I Like Trees

Half a loaf is something; give me your blessing.

Then take the whole, and go finally free-

The stories are full of sons who journey

and women, always the women, baking the bread,

doling out blessings and cursings

conveniently measured according to disposition,

cleverly kept until needed, in walnuts and apples,

combs that turn into forests and swords that sing-

(“I used it to carve up the turkeys,” she grinned. “I’ll admit that i miss the thing…”)

.

conveniently dying young to make room for another-

take the loaf, my good mother,

with all my blessings, and run-

I will tell them you went for water with a seive,

and never returned.

.

It is always the beggars,

venture-capital fountains dressed in rags,

testing your nature by asking for bread from your bags.

I come from a city they come from,

and years ago stopped bearing bread.

so i may as well go to the corners

and share what i know-

/the third calf is your prince, and ask for what’s under the bed-

when you’re old, and you’re tired of ogres, you take things slow.

.

Here. Take this, you’ll need it. I look to the shelf,

find any old thing in the heap:

a lantern, a comb, a ruby,

a horn that puts men to sleep-

When i get bored i make things. Have this to keep.

It will get you in trouble, I promise, and you’ll be set.

Give those people a show that they’ll never forget.

Now let me go, go on, now,

there’s the road, and thanks for the bread-

i’ve a silk dress to fit in a walnut, because i can.

This story starts with a hurricane.

Hurricanes always start stories. They’re big, loud events with long aftershocks. Sometimes devastating, sometimes just strange.

This one’s strange.

Hurricane Sandy. I was prepared. I was ready. I had water, food, air-activated hot packs, flashlights, batteries, everything. I was all set, in my two room shoebox of an apartment, to hunker down and wait it out. Fortunately, I’m not in a flood plain, and we don’t often lose power, so I expected no more than a bad storm. I grew up in New England, though, so you can expect whatever you want: what you prepare for is a hurricane.

I got what I expected, not what I’d prepared for. A bad storm, missed a day of work and lost power for only a little while. Then I got something I had not expected, and most certainly wasn’t prepared for. I headed out to take out the rubbish, after the storm had passed and the sky was quiet again. We have the typical apartment complex dumpster out back. You pry up the plastic lid, you throw the bags of trash into the skip, and some shrieking growling truck comes at four AM on a random morning to wake everyone up and haul it off. This time, I opened the lid, and out came a grey and bounding ball of flying doom.

I had just time enough to register, “squirrelnotratjustsquirrel,” before it was on me. Literally, on me. It leaped up onto my head, throwing my glasses to the ground. I ducked and turned, and it leaped back onto the lid and scrambled away, scolding loudly. I retrieved my glasses and the bag of trash, reluctantly lifted the lid again, and put the rubbish in… quietly counting my blessings that it hadn’t bitten me, because all I could think as it leaped was that this was going to mean rabies inoculations.

I only bring this up because today I went out with the rubbish. And now I’m paranoid that I’ll get leapt upon by an angry squirrel every time I take out the trash.

Most of our fears are very rational things. We fear things because we’ve been hurt by things, and could be hurt by things. We fear things that we’ve never experienced because we still know in our bones how fragile we are. We fear things that might not even hurt us physically- a five pound squirrel isn’t going to kill me. We fear things that we know can’t even happen, long after the ages that we dream them up. We fear, because fear keeps us sharp, keeps us alert. It keeps us alive. The ones who were afraid, lived. It’s coded into our genes to play the odds in favour of our survival, wherever we can.

Fear also connects us to the places where we conquer fear, where we can be rational and strong and even irrational and strong. It gives us the chance to believe in being big and powerful, as well as being scared and small. It lets us touch the places that matter. It lets me take the trash out, knowing full well that there might be a squirrel waiting to spring. I can do this, because if there is, I will survive it. I can handle it.

Well, I went out. I carefully stood back. I peeled up the corner of the lid and jumped back, just as I have every time since finding the squirrel after the storm. I can’t help it. I’ll never just blindly open the thing again. I stand well back, just in case.

The squirrel leaped out, screeching angrily, and ran off.

Schools hate us, and we hate them.

We’re the broken, and they’re the field,
where all plants thrive who know the ways
of water and bearing crop.

