Chicago 9:30 AM 5 hours of fitful intermittent sleep
Chicago--where the trains make the streets shake and everyone pretends not to notice. Walk down from the bus depot, down Canal St. which is the coolest name ever for a street I think. Down Jackson. Down Wabash. Too restless to land anywhere. Abortive attempt to eat Jerk Chicken pita and read neighborhood and alternative papers, including the Chicago Reader, the Village Voice of the Midwest. Restless inability to sit still. Abandon heavy spicy gravy meat. Too hot to eat in Chicago. It's always unbearably humid here. People must sweat here even in February. My jeans weigh down my legs, making me too heavy to walk, weightless like an astronaut in a heavy suit, clumsy, unnatural. The food around me all smells heavy, thick, makes me sweat just thinking of it. Completely paranoid that I will get sick--get a cold--out here on the road and be miserable.
The Chicago bus station, rebuilt and relocated in the 1980s, is always miserably cramped and chaotic. Several other people in line with me are headed to Minneapolis and we listen to rumors from staff and other passengers about which buses might leave first--should we wait and route through Madison or Milwaukee? One young man with a Cuban-sounding accent, and I band together to try to figure out the fastest way to get off the floor of that miserable station and on a bus home. It is 8:30 pm and the bus through Madison is not due until nearly 11:00. There is a very short line of people at a door marked Milwaukee. I motion to my conspirator. He holds my place in the Madison line and I jump into Milwaukee. Soon the announcement is made-- Milwaukee, Twin Cities. He jumps in line behind me and we pile on the bus, where we will sit for nearly another hour as others figure this out as well and we pack the bus to 100%+ capacity.
7:30 pm - I can't believe I am finally on a bus! The Chicago Greyhound station is a nightmare. Constantly filled to capacity with lines of people passing through, waiting for connections that never seems to come. My bus left an hour late, but still :45 earlier than the next scheduled bus.
Hammond, Indiana. GI housing and power plants. Towers like giant monsters everywhere. Like those dress maker dummies, only huge, mutant, foreboding. Angry women with their hands on their hips. Haven't been on terra firma since I got on the bus. Interstate 90 from Chicago through this first part of Indiana is like being on the EL trains--the highways are all built above ground like one humongous overpass. But once again, I have waiting out for the less crowded of the 2 buses and have a seat to myself where I can sleep. There are even empty seats on this bus, unlike the one that pulled away 15 minutes earlier, the one everyone was struggling and fighting to get onto.
More power plants. Domes and pools. Indiana must be the Newark of the midwest. Dinner stop coming up in Elkhart, home of the mini-motor home.
Indiana is unimpressive. Good choice to leave Chicago at night. This is the "old economy"--smokestacks and lighted towers. Social realism, soviet style art glorifying the unity of the grime-covered workers. Coalminers or, the other way, glum lifeless apocalyptic future of automatons working beneath a permanently hazy gray sky.
Chicago was delightful. Stretched out and slept in Grant Park beside Lake Michigan.(like the yippies 35 years before me) Felt so GOOD to stretch out after a night scrunched on the bus and then 6 hours of walking.
Indiana must steal or gamble away all of its road funds. This is the worst maintained toll road I have ever been on. What do they DO with the money?
For all of the ugly sprawl of mall areas, the conformist monoculture of chain restaurants and department anchor stores, neon is a friend to both the insomniac and the night traveler. Miles of dark highway with nothing to gaze upon, save for reflected headlights in the opposite bus window and intermittent glances at the moon leave you stranded and suspended, lacking concept of time and geography. Signs of life outside the window, distant from the highway, anchor you, keep you from drifting too far away. It's not quite home . . .
10:30 pm. The Ohio Turnpike. Another new state.
This is much more grueling than I expected. After only a few days, I am already dreaming of home-fantasies of aborting the trip and going to home to her hard futon, messy house, and no groceries.
Managed the coveted back bench of the bus -- 3 seats across-- for the Boston-New York trip. Smell of the bathroom, but room to stretch out. Several tall young men eyed me enviously. The bus is filling up but I am hopeful. There is something sacrosanct, foreboding, about someone already in the back set. I am stretched out where everyone can see me, marking my turf, writing. Not making eye contact, not inviting.
Got a hotel room in Cambridge, the desire for a night in a hotel--privacy, naked time, silent vegetation in front of the television. I have heat rashes all over my body from 5 days spent almost entirely in clothes in hot humid weather. Skin needs air, to breathe. Although there was the brief thrill of public nakedness in the bathroom stall at the Chicago bus station on Thursday changing clothes.
This is only the 2nd of 5 buses that have actually left on time. Go Greyhound and leave the waiting to us.
Spending money faster than expected. ATM in South Station is broken. I leave for New York with 5 cents in my pocket.
Statue of Liberty should add to its sign: Now Entering America. Video Monitoring in Use.
The older man sitting in front of me looks a lot like Gerald Ford with a couple of Richard Nixon features thrown in.
Slept through New York State entirely on Friday. First part of the trip where I had to share a seat, so I shouldn't complain. Very groggy, 3 1/2 hour sleep Cleveland to Buffalo. 3 hours awake in Buffalo waiting for Boston Connection. Awakened every 2 hours for connections, forced to get off bus in some cases. Almost like being POWs, I imagine. Sleep deprived, marched in and out of “holding centers", standing in line, uncertainty of making (being chosen for) the next bus out, crammed in like cattle, loading and unloading your own bas, carrying all the positions you can fit in one or to bags. Obviously, fear for your own life is not omnipresent--unless your driver has substance abuse problems, extreme sleep deprivation like me, or is on a suicide bomber mission. So far so good.
Narcolepsy. Newly developed Pavlovian response to being on the bus. Can't keep my eyes open. Just woke up in Connecticut.
I have become an intellectual nomad--unable to land on anything. Even during my trip, spent most of my time walking walking cities and never stopping. Hard to even get myself to stop and have lunch anywhere--always the feeling there was something better or different or more unique waiting somewhere.
*******************************************
I feel guilty for coming home to normalcy after being in New York. Like I should be there. Like I shouldn't be allowed to forget. The images so clear in my mind already starting to fade, to look like tv re-runs.
I came home terribly sick from the greyhound trip. I tell people I have just been to an underdeveloped national called Greyhound where I suffered inadequate sleep, poor nutrition, etc. You've already read the refugee/pow comparison here.
I sleep constantly. After 12 hours awake I'm completely exhausted. Can't tell if it's depression or from the trip. I've finally started dreaming again, but every time I do, I dream that I am in the middle of a disaster. Last night, I was a school child who saw a tornado. I keep trying to tell everyone about it, but no one believed me and would come in from the playground. Everyone finally saw it and got in ok. I think we were in a fire station hiding from the tornado, although the basement seems to have been the one from the house I grew up in. That makes sense, since we were the only house on the block with a basement and everyone used to gather at our house during tornado alarms. I know there was a disaster in my dreams the other
night too, although I can't remember what nature. Not a plane crash or war, nothing quite that obvious. Only remember the feeling of it.
I'm living in fits and starts right now--I get a burst of energy and start something, but then lose momentum for a day or more. Don't know what to do with myself.
Surrealist Doodle
This was used as the cover of Karawane in 2006 and I have included it in on a number of bags and postcards over the years. Someone on the subway asked me if it was a Miro. I was very flattered!
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Wednesday, February 06, 2013
Chapter 2 of My Accursed Novel
CHAPTER: Revolution and Social Upheaval in the Twentieth Century.
Clark put away his books and papers and went upstairs for the night. It was four o'clock in the morning, and he had a class to teach in six hours. He still hadn't heard from Maureen since she had left the previous evening. His sleep was filled with visions of her being pulled into vans or beat up old station wagons by men with cold or wild looking eyes. Every time the phone rang he jumped, terrified it would be Maureen's parents or the police. Or Maureen to say she wasn't coming back.
Right now, though, even that call would be welcome. He could talk her out of that one. He just had to get the chance.
After an hour, Maureen still hadn't turned on the light in her room. With the curtains open, she a view of a giant lighted rodent, a gopher on a pole. She began to jump up and down on the bed, her red spirals flopping up and down. She stopped for a moment to take off her tennis shoes. Then came the jeans. And the t-shirt. In a bra and panties, she climbed back up on top of the bed and jumped some more, holding the remote control in her hands turning on the television and running the channels while she jumped. She had come t the motel room with only the clothes on her back and whatever was in her backpack. She wasn't sure what she running to or from, and so wasn't sure when she would go back. She spread out on the floor, on all fours, and did a yoga cat stretch, arching her back out and in. She sat for a few minutes with her back to the bed, perfectly straight and closed her eyes, but jumped up almost immediately and grabbed her notebook. She had the urge to write down everything she could possibly remember all at once.
until my life falls away and I can float through a world
until my life falls away and I can float through a world
until my life falls away and I can float through a world
I want to sit perfectly still and meditate until my life falls away and I can float through a world where nothing I know exists, until there are no rallies or causes or classes or internships or obligations, no cliques and no one to impress and no one who can make me feel inferior about my choices and my mortal coil which I've never given much mind to yet is asserting itself so much into my psyche as inadequate, as ugly, as not good enough, I want to find emptiness and I want it now.
Maureen had been a student in one of Clark's senior seminars. He was 33 at the time, and she 21. She was just shorter than medium height, with dark red spiral curls and brown eyes. She schlepped to class every day in faded jeans, tennis shoes, more often than not knotted together and slung over her shoulder in warmer weather, a second hand olive drab army jacket, and a new slogan on her t-shirt every day. Emma Goldman. "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." Gloria Steinem. "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle." "U.S. Out of North America". She loved to confuse people, to make people laugh, but also to think. Somehow, she managed not to come across too preachy or self-righteous. Not that she had throngs of apostles. No one had those anymore. But everyone did seem to like her, even if she was unable to turn that sense of goodwill into an organizing tactic.
Maureen was always in motion. She organized anti-ROTC rallies on campus. She led the anarchic shout-down of G. Gordon Liddy's campus speech. She idolized Abbie Hoffman and she desperately want to be able to create something new. When she talked, he didn't just smile reminiscently indulgent of her enthusiasm. She was the new prophet on the block, the one with heaven still in her eyes. The Shaman, whose vision Clark could enter into.
Clark and Maureen kept their friendship at a distance while she was in the class. He wanted no hint of impropriety, and she didn't want the uncertainty of whether or not she had earned her grade. But the spark between them and their mutual admiration was clear. When the semester ended, they continued to get together for coffee. When they started dating, many in the department suggested, not entirely to themselves, that it was something other than an "honest relationship." They accused Clark of trying too hard to stay an "eternal student"-- a way to deny that he was a grown-up and professional member of the University and not just some young person observing the whole process from the outside.
