T.R. Wallace

[trwallacewrites]

Texas: Overrun by Men Who are Always in Favor of Rash and Extreme Measures

As a Texan and an Aggie, through and through, I know firsthand how self absorbed the state can be, how prideful its people are when it concerns their independence, their unwillingness to back down in the face of change, to cling to morals and traditions that have no place nor make much sense neither here nor there. From the countless hate mails I received in college, writing op-ed columns that didn't glorify Bush for the Texas A&M community, to the multiple times I've been told the following: "You're a feminist? That's cute." "You're just confused and angsty. You'll grow out of it. " "You're a republican. Look at you. You can't not be." I must honestly say that it is much easier watching Texas politics from afar, fielding the question, "Why would anyone not white and male want to live there?" with a shrug, both sad to call it my home state and thankful that I had managed to escape.

The problem here is not, though, that Texas pride is wrong, or should be toned down. It's that Texans have been truly misled. The GOP is no longer merely a red party. It moves further right with every single election, with every single fear tactic, with every single piece of rhetoric that knows Texans so well, but isn't working in their best interest. Want proof? Greg Abbott built his campaign on keeping Texas great. Rhetoric that looks backward at the Texas we once knew, with little true leadership looking forward. In the spirit of that, of keeping Texas the way Abbott remembers it, this story will serve us well. The unfortunate incident that resulted in his paralysis granted him millions for care, for a complete change in lifestyle. And then he actively worked the system to ensure that no other Texan ever receive the same monetary benefits and ease as he did. That's his type of leadership, the kind where he reaps the benefits, then pulls up the ladder behind him, acting confused as to why no one else could achieve what he has.

He is not an inspiration. He is not representative of Texan morals, traditions or wants for the future. But he is our governor. And Texans, those people so prideful on independence, made that choice, likely via straight ticket voting. Because that's what was easy, that's what didn't force anyone to think, to dig, to ask the right questions. Because that's what Texas has become. A state so wrapped up in fear that the majority of the state wouldn't recognize a modern day Sam Houston if they tried. And now we find ourselves back here, living up to a description that even then was no compliment:

"All new states are invested, more or less, by a class of noisy, second-rate men who are always in favor of rash and extreme measures, but Texas was absolutely overrun by such men."

[trwallacewrites]

There's a light at the end of the tunnel. That's what they tell us. Except the only people who ever see that light are heading toward the grave. What is that supposed to mean? Random neurons connecting in what will soon be the mush of what was once your brain. That's what the text books Texas hasn't touched will say. That light is the last of your brain processing an extremely stressful situation -- your demise. It's the last animal reaction to the end of the world. The last moment anything working in your body uses energy to think. The last moment that logic steps in and tries to process. That is when you see the light -- not when there is hope, but when all that hope is gone. 

So, to tolerate the optimistic life the world leads, I read quotes by authors who decided to bring the light to them. That seems to make the most sense. Virginia Woolf. Sylvia Plath. Ernest Hemingway. David Foster Wallace. There is something in their words, even from the very beginning, that says, "I don't believe any of you. You're all fools. I'll show you what I mean." And then they do -- by offing themselves.

And mental illness is sad. It is sad and it is crazy and it does a lot of things to brains we don't fully understand. But so does mental health. Eight glasses of water was the standard. That's what 90s kids grew up on. Drink 8 glasses and you'll be fine. Those molecules will moisten your joints and clear your skin -- but we all still had acne in 10th grade and our bones will ache beginning on our 30th birthday.

The point is that cliches are always cliches, especially when almost everyone agrees. When an entire country or large group of people decides nearly unanimously that something is right or wrong or moral or not, you can almost always assume the opposite is true. You can almost always assume somewhere, sitting high on a California hill or atop a West Village rooftop, there is a man (almost always a man) puffing a cigar, not giving a damn about lung cancer because all the money he just got from his new birth control drug or cancer treatment that ultimately kills us all five or ten or twenty years before we should have to go made him money enough to buy Google's next big "You'll live forever" technology. 

