The Inner Condition @innercondition - Tumblr Blog

How to Fix (Or Possibly Break) Democracy

The last time I wrote one of these columns was several months ago, which in the Internet Age means I might as well have written a couple of days before the discovery of fire. However, I vaguely remember promising to say something scathing about British politics, so here it is: British politics is an absolute load of festering jizz. Our Tory Prime Minister is a balloon-faced meat sculpture whose savage austerity cuts have specifically targeted the poorest in society and resulted in thousands of deaths. He’s so loathsome that he once fucked a decapitated pig’s head... and that’s the most likeable fact about him.

Here’s an interesting factoid, though: thanks to kindly socialist Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing Labour Party currently has more party members than any other party in Britain. Of course, I can’t claim that the only people who are politically engaged are the ones who bother to join political parties, but I think political party membership is a pretty good barometer of the what the politically engaged are thinking, because joining a political party is a) something that only the politically engaged do and b) something that is easy enough to do that huge numbers of the political engaged do it. As such, we can say with some confidence that the vast majority of people who actually follow and understand politics in Great Britain want the left-wing candidate Jeremy Corbyn in charge (and why wouldn’t you? He’s sensible, soft-spoken and he prioritises looking after the needs of people above those of abstract concepts like the economy). And yet we don’t have a Labour government. From this we can deduce that the last election wasn’t decided by people who understand and care about politics: it was decided by people who voted either a) purely to protect their own interests, like selfish dicks, b) because they’d formed a half-baked opinion based on the last thing they read in a tabloid or c) because they vaguely felt like they should. As a result, Britain voted in the Tories: something we should have learned to stop doing after they made a complete bollocks of literally everything in the eighties (here’s the highlights reel: Belgrano, Poll Tax, privatisation of key utilities industries on which the public depend, death of political prisoners on hunger strike, closure of mines, total devastation of northern industries and the rise to prominence of fucking Portillo).

The obviously solution would be to take a census in which we ask every member of the public if they consider themselves either an arsehole or a fuckwit and then disallow those who answer in the affirmative from voting... or using metal cutlery. Unfortunately, arseholes and fuckwits tend not to admit that they’re arseholes and/or fuckwits, so we’re probably going to have to get a bit craftier. Here are my suggestions:

1. Don’t let people who are so rich they have no stake in a functioning society vote. Let’s face it: some people are so obscenely rich that nothing any government will ever do will affect them in the slightest. They’re so well-off that they’ll never depend on society for anything, because they can always buy private accommodation, healthcare, insurance and whatever else they need. Even if you raise taxes on them, they’ll still have so much money left over that they’ll barely notice. These people have no reason to care if the NHS works properly, if there’s enough social security to look after the vulnerable or if the education system helps elevate everyone equally. What’s more, they quite frequently don’t care, because nobody gets to be that rich by being a nice person. Should people who would be completely unfazed if society collapsed in a pile of screaming rubble really be allowed a say in how it’s run? Well, that’s for you to decide. I realise how ethically repellent the idea of denying anyone a vote is, so I’m not sure how I feel about my own suggestion here. But, honestly, I wouldn’t give a pyromaniac my house-keys and a book of matches: by the same logic, I don’t much fancy giving rich, over-privileged sociopaths the ability to affect issues in a populace they don’t have to interact with in any meaningful way.

2. Stop letting a handful of people own all the fucking news media. The main reason people vote unthinkingly and without serious political engagement is because they constantly hear the same (frequently bigoted, far-right) opinions from most of the media they consume until they internalise it and stop questioning it. And why do they hear the same opinions regurgitated over and over again? Because most British news media- in fact, most powerful British media of any kind- is owned by a small number of people and companies (such as malignant human scrotum Rupert Murdoch). To prevent this, I suggest the following: NO ONE PERSON OR LEGAL ENTITY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO OWN MORE THAN ONE (1) NEWS CHANNEL AND ONE NEWSPAPER/MAGAZINE. Oh, and if you own news media, you shouldn’t also be allowed to own entertainment media, because that also gives you too much cultural dominance. Adopting this suggestion should prevent the creation of politically disengaged dipshits without needing to deny existing dipshits the vote.

3. If the opposition has a significantly greater party membership than the incumbent government, they should automatically be able to test their support in a snap general election. Sometimes elections produce results that are anomalous, not an accurate reflection of the public’s actual majority opinion, or just plain stupid. So if the opposition acquires a huge boost to its party’s membership after an election, it’s probably a pretty good sign that Something Went Wrong and the public might be yearning for a general election to correct their embarrassing fuck-up. Let them have it at the earliest opportunity.

There: that’s how I’d reform British democracy: take out the rich gits who aren’t properly involved in it; break the power of rich media corporation; and make it easier for opposition parties to attack incumbents when they’re obviously acting against the public’s wishes and best interests.

If that sounds extreme, bear in mind that my original plan was to wipe out mankind using killer robots and then let the dolphins take over as the planet’s dominant lifeform.

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Make Art/Letter to a Young Artist

There’s a quote by the French-born author, Anais Nin which I read in my own voice. You know, that inner voice which truly reveals itself when you perform your own writing or give an honest speech or express your love for something, or someone. I hear that voice when I read,

“I am so thirsty for the marvellous that only the marvellous has power over me. Anything I cannot transform into something marvellous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.” – Anais Nin

My feelings towards the world on a good day are accurately represented by Nin. Reality does not impress me. A week ago, on my way to the local supermarket, a dead squirrel laid rigid on the path. Its forefeet straight out in front of its nose, its tail unnaturally straight, bushy but visibly stiff, anchoring the scene into my mind for days. I think about the sight, and evade the reality of endings. The squirrel is merely matter, inanimate, and lost in the void of pure calm. The calmness makes most shiver, makes some cry, but makes me want to create.

Death, like most endings, can be seen as an empty, daunting space into which no one wants to step. But, like all spaces, it brings forth opportunity. The old cliché of an empty canvas fits here, but canvas seems to imply solidity in concepts that are mere clouds of idea, sometimes here, sometimes gone. Newness doesn’t stick around, because as soon as its form comes into fulfilment, it’s old. Old news, last season, unoriginal (due to the array of copies, critiques and recreations before you’ve even put your finalising project notes away). What could be a better reason for creating?

Your ideas are the future which become current before receding into the past. They feature in these time frames better than you do, because they begin to exist as an entity of themselves. They morph from the grip of your sweaty hands into the fires of the world. Opinions will tear you to pieces and reduce you to a mere fraction of your worth, based on their own experiences which have no more value than that of a peanut’s. And you love it. You love being told your work is ‘inundated with classic teenage angst’ and that you have ‘clearly been reading too much Plath’ and ‘gazing at too long Grayson Perry’ and ‘have no real concept of what real poetry or actual art is’. You love it because they care. They would never talk about your work be it painting, poetry, sculpture, acting, unless they cared about what you’ve created/performed. You have the ability to influence people and this influence may be one of disgust and anger, but it could be one of amazement and inspiration. Or they could simply quite like it. It’s worth it. You have it inside you and it’s blazing, desperate to be seen and heard. It will not die out and will not waste away until you do.

When I think about the body of the squirrel on the pavement, I see it reanimated, and I visualise its paws rubbing its face and the twitch of its tail as it stops steady, witnessing the fall of a twig. I come home and write a short piece about the squirrel, but it’s not about the squirrel, it’s about the life before the inevitable. It’s about what we do before we waste away. We will all move away from life, be it sudden or slow, so we’re better off making an art of it. The majority of people think they fear death, but I believe the truth is, they fear life. They’re scared of not doing the things they want before it’s all gone, and they’re afraid of throwing their voice into a sea of ignorance and getting nothing back. Would you rather say nothing at all?

Make an impact while you can, and maybe after you go, someone will write something about you, reanimate you, or more significantly be inspired by your works enough to make their own. Express yourself in the way that only you can and turn your reality into something impressive. Relish the criticism, repay compliments, read, write, express, make art.

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A Visit With Nancy and Endi

I was recently watching sumo with my Canadian friend, Nancy, and her Japanese cop husband, Endi, at their place. They’re in their sixties and have just built their retirement home on Endi's family property to replace the house that was bust up in the big earthquake.

Nancy's from Nova Scotia and is one of those lapsed church ladies that can be incredibly hilarious and crass without ever saying a bad word. She was my original teaching superior at my first job in eikaiwa in Japan (English conversations school). Since then she's become something of a surrogate mom for me.

Her husband, Endi, is an odd duck. For example, Nancy was complaining that while she was on her last trip to Canada, he rearranged the living room furniture so that all the chairs and sofa were facing a blank wall.

