I have eaten the plums

The sun is back out. America's midterm elections are over. My friend V ... well. Losing her is awful, it's cruel. But she is not hurting now. Doctors can't use her body to experiment now. And those who love her - I am humbled they embrace me. Her husband, her family, her beloved friends: beautiful, beautiful, wonderful people.

This time has been hard. Like so many families, the remains of our nuclear unit - just me, mom, and my brother now - endure terrible political strain in these times. But, just for this morning, it's virtual hugs and three courses of "I love you." Because these strains have everyday, real consequences - this has, in some ways, been even harder than watching my lifelong friend die. Or, perhaps, it only got in the way of comprehending and mourning. I only know this has been the hardest thing to bear, over this past week.

We are all enduring a confluence. My brother is traveling to the memorial of a friend of his, and beautiful V's will be remembered on Saturday. As her kids do this, my mom is now watching her own oldest friend in town "giving back", as some say in the South. It may be we all suffer the loss of our dear Deebo, my stepfather - and each of our dear friends.

The light of inspiration peeked out not too long ago - unsurprisingly, after The Conference, but also very much under the influence of other friendships. Leila, especially, uniquely lights my creative way. She and I have so much in common, but we write such different works, and about the time I did a recent beta-read for her, I also happened to find the ENDING for a short work we began an embarrassing number of years ago in our writing group. It's been drafted two different ways, I let it settle in a certain direction, and for now it is sitting quietly, resting, rising, awaiting both her feedback and my final attentions.

Writing. Feels. So. Good.

There truly is nothing else like writing.

And so, with voting done and the sun out and my family whole ... I open up the WIP, the big dog, the "real" work. The novel. Just open it. I shall scroll about in it, find something to alight upon, and read a little bit.

Research feels like a good way to go. I fear it may have to be, at long last, the pogrom. (Yes, now, of all moments.)

Sometimes, the way writing feels "good" is different from other times. It's not always pleasure.

Sometimes, it's memorial.

Getting the hang of Thursdays

Publishing late because ... that's how writing (even a blog) goes at times like this ...


Before me lies a sea of irritations. The thing I see is that they all ebb and flow in three currents, and all of these currents sway and merge, and the three are related.

On Tuesday morning, one of my oldest friends died. She has been there for me in situations where no other fried, not even Mr. X, could stand behind me. She has been quietly present, she has been raucously beside me, she has been kind and crazy and tolerant and irrepressible. She died with a hundred health issues, a good husband, a heart of gold, still fizzing electrically even after, really, our girl was gone from us.

Yesterday, I donned mourning - for a girl who loved Hallowe'en, I put on my looks-like-a-comic-character-makeup, and changed the dress to black. It was a hard day, but leavened by good people all around me (it will never stop being a blessing, how overwhelmingly human my colleagues and employer are), a good meal with my mom, and trick-or-treaters.

Today was harder.

Reaching the point, by 2:30, where I could not comprehend that the day was moving so slowly, I could barely pick up another envelope to open it. It took me all day long to open the incoming pile. Something far beyond "fatigue" pressed down on me, and I succumbed, I let it press. Exhausting and torturous. And it's strange, because last night and the night before, I have slept. Going to bed pretty early, indeed, and not getting up at the crack of 5:40.

I was putting off calling one of my guys. I knew he wanted to put me on a new project, and at the same time I was fighting off some niggling persnicketude from our "Services" center, and - did I mention about that succumbing thing?

My boss needed me to set up a call, so I toddled to his office, and the few steps that took, the conversation with a human, woke me up a little bit. So I called the guy back, and ... it turns out that he's fighting some niggling persnicketude from our "Services" center.

And a month ago, I was fighting a very related form of? Niggling persnicketude from our "Services" center.



Is it weird, that talking with my frustrated guy out in Texas, telling him that this is an "opportunity" for Operations wasn't even me taking a bullet or making a joke?

There is a sea of irritations, and there are three currents, and the currents are swirling in niggling persnicketude. And I can, perhaps - at least learn enough about the niggles to begin to deal with them.



I was in the hospital with V and her husband W two and a half weeks ago, when it looked like she might be dying. That afternoon, they "saved her life." She was transferred to a new hospital after that, maybe-diagnosed and then not diagnosed with yet another shockingly rare and dangerously mortal disease. They found a surgical complication we knew was a problem was worse than previously known. More surgery. More life support.

Really, though, no more *life*.

On Tuesday barely after four a.m., W called me and I caromed around my bedroom putting some clothes on my body and thinking what I would need at the hospital. I got there at five. And we sat. Watched the sun rise. Family and friends came.

It was the first I have been with V in too long. All these hospital visits; I have been a poor friend over the past year. And it is too late. Except to be there for her family, for W.

She died with music playing.



I still can't believe she is gone.

I still can't believe she is gone ...

Collection

It's the processed-everything and SUGAR, stupid. I'm so glad this science seems finally to be getting out more, let's hope it prevails.

Four(-eyed) flushers. It's probably been about fifteen years since I learned that putting anything other than effluvia or the tissue we use to deal with it into a commode yields problems for the sanitation systems which process our sewage. Now and then, I do still flush the hair after I clean my brush, but usually I do try to stick by the rule, sensitive to the cost of waste management (astronomical, in case you've never wondered). Hit the link above for another reason.

So, consequences are over I guess. Inevitable, but dispiriting nonetheless. Weinstein gets to be "relieved" because Asia Argento is also facing allegations of harassment. Lauer wants to be on TV again. I'm sure there are people who'd watch that; personally, I feel a bit dirty just pointing it out. But the thing is, lots of disgraced men are eyeing comebacks. Not everyone resides at the same level of repellence. But that is the point - they ALL apparently (think they) are owed careers and money and our attention. Sigh. I guess it's true. If you own it, you get to get away with anything.

