puppets in a time of swine flu

there is something both heartening and heartbreaking the moment you realize your lover has an existence beyond you. there is evidence of such a thing from the beginning, but in the drowsy bliss of first moments detachment comes easily. evidence of the outside world--the names that appear repeatedly in stories, for example--appear only to add color to the world the two of you are constructing against the elements. the people they are attached to have the quality of being uttered into being as if by magic, in no way grounded in the complex world of consensus reality. work, too, emerges as little more than a mythical obstacle of forced separation, a test of the new bond, hardly grounded in the mechanics of income and expense. everything has the quality of being about the new narrative you're unspooling together and anything beyond that can take on the quality of shadow puppets, with the loved one uttering the lines and controlling the movement for half of your shared concerns. it's easy for each person to begin to think the show is just a benefit to them, conducted in interludes, precisely for entertainment and in no way connected to the real world. (exhibit a, blowing bubbles at the beach in our own little world.)

eventually this bubble bursts, usually when we begin to meet the people who make up each other's worlds. the names are no longer mythical once you're sharing pizza with the guy who dated the same girl as your boyfriend sophomore year or smoking pot with the guy he drove across illinois. it is a slow integration, highly intentional, and an ever widening circle. sometimes it even ends as it did yesterday, in hot toddies with one of the ex-girlfriends while my boyfriend was being diagnosed with swine flu, loves past and present overlapping in a venn diagram of concern. it is a somewhat provocative phase.

it is a remarkable moment when you can finally witness not only most of the circle, but evaluate the action going on within it. there is a phase here where you are known but not yet fully integrated, and thus able to watch and learn from what transpires in your presence, instead of speculating in that ephemeral puppet show. it is somewhere in this moment that you realize the circle existed before you came into your lover's life, and quite frankly, it will continue to exist if and when you leave. it describes and defines a relationship. (exhibit b, ryan was first introduced to my past via cyrus, my oldest friend living in new york.)

this phase also allows for the confrontation of past romances, whether directly or indirectly. you might describe past relationships to each other but they are shadows until some real evidence emerges; not just a heisted button-down, but something more tangible and indicative of the tone and manner of the interaction. a letter or a photograph, for example, will suffice. (exhibit c, this is the kind of photo i mean. f and me in happier times.)

for me that moment arrived on a recent evening when ryan and i came across piles of old chats with his ex-girlfriend. we gently read through them. the shock of that intimacy--words that should be reserved for me!--forced me to recognize that laura was not some puppet manufactured to give meaning to the present but the person who had formerly held the place in the circle that i now held, the place that feels so definitively mine. it made me sniff a little, not in jealousy, but in disappointment that the words had ever been spoken to anyone before, that this fresh radiance defining our days was perhaps "a xerox of some old emotional state," as joseph o'neill calls it.

the whole thing struck me as funny and sad, my sudden awareness that ryan plays a highly specific role with me, that his behaviors are part of a trajectory and not simply conjured by my supreme uniqueness into being. how conceited i sound, and yet i doubt that anyone in love could say they've skipped this phase! similarly, as the circle widens around me, i am both glad to know that the person i love operates from a place of kindness and warmth with everyone, that such love is part of who he is, while simultaneously nursing a silly heartbreak that those qualities weren't all about me. it is a mean trick that love convinces us we are the center of the universe, that not only has the thing we're experiencing never been seen before in the other person's life, but that it's never been known in the course of human history. (exhibit d.) how could people have ever been this happy before! how could there be war when there can be this bliss? (that answer easily revealed to us the moment we fall from favor and find ourselves outside the bonds of that love, wretched, alone with our trauma.)

evidence of past happiness of course raises that perennial curiosity in us, of whether there is a "The One"or not. zeke believes, and i agree with him, that if you live in new york city, and you are one in a million, then there are 8 people just like you within 20 miles. you could marry one person, but your happiness may or may not be any greater than if you had married someone similar, a concept i like to summarize as the availability of a future with someone. this only applies to perhaps those 8 people, but any of those 8 might make you content, and even then i believe contentment may only be available in phases, and intimacy only appropriate with some of them at certain times. it seems much better to me to take each person as the gift they are rather than awaiting "The One." it does not mean an aversion to commitment, just a refusal to accept rigidity.

which brings me again to the heartening and heartbreaking portion of our show, the understanding that we choose our own happiness, that we can fall in love with whoever we want, a belief both beautiful in that we always can have a merrily intimate future and almost tragic in that it will never be solely circumscribed by a single person. it isn't that there is not one person who can make us happy, but that the evidence that there are many people who make us happy, that it is never just one person who can be the world to us, that there is always a place within a larger community reserved for this intimacy, and that in many cases that role has been had before, that is so bittersweet. i've been told it is a testing phase, a little world you've built in private limelight colliding with the outside, when suddenly you can see where you're standing. in some ways it is heartening just to find that you're standing.

