collective voices

In the mornings at Baltimore School for the Arts, all the music students (150? 200?) gather in one of the recital rooms and sing. When my daughter shadowed there, this morning exercise was the standout part of the day. Though the word is overused, awesome describes the power of so many voices, whether in unison or in delicious harmony.

The collective voice is why I put it out there.

Not all of it, mind you. But I believe that you don’t get what you want by blowing a dandelion clock toward the heavens. (And you don’t get anything you’d be proud of by blowing someone behind the shed.)

So when I want—or need—something, I just say it. A lot. That covers anything from broken plates to words for a poem to collective prayers. And I believe a collective prayer is as tangible a thing as the broken dishes that compose my mosaics and the words that compose my poems. It’s why when my dad is in the hospital and not getting better, like now, I tell the universe.

My universe comprises, at least, 672 Facebook friends. It’s not a lot of people by any measure (a close friend of mine who is on top of every trend decades before anyone else has 3,406 friends). But I know almost all of them. And I make an effort to engage them in some kind of meaningful discussion or to puff up some small talk and make it personal; you won’t find a mere “happy birthday” from me on your special day.

It’s deliberate, but it’s not calculating. I engage people I like and respect, and my reward is another beautiful voice in the chorus of people pulling for me to get my book published, my dad to get well, my husband to keep playing guitar, my daughter to grow with poise and grace, and my best dogs to go in peace.

I don’t believe in a capital-g god, but I do believe in synchronicity (and most of the Police’s body of work—worth a listen if they’ve been long neglected by you). Sometimes you get messages from the darnedest places: your iPod on shuffle—in a Police song, in an email from a long lost friend, in a dream, in the sound the wind makes when you leave your window down a crack. I listen to these.

Maybe this is an apology to the people who think I over-share. If it’s a sign of strength and independence to ignore what others think, it’s a sign of stubbornness and arrogance, too. We should be respectful of others’ opinions, and our minds should be open enough that we can change them when we have new information. We should be changing every day. You never step in the same stream twice.

But there’s a solution to the annoying over-sharer that doesn’t include unfriending (or defacing, as some call it). Because I have already learned that asking for what I want brings favorable results most of the time. Putting it out there brings sandwiches to my dad in the hospital. It brings my family hot meals after my back surgery. It brings me poetry. And, best of all, it brings a chorus of hope and love and strength, and I can feel it—even without 100 likes and 58 comments.

Last week was the much-anticipated, sleepless high-school acceptance week. I wanted my daughter to be accepted to Baltimore School for the Arts. I know she will thrive there, because I know how driven and how focused she is. I remember being at Goucher and hearing the grad students in my program read. I thought: They are all so good! They can’t have made the one mistake with me! I want her to feel that kind of self-respect. So I share the things about my daughter that amaze me, and I say out loud every day that she is a prize. I tell any of the 672 friends on Facebook who are listening so they can charge the air.

Do I believe that all those voices had a part in my daughter’s acceptance (one of 125 out of 1,200+ applicants)? Her talent and brilliance clinched it. But yes! Those voices found a way to imbue her performance with a little bit of magic.

And when those judges drove home from work, they cracked their windows, and the wind said, “Serena.”

(there's no such thing as shameless) self-promotion

I can flirt with the best of them. I can make lewd comments, behave boldly, brashly, wear low-cut shirts, talk trash, cuss like a sailor, pinch a friend’s ass, and take seductive fat-girl photos. But I can’t toot—blow—my own horn.

Back when The Book was being published, people would ask me about it, and I’d do the pshaw wave. (It’s the opposite of the Queen of England’s wave; it says not hello or goodbye but getthefuckouttahere.)

I didn't know I was supposed to be promoting it; I thought that was the publisher’s job. For a month—and, to my surprise, only a month—they scheduled me to appear in magazines and newspapers and cool online sites. I spoke on radio—“A Chef’s Table” (syndicated NPR) and several Satellite radio stations. Nah, let’s talk about you, I wanted to say. What are you doing these days? That’s more interesting to me, even if it’s less funny.

Self-promotion skeeves me out. I don’t like to brag or boast unless it’s about my daughter, and then I can be relentless. But it’s unseemly to promote yourself. Tacky. Fugly.

I often sign up for those marketing-tip emails from fierce bloggers and self-promoters, thinking it’ll give me a kick in the pants about just doing what has to be done to survive as an artist, to reclaim my envied position at the desk in my dining room. But I hate those people. They sound smarmy and loud. I read their first two emails with the voice of Billy Mays or Aussie crocodile wrestler, Steve Irwin. (Ironic: they're both dead.) And I wind up deleting all the rest of them unread. I can’t bring myself to send the “remove me” message. It’s like quitting.

