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mary’zine #71: October 2014

October 26, 2014

saga d’amour conclut

When you fall in love, it’s like you get on a moving train with your lover, and you glide across the fruited plains and want for nothing. Everything is beautiful, and you believe that it will never change. Suddenly, you find yourself in the foothills, then on the dangerous mountain roads. You’re no longer on a train, and there’s no one else around. You’re alone with your simple need, one that your lover can no longer fulfill. You don’t know when—let alone why—everything changed. Despite the rarefied mountain air, you discover that Love is Flat, like the earth once felt. And you fall off the edge, as millions have done before you.

Now that the relationship is over, I risk sounding merely delusional, a victim of my own fantastical tendencies… as if I made the whole thing up, as if she was the level-headed one all along, humoring me while keeping my intense feelings at bay. There really ought to be a fairytale—told by the Grimm Sisters, perhaps—in which a Lesbian falls in love with a beautiful Princess (who is, of course, heterosexual; did you ever hear of a dyke Princess?). It’s a classic story, but, like many other women’s stories, it was never written down, or passed down orally. Ahem. This fairytale, if it existed, would not have a happy ending. And to be a bona fide fairy tale, a happy ending is a must—as is the inclusion of a Man to rescue the damsel from whatever horror results from not being with a Man. We lesbians have to rescue ourselves, or die trying.

My story doesn’t include a Man, unless you consider the male character who stands to the side of the stage, unaware of what is going on emotionally between his Woman and the never-seen Lesbian. I’m surprised Shakespeare never wrote this story. Or maybe he did and I missed it, having gotten a D in Shakespeare in college. (I had a lost year but was redeemed after I dropped out and started smoking marijuana. True story.)

There were certainly moments when it seemed that I—as the bona fide lesbian in the situation—was doomed or assumed to be the One in Love. But I know that she felt the same for awhile, which is what distinguished the relationship from my past encounters with unobtainable women. Oh sure, she was unobtainable, but there was a beautiful (delusional) time when we were together in the same matrix of wish and desire.

requiem for a mad, mad, mad, mad love

When love is not madness it is not love.―Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Friendship is solid. That’s its nature. It can take many forms: years long, or situational. Situational friendship ends when the situation is over. Usually, this is understood by both parties. Situational friendship can reconstitute itself if the new situation allows it, or it can fade from lack of contact. Years-long friendship changes to love naturally, over time, but it is still solid.

Romantic love is volatile. Most such love is doomed to failure, unless both parties allow it to change its form.

Madness is volatile. If one person emerges from the madness and wants to transform the relationship into something safer, easier—into “friendship”—it won’t work if the other one is still in a state of madness.

It’s a loop. Fantasy is volatile. Romantic love is fantasy. Fantasy is madness. Romantic love is madness, and madness is highly addictive, given the right circumstances.

With our friends, partners, relatives, we say we “love” them. When we’re mad, we say we’re “in love.”

Mad in love feels crazy, beautiful, even miraculous. It can cross boundaries with ease: marriage, sexual orientation, age, distance all become incidental… not because they are no longer true, or important, but because they have been swept away by the madness.

This old love has me bound. But the new love cuts deep.—Joan Armatrading

Mad in love is a revelation that two people could have such strong feelings for each other, even after a brief acquaintance. The spark flies, the flame is lit. But it rarely lasts. Someone comes to her senses, someone is threatened, has something to lose, is in danger of destroying another relationship that is no longer as exciting, as romantic, as mad… but is still important, a foundation that has momentarily been shaken.

She who emerges from the fantasy, the madness, is rationality personified. Friendship makes more sense (it is solid). It doesn’t threaten anything, it can coexist with the other elements. It is freer, less draining. Less hard on the heart. No longer volatile. Like taking the best parts of the attraction and eliminating the angst, the high emotion, as lovely as that was while it lasted. It’s hard to argue against friendship.

She who is still mad understands the reasonableness, is even in favor of it. Anything to stay close to the flame. She means well. But she is mad, after all. She misses the excitement, the intensity. She keeps looking for it even after it has been pronounced dead, or transformed. There is no transformation for the mad, regardless of the promises she makes, the reasonableness she thinks she can learn to live with.

Conflict becomes inevitable. One side wants reassurance, a return to the madness (even as she realizes it’s impossible), some proof that the flame is still flickering. The other side wants the madness to end—for her, the madness has ended—but doesn’t want to lose the connection.

Accusations fly, defenses are breached. Eventually, someone has to do something, because the reasonable and the mad do not mix. Someone must surrender to reality, declare a mistrial, give up the fantasy, give up the mad.

A happy ending is by no means assured. She who is still mad believes that she can’t “turn it on and off.” She who has already turned it off regards the other as immature, manipulative; she feels duped, sad, even indignant, as if she had nothing to do with any of it: the fantasy or the inevitable division and separation.

But there is no recourse. The worst must be faced. The madness will flame on for a bit longer, but she who has been clinging to the fantasy must see that it has been supplanted by the entirely reasonable-sounding “friendship.” Even then, the relationship has been built on a lie. The center cannot hold.

Both wish that the terms could be renegotiated, the past reconstructed, as if nothing had happened. But something has happened, and there’s no going back.

It hurts, but there is also relief (surprisingly).

Farewell to the madness. Rest in Pieces.

Tags:desire, illusion, love, madness, relationship
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mary’zine #70: August 2014

July 28, 2014

I think I fall in love a little bit with anyone who shows me their soul. This world is so guarded and fearful. I appreciate rawness so much. —Emery Allen

Do you think the universe fights for souls to be together? Some things are too strange and strong to be coincidences. —Emery Allen

We were all wounded in some domestic war. —Melissa Etheridge

I could fill this whole issue with quotations on the order of: “The course of true love never did run smooth.” Wouldn’t that be fun? No? OK, I’ll have to find my own words.

I went down a giant slide once, years ago, and I remember it vividly. The slide was so slick and so long, and the ride so fast, that halfway down I felt like I was going to hurtle into space, overcoming gravity by the greater force of centrifugation. It was as helpless a feeling as I have ever known.

Oh, fickle gravity, which hurts so bad when you fall out of a tree but keeps you more or less moored to the earth or to a slippery metal slide.

My new love, which I recounted in great excitement in mary’zine #68, was about to transcend gravity in its own way…. I was going to travel to visit her, we talked about things we would do while I was there… when something happened…. Isn’t it always the way? Something happens, you’re not sure what, even after extensive back-and-forths where you alternately praise, accuse, justify, plead, and despair of getting back to the used to be…. It’s what you both want, but somehow you’re going in different directions, you can’t seem to make it work, so many tears. One or both of you announce your imminent departure, then you come back, please, let’s work this out. The ambivalence is palpable, on both sides. The two of you have promised to be honest and open, not to disappear without a word. But you’re both caught in a morass of misunderstanding, seeing facts and implications with completely different eyes. What had begun as an uncanny simpatico, a field of blue flowers open to all outcomes, is suddenly charged with doubt. It’s a wonder true love ever succeeds: How do two people navigate that swampy land of differences that were such a delight in the beginning?

One night, in an e-mail that seemed to come out of nowhere, she decided we had to “redefine the relationship.” Apparently I had been taking too much, expecting too much. I read on with disbelief and increasing dread. I didn’t know how we had gotten to this place. I wanted to tell her, I am not Hitler and you are not Czechoslovakia, but the time for jocularity seemed long past. I had believed that I could say anything to her and she would understand. (From which naïve forehead of a Greek god had I sprung?) We had both said we were in it for the long term. But I didn’t know what to do with this new development.

Can a lesbian and a heterosexual woman ever be completely in sync? … maintain a close friendship, let alone a mutually declared sense of being “in love”? It seems crazy now. But I am still in it for the long love, the love that cares more for the well-being of the other than for one’s own selfish desires.

I had been in love before, and I had grown into love, but I had thought that, for the first time, I had met my match and found my equal, that we were in the same place at the same time. I felt infinitely adaptable, willing to make room for her primary relationships, feeling I was at once on the outside and on the inside, in her heart. Her daily life could not include me, and I knew that. We were not young, we had histories, and we felt we could create a relationship that was out of the bounds of normality, personally crafted to connect on the levels that mattered and careful not to trample on what had come before.

