Volunteer State- Part 2 “Sleep”

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I sleep for 15 hours. Well, I wake up a few times along the way. But there was no phone or clock to check and my head was impossibly heavy on the pillow. Nothing to do, really. Why not let it happen? Just sleep.

Finally I get up at 3:00 pm still tired. I am sick and the sore throat that started with hearty gospels in the car yesterday has stuck around. I am proud that I have allowed myself this excess. I wonder how I would have accommodated this illness if I were back in my normal life. Would I even press snooze? Would I drink a cup of tea? Would I force myself through yoga and binge my way through the uncomfortable feelings my body was putting out? Whatever it would be, this is certainly gentler.

I walk around the woods awhile, I pick through my books, and I write. From the comfort of the Pepto-Bismol-pink soft-with-age sheets, I write out my lofty goals for my time in this distant place.

  1. I want to Get Clean: I want to get off sugar. I need a foundation of abstinence to get me through my “normal life.” A controlled environment, a peaceful environment, I believe this will help. I believe abstinence is possible here.
  2. I want to read: A pile of books sits next to me. I want to pass hours turning pages, get tired, close my eyes, and go back for more. It used to be that I never read a book without finishing it, now the exception has become the rule. Where did my persistence go? I want to indulge my love of learning and be patient with the time it takes to mosey through the countless lines of text. I want to reach the last line and smile.
  3. I want to write: Always so much to write about. I want to write by hand, in this journal. I want to finally finish my 3rd creation story. I want to write out my confessional to facilitate my recovery. I want to stain my left pinky in ink.
  4. I want silence.
  5. I want to shave my head. Well, I don’t really want to, I want to be willing to. I want to be brave enough to. I want the freedom to. The idea first occurred to me just over 3 years ago, when just about everything in my life was different but the aching desire to be free of my addiction to food. The desperation tugged at me then, it does now. A few days ago, my sister cut my hair to give me bangs (with my permission) but she did a very sloppy job (without my permission). Earlier today, feeling like the shave was inevitable, I cut my own hair with a pair of scissors in the mirror of my little rustic cabin. I didn’t like the ends, with their damaged dyed blonde scraggly ends, but now it is short and embarrassingly childish. Nothing is inevitable but I’ve certainly set myself up for a dramatic recoiffiture.

Continue reading “Volunteer State- Part 2 “Sleep””

Volunteer State- Part 1- “South”

IMG_5420I came to Nashville for the same reason that I’ve done a lot of things in the past 11 years­– to get away, to make a clean break, to start over. This is one of the less dramatic iterations, seeing as I don’t want to fully wipe the Etch-a-sketch clear and start over altogether, I just want to get clean, I want to unmuddy the internal so I can resume the life I am and have been building back in Detroit. Thank god at least for that.

I found this place on Airbnb, I liked the idea of going South, a direction I’ve never traveled on my own before, maybe if I go north and back, south and back, it will be like a seamstress reinforcing a stitch, making it hold tight. This particular place seemed rather perfect– a “writer’s cabin,” a “spiritual retreat.” Done.

It was hard to get away. I spent the night before driving down here sleeping on the kitchen floor of my childhood home alongside the heavy-breathing body of poor sweet Tansy, the dignified elderly doggy now struggling through her 14th year. We didn’t expect her to survive the night. I fed her water by hand an watched as her large head, slow motion, sagged one millimeter per second until it got low enough to where she could drink it herself. Time was slowing for her.

My alarm went off at 4am, signaling my cue to hit the road, I re-set it for another hour. 5:00. 6:00. 7:00. Maybe I wouldn’t go at all. Dad came downstairs and promptly reported to me that my cell phone appeared to be sitting at the bottom of Tansy’s water bowl. Ouch. Maybe I really wouldn’t be leaving.

The phone was revived magically by a bag of rice and Tansy even stood and went outside to pee. I was morbidly upset that she hadn’t died in my presence these past few days, would I now miss it? Do I dare leave only to have her perish while I’m halfway down America’s rusty spine? Did I even want to go? I went. Continue reading “Volunteer State- Part 1- “South””

abundant brevity: an acknowledgement of Time

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Last fall, I met a man in front of his home in Hamtramck. His told me that his name was Mr. Ben Jaros, that he was 97 years old and had lived each of those years in this very house (except for the ones when he was enlisted in World War II). I snapped a photo in front of the house with the intention of sending it to him one day and taking him out to coffee or breakfast or polish food and soaking up his stories. I knew he had many to share and our brief encounter gave me the impression that he just might like to tell them.