“He likes to sit and stare at the wall,” Nancy said. “He's says it's 'berry nice.'”

He also collects rocks, which for some reason drives Nancy crazy. Not crystals or geodes, mind you. Rocks.

Endi used to handle the dead body inspection wherever he was stationed. He'd be the cop that would decide whether to have an autopsy or start a murder investigation when a corpse was found. With us being in basically rural Japan, it was generally a lot of suicides and solitary oldster decomps. He was also busy after the Great Tohoku Earthquake dealing with all the tsunami bodies. That got rough, he said. Not just the ocean water victims with the crabs and everything (although he said that was causing the military boys a lot of psychological trouble), but also dealing with families fighting over remains in the hopes of having something to have a funeral with.

Endi has all kinds of interesting dead body stories. He can be pretty callous, as is to be expected, so he can be fun to talk to about that kind of stuff. He never says much about active police work though. People for him tend to fall into two categories: “Nice Guy/Lady” or “Berry Stupid Guy/Lady.”

Endi's also pretty intimidating in his way. He's totally chill, but he's got a face like one of those Japanese Buddhist guardian angels, and has black belts in kyokushin karate (hardcore full contact) and judo. Even in his sixties, he looks like he's been carved out of wood like one of those temple guardian statues.

The first outing I had with Nancy and Endi was with my wife. We went to a Buddhist temple that had two really fine guardian statues inside the entrance gate, flanking the portal. Endi kept sticking his head into their space and smiling up at them saying, “guard. Guaaaaaaard. Guuuuuaaaaaaard,” in a really low, guttural tone, like a growl. Then he looked at me with basically the same smile that the statue had. Message received.

Not that I was too worried; Nancy had already told me that Endi said I was a nice guy.

He's semi-retired now, which means he got transferred to his home town and will be driving a desk at headquarters until he's 65. To prevent corruption, Japanese cops get transferred every few years from town to town within their prefecture. This has given me cause to see much of Fukushima that I wouldn't have otherwise, since my wife and I tend go to visit Nancy and Endi every couple months.

At their house last weekend, in breaks between sumo bouts, I was asking Endi what work's been like. Apparently, guys in his position are used to handle the “problem customers” that police face. Endi's regulars are old ladies with dementia who live alone and use filing police reports as a form of entertainment. One in particular is a widow whose husband used to be police. Every week she comes in and tries to file one of two reports: either her home has been burgled and her money's been stolen; or, her home has been burgled and she has been raped. Endi says his duty is to listen gravely to the old ladies, take notes with all his years of report taking experience, assure them that all investigative measures will be taken, and then throw away the notes as soon as they leave.

Endi loves sumo, so it was interesting to watch it with him. Between bouts he was happy to tell me all about the personalities, rivalries, nuances, and conventions. He's very impressed with sumo wrestlers. One time he was at an onsen (hot spring spa) and there was a pro sumo wrestler in there with him. Endi offered to wash his back for him, and was allowed to do so. It seems that this was his proudest moment in life.

From Endi I learned that it is true that sumos have subordinates wipe their ass and wash their hind parts for them. This is an honorable and useful endeavor for the youngsters, I was assured (”Berry good, yes. Berry berry nice for them.”).

It was also fun watching sumo with Nancy, since she likes having me around to crack jokes with. She'll trot out her English master's degree grammar to say wickedly funny shit over her husband's head. They both liked it when I referred to one sumo move as “the titty grab.”

It was a fun visit.

ENDNOTES: Check out my tumblr blog for more of my writing and other nonsense: http://muse-vassal-oc.tumblr.com/

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It Just Might Be Alright

“Do you use alcohol to deal with it?”

When he asks me this I’m sitting on the floor in somebody else’s shorts, snot making it impossible to breathe through my nose, throat still burning from throwing up everything that’s ever been in my stomach, eyes nearly swollen shut from crying too much, head on his shoulder, arms trying to hold onto him in any way possible.

I definitely use alcohol to deal with this.

I hadn’t planned on getting drunk that night, actually. My roommate had to be at work at 4 AM and I needed to either be sober enough to drive her there or at least to make the ride home without throwing up. I was going to have a few beers, play a round of baseball (the drinking game, not the sport), and then abstain until it was time to go.

I was going to make sure Theo didn’t get too drunk, because I knew he was moving tomorrow. In fact, that’s why we were having this party. A last hurrah. A final goodbye to late nights on the porch, early mornings in the kitchen, afternoons in front of the TV.

Theo didn’t actually like the house too much, but I think it held sentimental value for us all. It was his wife’s house before they were married, and in the long run it was going to be cheaper to just stay in the massive place until they could move. When they got the news that she had been accepted to grad school in London, it made even more sense to stay, even though her brother would still be living with them.

With every cup of beer I became a little less concerned about getting my roommate to work. She hadn’t had anything to drink and was sleeping on the couch. She could just take my car, for all I cared. Then I realized no one was helping Theo take our team’s shots. I was eighteen innings, countless beers, and seven shots in when I decided to have a lie down. I’m no lightweight when it comes to drinking, either. I can usually go drink for drink with Theo.

Looking back I realize he probably made himself throw up earlier in the night, and that’s how he kept going. I should have done the same, but by the time I did make myself throw up it was too late. The trick to that is doing it once early in the night, and then as needed. But when you wait too long, then you’ve opened up the floodgates and you can’t stop until everything is gone.

Theo was outside with everyone having a cigarette when I snuck into his bathroom to do the deed. Halfway through I forgot which bathroom I was in. I’d never thrown up at their house before, I couldn’t identify the carpet beneath my knees. They both had the same button to flush on top, so that wouldn’t help either. But, there it was, toilet paper on my left. Theo’s bathroom for sure. Which meant, of course, that I could stumble to his sink without opening my eyes. This was also especially good news because I could never work Adam’s sink sober any way, let alone in my current state.

I was able to make it back to the couch but only for a moment. As I mentioned, throwing up only managed to open the floodgates. I tried to stand up but was unsuccessful until Theo appeared at my side from out of nowhere.

“What do you need?”

I told him bathroom, maybe that I needed to throw up. I’m not sure, but then we were running to Adam’s bathroom. Theo knew what I needed either way. We must’ve made it in time, but I was only aware of the black of my eyelids and Theo’s hand on my back. My hair was tied up so he didn’t need to do anything there.

I was glad to have him, no one had ever helped me through getting sick before. While it was comforting I could help but thinking that Theo shouldn’t have been there. He was never supposed to see me this way, he was never supposed to have to do this. When I thought I was done I mumbled an apology. It was all I could get out word-wise before it was apparent that I was not in fact done emptying the contents of my stomach. I don’t know what was coming out of my mouth at that point because I hadn’t eaten in days.

Finally it was over. People had come in and out, helping Theo, getting water, making sure I wasn’t going to die I assume. I was moved to an emptied bedroom, given a blanket and some shorts. I was mortified. Not only had Theo witnessed me at my all-time lowest, but so had his wife and brother in-law. Theo tried to tuck me in when I mumbled my hundredth apology. Fuck. Fuck I’m so sorry, Theo.

“For what? What are you sorry for?”

That you have to do this. Deal with me.

“I get to do this, Lexi. I get to deal with you. You’re like my little sister, okay? Stop apologizing.”

Floodgates of an entirely different sort opened at that moment. I’ve considered Theo a brother for a long time now, but had never directly expressed it to him. I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable. Really I think that I was scared he didn’t feel the same, because no one ever has before. The sobbing came immediately. Theo hugged me, and I hugged him back. Fingers trying to find purchase, trying to grip so he couldn’t leave.

He asked what was wrong.

I sobbed and slurred that he was my brother, that he’d never know how much he meant to me. How much he’s done for me.

I had been meaning to tell him, sober of course, that he had been instrumental in keeping me alive. I had been meaning to explain to him before he left. But apparently fate had decided that this was the right time.

Drunk and afraid does a lot for honesty’s sake.

I felt the shift in his body when I said that I wouldn’t be alive. I couldn’t have missed it, clinging to every inch of him that I could. I could’ve sworn I could hear his tears start rolling too, but without a camera who can say what’s true. Theo’s wife was there at this point, and I had one hand holding hers while I tried to explain. Who could explain that? My mom doesn’t know. My therapist doesn’t know. This has been a secret for a long while.

His wife left shortly after when Theo said, “Babe, can I talk to Lexi for a minute?”

I am sure we were both in tears at this point. When he admitted that he’s still not quite over depression, that it’s not something you ever fully recover from. When he told me that there are still days he wakes up and doesn’t know if he can do it anymore. When I told him that, while I know we can stay in contact, I’m terrified of what will happen when they move across the world. When he asked if I used alcohol to cope with it.