Women can do this. Lesbians especially can do this, because we were born into a lawless land already. I never wanted to have a socially respectable relationship, one that followed the rules of courtship and betrothal, china patterns and dinner parties. When I fell in love with my roommate in college, it didn’t faze me. Oh, I’m this horrible thing called a homosexual? Fine. In my late twenties, I found myself in a menage à trois with my then-partner and a young woman with two kids. How crazy, you think. Yes. But that’s what I mean. When you’re making your own rules, anything seems possible, and you believe you can overcome all manner of unlikelihoods. Of course, the threesome didn’t last or, rather, it never really got off the ground. The strangest thing about it was that my mother—my mother—after taking to her bed a few years earlier when I told her I was gay, accepted this new relationship and even sent Christmas presents to the kids from their “other grandmother.”

So that’s where I’m coming from—and now, in my sixties, when I should be done with all that nonsense—I mean, exploring—I fall in love with a married woman and honestly believe, once again, that anything is possible and love will conquer all.

I think that American gay people have, in a sense, put one over on society by seeming to be “just like them,” with all the raising of children and family values and respectable clothes and modest romance (chaste kisses for the cameras at the marriage ceremony). The thrill of acceptance—old hatreds transmuted into new laws that seemingly free us from the prejudices of the unimaginative—may or may not be transformed into the platitudinous tedium of real life. Lesbians, like heterosexuals, can cheat on each other, leave each other, do all sorts of terrible things in the name of love. One thing that seems to be different is that lesbians tend to rearrange relationships in a group so that eventually everyone at the table has slept with the hostess. This can be awkward but is, in the end, rather endearing. We are loyal, and we are not just about sex. One of my best friends was my partner for 12 years (and one of the threesome), and she has been with her current partner for longer than that. She is now as much my family as my sisters are.

Although I accepted that lovemaking with my new love would never happen in reality, I kept the fantasy going in my head, loving each endearment she spoke, responding to her hints and innuendos. She was enjoying the flirtatiousness, too, but apparently didn’t know how close to the fire she was playing. I wanted to believe in the endless unfurling of a miracle. Is this not the essence of romantic love? The relationship itself had felt like a miracle. But now it was as if Cupid had pricked us both with his sly arrow and then pulled it out again, leaving us gasping for air like fish flopping on dry land.

Anyone in her right mind would have seen that it couldn’t last. Three- or four-hour phone calls, long chats online, checking for messages in the middle of the night…. But neither of us was in her right mind. Love—the booming fireworks that often begin the opening and sharing of the heart—is not a logical, clinical process. Nor is it a regular friendship, which proceeds in cautious steps, building trust and camaraderie as you go. No, this was sheer craziness, a ride not unlike the long slide of my youth that threatened to catapult me into the atmosphere.

In the stream of humanity, we are but a collection of molecules, held together by friction and desire, trying in vain to individuate ourselves from the masses. It’s an odd desire, this wanting to believe we are separate, that we are not what we, in fact, are: members of a species who will float downstream until we reach the end of our run and disappear into the froth and spray of an undifferentiated ocean.

But even as we try to individuate, we are looking to meld hearts with another. It’s one of the most fulfilling things in life. It is like a miracle, finding another person who sees you for who you are, who loves you despite all the practical difficulties, the fallen limbs that often lie across the path to true union. When a new friend declares she loves you, that she is in love with you, there is no headier feeling.

scared straight

I am the delinquent who will never steal again.

“Scared Straight” was a 1970s documentary that evolved into a TV series that has now turned into a program called “Beyond Scared Straight” (“because scaring teens is no longer as easy of a task”) that introduced young offenders to the reality of prison life. The idea was that the kids would be scared out of their incipient lives of crime, which must seem so glamorous and freeing when they are first attracted to it. The toughest-looking and -acting prisoners put on a convincing show for these kids, who tried to seem above it all but were mostly terrified at the thought of being passed along from rapist to rapist. I don’t know if this program worked, or if “Beyond…” scares them more efficiently, but I’m only using it as a metaphor, so let’s get on with it.

My love(r) was questioning the relationship because it was too intense and draining (as friendships between women tend to be) (you rarely hear about drama kings), and I was forced to see that I could lose everything if I didn’t stop wishing for what I couldn’t have. I had wrongly thought that wishing could remain an exciting part of this homemade, crafted-on-the-fly relationship, a personal quirk that she could accept because she would know it would never come to fruition.

But it was not to be. I was scared straight, all right, and I do not shrink from the double meaning in that term. As far as she’s concerned, I’m as good as heterosexual now. When faced with the possibility that I would lose her, I discovered that all fantasies had fled for higher ground. It was a sobering realization, and I’m still not sure how things will ultimately change between us. But it’s probably the best thing that could have happened, if we are truly destined to be close friends who enjoy and love each other for a lifetime.

Am I capable of writing about this experience honestly? I wonder. I’m not writing from the point of view of the future, after a relationship is lost and I can extract hard-earned lessons from it, free to describe and analyze what happened in the spirit of a past love well fought for but not to be. I’m still fighting for it, and for a myriad of reasons I can’t offer up all the details, all the things that would identify her, all the theories of, not only what I did wrong, but what she misunderstood or projected onto me from her own past.

She will read this, of course, as she read the “love letter” that was mary’zine #68. In the throes of blooming romance, there is nothing to tell that isn’t flattering, seductive (she says I “seduce with words”), and in the service of continuing the experience.

But is seduction even possible? It sounds so manipulative, intended to dominate, to force the issue. But isn’t it more a matter of the seducer happening upon a willingness to be seduced? Cupid shoots his arrow, but the receiver must be ripe—primed—hopeful even, looking for it—to receive it.

I don’t want to consume her, or merge with the hearth fire of her everyday life. I want to be a small, bright flame that burns in her heart of hearts, like a pilot light that is contained and respectful, that honors and supports life rather than destroys.

How can I be truly honest about what happens between a lesbian and a heterosexual woman when the lesbian can dream all the possibilities and the straight woman cannot?

Be the person you needed when you were younger. —Ayesha A. Siddiqi

When I opened up Facebook one morning, that quotation was the first thing I saw. I had just posted my mary’zine #69 called “Daddy’s girl,” and I thought, sure, I could have used the person I am to help me through my difficult childhood, but who’s going to help me now? Where is the person I might be when I’m 85 and can look back on this period of my life and send good thoughts down through the ether of time? It’s as if a lifetime of hard-won lessons has been flushed down the drain and I stand before you, as defenseless as a lamb.

After reading my lover’s e-mail about redefining the relationship, I sat there for I don’t know how long, paralyzed, with a feeling of utter hopelessness. Blood really does run cold at such times. Cold-blooded. Check it and see. I had a fever of a hundred and three but I’d been plunged into the icy depths of a love gone cold—or so it seemed to me at the time. To make it worse, she was not going to be available for several days, so no amount of frenzied typing would even reach her, let alone get a response for a long weekend’s eternity. So recently hot blooded, I was unable to respirate let alone think lucidly.

Love is never smooth, but it’s never so rough as when you’re trying to explain a position you held days ago but did not express well and that has now been through the wringer of her perceptions and your own fears and reactions. Love starts with excitement and surprise and ends with a surfeit of words, often at cross purposes. And when you’ve been hurt by love—as who hasn’t?—you may suddenly see manipulation and plotting where once you saw only innocent attention.

I knew I had to sift down through the layers of desire and confusion and be as honest as I’ve ever been in my life. I had to answer her accusations—that all I wanted was to make a sexual conquest, that I have issues with straight women and create scenarios in which I will be rejected or abandoned because “that’s all I know.” This is Psychology 101 and not a bad guess, but I am a different person now. I have been there and I have done that.

She is not a mother figure to me. She is my equal. We are well matched in intelligence, humor, and creativity. Like all lovers, we had tried to remember exactly how this thing had happened. It’s love’s favorite game:

When did you first notice me?
When did you start to feel like you were falling in love?
I knew you loved me, but when you said you wanted to make love to me, that’s when it really hit me.

I have lifelong friends, proven friends. I do not want for love: true love, not the sexy, new kind I was enjoying with her. But sexy and new, when going up against the old and true, has the advantage of youthfulness and a flowering in the blood that can’t be denied.

***

When I say, “I love you,” it’s not because I want you or because I can’t have you. It has nothing to do with me. I love what you are, what you do, how you try. I’ve seen your kindness and your strength. I’ve seen the best and the worst of you. And I understand with perfect clarity exactly what you are. You’re a hell of a woman.

I came upon this quotation when I was googling something else, and I recognized how I was feeling. But then I was embarrassed to see that it’s from a TV show: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So: —Joss Whedon.

My lover’s theory about my self-sabotage via the next attractive straight woman I came upon bothered me like the pearl grinding itself into beauty inside the oyster. Only I suspected there was no goddamn pearl in there, just more pain and self-recrimination.

