mercuryfern

Tuesday, April 12

A little tidbit from my top secret first attempt at blogging.  Keep in mind, dear reader- by yesterday I mean April 11.

I came unwound yesterday for reasons still unclear. For at least a week now, I have been building in energy, thinking it would crest into some of the productive exuberance I have known. Instead, it twisted into an implosion.  A retail smile hardened on my face while my tethers frayed and snapped.  My hearing went.  Sounds became vauge and distant like my head was underwater.  I found myself stopped in the middle of small tasks, staring at nothing, my eyes still and unfocused, drowning.

As with deja-vous or a sneeze, you kill it by calling its name. I told my coworker, a college student who shares her secrets with me, I am having a panic attack just now. She listened so generously and intently, my voice happy and calm, smiling through my terror, how surreal it must have sounded. Did I need any help? Well you see, its like when you look at a light and then close your eyes. Those spots you see? If you stare directly at them they drift and fade. I need to face this head on, to say it out loud. It usually goes away if I do that.

It stayed. It worsened. I spent that entire afternoon at work quickly building to something that spoke of bad times ahead; hard rain in the midwest from a green sky, you know a twister is coming. I feared days in bed, unable to talk or eat, shivering under blankets whatever the temperature. A few days ago, my husband and I had agreed that I would finish the taxes last night but I asked him if I could write instead, I needed to, I was freaking out. Of course honey.

I don't know how to explain what happened next. I sat down in this very uncomfortable chair. It didn't lift but I got my bearing. I sent some emails out. Please help me. This could get bad, to a dear friend who I knew would send me her love instantly, to a near stranger who I suspected would reply, to a list of women who have been there. I threw those ropes out and started putting other words down. I got replies. We care. You will be okay. Something shifted.

By the time my therapist appt came two hrs later, I was exhausted. I didn't think I could ride my bike the nine tenths of a mile. I did, though, and I finished breaking when I sat in her chair. My whole body felt so heavy. I could barely speak. When the words did come, they were slow and quiet. She pulled me through it, put it all in perspective.

I went home, sent out some more emails, suddenly feeling all the sleep I hadn't been getting this whole week. I woke up this morning surprised to find the storm had missed me. I did what I could to make it stop, then hunkered down, ready. It just never got bad. Asking for help, putting words down, it worked.

My god. I stared those spots away.

These Kids Today

I went to a poetry open mic night at my little sister’s college on Thursday. Being public about my personal writing is a new thing for me, here in this blog, and in reading aloud. To veterans of these events, it is a cliché that a different audience changes the meaning of piece. I don’t know enough not to be amazed by that fact.

The readings were quite good. Fascinating to me were the ones that were artifacts of the author's age and generation; not the same, yet not entirely different from my own. Several kids made fun of punk rock in a voice that made it obvious they were killing their idols. I don’t begrudge them this process, it is a necessary one. When a poem about a mohawked first love mocked the amount of money the author and his object spent on concerts and clothing, I pitied him for being born too late to know how much more it had been.

I loved punk rock once, too.  Oh, how my angsty heart broke when the scene ceased to be a utopia for angry freaks and geeks and became just another pretty thing stripped of meaning by commoditization. It is indeed lame to buy bondage pants at the mall and pay upwards of twenty dollars to see a band.  I happen to know what came before, though these kids are too young to remember.

At the beginning of my adolescence, when my sister and the abovementioned poet were not yet out of elementary school, I went to shows with the same hundred and fifty kids twice a week: in warehouses, in fire halls, sometimes in somebody’s parent’s basement or a county park. The bands were local high school students, the organizers the same. We gave voice to our age appropriate alienation with violent dancing, flailing, bouncing. Those rare times we held an all ages show at the local club, always weeknights so as not to interfere with the real music, you could jump off the stage and be caught by everyone there, could float above a crowd of bodies, anonymous hands pushing you in no direction, in every direction, until several somebodies helped you down. To be one of those anonymous hands was to find that a human being becomes weightless when held up by dozens of others. The magazines called it slam dancing, and I suppose it did look angry, but I was there. I know we kept our fists down or above our heads, never at person punching height. I know when somebody fell, the crowd backed up and made space and offered hands. I know what honest intimacy was born jumping and yelling in those cramped dark spots, staticy volume overwhelming our ears, pulsing directly into our bodies through the floor. Our souls broke open. We were not alone.

Among my five dear riot grrls, it was a given that each of us would have died for any of the others. We shoplifted makeup together: blue green black eyeliner lipstick nailpolish. That whole circle learned to smoke and drink on the bridge behind Alice’s house, seduced guys at the mall who we imagined believed the lies we told them about out ages. Lovely bright colors were slathered on each other’s faces, nails and, most importantly, our hair, in well planned ritual fashion. Safety pins pushed into our flesh in lieu of the sterile piercing we were not allowed. The secrecy of it all only enhanced the magic. It was such glorious trouble to turn our heads the color of grass or of the sky, to have metal bits in our skin. Long notes and poems full of love and rage and fear passed urgently between us. We determined to conquer the pain with art. I haven't known a tribe like that since. Threats came from every direction; boys and adults might hurt us anytime, but the five of us were each other’s spines.

Later, in college, I would stumble across the phrase Dionysian ecstasy while reading Nietsche and be taken back, would have a brainy way to talk about it, but by that time it had been long gone for several years.