When I told him, yes, I definitely do.

When he apologized for never responding to a text I sent last week, and I cried even harder and told him he didn’t owe me that. He didn’t owe me anything. He’s done so much already.

When he asked if it was during church or after I’d left, and I said during. When I said it was even shittier then because the only answer I got as to why I was feeling this way was that I wasn’t praying enough. When I told him leaving the church helped me realize that there was a reason for the feelings of despair and sadness, but that it didn’t make it any easier.

When I told him I drink at night just so I can sleep, so I don’t have nightmare after nightmare about losing him.

We stopped crying after a while. Both rubbing our eyes, rationing out the toilet paper his wife had brought for me to wipe my nose. I didn’t stop hugging him though, and I realized when we finally left the room for water that I hadn’t let go of him for over two hours.

I often regret the amount of alcohol I consume. I often tell myself that I need to stop, that it’s not healthy, that I’m on the road to addiction. As much as I am aware of this, there are nights when I wouldn’t trade drunkenness for anything. Nights when I can cry on my brothers shoulder, because now it’s a god-given fact that we are siblings despite our parentage, and know that even with an ocean between us I can’t lose him. It’s been two nights since we sat in that empty bedroom and expressed our woes. It’s been two nights since my last drink.

I haven’t had a nightmare in as many.

ENDNOTES: Both Theo and Adam are not the real names of my brother and his brother-in-law. While I am happy for all of you to know mine, I don’t feel comfortable sharing theirs without their consent.

Additionally, I had planned on writing a more up-beat column this time around, as my first was pretty heavy too. However, this was something I needed to say and decided that I needed to say it now or I never would. Thank you for reading! –A.E. Tallman

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How Do I Tell Them I’m Gone?

I come from a devoutly religious family. My great grandmother, who was very poor, wouldn’t drive all week so that she had enough gas on Sunday to drive around town and pick up all the kids in her small town and take them to church. Her daughter, and my grandma, would have a bible lesson with me every night before bed. My mom spent what little money she had to send me to whatever church camps and retreats I wanted.

I even spent a vast amount of time mentoring girls younger than me and teaching small groups and Sunday school classes. I went to a Christian school for five years. The Church was a huge part of my life growing up. I had questions, sure, even doubts. But those were always easily dismissed as a “Lack of Faith” or “Something to Pray About”.

A couple of years ago I left the country to teach English and witness to the locals. Our team was small, about six people, and on it was one of the church’s elders. This is someone who has been elected to his position, and has pledged to serve and lead the congregation. His behavior astounded me. I was constantly shocked to hear him speaking down to the people we were working with, making blatantly racist remarks, treating our team poorly, and even telling our translator directly that his culture was wrong.

I tried and tried to justify this man’s behavior. I told myself it was the way he was raised, or he was just having an off week. Maybe I misinterpreted his actions. But the longer I thought about it, the more I couldn’t figure out why he had been chosen to lead our church. In fact, I tried to think of a single elder that I respected, and could think of none. They all taught one thing and lived another.

“It’s harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle,” but you have a house that could fit five of mine inside, and 4 brand new cars.

“Be kind to one another,” but I’ve known you for eighteen years and you haven’t learned my name.

“Love one another,” except for gay people, people of color, or anyone else that doesn’t share your beliefs.

And then there was sin itself. “We are all sinners,” was commonly used as an excuse to do wrong. Because at the end of the day you could ask the big man in the sky for forgiveness, and you never actually had to right any wrongs.

None of it added up. There were still people I respected, there are still people I respect, but overall I couldn’t keep rationalizing this system with only “faith” as an excuse. I went from having a constant prayer running as my internal monologue, to not really talking to God at all. My pastor was forced out of the church by the elders, and I stopped going to Sunday services. I tried other churches, but one by one they got crossed of a list of potential church homes.

My pastor’s son, and my honorary brother, was still in town, and was struggling with some of the same things. We would have discussions for hours and hours about what was wrong with the system, the people, even ourselves. We would talk about God, and whether or not an all-powerful deity who built the universe would actually stand for the sorts of things that were happening in their church. If there was a god, then what the fuck was he doing?

Why was it that when you’re an adult, it’s all about love and forgiveness, but when you’re a kid, it’s all about scare tactics? I grew up being terrified of going to hell for an eternity just for stealing a pack of gum. And I hadn’t ever stolen a pack of gum. I had teachers who would catch kids in a lie and sing “Liars go to hell” to the tune of Frere Jacques. My brother had similar stories. My brother had worse stories.

Then one night my brother said what I was feeling.

“It’s not fun though. It’s not fucking fun to say I’m not a Christian anymore! These people come up to me every day and ask why I’m not around and I don’t know what to tell them because they think I’m enjoying this! They think I’m just out fucking around and breaking rules and enjoying it!” There were tears in my eyes. I knew what he meant, I knew exactly how he felt. We weren’t a part of the church anymore, we weren’t Christians, and we didn’t know what to do. We had both been big fish in a little pond, incredibly involved and dedicated, respected and loved by our “brothers and sisters in Christ”.

And here we were, sitting on a rock wall with a beer and a cigarette each, trying to figure out where the fuck we fit in anymore. We still haven’t figured it out.

What I have figured out though, is that I am a better person without God. I have to be accountable for the damage I cause when I do wrong. There is no easy out when I do something that negatively effects those around me. I have to right my wrongs.

This is not to say that I spend my days now slurring insults or bombing churches. I don’t condemn my family for what they believe, and I don’t try to lure my roommate into a life of debauchery. If having a god is what you need to keep going, then by all means, have a god. Believe in him (or her) with your whole heart. Do what needs to be done.

For a long time God was what kept me grounded. God was who got me through the first few years of depression and a panic disorder. God reminded me to be kind, he reminded me that I needed to live, not just for myself but for the people who loved me too. If it weren’t for God, Christianity, and the church, I would not be alive to today. My wrists would have opened up, or my pill bottles would all be empty. God got me to the point where I could survive without him.

I am writing this in the lobby of a hotel in Colorado, waiting for my family to get ready for dinner. My grandma will talk about how much the Lord has blessed our family to get to spend this weekend together. My aunt will comment on how she’s disappointed to be missing the new pastor’s sermon tomorrow. My cousins will ask me to quiz them on their scripture memory. One of them, the older one, will see two men holding hands and will remind me that they are sinning. I will tell him that they simply love each other, and I will say nothing more on the matter.

Because as firmly as I believe what I believe, I am still a coward. It’s the same cowardice that kept me in the church as long as it did. I am afraid of change. I am afraid of explaining myself to them. I am afraid that I won’t be allowed to see my cousins anymore. I am more afraid that my cousins won’t want to see me anymore. I am afraid to see my grandma cry. I am afraid to listen to what my mom has to say. I am afraid of many things.

Hell is no longer one of them.

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View beneath a branch on Stuart Street

Beneath a branch across the street I spied a house imprisoned behind a chain-link fence as I gave the dogs their morning constitutional. The lonely, picturesque framing under the arc of budding green leaves deserved to be captured. So, no one else being there to accomplish the task, (or interfere with it, more likely), I stopped to try and record the moment as best I could. It is owed a moment of still reverie, and so I will give it, despite having no connection at all to this small frame dwelling.

It’s sentence had been handed down. It is doomed to die to without dignity, unceremoniously scraped away from the ground that has faithfully borne it truly and securely these many decades. This is progress. I understand that houses do not last forever. Yet it seems only right that someone should stand in remembrance now for all the history that has transpired at 4571 Stuart Street.

I love my neighborhood. Some people call it the Highlands, though most of us who live here eschew that designation. We are, technically, a few blocks north of the Highlands. Others call it the Tennyson district, in homage to the homey business district that runs down Tennyson Street from 38th to 44th Avenues. But most of us prefer to call it Berkeley, named for the lovely park and small lake that borders the furthest northwest corner of Denver which we call our home.

We are close to downtown, a mere ten minute drive, but situated at the edge of the city limits, we enjoy a warmth and slower pace of life while still receiving the benefits of living in Denver proper. We know our neighbors, and have block parties through the year to enjoy each other’s company. We watch out for each other’s homes and children. And when I walk the dogs, folks say hello and engage in idle conversation, as if the old character of the area is still coursing through us.

It is a proud old neighborhood founded when new fangled streetcars ran in the big city, but off to the northwest, a hour or more away by horse, was what you’d call a bedroom community today. Over the years, the city grew and the neighborhood grew, until the former claimed the latter. Elitch Gardens, with it’s ornate theater became a well know attraction through the state and beyond. And over the passing decades, houses filled in the streets blocks in the styles and materials of their day – small Tudor homes from the 1930′s, and bungalows from the 1940′s; tract style homes with asbestos siding in the 50′s and 60′s, and brick ranch homes from the 70′s.