Bad artists are barren land:

we hate you for saying, give fruit or go unloved.

You hate us for being happy, as nettles and stones.

We claim to love our artists, but we lie.
It’s art that pays their passage,
and broken people must find themselves a use
as cogs or wheels or else become the shims
and small crushed stones on which our castles stand.
I knew one once, in the early years
when i could still obey,
but the cracks were starting to show like my too-early bosom
appearing against my will.
I hated the broken because he was like me
but more so,
and i saw the road ahead,
the hard long road of his art and need and light.
His paper was black with crayon. I drew a tree;
He found the flame of the world,
and covered it with wax as dark as hope,
burying fire in black loam, like a seed.

Across that darkened sky he drew his nails,
and scratched a name.
Not his,
but mine, in second grade.

These thirtyfive years of struggle
and the name
not mine, but belonging to him,
still hangs across the void, still bleeding light
from letters scratched in red and orange
and the pain of wax under fingernails

I wonder if anyone ever
could love me so much again
bad artists have no home
drifting out on the age, they thrive or die
as their failures command,

 i wonder where he went,
the boy with my name
on the darkness in his hands,
i wonder if his fingernails still drip
with the heavens even now,
torn off the void.

Eat the light.

They will tell you to share. Tell them-

-tell them-

go to hell.

She was tearful, the girl

at her cousin’s wedding- brought to me, like a child

to a principal’s office. Tell me- What did she DO?

“She writes stories. I was hoping

(because flattering her didn’t work)

maybe you

could coax her, give her the courage

to get them published.” She, in tears,

outed like so much circus stuff, looked on-

helpless to prevent her destruction.

And i,

faced with a friend who never understood it,

even now,

could not comprehend the pain

she caused a person whose only sin

was to open their head and let the wilderness in-

“Tell them,” I said, with the voice of a wild beast-

“Tell them,” i said, with the voice of a hunted thing,

“TELL THEM,” I commanded, loud

as a bright red dress in a funeral crowd,

“You tell them to go to hell.”

And I mean it. Eat the light.

Burn them, keep them, you paid for them hard

and they’re yours. You bled for them, who can say

that anyone else should prosper from your pain.

Hide them, write them,

lock them in a safe

for the rest of your life and then some,

tie them up

to a stone and throw it back into the depths

the way they came crawling breaking into yours-

Take from them anything holy,

rip them apart,

take anything they can offer against the dark,

because the dark is coming, it is coming quick

It always is, on the heels of a good idea.

And it will say: You owe us,

we who supported your genius,

give us your light

your warmth

your harvest

because the world is dark and cold and we have need.”

And you will plant the seeds down in the dirt,

instead,

and tell them go to hell.

You will grind the seeds

and make your bread

and try to live with what lives in your head

and tell them go to hell.

You will wake one day and the sun will be streaming in:

Take it. It’s good. And it’s yours.

Let them find their own. Let them stretch,

it will do them good.

Take anything you find

in the magical wood,

and keep it. Don’t let them tell you

you have to share.

The hungry will find their way. Find yours,

find yours first, before you give away your life.

Eat the light. Devour it, take its soul

like it took yours, seize it, wring it dry.

When life gives you lemons take them away

and don’t let anyone tell you to anything stupid of lemonade

unless they give you all that is sweet and joy,

and even then

eat the sugar and tell them tell them tell them then

here are lemons.

You can have them all.

She cried with relief

and escaped, down the path, and my former friend

shot me a glance of disgust.

Perhaps i condemned her stories to the fire

i can live with that, with so many inside to fight.

Maybe she’ll live. I’d like to think she did.

As for you, I tell you now:

it’s yours. All yours. Eat the light.

it’s the tracks and trails that hurt so much to see,
from the train
that ran them over hard,

leaving cold desperation in eyes that don’t follow the light

trust me. You either know it, or you don’t,
the itch in the bones,
the endlessness of a day-

you can move the furniture all you want,
but it’s still in your bones, like decay

and the only way out is to give up yet again
this time in the other direction.
Fine, we say. Let it itch.
We find distraction.
Fine, we say. Let it fight.
We walk away.

Fine, we say,
and our families won’t follow.
Fine, we say, and we finally just let it itch.