On the other side was Maureen, chiding him for hiding behind safe Theoretical University. He always contended that was reaching young people like her, raising up the next generation to follow her leadership.
"Clark, no revolution has ever been won in the universities," exasperated, her hands waving in the air, conducting her words like an imaginary orchestra. "That;s why the 60s 'radicals' couldn't sustain it. Once they had to live their rhetoric, out in the real world, they couldn't apply it. Look at the Russian intellectuals, the provisional government. The Bolsheviks, the revolutionaries of action, ran right over them. The Bolsheviks were elitists every bit as much as the Tsarists, Clark, but they acted. They fucking got things done. Look at the Spanish Civil War, where the intelligentsia actually did get down in the trenches and fight, and they still couldn't pull out a victory."
"That was much more complicated than George Orwell or Ernest Hemingway running over to Spain with a musket. Besides, they lost, remember? Intellectuals don't always make good soldiers."
"Exactly. Soft intellectuals make lousy warriors. Theory is the death of the revolution, Clark. It's in the coal miners and the workers and the peasants dying for the king. There's no revolution at the blackboard, on the page. . . " She became more animated, slapping her palm down on table, leaning forward and looking into his eyes, as if to hypnotize him into seeing her point.
"Slow down. You don't need to convert me. I'm already on your side."
"Yes. And no."
"What does that mean?"
"Whoever is not with us is against us."
"How are you going to build your movement with that kind of divisive rhetoric? Not everyone can take up arms. We all have our role to play. Revolution with no reason, no theory behind it, is just mob violence."
"It sucks the life out of us, Clark. Don't you see that? We're spread too thin as it is. We can't afford to lose one person to inaction. Theory allows you to sit on your ass patting yourself on the back and saying 'Of course I'm a good radical. I teach about Emma Goldman.'"
In Maureen's eyes Clark was just trying to make his views more palatable to the head of the college and his colleagues across the ideological aisle. As a true liberal, and someone who now had a stake in his position within the University, he was expected to appreciate and understand everyone else's viewpoint. Maureen didn't always find this tolerance reciprocated. And she hated sharing his attention with the receptions and the journal publishers and sometimes even the students. If Clark had been reduced to a charming anachronism, Maureen could feel the eyes of Clark's fellow faculty virtually patting her on the head, thinking "I was 20 once, too". She wanted to stop him from becoming what he hated, what at her age, he had sworn never to become.
"If I don't teach about Emma Goldman, then how will people who come after me know about her. Where would you be if you hadn't had me as a professor?"
"Living with my girlfriends?"
"I'm serious, Mo. There is no shame in what I do. It's important to make sure this knowledge gets passed down. And whether you agree with me or not, it's important that I manage to keep my position in the department. It's important that I be able to teach what I care about."
"But at what cost? Even if you're a joke?"
"Who am I a joke to?"
"Students, other professors."
"Is that what you think? That everyone thinks I'm a joke?"
Maureen slumped back into the booth and sighed. "No. Not yet."
"What the hell are you talking about? I work very hard, who thinks I'm a joke? You?"
"I've just seen it before."
"What have you seen before? You're twenty-five years old."
"Fuck you. That doesn't mean that I haven't seen things. That I don't understand what's happening. You know, it's bad enough I have to put with this crap from Harry and the other faculty, but if you don't respect me . . . "
"Well, Mo, you don't seem to respect me."
"That's not what I'm saying. If you'll let me finish . . . ?"
Clark nodded at Maureen gingerly. "Fine, go ahead."
"I just don't want people to be able to say that you teach one thing and live another. That's all. If you're always kissing the asses of people who work against you just to get some tiny little crumb thrown to you, what kind of credibility do you have to talk to your students about changing the world?"
Clark put away his books and papers and went upstairs for the night. It was four o'clock in the morning, and he had a class to teach in six hours. He still hadn't heard from Maureen since she had left the previous evening. His sleep was filled with visions of her being pulled into vans or beat up old station wagons by men with cold or wild looking eyes. Every time the phone rang he jumped, terrified it would be Maureen's parents or the police. Or Maureen to say she wasn't coming back.
Right now, though, even that call would be welcome. He could talk her out of that one. He just had to get the chance.
After an hour, Maureen still hadn't turned on the light in her room. With the curtains open, she a view of a giant lighted rodent, a gopher on a pole. She began to jump up and down on the bed, her red spirals flopping up and down. She stopped for a moment to take off her tennis shoes. Then came the jeans. And the t-shirt. In a bra and panties, she climbed back up on top of the bed and jumped some more, holding the remote control in her hands turning on the television and running the channels while she jumped. She had come t the motel room with only the clothes on her back and whatever was in her backpack. She wasn't sure what she running to or from, and so wasn't sure when she would go back. She spread out on the floor, on all fours, and did a yoga cat stretch, arching her back out and in. She sat for a few minutes with her back to the bed, perfectly straight and closed her eyes, but jumped up almost immediately and grabbed her notebook. She had the urge to write down everything she could possibly remember all at once.
until my life falls away and I can float through a world
until my life falls away and I can float through a world
until my life falls away and I can float through a world
I want to sit perfectly still and meditate until my life falls away and I can float through a world where nothing I know exists, until there are no rallies or causes or classes or internships or obligations, no cliques and no one to impress and no one who can make me feel inferior about my choices and my mortal coil which I've never given much mind to yet is asserting itself so much into my psyche as inadequate, as ugly, as not good enough, I want to find emptiness and I want it now.
Maureen had been a student in one of Clark's senior seminars. He was 33 at the time, and she 21. She was just shorter than medium height, with dark red spiral curls and brown eyes. She schlepped to class every day in faded jeans, tennis shoes, more often than not knotted together and slung over her shoulder in warmer weather, a second hand olive drab army jacket, and a new slogan on her t-shirt every day. Emma Goldman. "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." Gloria Steinem. "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle." "U.S. Out of North America". She loved to confuse people, to make people laugh, but also to think. Somehow, she managed not to come across too preachy or self-righteous. Not that she had throngs of apostles. No one had those anymore. But everyone did seem to like her, even if she was unable to turn that sense of goodwill into an organizing tactic.
Maureen was always in motion. She organized anti-ROTC rallies on campus. She led the anarchic shout-down of G. Gordon Liddy's campus speech. She idolized Abbie Hoffman and she desperately want to be able to create something new. When she talked, he didn't just smile reminiscently indulgent of her enthusiasm. She was the new prophet on the block, the one with heaven still in her eyes. The Shaman, whose vision Clark could enter into.
Clark and Maureen kept their friendship at a distance while she was in the class. He wanted no hint of impropriety, and she didn't want the uncertainty of whether or not she had earned her grade. But the spark between them and their mutual admiration was clear. When the semester ended, they continued to get together for coffee. When they started dating, many in the department suggested, not entirely to themselves, that it was something other than an "honest relationship." They accused Clark of trying too hard to stay an "eternal student"-- a way to deny that he was a grown-up and professional member of the University and not just some young person observing the whole process from the outside.
On the other side was Maureen, chiding him for hiding behind safe Theoretical University. He always contended that was reaching young people like her, raising up the next generation to follow her leadership.
"Clark, no revolution has ever been won in the universities," exasperated, her hands waving in the air, conducting her words like an imaginary orchestra. "That;s why the 60s 'radicals' couldn't sustain it. Once they had to live their rhetoric, out in the real world, they couldn't apply it. Look at the Russian intellectuals, the provisional government. The Bolsheviks, the revolutionaries of action, ran right over them. The Bolsheviks were elitists every bit as much as the Tsarists, Clark, but they acted. They fucking got things done. Look at the Spanish Civil War, where the intelligentsia actually did get down in the trenches and fight, and they still couldn't pull out a victory."
"That was much more complicated than George Orwell or Ernest Hemingway running over to Spain with a musket. Besides, they lost, remember? Intellectuals don't always make good soldiers."
"Exactly. Soft intellectuals make lousy warriors. Theory is the death of the revolution, Clark. It's in the coal miners and the workers and the peasants dying for the king. There's no revolution at the blackboard, on the page. . . " She became more animated, slapping her palm down on table, leaning forward and looking into his eyes, as if to hypnotize him into seeing her point.
"Slow down. You don't need to convert me. I'm already on your side."
"Yes. And no."
"What does that mean?"
"Whoever is not with us is against us."
"How are you going to build your movement with that kind of divisive rhetoric? Not everyone can take up arms. We all have our role to play. Revolution with no reason, no theory behind it, is just mob violence."
"It sucks the life out of us, Clark. Don't you see that? We're spread too thin as it is. We can't afford to lose one person to inaction. Theory allows you to sit on your ass patting yourself on the back and saying 'Of course I'm a good radical. I teach about Emma Goldman.'"
In Maureen's eyes Clark was just trying to make his views more palatable to the head of the college and his colleagues across the ideological aisle. As a true liberal, and someone who now had a stake in his position within the University, he was expected to appreciate and understand everyone else's viewpoint. Maureen didn't always find this tolerance reciprocated. And she hated sharing his attention with the receptions and the journal publishers and sometimes even the students. If Clark had been reduced to a charming anachronism, Maureen could feel the eyes of Clark's fellow faculty virtually patting her on the head, thinking "I was 20 once, too". She wanted to stop him from becoming what he hated, what at her age, he had sworn never to become.
"If I don't teach about Emma Goldman, then how will people who come after me know about her. Where would you be if you hadn't had me as a professor?"
"Living with my girlfriends?"
"I'm serious, Mo. There is no shame in what I do. It's important to make sure this knowledge gets passed down. And whether you agree with me or not, it's important that I manage to keep my position in the department. It's important that I be able to teach what I care about."
"But at what cost? Even if you're a joke?"
"Who am I a joke to?"
"Students, other professors."
"Is that what you think? That everyone thinks I'm a joke?"
Maureen slumped back into the booth and sighed. "No. Not yet."
"What the hell are you talking about? I work very hard, who thinks I'm a joke? You?"
"I've just seen it before."
"What have you seen before? You're twenty-five years old."
"Fuck you. That doesn't mean that I haven't seen things. That I don't understand what's happening. You know, it's bad enough I have to put with this crap from Harry and the other faculty, but if you don't respect me . . . "
"Well, Mo, you don't seem to respect me."
"That's not what I'm saying. If you'll let me finish . . . ?"
