pillars of salt

and it's been happening where i get unstuck in time... where all of the sudden i start feeling intensely.  all the voices around blur into very distant sounds like something whispered over a hill.  I read

"But she did look back, and I love her for that because it is so human"

and that just gets me every time- what is it, 4 times now?  5?- and all of the sudden the feeling of it is all i can do.  want to dwell in it and burst out of it and share it and keep it for myself.  vonnegut's nearly got me in tears.  who cries reading vonnegut?

i do. i could.  i nearly did.
in the fall after a few million dollar weeks when i'm feeling so strong and vulnerable.

cursing in the margins

So I guess my brother earned a spot in some sort of sharp shooter competition.   He'll be competing against 3 other guys for some sort of Top Gun recognition.

top gun

and i am supposed to feel proud of his accomplishment, but i keep thinking that that sharp shooting may one day be used to potentially end another living, breathing, feeling, thinking person's life and that he will be praised for it and that he is being trained right now with that knowledge in mind and how far away from your own beating heart do you have to step in order to look at spilled guts and feel pride and i am supposed to feel proud and thankful and patriotic but
 i do not.  i do not.  

something in me rebels.  

during night class before a discussion on gods go begging, i noted that you know a novel's really got you when you start cursing in the margins.  the more i think about that phrase, the more truth i find in the idea.

i find myself cursing in the margins of the generally accepted discourse that says war is necessary and a means to justice and that participation in such is something to be rewarded and praised.
but what can i do?  what can i do?
curse in the margins
and pass on
my copy?

the familiar is not the only.
our side is not the only.

somewhere in some other country, some other family member is feeling proud of their sibling for achieving well in some shooting competition.  and someday that person could use that skill to kill my brother.  to win.

but what do i know about war?  about necessity?  about justice?  about the big picture?
besides, don't i basically subscribe to a sort of existential detachment?
nothing really means anything, afterall, right?
we are surrounded by the absurd.
death is an absurd fear.  it will come when it will and will lead to nothing.

but brutality?

something in me rebels.  although i don't really know what the value of a human life really is or where it resides or that it even exists at all, something in me rebels about the idea of war.  people killing people they do not even know because of some ideal.

killing.
ending.
deciding.


and how would i propose to change things?  what grand plan do i have to rid the world of war?  isn't that sort of an abstract dream?  isn't war a part of the human condition?

if war is our natural state, then what is it in me that rebels?

when i saw The Pianist yeeeaarrss ago, i remember suddenly thinking that the idea of GI Joe toys and letting little kids play at killing each other was the most absurd thing i could imagine.  the general acceptance of it seemed suddenly astounding- seemed like a gross oversight-  a preposterous lack of thought.  how can we let little kids play at war?  don't we have any idea what war is?  how can we color it in shades of valor and honor?  Over the years, I suppose I became desensitized again.  But now... after some reading and a reason to reconsider war... i'm back to the shock.  back to the horror of the way we justify and back to confusion about what seems to me to be some sort of mass delusion.

back to cursing in the margins.

A Short-Lived Career

A Short Cautionary Tale of Broken English and Agitation

Once upon a time, a broke teacher answered an email from her college requesting editing help on a nursing student's thesis.  The teacher quickly googled going rates for editors, pitched a rate and landed the position.  The nursing student was to send her 60 page documents for revision on such a such a day, and it was to be completed by such and such a day.  

The day came and the nursing student sent a document as well as a request that the teacher construct a few complex diagrams to accompany the report.  The teacher upped her rate, was approved, and spent five hours on a beautiful Sunday editing the work of a grown-ass supposedly educated college student whose writing would have earned a C (maybe) in her high school class.  The experience was painful, (containing gems such as "not only in the U.S, but nation wide), but the teacher consoled herself with the promise of a paycheck and the fact that she was probably helping this woman from failing at life entirely.

Later that evening, the teacher returned a phone call from the nursing student.  During this conversation, she was told that, oh no, she didn't have to worry about checking the document part, that the document part is fine as is, and could she please just make the diagrams and check that the document was in proper APA format.

And so began and ended the teacher's editing career.

Never again.

The End

A Brief Conversation

I had a brief conversation with a three year old boy who didn't speak English.  He sat beside me and swung his legs on the bench.  We just looked at each other and told our own stories and derived our own meaning.

Every experience of my life has led up to this exact moment.