And it burns in our bodies, destroying the lifeboats
whatever we had
whatever we built
but we build again, because out there
is the train,

and everywhere that train goes,
we know it’s for real
a realness you, the living, will never know.
at least i hope
with all my heart,
in penance for all of the other things i’ve wished for.

we ignore our craving for dying
every day
and you don’t know, who’ve never tasted death.
We, who’ve been to the goblin market once, 
know how sweet the first bite of drowning is
and how bitter forever after.

we resign ourselves, finally
never to taste any better
and stop the chase
and save our lives,
if anything’s left to save.

you can’t know, who’ve never tasted.
every day, i cover the scars  and make believe
the scars where the train rolled over, not once, but twice-

and every day still sends me love letters

full of lies.

I am the set point where Laziness and Ambition compromise, a sort of no-man’s-land between the two, full of landmines of wish and surprise. It’s where we all live.

“How do you do it,” he asks, waving a hand at Harvard Square.

“Do what?” I ask. I genuinely mean it.

“You work two jobs, go to school, do all this… stuff.“  I’m still going strong, and I do a lot of the things I want to do. As I’ve been getting out and making the effort to be more social, I find people looking at me and asking this question more and more. “Night school? Really? How do you have time?”

                …What?

What do you mean, how do I have time?

                No, really, what are you talking about? What are you doing that takes up all of your time? Is there a demon lying under your couch? Are there time ninjas who take minutes from your clock? Do you have to spend six hours a day in a special cryochamber, waiting for your shift?

                Oh, wait. You’re not talking about time at all, are you?

The question, though, is not about time at all. The question is the same one I do. “How do you get the energy?” Because really, none of us have the time and energy or motivation to become who we’d really rather be. We have our innate lazinesses, preferences, laundry heaps (physical and metaphorical) and our own long collection of bad habits. Especially me.  I’m not exactly qualified to answer this question, remember. There are dishes in the sink as I type this, there are piles of clutter, there’s a lot of work undone. I am not in the shape I’d like to be in spite of running three times a week, and I can’t afford my krav classes this semester. 

                But I’m doing the important parts, and that’s, well, I guess that’s THE most important part. And it’s a relevant question, because I can’t just blame my narcolepsy for my not doing things, or claim the minutes back that the time fairies steal. It’s a relevant question because I once stared at a teacher who was in Japanese question with me, and asked how the hell he worked two jobs and did all his hobbies.

                “Energy begets energy,” he shrugged, turning a page in the Japanese dictionary he was making notes in. I hated him instantly, angry that his answer relied on me to make my own motivation.

I got over it. He was right. 

It’s because of him that the first place that I send people is to their reading lists and netflix queues. Right now, you’re exactly who and what you can live with. You DO live with it. You’re living, right now, at the ‘set point’ between your laziness and your self-esteem.  There’s a brilliant article here on the struggle between the people we’d like to be, versus the people we are. 

The truth is that eventually, we make choices that combine those two in a combination we can live with, an amount of entropy and effort we can stand. The only way to change that is to either drop our standards, or decide that we want to change badly enough that it carries us through the decisions to do it. Then we make it easy to choose things that turn us into the people we’d like to be, and keep the habits going.

I fail at this so often that it’s not even funny. I don’t mean just, “grown-up fail,” where I pretend that a brownie is dinner. I mean fail where I realise it’s been nine months in the new apartment and the walls are half painted because I never finished. There there’s been a muslin for a pair of trousers on my work table for so long that it’s practically a tablecloth. I get fan letters starting with, “Did you die?” I mean fail.

But these aren’t necessarily failure points; they’re decision points. They’re places where I proved in action what was more important to me at the time—and what wasn’t important enough to me for me to put the energy into. I can either lower the standard, (which in the case of the muslin is the correct answer, I need to restart that project from the beginning, and schedule it at for a time when it can be a priority. Right now, I need to get it off the table and recognise that it’s simply not important to me right now, because something else is. ) Or I can raise the energy, raise the work output. I can make myself get back to work. I can’t do that for long; eventually, it has to come from somewhere, and I’ll be making choices again. But I’ll give that a try with some things, like the blogs. (No, I didn’t die. Kind of the opposite, actually; I’m more alive than ever.)