And while him and his immediate family make their way to the secret colony the Russian's have built on Mars (What? You thought it'd be the Obama Administration?), we'll all be down here wondering what life is about and how much love really costs -- if maybe that is the light at the end of the tunnel and if we just spend enough cash or dish out enough emotional junk we've hoarded up since the last time we thought love was a worthy conquest, maybe the light will shine bright enough for us to see. 

But it's that man on Mars with his conservative wife and blonde hair kids, it's that man who brought his Brazilian maid with him even though the family never had a maid down on earth, it is that man who knows the truth, who knows that the light at the end of the tunnel is what you see when you escape, when you enter the universe proper. It's the star that exploded when you died. It's the dust left behind. It's finding your celestial place away from the rock on which you were born -- and only the insanely rich and those brave enough to lose all hope ever get to really go. 

[trwallacewrites]

Each of us has multiple lives. We are spinning in this black hole of a universe and we each get multiple times to make it right, to do better, to become more than what we were that last time. Except the pity of it all is that we start over. Not with a new family, because the souls that you are tied to the first time are the ones that will be tied to you forever. So you don't get a new family or new friends, not the ones that matter -- really. You do another version of the waltz and this time you try not to step on their toes so often that they waltz right out. This time you try to remember that the song will end, for everyone and at different times, but especially for you. It is a silent disco and you have to remember to love the ones who's eyes talk to you -- who's message you can hear over the music, even when they don't speak. That's what the poets mean. That's what they mean when they say that the eyes are the windows to the soul because when you can look into someone's eyes and they speak to you, that's a soul you're tied to. And in this life, or the next, you'll have to figure it out. You'll have to figure out how to make it work with them. You don't get a choice. You don't get to say no to them. But they don't get to say no to you either. It's why you feel lonely, because those ties are pulled so tight they might break and there's a piece of your soul screaming out to you, trying to remind you of the last time. The time you died. The time they did. It's telling you to hurry. To love. To love. To love. To forget, to forgive, to love. Because the last time you gave up, which is why you're here this time. Your soul is trying to remind you that next time the music stops, you want to go to the big ball. The one where you don't have to waltz. The one where no one has silent disco ears on. The one that never ends, the one that is always playing music. On and on and on and you never tire of it. That ball is only for the ones who get it right. So get it right. Get it right this time. For the love, love. Just love. 

[trwallacewrites]

The goal is to make someone else happy. Every day, waking up with that goal in mind, that one task to accomplish. And it isn't so easy. Not as easy as you think. One day, a girl drops an orange on the sidewalk and it starts to roll toward the muddied waters gathered at the side of the street and I walk a little faster to pick it up and toss it back her way, and she smiles and her day is made. But tomorrow, when a coworker tears up every time a client says, "We want to portray love. Can you do that?" I say nothing, but note that chocolate and love aren't synonymous and if they are, I will never find love -- or like the taste of it even if I do. Later then, I'll hand her the M&Ms out of my Sweet and Salty snack bag and she'll smile, gratefully, but I know I can't help. Not now, not today. I can buy her a beer. I can brush her hair. I can tell her it will all be OK. But not today. No, not today. No, that's tomorrow.

[trwallacewrites]

All things inspiration #1

[trwallacewrites]

Life Lessons

I'd been lonely so long that the sad childlike fear of it had silently dissipated. There was nothing in that fear anymore - no longing for company or the outside world. I filled that place with memories of what those used it used to be like and had, as many before me also must, come to the conclusion that none of it was really worth it any way.

Sometimes, to remind myself of the horrors of humanity that made it worth the reprieve, I plug in my ethernet cord and search for a chat room of people who had or knew those who had their spinal cords snapped. In those rooms were the saddest stories.

One in particular of a woman who loved her husband but was convinced he didn't love her. Not an unlikely story, you might imagine, her being rendered helpless and all. But he married her after the injury - after a terrible accident after a not so terrible fight in which both were pretty sure the heretofore six month relationship was over. 