Self-promotion has been a sore spot with me where a friend is concerned. He does it; I don’t like it. I had another friend—used to shake your hand with a business card in it, like it was a plastic baggie full of crack. Butt crack is more like it.

I’m not saying I don’t want attention and admiration and overwhelming envy from you. I will flash you a poem or a song, usually with cleavage to make it more palatable, usually on a Saturday, when I think no one’s looking, and I will whack you over the head with a photograph or 20. But they’re usually not accompanied by: “And I am selling these photographs for money. Hit me up for deets!”

Sure, I post links to my blog from Facebook and Twitter and Flickr; those email marketers have taught me well (in their first two emails). But I usually follow them with a links to things more amazing, like Chuck Prophet's new CD, Temple Beautiful. (He was just on "Fresh Air"!)

Do I lack confidence? Am I shy? No way! I am fucking awesome. I’m just uncomfortable asking you to prove our friendship is important by shelling out some money for yet another thing I've made. I would rather give you some. That's why my next paragraph has me already hurting in the groin.

Please pre-order my book of poetry, BOYGIRLBOYGIRL, published by Finishing Line Press. It’s not that expensive, it has a pretty cover, and the more books I sell before March 5th, the more copies they print. (Imagine sticking the publisher with a thousand of these babies!)

I should mention this: each week, I get a recap of the sales. With names. So if you are my friend, and you don’t order, I’ll know about it. I'd rather not. Because it can't help but become this uncomfortable thing between us. Like an unvited hard-on.

Try before you buy. Then, please, buy.

Your Friend,

The Skanky Ho

u.n.c.l.e.

Today was a day like most other weekdays: long commute, long day writing mostly the same words in a slightly different order, work drama, some laughter coupled with paranoia and worry, a long commute, a beer, dinner, and the laptop and TV in bed.

On Thursdays, I go to shiatsu. I call it that, but Jim Hill doesn't really do pure shiatsu anymore. He's a "healer." He knows what hurts me by what hurts him, and he takes care of it with his own brand of acupressure. I call it poking.

Jim presses my flesh hard with his thumbs and fingers and palms and knees and feet. While I lie on my stomach, he puts the flat of his foot on my tailbone, picks up my legs, one in each hand, shakes them like he's spreading out a sheet on a bed, and pulls slowly. I am an inch taller, but it doesn't count.

When I'm on my side, he twists my arm behind my back in some sort of therapeutic wrestling hold. No holds barred. I say "uncle" in my head and whimper while U.N.K.L.E. plays on the utopia Internet radio station. I'm the only one of his clients who requests something other than the mind-numbing new age sounds. We go for trip-hop—Radiohead and Bjork and Zero7 and Thievery Corporation. My current favorite is Eel, but I don't like them much when I'm not lying on the floor.

Jim presses on my ribs. He grinds his knees into the backs of my thighs, his elbows into my butt, his fists into my shoulder blades. While I'm on my back, he pulls me from my neck, slowly, slowly, and I can feel my tailbone rising up, tucking inside my body, as if I'm turning inside-out.

Before I leave work on Thursdays, I take a half a hydrocodone. I pay $100 for two hours of tortuous poking. Some nights, the pain is just short of intense, and I can fall asleep for a few moments. Other nights, like tonight, It's too much. Jim stops working on my legs to poke a sore line that follows the underwire of my bra. These are lung points, he says, and asks if I've had trouble breathing—he means before now. I cough a little when I lie down, I say. I'll be sure to remember my inhaler. When he goes toward my left side, I worry that he'll touch the cancer. That it'll bust open and gush through my body like an ocean. Last night, I had a dream that I needed back surgery and chemotherapy at the same time.

When my treatment was over, I got dressed and raced home, cursing the slow drivers, blessing my heated seats. On Perring Parkway, I pulled over to let a slow-moving Emergency Medical Services vehicle get in front of me. Through the back window, I saw the EMT pumping someone's chest. He pumped and pumped and pumped. He stopped and looked at a machine and pumped again. He was frantic. I stared through the window, unblinking, hoping the tech would keep going because that would mean the patient was still alive. The ambulance was going too slowly. For two miles, from the beltway to Echodale, I was staring through the back window, thinking of that deer. The tech kept pumping, even as the truck turned right toward the hospital, so I did not cry.

I came home and drank a beer, ate dinner, and came upstairs, where I sit against a kind of pillow called a husband, The Mentalist on in the background, laptop engaged.

- - - - -

how I feel about that

It may surprise people to know this, but I used to go to a shrink. Another surprise: it was not because I’m crazy; I just forgot how to sleep.

Therapy isn’t like the olden days, when you were asked how you feel about that by a bearded and bespectacled older man, who encouraged you to badmouth your mother and talk about your dreams and return weekly for the rest of your life. You deal with each crisis as it comes, with months, even years, of untherapeutic living in between. That’s how it was with me. I'd get nervous about something, stop sleeping, and make an appointment.