I imagined myself going down, down, down into the inky void of my own soul. I wanted to face the truth rather than make up stories and offer excuses or apologies.

Being honest with another person can be difficult, but it’s nothing compared to being honest with yourself. I wanted to reach the rock bottom of my deluded self, push the illusions aside like so much clinging brush, and see myself with true eyes. We only half-understand ourselves under the best of circumstances. But it seemed crucial to face the hard truth or truths that would tell me which way to go—to attempt to rescue the relationship, or let it go. But going down to the rock bottom of your self is a fitful process, and you can’t help but look for footholds or a ledge upon which to rest, or reasons why this person who is angry at or disappointed in you cannot possibly be right. I kept letting go, and letting go, trying to forget the specifics and focus on the elusive truth. It was more important for me to find it than to convince her of it. I was only half of this equation, and x was still a complete mystery.

I could hardly move, could hardly breathe. I had days in front of me with no resolution, and, worse, no hope of resolution even when the time was up.

I had thought we were committing ourselves to working through the inevitable issues. We were embarked on a “friendship for life”… a friendship that she described early on as “an affair of the mind and of the heart.” We had had a wonderful time learning about each other for several months. There had been a hiccup or two, but we had got through them, which seemed to assure us that with honesty and perseverance we could get through anything.

But my desire for her—even in fantasy—had reared its ugly head enough times that she had had enough. She had thought it would “fade with time”—I’d “get over it”—an attitude with which I was very familiar. But we were each being true to our respective nature. To me, our relationship was new and exciting and had an unmistakable air of the sexual or at least the romantic. To her, it was the beginning of a long friendship—still new and exciting, but with a different result.

Finally, it was not about convincing her (or myself) of anything. Each of us had our own history that led us to this promising, intense relationship, our own feelings and the actions that could or could not follow. Consequences.

In time, she softened enough to say that she didn’t know what to do, that she wanted this “friendship for life” but didn’t know how it could work. The best scenario for her was to go back to before our used to be. We would see each other online and interact briefly. And that’s what we have done.

But I missed her so much; the feeling was palpable, visceral. There was a real connection there, and it looked like it was going to be cut off out of fear—a fear that we seemed to engender in each other, the panic of the lover wanting to rescue the drowning love but ultimately unable to save it.

I hope it works out. I love that woman.

postscript

I wrote most of this issue a few weeks ago, when things between me and my love were still up in the air. They have come down to earth now, I am happy to say. Again, it was a mysterious process, what she went through, what I went through, to get to the point where we can say honestly that we don’t want to lose each other. As friends. Because we are both emotional, intense people, that will still be a factor in the relationship, but I think we are over a major hump. I couldn’t put her in a sexual fantasy now if I wanted to. And I don’t want to, because I want her loving friendship more than a dream. That is so mature of me, I know, and it was getting scared straight that finally made the difference. As my father used to say, “Wake up to the fact that you’re alive!” I had to wake up to the frightening possibility of losing this new friend, this woman I admire and cherish so much.

Maybe we will always be not far from that edge, that big, deep feeling that can turn on a dime and become scared, whether straight or not. I told her once that I felt, with her, that I was riding a bucking bronco and just wanted to stay on long enough to… what?… well, just to stay on. You don’t always know with a metaphor like that if you’re truly staying on or if you’ve landed back in the stands and can only watch the rest of the rodeo go by. I have never used a rodeo as a metaphor before, and I hope I will never have to use it again. If she’s the bucking bronco and I’m the hapless rider, I think I’ll be better off standing a little bit apart and convincing the bronco that there’s no reason to buck, I’m off her back and she is free to live her life. Hopefully with me in it.

Tags:love
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mary’zine #68: June 2014

May 29, 2014

I am sick. Lovesick. I got a fever of a hundred and three. Hot blooded. Hot blooded. I wish I could tell you everything about her. But I can’t. I can only write about my own feelings. I’ll just say this one thing: She’s not “gay.” But she’s “a little bit gay for me.” It’s confusing for her, but not for me. I’m a seasoned lesbian. (Everything but cilantro.) I haven’t felt this way in a very long time.

Who knew this could happen at my advanced age? My baby sister Barb turned 60 recently, and now she signs herself, “Barbie 60.0.” That would make me Mary 67.5. Unimaginable. I first felt this way about a woman when I was a mere slip of an 18.0. “Our song”—unbeknownst to her—was “Woman” by Peter and Gordon. It was 1965, and it was the love that dared not speak its name. It was the first unconventional love I would experience, but not the last.

***

I wrote those first two paragraphs a few weeks ago. My fever has gone down slightly, but my love for (and trust of) this amazing woman has sky-rocketed. I can’t believe it.

I’ll call her “she.”

If only life were as simple as Facebook. I could just write, Relationship: Complicated.

My apologies to former lovers reading this. That was then, this is now. No comparisons. Life evolves, and sometimes we do, too. She and I feel that we were meant to get together on the playground (and workshop) of our minds and hearts. We have different—as well as similar—challenges, and we’ve already learned from each other. The banter and light verbal love play are intoxicating, but the drunkenness is fleeting. I’m learning that limitations and uncrossable boundaries can actually provide a freedom to soar above. She says she would like me to find a “complete” relationship, which she can’t give me for various reasons. I’m not interested in that. I’m much more interested in the inner life than the outer, and we are able to meet on that level. Though the screen is our palette, I am in love with the message, not the medium. She is a flesh and blood woman, proficient in the use of language, as I am. It’s amazing how much can be conveyed within that simple, seemingly colorless frame: some tears, some hearty LOLs, a few evocative icons, and the heart and intelligence to meet each other as equals and give and receive forgiveness for our failings. She believes in getting things out in the open. I’m more of a lurker. But I’m learning to love the challenge. One day there’s a misunderstanding—to be expected, since we are often typing at the same time, referring to earlier conversations or a parallel thread. She asks, “Are you playing games with me?” “No!” I stand my ground, assert my meaning. Suddenly “we can see clearly now”: Our first “fight” ends with mutual respect. I remind her what comes after a fight (make-up sex), but alas that’s not what we’re about. It’s a turning point, though, a moment of truth…. We both have trust issues, and we seem to be equally matched in guts and glory.

***

This thing started innocently enough. We were drawn to each other’s writing, and she to my paintings. I gave her a painting when I barely knew her. I could see that she was passionate about it, and the one she wanted was one I had thought no one would love but me.

Past middle age already, the body starts to fall apart. But the sexual flame can burn as hot as ever. The pounding heart when I see that she has left me a message: Priceless. It starts in the loins and progresses to the heart. On the one hand, my heart is sick with longing for what can never be. But on the other hand, I feel the simple joy of being alive and loving, not just her (in that heart-pounding way), but all my friends, and even some strangers, and humanity in general. I’m painting with my feverish heart. The images come fast and furious, and I paint them all, feel them all in my blood.

If I sound foolish, so be it. I am glad to feel this foolish, to have such a strong attraction to a woman with whom I can only relate via words on surrogate paper. I’m being here, now. Feeling what I feel as I go along. Dancing the pas de deux with a beautiful soul.

I had a new t-shirt made with the saying, “as is.” It was her idea, actually, that I would have to take her “as is.” And that’s exactly how I take her, and how she takes me. I have gained new confidence since my recent sexual escapade with an old friend… not just realizing that I’m capable of having sex, but that I want to. It’s been a long time since I even considered it. Self-confidence suffuses my being, makes me both lighter and stronger. This is true even though physical sex is not an option for us. But as I wrote in ‘zine #67, I am burning bright in myself. She is catching some of the passionate run-off, but I stake no claim on her. She’s only “a little bit gay.” Not enough to start a fire. I keep feeling like I’m borrowing Melissa Etheridge lyrics. Or Bruce Springsteen’s. Music is making me feel so full lately, so light on my feet. I dance inwardly and outwardly. We share songs that have touched us deeply. Music is the expression of sex, when sex is not on the table (so to speak). Sex is the heart’s blood. You don’t have to do it, but you can feel it, dammit… even we who live in the land where Puritans came to die.

I’m gushing. I know that. And instead of obeying the writer’s rule to “show, not tell,” I am just saying and saying and saying. And feeling and feeling. It feels good, it feels like almost too much but never quite. I am containing it, and it is pulsing within me. I am having an attack of the heart—but it’s a benign and joyous attack, like Death by Chocolate.

Besides: How can you not love someone who thinks your writing is “sublime”?