the city beautiful

one of my favorite things to do in new york city is walk. i am endlessly entertained by the movements of people and traffic, the interaction of the natural elements with a built environment, and by the buildings themselves. perhaps more than anything else, i find the buildings to be a source of amusement, joy, and wonder. many of them are so familiar they've come to symbolize certain emotions for me, a complex web of personal history and incident directly wired to what are ultimately works of public art. we all pour meaning into inanimate objects, but buildings are special because they are literally lived in, and thus come to embody that use. it's a unique significance that serves to personalize every one of them, a whole city of personal construction applied to public construction, multiplied by 8.5 million. the sheer quantity and diversity of mental maps alone, when you think of it, is staggering.

yesterday, for example, i came around the northeast corner of city hall park and was struck by the nyc municipal building, with its 25 foot gilded "civic fame," statue at the top, basking itself in the rosy limelight of sunset. (exhibit a and b, civic fame.) it is a boxy building, awkward and hunched looking, only truly handsome when viewed dead-on front and center, but in that saturday early twilight it had all the makings of a katharine hepburn of architecture, smooth, radiant, and glamorous.

i actually stopped to stare, backing myself to the edge of the sidewalk, thinking of what the building actually signifies. it commemorates the incorporation of the 5 boroughs, represented by 5 cupolas (exhibit a), and i like to think they exist to scout the horizon for new shades of sunset or tones of storm. there are majestic columns lining the entrance and a lovely arched foyer down the center with enough terra cotta flourishes to furnish a cathedral. it characterizes the city beautiful movement, a progressive-era effort to instill social order by creating majestic public construction. (exhibit c.) it was beauty as path to peace.

these things are noticed immediately by an outsider, but if you have any experience with the interior of the building itself beauty and order may not come readily to mind. it is floor upon floor of dark passages, with gold etching on the doors, and elevators appointed for partygoers in silk evening wear, the sound of heels clicking against a recently shined floor, cubicles with signs like "i can only please one person a day and today is not your day" and seemingly endless lines of citizens clutching paperwork. it's where i interviewed for a position in the borough president's office, in a conference room with a view that stretched into westchester, and where i gathered the paperwork for a domestic partnership agreement that i never signed. each entry required going through a metal detector and removing layers of sweaters, coats, and wraps, the line stretching out the revolving door into the cold. it is a city within a city, with its own rules and mores, and the grandeur of the place belies the absurd municipal doings. (exhibit d, the times posted about this daily city journal, published in the building, which characterizes the light inside.)

that's why yesterday it was refreshing to just appreciate the building for itself, without any of my baggage attached to it, and stand there in that rosy bounce of sunlight and actually feel forgiveness. i had been harboring anger towards it, it turns out, because of experiences on the interior and a negative association with the catholic church tucked behind it and no small amount of annoyance with the prices at the city store (which has the best gifts). those things came to mind, and civic fame shined in all her glory, and i felt gratitude, and then made my way home.

it is a simple thing, to forgive, and yet we aren't much in the habit of practicing it. i wonder what it does when 8.5 million people harbor anger towards a place? i wonder that certain karmic pits don't open up, like the anguish that surrounded 5 points, just a couple blocks north of the municipal building, where a collect pond was ruined by offal from tanneries and made into homes for impoverished immigrants that sank into the muck. when i pass that place now, with its well-used playground equipment and tai chi practitioners and old ladies offering shoes and massages and visions of your future for a small amount, i sometimes wonder if the anguish that existed there is carried on, or if the city just shifts, a new identity established, easy. i know it is the latter, and yet there is one two-foot space on water street, a few blocks from my house, where i always trip over a cobblestone, and each time i wonder if there isn't some angry former boarder or sailor or shipwrecked immigrant still lingering there beneath the stones. call it the 'there are more things in heaven and earth, horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy' question.

you have to wonder what the municipal building has seen, in its years of upstanding service to the city. a few years ago wnyc moved offices, leaving its broadcasting point dozens of floors in the air inside the municipal building, and on the last day the station allowed steve post to run the no show, a radio show just as much about his stories of the time a horse ran away from him at camp and his shoutouts to patrons as about classic popular music from the 1900s-1950s. (read full description here.) on that last broadcast steve told a story about being locked out of the studio and into the men's bathroom while on the air, climbing out a window and onto the precipice of the building in order to break through another window and get to the record before it ran out. if you take a look at those images above you'll see how crazy this was, but steve told that story in all its humor, of course, but also to express his own tie to the building, to honor the storms and sunny cold fronts he's watched coming from the west, or the moment when he was breaking into windows while the wind whipped around him and he was able to look out over this whole fair city and think "wow what a place i hope i don't die." now whenever i look at the building's top i think of steve, and his story is no longer a private one between he and the building but one that has entered the public narrative of that place.

if each building has a narrative just like the 8.5 million milling in and out of their doors, then new york will never be without a good story. it's just another way this is the city beautiful.

the ugliest impulse

recently i've been experiencing the ugliest of impulses, that of violence, in my dreams. my discomfort with this actually reinforces my need to share the experience, thus i thought i'd share a few snapshots, both waking and dreaming, of a set of issues that continues to grow upward. this is a story about my high school friend annie. (for more stories of this kind, check out this american life's "the allure of the mean friend.")