In one session, I talked about my father. I was troubled by one of his oft-repeated offers: “You want it? I’ll buy it.” Truth is there was no question; it was more of a run-on sentence.

Dad would utter this for everything while we were on vacation—often, embarrassingly, in front of a store owner to whom I was only being polite when I said those fancy jeans were cool. (A $250 pair of jeans is not cool.) While I was never rolling in dough, I would still sneak away to buy, with my own money, the things I wanted or needed—even when I was forty.

When Beth and I were kids, our family was lower than lower-middle class. But we didn’t know we were poor because we had everything: tiny black and white Luskin’s TVs and Realistic stereos and shag carpeting in our bedrooms. I had a pink princess phone, and my sister had a regular blue one. I wanted to go to NYU for college, but my dad said it would kill my mother if I left, so he bought me a car as a bribe. After he did, we couldn’t even afford Towson University, which was only about $20 a credit back then. My great aunt paid my tuition for a year, and I didn't find out until a decade or more later.

When I discovered how poor we really were back then (after hearing stories about my mom hocking her engagement ring to pay the phone bill), I assumed we'd had all those things because my dad didn't want us to know we were poor. But maybe it was because he traveled often and felt like it was the only way he could show his affection, since time with us was not an option.

But twenty years ago, he began doing well in his career. He was home, but we were gone. And the gifts got bigger. And as his generosity grew, so did his insistence that we accept his offers.

“You want it I’ll buy it” became his mantra. He didn’t want his girls to go without anything. I was pregnant, and my dad didn’t want me to fix the carburetor of my six-year-old, paid-off Honda Civic; I needed a new $35,000 Pathfinder. He paid most of the lease.

Critics—my friends, my brother-in-law, even my husband—thought I was spoiled. Marty and I would argue about it at the dinner table—about how many times I said no to something before I was just plain worn out. The badgering was relentless. I said no to a new car at least a dozen times. "I hate to see you drive that thing. It's not safe for my grandchild," he would tell me, often before hello.

What I learned in therapy was that this was how my father said he loved us. Saying no to his gifts was the equivalent of rejecting his love. So I began handling it differently, bartering, accepting a few offers with effusive gratitude. I promised I would let my father know when I found something I really wanted. I even began asking for things I needed.

This is one reason I worry so much about him now. Since his last cancer treatment, he has become so weak and sick. He was still going to work through his third chemotherapy infusion. In fact, I can’t remember him missing work or even being sick with a cold more than a handful of times in my life, except for surgeries on his broken leg. But he’s not been to his office since October. In the hospital and at rehab these months, he sometimes just stared into space, not even turning on the TV, not reading a book or a magazine.

If he’s not at work—where he feels valuable and important—he’s not maintaining his income. And he’s not able to offer us gifts to let us know he loves us.

At almost 75, he is finally realizing that we know. We have always known.


- - - - -

A little more about my dad here.

SOPA? NOPA. PIPA? also NOPA.

wake up and fight

By now, you've seen Woody Guthrie's "New Years Rulin's." The list lover in me is as tickled as the fan. Big surprise: Not much has changed in seventy years. We still want to "read lots good books." We still want to "eat good." We still don't learn people very well.

So maybe we are not running out to the banks to deposit our extra money or shining our shoes. But we're still fighting fascism (or should be, especially right here at home), and we're still doing what it takes to crank up that ol' hoping machine every day.

On our secret lists—yours and mine—we're reminding ourselves to floss more this year, to love people, to make the bed every morning. And while we may tailor our out-loud resolutions to individual goals ("write a song a day"), the two-thirds of us who are overweight are hoping to eat better—or, in my case, less. I have a few more things I want to accomplish.

To Do in 2012

1. Read more books. Novels, short stories, poetry.

1. Blueprints for Building Better Girls, by Elissa Schappell
2. God Bless America, by Steve Almond
3. Black Elvis, by Geoffrey Becker
4. The Greatest Show, by Michael Downs.

2. Write more poetry.

My poetry mojo has been stuffed in a too-small pair of underpants, further constringed by a girdle, squeezed into black control-top hose, and packed into tight leather pants that nobody wears anymore. It's itchy and lonely and hot and needs to go commando.

It's been a long time since I wrote a poem without having to rely on single, unrelated words from Facebook friends. But as soon as I made the resolution, I wrote a poem in my head. It's about buttons. It's going to be good; I can feel it. I just need to squeeze it out.

3. Take more photographs.

I'm not talking about pointing at and shooting so many sunrises and sunsets, so much of the minutiae of my day, the birds, the rockstar kids I know, people, food, buildings.

I'm talking about sunrises and sunsets! The minutiae of my day! Oh, the birds! Those rockstar kids I know! People! Food! Buildings!