***

I love being gay, and it has almost nothing to do with sex (despite what I just said). Someday we will be completely absorbed into the larger society and it will seem odd that we were ever singled out for scorn and harassment. Society’s targets constantly change, while the methods and rationale remain the same. The Irish were the first “niggers” (A Different Mirror; Ronald Takaki). I worked with a woman direct from England who was scoffing at the idea of St. Patrick’s Day, and then she noticed that I was in the room and remembered the first 2 letters of my surname. She quickly backpedaled, but I caught the innuendo. And yet Irish Americans are, as far as I can tell, perfectly respectable now. And so will gay people be, one day.

Being gay, in the early 1970s when I came out, was difficult and awkward in many ways, but I loved living an “alternative lifestyle,” below the radar. By the way, I faced more surly looks and comments in the San Francisco Bay Area than I do here in the U.P. That probably just means that we’re still underground here, not at the top of anyone’s list of people to hate. But I’ve faced down a few men who thought they could stare and smirk and make me slink away with my vagina between my legs. One guy was sitting at the counter at the former Pat and Rayleen’s. I was paying my bill, the smirker smirked, and I stared back at him with fierce dyke eyes. Of course he backed down and looked away, what was he going to do? I happen to look more intimidating than I feel (or so I’ve been told: The enormous husband of a friend of mine thought I was going to kick his ass), so that can work for me in selected situations (daylight, public space, people around).

Back in those semi-dark ages, being gay seemed like a platinum credit card with no spending limit. We could move about, make changes, live our lives with no one being the wiser. P and I bought a house in Marin (suburb of San Francisco) when we couldn’t stand living in the cold and fog in S.F. anymore. The neighborhood was nice, the house and yard were quintessential suburbia, and the kitchen sported a counter with bar stools on one side, which perfectly matched our sense of ourselves as upwardly mobile semi-professionals. I said to P one day, “I feel like we fell through the cracks! How do they let us do this?” San Francisco was used to its “gays,” but Marin was a bedroom community that hadn’t quite registered our presence in its midst. It was like playing dress-up, or “store” or “house” in the basement when we were kids. It seemed like the ultimate payback for the discrimination we faced in other areas: “We will live like you!—not to mock you but because we watched Leave It to Beaver growing up, too, and we want nice things.” This could be the exact strategy of the baby-making gay men and lesbians who get to prove, finally, that we all have the equipment for reproduction regardless of who is paired with whom. Who knew that it would be “Adam and Steve” living in the garden? (“Ann and Eve”? I’ve never heard a female version of this meme.)

Lesbians were second-class gay citizens until we were (for some reason) included in the movement’s acronyms, LGBT and its more complicated successors; and not just included, but first! (For a handy definition of terms, see http://internationalspectrum.umich.edu/life/definitions). Now it’s de rigueur to say “lesbians and gay men,” although we’re still made to feel less than our male counterparts, because their public image is one of “slender, beautiful, and talented,” whereas ours is “fat and flannel wearing.” (Sex guy Dan Savage looks down on us for letting ourselves go. Dig a little deeper, Dan; there are reasons for that.) Men have agency. Women who don’t desire men and are not desired by them are either irrelevant or threatening to the world as men see it.

I love not being on a conventional track. I was “as good as married” for 12 years, and our break-up, though painful as any other, involved piling my VW Bug with whatever it would carry and driving 10 miles south to my new apartment. A good friend who got married when it was made legal in Massachusetts went through hell and a lot of money to get out of that contract.

***

When you’re in love, no one really wants to hear about it. Good friends will listen as they listen to any other story about your life, but there’s a limit to what you feel you can tell them. You don’t just want to give the barest details, the who, the why, the how-you-met—you want to repeat and chuckle over the endearments, the in-jokes, the “you won’t believe what she said last night”s. For some reason, it isn’t enough to laugh about this with your new love, you want to share. And we all know what sharing that sort of thing eventually turns into: too much information.

Lovers are inherently selfish. You’re delighted with yourselves, proud that someone chose you. You get giddy, adopt pet names, stay online, on the phone, or in bed (if you’re lucky) for hours. The rest of the world recedes, at least for the duration. It’s wonderful, but sometimes you feel it’s only a matter of time before the whole thing will come crashing down. The wrong person will find out, or, worse, one lover’s definition of the relationship (an unstoppable force) will meet the other lover’s quite different idea of what’s going on (an immovable object).

There is a certain amount of hubris involved in a new love relationship. You think you can change her life, just as she expects to make a few adjustments to yours. Neither plan may live up to the expectations of the other. Geography, marital status, sexual orientation, and other factors that seem like certainties may temporarily be finessed or passed over, as if the grand belief that “anything is possible” is really a solid basis for reconciling your two hearts. Yes, people can move, marriages can end, and sexual orientation can be redefined, but often these fixes are not possible or even desired.

***

I feel like I’ve gained a new lease on life and all the other clichés that say the same thing. My blood is pounding at more frequent intervals, my organs are sprucing themselves up and getting a new wardrobe, and I feel more alive and engaged than I have felt in years. I haven’t been unhappy here in the U.P.—quite the opposite. But a few years ago I felt complete, felt I had accomplished all I’d wanted to in life, and was perfectly happy to let it all go if that’s what was meant to happen. Now… I want to stick around. It was the farthest thing from my mind that I would ever fall in love again, let alone feel physically attracted to someone who returned the emotional attachment if not the full complement of sexual feelings.

But even that sexual asymmetry can work in one’s favor. It’s lovely to be loved, even if it can’t be embodied. Sex is there when we love the same song. We have been known to break out in lyrics when we’re typing onscreen. Music is in our blood. Our hot blood. My hot blood, maybe “a little bit” in hers. I’m not responsible for her blood, nor she for mine. Whatever’s happening with her is fine with me.

There are, of course, many patterns that lovers tend to play out. And maybe everyone thinks they will be different. But I truly feel that I have found someone who is able and willing to transcend the burden and complications of a physical love and living situation. When faced with limitations, you can turn them around to become advantages. We are both oriented toward the inner rather than the outer. We enjoy and are learning from each other in all the ways that matter: becoming stronger, more secure in our own beings. Working through the baggage we all carry, in whatever degree and kind. You could say it’s just cerebral, but it’s a lot more than that. She’s the only person I’ve found who is both emotionally and intellectually stimulating. Both familiar and exciting. Neither of us was looking for anything or anyone. We met under the most unlikely circumstances. And I will be forever grateful to her, regardless of what happens next.

***

Is that all you can talk about, Mare? Yeah, pretty much… for now. My heart is full, and so is my mind…. wondering at life’s sudden changes of direction. But what seems to be coming out of thin air actually has long-growing roots. A long-awaited bloom. A spring that took forever to get here but is now bursting with life.

Bring it on.

Tags:body, desire, gay, love, sex, women
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mary’zine #67: May 2014

May 11, 2014

When I was putting the finishing touches on the #66 mary’zine, I almost forgot to add the tags. So I went back: birds, cat, snow, winter… all tags I’d used before. But when I added love, I was startled to discover that I had never used it as a tag before. Surely I had written about love many times in the past 14 years? Hadn’t love been the predominant theme in my life and in those 66 posts?

I wrote last time about the love that is everywhere. And it continues to multiply. In fact, between then and now, a new love has entered my life. As love is wont to do, it entered quietly, almost without my noticing. But then it blossomed suddenly, unlike the still-leafless trees in my neighborhood. Love is not affected by climate change, apparently. I won’t go into specifics about this love; I’ll just say that it is true; that it transcends many barriers; and that it is mutual.

I am burning with it as I write this. But the flame is only a representation, it is not the real thing. The real thing passes between us, always. I can burn brightly in myself; whether she burns in kind, in mind, or in or out of time—is her business.

In some ways, I think I have taken the love in my life for granted. At times it has appeared to be ordained or obliged or inherited, nothing that was intended for me alone.

Love has come and gone, and sometimes it has come back again. The revived love may be the sweetest. But love has taken its time—sequential, not easily renewed. The love behind me has never seemed to live up to the loves I imagine ahead. Me and love: never on the same page… until I finally learned that it’s omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient—like that thing they call “God.” I’m not going to say that Love is God, because I don’t see why we have to use an unproven, invisible entity to explain the very much proven phenomenon of Love.

Back in January, I had a crisis of relationship in which I wondered if the love I had experienced with a dear old friend would survive the sudden eruption of sexual desire between us and the just as sudden tamping down. I am happy to report that the love is intact and that the unexpected fire, like the Tahini spectabilis that bursts into flower only once every 80-100 years, did not consume us.

