Savannah Lee

Sort of.

When Child was little, she used to watch Arthur, the animated show about the serious and bespectacled young aardvark making his way in the world.

Arthur had a holiday show which taught its young viewers all the different ways that people celebrated in the dark time of the year. The Brain held down Kwanzaa duties, Francine did Hanukkah, Arthur represented for Christmas...

...and Buster, the asthmatic gourmand who upset the upstanding by visiting a household with two moms on his spinoff show, stood up for the "I don't even care enough to be considered secular" crowd.

Buster is my patron non-saint.

He and his mom did Christmas by eating pancakes, snuggling in a cozy chair, and just *being.* It was their special day together. It was an oasis of calm and humanness. It was personal and individual. It was a deep breath. I loved it.

That's all I want any holiday to be. A day or two (or five) when things slow down. When families gather to blow an afternoon playing "Rock Band" and then take a nap. I tend to break this rule myself, continuing to pound the keyboard like a madman, but I do drop in on the relaxation every now and then to sing "Dani California" as softly as possible and still have the mike pick me up. (I am valued as "Sleepyhead and the Marshmallows'" singer, Signe from Stockholm, because I stay on pitch. This does not, however, mean that I am actually listenable, so I try to keep it down.)

#

You should see how big the icicles have gotten, outside my window. Yesterday there were men on the roof breaking it all up.

My daughter and I are talking to each other right now by writing notes on 3x5 cards. This is a family tradition. My dad and I used to do it all the time. I don't know why. We'd be sitting RIGHT NEXT TO EACH OTHER on the train, in the hotel room, in the cabin, in the airport, in our living room, and instead of talking, we'd pass notebooks back and forth to each other. I'd ask him questions about time or God or the truly undiscovered country of his origin, or possibly whether a hamburger and french fries could be wrested from whatever circumstances we had gotten ourselves into this time. (Very often the answer was no.)

I think it started, actually, when I had strep throat during one of our train trips. (God, don't remind me; I can still feel the fire all through my ears.) Somehow it kept going. It turned out to be a good way to manage our simultaneous intensity and introversion. One generation on, still is. If my daughter *talks* to me while I'm working, I get horribly bent out of shape, but if she passes me notes, I'm happy as a clam. We've just had a cheery discussion that we could never have had if she'd spoken out loud.

On an ordinary day, she'd be at school. I'd miss her so.

But I still did it. I still rode the stationary bike.

The bike was wedged between the closets and my boyfriend's model railroad, which he had built across half our bedroom. It was only half-finished that summer, and remained so.

I put the radio on when I rode. It was out of reach so I couldn't distract myself by shopping the dial like I usually did (and still do). When a bad song came on, I would pedal harder to try to make it be over faster.

You know how every station always has one or two songs that they're flogging to death at any moment? That summer, on that station, those two songs were Jewel's "You Were Meant For Me" and Ani DiFranco's "Little Plastic Castle." (Sophie B. Hawkins' "As I Lay Me Down" was the third runner up.) It seems impossible now that there was a time when these delicate, articulate, for-lack-of-a-better-word *literate* songs were ever on the radio. I appreciated them more intellectually than viscerally, but I do miss 'em. As the exertion pushed me ever closer to tipping over, they soothed me.

Which brings me, by the way, to the point I make whenever I get the chance. All that shit about working out lessening anxiety? Uh, no.

I was very fragile that summer, ever-so-silently creeping away from a dark room while the Thing inside was half-asleep. And my half-hour bouts of bike riding always, always, always triggered my panic. Because THE SYMPTOMS WERE THE SAME: racing heart, sweat, hard breathing. I would have to brace myself on the bathroom sink afterwards, sometimes for a good twenty minutes, before I was together enough to get in the shower. The only difference was that, after a ride, my mind was blank instead of fixated on specific terrors. I suppose that was an improvement.

Why did I do it? I still don't know. Because I was alone a lot. Because it was something I was able to focus on, at a time when focusing in general was very hard for me. Because the malleability of my body was so fascinating--I watched myself, day to day, go faster and hold those peaks longer.

Some people's bodies, like my husband's powerful, unbreakable machine, announce themselves for what they are and refuse thereafter to be moved. Mine has, so far, been a chameleon. Starve it and it shrinks; feed it and it waxes (to exactly that degree and no further); ignore it and it softens; push it and it hardens. Just like that. Its posture changes dramatically, too, depending on what I do with it.

(And if you're saying "Well duh, that's what all bodies are like," you need to educate yourself. SOME bodies are like that. By no means all.) (ED: And does it even need saying? All bodies are wondrous and beautiful and perfect the way they are.)

But in another way, *it* is the immovable master and *I* am the chameleon. I've done all those things to it, but not by my own conscious will; I've experienced each phase as coming from *it*. *It* can't handle eating for a decade or two; the breathing and swallowing are too hard. Fine. Then *it* changes its mind and wants a whole pizza; okay, I'm picking up the phone. *It* wants to sit in a chair for a few years, so I do; now *it* is climbing on the bike day after day despite the fact that this invokes its panic signals. Whatever. I'll bring myself back down afterwards.

I think my body and I think we're bottoming to each other.

In the Russian church, they crown each wedding couple as martyrs to each other. Not a top and a bottom, nor a pair of equals, but two mutual sacrifices.

Yeah, I think that's about right.

Sorry I missed yesterday, by the way. There were emergency biopsies and outpatient surgeries in the family. Things are fine now.

Last post, I said:

"In the Russian church, they crown each wedding couple as martyrs to each other. Not a top and a bottom, nor a pair of equals, but two mutual sacrifices."

I need to dig into that a little more.

Notice, for example, how Americans don't really do the mutual sacrifice thing. Not as an ideal.

We also don't do the top/bottom thing, at least not outside the bounds of negotiated alternatives or crypto-kinky religious subcultures. (I'm lookin' at you, evangelicals.)

With those exceptions, Americans are a consciously egalitarian bunch. The degree of our egalitarianism has fluctuated, but for the most part, we like the "pair of equals" designation. It sounds right to us. It's Constitutional, after all--"that all men were created equal," and so on.

We tend to interpret "equal" in light of our other Constitutional biggie, "the pursuit of happiness."

The Russian crowning, though, symbolizes a different *kind* of equality. In a way, quite literally, it means you're equally screwed. (Russians raise pessimism to the level of the sublime.)

Americans don't want to hear that. We want to imagine that our marriages are for *us* and will benefit *us.*

As inheritors of a Puritan legacy, we are certainly willing to hear that this will take work. Nobody can absorb lectures about hard work like an American. We have an endless capacity to sit there and be told that we must WORK! at our relationships and WORK! on our issues and WORK! on our spiritual lives and WORK! on getting/staying in shape or conversely WORK! on accepting our bodies and then WORK! for justice or righteousness, whichever flavor you prefer.

This must mean we're phantasmagorically lazy, on the theory that cultures only lecture themselves about things they *don't* do. (If you pick up a medieval etiquette manual, for example, and it says "When thou eateth, useth thine fork!", you can be pretty sure that they didn't-eth.)

In any case, Americans don't like to feel that we're giving anything up. Generally, I agree with this. I believe in self-actualization.

But the interesting thing about self-actualization is that its meaning is actually wider than we assume. We assume that growth and development mean "upward." Very often they do. But not always, and not in every area. Sometimes growth means "outward" or even "downward." Roots, for example, grow down.

And the branches won't get as high as they can if the roots don't go as deep.

...outside my window. It's not clear anymore.

Maybe it never was.

Memory is like that for me. I'm one of those people who look back and see something entirely different in the rearview than they saw at the time. It's...an interesting feeling.

I listen to Deva Premal sometimes. When I'm tired from unwinding a twisted thread which long ago sank beneath my skin. I haven't found the end of it yet.

Usually we think of betrayal as being committed with some sort of purpose in mind--to gain money, status, a relationship, revenge. There was no such external gain in this case. It was done purely for its own sake, raising it to the level of art. I'm not an artist; I'm an artwork. If I ever have the money, I'm going to have my creator's full name--all its permutations, and there are several--tattooed down my side in thick black ink.

I think Deva is an artwork too. Read her account of going from one impresario to another, one older authority figure with a vision to another. That's not necessarily what she meant to convey in this story, but it's a pattern that very much stands out to my eyes. The stern charismatic father who set her on the spiritual path which was so important to him...her subsequent fascination with Jesus and Osho...her gravitation towards a much older and more experienced man who took an interest in her latent musical ability.

I envy her. Her creators made something beautiful of her.

The ice outside my window's going to melt soon.