But as a new generation has embraced urban living, our little enclave has become what they call in the real estate business as ‘hot’. The older, smaller homes are being cleared to make way for newer, modern structures which will become just as dear and filled with memories as the ones they replaced. Some of the residents resent the changes, and the newcomers who live in them. They resent the increase in property taxes, and the new businesses that replace the old ones. They would like to keep the character of the neighborhood the way it was when they first moved to the area. I understand the inclination to hold to what is familiar, especially when it has been so good.

Yet change is the one true constant of life, and it is coming to my neighborhood whether the residents cheer or hiss. I try to look on the positive side of things, not least because I am one of the interlopers, living in one of the new houses. I never saw the house that used to sit where I now live, but I’ve heard about it from the neighbors, and it must have been similar to the one I saw today. It was a small thing, between 600 and 700 square feet, and in a bad state of disrepair. Sheer economics spelled its doom. A large duplex replaced it, each selling for what I thought an embarrassingly high sum five years ago, but which is cheap now compared to the current prices. The price of progress is apparently fairly steep.

All told the differences between neighbors is an undercurrent and not a major source of conflict. And the newcomers form friendships with the old the way they have in decades gone by. But I can’t help but feel a tinge of sorrow as I looked upon 4571 Stuart Street, marked for extinction, and wonder what memories it will take with it when it passes.

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Conversations I don't think I'll get used to having

Have you ever heard of bonobo apes? I hadn't either. Not until my partner mentioned them to me this evening. Why he brought them up or how he came to know about them is not important. My reason for mentioning them is that I've had the idea for this piece for a couple of days but hadn't been able to find a beginning for it; and since it's about sex, the apes' sexual habits sort of gave me a way of starting the piece off. They won't make another appearance, they simply gave me a way of bringing up the topic of sex; because, truth be told, I haven't really known how to bring it up in the past and I'm still only comfortable discussing it with less than a handful of people.

I wouldn't call myself a prude (you might); I think sex is something that has different meanings to different people and I personally like to treat with respect and privacy. Meaning that my sex life is the conversation and business of my partner and I. Fullstop.

Now that we're clear about that, you should've understood I'm not writing about sex in relation to myself either. I say either because the first potential subject of sexual conversation was the apes. I don't know what the norm for talking about sex with friends is. I don't know if girls generally discuss their sex lives with their girlfriends, or if guys do so with their friends. I only know I don't do it. No one even knew I'd lost my virginity until more than six months later. I didn't care to tell anyone - what is it to them?

The first person I told didn't bludgeon me with questions because her thinking is much too similar to mine to do that. She and I were sitting on my bed in our pyjamas, flipping through the magazines she'd bought for the train journey, and it was an article on sex that made her ask. She didn't ask whether or not I regretted it. Instead she leaned across the bed to give me a hug and turned back to the article.

The next time I found myself talking about sex with a girlfriend was a little under a year ago. She isn't my closest friend but we've been through a lot together and have been each other's support system on more that several occasions, so talking to her about personal matters isn't as difficult as it is with others. It's still she who finds it easier to talk to me about such things. I wonder why that is?

It wasn't something I anticipated her bringing up, so when she inquired whether I could help her figure something out I thought it had to do with the man her parents wanted to introduce her to. I knew she was (still is) seeing someone and that she had (still has) trouble disclosing it to her parents and was somewhat relieved at that not being the topic of question.

I wasn't surprised by her wanting to talk about sex. I was always the one my girlfriends came to with questions about periods, tampons, vibrators, and virginity. I'm not quite sure why that was; I was only the most experienced when it came to tampons. I once questioned why they only ever came to me; something about not making them feel stupid for asking.

She wanted to know if I had any ideas about why she wasn't able to orgasm while having intercourse with her boyfriend. They had tried to work on it and figure it out between themselves, but she wanted the opinion of a fellow woman. She was starting to feel pressured and what she put down to as incompatibility after only a few weeks because she found it easier to orgasm on her own than with him. My immediate reaction was to tell her it sometimes takes time to figure out one another's pace and preference and she shouldn't let it stress her.

We ended up spending hours talking late into the night sporadically trying to figure out the differences between her pleasuring herself and him pleasuring her, and eventually came up with a few ideas for them to work with. It boiled down to patience and her needing to guide and teach him what her body wanted, and reciprocating the same.

I've met her a couple of times since, but I don't know what became of our conversation because I don't usually bring up the topic of sex.

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Orange Is The New Black, Season 3: On Being a Mother

I have been a daughter for 25 years. In that time, I don’t recall a specific moment when I was taught or told I would become a mother. It is something a girl grows into, assuming every girl becomes a woman becomes a mother. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized motherhood could be a choice. There are options.

As a single woman, you are asked– usually at family get-togethers, to make matters worse– “Where’s the boyfriend?” (Yes, even if you are gay and your family’s aware of it, you will probably be asked, “Where’s the boyfriend?”) Once you have convinced someone to date you, it’s, “Where’s the ring?” I have been a wife for a little over a year. As a married woman, I am asked at least once every couple of weeks, sometimes by complete strangers: “Where are the kids?”

The most common assumption: You are a woman. You will have children.

The third season of Orange is the New Black started with a Mother’s Day episode that marked the biggest theme of the season: motherhood. The season opener revolves around the pressure Litchfield mothers feel to give their kids a break, to help them feel comfortable, like their mothers are not behind bars. The women use resources at their disposal to create games– including breaking open an empty piñata, which Soso says is “such a metaphor for their lives”– and provide a little distraction.

In between flashbacks of mother-daughter interactions from our favorite characters (including glimpses into Sam Healy’s relationship with his mother) we see Sophia trying to balance being a mother and giving her son some “fatherly” advice. We see Poussey dealing with her mother’s death. And we see Big Boo and Pennsatucky in one of my favorite scenes of the season, one that cements the friendship season two hinted at. Boo comforts Pennsatucky as she mourns over a Popsicle-stick graveyard of her aborted fetuses. Boo uses Freakonomics to show Doggett some compassion, explaining that she might have saved society from more “meth head white trash pieces of shit” such as herself. “A good mother does what’s best for her children,” Boo says, “and maybe what was best for your children was wiping them out before they had to lead miserable fucking lives.” It’s classic Orange, a scene that feels sad and real but funny and just a bit absurd. It starts the season off with a simple idea: some women aren’t meant to be mothers. And they need to stop beating themselves up over it.

One of the season’s biggest storylines focuses on Daya’s struggle with giving up the baby after Pornstache’s mother (Mary Steenburgen, you goddess, you) offers to adopt. It was fascinating to meet Pornstache’s mother– it’s always interesting to meet whoever raised a douchebag like ‘Stache. Who’s to blame for this asshole? It’s easy for onlookers to always blame the parents. Drug addicts, school shooters, we blame the parents, we blame the parenting, we assume they come from a broken home. There’s a scene when Delia Powell (Steenburgen) visits Daya and explains what it was like– from the moment he was born, a nurse handed George over and bid his mother good luck; he was a difficult child from the start. It was a heartbreaking scene, a quick example of a mother feeling like she owes the world an explanation, like she needs to justify her child’s mistakes.

Powell seems like a kind woman and a good mother, and her biggest appeal to pregnant Daya is her money. Powell has a big house where the baby could have his or her own bedroom– something Daya never had, could never have dreamed of. Daya goes up to Piper at one point and asks her what it was like to grow up with money. Piper reminds her they both ended up at Litchfield; money isn’t everything. We see this same idea reflected in Nichols’ relationship with her mother, who is wealthy but (somewhat) neglectful. Did money facilitate Nicky’s addiction? Is money supposed to make motherhood easier? Is it supposed to make a child more grateful to their parents than a kid without the same opportunities?

Aleida quickly dismisses the idea that love is more important than money, telling her daughter, “babies ruin your life”. In a later flashback, we see a young Aleida send little Daya to summer camp in hopes of a month-long “vacation”. Daya kicks and screams, begging her mother not to leave her, but Aleida pulls away. When she returns a month later, Daya is happy after a great experience at camp, which only appears to upset Aleida. She diminishes Daya’s artwork, makes fun of the other kids and camp counselor… She pushes Daya away, but doesn’t want anyone else to have her. Daya gives in, aching for her mother’s approval.

