But I want them to myself. Or rather, I want to protect them. Because only I can understand them; I have that conceit, sometimes, as if I alone have supernatural qualities that enable me to fully comprehend an author’s constructed world. I want to hold his characters close to me, their fragilities safe in my arms. Because I know this: she felt the dark sensation around her, the nowhere feeling, and knew it was going to be a difficult day and I know this: she can feel the nearness of the old devil (what else to call it?), and she knows she will be utterly alone if and when the devil chooses to appear again (funny, even Tennessee Williams called them “the blue devils”) and I know this: “But there are still the hours, aren’t there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there’s another.” (and how could it be that when I first read the book, several years ago, I didn’t understand the title?) and I know this: Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Because yes, even though I’ve had my share of those hours, I still want more, of everything, it’s not something I can give up. And because these women and men, made from combinations of words across a page, because they know the doubt and the soul-numbing fear and the undependable love they feel for each other; because of this I want to protect them, from the crowds and the ignorants and the never-saddened, I want to hold them tight in the dark theater, I don’t want to hear the chatter around me as the lights come up again, I don’t want to walk back to my car in that parking garage and hear around me the debates and the frustrations why did she have to kill herself? because I am conceited that way; I alone understand these women and men, I cannot trust their lives to the people around me.