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The internet is full of lies. Be careful out there.

6/30/2015

Shoulda, haveta, wanna

6/29/2015

Here are the shoulds:

I should get the mail, sort it, find the new debit card my bank sent me, activate it, and shred my old card.
I should make a list of all of the bills that are connected to that card on auto-pay, from my rent to the EZ Pass, insurance, Amazon.com, friggin Comcast, goddamned Verizon, and God knows who else.
I should set aside an hour to do all this switching. Make the calls, do the online whatevers.
While I’m at it, I should figure out why I’m getting a magazine produced by Red Bull and figure out who I need to email or call to get them to stop sending me that garbage.

Ok. Those are the things that I should do. But I won’t get around to any of them today, because I have a more pressing list of things I have to do:

I have to edit this article that I’m getting paid to write. Nevermind that I wrote it perfectly the first time through - when you’re paid to write something and they send you edits, you HAVE to incorporate them. That’s what getting paid means. You’re taking money to do what you otherwise wouldn’t do. So I have to incorporate these edits. Today.
I have to stop crying every ten minutes. Just because I’m being ripped off by my insurance company and they keep telling me completely different things, and the reaming I’m getting from Geico feels more violating than the vandalism done to my car over the weekend, that doesn’t mean that I can collapse on the floor for an entire day, hyperventilating and focusing on how I’m alone in the world. I’m getting dehydrated and it’s time to pull it together.
I have to look at the shape of my life as a fractal, otherwise everything becomes mushy and amorphous. A fractal with a solid gold cord bisecting it, which is its own light source, and exists outside of time. I have to do this otherwise everything becomes soupy and violent.

So that all seems really clear. But unfortunately I was born this time into a human body and the only guidance system I have for it is this clunky human brain, and based on this human experience I’ve been having, I’m a bit distracted by all of the things that I want right in this moment:

I want to take a nap. I am bone tired from all of this struggle and crying and fighting and being alive.
I want to find the home addresses of everyone involved with the Red Bull magazine and send them copies of my blog posts. Just keep sending them out. Never explain why they’re getting them or give them a way to cancel.
You know, I bet I could raise some money for a campaign to do that. Like all the people who got the Restoration Hardware catalogues, they all banded together and did something about that, didn’t they? I want to look into that.
Actually, the campaign I really want to start is the one where we get people to stop saying “Jeez Louise” and start sayng “Sheesh Looweesh”. Because it’s funny and better.
I want to, slowly, over time, build a small succulent collection for my new, rusty and jagged-edged table.
I want to read every “On Language” column William Safire ever wrote for the New York Times, and print them out one at a time and send them to my grandmother and talk about them together.
I want to blog about my shoulds, have to’s and want to’s. CHECK!

Feeling and bumbling

6/22/2015

I dated a clown. Not for very long, just up until my Dad was diagnosed with lung cancer a few years ago. The relationship really unravelled after that news hit. The clown I dated had a regular job, a day job; he was a project manager for a company that sold lights for hydroponic plants. The clown I dated lived in a tiny house. He played a banjo. He was warm and sweet and kind and never said anything mean about anyone. He was gentle and a little childlike. He took me to Burning Man. He taught me how to ride a bike. He was extremely generous. Recently, I heard he got engaged.

Before that, I lived with a clown. For a year. My roommate clown had studied with a master clown teacher in France. My roommate clown had a tiny dog and two cats and lived in a big three story house in San Francisco. He exercised every day and always got a dozen brand new ideas while he was out walking. He’d come home and tell me all of his ideas, and I’d say what fabulous ideas they all were, and then he’d list several water-tight reasons why he couldn’t execute any of them. Then he would retreat to his room where he’d draw or organize old photos or listen to music. His basement was full of memorabilia. One day after he thought that his dog had eaten a package of my chocolate cookies, he asked me to move out. I wish that I had taken a photo of the rooms of that old Victorian house in San Francisco. It was a magical place and I’m grateful that I got to live there.

Years before either of these experiences, I was introduced to the art of clowning through a show I worked on called Clown Bible. I made a bunch of friends while I was stage managing the thing, including the clown that I would later date and the clown I would later share a home with. I’d never heard of the European style of clown, and I never knew that there’s a lot more to the art form than poofy orange hair and crazy makeup.

Clown Bible was a musical, and the idea of the show was that all of humanity is just bumbling around, comically and tragically. The plot got pretty twisted when we went from Old Testament to New Testament, and the actor playing God became Jesus, red nose and all. Not blasphemous, exactly, but definitely strange. I had been in love with the band leader, but then I found out that he was fooling around with the woman playing God and Jesus.

Anyway, that was my introduction to clowning. I learned that circus clowns came about to help relieve the tension after a particularly perilous act, like when the soldiers did headstands on the backs of horses galloping at top speeds around the tent. The audience would have been holding their breath throughout that whole thing, and so the clowns would come out and be ridiculous and let people laugh and breathe again. Clowns help us not take ourselves so seriously. Sometimes clowns would be the focus of their own whole show, inviting the audience along with them into their strange, dreamlike worlds.

Clowns have their own logic that’s different from human logic, different from the rational world. In clown logic, it makes sense to dial a phone, hang it up, walk to another phone and wait for it to ring. Most clowns don’t speak very much, or if they do, it’s just gibberish. Most clowns have a hat. Most clowns don’t show a lot of skin - they aren’t sexy or suggestive. But they do have big feelings. Huge feelings.

