Coup

 So.  

In 2020 I left a job I'd been in for 30 years to live my dream.  Not the dream of running.  The dream of puzzling. In 2020 my child became a man, to some extent.  We have been in quarantine, on a global scale.  We have been in the streets, on a global scale.  The divides are unfathomable when I look into them.  I'm not always looking.

When I'm 54

Because I write down my dreams, I've become aware that I'm running in my dreams these days.  Running for joy, speed, strength and freedom.  Running to use my muscles and my lungs.  Running in a limited but unobstructed space, either roundabout through interconnecting hallways or back and forth across a bordered field.  

I will be at the end of an obligation, when I realize I'm "alone" in the sense of having no further obligations and nowhere to be, and in that second I'll see where I am and think "now I can run!"  There are people here and there and everywhere, but I'm unobserved and solitary, apart, owing them nothing.  I get to really, finally, fully feel my body and just run.

In this morning's birthday dream, I'm at the end of an obligation and I think "now I can run!  But... let's see if I can run as well as I run in my dreams..." (insert some self-doubt here)

It takes a little extra concentration, because I don't believe I'm dreaming, so it's got to be harder in the real life I'm dreaming I'm in.  But I find that by doubling down on my focus and determination, I'm able to do what I do in my dreams, and it's liberating.

So that's where I'm at at 54.  I'm gonna run with it.

 

Poverty

I gave $20 to someone holding a homeless veteran sign in the frigid temperatures, because she was a woman and I decided to believe her, even if there's some chance her sign is a lie or a half-truth.  Also, I had just spontaneously invoked the "cash back" option when buying groceries, without really knowing why I would need $20 (lottery tickets? snacks? a latte or four?), so its purpose seemed to be presenting itself to me in an instantaneous, looming fashion from the karma bank.  

I do navigate by synchronicity, and enjoy really taking that ride with fate and free will.

The bundled-up woman told me to have a blessed day, kindly and soberly.  Not a "bless-ed" day as in "Bless-ed are the meek," but "blessed" as a rhyme for rest, which is a welcome rhyme in my mind.  She had the demeanor and vocal tone of a friendly shopkeeper, rather than conveying the persona of a down-and-out soul who has run out of options.  I didn't need her to be sad and convincingly wretched, though.  It felt benevolent: not my gift, but her perky blessing in return.  

When my son needed cash later that day, I didn't have any for him.  In fact, we're not going to be able to pay for his college, let alone this movie date with Emily.  There is no fund, no plan, but also no fear, because of the way I have always lived.  

As a child I learned to ride any wave and take my luck wherever I found it, trusting that things would just work out somehow.  I was acquisitive.  Yes, I was even a disingenuous little thief at times. But mostly I was just taking what was available or given.  I was appreciative of hand-me-downs, willing to work (babysitting), and I hitchhiked when I had to or wanted to.  I ate what was served wherever I went.  I loved sleepovers with friends who had interesting toys to play with, like marionettes and horseshoes and kaleidoscopes and jacks, and it was really their exotica I loved, more than it was their hot running water for the tub, the way that every room in the house was warm, and the lack of fleas. 

There was some built-in privilege underpinning my luck that I wasn't aware of then, which allowed my mother to make good choices about where we lived and where we went to school, choices that made my childhood safe and stimulating despite our poverty.  

I'm not sure how to end this essay.  I like middles and I like inconclusive statements and I like ambiguities. 












 

gratitude

It's not easy to 
write a clue for inward (try)
but it's easier

than birthing a child
for twenty plus four hours
redefining love

I would not emerge
until a child emerging
broke my containment

I found my new voice
a worshipful profane growl
for the child in me

she's fiercer than I
could ever have imagined
her silence darker

while the child, fifteen
devotes this hour to Snapchat
a bored miracle


 














 
 

The Struggle is Real

What is the struggle these days?  

I struggle with my own reactions to raging ego, the ineffective and humiliating mechanisms I go through to dampen the intensity or consequences of a rager's self-centered explosiveness.  Typically I just play along with the false premise that the source of the outrage is a big deal, just to quiet a mother fucker down. 