The fight was about her love for him, and his lack for her, not that his love was something he ever denied. He certainly felt something, but day in and day out it was the lack of the little things. You know, those small gestures you almost always forget unless for some reason, usually love, you don't. Like picking up an extra root beer, their favorite drink, on the way home while you grab yourself  a pack of camels and a beer. Or remembering that they like bacon on their hamburger, never a cheeseburger, when they run to the bathroom at a restaurant and the waiter stops by. All those things that most mothers instinctively do for their kids. All those things that those kids take for granted even in college as one thoughtful care package makes its way to the thoughtless child.

This woman, before this terrible accident had done all those things, had thought of him in the unnecessary moments, had made his preferences part of her daily life. He, on the other hand, despite his claims of love, never made that motion. he wouldn't ever admit it, she was convinced as she chatted away her sad love tale, that in that argument he suddenly knew it - that his love for her wasn't being in love. That day, they would have separated forever except for that terrible accident, that moment when fate intervened or so the preacher and multiple therapists would tell her so as to calm her fears over the idea that he has married her out of pity.

So in the end her signed for the gig of a lame wife and she got to be the wife of the man she loved - only he didn't love her back, or so she was convinced. And so she convinced the chat room. 

According to her, he would constantly complain about her inability to care for herself, the poor young (only 35!) girl had no one else left. Terrible tragedy seemed her lot in life and both her parents, being only children and both dying, perhaps thankfully before they had to see their only child cut in half, figuratively, of course, yet in the most literal way, their terrible accidents were terrible too. 

A gun shot in a liquor store despite the no guns sign and a quiet pill-induced suicide as the final kicker. That was 10 years ago, right before she'd need them again yet right after she thought she no longer did.

So this man she loved would make fun of her and he would complain and she, one day, decided to take matters into her own hands and relieve him of the burden. She called a nursing home and used the small financial backing she received from the government and moved in. Now certainly this hadn't bought her an insanely nice room but it was a sort of freedom nonetheless. She left a note for the man she loved, telling him where she was an the nurses came to pick her up while he was at work - making his own money issued by the government. 

He wasn't completely clueless and he had of course called the place on the note to check in with the nurses and state and express his acceptance of the move. It would be two week, though, before she would see him - and no word otherwise. During this time, she would often be forced to sleep in her own piss and eat the same meal day after day. Left-overs they called it. Her immobility wasn't looked kindly upon, nor was her younger age.

As the first week passed and there was no sign of him ,she resigned herself to accept this sad fate that was  for all unfair purposes absolutely worse than living with a man who loves you but hates you and will never be in love with you - broken spinal cord or not. She would often think about that day, in both those homes where she was a burden, a few weeks after her 30th birthday and about how she was wearing the new high heel shoes he bought her. Now, she couldn't even remember where they were from. But nonetheless they were a little higher than she usually liked and she had a bit of trouble walking in them - only the first of walking troubles she would ever have. She wore them only twice, the day he gave them to her, two days after her birthday, and then that terrible night. He loved the shoes on her and though she expressed her difficulty in them, he paid no attention - and besides, she liked the attention of his gaze. To appease her, he told her they wouldn't walk much, but that night, she did walk, away from him at that. In the midst of a fight they both knew was coming, on a semi crowded sidewalk that caused her feet to wrap around themselves, she tripped into the street. A car hit her back just as she hit the pavement and the cracks were heard over the onlookers' screams.

The car stopped immediately and the ambulances came and eventually it was rendered an accident. She got some money for her trouble of tripping, but not enough to hold her 30-year-old self over for the rest of her what she would now call her life.

So, he married her.

And yet, she when she was convinced that a pee puddle in the morning and a hateful nurse's attitude upon every encounter would be her new reality, he came. He saved her in the superman way in which only a desperate woman can be saved. And things were different after that.

She told the chat room she was kinder, the love of her life was her real life superhero. He was worse, a passing fling of his forever weighing on his conscience.

I read that woman's chat, though never participated, for years. At 40, 10 years after her accident and 5 after her nursing home experience, she took her father's advice and filled her belly with pills. Or so her widowed husband's book related. From his perspective, the loving husband, that day lost the love of his life, his first of course. His new 29-year-old bride was his new light and he hoped to build with her, he would say in interviews, everything he deserved to build with his first.

