There’s not one person that I’ve been close to over these last ten years here in Portland that I’m close to now. A lot of things happened. It’s beautiful and sad and true. Still I feel lucky. Got moved. Got changed. Ain’t never gonna be the same, man.
The thing is this, recently I got cut loose by a couple people in my life out here and it has laid bare the nature of my connections or missed connections with folks in Portland. I know a lot of people around town. I like them, too. But I’m not part of any one group, not particularly close to any one body. Not any more. And that’s ok. This isn’t about feeling sorry for myself. Or trying to drum up pity from who ever is reading this post. And I’m not trying to be a martyr or a hard ass either. I’m only trying to talk about the nature of things in my life right now.
The truth is I’ve experienced a lot of loss out here. In Bloomington it always seemed people were moving through my life and it made sense to me because it was a college town. But out here, anyone I was close to at one point, I’m not close to any more. Not now. I can’t think of one exception. Folks have just moved out of my life. Or I’ve moved out of their’s. Lots of reasons for all that. But even the reasonableness of it feels a little sad.
It’s been raining buckets here. On and off, but all day. For a minute or two this morning the sun came out while it was raining and I was reminded of how sometimes thunder storm at home will roll away and reveal a blue sky. It seems like it’s been years since I’ve seen the sun shine on rain. So I sat and looked out my window for a little bit, looked out at the shadows and rain drops ripple across the tops of puddles and I missed home.
I’ve been thinking a lot about liminality. It makes me so happy when there’s one word to describe something so nuanced and complex. And in thinking about what it means to be liminal, I realized it’s a great term to understand this past historic election. For the last couple weeks I’ve been trying to figure out how a black man got himself elected president of the US. Given what race means here in Amercia, it is an amazing feat. And it came to me yesterday that Obama ran his presidential bid “occupying a space” of permanent liminality. But instead of creating dissonance like it so often does, it created relief. Relief for a lot of folks who didn’t want to resolve the issue of his race, as in yes this is a black man, or at least didn’t want to get resolution around understanding that his race has meaning, as in yes this is still a pretty racist society. Think of the footage from election night, the close-up of Jessie Jackson crying, the kids dancing at Spellman, the street party in Harlem, and try and reconcile that with comments to call-in radio shows and letters to editors from people saying this election wasn’t about race. Of course this election was about race (to some degree); it’s just that Obama didn’t run a race on race. Smart, smart move on his part. And being a black man not running on race but winning the race — that’s a liminal act of epic proportions. Seriously.
If only other folks were so lucky. Like my girl in western Mass, who I’ve come to think of as being permanently liminal. She’s wicked smart and wiley, but she’s never gonna escape the dissonance the world dishes back up at her as she tries to negotiate her way through it. Why? Because she’s sick. And when I say sick, I mean disabled sick. Illness, injury, disease, disability – this stuff begs out for resolve. And the collective urge to mend and fix and cure has certainly changed our human condition, as in increased the lifespan, decreased suffering and generally enhanced our quality of life. But not everything gets cured and why that is, well that’s a different blog.
But leaving aside how and why we choose to commit resources to curing some diseases and not others, we can at least agree that not everything can get cured. And when we don’t have a way to manage what’s wrong, when we can’t treat the condition so that the sick can live among us on our able bodied terms, well, if that’s your lot, you’re kinda screwed. As a society we see sickness and disablity and we want resolve, man. Normalize yourselves, you sickos: get better, or transcend what ails you like the super crip marathoner with prosthetics, or hide away and or die. Yes, I do mean to sound this harsh.
When what’s considered “normal” got constructed, my girl got left out. But the ideas about normalcy were built from a house of cards called assumptions. So there she is, liminal to the bone, like it or not. And the means for resolve are either out reach or out of the question. Yes, she could get some better and I hope she does, because things have been extraordinarily hard these last several years, but she will still have disabilities. Meaning she gets to beat her head against a world that at best might collectively in its actions and on a very good day, say something like “we love you in spite of how we have to accomodate your disability.”
And fuck that. If I can use the metaphor of access ramps, I say fuck this idea of a ramp to get in the building. Build the building so it doesn’t need a ramp in the first place. Build it so everyone get’s in. There is no reason that the act of entering a building should be the litmus test for ability, for what’s considered normal, for who gets included.