Please do not click on the links in that last paragraph. If you don't already know what they are (and I suspect everyone does, or is smart enough to guess), you can just hover and read the URLs. That is 100% of the content of the clicks, and *not* clicking will save these outlets the information that we "care". Thanks.

...

...

...

Okay, let's lighten up after THAT, shall we?

My brother and I spent a good fifteen - maybe even twenty - minutes laughing about this last night:

What a great country, where a fella can offer up hot spuds to whoever wants to eat 'em! Ka-pow!

3 full pounds of consternating comedy, y'all. Click away.

In other completely bizarre vintage culture, this:

I'm still agog.

Mourning.

I would hardly be the first, and it's hardly the first time I've thought this myself - but the loss, through the 20th century, of traditional mourning practices in the United States is also a loss of an important signal between us as humans. It's been tempting, since my stepfather's death, to find some way to communicate, without having to have awkward conversations with strangers or acquaintances, that I have just endured a loss. With even the black armband all but vanished, mourning itself is an awkward proposition anymore.

There has been an increasing sense, for me, that it's time to move on. Nobody has pressed this upon me, but with weeks passing at a clip (I almost cannot believe it's been nearly three now), there is an inescapable feeling that continuing to Have The Feels about my stepfather's death is already drama-queening. That, to be frank, there is only the briefest of periods we can get away with not being okay and getting on with the day-to-day.

It would be ... if not nice, then certainly convenient, to have an unspoken signal of mourning. If one is to get on with the day-to-day, not having to *speak* about the loss of a loved one would certainly facilitate that. But the human heart is what it is, and it still hurts when people you're not sure even "know about it" register no sympathy. There is confusion - do I tell this person I see every day? Why should I have to do that? It feels like dramatics to lay that on people - particularly when you're not sure whether they know already. Some people won't speak because it's been more than a few days, and the news-cycle of life has sailed. Some people won't speak because they are sensitive to the pain of loss. Some people won't speak because they are awkward with the subject. Some people won't speak because they do not know. As the bereaved, it would be easier to know - is this person in ignorance, or are they being kind? It HELPS to understand.

So much of communication is nonverbal.

And so, if I had a signal, I could at least understand the words that do come toward me. And I could also communicate this important thing about myself, without having to stop time in the workroom to say, "Yeah, my stepfather just died." And leave someone feeling VERY awkward.

My guess is, this is one more gift Americans have accidentally or heedlessly imposed upon the world. In the rush to imprint our informality, nonconformity, and expectations upon human interaction, we have obliterated some forms of signal someone figured wasn't necessary, and over time the social enforcement that is conformity (har) ended up killing off this branch of etiquette. Uncomfortable, restrictive, depressing, perhaps even importunate upon the carefree (har) lives of other individuals.

Goodbye, mourning. Seriously, has anyone seen real mourning since Jackie Kennedy? I can't so much as remember consistently black garb at funerals; my mom, as it happens, wore poppy-red over a red and black dress, to the funeral inspiring me to discuss this whole thing. She is a great believer in the reaffirmation of life in vivid (the word means lively, after all) color.

I wore black. He was a bit more traditional. And he deserves to be mourned.

Indeed, since he died, I have kept my wardrobe more on the sober side ever since. If I can't go around in mourning jewelry (that people will understand as such, as opposed to thinking I just picked coz I'm goth-ly tinged), at least I can calibrate my mien to less flamboyance. And wear *less* jewelry. I actually applied a shot of brown hairspray to cover the blue hair, in fact, before the funeral; and at least once or twice since. I'm not even wearing highlighting cosmetics these days; bright eyes just seem inappropriate. (And the simpler the eye makeup, the less smear when I slip and find myself crying. In the middle of a meeting. Because: dork. In mourning.)

Three weeks. And already, I find myself embarrassed to even SAY "I am in mourning" (except to that one actual human telemarketer who called, and I could not take it). In the culture I've grown up in, mourning itself is unseemly, because it imposes upon those around us the distasteful necessity of sensitivity, or just the reminder of mortality. Mourning for three WEEKS, well. That is just melodramatic.



And yet, I am impelled to say - at least here - he deserves more than weeks. And what he has taught me, perhaps especially in his own final week, which was horrific ... will stay with me for the rest of my life. I still don't understand everything I saw and experienced, and it's both something to process and also to extrapolate from: for all I went through the eternity and power and heartbreak of his deathbed, my mom has been enduring as a caregiver for years now. His decline, in fact, goes back eight years - I still remember the Mother's Day lunch we shared, when we had to hold his arm back out to the parking lot.

Mom is still learning, too. Just how long this road has been. How, bit by bit, her own liberty to move in the world was curtailed - sometimes by my stepfather's will (he developed terrified and aching separation anxiety), and always by his frailty. How she did it all herself, and kept him home.

Six months ago, I was firmly of the belief that I would NEVER die in a hospital. My own dad's death left me sure it was barbaric and awful. My own dad's death came fast, though.

Now, I am not so sure. Being home might be nice, if I could be assured of sudden death (and that The Poobahs would not starve). It has an allure - who would wish to be in a hospital at the end?

But a slow death at home ... knowing that I could be alone, is that something to sign up for in all eagerness? Not that I'm interested in artificial prolongation, but the variables in horror - if I were alone, and broke a hip (my stepfather's final crisis was a break, and this is often a precipitating factor for those already in decline), what would I endure, ensconsed at home yes, but immobilized, in pain ... ?