Clark nodded at Maureen gingerly. "Fine, go ahead."
"I just don't want people to be able to say that you teach one thing and live another. That's all. If you're always kissing the asses of people who work against you just to get some tiny little crumb thrown to you, what kind of credibility do you have to talk to your students about changing the world?"
Sunday, February 03, 2013
Actual travel journals I found while looking through my novel manuscript: Travel Journals from 9/11/01
Travel Journals & September 11th
I underestimated how physically, and consequently emotionally, grueling this trip would be. I also underestimated the travel narcolepsy that would develop, leaving me only 10 minute or so blocks of writing time as I fell asleep very soon after starting to write. Not a GOOD sleep mind you, as buses are cramped spaces, even for someone as small as me, and even when you can manage to get both seats to yourself.
I was tired from the trip and hadn't really had any decent sleep or alone time. I really hadn't even been able to be naked for more than a few minutes at a time while showering at my friends' house or changing clothes in the bus terminal, and I was starting to get a rash from the heat and from always being dressed.
It rained the whole way to New York and I didn't get into town until about 6:00 that night. My hosts and I walked around, hiding under awnings when the rains and winds got too intense, and finally made it to a pub where we could have dinner. As the rain let up, Bob walked me down to the Chelsea Piers and showed me around. I still felt very out of sorts and was anxious for the next morning, daylight, and a decent night's sleep to start fresh.
Several days prior, traveling from Chicago to New York, I had become stranded in Cleveland at 3:00 am when the two buses that left Chitown dwindled to one and we were at the mercy of Greyhound company. On the way from Boston to New York, I scribbled something to the effect that riding the Greyhound was like being a refugee. You were dragged off the bus in the middle of the night with all of your possessions, you were given no information about your fate or when you might be able to leave, you were malnourished--you didn't DARE leave the station for food and were therefore depending on vendables or possibly the Greyhound cafeteria. The only difference between a Greyhound passenger and a refugee was that you didn't fear for your life--unless your driver was depressed or a suicide bomber.
Even now, six days later, I can't believe it.
I keep waking up thinking it never happened. I have probably 30 pages of notes, a head full of images I can't sort out that keep coming back to me. My best friend asks me if I am having nightmares. I say no, I haven't dreamed in days. The most shocking symptom to me is how belligerent I feel. I have no patience for whining or complaining about anything. I have the trump card. A pass. The thing that sends me to the front of the line every time. "I was there when it happened." Everyone knows what that means.
For the next hour we are glued to the television. We can only get one station. The frightening events unfoldlike everyone else in the country, we wonder how widespread the attack is; how many more planes, how many more cities will be affected. Everyone is frozen in front of the television waiting for more news.
We run back and forth between the close-up shots on television and the full eyewitness account we have by leaning out and looking down Sixth Avenue.
I finally decide that it's time to stop seeing it on television and head down to the site to try to make it more real and to try to understand. So within 15 minutes I am dressed and head out the door.
Hoards of people are walking slowly toward downtown. The streets are largely taken over by pedestrians who gather together spontaneously around car radios and portable televisions. We stand together and watch or listen to a few minutes of news and then move on to the next block, all on our pilgrimage to get as close to the site as possible.
There are lines at all the pay phones; cell phones are working only sporadically. I walk down a side street between Fifth and Sixth avenues to a spare phone to call home and come out the other side five minutes later only to find the other tower is also down
As I make my way down Manhattan, there are people outside Yeshiva University saying prayers, the Kaddish I presume. There is no airline traffic except for the F16s.
Hearing them overhead elicits a shudder from me. People look up or run outside to get a look whenever they go by. The closer you get to the site, the more people you see with face masks and wet towels around their shoulders. On the way downtown, one woman sees me crying and stops to ask if I lost someone in the attack. I explain to her that I didn't but I feel overwhelmed by it. She touches me on the arm and smiles. "You're so sweet to be so upset." We talk for a few minutes, she tells me again how "sweet" I am and we part ways.
It seems that everyone in the city has made their way to Canal Street, The first thing I hear is frustration as much as anything. "How could this happen?" "Why didn't they stop them?" Emergency vehicles pass up and down the street, in and out of the site covered in soot and trailing smoke.
I manage to find an open café. On the radio they keep talking about how this is like a movie. They compare it to "Die Hard," "Independence Day." I think how much it is like the news, that there are people around the world who live with a steady stream of violence like this every day. There's not much conversation among strangers. There is some talk about this as the beginning of war, but for the most part, there is silence. This is personal to everyone who witnesses it. The police are tense and afraid as concerns of car bombs start to surface. As quickly as you can make your way a little farther south, they chase you back out. "I can't believe it" is all I can repeat over and over as I hold my hand over my mouth, intermittently breaking into fits of sobbing.
I slowly make my way back up to Chelsea, stopping periodically to peer back. It's been an exhausting day. People are starting to worry about logistics as the sun goes down. How are they going to get home? Where are they going to stay? There are simple black and white printed signs everywhere urging people to give blood. People are being bused to Lincoln Center. United Artists Theater in Union Square is closed but offers shelter for the day to anyone who needs it. Traffic begins to move uptown again. The president observed a moment of silence, but New Yorkers have had an entire day of it. There's nothing to say. It's unfathomable. The streets below Union Square are desolate except for emergency vehicles and foot traffic. As I reach my temporary home, I see several boys skateboard down the center of Broadway.
I sleep fitfully, listening to sirens all night. One lone Verizon truck parked on our block gives me some cause for concern. Is it going to go off in the middle of the night? Each small sound makes me start out of bed. I am more paranoid than I wish to be. I run through all the questions all night. Is it over? Will the subways be safe? What will I wake up to tomorrow?
I am sitting in the McDonald's in Times Square watching CNN and I can't stop crying. I go into the bathroom for an all out weeping before I leave and go back out into the street. "Apocalypse Now" is playing at one of the movie theaters in Times Square.
The mood on the streets is morose. Some people are out and about, but quiet, still stunned. Several people describe the city as a ghost town. There is virtually no car traffic down Broadway, except for emergency vehicles and an occasional taxi. The woman delivering mail says to a man with a briefcase, "Where are you going? This is a ghost town. Nobody's going to work." A young man tells his friends "I can't believe that asshole called and asked me to come to work after what happened." And it feels true. There are the ghosts pouring out of the wreckage, but there are also the living ghosts as well. Everyone on the street is a shadow of themselves. No one can look anyone else in the eye. All we can do is look away, stare off into the distance. In a few days, I will come to understand why Oedipus had to scratch his own eyes out in anguish.
We are still trying to grasp the immediate event, not the big picture. Mary says that I'm lucky. I get to go home, walk away, whereas the people who live there will be dealing with this for a long time. I feel bad about this. She's right--I won't have to be there to rebuild the city or my life. But I will carry this around with me for a long time as well.
The black smoke of yesterday has given way to gray and white clouds. I make my way up to Columbus Circle in Central Park today. There is a bit more bustle here than the lower parts of the island, but the knowledge of what happened is still with everyone. A few people are talking about it, some sitting and reading the papers. Others just sit around, silently, alone or with friends.
Somewhere around 3 p.m. there is a palpable break in the mood. Like yesterday, today is a gorgeous day. The breeze is warm and a little cheering. There are more people streaming out into the streets, activity is picking up. Several people walk beside me and strike up conversations about what has happenedthe first time all day that has occurred. We share our sense of grief and personal loss with one another. "Can you believe it?" are still the words on everyone's lips. The city starts to feel alive again. Later that evening, the restaurants and cafés start to fill up a little more. The mood is not jovial by any means, but people are trying to get back out, trying to feel better.
A 3 year old child who, not knowing what happened, nonetheless understands more than you might think. "Everybody's so sad," he tells his mom. "I'm going to sing for them so they'll be happy."
After dinner with a friend, he invites me to walk part of the way home to SoHo with him. He gets me past the barricades, showing his ID with his address to the police guards, and I am admitted to the military zone that surrounds the area. There is no getting to ground zero, and I don't even try. But even being a few blocks in is strange, eerie. For one thing, I've never had to walk past police and armed guards just to go down the street. The candlelight vigil that began at 7 p.m. is still going on well past 8 o'clock. We stop by a fire station where people are lighting candles and writing messages for the firefighters on the job and the ones who lost their lives.
We go past St. Vincent's hospital where it's a sea of television vans and live interviews, including the local Spanish channel. There are small lights everywhere from the handheld recorders. If there are mourners there, they are not as readily obvious.
Surprisingly, while Midtown is largely closed, the area just south of Union Square, which is on the edge of the closed off parts of the city, is bustling. All the restaurants, cafés and grocery stores are open. Posters of people who are missing are just now starting to go up on light posts and street signs, as are pleas to abstain from retaliation against any of our neighbors.
I am tempted to stay, settle into a café and start writing. But it's getting late and I am now walking home alone. Crime has been minimal, surprising considering the high concentration of police in one area of town. The personal way that everyone there feels about this event seems to have kept most people from indulging in their worst tendencies. I feel safe walking down the street. Still, better not to tempt fate.
By evening the wind has shifted north. As I walk back up to Midtown, the smoke stays thick all the way down and starts to settle in my lungs. It reminds me of walking down the street while people are burning leaves, only much more intense. My throat starts to burn and for about a half-hour I find it difficult to breathe deeply.
Nighttime is the eeriest. Processions of police cars and emergency vehicles provide most of the light among the smoke-filled sky, carrying loads of police, doctors or rescue workers. I decide on a small deli a block and a half from where I am staying. I sit down with a fruit tray and start making notes when I notice a taxi go the wrong way down the Avenue of the Americas.
The scariest thing isn't the sirens. It's when the sirens stop right in front of you.
Police cars wheel around and block off the intersection in front of where I am eating. I pack up my food and notebook and go running down the street. Others are running as well, spewing out rumors as we go. There's a bomb in the subway. Bomb at Penn Station. Bomb at the Empire State Building.
The edge of the quarantined area stops at the end of the block where I am staying. My door, half a block down, is presumed to be safe. The police officer says, "I hope this is safe. I'm standing here." I run upstairs and tell my hosts what's going on, to mixed reactions from the two of them one is nonchalant, the other is hanging up the phone and running out the door. I decide that half a block is not enough buffer and walk down a little further. After 45 minutes I go home and stumble into bed.
I feel weird about leaving, but Thursday was my scheduled time to leave anyway. The place I am staying is small and my hosts have another guest there with whom I have to share the futon, so there is little incentive to stay. I cry in the shower, which appears to be my new morning routine.