Lately, I feel like love is radiating out from my core, and coming back 10-fold. Sometimes 500-fold: Another old love, with whom I went through an unimaginably painful break-up some 30 years ago, is fixed in my heart but still capable of surprise. She and her current partner sent me $500 to help with some work on my house. Amazing.

My new love is happily married, and I am happy for her. I just happened to come along at a time when I could provide (and receive) something new and unexpected. She has “never known a woman like me,” and I would have to say the same about her. The mind and heart meld is very strong. The age of the participants is irrelevant, as is the physical distance between us. As I’ve said before, the best-kept secret of later age is that there is always the New to excite, enlighten, and motivate. We may look like yesterday’s news, but our hearts beat vigorously within, and we are easily undone by the beauty and surprise of things never before seen, never known, but real as anything. I feel surrounded by the mysterious, the inexplicable, the divine beat of the human heart. Thanks, Love. This was well worth waiting for.

Tags:love
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mary’zine #66: March/April 2014

April 16, 2014

winter wrap-up

I’m feeling pressure to finish this issue before my winter theme falls hopelessly behind the times. We in the upper Midwest are dying to stop complaining about cold weather so we can start complaining about the wind, the brown lawns, and the humidity of springsummer (no longer separate seasons). But considering that it is snowing as I write this (on April 16), it might not be a problem. Temperatures are straining to rise into the 40s (with the 50s surely not far behind), but you never know in these parts. You just never know.

Yes, it’s still winter in the U.P., despite what the calendar says and despite the photos of beautiful flowers and sunrises the West Coasters are sending our way, on the pretext of assuring us that spring will someday come to us as well.

My winter stories this year have not been ones of clumsy, comical falling down in the snow. I have fallen down (clumsily), don’t get me wrong, but it hasn’t been very funny at all … (see mary’zine #31 for some knee-slappers.) … partly because I have an even harder time getting up than I used to. I fell on the back steps but had the railing to hold on to as I hauled myself up. I fell at the end of my front walk after attempting to shovel a narrow (1 shovel-width) path for the mailman. Fortunately, the mailman happened to be standing right there, and when I stuck my hand out to be pulled up, he really had no choice. As I harp on constantly, the city snowplow comes through and shoves the snow off the road and onto whatever surface happens to be in the way, preferably a surface that has already been cleared. And there’s a general understanding—or maybe it’s a law—that you’re not to dump what is now your snow back into the road.

this was taken somewhere in Canada; so yes, it could be worse.

The driveway poses a bigger problem than the front walk, because, though it’s not very long, my mighty Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo doesn’t have a lot of traction when the snow is deep or the icing on the cake is actual ice. My usual method of making the driveway passable is to power through with the Jeep, back and forth until the tracks are deep enough to guide me in and out of the garage. But with the massive snowfalls we’ve been getting, combined with the city plow’s habit of building snow banks in front of every egress, an oddly sturdy hump of snow and ice has developed at the end of the driveway, so when I power out, there’s quite a stomach-lurching backwards drop at the end. I always have to remember to quickly move my foot to the brake so I don’t go too far and get lodged in the neighbor’s mound of road snow.

The other day I had to clear out three areas: front walk, driveway, and a circle in the back yard to dump a bag of sunflower seeds so the birds and squirrels don’t have to make snow tunnels to try to get sustenance. I was exhausted after doing the front walk, so I went inside and took a 3-hour nap. Then I forced myself to do some major shoveling at the end of the driveway, but the snow had gotten pretty high. The spirit was willing, but the flesh it took to shovel the snow out of the way of the Jeep tracks was weak. Actually, the spirit wasn’t very willing, either. Then I went to do the power-out thing. I managed to go back and forth a couple times, but when the Jeep slid out of the tracks, I panicked and managed to lurch into the side of the garage door and it was good-bye, passenger side view mirror.

An even bigger problem is that the ground has frozen way farther down than is usual. There’s a danger of the pipes in individual houses freezing, but even worse is the possibility that the entire water relay system will freeze up. Therefore, we’ve been told to keep water running from one faucet continuously, even after warmer temperatures make us forget all about our hoary winter.

I got a postcard from the city about this, but only after the citizenry debated in the newspaper and on Facebook what was going on and what exactly we were supposed to do about it. Various people “heard” things, such as that households south of 38th Ave. did (or did not) have to keep their water running. Someone posted that she lives north of 38th Ave. (as I do) and was told that she had to keep her water running. So I called what is euphemistically named “Infrastructure Alternatives” but is really “Waste Water,” as the man who answered the phone wearily confirmed. He asked for my address and told me I didn’t have to keep my water running. But the buzz grew louder that the whole town was supposed to keep their water running, and I eventually got an official postcard saying as much.

So then the question was: How much water? Word went out that the stream should be “the width of a pencil.” That didn’t sound right, because in the olden days it was always described as a “trickle.” Then I came across a website from a Green Bay TV station that said it should be the width of “a pencil lead.” That’s a very different thing. But apparently no one else noticed the discrepancy, and the “pencil” people won out over the “lead.” This policy is in effect until further notice, since warm weather above ground won’t do enough to thaw the earth below. We’re still having the occasional snowfall and single-digit temperatures. And I still have a ski jump at the end of my driveway.

seeds of gratitude

The birds must think they know
That the Bird gods blessed them with this bounty
Spread upon the hard snow.

Do they take it as their due to grow?
Or do they feel a burst of love
When they spot the seeds below—
This mysterious gift—unbidden—fallen with the snow?

Or am I the one who’s grateful for us all—
welcoming with a glad eye the cardinal
who comes alone at dusk
and cautiously, disbelieving, approaches
the abundance, a surfeit of love and trust.

—mmck

I don’t claim to be a poet, but sometimes I can fake it pretty good. The first poem I ever wrote was also about a bird. For high school English I wrote a rambly true story in free verse about going for a walk and finding a dead bird. It was sentimental—of course—but at least there was feeling in it. My friend, a wannabe sophisti-cat, made fun of me for it, as did the fat girl who wanted to replace me in his affections. This was the era of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, and anything less than howling did not a poem make. Mid-‘60s, it just seemed that all the artists, writers, and poets were men, and 90% of them were tortured existentialists. I had a teacher in college who was such a man, an extremely intense man who moonlighted as a shoe salesman, and he wrote all over my essays with great passion in red pen. Sometimes I think my whole college education was an apologia of 1950s existential guilt and penile hubris. I would still be an English major today, but I’d get to read a wider swath through American and world (and female) literature. But I digress.

strung out on epiphanies

There will be clouds of course. At least that’s what I’ve heard. That you fly through them.
—a Dutch woman contemplating what her first airplane ride will be like

During my first airplane ride (Menominee > Lansing, 1964), I had what may seem like a mundane epiphany: that the sun is always shining, despite the low cloud cover that seemed like a permanent part of my world. I “knew” this already, of course, but some knowledge has to be experienced directly.

Recently, I had what seemed like a profound epiphany, but it’s hard to hold on to. I can tell you that it had to do with love, but what hasn’t already been said about love? An epiphany is sudden and starkly real. It’s an experience. I can still feel the effects of this one, but I’m afraid that trying to describe it will just lead to a hackneyed greeting card sentiment fit only for Hallmark’s Sarah Jessica Parker collection.

But I have a cool metaphor to offer, take it or leave it. If I were a string of Christmas tree lights… stay with me… the bulbs shine brightly, but between them are lengths of unglamorous infrastructure to hold them together. Sometimes you’re the bulb, sometimes the cord.

For months now I’ve been thinking about love, sex, anger, forgiveness—what I want, what is (or isn’t) wanted from me—and it’s been a pretty tortured, confusing time. I have deep feelings, but I often don’t know what to make of them, how to accept them, where to direct them. All felt up and nowhere to go. That didn’t come out right.

I described the situation in mary’zine #65: I had a wonderful sexual experience with an old friend, but she declined to take it farther, for very good reasons. I knew I had to accept her decision, but how were we going to continue our friendship? I felt stuck: couldn’t go forward and couldn’t go back. I kept telling myself that it wasn’t about her at all, I was responsible for my own feelings—but how often do you work through something by thinking endlessly about it? In the midst of the emotional muck, I just tried to stay “real” and not push myself in one direction or another.