Shut up about computer games! Shut up about the radio! Shut up about lunch! Shut up about socks! Shut up about the garbage can! Shut up about the post office! Shut up, telephone!

I want to sit here, with my child, each of us doing our own thing, surrounded by very loud music with absolutely no redeeming social value (Def Leppard happens to be doing the honors right now), and go down the dark stairs to the place of echoes.

That's not where I "write" write from, by the way. That's more like, I wake up in the middle of the night and see people doing things in my head. Sometimes it's just a single image. If they keep going, though, I drag out of bed and start catching up on the keyboard. Yeah, "writing" writing is almost more like stenography. I have some strong-willed shades in my brain. I have some stubborn images and feelings.

But I never do know where they're going to take me. If anywhere at all.

Nobody ever seems to talk about this, but creativity involves tremendous waste. The criminally underrated Disney movie "Meet the Robinsons" gets at this, actually. In that movie, the experiments that don't work vastly outnumber the ones that do. The family, a bunch of inventors, giddily celebrates each failure a member achieves. Failures, they explain, are SO much more important than successes. It's true.

I have so many stories that just die before I can finish them...like orphans in a crowded ward, they fail to thrive. I have stories that get done, but aren't right, and I can't seem to fix it. I have so many thoughts that I just hammer at and hammer at and hammer at but can't get right. I have an equal number that I toss off in full confidence, only to revisit them and realize that they do not, in fact, necessarily say what I thought they said when I heard them in my mind. (It's extra fun when they're on the blog.)

With all that, I might as well just clunk my head against the wall eight to ten hours a day. Folks like us have dirty little masochistic streak which ain't so little. But we don't need a smokin' top or even a personal trainer (so don't try). We've got ourselves.

Shut up, self. Shut up, self. Shut up, self. I'm trying to blog.

Guess what? I've never supported myself. Ever. I've been a grad student/part-timer, a mother, and a mother/part-timer, but never a fully self-supporting entity.

I've never lived on my own either. I went from my father's house (well technically my mother's) to my husband's, although he did a few laps as my boyfriend before we formalized things.

I do not consider myself a homemaker, due to the fact that that word conjures images of picking stuff up *off* the floor as opposed to throwing it down *on* the floor. Which is what I actually do. (I leave stuff on counters too. Before throwing it away for me, my husband will occasionally pick up the latest empty frozen dinner box, torn-off film cover, semi-used paper towel, and fun-size candy wrappers and solemnly tell me, "This is trash. Trash goes in the garbage can. Right over here. See?" He will helpfully place the trash in the can so I can see how it's done. I will sincerely thank him for his time and effort, then not change.)

So anyhow, I do not consider myself a homemaker. What I consider myself...

Is a flat-out, balls-to-the-wall (okay, ovaries-to-the-stomach-lining) dependent.

That is a highly ambivalent thing to be in this country at this time.

It has not, however, damaged my core, nor dampened my feminism.

It has given me a different perspective.

The feminist movement has attacked the problem of women's low status by attacking their dependency. On the face of it, this is perfectly logical. Men go out and work, which earns them money, which gives them power. Let's have the ladies do the same!

As a practical strategy, this is unassailable. Where it shades into a theoretical underpinning, however, we run into trouble. "I work/earn, therefore I am" is a shaky philosophy. It suggests that personal value and social standing depend on paychecks.

First of all, that's odious.

Second of all, it leads to the really absurd situation where one woman hands off her baby to another woman who will do the same job as the mom would have, only for money. Does this make sense? Seriously, why would you pay someone--often a huge amount of money--to do a job that you could do yourself? I know there are reasons, but I'm going for the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt here. I want you to pull back, change your angle, and see the bizarreness of child care. And its kicker: the hired caregiver will in turn hand *her* baby off to *another* woman, and on and on and on until "it's turtles all the way down," as the lady in the urban legend said. Each woman handing their own child to another so they can take care of someone else's.

All because everyone has this big flapping horror of being a dependent.

Now with the way things are in this country these days, that's actually pretty understandable. Eudora Welty once said "A sheltered life is a daring life." She was right.

But any way of living as a woman is daring, whether we want it to be or not. Men's choices empower them; ours trap us.

So let's ask the obvious question: what happens when men become dependents?

Because sometimes they do.

As inconceivable as this is in the United States, countries with strong social contracts/safety nets/etcetera do...or at least, before the Awful 80s, did...make it possible for individuals to live without working *or* being partnered to someone who's working.

I know, I know. Take a minute. Breathe.

We have an artifact of this exotic world which, although not terribly listenable, is readily available: the song "Wham!Rap 86." It encourages men, specifically, to go on dole if they're anything less than thrilled with their jobs: "Do you enjoy what you do? If not, just stop!"

There is a definite loss of status with this choice, as evidenced in the defensive line, "I am a man/job or no job, you can't tell me that I'm not." But that defense is also an offense. Look at the presumptuousness of it: the singer simply declares his truth and dares anyone to disagree. This is the red-blooded, masculine approach. He backs it up with Classical philosophy: "I take pleasure in leisure/I believe in joy." (That would be Epicureanism.)

So we see that when men throw off the shackles of glibertarian Calvinist productivity, life turns into an "On the Road" style celebration of itself. Yes--surprise-surprise, we discover that the choice is liberating.

Frankly, I think welfare was invented for men. Women can go attach themselves to a partner, becoming his cherished companion or his slave or both, depending; men, of course, deserve better, and arrange for themselves to receive checks from the state.

American men have really missed the boat on this. Guys!! Come on!! Of course, in order for the whole thing to be fair, women would have to be able to get checks too, which is where things break down. What? Pay a woman just for existing? On her own? For herself? So she can spend the whole day farting around with her toddler that she probably went and had without even decently binding herself into wedlock? We can't have THAT.

#

Even if I could have had one of those magic paychecks, though, my choices would have been the same. My love for my partner guided me; I led myself by my feelings. (Something that my mother did only once, and lived to regret it.) Which is exactly why I've ended up living this quietly oppositional life. It's not the what. It's the how.

I guess that's what I want to make room for. The different, sometimes wildly different, ways that people approach their lives; the often strange and beautiful kingdoms inside them, the internal logic that drives many to live what for lack of a better word would have to be called surrendering, submissive (whether to fate or to some secret unfolding in the self), passive, INWARD, I-saw-it-all-in-my-cup-of-tea (Proust) lives.

Feminism tries, bravely, to fight the dominance paradigm of our cockroach-and-rhesus-macaque society, but inevitably ends up taking on its colors--"We can be CEOs too!" That's valuable and necessary but limited. I prefer the strain of feminist thought, and it does exist, that says, with Delirium, "There are other paths outside this garden."

I want to go someplace beyond even equality--where human value is so unquestioned that we don't need it. And where value is measured not by assertiveness, which does not even come naturally to a significant chunk of humanity, but by...I don't know. By whether you've seen your life in a cup of tea.

Whether you've seen the butterflies on their migration. And your delicately-beating eyelids have become the memory of their wings.

The quality of your feeling.

Can we measure that? For a change?

Okay, guys...I got something due Thursday, another thing due next week, *and* I just got two more assignments which are due in 14 days. Much as I would love to, I can't take the hour or two I need to finish the post I started for today. If I can fit it in later, I will; otherwise, see ya tomorrow.

And yes, that title *is* a reference to Bon Jovi's "Blaze of Glory" ("shot...DOWNNNN, in a BLAZE a glory...") which for some reason has mounted my head and will not get off.

At seventeen, I'd never driven *myself* much of anywhere either. But I had most definitely never gotten behind the wheel with a friend ridin' suicide. (Seat, that is.)

I was bringing "Tabitha" to a small gardeny place where one or both of our fathers were performing. I don't remember why she needed a ride from me instead of just coming with her dad, as I had done. Whatever the reason, I left rehearsal halfway through to pick her up from her house.

It was big and white and sprawling; she was small and contained, compact. With a natural athlete's build, although she didn't play any sports. I seem to remember her wearing a tank top and a flowy hippie skirt. Her hair...she'd had it feathered at one point; was it growing out by now? Her hair had always betrayed her desire to fit in at school. (We'd discussed that. She thought it was important. I disagreed.)

Out she came, in any event, and hopped in the car. Off we went.

I don't know what I had expected, driving a friend someplace for the first time, but it turned out she wasn't even nervous. There was no "You do notice that stop sign coming up, right?" Quite the contrary. Amazingly to me, she seemed to think I knew what I was doing. In fact, she assumed I knew what I was doing. To the point where she wasn't even conscious of it. She was too busy telling me girl stuff.