Even with caregivers, death at home isn't some peaceful slipping away in one's own bed. Indeed, a standard bed is a horrible, dangerous place. Only after a hospital bed was delivered did my stepfather subside from cruel restlessness and the torture of his broken bones. And by "subside" I do not mean he found comfort. Only some respite, and that incomplete itself.

I learned from him; and sat with him, and tried to give him silence. Sound made him uncomfortable, so I stopped even indulging myself telling him how much I loved him. Or that he could go on. We told him that a lot. He didn't need to hear it, he wasn't holding out for permission to die.


And this too, I learned from him ... death doesn't always answer to the pretty stories we apply to it. It's not always a saga of fulfillment, someone waiting until an important figure comes to their side and releases them. It's not even always a question of release. The man my stepfather was? He had life left, and he was going to use it all up. All of it. Where for six years, he literally begged for death, once it announced it was come, he wrung out of his body the last *iota* of life left to him. Death wasn't impatient for him; those of us around him were.

It is a harrowing thing, a week long deathbed. Human chatter becomes intolerable, and I understand his responses when it was pushed on him, or shot over him as if he were barely there. He was there.

Even outside the room where he lay, the prognostications of "when" ... the stories about crows haunting us, or passed family members coming to take him away ... were not merely exhausting, they became irrelevant quickly as he kept on living on ... and we undoubtedly crossed into distasteful territory, more than once. People coming and going, speaking loudly of meals once shared, or playing music he would have hated ... crossing with those who came to sing, to pray, to just be beside him.

I think (and this may just be a story I tell myself) I became more silent as the days passed, simply because that was the only gift I had left to give to him. I stopped typing one day, because I felt the sound of my keystrokes, even, were too much to bear. I didn't hold his hand constantly, I stopped telling him he was the best stepfather ever, or that I loved him, or how much he amazed me.

I just never stopped kissing his head. Breathing the smells of him - not all of them beautiful. And yet, I both miss the scent of him and find myself having a sort of PTSD series of flashbacks to the smell that seemed most emblematic of him in his last year or so. The smell of his death began long before he ever broke a bone.



I miss him, and I love him, and I mourn him, and just thinking it makes me weep silently.

One of the funniest people I ever knew.

Someone who, never having been a father before, took on our whole family when he was not a strapping youth, and who found ways to laugh alongside us. Great G-d, it was not always easy - for him, or for us. The first years were difficult.

But the past eight? The past six? The years since my brother's family moved, and it's been me, mom, and him? The time it took for me to go from reluctance, to content, to tenderness?

I am blessed to have had these years.

Their passing deserves observation.

My stepfather deserves mourning.

Meta-for

The old metaphor of life, like a candle, flaring up before it goes out ... really isn't strictly poetic. When you reduce them to lowest terms - that fire, and life, are energy processing systems - they are the same thing, fundamentally. A wick left on its own will burn until all its paraffin is gone or it sinks into its own matter, self-snuffing. Life seems similar; we eat, we burn - and, though human beings of course also do so much more than this processing, the end of fuel means the end of life.

What is rarely displayed is just how efficiently the human system burns, sometimes.

I put the blog on pause to wait out a system at its end ... and here, on day six, we still are waiting. Life is almost cruelly tenacious. And, like a candle, life can gutter by flaring up, by burning furiously and then flickering. And even then it may not be exhausted.

Life is *alarmingly* tenacious.



The sacred time we place, around birth or marriage or death, the most important things to us ... I have never spent so long, in my life, in this time removed from the world, from everyday life. I have been enclosed in sacred time so long now it may be time to emerge, at least for a day. Only, presumably, to go back inside. It is a dizzying prospect, even though the hermetic seal around us right now is itself rarefied and disconcerting/disorienting.

We are exhausted. The living, and the dying. But I have learned this: though I know I have had periods in sacred time before, thinking I wished it would go on and on ... now I understand in a more immediate way, the truly sacred part of time separated from the everyday, from the world: is that it must be finite. The truly sacred part is re-entering LIFE.

Tomorrow, I may have to do that. Let us see what tonight will bring.

It was a day ...

... and it is an evening.

One of those days it's hard to keep yourself together. One of those days you feel like this, or this - or wish you did, because actually you are so much more fragile. One of those days you break, because of music. One of those days you are angry - and impotent. Cruelly, inhumanly, inhumanely - impotent. To help, to love, to DO.

It was a productive day. The sort of day you clear out the "pending work" folder and fill the recycling bin. You lob a few balls into other peoples courts, and check off a few things, completed, too. And even still, the sort of day you still have time to realize ... terrible, terrible things. Things you have always known, even articulated before, in different ways. But which still have the power to devastate.

Sometimes, it is a good thing to know that, when I say I am possessed of a  wee and paltry brain, really it is a joke.

Sometimes, it is a burden. To understand too well. And still be powerless. And still be the little girl, who is desperate and too tender and devastatingly weak.

Sometimes, it is a good thing, having a daily routine, having discipline - it keeps us together, most of the time.

Sometimes, it is a burden - the routine, the discipline. Keeping it together. And being devastatingly weak.

It is time to feel this. Instead of maintaining, to succumb.

It is evening.

It is night. Oh, Lord.

This Day In ...

My dad had been diagnosed terminal about two years previous, but he wasn't one who spent his time dying. He fought the dragon - his attacks of airlessness, the cruelty of pulmonary fibrosis - he took to a wheelchair when he had to, he toted his concentrator. But he lived.