I read that book cover to cover and his philanthropic deed never missed a moment to gloat. Closing that book, I reminded myself that every story has three side: his, hers and the truth. Of course, my loneliness has taught me better than that. See, there is only one truth, and only the lonely is us, that small voice saying its unfair, it isn't right, even while the majority disagrees, that can ever truly see the light. So, I sit in my house, away from company or the outside world, holding the truth within me - and the best I can do is take it to the grave.

[trwallacewrites]

Ladylike

To hell with the idea that there is such a thing as a proper woman. Stop posting all that garbage about how to be a proper lady. There are no rules to being a lady! Those rules come from a definition and you, sweetheart, are not a definition. 

You can work all your life to fit that mold, to use a whisper rather than a yell, to set the table with the prettiest plates, to keep a knowing and understanding smile on that sweet, sweet face, but you won't fit that mold. When that doors close and it's just you and that man who tries to fit the definition of 'gentlemen' the two of you will scream. He won't be happy about where you put his dessert spoon or why he had to use the small fork for dinner despite the fact that he used the wrong fork for his salad. He will scream about the slightly sarcastic comment you made pointing out his lack of table manner knowledge, but it isn't the sarcasm that gets at him. No, it was the way that for a split second you dropped that sweet, sweet smile and looked straight into his eyes and for a moment became his equal. 

You, the lady of the house, are a Barbie Doll built in the 1950's. You, the lady of the house, are as Gone With The Wind as racial stereotypes. You, the lady of the house, are quickly fading away, becoming irrelevant and even offensive, and all you are is a definition. 

So, to hell with the idea that there is such a thing as a proper woman. Stop posting all that garbage about how to be a proper lady. There are no rules to being a lady! Those rules come from a definition and you, sweetheart, are not a definition.

[trwallacewrites]

Delusional

Downtrodden by a high school pregnancy that stole her dreams and manifested them into two young girls with big eyes and frizzy curls, she was just too young to understand that it could be worth it, that she could have both, the family and the dream. 

But that was the 80s. Women had power, but what was between their legs was a glass ceiling, which meant that while their softer looks and longer hair and higher pitched voices were now deemed acceptable in an office atmosphere, the natural workings of the body parts that those softer qualities covered were not. Pregnancy was a cause for resignation, cleavage for promotion. Only the aesthetic parts mattered to the men in charge - and those women gave birth to girls they hoped would break that ceiling and call for equality while their mothers slaved away at part time jobs that allowed them just enough to buy the roast for the night. 

It was all too much for a mother of 18 and then again at 20. She had dreamed of office buildings and city lights and late nights with friends all searching for the perfect man whom they could wed and leave it all behind...for the life of misery she was experiencing now - earlier than her peers. It was a shame she didn't appreciate the lesson a little more. She could have learned that it wasn't what she wanted, at 18 or at 28. She could have taught those daughters of hers that the glass ceiling was only a figment of their imagination and that if they worked hard enough, they could create a reality that produced happiness at all stages in life, if one so sought it. 

Instead, she tossed those little girls aside to an ex-husbands new wife and went to the city and worked in a tall building and drank with friends who never knew she already had those two kids. There, she found a rich man who would eventually build her a big house that would put a roof over the heads of those two little girls and the two others she had yet to bear. But that man too would bring her the same unhappiness as the first - and she would realize much later at perhaps 48 that she had turned her head to life's most important lesson at merely 18 and instead took the pill society was handing away. 

And that delusion made all the difference.

[trwallacewrites]

Forging a New Path

It is a constant state of flux, this writing drone that I hold within. The written word comes naturally and sentences from novels yet to be thought flood my brain on a constant basis. But writing these sentences down? Capturing them? Turning them into a story for the good of myself, to pay myself, to provide myself a living? I don't know if they should so be punished. 

And yet what about me? This typing, typing, typing on a keypad to produce words for articles that no one will care about tomorrow - and that many don't even care about today - should I be so punished? 