The girl stuff was not, sadly, "mall-and-cute-guy" girl stuff. Instead, it was "parental-divorce-and-exploitative-guy" girl stuff. "This is what guys do," she tutored me. "First they look at your ass, then they look at your tits, then they wonder how you'd be in bed."

Did they really. I wouldn't have known. I went to an all-girl school at this point. Plus, I was depressed. I don't think I had a body during those years. I can't remember feeling it at all, in any way, except when it decided not to breathe. So it had no reaction to her statement--not revulsion, not fear, not arousal. She might as well have been describing Martian moon rituals.

I remember glancing at her while she did, sunken as she was into that seat, totally surrendered to it, and being awed by that portrait of trust all the more profound for how offhand it was.

#

It's been raining here. This is not the kind of place where it ought to rain in January. Even the place where I grew up, which was northern but soft in the winter, didn't see rain in January.

February yes. (And snow in April. Rain in February, snow in April.)

But not January.

I was already worried about this back when I drove Tabitha. It was scarier then, actually, because it was still something largely off in the future. We couldn't picture it. Now we're starting to live it.

Tabitha and I lost touch a good long time ago. Sometimes I almost wonder if it was even real, or if we dreamed each other. It was that kind of friendship, where we wrote stories together and had sleepovers when at 3am we'd decide to do an improv. (Hey, our dads were artsy--this was normal to us.) She lived in that wild and rambling house from another time.

She thought I knew what I was doing in that car. She really did. She just...rode. A passenger.

I'd never had one before.

This is what I saw in my head when I was half-asleep this morning. You're getting it pretty much as it comes to me.

#

Malkin made sure no one was looking, then checked her teeth in the glass on Marty's diploma. (Why he put it up in his dining room she would never understand.) Those spinach-stuffed mushrooms were great, but perilous. It...

"Mary? Mary Brandt?"

Here was yet another person she didn't know. Marty had promised it would be just friends. Now she knew what that was worth. "You've got to finally come to one of my potlucks! It'll be great, come on, it's real relaxed, it's just friends." Yeah, his friends.

Perhaps that was what he thought she'd meant.

"Mary? You are Mary Brandt, aren't you?"

"Guilty." She wiped her hand against her side, where with any luck the stranger wouldn't see, then went in for the shake.

Hm. Oddly hard for a woman. It actually hurt. Malkin forced herself to pull the nervous blur into focus. The stranger coalesced into a big-shouldered red blazer, a big spreading skirt, and big spreading hair, graying. Malkin saw eyes that were warningly bright.

"...Hi," she said.

"So I understand you're Marty's secretary."

"Ah! I'm glad you don't use the odious 'administrative assistant.' Yes, I am Marty's secretary," Malkin said.

"I have two," said the woman. "Secretaries."

"Good for you. Gosh, look at the time."

"And you are one."

Malkin paused. "Um...yeah?"

"I," explained the woman, "am a professional. You aren't."

This was what she'd most feared--that she'd go back into this world, Marty's world, and someone would humiliate her. Marty was tone-deaf about that, he didn't understand. To him, her obviously shared background with him meant she still belonged. She knew better. She, after all, was the one who 'got away.' The one who shoulda-coulda. The downward mobility. The, um, yeah, failure. Everyone knew it. Now finally someone had said it.

Yet it somehow didn't turn out like she'd expected. She didn't redden or cry or run away. (She would have hit somebody anyhow, if she'd tried; the house was packed.) Instead, everything became silent, like in a dream, and her body started to swim like she'd turned into a ghost.

She heard herself say "That's right; you couldn't pay me enough to be one of those assholes." It sounded like she was smiling.

Bright-Eyes looked her up and down slack-jawed. Malkin had the sense that she'd up-ended the woman completely, but was unable to process it or feel anything around it. Or at all. She just watched.

Bright-Eyes noticed that, noticed Malkin watching, and drew back into the big shoulders of her jacket. She seemed confused, even almost frightened. A flash of deep hatred came into her eyes, and she turned and skulked away.

Noise crashed back in on Malkin. The faces of the ones who filled Bright-Eyes' space in the room leered past her. She felt her heart racing. Now the flushing, now the tears, now everything she feared. She dove straight for Marty's back door out the kitchen.

That, of course, was where Brighty had retreated to. Malkin saw her back.

Brighty turned, and seemed to hiss like a snake. "Your son. Dumped my daughter."

So this was Cherie Bower!

But that meant the insult wasn't just pure plutocratic contempt. It was personal! Somehow that made it all better.

For a split-second. Then, worse. Cherie Bower, the mother of the girl her son just, yes, broke up with. Hmmm. Fancy meeting her here. Now who would have done that?

Probably not Marty. But oh, that wife of his...Malkin put that aside. There was no time for Sheila now.

So. Cherie Bower. Well, Malkin certainly never expected the mother of a high school sophomore to be quite so gray.

Whoever had said "you couldn't pay me enough to be one of those assholes" picked that right up inside Malkin's head. "Daughter?" it batted its eyelashes. "You mean your granddaughter, don't you?"

That person, fortunately, was not near the controls right now. Malkin just wiped her eyes and said "I'm sorry."

She wondered how she meant it: cravenly? Humanly? Of course it didn't matter. Brighty was going to see what she wanted to see. Malkin, head down, turned for the door.

"I hate you," followed up Brighty.

Malkin stopped on the doorstep. Wasn't that a bit...Ah yes, of course. She took a second look, but yes, the eyes. She'd seen it, she'd known, she just hadn't known she'd known. "Got someone to drive you home?" she asked.

Brighty started to form the "w" for an indignant "What!?", then crumpled the effort up and threw it away. Malkin knew what that meant. She was at the point where there was no point.

"I will," said Malkin. "I'll drive you home. Okay?"

If Brighty had hated her before, she truly loathed and despised her now. "Why! Why!" she demanded. Why do you cross this line. Why do you mess up our boundaries.

Malkin thought "Because your daughter needs you." She thought "Because I still love my mother, god help me." She thought "Because you're already gray."

She said "Because. I'm a secretary."

Brighty blinked.

"Yes!" smiled Malkin. "Yes, and you're the boss. Remember?"

Brighty squared her shoulders. "I'm the boss," she said.

"You're the boss. C'mon. Let me take you home, boss."

Brighty grandly linked her arm.

She wondered what, if anything, she would tell her boy tomorrow morning.

#

There ya go. Take it for what it is, nothing more. These were the people who visited me this morning.

I will be posting late today. Sorry for the inconvenience.

In other news, I just finished with the galleys for my latest story at Clean Sheets (over-eighteen only please thank you). It'll be up on 1/23.

Later...

I think I'm still depressed, but the problem is that I'm a lot less than I was before, and I kind of miss it.

The mental agony was not particularly fun. But I was used to it. I could hold up. And now that it's more or less gone, I look back on the past, let's see, it really hit me at twelve, so...

I look back on the past twenty-seven years and see an incredibly time-consuming, energy-sapping, perspective-warping battle.

And...that's it.

A battle for nothing. A war with no enemy except myself.

HOW DARE IT BE OVER NOW? What am I going to do with myself? How am I going to adjust? How am I going to make up for lost time? I spent twenty-seven years fighting what might as well have been an addiction, and I didn't even get to have any fun. At least addicts get to have some fun, for a little while. If I have to have a 27-year Lost Weekend, could I go back and have it be lost to smack?

But that would be just another face of the same waste.

I guess what I really want is to go back to the fight, in a way, because the fight is all the meaning you need when you're in it.

Chris Hedges has that book. The book with the ominously beautiful title. He meant it literally but it can be a metaphor too. War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. War is a force that gives us meaning. War is a force that gives us meaning. War is a force that gives us meaning. War is a force that gives us meaning. War is a force that gives us meaning. War. Is a force. That gives us. Meaning.

But it itself, of course, has none. It can't.

So when it's gone, or when we look around, or if it is our fate to be 'collateral,' then all we have is waste.

Like the Bush years. Why did they have to happen? Why? Janis said "I'd trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday." I'd take one in '99 or so.

Yesterday, Juan Cole wrote, "I am often struck by how clueless the American public is to the vast destruction we have wrought on Iraq and its people...How many orphans have we created? How many widows? How many people who weep and cry every night while falling asleep on straw mats?"

We are just as clueless about the much subtler, and very different, but parallel destruction we have wrought on ourselves. How many addicts can't find a treatment bed? How many poor and, these days, middle class people have to drop out of college? How many uninsured live in fear? How many women have to leave their babies when they don't want to? How many babies have to be left when they don't want to? And weep and cry, tiny daily casualties that no one sees? None of this was necessary. None of it had to be this way.