My intent was sincere but non-urgent and life is busy. I planned to get to it the next time I printed photos, but over a year passed and I never got around to it. Finally, I got the photo printed and a week or too after that I bought a frame. It sat in the passenger seat of my car for another while until I finally made the time to visit. I wanted to leave a large open window of time just in case the a spontaneous impromptu interview should await me. I knocked but no one was home, more time passed until I found a moment for another visit.

Tonight, I stopped by.

The lights were off and a neighbor was walking by with her fuzzy golden doodle. I asked her if her neighbor was home, pointing to the house that matched my photograph. She looked at me with confusion and said something polish until her husband stepped up. I repeated my question to him and he confirmed my fears: “That man, he died, about one month ago.”

He died.  Continue reading “abundant brevity: an acknowledgement of Time”

Uncompromisingly Awake

 

Screen Shot 2015-10-30 at 10.05.26 AMWhen I was married, I thought I had the perfect plan to make the relationship work: if my husband and I both had strong feelings about a topic, we would compromise but, if one person didn’t care and the other had an opinion, then that person would get what they wanted. It wasn’t even clever it was just logical. In theory, it created a nice balance. In practice, it created a stable imbalance– He always knew what he wanted and I never did, so He ended up making just about all of the big decisions in our relationship.

Usually that involved some form of travel. He picked the destination when we studied abroad in Australia. He chose when we went to South Africa. He planned our honeymoon to Switzerland. He made the call when we lived in France and learned French (I preferred Spanish). I kept getting taken to amazing places so I felt that the system must be working, but there were more than a few times when I had the nagging feeling that this Thing that I was obviously supposed to be grateful for just wasn’t all that great. I was living someone else’s dream and, in many ways it was lovely, but that didn’t make it mine. Continue reading “Uncompromisingly Awake”

The Lee of The Stone

IMG_0600I love chaos
I thrive in it
I create it
and then I hide in it.

I ride the tide of the rapids, edging the hazards in a wall of sound echoing so loud that there’s no room to wonder
Why
or What Else
or At What Cost?

When the big day is over
and the phone stops ringing,
the backwaters eddy in the lee of the stone,
the silence has its own echoes.
I am alone.

 

My Pleasure aka “Suzie”

Tie breaker story for The Moth “Vices” 

Audio Here

Dealing with my newfound singlehood after moving out of me and my ex’s apartment was all about self discovery. I wanted to find out who I was, what I liked. I wanted to exert my independence. And yes, I wanted to be more sexually self-sufficient. I brought out my old vibrator. I had never been against using it, but it hadn’t gotten a ton of use when I was married, especially because, at one point along the way, I had made a generous interpretation of the “splash proof” label and decided that maybe it was water proof. It’s not water-proof. Ever since I took it in the bath with me the battery contacts rusted and it started sounding like it had an outboard motor or maybe Hemi. rrrrRRRRarr. Continue reading “My Pleasure aka “Suzie””

Family Recipe

IMG_4948All across America today, as families and friends gather over heaping plates of food, they are arguing or disagreeing or pushing down their feelings about the offensive things being said across the table. Everyone seems to have a grandma or an uncle or a brother-in-law who thinks outrageous things and finds in a holiday meal an excellent platform to talk about them. So often the dessert hasn’t been served by the time the conversation devolves into a full on argument or seething frustration.

Why does it have to be so hard?

Because families contains a variety of ingredients to make them what they are and family gatherings bring out a rare combination of diversity and intimacy. At a minimum, each family contains a difference in age. We are all products of our surroundings and it is fundamentally impossible for two people from different generations to come ready-made with the same ideas about everything. Throw that into the pot.

For another thing, families actual create their own diversity. Even if one child follows his mother or father’s footsteps exactly, he will be different from the other parent, and the other siblings will be different from him. Kids find their identities by cleaving off of their siblings, and even if the rest of the world would find them similar, amongst themselves they are a special sort of unique. Family dynamics require different roles and characters, so even people who are otherwise alike might fall into roles dictated by their age, rank and gender. Throw that in too.

The most seasoning comes from the influences of the outside world. Every family has someone who is unemployed or underemployed or somehow not “living up to their full potential.” Every family has someone else who is still single and shouldn’t be or who chose the wrong mate or is otherwise making grave decisions that the family could correct quite easily if only the person would listen. Usually there are differences in political or religious beliefs that have a way of making themselves known around the dinner table. If two people find something to agree on, the longer they talk, the more likely they are to uncover something that someone else disagrees with. That’s just how it goes.