That’s why I took the clown workshop this past weekend - to practice expressing authentic, huge feelings through my body instead of my words. Clowns do a lot of expressing and they do a lot of noticing. They notice these very specific things, and I think that helps them imagine all kinds of things that humans don’t. For example, I had a chance to play with a towel for ten minutes. It was a tie, a bib, a skirt, a picnic blanket, a baby, a flag, a boat, a bridge, a book, and a jumprope. It would have been ten more things if I had played with it for ten more minutes. I just kept noticing more things about it. It kept changing.

My clown had this way of walking, kind of slow, kind of uneven, a little slumped inwards, but looking up. She really liked examining inanimate objects, and also people who were far away. Most of the time they never saw her looking at them. She felt this yearning, a deep need to be close to the one who was farthest away. Meanwhile, the ones who were closest were practically invisible to her. If anyone did come up close, she had to find a way to get away from them. But if, on the other hand, the clown who was far away suddenly became closer, oh how much joy and fear and overwhelming feeling she felt. It was almost too much. She would pant and sigh and shake and sweat. One time she saw another clown and he got close to her and she had to turn her back. She couldn’t bear to be that close and look at him, but she reached out behind her to make contact. They stood like that for a while, touching finger tips. It was exhausting.

I remember that, many years ago during Clown Bible, right before opening night, the director had everyone do a turn by themselves with the nose. One at a time, each person working in the show got to come out from behind the scenes and show themselves to everyone else in the cast and crew. In ten years of working behind the scenes on all kinds of shows, that was the only time I was ever invited to come on stage and be seen by everyone else, just one bumbling human in front of a crowd of other bumbling humans.

Just a flash

6/9/2015

I’m in 7th grade and I already like science so I’m really excited about this trip to the Boston Museum of Science! It’s a sleep-over thing and we’re missing two whole days of school for it and it’s just the girls - isn’t that cool?

Mom used a sharpie to write our last name on the LL Bean tote bag that I’m using to bring all my stuff. I’m not bringing my panda bear - I’m in 7th grade, come on! And we’re not even taking a regular school bus, we’re taking one of those nice busses with the grey seats and the rainbow print down the middle of the seats, you know those? And Marlene Stewart is sitting across from me and she let me borrow her Walkman to listen to that one INXS song.

And the drive took forever but finally we’re here and now we’re walking down this really long hallway, it feels like one of those behind the scenes hallways, I can tell because there aren’t any advertisements on the wall, it’s just a long long long hallway and I’m starting to wonder if we’re going the wrong way but now I see it up ahead, there’s a door that’s opening up and I’m walking faster now - jeez this bag is heavy - and now we’re here!

We’re inside the Museum of Science! There’s a big round desk in the middle and a really high ceiling and a huge moving sculpture in front of a big window, and it’s really echoey in here but it’s not loud because it’s just us, just one hundred girls and our stuff, and they just closed the museum.

We’re here after the museum is closed! Isn’t that special? I still don’t understand where we’re all going to sleep. But now someone is putting my stuff on a rollaway cart and Mr. Bernard is talking blah blah blah, but now he’s waving his hands out in front of him, like, “Shoo! Go on!” And that’s it!

Where do I go? The planetarium! The electricity room! The wing with the animals in it. It’s getting late I think but I’m not tired or hungry, there’s just so much to see!

What’s this room, Mathematics? There’s a weird loopy train track floating above the room and the train is shaped like a red arrow. There’s a button underneath a sign, “Mobius Strip”. Ok. Wait - WHAT? That doesn’t make any sense, I need to watch that again! Marlene, look at this!

Oh, what’s that? It just looks like a map of the world, I don’t get it. With a little red light on every country. Oh, wait, I see buttons down here. “Birth rate.” Holy smokes - does that mean every time a light flashes, someone is born?

And what’s this one? “Death rate.” So… every time a light flashes, someone out there… dies?

Why are there some countries with lights that are flashing so fast? What’s that all about? Does that mean that there are babies out there who never get a chance… never grow up… never…

I’ll be one of these flashing lights one day.

Is that all I am? Just a flash?

An ok space

6/9/2015

As the full moon grows, I can feel it pulling on me.

I feel my brain being pulled slightly out of my head. The space there where it’s being pulled leaves a vacuum and in that vacuum there is a holy space. And into that holy space, a higher power flows. With no mass or height or weight, only spirit - not even light. The brain is leaving me and in its place this vacuum is created and this vacuum naturally pulls spirit towards it and I am filled, not by my own doing, but by the force of the moon.

I am filled and refilled by moon power. The vacuum moves all of the stuck parts in me, the places that have been holding on - these are all sucked and shifted and cracked to let the spirit flow free again: up through the channels in my body, between blood and bone, up through the cracks by spiritual capillary action, into this space, this holy space that floats around my brain which is, of course, still being pulled away by the moon.

All the brain parts are stretching - it’s like a hot yoga class for my myelin sheath - my brain is being wrung out by the power of the moon - this constant, loving, insisting force, pulling up on my brain and even my eyes which feel floaty and tight and blurry from the pulling, and this swirling nothing that’s created all around my brain but especially the back of my brain, now there is space there

There is nothing for me to do but just let it happen. And be gentle to this poor physical human body which aches and protests and doesn’t want to feel strange new uncomfortable feelings. the heaviness of this brain pull is so strange but if I can just breathe and do nothing, for once - just breathe and do nothing for one goddamn minute - if I can just breathe and let this thing happen and let all this space really fill up with the spirit that I have been so lonely for, so desperate for, so longing for so long for -

If I can just stay in this heavy-weird-pulling-floating-unplugging-new-makes-no-sense place,

And also tell my body that it’s an ok space,

Then the space can do it’s space thing, which is all the moon ever really wanted from me in the first place.

The internet is full of lies. Be careful out there.

Shoulda, haveta, wanna

Feeling and bumbling

Just a flash

An ok space

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