How many stolen journeys.

I have an unavoidable monster of a day today. I will see you this evening.

I will say this: I just ate a breakfast sandwich and a frozen drink from a major chain (I'm not going to be eating lunch, so I have to be sure I can make it through)...and that is a *bad* idea if your usual breakfast is, like, a bowl of cereal and half a grapefruit.

Seasick.

You'd think it would be a relief.

It isn't.

Suicidality of patients on antidepressants spikes because, one theory goes, they realize how they could have felt all along and they can't stand it. Ursula K. LeGuin writes, of a long-suffering character, "She wept in pain, because she was free." Heavy on her mind are "the long years spent in bondage to a useless evil." She didn't see it that way before--as useless, that is--because she couldn't. Her liberation *is* in a sense her imprisonment--her realization of the true nature of her prior existence.

With which she will always be stuck.

I don't think most depressed people feel that their time or lives are being wasted by the struggle. As soon as the struggle recedes, however, that's exactly what many feel. They project their new consciousness back into their past and see their lives very differently from that vantage point. They see possibilities to which they were completely blind back when they were just holding themselves together. Certainly that's true of me.

And this is not the usual "If only I'd known then what I know now" stuff. Many depressed people are in a kind of miasma, there's static, things seem very complicated. To the point where it can get totally ridiculous. I went through college absolutely starving--like I'd wake up at night seriously hungry--because I literally could not figure out the concept of keeping a candy bar by my bed. Even when I did, I wouldn't eat it half the time, because if I did, then I wouldn't have it later when I might need it more.

You're laughing, but those ruminations made perfect sense to me back then. I experienced those objections--"but I might need it more later, but it's only an hour til class, but if I eat now then I won't be hungry at the 'right' time"--as insurmountable obstacles. Invisible but very real walls around me. If you had told me "But Savannah...you can just...GET ANOTHER CANDY BAR," I would of course have understood you intellectually and said "I know." But inside, it would have been like, "But that would mean I'd have to go to the store." And I was not always able to do that, you see, because, as Anne Lamott would put it, I was not always well enough. So things were complicated. Which is what I was saying.

With food, it was just an annoyance. With other things, not so much.

Oh well. What are you going to do?

Besides, I'd rather have that than the reverse. An ideal, golden past from which one is now cut off. A wasted present.

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The griefstricken Ursula K. LeGuin character is a girl named Tenar. Much later in her tale, cursed with fear by evil wizards, she reaches back to the dark priestess that she used to be and turns the curse on them. Sadly, however, it doesn't stick; her "useless evil" is useful enough now, but she can't or simply doesn't reclaim it sufficiently to give the posturing baddies the shock they deserve. I was always annoyed by that. If her past was strong enough to make her suffer, strong enough almost to kill her when she escaped from it, then it should have been strong enough to save her too.

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So, yesterday's "later" turned out to be a bit later than I thought. Sorry about that. I ended up not getting home until 8:00, at which point I had to make dinner and do mom stuff. Long day.

Take care...

All that wasted time I've been bitching about--only part of it was *bad* waste.

My general mental paralysis, which was not under my control, was a bad thing, but it created an umbrella in which some very good things happened. Not many people, I think, know what it's like to read Genet in an empty laundry room while their underwear chugs around and around on the hamster wheel of the dryer. I used to do that every week.

Not many people know what it's like to do what they love *just* for love, *just* for joy. I used to do that every day. I wrote just to see where it would take me. I wrote what my visitors showed me. They revealed certain moments and aspects of their lives to me, and because I did not ask them for more (as in "Yes, but why are you in a dodgy motel, my darling, waiting for a stranger?"), they trusted me.

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It must be frustrating for characters, you know--never to be taken as they are. Well, they used to be; any older book you pick up which bores the shit out of you is probably one of them. If you find yourself asking, are we going anywhere with this?--that is probably a book where the characters got to have their day.

They are people, you know, and like people, they prefer to feel that they matter for themselves, not for what's going to happen now that their dead father's Vietnam buddy, on whom they nurse a displaced oedipal crush, has come back to town. Which is a problem because their husband is his PTSD therapist. And an affair between a patient and the wife of his therapist would spectacularly wreck everybody's lives anyhow, but especially because one of them is a sniper.

You'd be amazed how touchy characters are about that kind of thing. They certainly don't want you to know about it, because after all, who the hell are you?

It makes perfect sense. If I was the one schtupping my dad's (fictional!) old combat buddy who happened to be my husband's patient, that is not the first thing I would reveal about myself to a new acquaintance. I am fairly sure the same thing is true of you. Why wouldn't it be true of our visitors?

Furthermore, a lot of characters are actually pretty competent at managing that kind of situation. You think a hardened, damaged vet can't do his therapist's wife and then stare the therapist down like nothing happened? Well, if not, then he can just stop going to therapy, and the therapist, being a busy man, will probably just take the next guy on his list. The wife, of course, will not be inclined to press the matter.

What writers have to do these days, and it's actually kind of embarrassing and stupid, is figure out ways to disable their people's competence so that things can happen. The vet has to keep showing up for therapy despite his shaking hands. Or the husband for some reason doesn't want to let the vet just disappear and pursues him like a demented angel of mercy. There are people who do that kind of thing--overly helpful, meddlesome types. Is that who the woman married, though? Well...it is now.

Notice that as the situation gets more interesting, more story-like (the vet standing outside the office door, still able to smell Mrs. Therapist on those trembling fingers--oh, and his memories of when she didn't smell that way at all, but of baby powder and juice--god what a perv he is, screwing a woman he knew when she was two)...as this happens, the people are getting both less competent *and* less real.

This is what could be called the Sopranos Dilemma. To wit: A wiseguy in therapy? Uh...sure. Yeah. A guy in the mafia is going to pay money to sit and tell a woman his doubts. Can you even COUNT the red flags in that sentence?

Don't get me wrong. It's fantastic, as both entertainment and metaphor. But "the lambs are screaming, Clarice." The night visitors are crying. Men who sleep with their therapist's wives that they knew as a two-year-old don't stand outside the door with shaking hands, smelling her on their skin and feeling two kinds of damned. They just don't. If they do anything at all, they think, "Heh-heh. And you don't even know it, you chump." Or, "It's not my fault. She made me."

The kind of man who would have an interesting, worthwhile reaction to that sort of situation is the kind of man who wouldn't be in it. Or not in that way. That's how life is.

Life takes us away from story. Life is the first thing a writer has to get rid of. But you need it, too; you need to learn to steal from it, so you can cover your necessary distortions with the proper scent.

But this hurts. This hurts your visitors. It does.

Think about it. If you or I were doing the combat buddy who was also our husband's patient...is that how we'd handle it? So badly that our lover would be laughing at our husband like that?

More importantly, is that who we'd think we were? Is that what we would think was the most essential and interesting part of ourselves? Is that the story we would tell ourselves about ourselves?

Almost certainly not. We'd see ourselves as the mother of a cowlicky soccer player with a heartbreaking smile; we'd locate our truth in the semester we spent in Senegal that reoriented our center of gravity. Made us less American, in a good way. Or that summer we spent at Jenny's bedside while she slipped away.

But guess what. Those things don't matter. Because you know why? Those things have no potential to put you (possibly a hostage, possibly vainly pleading for sanity, possibly both) and the unhinged sniper on top of the town hall at midnight and then your husband walks right the hell into the line of fire and yells "ENOUGH!" (You know, or the reverse--your husband is up there trying to reason with the man, and you all of a sudden feel your old berserker of a father in you and you walk right out in front of Snake's gun.)

Yeah, that's all a storyteller would care about.

And you know what a really evil one would do? She'd take your sister Jenny's death (oh did you know Jenny was your sister?) She'd take your sister Jenny's death and move it up so it was happening at the same time as this affair. And she'd use your cowlicky soccer-playing kid with the bright eyes, and she'd use your memories of that hot flyswatting place, the one that made your heart bigger and sadder, she would use those things--she would use you--to make us care about the fact that you just walked in front of your lover's gun. Isn't that great?

Everything about you, in other words, everything you just offered me in order to prove that you were more than this affair, that this affair was not you...would become sublimated to the affair. Everything would be all about the moment you walked in front of the gun.

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Now if you really did walk in front of your lover's gun at midnight, if it went that far, you'd need to talk about it, wouldn't you. Yes, at some point, in some way. You might let someone in to that moment. But: it would be a person of your choosing. In your own time. In your own way. And on your own terms.