So the day he and mom were alone at the house, and asked me to just come be with them; that was new. He was in bed, and mom had just come home with cell phones; including one for me. Just in case.

Mom's was the FANCY phone. It was a flip. Mine was a little silver sneaker of a thing; rubber buttons, an antenna encased in more rubber. It seemed tiny, and had the brightest blue screen. I figured out how to play with it; producing pings and buzzes and what passed, fourteen years ago, for music on a cell phone. Tinklings and twangs. But it seemed neato.

Dad being a scientist, and just possessed of a curious and analytical mind, he 'gee whizzed' a bit about this new tech, and we spent the afternoon in their bedroom, figuring the little things out.

We spent the afternoon listening to footage and sadness.



It would come as a shock to me, years later, to find that there had been a Space Shuttle disaster just before my dad died. I remembered that day at their house. I had forgotten, utterly, what we'd had on the tube. While we played with the new phones - "just in case" anything happened with dad's condition - we had no idea there would be no condition at all anymore, in just a week.

So that event obliterated my recall of Columbia.



Resentfully, I can relate that I do recall (with painful clarity) the soundtrack of dad's actual final hours. It was Martin Bashir's documentary about Michael Jackson - about which I cared nothing, but which back then was about all there was going, for someone shuttling back and forth between hospital and home, grabbing scraps to eat and scraps of sleep in between thinking "this is the new normal" and ... "this is the last day."

I didn't have cable. Being alone in the house with no sound - even with my Sweet Siddy La there with me; her heartbeat and her sweet face - I could not take it. I would turn on the tube, and there he would be, protesting innocence and normalcy. Seemed to go on all day every day for the sacred time that is Waiting for Death.



The things you remember. Snow in square Xs on the sky lights below dad's room. Moving him to another room. Almost immediately losing his voice, his presence, to morphine. Knowing we'd lose him all the more, never to speak with him again.

Holding his hand. So soft; and that thick, heavy wedding ring, glowing against his grey-mauve skin.

My brother and I had left in the night, mom climbing in the bed to spoon him, as he died. She called us each at about four a.m., and we both arrived back at the hospital at the same moment - having both been listening to the same music on NPR. Something called Autumnal, by Brahms I think it was. It was perfect. Snow and elegiac strains. And holding hands with my brother, possibly the only time in our lives we've ever done that. Walking in through the bewildering route to quiet, and darkness, and mom and dad.

Holding hands. Dad's hands.

The way his muscles tightened on my hand after he had died.



When I was small, dad and I would sit in church, mom in the choir, and he would just lift up one big, warm paw in a gesture so old between us I cannot even place its origin. I would ball up my own paw into a fist, and place it into his. Ball-and-socket dad and kid.

Dad had warm hands all his life, till the diagnosis. Soft, dad was hairy too. Fuzzy Wuzzy was my dad - except, of course, on top of his big round Charlie Brown head. He was warm and reassuringly stocky; not what I can call stout, but solid, firmly on the ground. Not tall, but never a negligible physical presence.

He had this warm, gravelly-gruff voice.

There was a voice mail on that little silver sneaker. I had it for a long time, but after some period they auto-delete. I lost my dad's voice maybe six months after he died.



He was the best.

I miss my dad.

1986, just before the prom
... holding hands ...

In the News

More and more lately, entertainment seems to reflect the news - not because it is even possible to be prescient and to write, produce, and release works that could have known what is happening around us just.this.month, but because human behavior is repetitive.

For all we feel stunned by human events, for all predicting what is happening - what WILL happen next - seems impossible, still it is true: nothing is new, under the sun. Perhaps any sun.

And so it is only fair that the news reflects entertainment as well.

Not for the first time, I am brought to mind of Star Trek Deep Space 9's brilliant episode, Duet. This week the story walks among us again in Oskar Groening, the bookkeeper at Auschwitz. No echo at all of the bookkeeper at Gallitep.

I won't add much more than what I observed in that first link, my post above.

Rabbit Holes

Today, I was talking with my oldest friend, The Elfin One, and she asked how my mom and stepfather are doing. He is the one to whom I've alluded a time or two, who has for some years now been slowly dying. A part of this has been deterioration of his cognition. ... and my mom has endured a chronic, profound disruption of her sleep patterns, as he loses track of time completely. The result is she's not quite the woman of stunning recall I have always been used to her being.

TEO asked me whether this is stress or some reflection of an organic problem. I think it's the sleep issues, the fear and unceasing demands. But it's so easy to forget ... that she forgets. With my stepfather, we've grown used to his lapses.

Last week, she came to my house and thought she had never seen the painting I did in my upstairs bathroom ... six months ago or more.

My mom is fully down the rabbit hole with my stepfather. And honestly, she's getting a little rabbity.


The next question is, "Diane, how are you?"

My response to this tends to be some combination of bewilderment and dismissiveness. I'm *aware* this is hard on me too, but I'm much more aware how much easier it is for me than it is for my mom. There's a tendency to push off sympathy so people will spend it, and their prayers, on my mom instead.

Not with TEO. With my oldest, best friend, I can be honest (with my brother too). And I realized where I stand.

I'm like standing guard at the entrance to the rabbit hole.



G-d has been especially kind to me of late. A few months ago, it was stress helping them do their taxes, and for the past few months I've been doing all I can to be not only on call if they need me, but also to just spend time as much as I can. To be an escape valve and a social distraction that is NOT demanding for them.