Another big storyline this season was the battle between Mendoza and Sophia. Their stories intertwine when Gloria asks if her son Benito can ride with Sophia’s family on visitation days. Sophia agrees, but when her own son begins misbehaving she fears Benito is a bad influence. Sophia confronts Gloria and questions her parenting style; it’s a devastating scene, both mothers desperate to guide their children from behind bars and jumping to judge or blame instead of considering their own faults. In wanting the best for their sons, both mothers tear into each other, and their argument leads to Sophia getting jumped.

My husband will stop and watch OITNB with me when I have it on, catching bits and pieces that he tries to tie together. This weekend he sat down during a Pennsatucky flashback: She’s just gotten her period and she goes to her mother, worried that the blood on her undies means she’s dying. Mama ‘Tucky shrugs it off and tells her daughter this means men will start looking at her differently, and she just has to let men be men. My husband turned to me, a look of terror on his face. Dafuq kinda mother says that to her kid?! The series then takes us on a brief and painful history of Pennsatucky’s sex life, showing us how her mother’s words shaped her views on sex, men, love, and self-worth. It was, in my opinion, the most tragic story this season. It is scary to think how much power parents have over their children, their ability to create or destroy them– us– with just a few words, their influence on the choices we make and the things we end up believing about ourselves.

Motherhood comes up in other small moments throughout the season. We learn that Big Boo lost touch with her mother growing up, and refused to say goodbye on her mother’s deathbed after her father asked her to change out of “costume”. Even if it was a slightly predictable backstory, I enjoyed learning a little bit more about Boo, who always seems so confident and refuses to compromise who she is. We meet Marisol’s mother, we see Red dealing with “daughter” Nicky being taken to max, and get a quick look into Suzanne’s life after Vee. Near the end, we also see Taystee taking the new role of The Mom of her group, which happens naturally and kind of unwillingly– Taystee serves as an example of a different type of mother, the mother as a symbolic representation of love, care, and guidance.

This season the most poignant themes were religion, faith, and the idea of belonging. Storylines like Norma’s, Leanne’s, and Soso’s were interesting, but the theme of motherhood hit a nerve for me. I want to be a mother. I am excited to be a mother.

I am terrified of being a mother.

The stories in season three were refreshing to watch on TV, stories that are diverse and, screwed up as it may sound, hopeful. These women are already at what most could consider their worst– they are locked up. The circumstances allow us to dive deeper into the characters’ stories as daughters, as mothers, as the mothers they could have been. The season pulls through a series of questions: What kind of mother are you? What kind of mother do you want to be? What makes a good mother, and what makes a bad one? What are our options?

And who gets a say?

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Paranoia in the USA

Guess where I’ve been recently! Or better yet: don’t! I’ve been to America (that’s why there was no article from me last month: I was staring at Niagara Falls like a slack-jawed yokel). Overall, it was a pretty amazing experience. But let’s face it- nobody reads my articles to hear me gurgle happily about my holidays. No, what I want to talk about is something a lot more disturbing. While I was in America, I found it impossible not to notice that the whole country was constantly dripping with paranoia. It’s like a low-level background hum- probably barely noticeable if you’ve lived in it all your life, but distracting and disorienting for outsiders exposed to it for the first time.

As you might expect, this paranoia most frequently manifested itself in what I can only describe as a pathological obsession with terrorism. Terrorism and bombings seem to be standard reference points for the American psyche. Let me give you an example: I went on a short ferry trip to the Statue of Liberty and back and the tour guide (why the fuck a forty minute river cruise needed a blaring idiot narrating it is an issue I’ll have to tackle some other time) could only talk about one fucking thing: the 9/11 bombings. He kept banging on about how we all had to be prepared lest someone come to take away our freedoms (the irony of this speech is something else I’ll have to deal with some other time). Later, I was chatting with someone (who seemed perfectly nice) in a hotel, and she joked about people “looking like terrorists” when trying to cross international borders. Yes, she was taking the piss, but it’s concerning that she has a preconceived notion that some people ‘look like terrorists’ because it suggests a subconscious prejudice or fear against certain groups grounded on paranoia. Meanwhile, every public area is saturated with armed security (in case someone tries something explode-y) and the airports even take visitors fingerprints (hot tip, America: that’s not fucking normal). I can only assume that last demented measure was introduced as a bid to tackle terrorism, but I’m not sure how it’s supposed to work. Are terrorists’ fingerprints shaped like little bombs or something?

The pervasive sense of paranoia isn’t just confined to the fear of people blowing themselves up: there’s a sense of edginess and aggression that seeps into a lot of the culture. At one point, I had to ask a border patrol person something about my Visa Waiver thing and my status while I was state-side. It should have been a perfectly normal exchange based on a perfectly routine question... but the border patroller (I have no fucking idea what they’re actually called) insisted on keeping a distance of approximately twelve feet between us and kept her hand resting on her gun throughout the entire conversation. Even trying to fucking buy stuff (y’know, in shops) I was frequently greeted with suspicious looks and an aggressive attitude. That wasn’t a universal experience, mind, but it happened often enough to be jarring and the only apparent reason for it was that I Was Not American and therefore Did Not Belong And Might Be Up To No Good.

Do I have a wider point here? Yes, actually. I lot of Brits who visit America talk about how friendly and easy-to-talk to everyone over there is, and that’s true (up to a point), but I think that something that a lot of people fail to talk about is the dark side of the American atmosphere. There’s ever-present sense of embattlement. The USA feels like a country that’s always looking for an enemy. It’s the other side of that old ‘American Exceptionalism’ paradigm: if a nation’s culture enshrines the idea that that nation is inherently special and heroic, then naturally it will start to perceive itself as being assailed and fighting for its unique, special place in the world. The problem is- and I don’t mean to overstate the case here- THAT SHIT AIN’T HEALTHY.

If I’m being painfully honest, I think this embattled sense of paranoia may explain quite a few of America’s more universally-recognised problems. The rampant racism; the pathological attachment to guns-as-a-means-of-personal-defence; the xenophobia towards gay people and other minorities. Ultimately, American exceptionalism has curdled into general paranoia which lashes out at any target who shows the slightest degree of variation from the cultural norm.

But that’s just a theory. And what do I know? I live in a country so warped the government was voted for by less than 25% of the people who voted, who in turn accounted for less than 60% of the population... and nobody seems to be complaining about it. So I guess I’m in no position to slag off an entire sovereign country... but I just did, so fucking YOLO, motherfuckers. And, yes: I will go off on a full-length rant about Britain’s warped political system in the next one of these I right.

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Grief and it’s companions

I was four when my brother died.

He was just three months old and we shared a room. I was in the room as he took his last breath; but there was nothing I could have done.

He died of SIDS.

I remember my mother coming into the room. Her panic, her hysteria. My bed was by the window, and his crib on the perpendicular wall. I remember being confused and not understanding exactly what was happening. We lived just a block from the local hospital.

It didn’t matter.

My mother had already divorced my brother’s father; my stepfather of just six months.

That man is dead.

My mother is dying.

My grandmother is dead.

I am the only one left who remembers my little brother. My other siblings are far too young.

I remember carrying him down the stairs of our apartment. I also see memories lit like photographs, the scraps left over in the album my mother put together.

I visit him, whenever I go home. The small bronze headstone, bought for our family by our landlords at the time. They felt deeply for my mother, a young, single mother of two, struggling to get by; unable to afford the grave marker.

My mother kept it all. The drafts of notes she sent my kindergarten teacher, explaining the loss, the thank you notes to friends and family for donations and gifts. The sympathy cards, the few pictures she had of him, small and tiny.

It was the 80s. No digital pictures. Too poor for a video camera. The handful of photos we have, they exist in just one album, the story of my mother’s short lived marriage, the son she conceived, and the death that followed.

Her defense mechanism was to bury the grief. I don’t know how deeply; she rarely talked about him at all. When I was young, we brought flowers to his grave, but over time our visits were few and far between. When I gave birth to my first child, she came to visit, and commented; the first acknowledgement of him in many, many years.

“Now just imagine,” she said, as I held my newborn infant, “Imagine that someone said to you, ‘Well, at least you didn’t have long to get to know him.”

I was oddly grateful for the reminder, the confirmation that he hadn’t been forgotten. In later years, she would scorn other women who lost children and kept count of them. “I’ve got three, but my daughter passed,” they would say, and my mother would scoff later behind closed doors. She’d gone to grief groups soon after his death and found the members’ attachment to the dead alarming, unhealthy, and far too obsessive.

Sometimes I wondered if her own dismissal, her own burial of the topic, was unhealthy as well.

Is that why she treated me as she did? Was it grief that I had survived when he had not? Or was it simply the effect of a woman far too young, having a child she didn’t want, and forced by society to pretend to love and care. In the end it doesn’t matter.

He is dead.

I am not.

And my mother is dying just the same.