The island is open again and the bustle and traffic are back. Taxis are honking and trying to get through. This is the New York I am accustomed to and it makes it even harder to leave just as things are trying to come back to life. There is still great sadness on everyone's faces. Sirens, barricades, police on every corner tell you everything is not really normal. There is a haze over downtown that replaces two days of billowing smoke.
On Wednesday the Greyhound Web site had said to take a train to Newark and catch the buses from there. That's what I'm prepared to do. Having walked by Port Authority yesterday, seeing police and barricades everywhere, I am surprised to call Greyhound and find out that it's open. I drag my heavy bags down there and am further surprised that no one has stopped me or tried to check my bags. I get in line, hoping to make the next bus to Cleveland and all points west, prepared for a day of sitting in line.
There is jubilation in the bus line when we are told that an earlier bus is being brought in to accommodate all the travelers. At 12:15 p.m. I ask someone to watch my bag while I go to the bathroom. When I come out, everyone is running upstairs. Port Authority is being evacuated. Eventually, so is Penn Station, the Condé Nast magazine building and, rumor has it, the Times Square subway station. (The woman sitting next to me on the bus later calls her cousin, who informs her that there were 42 bomb threats in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday.)
At 1:25 p.m. we go back in and someone immediately screams "bomb" again and goes running up the stairs. I am not budging. There is no bomb, I declare, and I am not losing my place in line again. At 2 p.m., we finally start boarding buses. There is chaos as I try to get information from anyone I can, including drivers, baggage handlers and other passengers. Reportedly, Port Authority has been evacuated three times today, and it seems, once on the bus, that they are trying to evacuate us again. The drivers refuse and people pour out the doors and onto buses like refugees, tired, edgy, frantic to get onto the next bus out. I keep repeating the mantra that I started out on the sidewalk. "I should have gone through Jersey." I Greyhound driver walks past me. I pull him aside and say "Go grab a bus and meet us back here. . . " Everyone on the sidewalk smiles or laughs.
Soon after we get back inside, buses start pulling up to the docks and hundreds of people pour out of the doors in large streams, frantic to get on any bus out of town. Last minute decisions are bein made by drivers about the routes they will take, so you have to ask 3 or 4 drivers if you should get on their bus or not. It is chaos and is straight out of a movie scene. Refugees, again, are all I can think.
I hear the driver of the bus I will be on arguing with someone from the station. "Just get them on the buses. These people are going to riot if we don't get them on a bus."
Loaded up at last, we start driving through Port Authority and toward the sunlight and the street. At the end of the ramp, the bus is stopped and the driver gets out. We all groan. Just keep driving. The driver returns and the sunlight of Manhattan finally comes through the windows and we all take our last looks as we head for the Lincoln Tunnel.
Everyone cheers as we leave New York, anxious to put this as far behind them as possible. I don't want to forget. It's too soon to go back to normal, although I assume all of this will fade in time as all memories
do. I wonder as I leave, if leaving alone will make it fade. Everyone holds their breath as we pass through the Lincoln Tunnel, which is open for the first time in days. Then the collective sigh on the other side alive, our bus intact. There is no other comparison--we have crossed to freedom. It is shocking to watch New York from the Jersey shore as we pull away. The buildings are still smoldering and the skyline is small. Only the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building stand out now.
The next morning, up and back into line to head to Chicago and then home. I call home from my hotel and in the middle of conversation every few minutes, I break into loud sobbing. I can't stop myself. This will be my pattern for the next several days--spontaneous bouts of sobbing.
The man sitting ahead of me starts obsessing about his luggage. I am tired and fed up with problems, delays and complaining. He goes on and on wondering if they have put his luggage on the right bus and eventually declares "this is a nightmare". I snap. "I just got back from New York. This is NOTHING."
The first few days back have been difficult. I feel guilty for leaving as early as I did. I should have stayed and participated in the vigils, or even just been there, continued to be a part of it. I have tense e-mail discussions with my friends, who are also all trying to make sense of it from afar. I try explaining to them that if you can talk about war and the big picture of this, that you are operating from a position of luxury. Having been there, it is just an intensely personal trauma to me. I am still walking around in a daze, unable to look anyone in the eye. All I can do is look away. The first few hours of each day I can think of little else. I'm light-headed and become extremely tired every few hours, as if I have a concussion. It takes me until the late afternoon for anything to be able to distract me.
Back in Minneapolis, life is disturbingly normal. On Hennepin Avenue, people are going to the theater as usual, laughing and having fun, the streets are crowded, and marquees are bright and festive. I do not belong here. I am not ready for this. No one here can possibly understand what is inside of me right now and I struggle to keep from sobbing every so often as we ride the bus, as I look at our very intact skyline, as I listen to people talk about something other than the attacks.
I feel perversely grateful to have been there. This is not abstract to me the way it would be if I had only seen it on television. I know that when I see something like this on the news in the future, my conversations and debates will be on an entirely different level. But I also still feel empty and distracted and do not know what to expect or what I will feel from day to day. Suddenly I can't talk about it enough. I want to stop everyone on the street and tell them where I've been and what I've seen although oddly, the more I tell it, the less I seem to be able to convey.
I still keep thinking it couldn't really have happened, that it was impossible, just a product of my overactive imagination.
There is also survivor guilt. I should have gone down on the 9th as planned and I would have gotten to see the buildings once in my lifetime. I was supposed to have gone down there the day it happened, but I didn't. It's as if I was there, but not FULLY there. I should have been one of those people in the gas masks and wet towels, covered in soot. It should have been me, except for one extra hour of sleep.
Then there are the constant flashbacks. The sounds of sirens set them off. Skyscrapers. Steam coming off the IDS tower later in the fall, sometimes nothing at all but the sounds of voices and conversations and the pictures in my head. For the first two months after I return, I cry every single day.
The dreams do eventually start, and some of them are disturbingly accurate. One morning in December, I dream that I am in Central Park, on a beautiful sunny day, like September 11th. As I make my way downtown, it becomes as dark as night and there is thick billowing smoke. Among dark coal-like ash,. animal carcasses, particularly goat's heads, are being excavated from the site--mad cow incineration scenes meet the World Trade Center. That day, 13 bodies are found at the site--the first in months.
Six months later, I don't want to forget, but I don't dare go back into those memories fully. To have a full and visceral memory of any moment of those four days means touching something that I don't have the strength for. The tears are still just at the edge, particularly when I tell someone I was there on the 11th and they give me "that" look of disbelief. The more I have to explain it, the harder it becomes. But my tears are still a little shallow. I can't continue to sob every day, but I can't let go of it either. I don't want it to go away. I want to turn the clock back to September 10th. I want it to never have happened. But I can't have that, and so I can't give this away either. I weathered the worst of it. I weathered the hopeless feelings, the thoughts of killing myself. It was difficult to imagine that I could ever be happy again or see a point to my life. There were flashes of those thoughts.
I feel irresponsible now. After being an activist most my adult life, I find myself having to turn it all off a little, building a little cocoon around myself. It is never not with me. But I am finding a lot of happiness in my daily life, and have had to keep the focus on that right now, on what is possible and positive. And like my extremely personal reactions that day, have to leave the bigger picture to people who had the luxury of only seeing this on tv. At the moment the best I can do is make a little place for myself and take things as they come, trying not to be overwhelmed.
I underestimated how physically, and consequently emotionally, grueling this trip would be. I also underestimated the travel narcolepsy that would develop, leaving me only 10 minute or so blocks of writing time as I fell asleep very soon after starting to write. Not a GOOD sleep mind you, as buses are cramped spaces, even for someone as small as me, and even when you can manage to get both seats to yourself.
I was tired from the trip and hadn't really had any decent sleep or alone time. I really hadn't even been able to be naked for more than a few minutes at a time while showering at my friends' house or changing clothes in the bus terminal, and I was starting to get a rash from the heat and from always being dressed.
It rained the whole way to New York and I didn't get into town until about 6:00 that night. My hosts and I walked around, hiding under awnings when the rains and winds got too intense, and finally made it to a pub where we could have dinner. As the rain let up, Bob walked me down to the Chelsea Piers and showed me around. I still felt very out of sorts and was anxious for the next morning, daylight, and a decent night's sleep to start fresh.
Several days prior, traveling from Chicago to New York, I had become stranded in Cleveland at 3:00 am when the two buses that left Chitown dwindled to one and we were at the mercy of Greyhound company. On the way from Boston to New York, I scribbled something to the effect that riding the Greyhound was like being a refugee. You were dragged off the bus in the middle of the night with all of your possessions, you were given no information about your fate or when you might be able to leave, you were malnourished--you didn't DARE leave the station for food and were therefore depending on vendables or possibly the Greyhound cafeteria. The only difference between a Greyhound passenger and a refugee was that you didn't fear for your life--unless your driver was depressed or a suicide bomber.
Even now, six days later, I can't believe it.
I keep waking up thinking it never happened. I have probably 30 pages of notes, a head full of images I can't sort out that keep coming back to me. My best friend asks me if I am having nightmares. I say no, I haven't dreamed in days. The most shocking symptom to me is how belligerent I feel. I have no patience for whining or complaining about anything. I have the trump card. A pass. The thing that sends me to the front of the line every time. "I was there when it happened." Everyone knows what that means.
For the next hour we are glued to the television. We can only get one station. The frightening events unfoldlike everyone else in the country, we wonder how widespread the attack is; how many more planes, how many more cities will be affected. Everyone is frozen in front of the television waiting for more news.
We run back and forth between the close-up shots on television and the full eyewitness account we have by leaning out and looking down Sixth Avenue.
I finally decide that it's time to stop seeing it on television and head down to the site to try to make it more real and to try to understand. So within 15 minutes I am dressed and head out the door.
Hoards of people are walking slowly toward downtown. The streets are largely taken over by pedestrians who gather together spontaneously around car radios and portable televisions. We stand together and watch or listen to a few minutes of news and then move on to the next block, all on our pilgrimage to get as close to the site as possible.
There are lines at all the pay phones; cell phones are working only sporadically. I walk down a side street between Fifth and Sixth avenues to a spare phone to call home and come out the other side five minutes later only to find the other tower is also down
As I make my way down Manhattan, there are people outside Yeshiva University saying prayers, the Kaddish I presume. There is no airline traffic except for the F16s.