Maybe some good came out of my harbor in a storm becoming so popular it turned into a place I could no longer love. Maybe spreading the subculture’s values was worth diluting the opportunity to experience them. Lost, though, was the emphasis on process over product, how craftsmanship was once totally out of the equation. DIY was an acronym not about home repair for us, but about creating a community where the act of making raw clumsy art was recognized to be more nourishing than consuming something perfectly polished. When we poured unlikely colors through our tresses, we belonged to ourselves; we redefined beauty on our own terms. Fundamentally, it never was about the piercings or the hair or the clothes, nor the sex and drugs; it wasn’t even about the music. We could have been writing code or planting gardens instead of playing songs; later, some of us were. The important thing was to find our voices, to do it together, to build something all our own.

Everybody supposes the era of their adolescence was the best one in which to be a teenager, but I look at kids only a few years younger than me, and I am grateful to have known what they can only imagine.

Strangers

When I visited my sister the weekend before last, she pointed out a woman and child sitting at the front of the bus into town.

“Those two ride the morning bus with me everyday.   I love to make up stories about them.  The mom is always studying, I think she adopted the child and is trying to learn to speak her language.  See, look, I must be right, the book even has characters on it. I bet she’s studying Chinese.”

The two of then likely would have stood out even if my sister had not informed me of the secret life they live in her head.  This being a university town, every bus rider was between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two but the child, the woman, and technically, myself, though I can pass.  The child, an Asian girl of perhaps seven, looked out the window in obviously self made and very fabulous Halloween costume which may have transformed her into anything from a princess to a sparkly supernatural being, and the woman, thin and wiry, hair streaked with grey, bent over her textbook, seemingly oblivious to the kid at her side.

I make up stories about the strangers I see regularly, too. My sister and I haven't lived to together since she was nine.  Now, as young adults, our shared eccentricities are precious gifts each time I stumble on one.  To suddenly discover this amazing young person who came to many of the same conclusions as I, but from a vastly different path, almost makes up for being absent from her youth. 

At the public library where I do most of my writing, there is an elderly man, maybe in his seventies or eighties, who comes everyday to spend hours on the Internet.  He is dressed up, the way people from that generation insist on being whenever they appear in public: clothes impeccable and dignified without being fancy, shoes shined, shirt pressed.  He brings a briefcase and a newspaper. Times when I have had occasion to eyeball his screen, it appears he is managing a financial portfolio, maybe day trading.  Sometimes he reads the newspaper while sitting in the uncomfortable wooden chair, not touching the keyboard or seeming to glance at the screen for long stretches.

The other day, I came in to sit at the typer all morning before a late shift, and his usual spot sat empty.  Around my second hour of email checking and blog perusing, a bit of worry began to nag at the corners of my mind.  I waited as long as I possibly could, wasting time, hoping he would show before I needed to get to work.  There came a moment when I had to choose between assuaging my curious concern, and fulfilling my duties as an employee.  With a heavy heart I chose the last, put on my coat and headed out the door. 

We crossed paths there.  Eyes fixed ahead and oblivious, as always, to other sentient beings, he did not see the relief wash over my face.

Not That Crazy

Yesterday at work we had an especially belligerent customer.  I found out later they call her the hot chocolate lady, after the only order she ever places.  She was muttering angrily under her breath as she came in, “Rediculous...I can’t believe it...”  When I asked her what was wrong, making conversation as I am wont to do when we are slow, you should have seen the hateful look she gave me.  It is my habit, especially in a retail setting, to turn the full force of my charm on people who do not respond sufficiently to the initial dosage.  Do you really think yourself capable of plumbing the depths of my resilience?  Please, you don't have it in you to more than scratch the surface.  Anything you care to dish out will be returned with the most tooth aching sugary sweetness, see if it isn't.  Bring it, your misery vs my hard won exuberance, we’ll see who breaks first.

Eyes contacting, my face aglow with a custom blend of joy and empathy, I gave her my best smile with her change.  Working retail in Texas, where social niceties are a sacred pact, I learned to make this face and mean it.  My happiness is highly contagious, but she was immune, replied with mockery, a sarcastic grimace thrown back like she was offended that I should presume to attempt cheering her.  She watched the kid making her drink like a hawk, hassled him about whether the spoon he used for separating the foam from the milk was clean enough.

I was bothered a little by the interaction.  When someone is an asshole for no reason, though, I am pretty good at saying to myself, “Wow, she must be in some serious pain for that kind of human contact to seem reasonable.”  Let’s be honest, it’s not like I haven't been in such pain myself.

The two managers on duty commenced discussing the woman as soon as she left.  (Within earshot of the other customers, who now know the employees occasionally engage in mean spirited gossip about one of their number.)

“She is insane.”

“Seriously.  Something is wrong with her.  She keeps applying here over and over, always asks me what my name is.  Right, like we want her working here.”

“But, I mean, I wonder what her problem is.”

“She’s a bitch, that’s her problem.”

“No, I mean, I wonder what her diagnosis is.  Y’know, like, what officially is wrong with her.”

“I bet she doesn’t have a name for it.  Like, she’s not schizo or multiple personality or whatever.  She doesn’t, y’know, seem insane enough to where she would really need drugs or something.  I mean, she’s not *that* crazy.”

Meanwhile a two time veteran of the loony bin listened from the register, trying to decide whether to be annoyed at their lack of professionalism or extremely amused by their ignorance.  Over the course of the conversation, I settled on the latter.  Ladies, you have no idea.  Nutcases lurk among you.