The mother fucker is an entity who stalks me, wearing different masks, not always a man's mask, in fact just as often a woman's.  Don't assume I'm talking about my husband, my boss, my employee, my mother, my father, or my best friend.  It could be one, all, or none of those entities on any given day over the last 50 years or so.

To be clear, though, it's never been my son.  He's consistently kind and forgiving, like me, god bless him.  We two shall inherit whatever's left of the earth.

It is not and never will be, by any objective measure, a big deal, this editor's disagreement with your correction, the fact that someone drives too slow in the left lane, the fifth telemarketer not honoring the no-call list, the dishes piling up in the sink, the car not starting, the cat shitting outside of the box. 

Here's the thing.

IT'S NOT PERSONAL.  NOBODY IS TRYING TO MAKE YOU FEEL DISRESPECTED. 

Can we be mildly annoyed?  Rational?  Solution-oriented?  Generous?  

An inauthentic self arises in me when I pretend that the thing you're raging about is as important as a nuclear disaster.  It's like I'm acting in a play, and I'm somehow getting paid for it, but I haven't figured out my motivation so I'm just delivering lines I've rehearsed and am relieved when the scene ends.  I learned as a child that you just agree with a rager and things calm down sooner.  I'm learning as an adult that there's no end to it, just no fucking end to it, unless I learn to do something different.

I just don't know yet what that something different is.



 

Dream noir

John Lithgow died somewhere in my house, in his sleep, while visiting us.  Maybe in the basement?  It's not my fault.  But it is my problem.  The longer I wait to alert the authorities, the worse it's looking, the more complicit and criminal and indefensible my inaction will seem to be.  When a bad thing like that happens, you don't just wait three days until it's convenient to call the authorities, but that's what I've done.  There's just a lot of other shit going on right now.  

For example, there's a party happening, and I'm the hostess, preventing sleepy-seeming teenage boys from stumbling toward the guest bed in the curtained-off cellar corner.  

I can see a huge, inert human shape under blankets on that bed, in the dim cellar light.  I've not actually examined or confirmed that it's the larger-than-life famous actor.  I'm trusting what I've come to believe, but you couldn't pay me to go lift that blanket.  I just keep hoping the shape will be gone the next time I look over there, like he wasn't really dead after all, and got up and left on his own.  

I'm aware that perhaps people are even now beginning to look for John Lithgow at the hotel he was supposed to check out of several days ago.  They'll be asking the taxi driver where he got dropped off.  So, like, it will not look good if I haven't made the call before that search party arrives at my door.  

What am I going to say about this thing though?  What lie sounds more defensible than the truth, that I just didn't want to deal with it and hoped it would go away?

And yes, I am also sad about the loss of this fine man to the world.  I do feel that.  But it's not the dominant anguish.  I'm seething, because this should not be my job right now.  I should not be held accountable for hiding an unwieldy dead body, nor should I be punished for delaying its necessary revelation.  I didn't invite this burdensome man into my home, and I am not the one who killed him.  

He just died, and I'm probably gonna hang for it, because I'm sure a woman must pay the price for John Lithgow dying in her house.




  

Oppression

A late September dream that should probably come with a trigger warning not fully conveyed by the title.
__________________

He's barely conscious, and he's taking up all the space on our king-sized bed, crushing me.  Maybe he's dreaming, maybe he's drunk, maybe he's dense.  But I can't get him to wake up and be aware.  He persists in crushing me, and when roused he's like an angry bull about it.  I'm so sensitized to gently managing his inert self-interest that I can extricate myself unobtrusively, moving over to his side of the bed when he rolls over me to occupy mine, at which point he falls half off the bed.  He can't even stay on the bed he's so unwieldy and restless and out of it.  I can't ever get out from under.  Every time I free myself, he rolls to where I am.  When I try to help him get back on the bed, and I get out of the space he's trying to occupy, he begins to wake and becomes enraged.  The light is dim, but I can see once he's got me pinned again that he's silent-rage-screaming an inch from my face.  I become absolutely still.  I can't fight back.  All I can do is hope he doesn't kill me.  He's much larger than any human, though his face is much like one I used to love.