These decision points are everywhere, and say worlds about who I actually am, and where I am in my set point of compromise. Am I someone who procrastinates? Not much. Mostly, I flat-out decide not to do things. Am I someone who exercises? Yes. I’m someone who leaves dishes in the sink but goes for a run, someone who writes an article on the train but had candy for breakfast. We all have these set points. At least we can be honest with ourselves about it.

I’ve known a lot of people who self medicate with love affairs. It frightens me. I know one person who, as long as I’ve known them, has never remained single for more than a few weeks. Ever.

 Everyone has a different take on love, but for the sake of discussion, let’s assume that every type of love- parental, societal, compassionate, intimate, stranger, puppy, all of it- is the same basic thing, in a different shape and direction, the way that a diamond and coal are both carbon.

But that analogy, as helpful as it is, isn’t accurate. Not even a little. See, we have this problem: we use the same word for the act of moving, that we use for the state of being in motion. “Love” is a feeling- and “feeling” is a gerund for a reason. It is an active verb.  This has been beaten to death by happy-clappy counselors all over. Don’t listen to them if this is where they start, and don’t listen to them if this is where they end. There’s a lot of work under the hood that isn’t covered in a cliche based on grammatical hair-splitting.

I’m currently taking time to myself, time to examine what I’ve been doing all my life. Love is one of those things I’m examining. What it is, how I’ve used it, what I’ve tried to use it for over the years. The shape of the holes I’ve tried to fill with a noun, rather than a running straem.  Love is something that I always fell into, stubled upon, was swept away by. It was never something that I looked at as a road, or a path. It was a swimming pool, a riptide, a something that made it okay to let go. If you’re wondering, this is a lot like how people self-treat anxiety with alcohol. It’s an excuse to let go, a chance to not have to be in control. A chance to have something else take over, giving you permission to feel good or bad or anything at all.

Like alcohol, we use love in our society to propel a lot of choices best made sober. Moving to another country for love? Totally acceptable, even if it’s a bad idea. Movies get made about this all the time. Leaving one lover for another? They make movies about that, too. They rarely make them from the perspective of the left person, usually it’s the one doing the self-discovery-through-another kick.

Ha. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying love can’t come along and change you and your life like a typhoon. It can, it does. But if it does, it’s usually because your life was ready for change, anyway. The hurricane isn’t the love- it’s the life you’ve built in the way of funcitonal habits of loving. And often, the loves that wreak havoc on your life don’t last, for that very reason. The habits take time to learn.

We have this emptiness that we teach people, telling them that if they just find the right person… but I no longer believe in that, either. I no longer believe in that, because I’ve looked around. How many people do you see, actually witness, who are putting in the time to become the right person? How much time have you put in, becoming the right person?

No. We’re just running on the assumption that with the right person, everything will fit. It’s a dangerous assumption. It also rules out a lot of wonderful relationships we might have, if we tried just a little harder to learn to be healthy and well individuals. For me, I need to work harder on my independence and my patience. And my self-trust.

Also, how I view love.

In case you haven’t heard of it, Child’s Play started as a way to show the gamer-haters that gamers were good people, by giving them a way to give back to their community in their own medium. Kids in hospitals get games to help distract them from what they’re going through.

That’s it. Gamers, giving toys to kids. No administration to eat up the budget, no central charity continually pleading for you to sponsor a pediatric ward. You look at their lists, give what you feel like, the games go right to them.

Well, the fabulous gamewarriors at MarioMarathon stepped into the ring with the same meek premise. It didn’t matter what they made, they just thought, let’s play some games, collect donations, funnel it all into child’s play, and call it a weekend! After all, who hasn’t wasted a whole weekend playing games with friends before?

And, like before, gamers responded… In hordes. (Yes, that is the correct spelling. “Hoards” refers to inanimate piles, “hordes” refers to groups of animate creatures. “Horde” is used in gaming because it’s commonly used to describe invading armies, as in, “A horde of enemy warriors scaled the wall.”)

They aren’t just playing, though. What makes it special is that they’re broadcasting. It’s like something out of “Pump Up The Volume” meets “Comic Relief,” meets the PBS fundraisers. Yes, I really am that old. Get over it.

