Scrabble

This morning I came across a quote from Cervantes: 'All these squalls to which we have been subjected are signs that the weather will improve... for it is not possible for the bad or the good to endure forever and... since the bad has lasted so long the good is close at hand.'  Well... it touched me-- like a mother's hand on my face, until I realized-- these are the words of a deluded madman, are they not? I thought of Job-- then a friend lying in a hospital on a ventilator, witnessing or not witnessing the disintegration of his own brain. 

'We have all been here before' the song from 1970 was running over and over in my mind's ear like a damaged vinyl skip as I woke... and wondered, as I often do these days, if I am losing my mind or simply misplacing pieces of it.  While identifying the music in my head (often it is my own invention which takes form in a dream) from the Deja Vu album,  it occurred that we have not been here before... at least not I... and I am not sure when the good will come as I watch another friend suffer from the relentless tide of late-stage cancer and there are no highlighted days on her calendar-- not celebrations or moments of relief without drugs.  

My own mother warned me-- Pick something beautiful, she used to say... but I continued to opt for the dark and difficult.   She read to us from Bambi... my first souvenir was the word 'thicket'.. I was enchanted by the aura of words which led me into hidden passages and opened doors that seemed a little forbidden.  These days-- entering older age at an intersection of quarantine and cultural procrastination... well, it is an unforgiving sort of wilderness-- a bad mirage.  It is like stepping out and not knowing where the deep sidewalk crevasses may lie... there are no maps for this.  

And still, watching the news, accosted daily with the barrage of online activities and people--even friends-- competing for time on social media... it is as though things have not stopped accelerating. My peers are both bewildered and a little terrified... we have been simultaneously halted in our tracks and left behind.  No wonder Bruce Springsteen had a DUI.  It's not easy navigating reality and the dark gravity of what is still in our head.  He was writing a song of himself... ? Personally I have no license, no car... but I was 'there'...

Some of us have begun memoirs and autobiographies.  Some have begun to shed memories... or to find, as I often do, this 'soup' of sentimentality and nostalgia simmering on a hot stove of unfamiliar ingredients.  Compounded by the challenge of losing our taste and smell... has anyone else spent nightmarish hours wondering at the metaphorical resonance of this virus symptom?  As though we are intentionally misplaced... what if we were bloodhounds, any animals who became entirely useless and disoriented and could not find our way home?

We are at this threshold, many of us... I see even celebrities losing their minds, making bad choices-- a bit of Quixotic paranoia, a bit of desperation to be relevant-- inventing drama, putting it up on a screen for others to judge, to approve... to be watched or seen because we can't seem to find our own Deja-Vu here.   Our own mental illness has become sort of an entertainment raison d'être... it makes news, it reaches others... Personally I feel like a reverse ventriloquist-- like I must speak for those who cannot-- the ones lying in hospital beds-- the forgotten neighbors who fear leaving their apartments... and the ones who are no longer here.  They haunt my dreams.  

We are all future ghosts and corpses.  I'm sorry, Mom... it's a terrible thought but it is a life force.  I leave virtual daffodils at your sad grave every day; I have failed you simply by fulfilling my own program.  Like Bruce, maybe-- and I was uncharitable to him-- I am driven but not driving, thank goodness.  Last night I saw Demi Lovato and the Duchess or whatever she is also prostrating themselves... Yes, they are given a platform and it behooves them to take it for themselves, however dramatically they insist the opposite.  Our Governor-- can they not find someone else to crucify?  These people are maybe discarded too quickly.  You voted for them and they are human and on a platform and made mistakes.  I remember how quickly they took down Eliot Spitzer when he was trying to dismantle the frauds of Wall Street.  Where is our perspective? Heroes are all flawed... scrutiny cannot fail to reveal them.  

Yes, we women have all suffered injustices and disrespect; at this moment of my life I occasionally peruse the scrapbook of my girlhood and the incidents were plentiful and appalling.  I was busy trying to become the voice for something I have surely failed.  Rather than identify as a whiner I opted for the larger picture.   Two of my friends, coincidentally, have just begun-- out of boredom or disappointment-- jigsaw puzzles.  Comforting to know there is a solution; it will work.  The rest of the world seems to be fragmenting.  Perhaps I the aging chicken have become my own fallen egg.  All the Kings Horses, etc... 