More, but better! I'm hoping for a series of self-portraits in the new year. Maybe superheroes. Maybe art recreations. Something weekly.

4. Concentrate on the concentrations of goodness wherever it's found.

I find mine in Tuesday nights with friends, in a fancy Maudite glass, in the basement, on the dog bed. In fact, wherever there are good people and good food and good music, I'm usually pretty happy. There's some of that for all of us every day. Yes?

5. Play guitar every day.

Even though I suck. Maybe I'll suck less.

6. Lose weight. Move More.

There's nothing worse than being old except being old and fat. I hurt myself in a pilates class at work, and now even my fat pants don't fit. I've given myself permission to satisfy sadness and stress and pain with beer and pizza, even though it only feeds a pathetic fire. So after I ring in the new year with a roasted pig, I'll stop being one. I'll be on Medifast for a month—at least until I learn how to control myself.

Finally,

7. Wake up and fight.

For far too many mornings since June, I have found myself in the company of those who wake up and surrender. Tonight, I burn the white flags.



My wish for you in 2012 is my wish for me and everyone else. Take more pictures—with your camera, your words, your mind. Love. Pleasure yourself while you pleasure others (doesn't even require two hands). Listen to good music and drink good beverages and eat good food and keep good company.

Remember to put the oxygen mask on yourself first. It's how you run the hoping machine.


What are your plans for 2012? Will you learn a new language? A new instrument? Will you take a leap of faith? Will you trust more, worry less?

merry giftsmas and happy chanustuff

It’s 7:00 a.m. on Christmas Eve. The sky is still dark, and my dogs are snoring at my feet. My husband and daughter are away until afternoon. The last sip of the coffee I made at 5:45 is still hot in my lidded Thermos mug. The tree is twinkling, and the crows are barking hello to me as they fly over the house.

The room where I write is full of stuff—books, wrapped presents, framed photographs, guitars, a collection of cake plates, crow-themed items. The eight leather chairs are new.

Every year, without fail, I amass new stuff (alas, without purging much of the old). Because we’re not in hock, with credit card debt and a mortgage that’s higher than our home’s value, we can usually take care of the little emergencies—and even some luxuries, like a concierge doctor or a guitar.

For the last few years, I had a tough time getting jingly wit’ Christmas. Sure, I’m always up for eggnog and cookies, a couple of favorite holiday songs, festive lights (the gaudier the better). But the frantic buying of stuff has bugged me.

I guess that’s ironic, given that I am a material girl.

The other day, a friend was torn about lamenting. Her favorite ornament—a one-of-a-kind, personalized item given to her by her sister—had broken, and she wondered how to come to terms with the loss when she generally takes a Buddhist approach to attachments.

Well, cross that religion off my list! I love things! I mean, I love things.

Lording over the living room is a taxidermy crow. On the sofa is a crow hand puppet so soft and fluffy that I put my hand inside it regularly. On Halloween, I gave it a clown nose, and it cheers me. On the bookshelf, I have a glass vase filled with hundreds of paper cranes. Those cake plates? I have seven of them.

Some of the things I have can be replaced, but so much of what I love most is a reminder of whom I love most: my thoughtful husband and daughter, who brought me a frozen crow in the dead of winter; my sister, who always gives the best gifts and helps to talk me down from the ledge; Grace, a young artist, who is already a star in my book but who is destined for others’ books; friends who helped me celebrate the release of my own book.

The woman who’d lost her ornament quoted someone named Peter Walsh. “The memento is not the memory,” she reminded me. True! But for me—menopausal, forgetful, busy, over-stimulated—that memento is the trigger for that memory. It reminds me to think of those people and their goodness every day, not just when they pop randomly into my head.

For the past few years, I’ve been a Christmas curmudgeon. This year, though, I’ve made some new material attachments. And to temper all this getting—paintings, earrings, magnets that say “Fuck” and “Shit”—I gave. I supported half a dozen Kickstarters. I donated to public radio and poetry and Wikipedia! Now they are my things, too.

I still hate that stuff-buying is a holiday. I want giving and receiving to be more special than that. People should display their affection with material items when they come across something that is you, something that would always remind you of their love, like the way they share a link on your Facebook wall. It shouldn’t be dictated by the calendar. Or maybe it should be on your own birthday, rather than someone else's.

How do you fight that, especially when you have children, even though that's when it seems most important to try?

The Christmas card I made for the year (yes, it’s a Christmas card; Rudolph is on the front) says, “May your joys outnumber your toys.” I do mean it. And if your toys bring you joy, too—well, you do the math.

Steven Wright said, “You can’t have everything; where would you put it?” He’s right, of course. But I still have some room.


* * * *

I miss you, Mark Harp. This will forever be your day.

RIP, Cleopatra.