That's what our visitors want. Our true ones, the ones who come to us from the real and scary inner darkness like wild deer. They want to show their wounds in their own time. In their own way.

And for themselves, not for us.

Or the freaky things that live at crush-depth in the ocean. Things that are lumpy and flattened and never evolved any eyes.

I can't decide what to write about today.

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Maybe something about Christmas. Putting the tree up early to make sure it won't fall over again this year. Baking cookies.

Or the dreams, nervous and haunted, which come that night. The things that live at crush-depth of our hearts. Things that are lumpy and never evolved any eyes.

I can't decide what to write about today.

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There are entire television genres about the cookies and the nightmares. Nineteenth-century novels too. Massive oeuvres which strive to turn the two faces so they can see each other.

But that means pulling them apart.

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I can't decide what to write about today.

I thought this essay by Kate Sheppard in the American Prospect, complaining about quirky characters in independent film, was worth reading.

Sheppard asserts that independent films are acting from Tolstoy's dictum that "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

"The problem is," she declares, "Tolstoy was wrong. The central components of unhappiness in [the indie titles she mentions]--insecurity, loss, realization of one's own mortality, failing to live up to expectations--are the very essence of what moviegoers identify with. ...but rather than exploring those similarities...[indie filmmakers] create characters with odd personality traits and the false pretense that everyone's struggles are inherently unique."

I both agree with and disagree with Sheppard.

Disagreement first: I don't think Tolstoy meant what she thinks he did. After all, Sheppard is right--everyone faces insecurity, loss, mortality, disappointment, failure, etcetera. That's just a given. The happiest, most fulfilled life still has all those elements. The happiest, most fulfilled family does too.

But, and I think this is what Tolstoy meant, the question is how a given family deals with it.

There are some families which deal with it graciously and humanly. Even with a touch of humor.

And then there are the families which deal with it by screaming at each other about the meatloaf. Or pretending to help each other while they tear each other down. Or scapegoating one or more of their members. Or all of the above. Or all of the above plus snorting heroin, stealing their kids' lunch money, and lying to them about it.

These are the families that indie filmmakers are going for. I would argue that when Sheppard criticizes the self-absorbed, self-important, shallow behavior of protagonists Jon and Wendy Savage in THE SAVAGES, she's missing the point. The point of the film is, "Look at how these idiots can't even deal with an aging parent."

After all...again...how much story is there in a pair of siblings bravely, imperfectly, but honestly facing the aging of a parent? These days, I mean. In 1840, you would have been good to go. Even in 1940, people would have stayed with you. Now...now you need to add a lot of value to that scenario.

Plus...Sheppard appears not to realize that characters like Juno, Jon and Wendy Savage, and the Little Miss Sunshine clan are NOT quirky to a whole lot of us. I have a couple of relatives where, if I sent them over to Ms. Sheppard, she would soon embrace indie film as a clear-eyed, indeed understated, source of PBS-style documentary truth. A lot of us do actually have people in our families who cannot be taken to the grocery store because the sheer number of tomatoes on display will make them start ranting about infanticide in rural East Africa. And that's if you're lucky.

On the other hand.

It is undeniable that there is something horribly self-conscious about a lot of indie film. I think, quite honestly, it's because filmmakers don't have enough room to maneuver in dealing with this subject. There are certain shades of drama that just aren't open to them.

It's a shame, for example, that the unbearable Eugene O'Neill overdid the angsty approach back in his day. I am convinced that his shadow hangs over all playwrights and filmmakers who want to deal with family topics. "Get away!" he snarls, like one of his own demented characters. "Me and Ibsen got the family melodrama locked up for at least a hundred years yet! Also Strindberg. So go away! It's suspenders for you!" (Sheppard complains, in THE SAVAGES, about the pointlessness of Wendy Savage removing her father's suspenders on aesthetic grounds, which causes his pants to fall down later on when he tries to stand up. This, demands Sheppard with justified annoyance, is what we're supposed to take away from family drama these days?)

So yeah. Desire Under The Elms, god help us, and its horrible ilk, still hold sway over American family drama of the stage and screen. (Yes, I know, O'Neill is supposed to be a genius. I'm not buying it. I really find him dishonest and manipulative. I direly wish that Heavy Metal Drama could have found a better scribe. YMMV.)

And we are left with suspenders.

Nearly eight years ago, Andrew Sullivan wrote this piece about testosterone in the New York Times Magazine.

I read it at the time and it's been with me ever since, nagging at me now and then. His story is striking: having been diagnosed with low testosterone due to HIV, he was prescribed artificial testosterone and experienced unbelievable effects.

"My appetite in every sense of that word expanded beyond measure. Going from napping two hours a day, I now rarely sleep in the daytime and have enough energy for daily workouts and a hefty work schedule...I feel...more persistent, more alive."

And that's to say nothing of the stupid fight he almost got into one day after giving himself his shot.

Here's what interests me. After stating he means no disrespect to women, he says he's glad "to feel things no woman will ever feel to the degree that I feel them, to experience the world in a way no woman ever has."

Women used to be thought of as lesser, defective versions of men, and there's a hint of that here in the idea that he feels MORE than we do ("no woman will ever feel [the things I feel] to the degree that I feel them").

Of course there's a truth in that. The explosion of energy he experienced after boosting his T-level is certainly amazing to behold. The women who match his punishing schedule, and there are many, tend to do it because we have no choice, and we tend to look (and feel) awfully tired while doing it.

But we do it anyway. In fact, there's a subversive point here: not how awesome men are with their great coursing tides of testosterone giving them endless power and energy, but how awesome women are to be doing as much as we do without it.

What amuses me, though, is that Sullivan doesn't seem to see that there's another side to this. He says he "experiences the world in a way no woman ever has." This implies that his own experience encompasses ours but goes beyond it. I'd say that's almost certainly not true. Women's testosterone, as Sullivan points out, is WAY lower than men's. So much lower, I'd argue, that we're talking about a whole different universe. Plus, we've got way more estrogen.

Women, therefore, experience the world in a way no man ever has. Most men would probably not leap at the chance to discover life on the other side. But it is a world of its own, not a paler, deficient version of theirs.

I remember once when I was a very young girl, puzzling over the profound bizarreness that my father was--you know--a man. How, I wanted to know, did he stand it? (I liked him, you see, so I felt bad that the tragedy of not-femalehood had been visited upon him.)

He informed me that he didn't know anything different from being male, so it was fine and he was happy that way.

I felt terribly sorry for him.

Who is Eric G. Wilson? I want to have his babies. Of course, that can never happen, but that's great--it's a source of melancholy! A source of "luminous gloom [and] terrible beauty." Of "frantic poems."

Eric G. Wilson is an English professor at Wake Forest University, as it turns out. If he's partnered--sorry, Mr. or Mrs. Partner, for couching my admiration in such terms. But I'm sure you of all people can understand my joy at finding his eloquent defense of melancholy.

Basically, Wilson is creeped out by the American pursuit of happiness. Not only that, he's creeped out by the stunningly American degree of success we appear to have achieved in said pursuit.

"How," he wants to know, "can so many people be happy in the midst of all the problems that beset our globe--not only the collective and apocalyptic ills, but also...those money issues and marital spats, those stifling vocations and lonely dawns?" (He keeps breaking into poetry. I love it.) "I...am concerned," he continues, "that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic..."

Americans do desire only happiness. I once read a pointed indictment of our culture in that regard. I wish I could remember who it was by. I think it was in a review of a Japanese film about a ghost. It said (I'm paraphrasing): "We have the ugly habit of referring to people who have been disappointed by life as 'losers.'"

The dirty little secret, of course, is that we're all losers, and none more so than the golden girls and boys who strive the hardest to hide it. According to the Medieval Etiquette Manual Rule (what we collectively tell ourselves to do is what we don't, and what we tell ourselves to be is what we aren't), all our books and articles about how to be happy therefore reveal that we are totally miserable. So Mr. Wilson can relax.

Except for the nagging problem that we feel we shouldn't be miserable.

Wilson himself is not immune to that pressure. In a sidebar, he confesses, "American happiness is a temptation, one to which I've succumbed on several occasions." As if at some AA meeting for the happiness-addicted, he lays bare his efforts "to get out of my dark house and away from my somber books and participate in the world of meaningful action."

Except for managing to snag that university English professorship, however, Wilson's efforts did not stick, leaving him, like a crash-dieter, fatter (sadder) than he was before: "The road to hell is paved with happy plans."

But if your desire is to embrace melancholy, then that road to hell is what you want, isn't it? You pretty much can't lose.

