The Luck I've Had

In the past week, I held a modest gathering to thank my closest comrades for helping me through a vulnerable time, signed a lease on a gorgeous apartment with one of my favorite roommates ever, bought a hilariously dorky car that will hopefully get me reliably to all the places I want to be (with help from my dad, whose vocal and tangible support over the last year or so has been especially touching), and drove my charming bandmates and all our gear in said car to our first out-of-town show, where we were received warmly and paid more than enough for gas and road snacks.

Maybe it comes of being a Capricorn, but I tend to focus on the things I don't have, the problems I need to solve, the stuff I have yet to accomplish. I make lists, I pine, I analyze, I wear myself out.

Today I heard a Smiths song and laughed out loud with joy. (The Smiths have that effect on me quite a lot, actually.) As much as I relate to Morrissey's yearning, most of these lyrics don't apply to me. I have dreams all the time, and a lot of them do come true. Then I'm on to the next, bigger dream, almost without pause, the goat scrambling up the cliff. So it was nice to reflect for a moment, as Moz crooned longingly, on the sweetness of my life, which often feels like so much struggle and worry.

There's still so much I want, for myself and those around me, and stopping to see what's been achieved through the collective efforts of those I struggle alongside makes me want to keep climbing. Also, I want to find Morrissey and hug him.

Seventeen by The Smiths

Please, please, please let me
Get what I want. Lord knows it
Would be the first time.

This wagon is flaggin'.
(During our road trip, someone discovered his boxers were too long for his shorts.)
(Not me.)

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

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.

That Time Locusts Ate My Bike, and Other Bible Stories

My mom just bought me a bike.

I am going to turn 39 before the year is out.

But she was never able to buy me a bike as a kid, and I mentioned to her I was looking at buying a bike but it seemed like a lot of money, and she said to buy it and she'd send me a check.

"Making up for lost time?" I quipped.

She quoted me the Bible.

Joel 2:25. "And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten."

She quotes the Bible to me a lot, and always has, and I'll admit sometimes it's tiresome, but something about this was sweet. That such an obscure-seeming scripture was at the ready, that she had this assurance that it was not too late to do for her very grown-up kid what she couldn't do when I was little, that broken hearts can be mended while they still beat.

That's what I got out of it, anyway. Well, that and a bike.

Poem for Cyclical Time (See What I Did There)

Time gives more chances,
More a circle than a line,
Cycles round again.

I kind of want a tiny license plate for it that says EAT MY DUST, LOCUSTS or something ridiculous.

It's too damn warm out.

Last night, after a rock show in a small venue full of stinky young people, a friend brought a bubble machine into the space and pointed it out the window. We scrambled down the stairs and into the alley to chase the frozen bubbles.

The cold made them more durable, not solid but gummy. We could catch them without popping them, and they would cave in but not disintegrate. After a while, they started collecting on the pavement, sticking to each other and rolling down the street in clumps of bubble-tumbleweeds.

We screamed with laughter and staggered around the alley like sugared-up toddlers. And wished it were even colder so we could see what the bubbles would do.

Seems like that's the value of magic, even the silly type of magic that makes soap bubbles into something strange and wondrous: that we are willing and even glad to give up what's comfortable (relative warmth at 20 degrees F) in exchange for possibility.

Haiku for Barely Frozen Bubbles

I stayed out too late
Breathing body odor and
Chasing bumbleweeds

Climb Every Mountain (Even If You Hate It)

My grandpa had a saying: "I like banging my head against the wall because it feels so good when I stop." I always took it as a joke. Because you know what feels better than that? Not hitting your head in the first place.

Last weekend, some friends were climbing a mountain under the "full moon"* following several successive snowstorms. It's considered a relatively easy hike without snow, maybe 2 miles of switchbacks and nothing really steep. So I went along (I really like the moon).

But it was late, and overcast, and my companions' legs were about twice as long as mine, and the dog kept stepping on my snowshoes and knocking me over. Overall, it was kind of an ordeal.

At the top, someone shared their beverage with the rest of us, who had not thought to bring anything to drink. I was sweaty and out of breath, and that first sip tasted like sweet, delicious heaven.

That seemed to be the general reaction to this quenching of thirst, and a conversation arose about the merits of deprivation. Someone told a story about some guy who had been without food in the wilderness for days and when he arrived at his food supply, a chocolate bar made him weep with joy.

In the days that followed, I saw that mountain in the distance and thought about how nice it was to be doing whatever I was doing then instead of stumbling uphill in snow, silently cursing my fate. I still have not decided whether I'm glad I went, or whether I believe that hardship can be gratifying enough to seek it out on purpose. Life is hard enough. Or is it that, for some, it's not hard enough?