late fall 1998, charleston, west virginia:

annie and gabriele are my best friends in high school. we spend almost all our time together but we have very different friendships with each other. in gabriele i feel a kindred spirit, but with annie i feel i have to work at it, like im never fun or funny or smart or pretty enough, that i am always falling short. gabriele and i galavant, but with annie i am always fixated on how superior she is in everything. she has perfect grades and a perfect family. she's beautiful and everyone wants to be her friend or date her. she's a wonderful writer, well-read, dances ballet, and seems to have the womanly grace im longing for at 16. everyone loves her, including me. (exhibit a, annie, ironically enough wearing my favorite clothing from the period which she had asked to borrow for a party.)

annie is the most conservative of our teenage selves. one day in september we skip class, cutting out right after first period, annie jumping into my geo prizm with a bag of yogurt-covered raisins and no place to go. we go shopping: i buy a tank top at tj maxx and a donut at the krispie creme and later we buy indie girl magazines from taylor books. over a shared plate of spaghetti at fazoli's she tells me the only reason she is skipping with me is to have done it so she could write about it and avoid the regret of not skipping. i remember blinking and thinking, "really? 'cause im just living my life," and feeling she had been a little disingenuous.

still, annie and i talk about someday living in new york and running a magazine together. we both want to be "cool, tall, vulnerable, and luscious," just like liz phair. we also both want to date the same boy, who had been my on-and-off boyfriend for about 6 months, and would later become my boyfriend for two years. i politely step aside and they date for a couple months, until her parents decide he's a bad influence. their intimacy during this period is incredibly painful to me, and i wonder that i could have a girlfriend who would do this when she knows how in love i am with this particular boy. the fact that years after their breakup he continues to call her the perfect girl doesn't do much to ease the situation. that whole fall, and the seasons afterward, are colored by the painful realization he loves her more than me and im merely a consolation prize.

in the one dream about annie of any real significance in this period the scene is very dark. there are lightning bugs everywhere, and we are outside right at sunset, as a thick hillside twilight appears. everywhere women are in formal wear. annie sits in the middle of the frame in a blue dress that shimmers without being shiny, gathers without being revealing, that moves in waves practically coordinated by the lightening bugs. in the dream i am struck by how gorgeous she is, and am immediately caught off balance. i later have to be assisted with my dress by my friend emma because something is horribly wrong.

that should be a pretty easy one to decipher, for those of you keeping score at home.

late fall 2004-spring 2008, new york city:

annie and i are both living in new york city and have been for months. we have not chosen to see each other, despite mutual friends who might bring that to pass. in fact, we haven't even spoken to each other since 2001, when we briefly encountered each other at a new year's party. on that day she arrived dressed down and i wore a red wrap dress cinched around my waist and a pair of doc martens, several grams of glitter heavily applied to my eyelids. the most attractive and sought after individual was also my date, and that night i felt i'd won the first round of post-high school encounters. at that point it felt like a contest, as things between annie and i had chilled significantly, not least because her parents decided i was a bad influence when i got kicked out of capital.

in new york annie is working as a copy editor at a publishing house and im gamely entering my final months of grad school. we agree to meet and sit at schiller's liquor bar, on the lower east side, a place i choose because it is warmly lit and easy to feel lovely there, like you're sporting the milk and honey complexion of an earlier time. we sit at the bar and she downs martinis while i stick to gin and tonics. i am aware her nose has changed, that while still attractive the girl who was the most beautiful in our school isn't going to age well, and through her stories i learn she doesn't have many friends and doesn't know the city at all. the bait is just too tempting, a way to set our little private cosmos right side up again: i know the city, have a bunch of friends, and can finally offer her something. we become friends.

our friendship for the first two years is simple: we go to ballets or bars or picnics together, slowly easing into a routine of big dinners at the metroranch and too many bottles of wine. she is deeply unhappy and we work through that, through doctors and prescriptions and boyfriends. i bring her back into gabriele's favor and we reunite with the joy of long lost sisters. (exhibits b and c, me and annie goofing at gabriele's in fall 2006, and earlier in the year with josh at the metroranch.) when i fall emotionally ill one winter she becomes frustrated, deeply disapproving of my period on the couch, almost angry that i am capable of letting others down in this way, like im proving myself to be that same girl who got thrown out of high school years ago.

when i break up with my boyfriend of 5 years in spring 2008 annie goes with him to bars to help console him. we are still living together and boundaries are blurry. i am looking for a new place, still trying to figure out what's happening with the boy i left him for, and eyeing this new behavior of annie's closely. i recognize it for what it is: she's interested. i suspect it is not because she loves him per se, but because he is paying attention to her and could provide her with a certain quality of life. this offends me and i feel protective of him. they begin fooling around, both of them lying to me about it. of course i have no say in the matter, technically, but it is deeply hurtful and i indicate that to both of them before i ever have proof. when proof does arrive, in the form of a photo of annie reading in a cape cod house, the same portrait my ex takes of all his lovers, my suspicions are confirmed. not only is she sleeping with the man im still living with, she is lying about it, and apparently also went on the vacation i planned to boot. lovely. confrontation does not get me so much as an apology, and after several days of crying in new york city parks i write an email asking to be left alone. i never want to speak to her again.