Wilson makes the standard disclaimer: "I'm not romanticizing clinical depression." To him, depression is marked by apathy; to me, it's marked instead by an inability to fight your way clear of horrible confusion, constriction, inner fragmentation, exhaustion, incoherence, and inhibition in every sense of the word. You can't show up for yourself the way you most need to--and you can't, with Keats, "glut thy sorrow on a morning rose" (Wilson talks about Keats a lot). It wouldn't make sense. Your sorrow is of a totally different kind.

You can, however, read a quote from a Roman philosopher about forgetting "the brief and troubled dream of life" with a yearning that most people reserve for that fantasy of Alan Rickman de--

Excuse me. Through some hideous rent in the universe, Lee Ann Womack's "I Hope You Dance" has come on my radio. No offense whatsoever to Ms. Womack, but her song, which many love and if you're one of them more power to you, represents everything Wilson is complaining about and generally threatens my survival and I have to make it go away.

--Okay, I found Metallica's wondrous cover of "Am I Evil" elsewhere on the dial. I can now continue.

So: You can read a quote from a Roman philosopher about forgetting "the brief and troubled dream of life" with desperate joy. (Speaking of Metallica, "Fade to Black" makes good listening at those times too, for entirely the wrong reasons.)

If and when you crawl past that, though, and realize what it's cost you--for no reason at all, for no purpose, to no greater understanding whatever--THEN you are ready for Wilsonian melancholy. THEN you are ready for Keats. THEN you are ready to "glut your sorrows on a rose" (because the rose is lovely, and must die).

And weep with sad joy over babies. When my girl was 2 months old and had to get a shot, the nurse looked at her and said "Poor little thing, you don't know what's comin', do ya?" Exactly.

Yes, we should all get healthy enough to feel this beautiful pain.

The severe cold snap coming down from the north is hitting us today. Zero would be a balmy blessing, and tonight it's going to be well into the double-digits below. People are being warned to stay indoors and delay all nonessential travel.

The last time it was like this, I got chilblains. About '93 or so, maybe '92. It was -20 outside, with a wind chill of -40, and I had to stand around waiting for buses. I bundled myself up just fine in every way--

--except for my feet. I wore regular thin-soled shoes and regular socks. That was what you'd call a tiny little oversight on my part.

After a day or so, I began to notice that the toes on my right foot were throbbing. It was really odd. And quite painful. I took me to the doctor, and she was stumped too, but since a mini-epidemic had broken out due to the conditions, an impromptu consultation with a colleague brought about the diagnosis.

I had to elevate my foot and take a bunch of medicines plus ibuprofen. For a week. Not a fun time.

The 'blains are acting up today, I can tell you. It's much milder, but I can feel it. (Can't take a hot shower without some swelling either. It's a vascular constriction thing, so any time there's a strong change in temperature around my foot, the afflicted toes freak out.)

Seems like weather takes it out of us one way or another. Those who flee the snow have to deal with snakes, scorpions, tropical diseases and poisonous spiders, while those who flee the germs and critters rack up chilblains, broken bones from falls on the ice (Louisa, my husband), and horrific nights driving through blizzards. (I hope there's a god so I can kick his ass someday over the one I had to drive through this December.)

My mom, with her typical luck, managed to grow up in a place which had the worst of both worlds: monster winters AND poisonous snakes. Each bit her in its own way. Winter stabbed her nose with her own breath and made it bleed every day on her way to school, while summer saved up for one big wallop from a rattlesnake. Yes, my mom survived a poisonous snakebite--thanks to quick action on the part of my granddad, who was right there when it happened and immediately cut the bite open and started sucking out the venom. (It was not, as you might imagine, my mom's favorite day.)

I guess that says something about her. That she was bitten by both faces of the earth. And lived to tell.

Maybe I'll cry, but not today. Maybe I'll beg for more time, but not today. Maybe I'll walk away, but not today. Maybe I'll ask why I'm trying, but not today. Maybe I'll crack for good, but not today.

These are possibilities from the past. They're future shadows. Things that may come again.

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I spent so much of my life in the back seat of that car. The wind roared around it on the highway. Carrying me forward under someone else's hand. My world had nothing to do with that speed or that direction. It was a dream inside the dreamer's head as the dreamer moved through time. Time was the air, or maybe the engine; one part or another of the oppositional duet of those two forces.

My friend Louisa used to spend a lot of time in transit too. For different reasons. But both of us lacked a significant degree of control over our own placement and hence our own lives.

We weren't actually friends during those years--we couldn't have been. Even if we'd lived in the same town, we would have had too many cars to ride in.

But they were happy times, you know. I drew, I read, I made up worlds. Never asking where my own was going.

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It took me a long time to understand what I missed. Out there, and in myself.

Maybe it's for the best.

I could cry. But not today.

He lives under 24-hour police protection, with bars on his windows. In, by the way, a council flat, because he has no money, because you don't get rich in life by (A) invading militant Muslim rallies to issue counter-fatwas to their leaders' faces, (B) confronting the Archbishop of Canterbury during his own sermon and (C) performing a citizens' arrest on Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe.

He is Peter Tatchell, and the inimitable Johann Hari (himself no slouch in the "go into harm's way" department) has an interview with him here which tells his unbelievable story.

I say unbelievable because that is precisely the level of physical and moral courage Tatchell has shown throughout his life: un. be. lievable. He really did disrupt, not just one, but two radical Muslim rallies to criticize its leaders to their faces. He really did do the exact same thing to the Archbishop of Canterbury. He really did open the door of Robert Mugabe's stopped car and risk death at the hands of Mugabe's bodyguards to inform Mugabe that he was under arrest for torture. He's been severely beaten by Russian police. Forget Eric G. Wilson (though I do still like him a lot), I want to absolutely litter the world with Peter Tatchell's progeny in hopes that just one or two of them would inherit their father's backbone and sense of justice.

But I suppose that every time someone is inspired by one of Tatchell's deeds, he has another child.

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Now here's the thing. If you hit any of those links, you know that Peter Tatchell, and Johann Hari too, are gay. Tatchell undertook many of his most dangerous missions, such as confronting the militant preachers in mid-rally, on behalf of gay rights.

Which brings us to questions of masculinity.

On his website, Tatchell has an article about masculinity in which he says that gay men are not very masculine and thank god. The thing is that, by "masculine," Tatchell means only "soccer hooligan." Domineering and stupidly aggressive. And yes, most gay men do give those lovely qualities a wide berth in their journey through life.

But how else can you describe Peter Tatchell's deeds except as staggeringly, literally death-defyingly, masculine? The man puts his life and specifically his body at risk every day in a fight against people who outnumber and outgun him. He does this coolly, calmly, and for the sake of protecting and defending the vulnerable.

That's what Johann Hari does too by the way. Column after column, he takes it to the powerful for the sake of the voiceless, and this has not gone unnoticed. There are websites (which I won't link to) inciting people to kill him.

If this is not masculine, if this is not what we mean by "manliness," then nothing is.

Tatchell and Hari, of course, would be the first to argue that "manliness" per se does not exist; there is only courage. And they're right. But: men with courage are considered manly and masculine (whereas women with courage are usually just called bitches or crazy, but that's another post).

Or at least, men with courage should be considered manly and masculine. But Tatchell's own essay shows that they are not. He himself doesn't even seem aware that he's an exemplar of Three-Musketeers-esque daring, that he has a share in western culture's traditional masculine ideal.

And this is because that ideal has become so crusted over with aggression and posturing and strutting around on flight decks in military costumes.

And thus, deliberately, it excludes gay men. Yes, heavens, Manly Men can't let in a bunch of gentle, cultured creatures who sip tea with upraised pinkies and care about the arts and treat women as equals. Men who wouldn't even get in a drunken fistfight. Men who don't even want to harshly dominate anything. If THEY are allowed to be seen as physically butch, it ruins all the fun! How will the Manly Men stoke their egos if they're forced to acknowledge that this other sort of man is actually just as macho, and in fact more so, than they are? (Taking hits on the soccer field is one thing. Being what you are, when people in this world want to kill you for it, is something else. Confronting those people on the level of Tatchell and Hari--forget it.)

I think that what we mean by "masculine" no longer has anything to do with actual masculine traits. It's a visual style, a fetish. There are people who look butch and strut butch and talk butch, and in this decayed and rotten age, that's what we care about.

Yes, there are guys who look butch.

And then, there are men who really are.