At a certain point—being open to whatever the truth turned out to be—the clouds cleared and I knew what the problem was. My ego was having a tantrum. I could count on one hand (with a couple fingers left over) the times that my friend had gone against my wishes. My ego was wounded, and all I knew to do was to hide behind the well-used, patched and puttied wall that had been my go-to place for licking my wounds for as long as I could remember. In the past I couldn’t have been so open to seeing a less than flattering side of myself. But years—many years—on this planet have taught me something after all, and I was actually relieved to know the truth.

When I allowed myself to own this truth, my feelings of anger and resentment just dissipated. My other friends were astonished to hear me express such a mature attitude. It’s an ongoing process, of course. Part of me didn’t want to give up my defenses. It was a big deal to me, and I didn’t want to just drop it and never speak of it again. So much for my mature attitude. I wanted to keep her on the hook, I didn’t want the elephant in the room to become invisible. I felt a bit like George Costanza on Seinfeld, when he didn’t get credit for buying the “big salad” for Elaine because George’s friend handed it to her and was graciously thanked. The genius of that show was that it highlighted the pettiness we all feel at times. On Seinfeld there was famously “no hugging, no learning.” But the universality of the characters’ selfishness was a lesson for the viewers if we were willing to take it in.

***

I have often wished, frivolously, that the birds who come to my back yard to dine and bathe would come to trust me and not flee when I open the back door carrying a heavy bag of seeds and a watering can. In an ideal world, they would realize that I’d never harmed or threatened them, that I was the source of their bounty. As in the Disney world of Snow White, they would fly chirping around my head as they crowned me with garden flowers. I know it’s just a harmless fantasy. But if I’m feeding them out of love, it makes no difference that I’m not being thanked or seen as the giver, the provider.

***

Without warning, I had one glorious day when I got it. I glowed with the feeling, with the knowledge, the long-sought epiphany. Love isn’t to be found outside myself, it’s in me, it is me. I don’t love X, Y, or Z: I love. In our hearts we are like those worms that are both male and female. Each one of us is holographic, we embody everything. Looking for love in all the wrong places? It’s all right there, in you! You can put it out or you can take it in, but you don’t need to be thanked, appreciated, affirmed, over and over again. You are the source, or I should say the conduit. If we can just be, love exudes from us like the fragrance of a flower. We think we can shut it off, but it can’t stay shut for long. It can be a deluge, a downpour, an outpouring—or it can be like the pencil-width stream that continually trickles down the pipes to thaw the frozen earth—or heart—on which we live.

love, everywhere

It’s one thing to have a private epiphany and the feelings that go with it, but then there’s the world and other people: Real Life. My money where my mouth is.

In the almost 10 years since I moved back home (“Back in the USUP”), I’ve often lamented that I don’t have friends here. It’s great to spend time with my sisters, but it’s nice to have other connections as well. I’m friendly but not quite friends with a number of people: my contractor and his wife, a server at my favorite restaurant, my haircutter, my dental hygienist (now that’s a first!), various people who I’m happy to see and who seem to be happy to see me. I’ve been limited in my idea of what a friend is. Leaving my cozy nest and going out into the world, I don’t always have a great experience, but I’m often surprised at the connections. My last two encounters with Karna, who cleans my teeth, have been delightful. I’m at a disadvantage in that situation, of course, because I often can’t talk because her hands are in my mouth, but believe me, I take advantage of every time she pauses or turns to look at my chart. And even when I can’t form words, I can laugh in response to her funny comments and stories. I don’t even remember what we talk about, but in one of our sessions I told her, during a 3-second break in the action, “I’m having fun!” And I could tell she was too. Last time, referring to my sense of humor, she told me, “You are dry, Mary.” I was saying I maybe shouldn’t have told Dr. Aschim that one time that I felt like I was doing all the work. But I have this quirky, risk-taking side, which my mother also had (you might be surprised to hear this if you’ve read my “autobiography” of her). It means that I might say something inappropriate at times, but the risk is usually worth it. I may leave in my wake a number of people who are shaking their heads and thinking to themselves, “That’s a weird one,” but since my heart is in the right place, I’m coming across more people who “get me.” Isn’t that the ultimate in relationship, regardless of what level it’s at?

The computer and the phone are essential parts of my life here. I have regular conversations with my faraway friends P, T, and B, and online a strange thing has happened: Among my Facebook friends there have emerged some real friends, even though I haven’t met them in person. Even in “social media,” feelings come through loud and clear. A lot of it involves bantering: I can spend more than 2 hours having a conversation on private messaging with one person at the same time that I’m responding to 2 or 3 other people who are Liking or Commenting on or Sharing things I or they have posted. The range of connection covers the whole spectrum of human relationship, from barely conversant to casual to intimate. You may dispute the possibility of intimacy, but it’s there. Many connections are based on politics, cats, street art, the weather, commiseration over common problems, and bonding over joys and triumphs. I used to think that all interaction on Facebook had to be superficial by definition… but people find each other. The beauty and the voluntary nature of contact allow for freely made associations and surprising discoveries.

One of the people I’ve connected with responded enthusiastically to one of my paintings, some of which I’ve posted online. We had already established that we’re kindred souls, so I told her I sometimes give away my paintings but the person has to ask. I gave her an out by saying that she might like the painting a lot but not want to have it on her wall. The requisite “are you sure”s and “what do you want for it”s were quickly dispensed with, and finally she said, “I want it. And I want it on my wall.” So after tearing apart one room and two closets looking for it, I sent it to her the next day. She loves it. She’s happy. I’m happy. She doesn’t live here, so I may never meet her in person, but I feel like I have a friend for life. Lesson learned: If you put yourself out there, friends and meaningful connections can pop up not only in “all the old familiar places” but in unexpected places as well.

and sometimes… love hurts

My cat Luther just bit my thumb as I was trying to balance him on my lap so that I could reach the keyboard. I try to keep my fingers away from his mouth and firmly remind him, when he gets too close, “No biting!” But he hasn’t gotten the message. He doesn’t seem to do it out of anger, it’s more that he just finds me delectable. If I were to collapse at home and die, I would fully expect him and Brutus to gnaw me to pieces… not out of malice but out of whatever animal logic tells them it’s the right thing to do.

Luther has a chronic bladder infection and has had at least 3 surgeries to remove jagged stones. After the last one, about a week ago, Dr. A said he wouldn’t survive another one. This is devastating news, of course. I now have to wait and see what happens and decide when his quality of life has declined irreversibly. He’s been through a lot and is not exactly welcome at the vet clinic. One female vet told me, when I brought him in for an emergency after hours, that she and Luther “don’t like each other” because he’s “nasty.” Through angry tears I said, “He’s not nasty, he’s scared to death!” She apologized, but I could tell she wasn’t convinced. But ol’ Dr. A takes him in stride.

When I got Luther home after his latest surgery, he couldn’t walk straight for several hours, and when he could, he tried to get away from me by scooting under the bed. At about 24 hours, I petted him and said his name gently. He always responds to his name, but this time he turned his head away. I don’t know how much of his behavior is emotionally based, or if I’m just imagining what he’s feeling. At one point I went to check on him, and he was splayed out in the litter box. When he realized I was there, he pulled himself halfway out, presumably to escape from me again. I know it’s not really personal, but it’s hard to take. I was telling one of my friends on Facebook how he’d been acting since coming home, and the minute I sent the message, Luther came walking over to me and rubbing on my leg and purring. I wanted to think we were having a mind meld where he knew what I had just written about him. Anthropomorphism: a chronic state in which animal lovers can’t let their pets (or their backyard birds) be who they really are. We try to impose our feelings and expectations on them, as though the actual bond, visible or not, between us and them isn’t enough. I am going to try to be with Luther for the time he has left and not dwell on the inevitable. Easier said than done. But he’d better not bite me again.

in love and gratitude,

Tags:birds, cat, love, snow, winter
Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments »

mary’zine #64: November 2013

November 8, 2013

baltimore love

Update: The highway is my byway once again. After many months of man-hours and dirt and noise and inconvenience, the road called M35 is now paved with good intentions. Fortunately, Hell, MI, is in the Lower Peninsula. My hat is off to the fellas who do this grueling work. It must have felt like Hell all summer. On the other hand, their brothers who work in our few remaining factories might envy them the sort-of fresh air, if not the annoyed drivers trying to get from A to B.