my dreams of annie in this period were vivid and always involved extreme violence. i would sometimes wake up and have spent what felt like most of the night punching her in the face, her body strangely morphing back to normal after each attempt to disfigure it, her smile reforming each time, taunting me. they were nightmares of the first degree, and i woke up many times in a cold sweat, unable to breathe.

late fall 2009, sugar hill, new york city:

cyrus (exhibit d, cyrus and me on a recent field trip) and his brother live in a beautiful clean cut brownstone on a block of similarly renovated and handsome construction. i am there to celebrate cyrus' birthday. we are surrounded by friends, including ryan and emily, and im wearing a dress that, while described as "salvation army cotillion," makes me feel quite lovely. eyelid glitter helps.

i know that annie will probably be here tonight. cyrus is aware of the dynamic. he was there the last time we met, quite by accident at a bar where i had ventured to see a visiting high school friend, and where i sat for one drink avoiding eye contact with annie and refusing to speak to her while merrily engaging the other two people at the table. he knows how deep this hurt runs. he knows i have not entirely ruled out confronting her, and he knows that the chances of that are higher with each pumpkin liquor cocktail he places in my hand. when she finally does enter the room, with the boyfriend i've seen on facebook, ryan and emily brace on either side of me, but she never makes eye contact, instead quickly scurrying up the stairs to safety, led by cyrus of course.

"oh well," i say, "let's go i guess." we've been ready for half an hour anyway. i feel slightly vindicated that she didn't look attractive, but really i just feel hollowed out and sick. the adrenaline that was rushing through my veins has left me limp, without even a buzz, and i just want to go to bed.

over the next week the violent nightmare returns. i hit and hit and hit to no avail. every time she goes back to the way she was. she is sneering at me, challenging and threatening. when i wake im not sweating, but im displeased. i don't want to suffer these dreams anymore.

again, if you're keeping score, this one feels pretty simple. they often are.

i treat dreams very seriously. my people are those who wake up and take action based on something revealed to them while they were sleeping, people who write down and remember what their subconscious was telling them, who engage in lucid dreaming. my people, like the iroquois who came before them, are dedicated to dreaming as a process. i know that i need resolution because my dreams tell me so. i am not a violent person, but my subconscious is very clearly demonstrating that i feel threatened, hurt, and unable to defend myself. i would never commit an act of violence, despite what i may say and what my dreams might indicate, but in keeping with my beliefs i know my dreams require action. i think for now it is best to work through my subconscious, to strive for a lucidity that can help me create the peace that i want to live within. peace, it turns out, is harder to create than war, even just between two people.

a shot of hope, please, neat

"we were trying, as i irrelevantly analyzed it, to avoid what might be termed a historic mistake. we were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the european jews in the thirties or the last citizens of pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near-apocalyptic, like that of the cold war inhabitants of new york, london, washington, and, for that matter, moscow...i wanted to believe that this episode of history, like those old cataclysms that deposit a geologically telling layer of dust on the floors of seas, had sooted its survivors with special information."-joseph o'neill, netherland

when i think about the last ten years it feels like the country somehow hit a political growth spurt. im young, so maybe o'neill's imagined generations could share some of their wisdom with me, but even with two degrees worth of history inside my head i cannot fathom a time in the american experience quite like the present. i suppose that is always true, but in wrapping my head around the uniqueness of the period, our political moment, as my colleagues in the movement like to call it, i keep coming back to the same emotions: fear, hope, fatigue, and confusion. im beginning to believe it is impossible to separate the political from the emotional.

that is where fiction is useful.

i've read three novels that treat the subject of september 11th and its emotional aftermath, netherland being the most recent. to be perfectly honest it is a relief the subject has finally made its way into our bestsellers, that we've moved to a place as a people where we can begin to synthesize what the hell just happened to us over the past ten years. while my story, and the story of my generation, has yet to make its appearance despite some feeble attempts, (indecision, anyone?), each of these contain whole strings of sentences that resonate with what we were all feeling during that period. when they do it's like touching the void, comforting as though a warm wind kicked up and wrapped itself around you just when you were going for another sweater but somehow divine, too, indicative of a spiritual awareness, a collective unconscious, that binds us to each other and reminds us we are never truly alone as long as we are alive. that's what i gather from reading fictional accounts of the yeoman experience of the war on terror.

lately, though, i've been giving more thought to my own generation, especially the individuals who are working to create community and sustain a movement. the country is in a strange place demographically anyway, the boomers unable to leave their jobs because of the financial crisis (can we call it a depression already?) and their offspring unable to move into jobs that can accommodate their personal and collective debt. we're broke. ten years ago i sat in traffic in my van every morning while listening to morning edition and waiting to pull into my high school parking lot. every morning npr heralded the advances of the internet. that brave new world that was a booming industry, creating millionaires out of people barely older than me, pulling both profit and loss out of the ether, summoning it from somewhere that was definitely not charleston, west virginia, but that we were told had no place. as a senior i believed there were jobs, that there was a life out there for all of us, shiny and new, everything we'd ever been promised. i think you know how that turned out.