I’ve got such a serious case of monkey mind today that I’m surprised I can get my two feet to work together and walk from here to there without falling down. Part of me wants to say please ignore everything I just said in the last several posts because I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. But of course I’m not altogether serious in that plea, not that I’m joking either.
I’m not purposefully trying to be contradictory here. I know I drive people nuts when I try and articulate this stuff because it often reads as inconsistent, but this is my mind at work. And honestly, I believe in diverse truths. Also, I’ve been thinking a lot about liminality. There is something liminal in being butch.
I am back in Portland. And in a daze. I don’t really know where to begin in talking about my travels, as it was so much more a journey of the heart than anything else. Had I combined this trip with a stop in Indiana my heart my just might have burst.
One funny thing that occurred that I didn’t expect was that I missed Portland. I missed riding my bike and drinking good coffee and walking around my neighborhood and making contact with co-workers and neighbors. I missed the every day familiarity and comfort that grounds me and keeps me connected to the world when I’m so lost in my head. I even missed the idea that just around the corner is the most mind blowing hike or day trip or backpacking weekend, which is quite funny to me because for the better part of this last year I’ve been railing on the how I can’t deal with the relentlessness of the stunning landscape of the Northwest. In fact, I had to laugh at myself on the bus ride up from NYC to Northampton when I looked out the window and found myself longing to see something tall and then felt so grateful as we left Connecticut and the low mountain ranges of western Mass finally came into view. Like it or not, Oregon has imprinted itself on my brain.
I missed all those things because I’ve been thinking of leaving them. I don’t have a plan, just in case anyone is wondering. I have vague ideas and dreamy notions and all this last year I’ve been opening up to the thought of moving away from Portland, a thought which scares me. For lots of reasons. Like it scares me because I crave familiarity and routine and I’ve found that here. Along with some things that make part of every day work for me. And some people I love. But one thing that is clear to me is I really can’t hold on to the life I have if I want to have the life that’s waiting for me. That all probably sounds much more dramatic and fateful than I intend, because I really don’t know what’s waiting. But I do get that to really open a door to one thing, to open it and go all the way in, that means I have close the door on other things.
I’ve just been churning inside and not externalizing it very much, which explains some of the silence here. Plus I’m not very well groomed for social commentary and I don’t watch TV or listen to the radio much, so I’ve not had much to say about the big topics at hand, like the election and the financial meltdown. I’m glad to have a number of friends who are better equipped in this arena. With that in mind, onto something completely different.
First, here are some photos from the butch femme bash I attended when I went to SF.
I was really moved by Forest Church talking with Terry Gross about living, loving and death. Early on in the interview he talks about not believing in an interventionist God. A God who micro-manages our lives. He goes on to articulating how he does not find solace in the face of tragedy, whatever the scale, when folks say “It’s part of God’s plan” or “God has his reasons.” His words were powerful: God doesn’t throw a three year old child out of a window. Or allow a drunken driver to kill a family crossing the street. These are accidents if life and death. If God is responsible for the a tsunami that obliterates the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and leaves their families in tatters, then God is a bastard.”
I’m thinking about my friend who is having her first round of chemo today and hoping for the best.
And I’m heading east next week to see one of my most favorite people in the world and then to meet this girl I’ve been wanting to meet for a long time now.
I meant to post this last night, but I guess I didn’t hit publish. It still stands though, so up it goes.
I hung my coat on the peg inside my front door after an angry ride home and felt utterly alone. Sun was nearly set. Apartment was empty. Nothing was on the schedule except dishes, eating and working out. Alone.
Anger is a good first sign that sadness is lurking beneath the surface. Sadness and confusion. I can’t say that I know what I’m doing these day because I just don’t. I don’t know that is. I think I talk a lot like I do, but inside I’m confused and sometimes, like right now, I am sad and lonely. I keep telling myself it’s good work to just try and stay with the sadness. I’m resisting turning on the radio or calling a friend or thumbing through a catalog. I’m resisting distracting myself too much so I can experience the fear and the sadness and the yearning for something to change those unwanted feelings into ones that are more pleasurable.
This is me today. Still sad and I think fighting off some sickness. This is the first time I’ve called in sick to work since I started this job more than two years ago. I need to sleep. I went to bed at 8:30 last night and got up today at 10 and will probably go back to bed pretty soon.