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Drained

There is no nice way to tell someone you think your friendship has run its course. You can't end a friendship like you can a relationship, with the promise you'll stay in touch. Ending a friendship is finite and hurtful and no one gets out unscathed.

In my short 19 years of life, I've seen many friends come and go. Some have left marks, some have merely been gusts of wind through my life, and some have left scars. Some have left scars so deep it feels like they could pucker and split open at any given moment.

That's the unfair thing about memory. We are more likely to remember instances of trauma than instances of joy. Evolutionarily, this is because we're more likely to avoid these things in the future. In reality, humans are incredibly stupid, and I'm quite surprised we haven't died out yet.

We think the mistakes we make are situational, and that we'll never face those circumstances again. They aren't. Me? I thought I could fix people. I think I still do, to an extent, and that's something I'll never truly conquer. But it got to the point last year when I put my own health and personal sanity on the line for someone else. Someone who took and took from me without thinking twice. It got to the point that instead of me trying to fix people, they expected me to fix them. Sleepless nights, endless text messages, and a constant feeling of guilt became my reality. One day, I said enough. I put down the phone, I stopped texting back, and I went to bed. I didn't think about it for months, until one day he called me. He apologized, but he had apologized so many times before I didn't know whether to believe him. It's hard to feel validated by your toxic relationship when it isn't romantic, and it's even harder to tell that person you don't think you can be their friend. And he's trying. He'll text me every week or so asking me how my life is, making grandiose plans to hang out--But every time I see his name on a screen I think about all the toxic things that have come up under that name. I learned a lot about myself from my friendship with him, and maybe evolution did do something right. Which is why I can't go back, I've been conditioned to understand it would be stupid to make the same mistakes twice. I just hope I'm strong enough.

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Notes on Happy, Sad (and Beautiful) Things

I dream of my house sometimes. The smell of those black leather chairs in the main study, where I learned to color outside the lines. My feet reacting to the white marble floors, shockingly cold even at the height of Monterrey summer. I dream of long days spent outside, with smoke and barbecue and chlorine in my hair, staring up at the orange walls decorating the piercing blue sky.

A few weeks ago at work I was asked to call in a food order to a local sandwich shop. The salesgirl asked me to please wait for a minute while she put the order in– click, the hold music came on.

I’m put on hold a lot– when I’m calling for a cab or when I’m ordering a pizza. When I’m trying to pay a bill over the phone, or simply when I need to talk to someone. I know hold music, and I used to know my own. When I was growing up, there was a point when we had four phone lines in my house. Now, even the thought of a single landline is ridiculous. But back then, we had four phone lines. I remember calling home– from a friend’s house, trying to get permission from my mom for one thing or another… or from school, begging her to bring by a forgotten assignment or what have you. If my sister answered, it would be a rough, annoyed, “Ugh–Wait” before being put on hold and transferred to my mother. If my dad answered, he would barely let me get a word in before: “GISELAAAAAAA!” quickly followed by– click. Hold. Sometimes it would be a few seconds, other times it would be minutes. Minutes, whole minutes listening to that hold music– this weird, Disneyesque tune that would cling to me for the rest of the day. Music I didn’t know I remembered, until I ordered sandwiches a few weeks ago and there it was. I began to dream of home again.

My best friend used to hug me when we were younger, breathe in and say, “You smell like your house.” I have never known if people smell like places, or places smell like their people. I always thought it was a little bit of both. But I knew what she meant. My house had this smell… I grew up on it, and I still miss it sometimes. My husband will hug me and every now and then, he will smile and say, “You smell like you.” He never got the chance to spend much time at my old house. When he came along, my mother was ready to sell.

When I was growing up, no one warned me about the attachment you can feel to a place, to a thing, to a collection of things. I believed extensions of a person were other people– until I grew up, and I realized most of my extensions were things; my books, my music, my car. I held on to them for dear life.

The house sold two Decembers ago, and before then it had been a long time when I would return to Mexico maybe once a year, twice if I really tried. Whenever I did go, I would enjoy that house as much as, if not more than the company of people. I would go in and take a deep breath, walk down the stairs, hand on the dark wood railing, into that red kitchen. I would explore corners of my house I thought I knew perfectly, climb those four flights of stairs up to my bedroom and lightly flirt with my books and picture frames, pull out old notebooks and read scribbles from gods know when.

I still find my house everywhere. Even today, I will look over at my current shelves, a title will catch my eye, and I can picture its exact place in my old bookshelves back home, shelves that aren’t there anymore.

Last year I read The Goldfinch, and it hurt how much I understood it. It hurt because it made me feel ridiculous. Words that beautiful couldn’t be talking about me, and this absurd relationship I believed I had with a house that didn’t even exist anymore, right?

“Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only– if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things– beautiful things– that they connect you to some larger beauty?”

I read and reread those words, time and again, feeling sad and liking it. Enjoying the sadness. It felt good to miss something that much. I’m pretty sure my husband suspected my madness in those moments of whatever-it-was, but he would only kiss me and listen. The friends who knew me Before, they understood; they knew that house held a certain kind of darkness for my entire family, and that this was a good thing disguised as a sad thing. But still. When you grow up watching as much TV as I did– well, just think about it. The Seaver house, the Brady house, Monica’s apartment. Setting always mattered. The characters did too, but the place they spent their lives in came a close second. That final Friends scene, when they pan out and show the empty apartment– terrible purple walls and all– I still cry when I watch that scene. How can they leave that place? It’s The Apartment. It’s Home. Elsewhere makes no sense.

My husband doesn’t really have a connection to his parents’ house. “My parents’ house.” That’s what he calls it. And I guess he’s right, I mean, hell– I never paid for anything. It was my parents’ house. My mother’s house, later on. My in-laws have lived in this particular house for more than ten years, which to me would make it Home. But when their kids were young they moved around a lot, and they had this funny little concept of “home is where your family is.” Damn hippies. So I think about that sometimes, seeing how happy my husband is thinking of “his parents’ house”. Maybe holding on to one particular place, even if I considered it home, was a kind of disservice. I thought of it as stability, when it could have just been… stuck.

I’ve struggled for years over this concept of home, and whether it’s things or it’s people, or maybe it’s just a feeling you get. The place we live in now, we’ve been here for almost two years, and it’s a tiny hole in the wall in a beautiful neighborhood in Austin. I fell in love with it immediately. And I think what got me was the realtor saying it was the house the owner grew up in. The owner, in her 60′s, doesn’t even live in Austin anymore, but she couldn’t part with it. Not just yet.

After the hold music thing, I texted my mom (I know, we’re so hip) and told her about it. I was excited, or shocked, or I don’t know the exact term for it. And her response was Classic My Mom; she said she hopes when I think of home, I always remember the happy moments instead of the sad ones. And I guess that’s when it hit me: I did remember the happy moments. And maybe she wasn’t that lucky.

It was one of those “maybe when you have kids, you’ll understand” moments for her, but for me it was clear. My mom had to deal with a completely different house than I did.

I wonder now what her house was like; if it smelled like rain and flowers, or tobacco and old, worn leather.

I wonder if the thought of it ever makes her smile,

or if she tries not to think about it,

or if she doesn’t even have to try anymore.

And that’s when I forget about the house, and I begin to miss her. Her larger beauty. Home.

Follow me on Twitter: @euvelab

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Statement of Intent

For me the word ‘change’ reminds me of the concept of time. Essentially time is a measurement of change (Aristotle). Therefore the concept for my photographs will capture the essence of time passing, showing change in that form. The photographs taken are from my windowsill, the subject being the view from my room and the changing of light in the sky depending on the time of day. When I work at my desk and turn around, this is the view I always see, and even though it’s essentially static, change is still prevalent.

The photographs are the progression of time, whether it be the sunset, sunrise, times throughout the day and night. It’s a simple view, the composition is not exactly thrilling, but it is the view I look at everyday from my desk. Whether it be an all-nighter, just waking up, or generally doing everyday tasks at my desk, when I turn my swivel chair, this is the view that I look at when taking a break to relax. The change is both physical and mental. The obvious physical change would be the lighting of my outside environment. The mental change is the relaxation and solace I find in the simplicity of just looking outside my window. Windows are a hugely symbolic in my life as it I use them as a form of escape. If I’m in a train, I look out the window, when I’m in a car, out the window, plane, out the window. All my journeys include a view, a view provided and framed by a window.