the first election i ever voted in is the one george w. bush stole. the first antiwar protest i ever went to was one i helped organize. the first national march in washington d.c. that i attended was focused on halting that same war. the left political arena, a fairly new place for me, was echoing the logic of international law and public outcry, and we watched as our congress ceded their power and the president took us into two unwinnable wars. the long dark teatime of the soul (sorry mr. adams) that we then entered into felt like some kind of farce, like a videogame almost, a virtual reality that was summoned from the same ether that produced and then vanished all those millions. who were the people running this reality? the only certain thing, in my mind during those years, was that there was nothing consensus about it. noam chomsky's own thoughts on the subject be damned. that all felt pre-apocalyptic.

then came new york, and the rabbit hole of maritime history, my own personal foray into a self-constructed reality. in that reality, as with most subcultures, i was surrounded by other people who felt what i was doing mattered, but when i talked about it with the outside world people rarely agreed. they just didn't care. what im recognizing now, through fiction, is that a lot of people were in their own rabbit holes during this period. what else was there to do?

i mark the end of this period with the election of barack obama. the forces mobilizing in his favor, over the course of that two year campaign, remain remarkable. that victory was only a year ago. remember people crying in the streets? i cried in the street, and at the bar, and at the office, and upon waking, for days. just thinking about it makes me want to cry right now. that victory was personal for a whole nation, whether they were for or against him.

now, after a year to sober up from that hope bender we were all on, we can see our man in washington as a centrist leader and decent human being capable of compromising in our favor if we can merely raise enough of a din to reflect political clout. that's the realistic assessment, and it sounds like what we might say for most politicians, but the truth is after the shit show that came before it's really not something to take for granted. would i prefer to have someone who would act as an advocate for social justice? of course. but i'll take barack obama, and his gorgeous and smart wife, and adorable kids, and bo too. wanna throw in the grandmother? perfect.

truth is i don't think the left has fully taken advantage of this position. perhaps we never do. the whole movement feels squeamish and sickly, tired, dried up. there is hope now, but we are a ragged lot. it now just feels our lives have been downgraded on the crisis scale to near-apocalyptic. now that we're able to finally return to our own agendas, instead of focusing on protecting our basic constitutional rights, we see just how much work there is to be done and feel the pressure of all that time lost. every aspect of our infrastructure has to be overhauled, energy, health care, education, transportation, governance, finance, etc. it is overwhelming and daunting, and there is little or no money to do it despite billions to be made. strange, when the left tries to summon a reality it's so much more difficult. it turns out reality is defined by money.

which brings me to the present. we're broke. ngos are cutting their staff. foundations, just as greedy as all the other investors, played fast and loose and like everyone else lost roughly a quarter of their wealth. there are jobs out there, but often they are two or three jobs rolled into one position, and overwhelming in their expectations. i understand it's bad out there for everyone, but for a movement that could just begin to really push for changes that would benefit everyone, and help lead us out of the vicious cycles of systemic violence we're experiencing, it is pretty debilitating. maybe that's why so many of the young leaders i know routinely take to their beds, days off spend curled up out of reach of phone or email, just grappling with the moment and the agony of making change that is desperately needed.

the answer, as always, lies in reaching more people. maybe you've seen the fun theory video going around, where engineers design games to change people's behavior, i.e. making stairs into a piano so people will take the stairs instead of escalator, or making a bottle drop into a video arcade that lights up and awards points for bottles dropped. that's the kind of thinking that needs to propel the social justice movement right now, the kind of hope and joy we can create without ever using words like "hope" or "change" or any of obama's buzzwords. it's hard to summon that energy in face of complete ruin and destruction, naturally, but then michelle plays with a hula hoop and its not quite as hard to get up in the morning. the ground is shifting, we may not know exactly what the next decade will look like, but it clear we need to attract people and engage them, to build a culture around change that resonates and enriches. maybe im crazy, but it does look, at least, like the boomers took a shot at it in the 60s. maybe i just need to find some sooty near-apocalyptic survivors to give me, and the movement, some perspective.

sweetening fear

october 31st, like most holidays, is actually rooted in pagan tradition. the celts honored the seasonal decrease in daylight but also believed the border between the spirit world and human world grew thin at this time and sought to protect themselves accordingly. the various symbols we associate with halloween, including costumes and lanterns carved from gourds, probably originated from these fears.

the church, in all its wisdom, sought to supplant the pagan holiday with a christian one, and the pope moved all saints day accordingly. all saints day is just that, a whammy of a holy day of obligation for a people with hundreds of saints to honor. a few days later they're hit with another one, all souls day, which focuses on the departed. interesting that the focus of the church, long after a time when people focused their attention on death as the northern hemisphere moved into hibernation for winter, continues to propagate the moral and ethical questions of a much earlier people.