Hearing them overhead elicits a shudder from me. People look up or run outside to get a look whenever they go by. The closer you get to the site, the more people you see with face masks and wet towels around their shoulders. On the way downtown, one woman sees me crying and stops to ask if I lost someone in the attack. I explain to her that I didn't but I feel overwhelmed by it. She touches me on the arm and smiles. "You're so sweet to be so upset." We talk for a few minutes, she tells me again how "sweet" I am and we part ways.
It seems that everyone in the city has made their way to Canal Street, The first thing I hear is frustration as much as anything. "How could this happen?" "Why didn't they stop them?" Emergency vehicles pass up and down the street, in and out of the site covered in soot and trailing smoke.
I manage to find an open café. On the radio they keep talking about how this is like a movie. They compare it to "Die Hard," "Independence Day." I think how much it is like the news, that there are people around the world who live with a steady stream of violence like this every day. There's not much conversation among strangers. There is some talk about this as the beginning of war, but for the most part, there is silence. This is personal to everyone who witnesses it. The police are tense and afraid as concerns of car bombs start to surface. As quickly as you can make your way a little farther south, they chase you back out. "I can't believe it" is all I can repeat over and over as I hold my hand over my mouth, intermittently breaking into fits of sobbing.
I slowly make my way back up to Chelsea, stopping periodically to peer back. It's been an exhausting day. People are starting to worry about logistics as the sun goes down. How are they going to get home? Where are they going to stay? There are simple black and white printed signs everywhere urging people to give blood. People are being bused to Lincoln Center. United Artists Theater in Union Square is closed but offers shelter for the day to anyone who needs it. Traffic begins to move uptown again. The president observed a moment of silence, but New Yorkers have had an entire day of it. There's nothing to say. It's unfathomable. The streets below Union Square are desolate except for emergency vehicles and foot traffic. As I reach my temporary home, I see several boys skateboard down the center of Broadway.
I sleep fitfully, listening to sirens all night. One lone Verizon truck parked on our block gives me some cause for concern. Is it going to go off in the middle of the night? Each small sound makes me start out of bed. I am more paranoid than I wish to be. I run through all the questions all night. Is it over? Will the subways be safe? What will I wake up to tomorrow?
I am sitting in the McDonald's in Times Square watching CNN and I can't stop crying. I go into the bathroom for an all out weeping before I leave and go back out into the street. "Apocalypse Now" is playing at one of the movie theaters in Times Square.
The mood on the streets is morose. Some people are out and about, but quiet, still stunned. Several people describe the city as a ghost town. There is virtually no car traffic down Broadway, except for emergency vehicles and an occasional taxi. The woman delivering mail says to a man with a briefcase, "Where are you going? This is a ghost town. Nobody's going to work." A young man tells his friends "I can't believe that asshole called and asked me to come to work after what happened." And it feels true. There are the ghosts pouring out of the wreckage, but there are also the living ghosts as well. Everyone on the street is a shadow of themselves. No one can look anyone else in the eye. All we can do is look away, stare off into the distance. In a few days, I will come to understand why Oedipus had to scratch his own eyes out in anguish.
We are still trying to grasp the immediate event, not the big picture. Mary says that I'm lucky. I get to go home, walk away, whereas the people who live there will be dealing with this for a long time. I feel bad about this. She's right--I won't have to be there to rebuild the city or my life. But I will carry this around with me for a long time as well.
The black smoke of yesterday has given way to gray and white clouds. I make my way up to Columbus Circle in Central Park today. There is a bit more bustle here than the lower parts of the island, but the knowledge of what happened is still with everyone. A few people are talking about it, some sitting and reading the papers. Others just sit around, silently, alone or with friends.
Somewhere around 3 p.m. there is a palpable break in the mood. Like yesterday, today is a gorgeous day. The breeze is warm and a little cheering. There are more people streaming out into the streets, activity is picking up. Several people walk beside me and strike up conversations about what has happenedthe first time all day that has occurred. We share our sense of grief and personal loss with one another. "Can you believe it?" are still the words on everyone's lips. The city starts to feel alive again. Later that evening, the restaurants and cafés start to fill up a little more. The mood is not jovial by any means, but people are trying to get back out, trying to feel better.
A 3 year old child who, not knowing what happened, nonetheless understands more than you might think. "Everybody's so sad," he tells his mom. "I'm going to sing for them so they'll be happy."
After dinner with a friend, he invites me to walk part of the way home to SoHo with him. He gets me past the barricades, showing his ID with his address to the police guards, and I am admitted to the military zone that surrounds the area. There is no getting to ground zero, and I don't even try. But even being a few blocks in is strange, eerie. For one thing, I've never had to walk past police and armed guards just to go down the street. The candlelight vigil that began at 7 p.m. is still going on well past 8 o'clock. We stop by a fire station where people are lighting candles and writing messages for the firefighters on the job and the ones who lost their lives.
We go past St. Vincent's hospital where it's a sea of television vans and live interviews, including the local Spanish channel. There are small lights everywhere from the handheld recorders. If there are mourners there, they are not as readily obvious.
Surprisingly, while Midtown is largely closed, the area just south of Union Square, which is on the edge of the closed off parts of the city, is bustling. All the restaurants, cafés and grocery stores are open. Posters of people who are missing are just now starting to go up on light posts and street signs, as are pleas to abstain from retaliation against any of our neighbors.
I am tempted to stay, settle into a café and start writing. But it's getting late and I am now walking home alone. Crime has been minimal, surprising considering the high concentration of police in one area of town. The personal way that everyone there feels about this event seems to have kept most people from indulging in their worst tendencies. I feel safe walking down the street. Still, better not to tempt fate.
By evening the wind has shifted north. As I walk back up to Midtown, the smoke stays thick all the way down and starts to settle in my lungs. It reminds me of walking down the street while people are burning leaves, only much more intense. My throat starts to burn and for about a half-hour I find it difficult to breathe deeply.
Nighttime is the eeriest. Processions of police cars and emergency vehicles provide most of the light among the smoke-filled sky, carrying loads of police, doctors or rescue workers. I decide on a small deli a block and a half from where I am staying. I sit down with a fruit tray and start making notes when I notice a taxi go the wrong way down the Avenue of the Americas.
The scariest thing isn't the sirens. It's when the sirens stop right in front of you.
Police cars wheel around and block off the intersection in front of where I am eating. I pack up my food and notebook and go running down the street. Others are running as well, spewing out rumors as we go. There's a bomb in the subway. Bomb at Penn Station. Bomb at the Empire State Building.
The edge of the quarantined area stops at the end of the block where I am staying. My door, half a block down, is presumed to be safe. The police officer says, "I hope this is safe. I'm standing here." I run upstairs and tell my hosts what's going on, to mixed reactions from the two of them one is nonchalant, the other is hanging up the phone and running out the door. I decide that half a block is not enough buffer and walk down a little further. After 45 minutes I go home and stumble into bed.
I feel weird about leaving, but Thursday was my scheduled time to leave anyway. The place I am staying is small and my hosts have another guest there with whom I have to share the futon, so there is little incentive to stay. I cry in the shower, which appears to be my new morning routine.
The island is open again and the bustle and traffic are back. Taxis are honking and trying to get through. This is the New York I am accustomed to and it makes it even harder to leave just as things are trying to come back to life. There is still great sadness on everyone's faces. Sirens, barricades, police on every corner tell you everything is not really normal. There is a haze over downtown that replaces two days of billowing smoke.
On Wednesday the Greyhound Web site had said to take a train to Newark and catch the buses from there. That's what I'm prepared to do. Having walked by Port Authority yesterday, seeing police and barricades everywhere, I am surprised to call Greyhound and find out that it's open. I drag my heavy bags down there and am further surprised that no one has stopped me or tried to check my bags. I get in line, hoping to make the next bus to Cleveland and all points west, prepared for a day of sitting in line.
There is jubilation in the bus line when we are told that an earlier bus is being brought in to accommodate all the travelers. At 12:15 p.m. I ask someone to watch my bag while I go to the bathroom. When I come out, everyone is running upstairs. Port Authority is being evacuated. Eventually, so is Penn Station, the Condé Nast magazine building and, rumor has it, the Times Square subway station. (The woman sitting next to me on the bus later calls her cousin, who informs her that there were 42 bomb threats in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday.)
At 1:25 p.m. we go back in and someone immediately screams "bomb" again and goes running up the stairs. I am not budging. There is no bomb, I declare, and I am not losing my place in line again. At 2 p.m., we finally start boarding buses. There is chaos as I try to get information from anyone I can, including drivers, baggage handlers and other passengers. Reportedly, Port Authority has been evacuated three times today, and it seems, once on the bus, that they are trying to evacuate us again. The drivers refuse and people pour out the doors and onto buses like refugees, tired, edgy, frantic to get onto the next bus out. I keep repeating the mantra that I started out on the sidewalk. "I should have gone through Jersey." I Greyhound driver walks past me. I pull him aside and say "Go grab a bus and meet us back here. . . " Everyone on the sidewalk smiles or laughs.
Soon after we get back inside, buses start pulling up to the docks and hundreds of people pour out of the doors in large streams, frantic to get on any bus out of town. Last minute decisions are bein made by drivers about the routes they will take, so you have to ask 3 or 4 drivers if you should get on their bus or not. It is chaos and is straight out of a movie scene. Refugees, again, are all I can think.
I hear the driver of the bus I will be on arguing with someone from the station. "Just get them on the buses. These people are going to riot if we don't get them on a bus."
Loaded up at last, we start driving through Port Authority and toward the sunlight and the street. At the end of the ramp, the bus is stopped and the driver gets out. We all groan. Just keep driving. The driver returns and the sunlight of Manhattan finally comes through the windows and we all take our last looks as we head for the Lincoln Tunnel.
Everyone cheers as we leave New York, anxious to put this as far behind them as possible. I don't want to forget. It's too soon to go back to normal, although I assume all of this will fade in time as all memories
do. I wonder as I leave, if leaving alone will make it fade. Everyone holds their breath as we pass through the Lincoln Tunnel, which is open for the first time in days. Then the collective sigh on the other side alive, our bus intact. There is no other comparison--we have crossed to freedom. It is shocking to watch New York from the Jersey shore as we pull away. The buildings are still smoldering and the skyline is small. Only the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building stand out now.
The next morning, up and back into line to head to Chicago and then home. I call home from my hotel and in the middle of conversation every few minutes, I break into loud sobbing. I can't stop myself. This will be my pattern for the next several days--spontaneous bouts of sobbing.
The man sitting ahead of me starts obsessing about his luggage. I am tired and fed up with problems, delays and complaining. He goes on and on wondering if they have put his luggage on the right bus and eventually declares "this is a nightmare". I snap. "I just got back from New York. This is NOTHING."