There's been a lot of social distraction for them lately - family, after family, after family - and my mom is incapable of not *hosting* her family. So for some weeks, as much as we LOVE them, visit after visit has had her fretting over what to cook, had her shopping, had her squiring loved ones around, had her socially "on" in a way that alone can be demanding. As someone who's lived alone for the bulk of my adult life, over twenty years now, I know how exhausting joy can be. Simply smiling all day - it is a pleasure to be with people, but I come home absolutely shot, and aching for my solitude, my home, the furbabies.

For me, there's been a lot of work distraction lately. Three solid weeks now of quite HIGH productivity - prep for our annual meeting, onboarding an exec I've been waiting for over a year and half, and this past week has been an apple pie hubbub. Multitasking extraordiaire.

I'm the lucky one: I'm not down in that rabbit hole, my world is still the real world. I get to sleep normally. And I have a job with the most extreme level of satisfaction I have ever enjoyed - which is saying something very significant.



So now my own question.

How do you hope your mom can have a life like that - productive, healthy, stimulating ... knowing what has to come for her to have that?

Yeah.

My Letter to you, Damien Echols

It's hard for me to say for how many years I've followed the story of the West Memphis Three, but fifteen years may be about fair, for paying specific attention and actually seeking reading (and the documentaries) about the tragedy.

For those unfamiliar with the story, I won't link Wikipedia, only provide the simple story. The West Memphis Three were Jessie Misskelly, Damien Echols, and Jason Baldwin. In 1993, amid Satanist panic and public furor, these teenaged boys were convicted of the murder of three young boys in West Memphis Arkansas, in one of the more famous miscarriages of justice in the twentieth century. The details abound, so I will not recount them here, but it is a cruelly fascinating episode, and shameful beyond description.

The most famous, and oldest, of the convicted Three, is Damien Echols. He has become well known both for his past and also for his recovery (I will not use the term rehabilitation), but it is always his writing that clings to me when I look again toward this story. It feels cruel to call it a story, though. Perhaps I should say, look again toward these people.

I wish I had a handful of dust
--Damien Echols

One of the things that always strikes me in the heart about these kids - about this one - is that he reminds me indelibly of two of the three great loves of my life. His melancholy and his coloring are powerfully like Mr. X. And his expression of what a disadvantaged - what a battered - life is like echo sometimes in the communications with my first love, who reappeared almost a year ago, and who still breaks my heart at times (not in the way we once felt, of course).

And, seven years younger than I am, I know he's not a child, but his experience sparks in me something like a maternal outrage. The wish it had been possible to protect him. He was just a boy, barely older than the murder victims themselves really, and so the offense at his wrongful conviction and confinement - on death ROW, no less - is compounded by whatever vestige of protectiveness washing around in my guts.



Humanity is filled with so many who respond so much worse to wounds so much less - or illusory - his is an example of grace.

In recent months, face to face with another kind of grace, reading the link above today was inspirational. And, I will admit it, entertaining. In the sense that art entertains, that great writing does - even as it may elevate, or relieve, or release, or evaporate with no ghost but pleasure had - to understand the experience of solitary, of death row, of imprisonment is ... how to choose a word carefully here ... "stimulating" is accurate, but larded with inaccurate implications ... "educational" is right too, but almost so spare of deeper meaning as to fall short rather than overshoot ...

Enlightening. It lightens the soul to know another soul is not burdened by the worst we can do to one another - or has been set free. And it lightens the world to illuminate corners of it most of us will never see, G-d be praised for it.

Image: Wikipedia

His writing is extraordinary, evocative. The piece linked above reads like engrossing fiction; and the fact that it is not is an outrage. Something beyond poignant, something so much more important.

Certain shade of agony have their own beauty
--Damien Echols

Read his writing at the link. It is life itself.

Thinkage

Today at work, I was thinking about the stress my family has been under , and half-thought to myself, "As human beings, we are not made to watch another person die." Instantly, I realized that this was incorrect.

As human beings, we are supposed to be with others - those we know, love, share community with - in illness and death, birth and joy.

It's the cube farm we're not made to do this in. Isolated from those we share the most with and under flourescent lights, breathing canned air, muffled by white noise.

Tears and blood and messy moments aren't the unnatural. Being compartmentalized and pressed away from these things is.

(Born Naked) and The Rest ...

It has been a hard, hard week, and a good one.

My stepfather didn't come into our lives until I was thirty-seven or so. Like any family, we had natural resistance to change. But, over time, he has become very dear to us. Indeed, at this point I find myself unexpectedly tender and protective toward him. I love him VERY much, and now the very fact we didn't see that coming means that loving him is very gratifying.

An astute reader will guess: it is his health which has for so long been an obliquely-referenced sadness when I blog about personal feelings.

This post is not about my stepfather.

His decline has put my mom into the position of caregiving. The difficulties and challenges don't require explaining. But the particulars, for us, are no less acute for being shared by so many others.

This week, I SLAYED IT at work. I was sick'ning. I was FEE-ACE.

The three statements above are consciously and intentionally pointed thievery, mainly from RuPaul (and a little bit from Tyra Banks).

At work, I killed a graphical map presentation. I helped give birth to an initiative which stands to save my company quite a lot of money. It felt good.

And at my mom and stepfather's house, I helped them do their taxes.



Most of the time someone we love is in difficulty, we are impotent to DO anything.

The impulse is to fix. The impulse is to give advice. The impulse is to anything but passive receipt of bad news, sadness, fear, bitterness. We can't hear a problem without wanting to respond to the problem.

The secret of my life has been in responding to the person. It is why, since I was thirteen, I have been the one friends - even family - turn to. It is that saying I don't understand is a better response than fixing, advising. Thinking we do understand.