There are moments in experiencing all the unwanted feelings when I’m able to summon the courage to let the experience open me up to other folks’ pain. Last night I thought about my mom and dad and my girl in western Mass and RU and my friend with breast cancer and some of the people I saw on the street in SF. I thought of all of them and I felt such tenderness. I felt a little in awe of the human condition too. The capacity for suffering. It made me think about my own capacity for suffering. Made me think about how I cause my suffering. What a silly human I can be. Seriously. I say that with mild judgment, because mostly it’s a curious and humorous endeavor.
I’ve been struggling a lot this year with trying to figure out how to connect with people–people I love, people I like, people I work with, people I just know–understanding that connection is not an all or nothing endeavor. I’ve also been trying to figure out how to manage what makes that hard for me, which means not shutting down to fear and fear is at my core, not that it’s the only thing there, but it’s in the mix. RU left a comment about fear that was right on target about how it prevents connection. In my experience fear shuts my ass right down, makes me smaller and meaner and tougher and more apart. But as I’ve worked with fear, sometimes I can loosen the grip and not take all those attendant feelings so seriously. Fear doesn’t exactly soften me, but it doesn’t rule me either, not every time. I say that and immediately get superstitious that now fear is gonna get me back and show me about how I should take it seriously. Ah, this is a perfect example of my monkey mind.
But it’s not just fear that get’s in the way of connection for me, it’s what’s at the bottom of it, and I’ve not been ready to get to the bottom of it until now. So what is it? It is this fundamental mistrust. This core belief that no one will look out for my best interests. No one has and no one will. Not because everyone’s mean or cold or so fucked up. I’m not a misanthrope. Folks just get broken in such a away they don’t have it in them, don’t have it to give. By the way this is not a personal reflection on anybody I’m close to or his or her capacity to be close. This is just me putting out there why it’s hard for me to be close in return.
I am some where new or not really new, more like I lost sight of myself for a long, long time and I finally got myself back in view. I will try to explain this later. I went to SF this weekend and am glad to have gone, but not for all the reasons I thought I would be, which is a funny commentary on expectations. Speaking of which, it is a curious place to be, letting go of some expectations, which I seem to be doing around various things, like when I might get to see my girl in Western Mass. I keep purging stuff at my house and spending hours on end trying to write a little bit of a story I think I’d like to read.And I feel like very slowly I’m conscious about how I spend my time.
My fingers are corssed so tight that Obama can pull off a win here come November that I swear my knuckles are gonna break. McCain and Palin are sinking to new and dangerous lows and I can’t help but think of them as anything but mean little fuckers.
News for my friend with breast cancer is not as good as we had all hoped. It’s fucking weird.
Biden did a good job last night. And I agree Pep, maybe we’ll pull this one out. My fingers are crossed for sure. I gave some money today. My god, I just can’t imagine the alternative to Obama/Biden becasue because we’re already in such a fucking shit storm. I don’t even wanna say the other ticket’s names because living under their administration is utterly unthinkable.
Oh man, I wish I could articulate all that I’ve come to understand about myself lately, but every time I try it ends up coming out kinda fucked up because the language I have to describe my human condition is so loaded. If I say something in me is broken, everyone except my therapist responds with a kind and loving version of “but you don’t know, you might change; you might fix it”, which is sweet. But I wanna figure out how to to adapt, how to to work with what got fucked up (for lack of better words). I don’t wanna be the super disabled dude who climbs a mountain; I’m fine being the guy with a ramp to get his chair up into his house. Dunno if this analogy is working. For some reason I’m thinking about how I’ve always loved playing rhythm guitar, never been a lead kinda guy. Anyway, what’s so wrong with figuring out one’s limits, one’s capacity, the boundaries of tolerance for things like being vulnerable and open. So what if I’m not quite as capable in some areas as others, does that make me incapable? Even now I’m not sure I’m getting at this the with the right words or ideas, but I thought I’d give it a try. Among other things I grew up with a lot of dissonance and darkness, as well a kind of understated danger about wanting or needing someone. I lost something along the way and even if I don’t get it back, it doesn’t mean I can’t figure out how to move forward on the things I want in my life and make adjustments. Like, if the way I love large, looks faint, then I need to find a girl, to whom it looks obvious.
I’ve been listening to this Johnny Cash version of Wichita Lineman. It’s a great cover. Just great. I love that Rolling Stone called it the first the first existential country song, because it resonates with this lone and longing cowboy motif I’ve been exploring in therapy.