The only thing between here and there and me and that is me, and only me. Myself is the blockade - and fear and failure and forcible drinking that I won't stop pouring down my own throat. But all those things are by my own hand, the unknowable "I" that lives within, that works constantly against my own will. I sit here dying, claustrophobic, allergic to the work around me that isn't mine. 

I work towards her goal and her dreams and mine - mine she doesn't even see. And whether she is a he or likes a him or a her - none of it matters other than the title "boss." Her niceties don't matter and her stock options don't matter - except only to those with no creative skill who see money over thought and dream only in green and not in the universe where dreams are realized and works of art are created. 

And all the greed in this world was dreamt by them, the ones who see green and who envy in green and who love for green and who work only, always and diligently but very rarely honestly, for green. And for those others who starve on streets or live in basements while mom cooks dinner upstairs? The green is worrisome and troublesome because what if, like so many others before, what if no one likes it? 

This work sits in front of them and collects dust, or red ink marks at least, until it bleeds so heavily there is nothing left but a cold corpse of a text that used to be a living breathing thing. Not anymore.

So, they put the star is starting over and over and one day a check and one day a letter and one day a column in the New York Times says that your work is the best, but the one in the Wall Street Journal says nay, it is the worst. And you realize finally that all press is good press because no press is the worst kind of press. Don't you see that when they ignore you - but wait….

They ignored the best. 

They ignored Henry David Thoreau. 

They ignored Kafka.

They ignored Emily Dickinson and Jane Austen and Sylvia Plath.

And Sylvia Plath for heavens sake! Sylvia Plath put her head in an oven because not even her words, which were lyrical and lucid could take her back to the universe she kept dreaming of. 

So now as I sit and bleed onto paper the words that flood my thoughts in something that only the future will call stream of consciousness - not absurdity, not insanity - I feel better for the writing, but not for the work. 

Because the work isn't mine, and soon, I will have to leave her. And my writing will be all the better for the starving, for the poor, for the work to get it published. And who cares if they ignored the best and who cares if they praise the worst and who cares if wizards win over real human subconscious - at least my head won't end up in an oven.

[trwallacewrites]

Teenage Karma

Her hands held down above her, her body no longer in her control, she focused on the inner piece of her that her mother called her soul. 

These boys were not innocent, God couldn’t forgive them for not knowing what they did. 

Their future wives would never know, nor their daughters, no, they’d only tell a few. 

Their shame for this act tonight would be too much to bear. Some may commit suicide, others would fade away behind glassy eyes and refuse to share. 

For her, though, the future was to be more prominent. Years from now she would look back and see the promise, her personal covenant. 

Remembering the pain, the scars, the bruises, she would focus on her inner-self. She would call upon her strength to nurse her back to health. 

No, this event tonight is not magical, but it is centuries old. So much so that nature put evolution in control. 

As she escaped reality and entered metaphysicality, those boys jailed themselves in what they would later call stupidity. 

Overcome by teenage forces they thought out of their control, but she was not among them, her mind aloft with her soul. 

So that tomorrow when she cries, her future self will know, the victim blaming and bashing that ensued was nothing but a show. 

Of course, for them the story doesn’t end so happily, because in this life when you take away naivety, karma ensures that you’re forever haunted by your lack of morality.

[trwallacewrites]

The Power of Sanity

I write to keep from talking aloud to myself because talking aloud is crazy and writing is sane. That’s what they say, and have always said, except to the women who could neither talk aloud nor write it down. So they instead went often to the gardens and named the flowers and called them friends. 

Cultivating plants unknown to half a species was a difficult task, but it was sane, except for the children who mustn’t play in the gardens. So they instead went down to the river and played in the waves and waved to the fisherman who were then seen as crazy, but playing in the water for the children, that was sane.

Not all too often, but enough for men to write down in their journals and scribble in their books, the women would not come back from the garden and the children wouldn’t be heard splashing in the distance. For writing takes you out of this world and places you amongst the stars, in galaxies definitely not ours, so the men would be too late, you see, until dinner past uncooked and empty beds were left to be.

Those sane women in their gardens and those sane children in their waters oft fell victim to insanity, where in which rose thorns became razors and water overtook lungs full of air, so that when that man who wrote quietly in his journal of pretty ladies in gardens and sweet children all soaken spoke aloud to their ghosts, it was he who was deemed crazy.