The process of creating these photographs required me to wake up at unreasonable hours and take pictures of the obvious change in lighting as time passes. If exhibited, the photos would be placed side by side in chronological order (as ordered in the portfolio) to show the slow progression of the aesthetic change of the sky throughout different times of the day. This interested me because often I find myself looking out my window and praying for change, whether it be in time or in myself. As a sufferer of mental illness the dark is usually the hardest part of the day for me, and as I sit at my desk at night ploughing through coursework or personal projects, I often wish for the time to either go faster, or slow down to allow more time to work on what I’ve sat down to do. If I’m not working at my desk, I often look out the window just to wish that times were different. That change would come sooner, especially if the current circumstances are unpleasant which for the past few months have been.

M.I. NICHOLS COLUMNS

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The Japanese, such a proud Jewish people

Not all of my memories of my year at Mizzou were awful. I managed to amass quite a few good times, and some really interesting, fun people to call friends. One of them was a brash, red-haired, journalism major whose name slips my mind. I’ll call her Janet, because that’s about as far from being her real name as I can imagine. (It was something both unusual and traditional, and started with an ‘R’.)

We were hanging out at her apartment smoking dope one afternoon. Janet had an apartment, since she was a junior to my freshmen, and we smoked weed because, well shit, we were at Mizzou, so drugs were like a prerequisite.

We were talking about some friends that went to the rather snooty, private school in town, Stephens College. Most of them, she told me, were legacies that simply were going because their mother’s went to school there. She was of the opinion that Stephens wasn’t what it used to be, while Mizzou had the number one journalism school in the country. Of course she says this to me with the same air of condescension that is so common among the Stephens girls, but I don’t mention this because that would be rude. I was from southern Missouri, which qualifies as the South, and we’re nothing if not polite.

So Janet talks about how the Stephens girls like to shop, and show off their family money. We had a friend, let’s call her Monique, who was from Chicago and attended Stephens. She had four full-length fur coats, she told us, but she had only been able to bring two of them to school. In Chicago, she explained, the winters were brutally cold, what with the wind off of the lake, and nothing, but nothing, protected from the cold like fur. Janet had a dislike for Monique that she freely expressed whenever Monique was absent, but was nothing but fawning when she was around. I think it’s a girl thing, maybe. It was confusing, but again, I didn’t bother to question it.

Then Janet tells me that, to be honest, she’s a Jap herself, and has her own addiction to shopping and being spoiled and expects anyone who dates her to basically worship the ground she walked one. Now I didn’t really concentrate on anything after her disclosure that she was a Jap, because while she had never discussed her ancestry, I had always kind of assumed she might be Jewish, but you just don’t talk about these types of things in polite conversation, so I kept it to myself. I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, Janet doesn’t look Japanese at all!” Plus, I thought it was considered offensive to refer to the Japanese as “Japs”, but I figured maybe, being Japanese, she could use the term referring to herself. Once again, showing my southern upbringing, I nodded and said nothing.

Later I was talking to another mutual friend, Will. (That’s his real name, actually. Funny how I remember the guy’s name but space on the girls. Gays! What are you going to do with us?) Will mentions Janet in passing, and feeling some freshman need to contribute something meaningful to the conversation, I say to him, “Gee, I couldn’t believe that Janet is Japanese. To be honest, I thought she might be Jewish.”

Of course, you can see where this is going by now. Will looks at me as if I was the daftest person on earth. “Japanese!” he cries out. “Why would you think she’s Japanese? She’s Jewish, of course.”

I say, “Oh, well... she said she was a Jap.” At this point I’m terrified on two fronts -- one, perhaps Janet doesn’t tell everyone that she’s Japanese and Ive disclosed something private, and two, maybe without realizing it I’ve made a complete fool of myself, the latter being a paralyzing fear I’d experienced often over the years.

“Oh!” Will says, laughing hysterically, although it seemed, hopefully, at the situation and not at me directly. “She means shes a JAP, ‘J ‘A’ ‘P’; a Jewish-American Princess.”

There are times in my life where I feel so stupid, so naive, that I want to dissolve into the air and dissipate away from an embarrassing moment. This was one of those times. I laughed along with Will, still not entirely sure what a Jewish-American Princess was, but not wanting to let on about that. I figured I could ask someone else later. This was the eighties after all, and there was no Google search to come to your rescue.

I did eventually learn what Janet meant. I also learned that I was more of a country bumpkin than i would have ever wanted to admit. That’s the kind of realization that makes your ears burn and you guts twist, and in some extreme cases requires an emergency trip to the bathroom. It was one of the first, although certainly not the last times, that I was smacked with the surety that even with book smarts, there was a lot of shit that I had no clue about in the wider world.

Despite my flailing through this encounter, Janet, Will, and I remained good friends throughout that year. We even got to the point where my faux pas became a running joke among the three of us. It was one of the first times I remember feeling liked and accepted even after I’d done something stupid, and it went a long way toward healing some of the scars from growing up different in a small, white, bigoted southern town.

It might even have allowed me to start the process of growing less fragile and cautious as I’ve aged, and to own the naivete that all of us should have in childhood. I’m no longer afraid to laugh at my own mistakes, or feel a need to stay quiet when I want to ask about something that puzzles me. Sometimes, in fact, I act downright silly in public. And I no longer mind the stares at all.

ENDNOTES: Check out more writing from Ted Jackson at: http://teodorjackson.tumblr.com.

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Revisiting Fight Club

Despite dressing like Hercule Poirot’s gay cousin and having a voice as smooth and creamy as an elf’s spunk, I am, in fact, working class. Which may partially explain why I love the film Fight Club... for all the ‘wrong’ reasons. Oh, and you should probably consider this a Spoiler Warning for that film.

Anyway, for those of you who have remained joyfully unaware aware of this, there’s a trend at the moment among snobby, well-to-do film critics of trying to ‘reclaim’ Fight Club. They argue that we’re meant to find the narrator and his hyperactive persona Tyler Durden pathetic, along with the entirety of Project Mayhem. They say that the film is intended as a coruscating criticism of the kind of people who would buy into a movement like that (hence Durden turning out to be nothing more than the narrator’s hallucinatory projected self-image: the ultimate display of how pitiable he is). There’s just one problem: they’re talking a load of arse.

I don’t know if Fight Club’s director, David Fincher, has gone on record at any point to clarify what he intended the film’s message to be, but it’s pretty hard to watch the flick all the way through and agree that we’re supposed to hold Project Mayhem in contempt. You see, there’s the ending to consider. Throughout the entire fucking movie, the narrator has been unable to meaningfully connect to another human being, instead allowing Durden to act as buffer between him and the real world. However, when Project Mayhem’s ultimate goal actually succeeds and the banks are blown up (resetting everyone to the same financial state and wiping out the arbitrary inequality built into the capitalist, consumerist system), Durden dies and the narrator is actually able to connect to the equally fucked-up Marla Singer on a meaningful human level. I’m not sure if it’s even possible to make the symbolism any more heavy handed: as the skyscrapers fall down in the background, Durden (the walking personification of social disconnection and mental illness) dies and our nominal hero finally matures into a not-emotionally-crippled person, it’s fairly obvious what we’re being told. Shall I spell it out for you? Alright-y then: LIVING UNDER AN UNEQUAL, HYPER-CONSUMERIST CAPITALIST SYSTEM IS AN INNATELY PATHALOGICAL EXPERIENCE AND THE ONLY WAY TO RECOVER OUR TRUE, UNFETTERED HUMANITY IS TO END THAT SYSTEM. Or, to put it another, Project Mayhem was right all along.

You see, I’m being told that I’m supposed to regard Fight Club’s revolutionary politics as a joke. But I don’t. Do you know why? Well, you know that feeling of disempowerment and being treated as though I have no meaningful identity within a system that, conversely, is obsessed with individualism-as-a-commodity that Fight Club’s raging masses are suffering from? THOSE AREN’T MADE-UP EMOTIONS CREATED FOR THE PURPOSES OF DRAMA: THOSE ARE A DAILT REALITY FOR ME AND PEOPLE LIKE ME.

Yes, we’re meant to find Project Mayhem’s cultish methodology laughable and a little troubling: the film’s packing a jet-black sense of humour and isn’t above acknowledging the flaws in its own supposed heroes. However, overall, the work still comes down fairly unambiguously on the side of those who are disenfranchised and abandoned within consumerism. Whether that was Fincher’s deliberate intention or whether he was constrained to a certain degree by the source material is up for debate- maybe he really was just trying to take the piss but missed the mark. It doesn’t matter: intentionally or not, the film ends up sending a very clear message about how shite capitalism is and how blowing it up wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

So I like Fight Club for what I’m constantly told are all the ‘wrong’ reasons: I love it for the sense of catharsis and for the feeling that someone else gets it. I enjoy it for its violence and anger and endless, rage-fuelled humour. So fuck those upper-middle-class film critics for trying to ‘reclaim’ it: it’s not theirs to reclaim. It was never theirs to begin with.