Haiku for a Difficult Climb

Sure, this sucks now, but
What is the point of comfort
If that's all you've known?

*It was two days after the full moon, but don't tell that to a certain hike organizer who didn't believe me.

Chip off the old block?

This is my life.

I must be doing something right.

Till a' the seas gang dry

I am so in love with this plant right now.

O my Luve's like a Schlumbergera.

I bought it at the grocery store for, I don't know, a dollar, last winter. I was living in a friend's attic, waiting to learn the fate of my 10-year relationship. (Negatory on the outcome, for those keeping score at home.)

It has moved with me twice. I haven't re-potted it. I have watered it sporadically and apologetically. The wind knocked it over a bunch before I weighed it down with a mug. I've never seen it flower before.

And this month it has begun to bloom its little heart out.

Haiku for My Heartbreak and Resiliency

My life is just like

[Insert clever simile

About this cactus].

Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.

Almost a couple weeks ago, someone gave me (as in, "Hey what's this thing I just picked up off the ground? Here ya go!") a green, spiky orb on a short, thick stem. It was sharp enough to cause a delightfully tingly-ouchie sensation when I held it in my hand (after I had twirled the thing til the stem fell off).

I left this magical alien plant life on the dash of my car (like ya do), and over the course of several days, it dried and split open, revealing a shiny, dark brown nutshell with a light brown spot.

And it seems like a theme of this blog, and of my life (I guess there's some overlap there): transformation, a very solid, beautiful thing hidden inside a bizarre, prickly thing, which is also beautiful and thrilling. And sure, I could have researched any and discovered that it was a (SPOILER ALERT!) horse chestnut, but why take away the mystery?

Haiku for What the Last Two Weeks Gave Me

Do I like it more
When it's new, strange, and pointy
Or smooth, dark, and hard?

DEEZ NUTZ LOL

There's a whole world out there.

One thing that's really stood out for me since moving from the Big City to the Small Town is how much less aware I am of global and even national events. I still get the same articles in my Facebook feed, I guess, but my focus is much more local.

And I wanted that. Going from editing a national magazine to providing direct service within a few miles' radius gave me the personal connections I was missing in my work. And I wanted my world to shrink to a manageable size so I could recover from the burnout of being stacked on top of and crammed together with 8 million of my fellow humans for 5 years.

But there are days when I feel cut off from the world and people who are in tune with and talk about the world outside their immediate sphere. And today, as news of Manning's sentence is making the internet rounds, I don't want to read smart, progressive articles or poignant, pointed tweets about what it means. I want to sit in a room with other people who are outraged or dejected or confused and just feel things and ask each other questions and stare at the floor.

Will that happen at the potluck tonight or around my kitchen table tomorrow or at the coffee shop Friday? Maybe, but probably not. I've felt this way many times recently--when Zimmerman was found not guilty, when Assata showed up on the most-wanted list, when the California prison hunger striker died, whenever there's news of Lynn Stewart's health declining. I could go on.

Maybe what I really miss is talking to people who are working on national or global social justice and a sense of hope for what is happening on the ground. All I'm left with is the headlines and a feeling of isolation.

Haiku for August 21, 2013 (aka tl;dr)

My New York Lefties,
Let's be depressed together
Til we change the world.

Life After Humans

So, you know how the Badlands in South Dakota used to be all underwater, and then the plates shifted and created mountains, and the water drained away, and then it was a jungle full of dinosaurs, and now we see these petrified soil layers sticking up all over amid these grassy plains? Well, me either, until yesterday. Now we both know.

Whenever I think in terms of millions of years on Earth, I find myself smiling with the realization that this experiment called homo sapiens will someday evolve into a new experiment with a species that will maybe not destroy itself and everything around it as quickly as it can.

Haiku for July 31, 2013

They called you "bad land,"
But you used to be a sea.
Anything can change.

In which I recycle a Facebook status update

This is the haiku version of my Facebook status two days ago. It still applies.

Haiku for May 14, 2013

i feel sorry for 
y'all who don't get periods. 
(buffy season six)

I can make even spring sound depressing.

I think this is the seed (see what I did there?) of what will be a longer poem about how growth is also loss, how there is a grieving that comes with any change, a moment of giving up the potential for the actualization of the thing. But because I am afraid of writing nature poetry, I will have to badass it up with swears. Because, as we have shown, that is how that is done.

Mourning the tight seed
What is this tender chaos
Sprung from a dark bed?