And though my wonderful contractor, Paul K, did not work the roads, he was busy all summer putting on roofs (rhymes with hoofs) and remodeling mobile and immobile homes and is finally freed up to do my bidding. Although I no longer have the ready cash that I used to throw around like confetti (as every once-poor person does who gets a windfall, thinking that it will last forever whether you spend it or not), I need to replace the shag carpet in Brutus and Luther’s room. There are so many stains from their throwing up (and worse) that I don’t even go in there barefoot anymore. So Paul is going to replace the carpet with vinyl, making me and my goddess-next-to-cleanliness niece, if not the cats themselves, happy and care-free. My task now is to pick out a color that will go with the blue, green, and lavender pastel walls that my sister K painted many years ago. The room has become a cat-chall (ha) for art supplies, boxes of old files, assorted tools—hammers, screwdrivers, a drill, a whatchamacallit (thing with a bubble in the middle to make sure something is—oh, level; good thing I wasn’t called upon to name it when it was first invented), two orange metal sawhorses that I bought just for color, a long table, half of which is topped with a comforter for a dedicated cat lookout spot, and a desk with shelves holding reams of xerox paper, on top of which sits a dollhouse exactly like the one I (and eventually my sisters) played with as a kid (which my sisters found at a garage sale), which is not outfitted with dollhouse-size furniture, oh no, it’s a house of pain, sand tray-style, with skulls and other oddities inside and toy men with bad intentions climbing the roof, and on the wall above it is a quilt hanging my mother made me that purports to be a representative pictorial of my life—an embroidered road along which a series of bonnet girls traverse the peaks and valleys from age 0 to about 30, and the weird thing is that most of what she considered valleys were actually peaks for me (like my publishing the Alternative Press Index in Northfield, MN, for no money) and vice versa. At the top she had embroidered “Pilgrim’s Progress” and at the bottom, “The Slough of Despond, the Delectable Mountains,” and got mad at me because I didn’t know the reference. On the opposite wall, above the orange sawhorses, is a larger quilt that my friend Diane L gave me that depicts a colorful series of snakes, not lifelike, alternating with geometric shapes, very cool. In a corner stands a dress form that has been dolled up with one of my shirts, a skull wearing a cap that says Scotch Lobster, and on and on.

Wanna come help me move all that stuff out of there?

*************************************************

If you’re terribly averse to metaphysical speculation, you might want to skip this part. But I hope you’ll give it a look-see, anyway.

I sent my friend P this quote from Robert Lanza, MD (author of Biocentrism; How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe):

Our consciousness animates reality much like a phonograph. Listening to it doesn’t alter the record, and depending on where the needle is placed, you hear a certain piece of music. This is what we call “now.” In reality, there is no before or after. All nows, past, present and future, always have existed and will always exist, even though we can only listen to the songs one by one.

P replied:

Interesting, so where does “free will” come in—deciding where to place the needle?

So I pontificated, based on my limited (or no) understanding:

No one decides where to place the needle. It’s all happening at the same time and it’s just “what is” at any given point. Like, when I’m dreaming, I’m “there,” and when I wake up I’m “here.” I didn’t travel between the two places or decide where to be, when. When I have a very vivid memory (like you and me passing each other at dusk before we met but when we knew who each other was), I’m there. And when it “actually” happened, we were both there. (One could see memory not as a later recapitulation of a real event but as the needle coming down on that spot again.) “Free will” is a myth that we tell ourselves so we’ll feel like we’re in charge. We can make the little choices, like whether or not to eat the doughnut, but forces much larger than us are joining together (but without intention) to manifest the really big stuff (who we are). Back to the record: We think we are the record, and that we start at the beginning and play until the end. But as in Lanza’s analogy, any number of things can happen that don’t follow the linear “track 1,” “track 2,” etc. You can skip tracks, play one over and over, or even put them into other songs by sampling. For that matter, the people who played the music on the record probably didn’t play it in exactly that order. And they may be “dead” now, but we still experience them as “alive.” Or they went on to make other records. Or several people are listening to the “same” record at the same or different times. It’s more 3[or 4 or 10]D, as opposed to our 2D conception of “born, live, die” on a linear time line.

I’m making this stuff up as I go, obviously, trying to springboard off Lanza’s comments. But that’s fun for me.

along the same lines…

love is a higher organizing principle than time, but its organization is hidden

I was lying in bed one night, playing solitaire on my Kindle, and a feeling of near-euphoria began to creep over me. There was no apparent reason for this, as I had not been taking any recreational drugs (unless you count chocolate chip muffins, and I do) and it hadn’t been a “wonderful” day or anything. After a while, I started to think about time. (Solitaire is not necessarily a waste of time, it’s a good way to keep the surface mind occupied while the depths are allowed to roam: free-range thinking, thinking without words.)

Time seems to be one of the few constants in our universe. It’s so obviously a linear, one-way phenomenon. So I’m thinking this while I idly tap on the cards, and then, again idly, inwardly, I see, as a little graph in the middle distance, first, the straight line of time, and then, off to the side, seemingly scattered and unclassifiable… love. I gasp out loud. I’m not sure what I have yet, but I know it’s something. Time to put the thinking without words into something more tangible.

Time isn’t really linear, it just feels that way. We “time-travel” all the time. (I can’t avoid using the word “time” in these two ways: the sacred and the mundane.) Time travel is remembering, misremembering, trying to pin down “the now”: Is it ever really “now,” or is it “now” all the time? We speak easily about “tomorrow,” but it never feels like tomorrow, does it? When “tomorrow” comes, it’s still now. So what if, like those turtles, it’s “now” all the way down? a through line rather than a clothesline?

It seems obvious that we grow, both physically and mentally, even as we decay and atrophy. It’s all very pat, this time thing. In 1945 I did not exist. But was I “dead”? When I become nonexistent “again,” what will be the difference (to me)—between nonexistence “after” life and nonexistence “before” life… between 1945 and 2033 or whenever I shuffle off. There’s really no “before” and no “after.” It’s all illusion.

Unlike time, love seems completely malleable, unreal or changeable, unorganized, given away and taken away, hardly eternal, rarely unconditional, no direction (home) let alone one-way-linear. No straight lines in love.

An old friend e-mailed me recently. We used to write each other daily—long, funny letters with paragraphs and everything. But in the past several years we’d hardly had any contact. Time kept on “slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future.” When I apologized for being so out of touch, she replied simply, “Love has no boundaries.” Cliché? Not when it’s true. This happens a lot with my painting friends. If I saw Ann again after, what, 30 years?, one of us would surely harken back to our fabulous night of dancing at Esalen. That was an eternal moment in our relationship—a moment beyond either of us. It existed—exists—without us. At the painting intensives, this happens all the time. Time does not factor into our relationships, because we have seen and held each other out of time. If I see a Facebook post from Madeleine, the love is fully there “again,” below the surface but never lost. And so on.

Love seems erratic. If you look back on your life, you can easily make a timeline, establish events all along the line, draw conclusions (on the wall). Time is what happens to you on the outside. The love you have experienced is not in the past tense, it exists outside time, where the structure is invisible, the organization chart non- hierarchical. It is alive, apart from your memory of it, apart from your loss of the other person, physically or mentally. It’s like the letters that pile up on each other when your typewriter key gets stuck. (I mean, got stuck; typewriters are definitely of time, and now fully out of it, except for some geezer authors who can’t let them go.) Love is all in a moment, an eternal moment. Sometimes you feel (like a nut), sometimes you don’t. But feeling is not everything. Love has a paradoxical solidity, an effervescent presence, that time will never have. It’s the organizing principle of our lives. Time is horizontal. Love is vertical. When the timeline of our physical self is cut off, time also stops. But love is perpendicular to time. It is not affected by time. No love is ever lost. No time is ever gained.

the requisite cat tales

Pookie lives! Luther and Brutus are still babies! (see gray heap in the center of the comforter)

Diane and I were talking about my cats “lolling”—meaning “lounging around”—but “lolling” looks like they were laughing out loud! But no—they laff on the inside, all the goddamn time.

One morning I was opening the blinds, and I stood looking out the window with my hand on the cat tree. Suddenly, I felt a furry object slam against the side of my face, the tree rocked, and Brutus jumped for the ottoman. I was struck by a wide-body cat! I think he was a little freaked out, like what the heck just happened?? We just looked at each other for a long beat. Then it was over. (He always jumps from the floor to the top of the thing, and it always rocks a little. I’ve been waiting for it to tip over when he does that. I never suspected I would be involved.)