P.V. TIMS COLUMNS

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Party Time

One time I was at a little backyard fire pit party thrown by this Japanese pot fiend in Vancouver. One of the guests was a Russian pseudo-gangster (maybe a real G, it's hard to tell sometimes). The Japanese guy was friends with the Russian because he couldn't understand what a total douche the guy was, due to language barriers and other cultural interference.

After some time, the Russian decided the wee party was lame and he stood up to go. He announced: “Any bitches wanna give me a blowjob for $50 before I go?”

I was so high that I got my subject and object mixed up in his sentence's meaning. I thought he was offering to give someone a blowjob and pay them fifty bucks. “Wow!” I thought, “this dood's a lot cooler than I thought!” Then, I almost put my hand up for the blowjob. I realized just in time that I didn't want a blowjob from the Russian gangsterling. I started laughing really, really hard because I thought it was so funny that I almost volunteered to get blown by this guy. At this point, I still really believed that he was offering to pay a guy at the party $50 to let him blow them. (In my own defence here, I have been to plenty of parties where that kind of deal would definitely not be offside.)

I kept killing myself laughing, and I guess this defused some of the tension everyone was feeling. I suppose they all thought I was laughing at the Russian. The guy left without saying much else.

It took me until much later on in the night to realize that the guy was actually propositioning the women at the party. I did wonder what they must've thought about my amusement, but it can't have been too negative, since they were awfully friendly towards me. One cute hippie girl almost half my age kept pressing her tits into me for the rest of the night. I'm married, so I didn't let that go anywhere. But the attention was nice, as were her tits. I just let her do her thing as I kept rolling blunts for that Japanese cat. Man, did he ever have some heavy shit.

It was a good night.

ENDNOTES: Check out my tumblr blog for more of my writing and other nonsense: http://muse-vassal-oc.tumblr.com/

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A Habit of Kicking

As a young boy I developed a habit of kicking rocks to and from school. School was Garfield Elementary, and since our town was small, and our house only 10 or 12 blocks from the school, my sisters and I had to walk to school daily instead of taking a bus. I am not sure what precipitated the kicking phase. My step-father would most likely blame it on the fact that I did not pick up my feet properly when I walked, but rather dragged them along lazily, scraping my shoes on the ground. He complained about this often and loudly, especially when I needed another pair of shoes.

We had only recently moved to this small college town in southeast Missouri, and already my life there seemed to be starting off on the wrong foot, so to speak. Prior to the move there had been no step-father. Our family consisted of my mother and my two sisters – Deanne, two and a half years older than me, and Kristi, three years my junior. My mother had been dating Jack for several years by then, and he seemed likable enough in the kind of way that a person visiting your house seemed pleasant and easy to get along with, so long as they were just visiting. Then seemingly out of nowhere Mom and Jack were getting married, and we were moving from our three-bedroom, townhouse style apartment in the big city to a small two-bedroom duplex in the middle of nowhere.

The duplex, we found out, was a temporary thing. It was simply a weigh station until our real house was finished being built. It was a nice enough place for a short stay I guess, although it had no basement, and had carports on either end of the building instead of garages, not that we had either a garage or a carport in our last home. It seemed odd to me, these permanent brick and frame awnings being attached to houses where garages should be. It still does. To this day I would not buy a house with a carport. Better no garage at all in my mind. It wasn’t as if no homes in town had garages, but ours did not. And the new house being built did not have one either. Why this would matter at all to an eight year-old boy I’m not sure. But I was quite sure it meant something. In our town there were definitely garage people and carport people. And we were going to be the latter.

After moving into the new house later that summer, a large three bedroom with a full, though unfinished basement , we inevitably had to go to register for school. I would find that to my step-father that some things were more important than garages. For instance, of the perhaps 10 or so elementary schools in town, ours held the distinction of being the only school that had no black children enrolled, as opposed to say, Mayfair Elementary that was in an adjacent neighborhood across Kings Highway which had several. I’m not sure if my step-father came right out and told us of the “no-blacks” benefits of our part of town, or if it came out in more subtle ways. But it was clear that we were expected to be grateful for his concern. Still, the stigma of being carport people in a garage people kind of neighborhood was its own cross to bear for a foolish eight year old boy.

When my mother remarried, we asked what we were supposed to call Jack, who to that point we’d simply called Jack. He said that we should simply call him Dad. This seemed reasonable enough. My biological father, Ron, hadn’t seen us in several years, nor written, nor sent so much as one child support check we were reminded. So Jack became Dad, and Dad became Ron. When we registered for school our names were listed as with my step-father's last name, Stewart, rather than Jackson, which I think was more to limit embarrassment for him. In this way no one would think we were not his real children, and by extension, no one would guess that he was not his wife’s first husband, (this from a man on his sixth marriage we later discovered).

In addition to registering for regular class, my parents made sure that I was enrolled in speech therapy, as I had been in both the first and second grade. My feet were not the only thing lazy about me. My tongue was also a slacker, and I had a problem pronouncing my s’s, sh’s, and ch’s. For two years I had been called out of class to go to the special education room, where I was fitted with a plastic device that cupped over one ear, across my mouth, then over the other ear. This allowed me to hear exactly what I sounded like as I mispronounced phrases such as the classic “Sally sells seashells by the seashore.” Let me assure you, for a child already soft-spoken and shy, speech therapy is a real confidence builder. The more I had to hear my own lisping voice, the more determined I became to speak as little as possible in front of others.

I think we’d been in school a month or two when our permanent records arrived from St. Louis. Trouble soon arose. Apparently it was not okay to simply register your children under whatever name you please. Meetings with the principal ensued. We were even called out of class once or twice. Eventually, much to my discomfort, it was determined that we would need to change our registrations to Jackson. So in the wink of an eye Ted Steward became Ted Jackson. In this small, southeastern Missouri town, even the teachers seemed to be confused by that. My name change couldn’t be made quietly either. No, no, my third grade teacher actually made an announcement during class, and called me up to the front of the classroom to offer a lisp littered explanation.

I believe, looking back, that she thought she was announcing something special. My sisters and I were being adopted by our new step-father, and our names were changing. Hurrah! Explain it to the youngsters as a positive thing. Instead I got to explain that it was the other way around. Evidently, my new step-father would not be adopting us. I couldn’t help but feel that my already tenuous status in class was being further damaged. I was the new kid in class, a chubby, second-rate boy who couldn’t pronounce his s’s, from a carport family whose bigoted new father didn’t want to be his father after all. It was an uncomfortable realization, made more so by the fact that I didn’t fully understand it myself until I was forced to explain it to a group of strangers.

I’m not sure who Ted Stewart would have grown up to be. But I know that he died that day in third grade, his short life snuffed out after only a few months. Whatever potential lay before him evaporated into the crisp autumn air. It was shortly afterwards that Ted Jackson began his habit of kicking stones to and from school.

Like most of the habits I developed, rock kicking soon became something of an obsession. It wasn’t enough to kick a rock to school. I soon found that I had to kick the same rock all the way to school. If it was a particularly good sort of rock, colorful, nicely shaped to provide a straight, predictable path, I would even try to locate it after school and kick it home. For an outstanding rock, a place was earned in my rock collection, which I kept in a shoe box in my room.

It seemed an odd sort of thing, even to a boy in the third grade, and instinctively I tried to keep the full intensity of my kicking compulsion hidden from others. To outsiders I imagined I looked like any other young boy, casually kicking a stone out of his path on his way home. But inside my head the game was far more complex. Each kick needed to be carefully planned and executed to deliver just the right satisfaction to the foot. And kicks needed to be made with alternating feet, so that one foot was not given favor over the other in the process. The amount of kick force was critical. Rocks that traveled long straight distances were far more valuable, but you had to be careful not to attempt too far a distance, or the rock may skitter across the street, and I’d be left trying to find a way to pursue it without letting on what I was doing to the other kids also walking home.

Even as a child, I found this activity suspicious, and I analyzed my behavior at length in my immature mind. Why could I not simply walk away from the rock after having begun the ritual? Why did I feel such an attachment, even obligation, to these inanimate objects? My mind was constantly abuzz with the murmurs of voices I could not make out, asking questions far too quickly to be answered.

Even a child's mind can be filled with whispered fears and memories of hurts endured. Laughter at how I talked, jeers about my weight, my haircut, my clothes -- echoed in my mind. And under it all, the growing certainty that I was undeserving of anything better. Yet still, I found that for a time I could silence it all and find peace, by just concentrating on one rock, and kicking, kicking, kicking.

ENDNOTES: Check out more writing from Ted Jackson at: http://teodorjackson.tumblr.com.

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