Where I'm At
Report from the kelp forest, low tide
Hey. Hello. Thanks to all the folks who have kindly asked and inquired about where I am, as their automatic payments blip me their $5/month or $80/year or they just wonder where I am and how I am doing. I’m sitting at the computer crying, while simultaneously laying out a zine I can’t for the life of me find the original of and I want to sell it at the Fisher Poets Gathering tomorrow, I’m getting another death notice of someone I’ve heard so much about and been so inspired to know about that I gasped aloud when the text came in, I’m gearing up to pack, I’m looking for my wallet, I’m getting another ‘missing trans kid’ alert, I’m in the middle of a poem I am working on for tomorrow night.
Over the post-cancer years as I’ve developed and been at the mercy of things my brain does—things described with lots of capital letters by some people and ‘made up excuses’ by my brain, and dismissed pretty much by everyone as ‘we all have that now,’ (or maybe that’s just my brain)—I’ve tried to figure out how I rest. In this extremely uncomfortable self-examination, I’ve learned that what is available to me (now that my body is too disabled to knit or play the violin) is motion. I rest in motion.
Car, train, boat, kayak, canoe, bike, Greyhound or other long-distance bus. Not airplane, not city bus or light rail. Moving through the world at a pace of at least 10mph. This is rest. This is one of the places where I find flow.
I wrote a postcard to my beloved writing teacher when I sent one of George’s calendars well after the new year, describing how I have been. Because it was my beloved writing teacher from 1986, I indulged in describing how I truly felt, rather than the, ‘I love you, here’s a calendar, thanks for being in my life, I’d like to spare you the actual garbage of my life’ note that I usually include. (This is the nervous system that has all the capital letters dancing around it, remember.) I told my teacher how I felt like a bull kelp on a strong ebb tide, my blades flapping slimy and useless in the shallows.
My beloved writing teacher wrote me back the best email, noting that “I hadda look up bull kelp and wow the ebb tide would have to be strong to move that behemoth.” It is. I feel underwater. Also I feel like I am running downhill struggling to get my legs under me, about to land on my face. Also I feel like I’m not permitted to say these things because I am also warm, dry, have a job, a thousand and one life skills, all kinds of blood and chosen family, tons of friends, and my body is mostly able. And I have art, for which I am so grateful.
But still I feel this way, weighed down by my specific obligations and my non-specific ambitions, while that unending, unnatural, ebb tide sucks at me. At the very end of the end of the bull kelp whip is an incredible construction called a ‘holdfast,’ a weaving that the body of the bull kelp makes with its environment so it can grow to tremendous lengths in tidal areas, seeking sunlight while firmly anchored in the dark. Aging, as anyone can determine by examining a bull kelp, is a long process in humans that involve life chipping away at our holdfasts.
Oh, I’m sorry, did that sound whiny? Or passive aggressive? I don’t know what to say about that except for part of the reason I’ve not been writing—from my place of whipping around in the undertow of “this moment”, as I’m calling our national collapse into the principles on which the country was literally founded—is that in THIS moment, I don’t have capacity to do much other than whine, at least here. My writing time seems to be taken up with other things that happen when the tide takes our fathers, and our body’s abilities, and our ideas about home. Whoosh. Some of my writing time has shifted to attending meetings to see if we as neighbors can cobble together any safety for us all, all neighbors. A lot of it I spend looking for my wallet, glasses, phone, original zines from which to make copies. I also spend quite a bit of time being furious about the hostage situation of modern capitalism, the lack of care for disability, the response of ‘well I had to do this so you should be able to do that too.’ My alphabet brain does not care that I made a particular agreement, it just does what it does and I struggle like hell to make the promises I made before I got cancer. (“Oh, but it’s the good kind so why are you still having a problem?” In case you wondered what the brain had to say about that last sentence.)
As the tide has dragged me further beyond the last post I wrote on Solstice, I’ve written several drafts of complicated essays and temporarily abandoned them to tend to things like having to manage the house alone for an extra two weeks while my loving man removes himself and his art from his childhood home so that property transfer can proceed apace. I did not energetically budget for this. Time, as George’s dad famously said to me every birthday, marches on.
I try to slow down. I canceled the local fisher poet shows for this year because all the people who help me with them are also dealing with this garbage moment, trying to answer the question, how do we help our neighbors and ourselves when people are being kidnapped? Meanwhile I went to the store to stock up for the Fisher Poets Gathering and got groceries enough that I could carry on my bicycle, and paid almost $300. I know everyone else is dealing with this too, so I hamstring myself when I go to write, it’s a lot of energy to not-write about collapse. And also I know that money is just an idea that washes back and forth, a tide of its own; greed is an illness caused by trauma, scarcity is the other side of the coin. I send people money for cat food and to get out of detention centers where they were illegally held, people send me money for the idea that I might write again regularly.
When I worked a few summers as a set netter, I was introduced to a piece of equipment that the guy I worked for pragmatically called a ‘pinger;’ a small electronic device fastened to part of the underwater fishing operation that sent out steady signals warning marine mammals away from the net, or as we called them, ‘pings.’ Here’s a ping for you, this post.
I know that the 29th Fisher Poets Gathering is going to be great. Sometimes I think the worse I feel beforehand, the better the art when I am on stage, if I can hold it together. Writing is only one thing I do—being on stage at the Gathering, pinging back and forth with the audience—is a favorite activity. It’s like being in motion, like tennis but with wit; all risk, and an ephemeral, immaterial payoff. It’s something my dad taught me, though I never saw him anywhere near a stage, his whole sphere, his entire life was a stage. My alphabet brain also wants you to know that—as per my experience as a child in a small town that does not value art or queerness—it is showing off, it is putting on ‘your show,’ as a family member said to me, it is too much.
I look forward to the weekend, when I will float with my fisherwomen comrades, my queer fishing comrades, my unafraid-of-me male comrades in our beautiful, endangered kelp forest, held briefly by the flood tide as we all come together in stories, even our dead friends, our dead crewmates, our dead fathers—this is our time to hold them up for everyone. You will see us on stage, in the light as we struggle to explain our depths. You may wonder why we do what we do, and we will scratch the heads that hold our alphabet brains (because commercial fishing boats are an excellent place for an alphabet brain to feel ‘normal,’) we will shrug, turn to walk the streets of a fishing town in the rain—knowing normal is a shore on which we will never alight—and enjoy our brief dance together in the glorious flood.
See you there.
That is a beautiful piece of writing, as always. Thanks for all you do! I'm sorry to miss FPG this year. Rouse some rabble!
I am sorry to miss you this year. Your good soul and wild grasp of truth inspire. The world knows you are in it and is grateful. XO