all this is probably an academic exercise for most individuals, but to a kid with a firm belief in the fires of hell, this was important information. a pagan tradition? a church holiday focused on death or the saints? you'd think the saints would be comforting, but that belies the truly macabre and horrific stories that are attached to these figures, their lives filled with bodily distortion and pain bordering on torture. the whole thing skeeved me out as a kid and in some ways was one of my first lessons in overthinking.

the day i rejected halloween my mother flew into a rage. what was i talking about...trick-or-treating being sinful? really? i stood there facing her, aware that she had planned for me to go trick-or-treating that night, aware that somehow i was infringing on her joy. i was 12.

i felt like somehow there had been some confusion. for starters, i'd thought about this a lot. it wasn't easy to give up a favorite holiday, especially one that involved candy, but i was abstemious. well, actually i was anorexic. my moral economy was all about giving things up for a greater reward. self-sacrifice was my thing. still, it's hard to be a kid and behave that way. the year before i'd dressed as a genie in red silk pajamas with gold sequins on the cuffs and a gold sequin crown that my pony tail tumbled through just like on i dream of jeannie. that was sixth grade and i had started to question whether or not halloween was actually a christian holiday, but in the end i went to a party at a church, not the catholic church at my school, but a friend's baptist church in another part of town. all my school friends went and i felt safe there. the jury might be out on catholicism, but if the crazy baptists thought it was ok then it probably was. i was hedging my bets.

the next year id changed my mind. first, id already begun to reject the teachings of my catholic instructors, so their reassurances halloween was nothing to worry about did little to alleviate my anxiety. i worried for weeks. i kept my ear close to the ground to identify answers. how does one do this when one lives in isolation and only encounters people at school, a riding stable, or in public places accompanied by a parent? well, the radio was a start. i listened for anyone who held halloween to be unchristian, for voices that ran counter to the consumer holiday-making machine. i listened in line at the grocery store, read the newspaper, and scanned the lawns of churches we passed in the car to see if they said anything on their billboards decrying trick-or-treating. i waited for a proper warning.

i looked hard enough that i felt it had arrived. i can't remember exactly what it was, but i think it could have been a caller on a morning talk show while driving to school. it only took one real example for me to realize there were dissidents, that halloween wasn't accepted by all faith traditions, that clearly my gut was right: there could be nothing holy, just, or beautiful about a holiday devoted to fear, death, disguise, and gluttony. i wanted nothing to do with it.

my mother's face tightened. "you will go trick-or-treating," she said.

"but mom, i don't want to. i don't think i should have to."

"you will. why don't you want to go? is this some religious thing?"

"well, maybe, i mean it doesn't seem like a christian holiday, but that's beside the point, i don't want to go."

"that's bullshit, you're going. it's just as christian as anything else."

and that pretty much ended it. i felt the inside of my body go hard, like organs were trying to tear themselves from the nest of veins and muscles that held them there. i was nauseous. my whole body flushed warm, and then cold, the waves of panic i would learn to later identify as a panic attack. i walked into the bathroom at the dog shop, aware of everything i was doing as though it were happening to someone else. i was convinced this whole episode would land me in hell. i pulled on the white baseball pants my mother had found, and then boots, a gaudy neon windbreaker, and helmet. i was going as a jockey that year. i smiled for my mother's pictures, tried to reconcile what i thought might be a silly fear with the actions of others who i trusted. truth be told, at that point the list was pretty short. i didn't trust anyone on spiritual matters, not even the bible. the bible didn't even mention halloween. it was all a crapshoot.

later we sat at the pizza hut in belle, wv, where we were having dinner with friends. the room was warm but i was cold with fear. bobby and billy, my best friends, talked about music and joked with our parents. i watched it from outside myself, seeing my mother glance at me now and then in anger, "eat!" meanwhile i stared at the baked ziti in front of me, the food thickening in my throat so i couldn't swallow, the light outside golden and falling softly in that lovely late fall way it has. i was aware my friends were playing with the jukebox but i couldn't be bothered to care. i think someone may have played cat stevens, the one about the cat and the fiddle and the silver spoon, but it's unclear. i was hazy. i had my soul to worry about.

in the end i went trick-or-treating that night to please my mother. i can't remember where we went and i don't think we were there for long. it was quick and supposed to be painless. my mother felt she had won a victory over my absurdism, and was happy to delve into the bag of candy and reward herself with snickers. i just sat there glad it was over, fully prepared to bargain with heaven to ensure my own safety and well-being. clearly my mother couldn't be counted on for it, and neither could the church since the church (i lumped all christian faiths together) couldn't even make up its mind what was christian and what wasn't. my religious confusion deepened. how was i supposed to get to heaven under these circumstances?