ED.: I realize I didn't quite, quite, complete my thought. What I mean by all this, what I'm getting at, is that everyone should apply masculine words to men like Hari and Tatchell. We should not just call them brave or courageous. We should call them manly and masculine and macho and studly and tough and daddies and badasses and warriors. We should gender the words we use to describe their bravery because they are men and they are brave. We should give them their danger, the danger that all truly brave men represent. We should give them their glamour. Here in America, we have aircraft carriers' worth of Republicans like George W. Bush who like to perform the pleasing visual rituals of masculinity. In the mainstream media, they get called all the loaded, admiring words. Since we do have these words for men, I want them to go to men whose conduct actually merits them.

Scroll down to the last two paragraphs of this post about atheism to see where author David Friedman articulates a particle-wave theory of spirituality versus materialism. (Andrew Sullivan, a good writer with whom I usually totally disagree, excerpted those paragraphs on his blog and I followed the link.)

Friedman argues that, just as light is both a particle and a wave, it's entirely possible that reality is both divinely created and not.

Makes sense to me. Not least because it neatly resolves my own personal contradictions: I can't believe in any kind of traditional religion or literal god (I tried), but at the same time, I always have been "spiritual," possessed of numinous feelings and convinced that the spiritual was real. I've had visions, I've had palpable experiences of the presence of what I would identify as Christ, the whole nine yards. I understand that this is "a trick of the brain," as an atheist would say, but then, so is love. And you don't just ignore love because it's biochemical in origin.

So: particle and wave! Spiritual and material! Theist and atheist! Both at the same time! Yes sirree. Works for me.

But. There are caveats.

Followers of traditional religions, for example, might feel vindicated, but in fact, they can only take marginal comfort in such a proposition. Here's why:

1) It still doesn't say which spiritual narrative would be true. Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Flying Spaghetti Monster, perhaps Aztec. Literalism, in other words, is out. All faiths would have to accept the strictly metaphorical interpretation of their scriptures and narratives.

Buddhists would immediately go to the head of the class in this regard because they pretty much do that already. For them, the center of the universe is "the Void"--the undefined god who exists by not existing. But they can get really hung up on the minutiae of karma sometimes, which kind of undercuts their otherwise sophisticated understanding.

2) Believers who feel superior to nonbelievers (and other faiths) would have to eat crow.

3) Besides being bathed in gorgeous spiritual light, believers would also have to understand that they were plunged in cold empty darkness.

4) And there are no guarantees. Death might be it.

There's bummers for atheists too:

1) It would suggest that some of them, at least--the ones who have never been able to have numinous or spiritual feelings--might actually be disabled. They, who pride themselves on their empiricism, might actually be distorted in their perceptions.

2) Atheists who feel superior to believers would have to eat crow.

3) Besides being plunged in cold empty darkness, atheists would also have to understand that they were bathed in gorgeous spiritual light.

4) And there are no guarantees. Death might not be it.

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I think Depeche Mode put it best: "I don't want to start any blasphemous rumours, but I think that God's got a sick sense of humor, and when I die, I expect to find him laughing..."

Hey, as long as I have a chance of someday watching him flounce up in tutu and lipstick to greet the holy homophobes, it's all good with me.

Welcome! I'm not a sex blogger, although I do proudly write stories that can be classified as erotica. (I'm an anything-that-pops-into-my-head blogger.)

I should add that I'm not thrilled by labels like "erotica," "fantasy," "mainstream," "literary." I never set out to write "an erotica" or "a fantasy story." It'd be the death of me if I did. I just write it and then go "Hmm, there appears to be enough carrying-on in this one to send it to Clean Sheets."

Which is always a happy day for me, because I love them.

Being a total Johann Hari fangirl, I was thrilled when he kindly informed me that he had linked to my post about him and human rights hero Peter Tatchell, calling it "the nicest blog post ever written about me."

The first sentence of this Smithsonian article about Vincent Van Gogh reminded me why I hate everything.

"The image of Vincent Van Gogh daubing paint onto canvas to record the visions of his untutored mind is so entrenched that perhaps no amount of contradictory evidence can dislodge it."

This idea that visual and performing artists don't really think DRIVES ME NUTS.

The idea that the less conventional they are, the even less they think, drives me all the more nuts.

The article goes on to talk about the "different Van Gogh" who "emerges" in a newly-discovered cache of letters in which he "discoursed knowledgeably about the novels of Zola and Balzac, the paintings in Paris' Louvre and Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, and the color theories of artists Eugene Delacroix and Paul Signac."

No kidding. Are we shocked when, for example, the plumber who comes to fix our toilet turns out to know (and be interested in) his job? Why wouldn't a painter know and be interested in his world? Why wouldn't a painter think long and hard about what he wants to do and how he wants to do it, particularly if it differs from the norm?

It appears not to be online yet, but the February 2008 Smithsonian has a fascinating excerpt from Steve Martin's autobiography "Born Standing Up." It describes how, over the course of eight years, his theoretical insights into comedy ("What if there were no punchlines?...What if I created tension and never released it?") worked their way into physical form in his show. With sometimes surreal, almost disturbing results. ("I walked out into the hallway, but [the audience] followed me there too. A reluctant pied piper, I went outside onto the campus, and they stayed right behind me.")

This came from the mind. It came from Martin's intellect, from his thinking about comedy. Same as Van Gogh's work came from his mind, his intention, his understanding.

It takes a lot of words to create something beyond words.

You may never see them, but rest assured they're there.

Yes, it was one of those mornings.

Half-asleep and lying on my right, I expected to open my eyes and see my clock-radio (the one I've had for twenty-six years). That radio hasn't been on that side of my bed since I was in college.

Then I thought I felt the hiss of the radiator in my childhood bedroom. If I opened my eyes, I would see my old Erte calendar up against the Dove of Peace wallpaper, and find the fashion history book and my box of colored pencils that I'd fallen asleep with.

Maybe next it took me right out of my life and into my mother's or grandmother's; maybe the yellow walls I felt around me, fading to sepia, were theirs. Can memory go down your veins like everything else? Do you pass it on to your own children and not even know?

Then I thought I was lying on a slab of pale Swedish wood with evergreens around me and silent water flowing past.

It was time to wake up.

Photographer Laurie Toby Edison posted this very quiet rebel yell against orthorexia on her blog.

Orthorexia, coined by Dr. Steven Bratman, is basically an obsession with eating right. Nutrition and/or morality guide your food choices rather than pleasure and satisfaction. Either that or, and we'll get to this, sufferers claim that they get pleasure and satisfaction from eating steamed macrobiotic tofu wheatgrass loaf with brewer's yeast and a side of raw spinach. Yes, they will claim, that is ever so much better than a plate of pot roast and mashed potatoes smothered in gravy, because once you start giving your body what's really good for it, your tastes change. They're proud of it, too. Check out this article in which a health food junkie happily claims the orthorexic label.

Examples of dietary philosophies which could trigger orthorexia would be veganism, raw foodism, fruitarianism, macrobiotics, calorie restriction with optimal nutrition, and, as with the article-writer above, a garden-variety preoccupation with health food. I.e. the person who will not contemplate eating Kraft macaroni and cheese because the cheese is processed and there are dyes in it and the macaroni is made from white flour obtained from wheat grown with pesticides.

Dr. Bratman is here to tell us that all this is just plain wrong. It's distorting, it's no fun, and, in one of the great ironies, it's unhealthy.

I don't need much convincing on that score. For reasons I don't understand, I go through periods when I don't eat as much as I am capable of at other times, but I can tell you that every bite I do consume is for pleasure. Baked potatoes with sour cream, penne marsala, burgers and fries and chocolate shakes, fresh glistening red grapefruit, cheesy omelets, oh hell yeah. I have never eaten anything for any purpose higher than my own delight. And I never will.

(I should add--I was indeed a vegetarian for eight years. Eight years that I spent eating spinach empanadas, mushroom stroganoff, pizza, fried rice, chocolate-chip cookies, brownies, Snickers bars, pancakes, and ice cream sundaes.)

Orthorexia is the enemy of all this. A slice of pizza could never pass the nutritional or moral audition that your average orthorexic or orthorexically-inclined person would put it through. To say nothing of a chocolate chip cookie.

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When I was fourteen or fifteen, I was not doing very well at all. My parents took me to a naturopathic doctor who gave me a blood test for food allergies. It was determined that I was allergic to yeast, dairy, corn, and sugar--in short, everything. I was forbidden all these foods and their offshoots for twelve weeks. No bread, no milk, no cheese, no tortilla chips, no cereal, no this, no that, no the other thing.