Some of the worst times in my life have been when a cat of mine died or, worse, when I had to decide to put him or her down, to spare it from pain. Radar, who had feline leukemia, died in the night. I waited to take Tweeter to the vet until her tumor broke through the skin. I like to think that Pookie and I agreed on the time for him to be released from his painful lack of kidney function. Toward the end, he weighed next to nothing. We were both sitting on my bed one day, and we just looked at each other. I’m not saying the look we exchanged was conscious on both our parts, or that we had a mind meld or anything. But we had come a long way, Pookie and I. Almost 20 years. When I would return after 10 or 12 days at a painting intensive, his cry of welcome was one of sheer bliss. One of those times, when I arrived home after midnight, I sat for over an hour just petting and combing him, talking to him. He would look back at me over his shoulder and just beam, radiating pleasure and love. Yes, I call it love.

You can’t take time away from a cat. A cat is not trying to hold on to life, like we humans do. We think of life as a quantity—more is more. A cat is always now. It’s for ourselves that we try to keep them with us, sometimes long past the time they need to go.

from the sacred to the deeply philosophical

My friend Liz, who posted this cartoon on Facebook, commented,
“This is so deeply philosophical, had to post.” I agree.

my “diz-zies”

My world was turned upside down for 9 days—part literally and part metaphorically. On day 1 I got out of bed feeling dizzy. It’s not a pleasant feeling, but I figured it would pass in minutes. It didn’t. It wasn’t vertigo—when the room seems to be spinning around—I had had that for a few hours about a month before. Never knew for sure what caused it, but possibly I inadvertently took a double dose of Zoloft that morning. This “diz-zies” was all on the inside, and it was positional. If I stood or sat without moving my head, I felt fine. Ah, the perfect state I’ve been longing for my whole life: no physical movement except for my eyes and hands. (I half expect I will end up like the Twilight Zone character who was the only one left on earth with nothing but time and no distractions to take him away from his precious books… but then his glasses broke. Not sure how that will play out for me, but I’m of the half-glass-empty persuasion.) I obviously couldn’t drive. So my sister Barb had to chauffeur me around, which I know she was more than happy to do (well, maybe not more than happy). I was grateful for her help but also uncomfortable with it, because, like all old people, I fear losing my independence.

The soonest I could see the doctor was on day 3. Barb drove me there, waited around for more than an hour, and then drove me to the pharmacy, the grocery store, and then lunch at Schloegel’s. The doctor gave it her best shot, but no diagnosis seemed to fit the symptom. She did some hands-on neurological tests, such as having me lie on my back with my head hanging off the table then held my head at a 45-degree angle as I sat up. We went through all the requisite questioning about what could have caused the diz-zies, but there were no answers. She checked various possibilities on the computer, but nothing seemed to fit. She said it was quite possible that it was “viral.” I thought, Does that mean I’m going to be famous on the Internet?? Thankfully, I didn’t share that pearl of humor with her. I keep learning that not everyone finds me funny, or indeed comprehensible. Many times when chatting with, say, a young woman who’s checking out my groceries (“Is this garlic?” she asks; oh honey, you have a lot to learn), I’ll try to make a wee funny and I usually get a blank stare in return. Like maybe she says, “I have a long drive home, so when I get off work at night, I have to eat or drink something on the way.” I comment that I don’t restrict myself to eating and drinking at night, I do it all day long. Stare. Blank. Maybe they don’t hear me, since I tend to mumble. Also, I’m sure I look really old to these young whippersnappers (and let’s face it….). Who would expect a specimen such as myself to try to relate through humor?

So… with a prescription for meclizine, a motion sickness pill that did absolutely nothing, and a date for a follow-up with the doc in 2 weeks, I spent the next 4 days trying to keep motion to a minimum. I was a motion minimalist. It was awkward when I had to clean out the cats’ litter boxes, and when Luther flopped on his back and rolled over in front of me, I couldn’t lean down to pet him, which made me feel strangely guilty. He would recover and then lounge there trying to look blasé about being rejected. I don’t treat my cats like they’re human, oh no. I mean, just because I will sit in an uncomfortable position with my left arm aching or having to go to the bathroom but unwilling to disturb their sleep….

I stayed home until day 7—lost at least 2 pounds because I had no access to potato chips—and then Barb offered to stop at the store for me and then get us both some lunch and bring it back to my house. I made a list—broccoli, eggs, milk, and a few other necessities, using all my self-control to not ask for chips or a muffin but hoping she would intuit that I would need some snack therapy. She didn’t… but she chose the broccoli crowns very well, which I’m really picky about. Then she drove back over the bridge to Menekaunee for fish fries and showed up chez moi with my very own meals on wheels. She stayed for a while as we ate and talked, but soon I felt like I was fading fast and I went back upstairs to nap in my chair. I kept thinking I could just sleep it off.

The previous night I had made the mistake of lying down for a few hours instead of slouching in my chair. When I woke up, I was so dizzy that I couldn’t take the garbage out to the road for fear that I would fall down outside. This wasn’t good news. I imagined this becoming a permanent condition.

On day 9 (Sunday) Barb came back to take me to her house to watch our shows: Homeland, Orphan Black, and a couple of new sit-coms. I had recovered from the intense diz-zies and was feeling hopeful that my long national nightmare was coming to an end. I was feeling more normal (or as close as I ever get) and enjoyed the chicken salad sandwich, chips, and Coke I had while watching TV. It’s the chips, I swear! I refuse to believe they are bad for you! I’m only half-joking!

Sure enough, I felt fully recovered by the next day, so I e-mailed my doctor’s office to cancel my follow-up appointment. I wish there had been a way to e-mail my job when I was feeling poorly or just needed a “me” day; it would have eliminated a lot of theatrical morning hoarseness during those awkward phone calls to say I wasn’t coming in. But that’s neither here nor there. It’s in the past. I have not lost my independence—in fact, I have gained a great deal of it, in that I can do my work in my own time. I now have the perfect work life, except for not getting paid very often. Hey, nothing’s perfect!

dreamstime_xs_21298577

what nightmares are made of

Every day you read the news or surf or stumble through the Internet, and there’s always some new atrocity, some stupid [Republican] opinion, some scary prospect, some fearful new law. I get tired of having to up my disbelief level to meet each new horrible challenge. Outrageous! Unbelievable! I become the girl who cries Wolf, but there’s always another Wolf around the corner. I’m going to print something here, in its entirety, from DailyKos.com, November 5, 2013. You may have seen it, but I think it’s worth another look. It’s a scary indicator of what America has come to, or is going toward, full speed ahead.

This news report out of New Mexico is so disturbing, it’s hard to imagine this could happen in America. Talk about an unreasonable search.

The incident began January 2, 2013 after David Eckert finished shopping at the Wal-Mart in Deming. According to a federal lawsuit, Eckert didn’t make a complete stop at a stop sign coming out of the parking lot and was immediately stopped by law enforcement.

Eckert’s attorney, Shannon Kennedy, said in an interview with KOB that after law enforcement asked him to step out of the vehicle, he appeared to be clenching his buttocks. Law enforcement thought that was probable cause to suspect that Eckert was hiding narcotics in his anal cavity. While officers detained Eckert, they secured a search warrant from a judge that allowed for an anal cavity search.

Initially the doctor on duty refused the search, citing it as “unethical.” Unfortunately, after several hours, hospital personnel relented and did the search.

Here’s what happened to David Eckert at that hospital:

While there, Eckert was subjected to repeated and humiliating forced medical procedures. A review of Eckert’s medical records, which he released to KOB, and details in the lawsuit show the following happened:

1. Eckert’s abdominal area was x-rayed; no narcotics were found.

2. Doctors then performed an exam of Eckert’s anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.

3. Doctors performed a second exam of Eckert’s anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.

4. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.

5. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema a second time. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.

6. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema a third time. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.

7. Doctors then x-rayed Eckert again; no narcotics were found.

8. Doctors prepared Eckert for surgery, sedated him, and then performed a colonoscopy where a scope with a camera was inserted into Eckert’s anus, rectum, colon, and large intestines. No narcotics were found.

Throughout this ordeal, Eckert protested and never gave doctors at the Gila Regional Medical Center consent to perform any of these medical procedures.

Think that’s outrageous? David Eckert has since been billed by the hospital for all the procedures and they are threatening to take him to collections.

***********************************************************************************

The Tent

Outside, the freezing desert night.
This other night inside grows warm, kindling.
Let the landscape be covered with thorny crust.
We have a soft garden in here.
The continents blasted,
cities and little towns, everything
become a scorched, blackened ball.

The news we hear is full of grief for that future,
but the real news inside here
is there’s no news at all.

–Rumi

Tags:body, cat, illusion, love, memory, police state
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Posts Tagged ‘love’

mary’zine #71: October 2014

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mary’zine #64: November 2013

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mary’zine #71: October 2014

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mary’zine #64: November 2013

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