[trwallacewrites]

Wilting Wild Flowers

It’s the smell of wild flowers that reminds her of funeral homes that she hates the most. She watches the children running from flower to flower within the park, smelling and picking and putting in their hair the little collection of petals that reminds her only of death. It’s surprising even to her that when spring comes around she is excited and giddy because the smell takes her back to that first funeral home, that first glance over the casket, the first time she would see the black cars and the black dresses, the blues that set over the people who came.

And perhaps that wouldn’t have been so bad, that first time, if that had been the last time. But from 1998 to 2008, she attended at least one funeral a year, most often two or three. The deaths came from nowhere and they spanned every genre. Some were wiped out by heart attack, others by their own hand and still others by murder or drinking and sitting behind a wheel. There were so many deaths that each time an old friend called she shuttered to pick it up, running a list of names through her head and what may have been their calling home card.

She wasn’t the only one who was so affected by the death. Her friends, too, became frightened and many packed their bags and headed west, convinced that there was something in the water in that town that made a heart stop beating. So kids that usually would have never gone to college applied to schools outside of their budget and when an acceptance letter came in, there was only the memory of the ones who didn’t make it to this moment, and the thought of packing up and getting out because life has to be treated as precious and in this town, nothing was precious.

The debt that would forever follow them around from a sub-par degree in business they would never use in their underwater welding career would slowly kill them, though. It might not have been at age 18 or after a few shots of Jack and a hurried drive home only to end in a bright light no one can save you from heading towards, but it would kill them nonetheless. The decisions they all made during that decade would forever affect their lives and spoil it with the slow rotting of death to come and death that had been. They could put it out of their mind, but the stench of wild flowers would still be there. They could tattoo the names on their bodies and remember their friends forever, but long before the skin would sag and that name became an unsolvable maze, the stench of wild flowers would be there.

No one who went to all those funerals and sat in all those homes and watched the parents of all those kids lose everything they had because of a depressed moment, a fight gone wrong, a drink too much, none of them would ever be able to smell flowers and not see death. And though they all had the same problem, the same olfactory system telling them that what others smell as good, you smell as rotten, they would never mention it to one another. Instead, they would simply never send flowers, or look away when others did. They would buy them, maybe, and put them in vases, but always by an open window that would take their smell far away from their confined apartments and houses. None of them would develop a green thumb. Their touch on plants would spell the coming death and even if the water was perfect and the sunlight was right, those plants must have smelled that stench too and – like so many others – passed away simply to get away.

[trwallacewrites]

What Gets Left Behind

Among the scattered leaves and limbs left lying in places they’d never been, she picked up a dish covered in sand. Looking around her, homes ripped off of their stilts, she could see straight out to the sea, nothing acting as a barrier between her and the caps but empty foundations. Limber as they might be, even the palm trees had been bullied by the ocean now slowly retreating back to its assigned place.

Looking down at the dish she held, unscathed, unbroken, she let her mind flow with memories of grilled fish dinners and fruit filled breakfasts. Those memories, those images, there in that house on those stilts painted that color –her children would never know them. No, not the way she had, or her mother had, or her grandmother had. That generational house on those stilts that could outlive three generations full of weddings and divorces, little league practices and ballet classes, kindergarten graduations and college commemorations, was swept off its feet by a storm the world not but 50 miles away would never care about.

Throwing the dish down on the foundation that no longer had any purpose, she watched her force break what the ocean couldn’t. Three generations was how long that house on those stilts, that beach with its barriers, that is how long they waited to be swept away.

Patience, she thought, plays a cruel joke on us all. Tidal tendencies convinced that house on those stilts and that beach with its barriers to give way, to be swayed, by the sea’s luring touch. Patiently they waited for love’s abiding return, day in and day out, lunar cycle to lunar cycle, only to be swept away not by the tides that tenderly teased, but by the storm that grew bored and tired and got rid of them with relative ease. So that the only thing left was a dish, hidden under leaves and limbs lying in places they should never have been.