Black Christmas

I have been dreading this moment, afraid of oversentimentalizing this shooting, this massacre, wondering why that word begins with a sacred prefix—it doesn’t look so evil in print… and how names change everything--- the way we’ll startle now when we hear these—Sandy Hook, Lanza, even Connecticut.  

We have listened to Anderson Cooper skipping over the few unpronounceable last names, refusing to repeat that of the shooter;  we have watched the CNN guy drawing diagrams on the screen.  We have not seen the chalk outlines and the blood, we have not seen parents beating their heads on the ground,  on walls, wanting to hold the corpses of their children before they are cold.  We have heard no screams.  We have imprinted the streets and landmarks of Newtown like a summer memory, we have tried to compare and contrast one horror with another; we have imagined our own phone call, the unbearable moment between the siren and the scream. 

We are all avoiding one another in the grocery store--- we do not look; we are guilty because our children are safe, we are buying food for our dinner, counting money--- things that are unthinkable for fresh grief.  We go home and turn on our televisions, some of us wondering why the image of the Palestinian father waving the corpse of his child several days ago at the Gaza border did not bring tears to our president.   Those New Yorkers still homeless and cold from the hurricane may feel more neglected and sad.   Bon Jovi and Bruce have spoken too many times now; they are silent.  This is not climate change or retribution of Mother Nature or even a drunk driver.  Maybe the shooter watched the concert on television.  It’s fairly likely that he did.  He may even have watched with his mother, shared popcorn or her home-baked Christmas cookies, no matter how much he hated it. 

I have gone over the seven sins tonight.  I am guilty of most of them, at some time or another.  I walked in the cold rain at midnight; it felt like some kind of punishment.  I passed the dogwalkers talking to illicit lovers on their phones, the secret ice cream eaters,  the possibility junkies—exchanging cards and sharing cigars with their neighbor.  I can rattle off all seven, although I often leave one out.  I mean--- I commit at least one every day—lust (passion--is this not good?), sloth, anger with frequency.   Gluttony I cannot afford, nor greed—and envy—well, I leave that to my neighbors when they compare their husbands’ end-of-year bonuses.  Pride—well, are we not supposed to be proud of our children when they are good, when they are brave?

I am mostly angry today.  None of this makes sense.  I try to feel empathy for the shooter, who apparently had none.  It is unbearable to empathize with the parents; any of us who has lost a child, who has even had one of those middle-of-the-night phone calls which years later has scarred over but still feels like a wound.   Where the fear is a noose and sometimes we hear the word ‘hospital’ or ‘jail’ and we breathe.   But we know the odds are against us, somehow.  And whether our own or our neighbor’s, we will have to bear some day the unbearable.  

My own was so young I have no photograph.  She had no favorite toy animal or song; there was so little to say.  I have only the reality that nothing rhymes with heartbreak or even with Christmas.   And on cold rainy nights when we try to grace someone else’s grief with our own, there are used condoms on the street, and on some blocks there are needles and half-empty coke bottles, and people sleeping, in old blankets and cardboard boxes, on church steps.

I am walking with the ghosts, glad my own drivers license has expired and who can ever afford a car anyway, because I’d be the one picking up hitchhikers, hoping I’ll come across someone I am missing, or their double, hoping I’ll make it across some bridge and maybe change someone’s life so when they get home they’ll put on their black clothes and pick up a rifle and decide not to load it—to go out for a walk in the rain or a drive, maybe, and sit on someone’s grave in some churchyard cemetery with a few cans of beer, and it will be enough.   

But the sirens will never stop, the scream is always there, within or out-of-earshot.  The dread is part of the prayer, the whisper is part of the message, the blood is on the inside or the outside.  For some of us God is inside the church; for others He is in the graveyard.  For some He is the stuff inside a needle, or in a glass, for some He is a rifle, or the madness inside our head.  For some He is the space between the siren and the scream:  the quiet space, the dead space, this silent night where you have to know about stars to believe they are behind the foggy mist.  And where you just might pretend for a few dreamless hours, in some light-years-distant non-lonely universe, that yes, there are sins and there are even maybe guns, but there is no ammunition-- that they forgot to invent that-- only blanks, and some fear, yes... but it is night and  things are as they were, and as they will be, same as it ever was…

 

Barack at the Bat

Lance Armstrong.  A name from a teenage boy novel.  Like who didn't know the guy was a phony.  Something totally irritating about him, but then I could never trust a man in bicycle shorts.  They embarrass me, like a dumb swimmer's wardrobe--- and then the helmet... and if that wasn't enough, the Sheryl Crow thing-- -the blatant fame sucking.... and now, from some, he gets a little of the sympathy vote.  Does he give back the money with the endorsements, the trophies?  Do I even care?