Because, even when we've been there, we never quite understand another's heart.



And so, the opportunity TO fix - TO actually, practically and concretely help - is a rare and special opportunity.



This week, I got to help.

It doesn't change the health picture. It doesn't change the fact that the secondary help I may be able to offer - to perhaps make it possible for my mom to go somewhere else and help someone else herself - is in answer to someone else's crisis. It doesn't untangle the way death creates a spiderweb that crosses more than one stand across us at any moment.

But my mom called me yesterday morning and said, "I slept."



So. What's Ru got to do with it?

Ru is my present to myself.

Drag Race has a live show, and Cute Shoes and I will get to go together. We'll get to dress up. I will meet her Gay Best Friend; someone else I know may be there with her husband, who may himself be in drag.

There will be ooh-ing and aah-ing over shoes, over wigs, over clothes and makeup.

There was already that one moment when my BROTHER got into the drag-planning and said, "You should do that greyscale makeup" and I realized I have corrupted him, and that was awesome.



Sometimes, you need something to look forward to.

I look forward to seeing the girls in the video above. I look forward to doing Pearl's "HULK SMASH" dance and loving it. I look forward to Ginger Minj's accent and sense of humor. I look forward to just looking at Violet, who is so young and so adorable and so deadly brilliant. I cannot even DEAL, that I will get to see Alaska T********** - the only thing named or remotely to do with Alaska that I ever loved (and I adore her completely).

I'm excited, excited.

And don't we ALL need that?

Mistakes? Life.

One of the philosophies I took from my family is that life would not be worthwhile if it were not for the differences among us. It would be boring for everyone to hold the same beliefs, no matter how “right” we may think our own are. We might never learn, if we never had to open our minds.

Likewise, joy is only enhanced by sorrow. If we have not known want, or sadness, then having, and happiness are not fully defined.

When Loretta sings, “why is that old drunk still livin’, when a daddy like mine is dyin’?” – I KNOW that question. I have asked it, in anger and in sadness. And I know her answer. It is as much a part of my family as the red clay or steep hills where my mama was born and grew up, or the white house on the hill where my daddy did.

The elegiac beauty of her song does not make it easier. It does not make the answer more acceptable. And yet. It states the simple facts.

In my family, that fact was summed up thus: life is not fair.

Taking succor, even rapture, from the relativity of joy and sorrow, of cold and warm, of frustration and fulfillment … is one thing.

Taking that on, and looking at the little baby she sings of – twisted – or the child who is blind … remains incomprehensible.

We learn from the difficulties in our own lives, and we even learn from those around us who suffer.

Yet it can feel so dirty. So awfully wrong. To watch someone face death, with more grace than you have ever seen, and to understand that death teases, plays, and delays. That it will not COME, even long after the point where this person has begun to beg for it.

I can accept that my dad only got sixty-five years, when people who seem to me not even to care about their lives – or who are just selfish – get to live on and on and on.

It is harder to accept the cruelty that is hardship suffered with no relief, or suffered by one who cannot comprehend their agony.



My elder niece, when she was only three or four, once said, “I think it would be better if everyone could be a LITTLE sick, instead of one person being VERY sick.” She said this when my dad was dying.

She’s no damned fool, my elder niece. Never was. Not even at three or four.

And the heartbreak is this: life can’t be had on egalitarian terms.

Life is not fair.

And, as beautiful as that can be, as bittersweet and gorgeous as some of our moments of pain can be …

… it hurts. It sucks.

And it STILL beats the alternative. As bad and as poorly designed and even as stupid as it is. It’s still the best thing going.

Forgivness is Loss

I'm going to do THAT Star Trek fan thing. I'm going to discuss an immensely serious issue, and couch it in the context of an episode of Deep Space Nine. It still may be worth reading anyway.

Doing this, I do not mean to trivialize human tragedy - and certainly not to praise Trek because/fangirl - but to point to one of the billion ways our culture - even pop culture - faces off with the nastiest elements of human nature ...

... and to recognize that sometimes, what we have to say with entertainment actually has something worthwhile to say about the history of human behavior.



Inevitable Trek Context (caveat/disclaimers for non-Trek-ites)

When DS9 came out, it was not universally adored. For one, it took place on a fixed space station instead of as space *ship*, which could go from place to place to place, and allowed for Alien of the Week eps, and may or may not have allowed character arcs to exist at all. For two, it took a dispiriting view of humanity-by-way-of-humans-and-aliens some found objectionable, in light of Gene Roddenberry's vision of a future mankind divested of money, illness (to a major degree), bigotry, and, frequently, many of its clothes. DS9 flew in the face of the enlightened evolution of TOS and TNG.

But that vision of human development had become at times insufferably smug, and shut down certain ways of telling stories that deal with the fundamental issues at the heart of Trek, and science fiction more generally.

DS9 debuted a story of a world fresh off fifty years' brutal occupation, and developed into the chronicle of a bitter war which actually affected its core ensemble (and many of its more peripheral characters) in genuinely terrible ways. It presented disharmonies - and even shone a light onto prejudices of previous Trek outings, taking on the presentation of the Ferengi, for instance - which had for years been seen as a rightly offensive caricature of anti-semitic stereotypes. DS9 dealt with religion in a way and with a depth and continuity that none of the previous series could, always in motion and never around any one culture long enough to really look at it sincerely.

DS9 was "dark."