The first few days back have been difficult. I feel guilty for leaving as early as I did. I should have stayed and participated in the vigils, or even just been there, continued to be a part of it. I have tense e-mail discussions with my friends, who are also all trying to make sense of it from afar. I try explaining to them that if you can talk about war and the big picture of this, that you are operating from a position of luxury. Having been there, it is just an intensely personal trauma to me. I am still walking around in a daze, unable to look anyone in the eye. All I can do is look away. The first few hours of each day I can think of little else. I'm light-headed and become extremely tired every few hours, as if I have a concussion. It takes me until the late afternoon for anything to be able to distract me.
Back in Minneapolis, life is disturbingly normal. On Hennepin Avenue, people are going to the theater as usual, laughing and having fun, the streets are crowded, and marquees are bright and festive. I do not belong here. I am not ready for this. No one here can possibly understand what is inside of me right now and I struggle to keep from sobbing every so often as we ride the bus, as I look at our very intact skyline, as I listen to people talk about something other than the attacks.
I feel perversely grateful to have been there. This is not abstract to me the way it would be if I had only seen it on television. I know that when I see something like this on the news in the future, my conversations and debates will be on an entirely different level. But I also still feel empty and distracted and do not know what to expect or what I will feel from day to day. Suddenly I can't talk about it enough. I want to stop everyone on the street and tell them where I've been and what I've seen although oddly, the more I tell it, the less I seem to be able to convey.
I still keep thinking it couldn't really have happened, that it was impossible, just a product of my overactive imagination.
There is also survivor guilt. I should have gone down on the 9th as planned and I would have gotten to see the buildings once in my lifetime. I was supposed to have gone down there the day it happened, but I didn't. It's as if I was there, but not FULLY there. I should have been one of those people in the gas masks and wet towels, covered in soot. It should have been me, except for one extra hour of sleep.
Then there are the constant flashbacks. The sounds of sirens set them off. Skyscrapers. Steam coming off the IDS tower later in the fall, sometimes nothing at all but the sounds of voices and conversations and the pictures in my head. For the first two months after I return, I cry every single day.
The dreams do eventually start, and some of them are disturbingly accurate. One morning in December, I dream that I am in Central Park, on a beautiful sunny day, like September 11th. As I make my way downtown, it becomes as dark as night and there is thick billowing smoke. Among dark coal-like ash,. animal carcasses, particularly goat's heads, are being excavated from the site--mad cow incineration scenes meet the World Trade Center. That day, 13 bodies are found at the site--the first in months.
Six months later, I don't want to forget, but I don't dare go back into those memories fully. To have a full and visceral memory of any moment of those four days means touching something that I don't have the strength for. The tears are still just at the edge, particularly when I tell someone I was there on the 11th and they give me "that" look of disbelief. The more I have to explain it, the harder it becomes. But my tears are still a little shallow. I can't continue to sob every day, but I can't let go of it either. I don't want it to go away. I want to turn the clock back to September 10th. I want it to never have happened. But I can't have that, and so I can't give this away either. I weathered the worst of it. I weathered the hopeless feelings, the thoughts of killing myself. It was difficult to imagine that I could ever be happy again or see a point to my life. There were flashes of those thoughts.
I feel irresponsible now. After being an activist most my adult life, I find myself having to turn it all off a little, building a little cocoon around myself. It is never not with me. But I am finding a lot of happiness in my daily life, and have had to keep the focus on that right now, on what is possible and positive. And like my extremely personal reactions that day, have to leave the bigger picture to people who had the luxury of only seeing this on tv. At the moment the best I can do is make a little place for myself and take things as they come, trying not to be overwhelmed.
Saturday, February 02, 2013
Break up cliches
A little something I dashed off today:
These are the Days of the Last Straw, when the weight of the world, our destinies, rest upon every single repetition of every fight over the years Every bottle, every wrapper left open, every toilet seat left up, one wrong move could set the whole thing off, trigger the end of the world. An exaggeration, but definitely the end of worlds that we know, the end of a way of life, sending each of us off in a different direction, paths potentially parallel for a while, only to wildly diverge, to wildly wander, to deviate at some future unnamed point in time.
Is there a mechanism to have this break and not repeat every break that every one else has ever had through time? Is it possible to have a break that is not the same as every other break that I have had? Is it possible to do it all originally, without the use of a thesaurus to try to avoid the break up clichés? Can one stay with someone long enough to discover the originality in breakups, or are we doomed to repeat them, performatively, performing the exact same phrases that came before us, as in a ritual, as in an un-marriage.
And so in our grief, even then, we are modern, worried about how to have an original thought, an original feeling. Perhaps this is what gets us through the process, distracts us from what matters or makes us see that in our clichés, this is what happens to everyone and it isn’t as tragic as we had originally thought.
These are the Days of the Last Straw, when the weight of the world, our destinies, rest upon every single repetition of every fight over the years Every bottle, every wrapper left open, every toilet seat left up, one wrong move could set the whole thing off, trigger the end of the world. An exaggeration, but definitely the end of worlds that we know, the end of a way of life, sending each of us off in a different direction, paths potentially parallel for a while, only to wildly diverge, to wildly wander, to deviate at some future unnamed point in time.
Is there a mechanism to have this break and not repeat every break that every one else has ever had through time? Is it possible to have a break that is not the same as every other break that I have had? Is it possible to do it all originally, without the use of a thesaurus to try to avoid the break up clichés? Can one stay with someone long enough to discover the originality in breakups, or are we doomed to repeat them, performatively, performing the exact same phrases that came before us, as in a ritual, as in an un-marriage.
And so in our grief, even then, we are modern, worried about how to have an original thought, an original feeling. Perhaps this is what gets us through the process, distracts us from what matters or makes us see that in our clichés, this is what happens to everyone and it isn’t as tragic as we had originally thought.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Chapter 1 of my accursed novel
That is what I have come to call the project that I have worked on intermittently and/or has sat in a drawer, on my computer, etc. for the past 25 years. I think that should I ever finish it, which I probably won't, maybe that will be the title. My Accursed Novel. For now, to have something to post, and maybe even get some comments, I think I will serialize it here. I would especially like comments such as "it's not so bad . . . ." But criticism, particularly the constructive kind, but whatever, is also welcomed, nay, highly encouraged!
CHAPTER: THE STARLIGHT MOTEL
I am a woman escaping.
Maureen looked around at the room that had become her "halfway house". A sterile, quiet, beautiful motel room with a white wood desk. She felt like the battered women she had spent two semesters working with as a volunteer at the shelter. She was grateful for a moment of peace, the breather. Unlike those women, what was chasing Maureen was not going to come bursting through the door with clenched knuckles and a red angry face. It would come out of her own mouth, and so she tried to remain silent. It would conjure in her sleep, and so she hadn't slept in days. This space belongs only to me, she thought, only to me. The way the ducks and the ice own the river in the winter.
I am a shaman, she scribbled quickly into the notebook she had picked up at Walgreen's on the way over. I have come back from walking death. I heave been empty among my own bones and felt nothing. Not numbness. That has its own feeling. I am empty, fleshless, and now I dance because I have come back and because I have bones that creek and bend that have reconnected themselves in the right sequence and because I am not a bee pollinating dandelions, attaching myself to other people. I've come a long way to get here and tonight I can finally sleep in a strange bed.
Freedom is its own squandering. It's why we probably need marriages and church and school and government. Left with absolute freedom, we sit in a stupor, our minds racing over the things we could be doing, while we sit inanimate in indecision. Or we flit from one thing to the next. From tv to dancing to praying to singing to writing to whatever comes next. Our free self becomes an adolescent sleepover at the house of the family with neatest stuff. We know our freedom can't last forever, and so we try to do everything at once and pretend our freedom has no limits. And so we never get around to what matters most.
Jack Kerouac would have called it her Sansara self--this false world. But eventually, Maureen tired herself out and began to feel lonely. She got up from the bed, where she had been lying down and scribbling in the dark, and turned on the lights and the television. She put her sweatshirt back on, but not her pants and stepped quietly out of her room and went down the hall for a soft drink from the machine, careful not to let the door close completely behind her, as she had left the key somewhere under a pile of clothes and notebooks and whatever else was in her backpack. She went back to her room undetected and closed the door. She could hear someone else's television through the wall.
Motels like this were where you came for illicit affairs and she thought about meeting someone in the hallway. She focused on one of the men she had seen earlier at the ice machine. She slipped her hand inside her panties and began to imagine what might happen if . . .
She removed her t-shirt and leaned against the side wall. She felt sexy and melodramatic and unreal, like a character in a play. Maybe Blanche DuBois. She looked own at the round white parts of her breasts cupped by the lace, lighted by the moon. She wanted all of the men she had ever been in love with, who had not loved her in return, to be there now, to see her sitting in the half-light, half-dressed. She picked up the remote and turned off the television and laid back, running her hands along her body. She was torn between her sensual self-exploration and the desire to get up and write some more of her thoughts down.
Masturbation, it occurred to her, as she rubbed her hands over her belly, is like a form of meditation. You have to empty your mind of day to day things and focus on your breathing, your clitoris, your hands. It's no good if you conjure a conversation you had last week, or a Jerry Lewis movie, or start making a grocery list or worrying about your unpaid phone bill. With a partner, there is always someone to focus on, someone to pull you back. But alone, you need a Buddhist's self-control to stay focused.
She picked up the remote and turned the television back on. She turned sideways on the bed and propped her feet against the wall for balance, so she could still look at the television while she touched herself. All cheap motels have a dirty movie channel, she told herself, and when she came upon channel 43, she put the remote down and focused on the movie on the screen, thinking again about the man at the ice machine.
Maureen got up and looked outside the window. This was the kind of motel room women disappeared from. A busy, urban road that had narrowed into a slightly rundown section of town, it was nestled a long driveway's length from the road. It was not too far from the lake and still had a sign advertising color televisions in the room.
Once inside though, the room was suprisingly clean. There were a few cigarette burns on the bedspread and some permanent ink stains on the formic and faux wood desk. It was not the kind of hotel with its own stationary and a pristine bible in the bedstand.
The mysterious second door led not to an indoor lobby with a whirlpool, the way it might at a Ramada Inn, but to a cement balcony that, were it not lacking a ladder, might just as easily have been a fire escape. Maureen stepped out the back door and eased herself onto the cement. She sat with her back to wall, her knees arched, and feet flat on the cement. She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. Without realizing it, she began talking outloud, answering people she would see later in the week, or replaying conversations that had already happened. She sighed and "shushed" herself, leaned her head against the wall and closed her eyes once more.
