Thanks.

I love acknowledging and expressing expressing gratitude. And I hate. HATE. the idea of going around the circle on Thanksgiving and everyone saying what they are thankful for. Because holidays, especially holidays that hang heavy with the legacy that this one does.

Tonight I am full of gratitude, and rage. It's really a strange combo. Rage at a country, a culture that devalues black lives, trans lives, poor lives, women's lives (the list goes on). Every day. Every damn day. And gratitude for my community, people close and far, family of origin and chosen, who work to end all forms of violence, who work with and take leadership from those most affected by that violence. I see you.

Then there are the ways you see and hold me personally that literally keep me going, that make the difference between me going out the door every day and ending up under a blanket in the corner of a room for a week. Which! Is fine! When it needs to happen! I'm just saying.

I'm thankful for my housemates who leave me notes in Spanish, or wishing me a good Thursday. My dad who reads my Queerest Post Ever and sends me a super relevant article. A Certain Someone who comes up with completely unnecessary excuses to see me (move the chicken coop, yeah right). Friends who scheme with me on projects and jam with me on songs. Siblings who miss me over the miles. People I've just met who quote gender theory and radical MLK at me and then drive around a cemetery with me after dark. And so much more.

Oh. And so thankful that no one I know in real life or Facebook or anywhere else has said anything about how people in Ferguson shouldn't riot or how Michael Brown was a criminal or how news reports of the grand jury's decision not to indict his killer interrupted their viewing of "Dancing with the Stars" because I don't know what I would have done, so help me.

17 of Something

Shit. Don't blow 
My cover, but I just 
Did that thing where 
I was thankful.

This is how good people are to me. Do I deserve this? Probably not.

Burning Down the Sky

The last couple of days have been full of tough feelings of the heart kind and the body kind, and I don't even have the words. But I will say this about my drive home from some work meetings at sunset yesterday.

I Said "17 a Day" But I Didn't Say 17 of What 

Damn this sky tonight making 
Me want to open up my veins 
And bleed neon orange pink

Quiet...Too Quiet

This post has been generously donated to our friend-blog City Mouse Country and can be found there. You should totally go read it.

Whose Haikus?

A while back (June?), I quietly stopped calling the poems on this blog "haiku" and changed the headline to say "short poem" instead. But I thought now it was time to be a bit more explicit. Maybe because lately I've been having a hard time telling people about this blog.

In a world where white men gobble up everything in sight (resources, power, culture) and spit up a milky backwash everyone else is expected to lap up and praise us for, it's easy to get lazy. I started this "haiku" thing as a way to get myself to write every day by doing the least amount of writing possible--the definition of laziness. And not that I need to wait for someone to call me on my bullshit, but I've been mostly unchallenged in my use of someone else's culture to tell cute little stories about my life.

I have found this project useful for marking moments over the last couple of years, connecting moments to ideas about the world, and occasionally connecting to others who comment here or on 17aDay's Facebook page. And the 5-7-5 form, with its syllable constraints, helps me focus and distill a lot of thoughts and feelings into something manageable, yet meaningful. So I don't want to just scrap the whole thing.

One thought I had was that maybe there's a short form in a European tradition that I might have any claim to (because I love a sonnet, but let's be real, I already struggle to post once a week), and I could rename the blog and keep on in much the same manner in the new form. My preliminary research hasn't turned up much, except some forms that were "inspired by" haiku and tanka. Also, though, that just sounds like a really easy out.

So, while I continue to ponder and process and publicly guilt about it, here's a limerick to hold you over.

There once was a blogger named Calvin
Who some shame for his haiku was havin'.
In his search for some verse
Less hijacked, just as terse,
It appeared that at straws he was grabbin'.

Robert Frost, Re-revisited Again Some More

This year, I attended the Royal Frog Ballet's annual Surrealist Cabaret and Pumpkin Walk. I went for the first time last year, and I thought it was lovely, but I also had a bad attitude that evening and tried to blame the event. Like, I decided it was ableist that attendees had to walk all over the farm from one performance space to the next, and all the performers appeared to be able bodied, young, and attractive, and that gave me some kind of self-righteous angst about the whole thing. Still, it was beautiful, and I appreciated how it ritualized and made meaning out of the season changing, the darkness growing, the earth shutting down.

So, I went again this year because some friends had an extra ticket. Actually, because I had previously ranted about my discomfort with last year's experience, the invitation was, "I think we have an extra ticket for the inaccessible white supremacy performance tomorrow night if you wanna come." Winky face totally implied. Maybe knowing I was in company that could hear and tolerate--if not share--my cynicism allowed me to relax a little, and I had a decent time, even though tall people in audiences need to be more aware of when they're blocking folks, I'm just saying.

Anyway, each year's performance has a theme, and this year's was "crossroads," which felt meaningful to me personally, and they printed Frost's "The Road Not Taken" in the program. This is a poem that has inspired plenty of rants from me, too, since people seem to remember only the last three lines and miss every shred of its irony by a mile. The same friend who sent me the snarky invitation to the Surrealist Cabaret distilled Frost's poem as follows, and I approve 100% of this interpretation and hope to live my life every day according to its wisdom.

two roads diverge in the woods.
wah wah wah. just fucking pick one.
it's gonna keep happening.

(Readers will remember from this instructive post that authentic haiku don't need to have 17 syllables and honestly I have not been writing authentic haiku at all this whole time, so don't worry about counting anything up there.)

Crossroads is also a 1986 film in which Ralph Macchio sells his soul to the devil to learn
blues guitar from an old black man so he can shred better than this other white boy.