in years since i have made it a point to carefully manage my compulsions around this holiday. they are omnipresent, though i no longer subscribe to the religious fervor that so terrified me back on the banks of the kanawha river in the mid-90s. these days my main concern is whether the duane reade has put the holiday decorations in the same aisle as the toothpaste and whether or not i can avoid entering buildings coated in images of death. im an adult and i don't have to participate in anything so i've experimented with my comfort level. the best yet was in college, probably in 2002, when i sat on a friends' porch alone in a red prom dress and handed out candy. my friends weren't home but kids didn't come door-to-door where i lived in the student ghetto and they agreed it was ok if i commandeered their porch . i sat on the cold concrete steps, my feet in doc martens two sizes too big for me, surrounded by gold and brown leaves covering a green lawn, the wind rustling leaves and skirt, feeling a greater openness and empathy than i had in weeks. i remember thinking what an act of generosity it was to participate in the childhood of others, to provide a simple act that fostered goodwill and community. i felt like an adult and a good one at that.

at the seaport there is a trick-or-treating tradition. every year i intend to hand out candy, but the kids all come at once in a big group and everyone from the building goes out front at the same time. something about that bothers me, like its too staged, too impersonal. so, usually i lie in the middle of the room with the windows open and listen to the kids outside, then the noise of adults hollering in the street after sundown. i feel alone and alienated because this isn't quite right either. we should be active in our neighbors' lives. this year im thinking the really scary thing is that this is one of the only opportunities we offer each other to do that.

don't want a tempest in a teapot? stop brewing crazy tea.

as long as i've known my mother i've known people who live in crisis. her many sisters live this way, and that whole side of my family has files in psychiatric facilities along the eastern seaboard. in fact, at the age of 8 or 9 i visited one of those psychiatric facilities to see my aunt, ate government ice cream with a wooden paddle in a brightly lit room, mere hours after we'd found my aunt naked in the middle of an intentional overdose. it was never a question of if the next crisis would occur, but when, where, and how earth-shattering it would be. i was so scared that after my aunt got out i refused to eat anything she made, though she made (and still does) an excellent homemade fudge, because i thought i could be contaminated by her crisis, that somehow her instability would become mine.

many of the people my parents brought into my life as a child fit this description, though family members were the worst. my mother lives in chaos still, every misfortune a reason to panic, death always knocking at the door, her fear palpable and controlling. i don't live this way, but when i was old enough to begin making my own choices i also chose people who lived in crisis, drama queens with psychiatric disorders who lived in the chaos i associated with adulthood. that turned out to be something i had to consciously outgrow.

spring 1997-spring 1998, roane county, west virginia:

the first person who really intervened in my life on this issue was a woman named mona. she was my father's first girlfriend after the divorce. she had wild curly hair that she wore in bandanas (like ani difranco), a crooked nose, a pair of shiny rusty gold doc martens, and an effervescent energy that pretty much drove my chilled out father crazy. she was the first person to suggest that instead of internalizing pain or striking out at others i'd do better to throw dishes off the back porch, and later when i did just that, hurling cups and saucers over the hillside, the thought of her made me smile. she was a gifted artist, and rather brilliant, and she came from new hampshire, from a tribe of yankee hippies that felt a little like long lost family. (exhibit a, she made this sculpture and one of them hangs in my father's house.)

she was around a lot that winter and spring of my ninth grade year. mostly i hated her, angry that now i had two mothers to contend with when i could barely handle the one. difference was, mona was a good mother and i just didn't realize it. she once dragged cooking utensils into the living room, poured out a box of crayons, and instructed me to draw them just to prove that everyone is an artist. when she and my father took a vacation to the coast she brought back a bucket of sand and shells and poured it onto the floor in front of our wood-burning stove so that i could smell and feel the beach. we painted a room together, blue with white clouds, while she kept sauces simmering on the stove and went for walks that resulted in rock and wood sculptures hanging from trees over the creek. i thought she was crazy.

but there was a method to mona's madness. mona's s.o.p. was to express her emotions, regardless of what those emotions might be. she wrestled with emotions, cried when she was sad, laughed when she was happy, and didn't much give a damn about how other people thought about that. that was terrifying to a kid bent on maintaining complete control. if i expressed my emotions who knew what i might say or do. i figured it wouldn't be pretty.

mona knew this. she also knew i loved writing. one day she made me a present of a book, julia cameron's the artist's way. if you're unfamiliar, it's basically julia's workbook for accessing and maintaining a creative self. to do that she advocates for staying centered, remaining spiritual, being present in the world, and limiting exposure to toxins including mass media and self-destructive people. she wrote that you didn't have to be an alcoholic to be a good writer or an addict to paint well. that was kind of a big thing to hear for a kid in love with jack kerouac and already drinking before school. the one thing that most resonated, though, was julia's firm advice towards people she called crazymakers: limit your exposure to them, no matter who they are, and protect yourself. don't be one and don't date one and don't be close to one.

fall 2009, new york city:

i never finished julia's book. i never made it beyond the first few chapters even. i adopted some of her methods for remaining creative (limiting exposure to media among them), tried others and neglected them, and eventually came to terms with the realization that mona was right. the two strains of thinking: express yourself and protect yourself from crazy became my main concern. roughly 8-10 years after that thinking fully crystallized im still forced to check the impulse to self-destruct, to surround myself with people who are brilliant and burning and beautiful but crazy in mammoth proportions. the people i now deal with are different and on the margins, true, but not in a crazymaking way...in fact, if we enlarge our definition of health to include the kind of freewheeling expressiveness of mona, they're actually quite healthy. which is a new concept, in some ways.