***


It is with no disrespect nor trivialization that I turn to the news which prompted this post: that changes in German law initiated in 2011, after a retired Ohio auto worker was brought to trial for his role as a Nazi guard at the Sobibor concentration camp, have led to the opening of prosecution against other surviving persons who worked in the camps. Reinhold Hanning, at age ninety-four, is about to face trial for his own role as an SS guard at Auschwitz-Birkenau.


***


How Can This Have Anything to Do With Trek?

The connection is stark and direct, actually.

In "Duet", episode nineteen of season of Deep Space Nine, we are brought face to face with The Butcher of Gallitep, an occupying officer in charge of what essentially was a concentration camp run by occupying Cardassians on Bajor, something of a host planet to the space station, and home planet of core ensemble character, Major Kira, liaison officer to the Federation presence on the station.

An anonymous Cardassian traveler stopping at DS9 is detained almost by happenstance, because he is found to have a rare disease common only to those exposed to conditions at the camp at Gallitep. Clearly not a Bajoran victim of the place, we learn soon enough that this man turns out to have been none other than the Cardassian overseeing officer of the facility, The Butcher of Gallitep himself.

Kira, a resistance fighter who has risen from the ashes of her oppressed planet's release from occupation, is a passionate, partisan survivor. She instantly wants to punish The Butcher, and wins the privilege of taking on the investigation into this man, with an eye toward his prosecution.

It is Kira's own investigation that turns up the tragic, horrific truth: the man in custody is not The Butcher ... but was a file clerk at Gallitep, who has disguised himself as The Butcher. He is tormented with guilt because of the actions of his people, and his own banal, administrative role in the rape of Kira's world, that he has come to the station in order to bring about his own execution ... and perhaps, in the guise of The Butcher, to provide the Bajorans with a marquee defendant ...

The scenes the file clerk plays as The Butcher are genuinely harrowing TV - brutal, unrepentant, self-righteous. The scenes once his true identity are discovered are bruisingly sensitive, fraught, and intelligent. The show and the episode are as static and set-bound as the Trek of popular imagination, but this script is a stunner - made in a time where we had not yet applied cinematic production values, budgets, and expectations to serial science fiction - or any television at all - the show makes the most of its drama without these things.

Philosophically, "Duet" honors the questions it raises not by answering them, but by respecting them as perhaps ultimately unanswerable: no outcome can satisfy all witnesses. And any judicial proceeding is as much about its witnesses as it is about its plaintiffs or defendants, and rulings.


In the end, the episode is about loss - and yet, *what* is lost? For Kira, some prejudices. Some rigidity. And her convictions.

Is there virtue, in paring down a survivor's sustaining beliefs?

Kira has to deal, throughout the whole of this series, with the sickening giddiness that comes not after the world is torn from beneath her feet, but after the person that makes her is constantly and continually deconstructed, through the years following her redemption from Cardiassian overlordship. She has gained a certain freedom, but lost so much of the core of what has sustained her. She is forced, over and over, and no matter how much she grows, to lose still more - in order to grow still more. It is both the most sublime outcome for someone who would never submit to victimhood, and yet a continuing punishment to her, at the ghost hands of Cardassians long gone - and constantly reappearing, to reopen old wounds.

It is against this dynamic the firmness of her faith, of the religion of the Bajoran people (explicitly corrupt, and yet meaningful to its adherents) is represented.


***


It is beyond me utterly to grapple even with the questions raised in "Duet" - and beyond comprehension for me to contemplate "answers" to the question of what contemporary Nazi prosecutions mean for the world. I believe in consequences for atrocity and injustice. I also question whether humanity is the best provider of those, though the existence of such questioning CANNOT mean that we should throw up our hands and never punish, never seek justice.



One of my oldest friends in the world - so long a friend he is family - is a defense attorney, and a Jew.

He said to me once, "The system is not always good, but it is the best in the world, and I am proud to be part of it." He looked across the room, and said, "When it works, it is gratifying."
He said this while we were breaking bread together at the restaurant of a client he had saved from injustice. I will never forget it.

And now, for Hanning, for the survivors, I can do only this, in the face of Nazi prosecution so many years beyond the regime: pray that he is right - and that it works.

Is Quantification Worse Than Objectification?

I have decided not to devote a whole big post to the article that had me so disturbed last night. I'll just leave it with a few quotes from the article ...

“(T)he thrill of quantification merging with the thrill of the chase” …

“The systematic, quantified pursuit of women tends to make men bitter and resentful.” …

“‘You know,’ his grandmother told him, ‘we’re women too.’” …

“I didn’t even know this sphere existed in humanity.”

And just to cleanse the palate of THAT human sadness, please enjoy this image, which Google says is labeled for re-use, so I am stealing it based on the plausible deniability that I trust Google's rulings on usage rights ...

Sigh.

Funny the Way a Day Can Go

Today was the first day back in the office for an awful lot of the Eastern Seaboard, and I made it an especially early day, getting right to it by 7:15 this morning and starting off running.

It wasn't a bad day, but after leaving early and getting home with a scrap of afternoon left to me, I read a long and especially disturbing article (blog post on THAT to follow, but I don't want to contaminate this post with a link), did a little more shoveling, did the pet thing, and ... kind of found myself mired in a place of dread and fear.

Hormones'll do that to ya, when they don't take you to the lush, weepy place. If something honestly disconcerting gets into your brain, it can leave you seriously upset, sometimes without even quite realizing why. It gets worse when you are alone: the other heartbeats in my house do go a long way to keeping me from going completely hermit-daft, but Gossamer and Penelope can't TALK with me, they can't laugh.



Thank G-d for good friends.