I'd just like to point out that I was under a hundred pounds at this point. If I stood with my feet together, you could have driven a truck through the gap between my thighs. Surely common sense would suggest that this was not the moment to restrict what such a girl might eat. But my parents were deranged enough with worry that they were prepared to believe that this temporary purge might somehow lead to subsequent attainment of Leni Riefenstahl-esque vigor. So we boldly forged ahead.

And it's not necessarily that dumb an idea--kind of like rebooting the computer.

So for twelve weeks I lived on soy muffins. I actually have happy memories of laughing in the kitchen with my mother as we baked them.

All this is by way of saying that the ortho-minded people (whether 'disordered' or not) are right about one thing: your tastes do change. After twelve weeks, I went and got an ice cream cone, and I didn't like it. I could smell the sugar wafting off it (an oddly jarring note), the sensation of my tongue sinking into the melty softness repelled me, and the taste did not compile. "What the hell is this," said my brain. "I don't want this. I want my soy muffins. Now there's flavor." (All too true.)

So all those people who claim that they genuinely prefer snap peas to brownies are not lying. This really does happen.

The question is, what do we do about it.

Me, I remembered that I used to love ice cream more than life itself. I wanted that pleasure back. So I littered the nation with pecked-at bowls of frosty until my tastes returned.

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My relationship to pleasure is complicated. That's why things like anorexia, orthorexia, size acceptance, and sex-positive culture matter to me. Fighting to regain my taste for ice cream mattered to me.

See, here's the thing about those twelve weeks: I never cheated. Not once. In fact, I never even considered cheating. If I couldn't face whatever soy-oriented shit there was to eat, I just didn't eat.

This is not like most people. Most people would sneak at least a couple of Tootsie rolls. Reality would burst through the strictures of the regimen.

For me, the regimen was reality.

That's dangerous.

I carry an Inspector Javert inside me. I carry a calorie-counter, a restricter, an orthorexic, an anorexic. A puritan. Fortunately she's internalized--she wants to impose her strictures only on herself, not on anyone else--but she's still got teeth. You have no idea how many battles she's won in my life. Just to take one, I tried, I really tried, to start drinking. I couldn't. Her fear of it was too strong. I was a reverse alcoholic: I could not control my impulse not to drink. I would resolve to have a beer on Friday night and then forget. When I did remember, I would drink down to where the neck widened and then pour it out. I have since given up. Sobriety won. And there is no recovery movement for my kind. ("Hi, my name is Savannah, and I'm a sobraholic...")

Hostess cupcakes are good for you.

Susie Bright advances the thought-provoking notion that famous financial advisor Suze Orman's relationship to money is shaped by her sexual orientation. And that so is everyone else's.

(You'll want to make sure you're grown up, and I don't just mean chronologically, before visiting Ms. Bright's corner of brilliance.)

Bright believes that Orman's kick-ass financial self-sufficiency is directly linked to the fact that she's not just gay but really gay--in Orman's own words, "I have never been with a man in my whole life." Bright writes, "This is why Suze Orman is incredulous that straight women keep getting taken to the cleaners financially."

Unfortunately that's in the context of a discussion of "virtue" that I find unconvincing--Bright argues that straight women are taught to be "good" and "virtuously" deny themselves income and orgasms, in return for imagined rewards of respect, esteem and protection which never come. Leaving them working two service jobs while trying to raise three kids on their own after their relationships go wrong.

Orman, Bright argues, is "oblivious to the call of virtue," so she happily went out and got her own.

Well, she was certainly oblivious to something, but is it really virtue? And is it even really men?

I know some straight women who absolutely believed, from day one, that no one was ever going to take care of them but themselves. These women grew up grim. They trusted no one; they went through hell to educate themselves; they put in horrific hours to advance at work. And most of them did also marry and have children, which just doubled their burden, since these were not the kind of people who would ever fall for what they'd call the obvious bullshit about putting their kid in a "quality" care setting. Right! Sure. In their minds, the world is a battlefield, and there was no way they'd leave their vulnerable kids in anyone else's hands. They figured something out.

If you read Orman's books--and I have--she fits the profile of this kind of person. New Agey warmth aside, she shows evidence of the tremendous drive, determination, innate mistrust of life, and deep need to do something about it that I've observed in my alpha friends. These women think I'm nuts to allow my husband to take care of me. I just tell them I'm reincarnated from the 19th century.

The question is--why does it take an unusual, highly driven personality in women to create this kind of self-sufficiency, whereas all types of men support themselves automatically.

My short answer would be, not "virtue," but childbearing. Most women, and I feel this is true of gay ones as well, see themselves, even if only vaguely, as being mothers one day. They may enjoy their jobs, but as one of the things in their life, not the thing. Because this other thing is coming.

Plus, they view work the same way they view impending motherhood--as something to fulfill them. Not something to protect them or keep them from ending up on the streets.

They're optimists.

So they figure that, you know, things'll be fine. They'll be partnered, and the partner will meet them at least halfway financially and with childcare, and there you go.

They trust life.

THAT is the problem. THAT is what gets them fucked. Not virtue. Not self-sacrifice. But trust. Believing that they can cover things part-way, do "their share," and/or invest themselves more in the human aspect of life than the professional, and SOMETHING--their partner, God, their family, fate--will step in and pick up the slack.

If you read Suze Orman's books, again, you will see that she lacks this trust in life so completely that she doesn't even know it's missing. I'm not sure anyone could even explain it to her. THAT, in my opinion, is why she's "incredulous" at what happens to women. She doesn't understand that they've gotten in trouble by TRUSTING that someone else will cover them while they're busy over here.

And that's a personality thing, not a sexual-orientation thing.

I dunno, though. It's an interesting question.

I was in "Health" after my allergy shot. I think it must have been the fall of 1987, my very first semester in that place.

After each shot, they made me wait fifteen minutes to make sure I wasn't going to go into anaphylactic shock. From being exposed to the allergens, dontcha know. Sometimes a body doesn't cope with that. (My allergist at home would just look in my eyes real good as he gave me the shot, then check them again after dumping the sharp. This satisfied him that disaster was not brewing and I'd be on my merry way. The nurses at school were more cautious.)

Usually I read while I waited, but that day, I didn't have a book with me. I wandered over to a bunch of brochures on a table.

They were the usual take-charge-of-your-health things. Watch out for this, improve that. Since we were all young in this place, the communiques were light on prostate and long on sex, STDs, depression...and anxiety.

I picked that one up.

And saw my life in line drawings: vague creatures, hardly there, peering around corners with fixed eyes while their hands juddered. The text calmly stated what these living ghosts avoided every day--

people

places

things.

Windows opened here and there onto the symphonies of static in their heads: obsession, compulsion, panic, rumination. This is depression, mentioned the text, just with another face.

Was it really. That would explain a lot.

I turned the page.

There was a picture of a prescription bottle.

A voice inside me said "I need that."

It was a small voice, tellingly small. It was unemotional and uninterested in my opinion. It said, "I need that."

I knew it was right. That kind of voice always is. Yet I also knew what I was going to do. I was going to close the brochure and put it down, and I was going to move on.

There were reasons; my family was virulently anti-medication of any kind. As a child I used to gut my way through the most blistering headaches and sore throats because I'd gotten the idea it was unhealthy to take aspirin. You can imagine how ominous a long-term psychoactive medication would seem under those circumstances. I didn't trust that it would help me; it seemed too good to be true, too easy. I couldn't picture who I'd be if it did help. Better the enemy you know.

Those were all true reasons and they sat on me like sandbags. But they got their power from something underneath, something wordless, something without logic or traceable origin. Maybe the disease itself. Determined like a sentient being to preserve itself. Close the book, dear. Walk away. Because your voice can say all it wants, but I am the hand with which you act. I took over long ago. You didn't even know.

The worst was yet to come.

But hey, this is me.

So okay. The mass Kennedy endorsement of Barack Obama.

On the grounds of idealism.

Said Caroline Kennedy, "Over the years, I've been deeply moved by the people who've told me they wish they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president. ...there is one candidate who offers that same sense of hope and inspiration [Barack Obama]."

Okay, um...I'm probably the only one, but I don't want an idealistic candidate. I don't want a candidate of hope and transformation. I may well end up voting for Mr. Obama, but not because of that.

It's too soon for hope right now in this country. This is not 1960. It's not even 1992. It's 2008, god help us, with global warming, peak oil, imperialism, domestic spying, torture, subprime, resegregation, deindustrialization, ascendant creationism, international revulsion, and everything in hock to China. I don't want to hear somebody saying we can all come together for any purpose other than to bury our dead and start the road back. Step by step.

The Kennedys may well have done the right thing by endorsing Obama. But, to me, they did it for the wrong reason.

IMHO. YMMV.