That is the thought that came to me on a Friday afternoon, while I was watching Judge Judy at the laundromat.

another end

These weeks have been going just so quickly.  I just reached another end to another moleskine last night.  Before I retire it to the collection, I'm going to send some of the randomness from the last few weeks of thought out into the cyberspacial world.  So, bullets:

• the super duper weird way that all couples are:  the weird language & way of speaking to/at each other full of codes and signals and little things that mean big things and big things avoided.  patronizing or coddling or loving or joking-but-not-really-joking or joking-with-a-full-heart.  being on a pair is the oddest thing.
• "It's always everything at once"
• Sprinkling like a quiet cloud passing:  25 pencils and pens beginning to take a quiz
• Things that bug
• meeting people you think are interesting only to realize they're crazy
• mismanaged time
• everyone in the world's goddamned needs
• elitists
• that guy at open mic nights.  STOP COMMUNICATING WITH ME.  THERE IS NO REASON FOR YOU TO COMMUNICATE WITH ME.
• people's general internet presences
• every single singer in the world trying to be Regina Spektor
• Does education have anything to do with this?
• The protagonist in this novel goes through a series of disillusions.  He wants to hold on to moral idealism, but the situation he confronts makes that impossible.
• second chances every day
• "Freeing yourself is one thing;  claiming ownership of that freed self is another."
• relationships are weird.  others are strange.  the self is strange.  i feel like a watcher, next to myself.  observing myself.  watching it all complacently.  going through motions, my heart places somewhere out of the way.  safe, but hidden so well i'm not sure i can find it again.
• fat legs won't stop.
• well wait. am i who i think i am?  who they think i am?  who is anyone?
• you think you're doing fine until you find yourself in the bathroom crying again.
• CLARITY
• there is no before.  we are always already.  
• for give
• john wayne had male lovers
• somewhere! i saw the cloud coming and i turned it around!
• unwavering & stable
• myth:  we live in a classless society where everyone can move up the social ladder
• recent google searches:
• the effect of gamma rays on man-in-the-moon marigolds
• mary mary quite contrary
• lifespan of a fly
• chuck d
• wendy's new logo
• where does that leave me?

what is it good for?

"You have to know that your life is empty before you can begin to fill it."

i know nothing about war.  i was in a movie about a war once (Wicked Spring), but that taught me next to nothing.  i was the fiance who stayed behind while my man went and got himself killed in war. i learned about corsets and craft services.  nothing about real (or even movie) war.

and then came gods go begging.

this novel offered no solution.  the novel looks at the results of living in a patriarchal hierarchy that forces desire and domination into an inseparable definition.  a hierarchy that excludes the possibility of desire existing in a way that does not in some way take.  what i loved most was that it focuses on the  devastating effects this culture has on men.  sometimes it's easy to forget that women aren't the only ones who suffer consequences from the societal expectations we swim in.  this novel moved me to see that men, in some ways, are just as victimized by our culture.  

the novel referred to war as "lewd acts with boys," a figurative (and sometimes literal) rape of young men who are too inexperienced and young to understand what is happening to them.  

a bold statement- 

particularly with a brother who just signed- 

but i think i agree.

for the sake of some patriotic ideal, or some sense of honor, or open doors in the future, or something, people sign up to defend their country.  for many, it costs their lives.  for so many more, it costs them a sort of emotional death that they may never recover from.  we send these people off to war in which they go through repeated traumatic experiences that forever reshapes their emotional health and their ability to look at the world.  then we send them home and pat them on the back and fly flags for them on certain days and build statues in their honor.  in their honor.  but these people return to a world that they don't belong in anymore.  war is a world apart, and i'm not sure we do a very good job providing a bridge back to this world once they return.  

i've never been to war.  but Alfredo Vea, the author of this novel, and PLENTY of disillusioned authors that i've read and respect have been.  while this novel may not have offered much in the way of a concrete solutions, it does point to the hollow and makes it echo with very human voices.  

voices that echo for days.  

i'm not sure i'd ever thought of war in anything but abstract terms.  this novel changed that.  this novel made me look and the empty and doubt that it would ever start to fill if we just continue to feed it the same old order.  

me

"What, baby?"
"She left me."
"Aw, girl.  Don't cry."
"She was my best thing."
Paul D sits down in the rocking chair and examines the quilt patched in carnival colors.  His hands are limp between his knees.  There are too many things to feel about this woman.  His head hurts.  Suddenly he remembers Sixo trying to describe the Thirty-Mile Woman.  "She is a friend of my mind.  She gather me, man.  The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.  It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind."

He is staring at the quilt but he is thinking about her wrought-iron back...  Only this woman Sethe could have left him his manhood like that.  He wants to put his story next to hers.

"Sethe," he says, "me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody.  We need some kind of tomorrow."

He leans over and takes her hand.  With the other he touches her face.  "You your best thing, Sethe.  You are."  His holding fingers are holding hers.

"Me?  Me?"
-Beloved

When I finished reading this passage out loud in class today, our last discussion day of the novel, I threw myself down on the desk in front of me in some dramatic demonstration of extreme emotion.  "This part kills me, girls.  It just kills me," I said, head buried in my arms.  

And it does.  

It tears me down and builds me up.

"This is not a story to pass on."
This is not a story to continue?
This is not a story to let die?
This is not a story to neglect?