This is the year of Lance Armstrong.  Of Sandusky.  A-Rod.  Mitt Romney.  What is it, America--- it's not enough that these people are the lying puppet versions of some symbol we have lost... it's that we continue to buy tickets to their theatres.   How many years ago did we sing 'We won't get fooled again'?
I mean, we have a president--- a black man,  to whom I pledged all belief, in 2008.  I made phone calls-- -I raised cash-- I was passionate.  And now even he seems--well, downright flippant.  It's as though we have a breakfast menu choice here between --well, a Democratic bowl of American cream of wheat with brown sugar, or a Republican photograph of bacon and eggs.  A picture.  Personally, I can't eat paper.  Or pixels.  Whatever.

I heard Bruce Springsteen tonight sheepishly playing his brand-new campaign song offering on an acoustic guitar, no doubt for much too large an audience.  The  Bruce Springsteen with the Grecian Formula hair, like Romney's.  Giggling, he was, making fun of the fact he'd run out of things to rhyme with Obama.   The song was dumb, apologetic.  Stupid.  Like a couple of frat boys sitting around after too many beers, ad-libbing.  I failed to find the point or the humor.  It's not a moment for playing rhyming games.   This is a country, a world-changing decision.  Okay, it's Bruce, not Oprah.  But it felt like the movie version of this campaign... like there is no longer any real world.  The Detroit pitcher had more conviction before he threw a breaking ball.  More commitment.

I'm tired of the digs and scripted humor, of the snide clever repartee.  The news anchormen and women are over-styled and too chatty.  They announce some tragic event and then they comment on someone's tie; their new puppy.  They wink and smirk.  I don't want to be friends with these people; I want some sobriety and some truth with my news.  I've noticed the doctors in those TV dramas these days tell jokes while performing dangerous surgery.  Maybe there's my writerless metaphor-of-the-moment:  America the anesthetized country on the operating table, our president in a white coat studying x-rays and making clever funny analogies while the Republican candidate is scrubbing to do a triple bypass without ever attending medical school.  Who let the dogs in?

We are going to wake up on the other side of a fence that has no return entry.  Doesn't anyone get this? I get a daily barrage of Obama-driven requests for money and cute little slogans and soundbites.  Tweets.  I want to be shaken.  I want my neighbors to be shaken.  I want someone to realize that it's fine to obsess about the wedding and the flowers and the bridesmaids and the ceremony--- but it's the marriage... it's the next four years and the perilous path we could be on toward eradicating the version of democracy that shaped my generation.  The grass will definitely be greener on the other side, and we will have lost access to that field forever.  It will be mere nostalgia which we will contemplate with growing bitterness and regret.  Are we that dumb? To fall for a man with Lance-worthy swagger and false leader-ly bravado?  At least Reagan could once act.  This actor is nasty.

So sit down Bruce.  You're a confusing political message at best.  A New Jersey billionaire in a denim shirt who lately has acquired a Clinton-esque accent.  A songwriting cowboy in a gated community.  We need to turn off our ipods and televisions and get tough and smart.  We need to use the minds Madison Avenue told us are a terrible thing to waste.  We need our president to stand up and one-two it and earn our trust and respect.  I don't want to live in a Lance Armstrong world.  I don't want to see Beyonce singing instead of Etta James at the next Inaugural Ball.  What were they thinking? Etta's ironically no longer around to separate the women from the girls by example.   And if we don't wake up, we won't be able to tell the difference between grass and turf.  This is not an SNL debate spoof...but from the comments and footage I see, I'm confused.

I'm sick of the rich guys winning.  I'm especially sick of the bad rich guys buying us off and winning.
I'm even glad the Yankees lost.  But this election isn't the World Series.  It's our future that will strike out.  My future.  My kids.  I'm ashamed to be represented by a smirky snarky tilted misogynistic power-seeker in a suit.    We need to use our hearts and our ideals and our eyes and ears and rip the masks off.   Mr. President--- you're not a super-hero, you're a man with a good brain and decent instincts and we elected you as such.  It's your final obligation as president with home-field advantage to come up with not a song but a slammer in this last inning.  Yes.