Some people avoid the situation altogether because can’t stand to be surrounded by such ignorance and closed-mindedness. But this is a huge mistake.

Growing up means often means moving out, and moving out exposes people to experiences that aren’t shared with their family members. Over time, the relocation has the combined effect of changing a person’s opinions and collecting them with other like-minded people. When people have deep conversations about their beliefs and opinions, they tend to be talking to people who already more or less agree with them. It can become easy to believe that everyone thinks and feels the same you do.

Family gatherings bring together people who have been spiced by individual life experiences into a shared space. These are rare opportunities to think beyond ourselves, to relate to other people, to gain a new perspective through the forced unifier of common experience. If, at a minimum, we asked ourselves “how can they actually believe that?” every time there was a disagreement, we might really learn something. That your idiot uncle might teach you something can be a tough prospect to swallow for someone who is already as enlightened as we all secretly think we are, but it’s more valuable than all the agreeing and better for you than pumpkin pie.

Port Ouvert

Before the media and the politicians got ahold of the collective fear consciousness following last week’s attacks in Paris, individuals reacted naturally in the most vulnerable yet most generous way possible– by opening their doors and homes to strangers seeking shelter from the violence outside. How did the spontaneous hosts know whether or not to trust their guests? It seems unlikely that they were all equipped with sophisticated mobile retina-scanning record-checking intention-evaluating devices. But the alternative is even more inconceivable– a reckless act of hospitality. Only a suicidal sap would welcome a stranger in their home on the city’s most violent night in 3 generations? As the terror subsides and better judgment forms, leaders across the western world have adopted a much more appropriate response of blind prejudice, sweeping antagonism and tightly shut doors.

We would be fools not to respond to violence with preventative measures, and we would be insane not to learn from the circumstances that led to it, but we have as much to learn from our instincts for compassion as from any “intelligence” finding. The terrifying truth is, that we can’t truly prevent violence, and any policy that perpetuates that fantasy is a mistake. Violence is not a communicable disease that can be stamped out by breaking the pump of a single well, it’s best antidote actually comes from increased interactions between people.

The root of all violence is imbalance and as nations with more power, more resources and more wealth, we will be perpetual targets unless or until we correct the skew. Rather than relinquish our grip, however, we focus our efforts on building walls and closing doors, creating dark pockets and miserable purgatory for refugees that act as breeding grounds for suffering and hate. A person’s willingness to leave everything and risk what’s left to seek shelter in behind the walls of a stranger’s home is evidence enough of their desperate circumstances, and is reason enough to leave the door wide open.

Taking Advantage of Detroit

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MetroTimes Repost


Post-bankruptcy Detroit is a place of undeniable opportunity, and people from all walks of life are eager to make the most of it. Massive tax foreclosures led to a record 24,000 properties being up for auction this fall, pitting residents against speculators for the chance to buy a home on the cheap. Everyone is trying to take advantage, but not everyone’s advantage corresponds with the best interests of the city.
So what is best for the city? It comes down to short versus long-term interests. Renters have shorter-term interests than their landlords and landlords have shorter-term interests that owner-occupants. One who depends on a home to raise their kids in has a different incentive to care for a property than one who sees it as a complement to their investment portfolio. For individuals, homeownership provides security in two major ways: First, by offering shelter, and second by offering stability. For speculators, property ownership provides a low-risk, low-effort form of passive income.

study by the Journal of Urban Affairs bears this out, showing that in Detroit, the prevalence of rental properties is a strong indicator of neighborhood crime (even more so than blight). The type of benefit a property owner gains from owning a property has a direct correlation to how much the community benefits in response. Continue reading “Taking Advantage of Detroit”

Mama Song

(Audio)

Down in the neighborhood when she as young
Cheryl was a friendly one who always got along
hop the fence right after school oh what a lot of fun-
to be jumpin rope and hopin scotch and skip n play n run?
But when the day was through she wished it wasn’t done–
she had to go home alone.

Suppertime and sleepy time oh wouldn’t it be nice-
for a brother or a sister who could make it fun by twice?
No one knew her secret wish but every night in bed
she closed her eyes and said….

“Oh I love my ma and I love my pa
and I thank dear god above,
but when I lay me down,
I pray another round:
“won’t you give me a little friend to love?” Continue reading “Mama Song”