Maureen could hear fighting out in the hallway and someone pounding on the door of the room next to her. She started to lift herself from the balcony, to go back into her room and lock the door. Instead she relaxed her legs and sat back down. After a few minutes the manager came stomping down the hall and the noise subsided.
Eventually, Maureen became bored with her self and wanted to talk to someone. She ran down the list of people she knew, pacing slowly around the room. It occurred to her that of all the people she knew, she didn't feel close enough to any of them to call and talk to them about what had happened.
She started to take inventory of her "friends". Who could she call now? She tried to think of someone she would want to talk to right now, or someone she could crash with while she decided what to do next.
Monday, January 07, 2013
December Reflection
December--when the weight of an entire year bears down on you, forcing you to confront your feelings about all of those things that you’ve been trying to avoid or spin or pretend didn’t hurt you all year.
It doesn’t take an arbitrary date to make you start writing a list of resolutions or reflections. Yet I never pooh-pooh arbitrary days. The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath. and so the arbitrary holidays, new years’, millenia, give us the license, the pause, to stop and reflect on our lives. But it’s no accident that every religion has a winter holiday, that most cultures start the new year in the winter, even though winter, cyclically speaking, is the time of death, and not of rebirth. We think we look ahead to the new year, but it’s the death of what passed us by, what we missed, what dragged us down, that garners our emotional attention. In the darkness of solstice, there is no where to look but back or in.
When you’re in pain, you always feel like you’re the one who’s been hurt or wronged, but it’s hard to distinguish, especially at those moments, who is the perpetrator.
Is there really one perpetrator, or do we just pass the pain back and forth? But where does it come from, when one minute you feel happy and optimistic and ready to take hold of the world and the next there’s a dull ache, a sluggishness in your walk, and a quiet slowness to your words, written or spoken. I refuse to believe it’s just chemicals bouncing around, that we are reduced to science and that our actually feelings are results of that, rather than active triggers. But I also find myself lashing out at people and confused about which came first--the anger or the sadness? Am I angry all the time because I’m sad, and am I lashing out at people arbitrarily? Or am I upset with someone’s, leading to the sadness? Is the anger “just” or not?
It seems like there should be one event you can point to and say “that’s why.” But it’s hard to tell. Is it the disjointedness of living in a world that contradicts everything your heart tells you is true?
The world that tries to sell you on war and violence and not to pay attention to the dead children and wasted lives of the enemy, who would kill you in a moment, they say, given the chance. The false dichotomy of your life or theirs. Better dead than red. Live free or die. But no one says it’s worth dying to live in peace. It’s worth being killed if you don’t have to become a killer.
A culture that tells you that consumption is good and money is important, even when you know in your heart that it doesn’t make you happy, that the pursuit of it sucks your time and your life way and makes you feel like an empty shell dragging itself down beige corridors trying to stay numb until it can catch a glimpse of sunlight, sleep as long as the body says, play, have sex, eat when hungry, dictate its own needs on its own time.
A culture that tells you that beauty is the most important thing in the world and then makes sure that what’s considered beautiful is nothing like you.
Or is the feeling of inevitability? That everything is pushing you toward this world that you didn’t create, don’t dwell in spiritually, and yet must pass through and make peace with? Is it the contradiction of your rage against fear, hopeless odds, being told not to rock the boat, not to make a scene, not to stand alone and face consequences alone? This is what happens when you must be silent but cannot. And so you turn on yourself.
Is it daily life? No money. Constant struggle and worry. Seeing that world is becoming a harsher place. Fear that not only will no one help you, but that no one will help anyone. Fear of being left out. Not loved enough. Not loved as much as other people.
It doesn’t take an arbitrary date to make you start writing a list of resolutions or reflections. Yet I never pooh-pooh arbitrary days. The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath. and so the arbitrary holidays, new years’, millenia, give us the license, the pause, to stop and reflect on our lives. But it’s no accident that every religion has a winter holiday, that most cultures start the new year in the winter, even though winter, cyclically speaking, is the time of death, and not of rebirth. We think we look ahead to the new year, but it’s the death of what passed us by, what we missed, what dragged us down, that garners our emotional attention. In the darkness of solstice, there is no where to look but back or in.
When you’re in pain, you always feel like you’re the one who’s been hurt or wronged, but it’s hard to distinguish, especially at those moments, who is the perpetrator.
Is there really one perpetrator, or do we just pass the pain back and forth? But where does it come from, when one minute you feel happy and optimistic and ready to take hold of the world and the next there’s a dull ache, a sluggishness in your walk, and a quiet slowness to your words, written or spoken. I refuse to believe it’s just chemicals bouncing around, that we are reduced to science and that our actually feelings are results of that, rather than active triggers. But I also find myself lashing out at people and confused about which came first--the anger or the sadness? Am I angry all the time because I’m sad, and am I lashing out at people arbitrarily? Or am I upset with someone’s, leading to the sadness? Is the anger “just” or not?
It seems like there should be one event you can point to and say “that’s why.” But it’s hard to tell. Is it the disjointedness of living in a world that contradicts everything your heart tells you is true?
The world that tries to sell you on war and violence and not to pay attention to the dead children and wasted lives of the enemy, who would kill you in a moment, they say, given the chance. The false dichotomy of your life or theirs. Better dead than red. Live free or die. But no one says it’s worth dying to live in peace. It’s worth being killed if you don’t have to become a killer.
A culture that tells you that consumption is good and money is important, even when you know in your heart that it doesn’t make you happy, that the pursuit of it sucks your time and your life way and makes you feel like an empty shell dragging itself down beige corridors trying to stay numb until it can catch a glimpse of sunlight, sleep as long as the body says, play, have sex, eat when hungry, dictate its own needs on its own time.
A culture that tells you that beauty is the most important thing in the world and then makes sure that what’s considered beautiful is nothing like you.
Or is the feeling of inevitability? That everything is pushing you toward this world that you didn’t create, don’t dwell in spiritually, and yet must pass through and make peace with? Is it the contradiction of your rage against fear, hopeless odds, being told not to rock the boat, not to make a scene, not to stand alone and face consequences alone? This is what happens when you must be silent but cannot. And so you turn on yourself.
Is it daily life? No money. Constant struggle and worry. Seeing that world is becoming a harsher place. Fear that not only will no one help you, but that no one will help anyone. Fear of being left out. Not loved enough. Not loved as much as other people.
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Nowhere to go
Ok, this is a short story I wrote using a prompt from The Writer magazine. I actually took 5 verbs (they only recommended 3) to weave into my story:
Button
Delay
Quiver
Muster
Quit
I very quickly realized that I had written myself into a corner and decided to self-consciously go along that route. You will see what I mean.
Nowhere to go
Her voice quivered as she spoke into the phone. It took all of the confidence she could muster. A deep voice bellowed on the other end. She quickly hung up, hoping there was no way to trace the call, but of course there was. Everyone had a way to retrace calls these days. As the young woman in the café had said to her horrified café confidante, there is no such thing as privacy anymore. She knew that. So why did she do something so stupid. Why would she think that she could trust something so private in such a public venue? She should have just gone to the internet. But she needed to hear the soothing sounds of someone’s voice in her ear, a voice as soothing as a hand stroking her hair or rubbing her back.
She decided to go out. She buttoned up her jeans and pulled on a t-shirt, slipped on her boots, and went out the door. It was a warm night and she decided to walk the 10 blocks or so down to the bar that she had been meaning to go to. As she got closer, the cell phone in her pocket began to ring, a ring that said the caller was unfamiliar, but when she looked at the number, it was not an unfamiliar number at all. She put in back in her pocket and continued walking.
Being new to town, she didn’t know anyone yet. She had moved here less than a month ago after she had quit her job and decided to reinvent her life. She had taped a note to her boss’s door, using a bit more tape than was required for the job, and gave her 5-minute notice and a forwarding address for her check, her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend’s address. She left town two days later, go a PO Box and arranged to have her mail forwarded. In three days time, she had changed her whole life, including her cell phone number. There was only place that knew her number. She looked around instinctively, knowing that she was being silly and paranoid. No one was paying her any attention, but was that a good or a bad thing? Could someone snatch her off the street without being noticed?
She walked up to the bar and put her hand out to pull open the door. Something stopped her.
It was the realization that this scenario had been played out with every possible ending. If she met someone and had a one-night stand, it would either be the pornographic version, or the post-modern “wasn’t that meaningless” version. If she went in and no one noticed her, it would be the sad and lonely Lifetime women’s movie or it would be the self-help realization that she didn’t need anyone but herself all along. Come to think of it, that was also a potential Lifetime movie, made for lonely women that didn’t want to admit it and tried to seem empowered. Perhaps she would have the crime novel ending, in which the mysterious stranger from the phone sex line would have tracked down her neighborhood from the incoming phone line and had started hanging out, in hopes that she would start to take chances with her lonely, empty, sexually unfulfilled life and he would be there to snatch her. (This was also a potential porn plot line, although much darker and one that she was loathe to admit that maybe she had come across once or twice in her internet viewing.) Perhaps it would be the action movie ending with all of the same plot lines as the crime novel/porn story ending, except that she would get away and potentially kill her captor. If she went in and nothing either happened or failed to happen, if people talked to her and she felt good but left alone and didn’t call any of them, that would just be a modern slice-of-life film or novel, or maybe a short story. She started to feel a sense of panic rise in her as she stood at the door, delayed, unable to stay or go.
OMG, she thought. Maybe she was stuck in some kind of hipster stream-of-consciousness writing!
Guy Debord was right. Living in an overmediated culture, there was nowhere to go, nothing original to be done. Our life is prescribed, stolen from us in a media feedback loop so intense that there was nothing to be done that hadn’t already been mapped out in some way, easily recognizable as an Oprah book or a movie of the week. She had created a situation in which an original response to whatever would happen to her was impossible.
She stood at the door with her hand out. The world as she knew it was now stopped, although people were clearly moving, asking if she were going in, edging around her, and eventually asking if she was ok.
She nodded absent-mindedly but remained frozen.
Button
Delay
Quiver
Muster
Quit
I very quickly realized that I had written myself into a corner and decided to self-consciously go along that route. You will see what I mean.
Nowhere to go
Her voice quivered as she spoke into the phone. It took all of the confidence she could muster. A deep voice bellowed on the other end. She quickly hung up, hoping there was no way to trace the call, but of course there was. Everyone had a way to retrace calls these days. As the young woman in the café had said to her horrified café confidante, there is no such thing as privacy anymore. She knew that. So why did she do something so stupid. Why would she think that she could trust something so private in such a public venue? She should have just gone to the internet. But she needed to hear the soothing sounds of someone’s voice in her ear, a voice as soothing as a hand stroking her hair or rubbing her back.