Cute Shoes called me around eight, and pulled my head out of my navel, and we laughed and rolled our eyes about a few things, and she let me off the phone in a better mental place. Cute Shoes is pretty OSUM like that (including when she induces me to evil, pointing out the sale at American Duchess, and then joining with me in the "I own a pair of American Duchess shoes" club). And, indeed, she's OSUM in other ways as well.

It put me in such a better mood I was able to call my mom, and she and I laughed for a while too. I turned on the episode of Fixer Upper she had on, and watched what ended up turning out to be about my favorite design of theirs they've EVER done, a mix of modern and cozy, light and warm, family memories and new design. And Fixer Upper stars a couple who do make me laugh.

Mom and I got off the phone to keep watching, and then I had to call her to laugh that the unfinished natural cedar planks they were using on one wall looked like bacon strips. Then she called me at the end (while I was resisting the urge to call her and ooh and ahh over how beautifully the house turned out) to ooh and ahh over how beautifully the house turned out. It MUST have been gorgeous, because mom and I don't really have similar aesthetics.

Friends are a good thing. I am so grateful.

Even so, I wouldn't have minded having Mr. X around to improve my mood. He's probably my favorite person in the world to watch laughing. And to *make* him laugh - well, just even thinking about it makes me happy.



Hooray for hormones!

Fractured Light

Speeding up a long afternoon freeway, winter sun glorious and low, rays strobed; daytime shattered by the shadows of ten thousand trees.

She is driving. Set mouth. Day-weary face of freckles and fatigue. Tear-glossed eyes - dry by the grace of G-d(less self-preserving control) - behind large, dark glasses. Music, loud. Very loud.

Picture it ("Sicily, 1933 ..." - no, wait) - music so pulsing the image is made a silent film; even words spoken to herself muted by the utterness of sound; even breath and heartbeat blotted out.

And so, no sound; only thinking.

Thinking of herself on a dancefloor. Imaginary self a stomping Joan Jett wannabe, a black-booted and leather-jeaned stretch of negative space around which everything in the world creates a void. Imaginary self swirling and swirling, the music all a turning, swaying to the sound of the demonic beat ...

She might have become many things.

Somewhere beneath the promise of the girl with a gold locket, she is (still and too) the result of the threat of that out-thrust lip, that early violence and anger, that thing she didn't have to be and half aspired to be, and - almost forgotten - sometimes regrets that she isn't. The bummed cigs and boys' jackets, the always-magenta lipstick, the resentment of her own privilege - ahh, the boys who weren't; the friends who weren't. The girl who hated admitting she went to the preppie school, the rich kids' domains. Could not bear to be one of *them* ...

... and yet never was successfully anything else, either ...

Sometimes ... sorrow is, in us, the most brutish, juvenile rebellion. Sometimes, it is a look into possibilities - who we might have been, when the skin of who we are is so tight that surely it must split and we break free, new and unmade and ready to take shape again.

Sometimes, you have to let the sun strobe to prove it has not died yet, and that you are not in the dark.


And sometimes, you have to listen to deathless music at top volume. And dance; even if only in your head.

Collection

"Death by PowerPoint." (I TOLD you!)

"Since 1994, 15 billion mobile phones have been made"
(and it's up to two billion annually at this time)

It's things like this that spark my interest in what I did this weekend: shopping (yes, online) for a vintage wind-up watch. I have a lovely old Longines in a gold tone, a beautiful timepiece and one that keeps excellent time - and now I'd like to have one in a silver tone or gunmetal. A wind-up watch doesn't bring new resources into the environment, AND it doesn't require batteries. Even if I lost it or threw it out, it would not poison anyone. ... and I ended up getting two beautiful watches, tested and working, for under twenty dollars.

“Eternally white, I am confident.” Colorism is a worldwide market phenomenon demonstrating how very well bigotry pays. And pays.  And pays.

Maine's governor brings us the latest in hideously blatant racist statements - part of an ongoing series spanning the history of ever.

... and then there were the thousand or so guys who celebrated New Year's Eve with sexual assault including rape, and called it "amusement"  ... This happened in city after city, and only the slenderest fraction of suspects has been apprehended at all. Plus: the coverup, the queasy racial/political overtones (see also: the ubiquity of the phrase “North African or Arab appearance”), AND victim blaming. ... Eight days on: the chief of police in Cologne consented to resign. About two thirds of suspects identified have been identified as asylum seekers.

And finally, in lighter news - sometimes a clean slate isn't all it's cracked up to be. More of those 1917 blackboards discovered in an Oklahoma school. Some wonderful preserved artwork here.

Truth and Weeping

When you are sorrowful, look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
--Kahlil Gibran

This ends with delight, but it begins in sorrow.

This is where my family is right now.

How do you remind the sorrowful that their fear is born of delight?

I guess you try to bring to mind the memory of the delight.

Quiet Time

The blog has been a little slower than usual of late, partly because I have been researching and writing, but also because life has been busier than usual of late.

Since July, there have been Big Doin's at the office in particular, but at home it's been hopping too - or, if not my actual house, at least in my personal life. Though, yes, the house has had its share of attention. This week, it'll see a wall guy, a plumber, an electrician.

The two huge meetings I have had a hand in managing are over, the smaller one comes on Tuesday and I am sanguine it will go well. The greatest initiatives of the past two years are in hand. Financial year end is in the summer time.

I wonder whether calendar year end will settle down; it might be nice, but I hold no breath.

It is Sunday, and we got an extra hour this weekend; I have nothing much to show for it. Things are hard sometimes. Things are hard for someone I love once again. For more than one person I love.

It is hard to watch the fight against death, as hard as it is to watch death, sometimes.