last night i sat at a bar with ryan on the upper east side. i drank a vodka gimlet, the incomplete mix of gin and lime juice creating swirls against each other in a martini glass. i became aware of the way ryan's watch band pressed against his wrist, smooth and flat, his arms stretched along the booth. it wasn't meant to be a negotiation, and yet at the end of the night i had a notebook filled with triggers, and a numerical system a la tom ridge designed to indicate the importance of any event. why? because we've been so conditioned to react, rather than respond (as my colleague michael recently wrote), that we merely get in our own way of communicating, get lost in the sauce of the thing, and end up simmering away in our own self-imposed oblivion.

mapping out a process for managing emotion in a relationship is so deliberate it seems crazy, it's so far outside anything i've ever known, and for awhile i was put off by our own absurdity, but then the safety of the thing took hold, and slowly the old fears of crisis began to abate. this was the kind of healthy mona would promote, this was the kind of healthy my similarly inclined yankee hippie shrink would encourage, and this, in the end, is the person i've become. crisis is an addiction and my challenge now is to confront the smaller ones, that still shoot adrenaline into bloodstream, with some degree of grace, if grace involves a pencil and notebook in a sad upper east side irish bar, which sometimes it does. this has been a bloody awful year, but sitting on the m15 bus this morning, watching the rain hit the pavement and streak across the windows, i kind of got the feeling im getting somewhere. or, well, at least im not throwing china off a porch, regressing. somewhere i hope mona is smiling.

working, playing, breathing change

the other day dan invited me to a holiday party. "it's open to people of all faiths or no faith," he said. i gave him the look brendan m calls the hairy eyeball: "no faith? really? isn't that a strange way to say someone lives outside a faith tradition? i think i have a lot of faith. you gotta have faith to do this work." he smiled at me. "right."

it got me thinking. i've written in the past about being allergic to religion. my adversarial attitude towards organized religion is well-documented. but maybe, perhaps, i haven't spent enough time defining what i actually believe. as is often the case, it takes outside prompting for me to do this work, but here we go, in four paragraphs or less. pencils ready? go.

i believe in change. i believe that almost all suffering in our world is a result of violence: economic, emotional, domestic, military, political, etc. i believe that every time we use violence, loosely defined as any act intended to subordinate or harm, we're perpetuating a systemic behavior that fails to meet our collective expectations for life on earth. i say collective because all those faith communities look at this behavior quite closely. i believe that changing this behavior is possible, literally one person at a time. and yes, i believe that this work will require generations to succeed. (exhibit a, rachel as vanna for the left.)

i believe creating cultures of love is essential to altering behavior. what does a culture of love look like? it starts with individual self-awareness and spreads outward. how are you impacting the world? what are you doing to cause and alleviate suffering? what cycles are you participating in? all these questions and a hundred thousand more, each reaching into the core of who we are and how we behave, each with potential to undo decades (centuries?) of harmful conditioning. it's all about getting to be a person who can give and receive love, which is a lot harder than it sounds. getting to that place means becoming compassionate, and with compassion comes empathy, which may very well be the single most important characteristic we have to develop. a culture of love is one that not only allows but empowers this self-work, that supports that work in others, that is a safe place to try to change who we are and the world we're in. (exhibit b, we're working on it.)

personal transformative change radiates out, creating more effective and loving communities, and draws people to us. to build a movement we have to draw people in and we can only do that by becoming a refuge from the violence that defines the world. it's a little unfair, because in the words of rec cofounder ryan b we have to ride the bike while we're still building it. we have to fix ourselves so we can work with each other, and while we're doing the fixing we have to work with each other anyway, because all too often the change we seek is immediate: climate change won't wait generations, we have to address it now. (exhibit c, michelle's ability to be a whole person resonates with a wide audience, her personal is political in a very big way.)

what else do i believe? i believe that life is precious, the earth is a rare and wondrous thing, and that the only way we can all actually enjoy it is through collective liberation. i believe we've been conditioned to expect too much and must now scale back what we want in order to be happy because the earth simply cannot give as much as advertisers have promised. i believe that to honor ourselves and each other is also to honor our resources, not just the earth but animals too, and i look for cultures that support that belief. for me, honoring animals means not eating them. (exhibit d, i would never eat wendy.) i believe that my faith in the basic good of people and planet, and the opportunity for change, is just as strong and important as someone else's faith in a buddha. pencils down.

it is only in the last year that i've come to recognize my organizing work is part of my spiritual practice, and that the way that i invest and engage with the world is just as valid as that of a person of faith. mine looks different: playing with a hula hoop, for example, or lying in the grass watching the north river, or standing in front of a bunch of kids asking them to define their values, but it is all the same thing. it's all in service of the same goal, a holistic approach that values breaks and play as much as the daily work because they make the work sustainable. if it feels a little nebulous that's because the ideas aren't fully formed yet, at least not well enough to easily articulate, but it's getting easier. i just need more hours on that hula hoop and then ill have it all figured out.