So head over. Even if you don’t donate, it’s worth checking out. They are wonderful. Even four events in, now having to juggle grownup lives around the games, they gamely step up. There was some doubt last year as to whether they would; every time the donations pass a certain amount, it adds to how long they play. They end up having a very long time to play. But they’re past $30,000 now. THIRTY THOUSAND, that’s well more than I make in a year of a day job. This makes me very happy. Kids love games. And so do we.

Keep Gaming.

This article is partly about drunk driving, but it’s mostly about how the concept of losing face is pervasive in our decisions, even the destructive and self-destructive ones. 

The odds are, if you’re an adult living and working in the US, you know someone who drives when they shouldn’t.  We all scoff, and turn our heads, and swear we’d never do that. At the same time, we know people who have a glass of wine with dinner, maybe two, or three, and they’re the ones driving themselves home. We think we aren’t these people if we do it, ourselves. Men, particularly, tend not to realise how intoxicating beer actually is, and have more at a time.

The drunk driver I knew was a binge drinker. He liked to party. He had a very strong intrinsic moral code, which unfortunately didn’t line up very well with our agreed-upon outward moral code very well in many places. He would drive, but he wouldn’t do it if he knew he was drunk. Most of the time, he didn’t know how drunk he was.

We all know that it’s wrong. All of us. There’s not a single mentally healthy and rational adult who can look someone else in the eye and say, “Risking the lives of other people by getting behind the wheel hammered is my right.”

Instead, you’ll hear,  “I know when I’ve had enough,” or “I’m not hurting anyone but myself.”

I bring this up because I was recently reading studies on the morality of alcohol and drunk driving, and what makes these acts okay to people. It’s very important to know why people do it, because it helps us understand how to prevent it, and how to recognise it in ourselves.   Here is one good read, talking about the various pressures which influence this decision.

I believe in letting people fall off their moral bicycles, but I don’t believe in letting them load those moral bicycles into a long ton of metal and driving it into someone else’s completely non-allegorical bicycle in the middle of the night.  It just isn’t done this way. 

“Why do people do it?” is an important question. Maybe one of the most important in psychology. No one does anything without a reason, and if it didn’t do something for them, they wouldn’t do it. So we have to ask, How do people reach this decision? What does it do  for them?  At what point are they genuinely convinced, or rather, until what point can they be swayed from it?

 As I get older, I’m beginning to consider much more carefully my assumptions about other people. I also have a friend with Asperger’s who often asks me about other people’s motivations, and I frequently have to try to explain how someone can be a tolerably good person most of the time, and make radically stupid decisions once in awhile. That’s not an easy thing to explain, is it?

The answer comes down to this: given a clear choice, most people will do the right thing, most of the time. Everything that we can do to help people make better decision works by helping to make it a clear choice, and removing all of the cloudy factors that swirl around it. The forces that determine whether a person does the right thing are a combination of internal and external behavioural weather, and we’re still sorting some of it out, but here are some of them:

Extrinsic factors:

• Accountability (Is anyone watching?)
• Anonymity (Will anyone know it was me?)
• Uniqueness of action (Is everyone else doing it?)
• Group perception of morality (Will anyone think it’s bad?)

Intrinsic factors:

• Perception of odds (Is this really likely to have consequences for me?)
• Perception of morality (Do I think this is bad?)
• Benefits gained (Do I look like my own person if I drive myself?)
• Social repercussions (Am I going to look like a pansy if I ask for a drive home after two beers?)
• Perception of rights (I have the right to drive, I have the right to decide when I’ve had too much)

One of the most perceptive programs I’ve ever seen in action was the advertising campaign aimed at students here in Boston. It featured posters expressing actual statistics of how many students binge-drink, versus what students thought was going on around them. Students routinely reported perceptions of far more alcohol use than was actually happening. By sharing the real statistics, public perception of the acceptability of it goes down… a lot. Students who don’t think everyone else is doing it are far less likely to drink.