She decided to go out. She buttoned up her jeans and pulled on a t-shirt, slipped on her boots, and went out the door. It was a warm night and she decided to walk the 10 blocks or so down to the bar that she had been meaning to go to. As she got closer, the cell phone in her pocket began to ring, a ring that said the caller was unfamiliar, but when she looked at the number, it was not an unfamiliar number at all. She put in back in her pocket and continued walking.
Being new to town, she didn’t know anyone yet. She had moved here less than a month ago after she had quit her job and decided to reinvent her life. She had taped a note to her boss’s door, using a bit more tape than was required for the job, and gave her 5-minute notice and a forwarding address for her check, her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend’s address. She left town two days later, go a PO Box and arranged to have her mail forwarded. In three days time, she had changed her whole life, including her cell phone number. There was only place that knew her number. She looked around instinctively, knowing that she was being silly and paranoid. No one was paying her any attention, but was that a good or a bad thing? Could someone snatch her off the street without being noticed?
She walked up to the bar and put her hand out to pull open the door. Something stopped her.
It was the realization that this scenario had been played out with every possible ending. If she met someone and had a one-night stand, it would either be the pornographic version, or the post-modern “wasn’t that meaningless” version. If she went in and no one noticed her, it would be the sad and lonely Lifetime women’s movie or it would be the self-help realization that she didn’t need anyone but herself all along. Come to think of it, that was also a potential Lifetime movie, made for lonely women that didn’t want to admit it and tried to seem empowered. Perhaps she would have the crime novel ending, in which the mysterious stranger from the phone sex line would have tracked down her neighborhood from the incoming phone line and had started hanging out, in hopes that she would start to take chances with her lonely, empty, sexually unfulfilled life and he would be there to snatch her. (This was also a potential porn plot line, although much darker and one that she was loathe to admit that maybe she had come across once or twice in her internet viewing.) Perhaps it would be the action movie ending with all of the same plot lines as the crime novel/porn story ending, except that she would get away and potentially kill her captor. If she went in and nothing either happened or failed to happen, if people talked to her and she felt good but left alone and didn’t call any of them, that would just be a modern slice-of-life film or novel, or maybe a short story. She started to feel a sense of panic rise in her as she stood at the door, delayed, unable to stay or go.
OMG, she thought. Maybe she was stuck in some kind of hipster stream-of-consciousness writing!
Guy Debord was right. Living in an overmediated culture, there was nowhere to go, nothing original to be done. Our life is prescribed, stolen from us in a media feedback loop so intense that there was nothing to be done that hadn’t already been mapped out in some way, easily recognizable as an Oprah book or a movie of the week. She had created a situation in which an original response to whatever would happen to her was impossible.
She stood at the door with her hand out. The world as she knew it was now stopped, although people were clearly moving, asking if she were going in, edging around her, and eventually asking if she was ok.
She nodded absent-mindedly but remained frozen.
Monday, December 03, 2012
Review of Carole Maso's Mother and Child
My review of Carole Maso's Mother and Child is up at Rain Taxi. It's a gorgeous book, as always, and also a very relevant series of allegories for our time. Read the review, then read the book!
Carole Maso’s work to date has been characterized by a lush, almost otherworldy writing, a style in which the reader experiences everything more deeply—the beauty of the world as well as heartbreak and longing. On top of this, her writing constantly folds back on itself. Maso’s work often goes off into what seem to be tangents, yet as soon as you go with her down a path, she will lead you (sometimes gently, sometimes forcefully) back to the previous idea, braiding stories together. . . .
Read on here:
http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2012fall/maso.php
Carole Maso’s work to date has been characterized by a lush, almost otherworldy writing, a style in which the reader experiences everything more deeply—the beauty of the world as well as heartbreak and longing. On top of this, her writing constantly folds back on itself. Maso’s work often goes off into what seem to be tangents, yet as soon as you go with her down a path, she will lead you (sometimes gently, sometimes forcefully) back to the previous idea, braiding stories together. . . .
Read on here:
http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2012fall/maso.php
Saturday, October 27, 2012
Junk Food/Non-Organic Manifesto
Junk Food/Non-Organic Manifesto
Our planet is becoming more and more polluted every day. People fool themselves every day into thinking that they can escape this, moving to organic farms, to buying organic fruit, vegetables and meat that is raised on the same types of food.
These people are delusional!
Is if PCBs and other toxins, run off from farm chemicals, etc. don’t touch organic farms, as if they are somehow immune. As if the fallout from Fukishima, the Bikini Islands, from the Asian tsunami does not wash upon our distant shores and pollute our air and our land. As if we are not still feeling the environmental effects of Bhopal,Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island.
Darwin has taught us that only the fittest survive, but what is it to be fit in today’s society? Nature teaches us that we must adapt. The time has come, friends, to adapt to our pre-apocalyptic world now, before the post- and apocalyptic render us extinct.
It has been said that Twinkies have a shelf-life of 30 years. That is over 1/3 the shelf life of man himself. The so-called junk food of today will of necessity be the health food of tomorrow, the food of the astronauts is upon us. Tang and Doritos and Twinkies will soon replace the rotted asparagus and broccoli that the contaminated ground now house. The time has come to inoculate ourselves so as to be prepared to survive the wretched earth that will be left to us. Ours is not only to survive, but to thrive.
It must be asked, if these non-organic foods can stay preserved for so long, what must the benefit be to human kind? Indeed, already it is discovered that corpses are taking longer to decompose as a result of these non-organic diets. Soon that will also apply to the living. Perhaps the secret of eternal life is to be found in a candy bar, not in a leaf of lettuce.
The answer then is not to retreat to organic farms based on a nostalgic notion of yesteryear, but to embrace the non-organic future that awaits us. But we must do it now so that someday our bodies will be ready.
It will not be an instantaneous process for most. You will have to gradually abandon not only your eating habits but your very ideas of health itself. You must embrace that which you have been told is toxic, begin eating these things made in factories that will continue to be made long after the animals and the plants are inedible. You must hoard these things in bulk, en masse, lay up your treasures now, so that they will be here, ready and waiting with their long shelf lives, to be consume after the grass withers away the barns grow sick and empty.
Our planet is becoming more and more polluted every day. People fool themselves every day into thinking that they can escape this, moving to organic farms, to buying organic fruit, vegetables and meat that is raised on the same types of food.
These people are delusional!
Is if PCBs and other toxins, run off from farm chemicals, etc. don’t touch organic farms, as if they are somehow immune. As if the fallout from Fukishima, the Bikini Islands, from the Asian tsunami does not wash upon our distant shores and pollute our air and our land. As if we are not still feeling the environmental effects of Bhopal,Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island.
Darwin has taught us that only the fittest survive, but what is it to be fit in today’s society? Nature teaches us that we must adapt. The time has come, friends, to adapt to our pre-apocalyptic world now, before the post- and apocalyptic render us extinct.
It has been said that Twinkies have a shelf-life of 30 years. That is over 1/3 the shelf life of man himself. The so-called junk food of today will of necessity be the health food of tomorrow, the food of the astronauts is upon us. Tang and Doritos and Twinkies will soon replace the rotted asparagus and broccoli that the contaminated ground now house. The time has come to inoculate ourselves so as to be prepared to survive the wretched earth that will be left to us. Ours is not only to survive, but to thrive.
It must be asked, if these non-organic foods can stay preserved for so long, what must the benefit be to human kind? Indeed, already it is discovered that corpses are taking longer to decompose as a result of these non-organic diets. Soon that will also apply to the living. Perhaps the secret of eternal life is to be found in a candy bar, not in a leaf of lettuce.
The answer then is not to retreat to organic farms based on a nostalgic notion of yesteryear, but to embrace the non-organic future that awaits us. But we must do it now so that someday our bodies will be ready.
It will not be an instantaneous process for most. You will have to gradually abandon not only your eating habits but your very ideas of health itself. You must embrace that which you have been told is toxic, begin eating these things made in factories that will continue to be made long after the animals and the plants are inedible. You must hoard these things in bulk, en masse, lay up your treasures now, so that they will be here, ready and waiting with their long shelf lives, to be consume after the grass withers away the barns grow sick and empty.
Two new cut up poems
The following two poems were written after I went to see John M. Bennett give a reading in Minneapolis this afternoon. For years I had tried to write in Spanish and in English, especially back when my Spanish was a little bit fresher, but it always came out too forced. When I heard John read this afternoon, for some reason it occurred to me to use Spanish and French language source texts for my cut up poems, so here are a couple. I was really impressed at the way they came out more or less grammatically accurate with what was going on in the English part of the poems!
Enjoy.
Transperences (Fr)
Too bright. Outspoken. A community
of women. En realidad, el director.
Political despair, 13 spins, the massacre
donde los hombres, musical and
programming the relation between
the appearance of des orages se
troublent the rose garden. Strike
of people on dit in bookstores, shooting
the innovative: a window, a phone, a
wheelchair, doorway of humanity.
Imperative
Early and often did the lord,
Greatly relieved to hear,
Bound to end by shaking hands,
Durant toute la semaine, after
Several thousand years of oppression,
Declare I am becoming.
En cualquier parte parezca que dominating
Even in the long shot,
Civilian casualties are inevitable.
So it began.
On est arrive, carrying the cross
Himself, the posturing that sometimes fulfills the
Conditions, willing to face himself. Me parece
Que the ideal ripens within our spirit
In the bathtub.
The lines were clearly drawn.
Enjoy.
Transperences (Fr)
Too bright. Outspoken. A community
of women. En realidad, el director.
Political despair, 13 spins, the massacre
donde los hombres, musical and
programming the relation between
the appearance of des orages se
troublent the rose garden. Strike
of people on dit in bookstores, shooting
the innovative: a window, a phone, a
wheelchair, doorway of humanity.
Imperative
Early and often did the lord,
Greatly relieved to hear,
Bound to end by shaking hands,
Durant toute la semaine, after
Several thousand years of oppression,
Declare I am becoming.
En cualquier parte parezca que dominating
Even in the long shot,
Civilian casualties are inevitable.
So it began.
On est arrive, carrying the cross
Himself, the posturing that sometimes fulfills the
Conditions, willing to face himself. Me parece
Que the ideal ripens within our spirit
In the bathtub.
The lines were clearly drawn.
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