Changing the perception of the norm is a great way to shift behaviour. It also gives you a change to alter the weight balance of a decision- if you make it so someone loses face, or respect, by doing something inappropriate, it gets easier to do the right thing. A good example?   At the next party, collect keys from anyone drinking. Or licenses. To get a drink, you hand over your license. That license gets given back to you by your driver at the end of the night, the end. Make it a clear choice, on that isn’t up to the person driving. It does more than prevent one night’s driving- it increases the perception that no amount of alcohol behind the wheel is safe, and it points out that you, and everyone there, agree with this idea. The social norm at the party is that you don’t drink when you’re driving. It makes it so that you lose face if you put up an argument, and it takes away the elsement of comparison. If everyone has to give up a license, you can still brag about how well you hold your booze to your inebriated buddies in the back seat with you.

What I’m getting at is not just “Take the keys.” The fourth of July is coming up, and yes, take the keys away. But also, remember that among the people who drink and drive, no one believes that it’s okay to hit someone with a car while drunk. They (or you) believe that either a) You’re able to tell how drunk you are (which isn’t true) b) it won’t happen to you, or c) You have the right to endanger yourself. They also may perceive a high immediate risk of losing face by admitting to not being able to handle their booze, when they believe they can- a risk removed when everyone must surrender their keys. By making it higher-risk to not play along, you make it likelier that they will be in a mental position where they don’t have to defend their own bad decisions.  It also means that if you’re routinely strict about it, they can’t argue, whether they’re drunk or only buzzed. By setting up as many factors in advance as we can, and making sure that there’s no loss of face for playing along, we eliminate the choice points that disasters stem from.

For my part, I’ll be planning an afternoon on the esplanade, with Shirley Temples and top hats. Our theme this year is “Privateers and Rapscallions” and we will have pirates and gentlemen galore. However, the trouble of chasing down top hats and moustachios has led me to the conclusion that next year, we’re having a luau.

Go to Hell.

No kidding, no fooling, not joking around here. I hope your magic shorts out and sends you to the alternate dimension full of lawyer hydras who only speak broken mandarin and pidgen south bronx. Without a ride home. And in that flimsy nightgown you insist on wearing everywhere. Artistic only gets you so far.

I hate you for existing in the public mind, for stealing from everyone by promoting the idea that we might need you, that you might be the appropriate solution to any problem that exists, anywhere, ever. More than that, I hate you for the idea that love fixes anything, or decreases the work we put into our lives. You’re messing with people and that’s not nice.

I hate you for pushing the idea that the wishes we have might be appropriate in our lives without the work and personality-building sacrifice behind them; the idea that our goals are playthings that can be bought for a wave of glitter rather than the gritty, dirty sweat of ugly and miserable work that tears up our hands and our ideals. I’m in the middle of that muddy bastard of a work right now, and let me tell you, even on the bad days when I come home with fingernails full of misery and an aching back and self-esteem trampled into the ground, I’m still glad I told you where to go. This may be a stupid and ugly life, it may not be going where i want, I may hate it every day, but it’s motherf*ing mine and i didn’t need you to give it to me. And more than that, i’m useful- which is more than sitting in a ballroom wearing rhinestone shoes was gonna get me. I’m useful, and as far as i can tell from here, in the trenches of the working real world, you’re not.

I don’t like you, or your sort. I don’t believe your industry deserves the cache with which generations of parents have endorsed it. I don’t think you deserve anything but to have to socialise, day and night, with the self-centered and spoiled children upon whom you have showered your dubious largess, and to have to live in the kingdoms which they have no idea now how to rule. You can keep your dresses, and your crowns. I’m enrolling in night school. I have a 3.6 and I did it without an ounce of glitter.

I’m glad you weren’t there for me. No one else was, either, but that problem is mine to deal with. I hate other people for that, separately, and that’s mine to work out. This is about the part between you and me, the part where it’s just good that you weren’t there for me.  I’m not sure that i ever WOULD be confronting the pain now, finally, if you had. This was not something- is not something- that magical second chances can fix. I don’t even know if it’s something I can fix, but I expect to at least learn to live with it. And that’s nothing your little wand can teach.

And i hate you for pushing the idea that anything, even you, can instantly fix anything at all.

If you want your wings and carriage back, you will find them at the Kingdom Auction to Benefit the Home for Wayward Nixies; the auction starts at seven, so you’d better bloody hurry. I’ve donated the slippers to the museum of questionable art on fourth street, and the mice have been restored to their rodent form. Touch them again and I’m calling the ASPCA, bitch.

Most sincerely,
Your extremely ordinary godchild.