Movement

There was a woman who was surrounded by beautiful, beautiful things.

She was in the kitchen, sitting on her customary wooden stool that was beautiful because it was hand-made and the wood used was recovered tropical wood that was otherwise illegal to own. It was gorgeous. The seat of the stool had the most burnished finish and it glowed with tropical-wood red and black and brown, a better finish than the rest of the stool: this was because of her ass. The sitting had buffed the seat of the thing to this almost impossible glow, and she was not unaware that her ass making something more beautiful was a metaphor for how she lived.

Her ass represented her money in that sense. It was a strange metaphor, but an apt one; everything in her highrise apartment was caressed with money to the point where it gained more depth and color, like the stool. She had enough money to surround herself with whatever she wished, and she wished to be enveloped with beauty. Once she retired from the custom furniture trade where she'd brokered the uncomfortable and unusable dining "chairs" or copper-and-titanium "sinks" to the decorators of the super-rich, and after the death of her beloved, wealthy husband, she toured the world slowly so that she could pick every item for her beautiful apartment with the utmost care and deadly patience. She knew enough to look and leave, not standing and fussing with some gallery owner or impoverished artisan; she looked at things that were clearly lovely enough for anyone and then leave. This was frustrating to the gallery owners and infuriating to the artisans. They each would think of her as lonely or stupid or tasteless over their respective bowls of noodles-the gallery owner's bowl overpriced and rife with ridiculous ingredients and the artisan's reconstituted from a noodle-brick- but the woman would usually come back within twelve months and pay for the item. To the gallery owner she paid the haggled-down price, and to the artisan she paid four times more than what they'd asked for. She had a sense of justice.

So the coffee she drank- supermarket coffee, since she'd lost her ability to taste things years before- was from a coffee mug that had been commissioned from a Master in South Korea who made tea cups for coffee and then glazed them a green-blue that had been mixed from rare and site-specific minerals. The living room was floored in old barn-beams that had been split and re-assembled, then gently polished. The couch in that room was a contrasting leather. Every window was floor-to-ceiling, and had a swaying piece of modernist stained glass hanging in front of it so that the apartment was filled with various colors that changed slowly during the sun's progression. The kitchen appliances were from Nordic countries and built for eternity in whimsical shapes, and they were so heavy that they were hard to clean beneath. This was not a problem, since those that visited her did not ask for espresso or fresh pasta- the whole place was for looking, not touching.

Later that day, the woman's friend Angel came over. She brought deli sandwiches and they ritualistically ate over the wax paper they'd been wrapped in, being very careful about dribbling thousand-island dressing since it was quick to stain. There was no way anything would ever stain the triple-sealed Italian marble countertop in the kitchen, but since it was ice-white with gentle ribbons of cobalt and completely crackless they took no chances.

"I love this place," Angel said. She really did. "It makes me feel so calm. Or really it makes me feel kind of awed, in a good way. It's church here."

The woman smiled- Angel was such a charmer. "I know. I feel that way too. It makes me move slower."

"You never told me that. I thought you were just a slow mover. Someone who moves slowly out of neccessity."

"I could move faster if I needed to" said the woman. She remembered her basketball days from college fondly- she'd had less money and less ass then.

"But you have to be slow here. It's so beautiful. You have exceptional taste." Angel sighed, since she envied this in her friend. Angel thought she would do the same as the woman if she had the money, and search out that which was exquisite to bring to her home. When she was being honest with herself she thought that she'd buy theater tickets.

After Angel left, the woman washed her coffee mug very carefully, and dried it with her hand-embroidered raw silk dish towel. She was not in the present: she was thinking again about moving faster, and how that felt, and how it made you so focused that you knew in your cells that the ball would come to you just now, and the shot you just took would score, and your hand would still be up pointing toward the hoop when it went in and you would strain to hear the whoosh right before the silence broke. Her hand slipped. The mug crashed on the kitchen floor, so that there were only three left. The woman looked at the shards of the beautiful coffee mug and knew she should have been bereft, but in the shock she just kept picturing a basketball.

They happen

A Not-Doing-Anything-Right Day:

I was sleeping a little bit when you said that. No, honestly- you know how I just go to sleep a little sometimes, while I'm standing there and you're talking about something really important? So, yeah, you should cut me a little slack because I was diagnosed with Narcolepsy.

While I was taking my rest there on my feet in the kitchen, I had a dream of some sort. I really, really did. You should trust me more, I have no reason whatsoever to be a shithead and make up physical ailments. Yeah, I had a dream. In this dream I was saying things that were witty and profound and I had an audience of unicorns. This is how I know I was sleeping when you were talking to me: the unicorns, honey. They all were wearing tweed jackets with suade elbow patches, and it really wasn't a good look for them. I could see a cuddly sweater on a unicorn, but a jacket is just too formal. They didn't fit well, either- they collectively needed a better tailor.

As you know, it's not what you look like but what's going on inside your head that's important, right? I assume we're agreed on that. The dream had me saying good stuff, perhaps golden stuff, bon mots and axioms for the 21st century; the unicorns were a tough crowd. They were  probably uncomfortable, because tweed is itchy if it touches the skin and our magical horse friends have really incredibly soft and sensitive skin. I said this to them, I basically told them that they might be experiencing a tweed reaction and that if they had the time I would be happy to knit them all big, unicorn-specific cuddly sweaters.

Yes, that is why I announced I was going to learn how to knit just when you were getting to the meat of the important thing you were saying. I was dreaming, but I woke up just for a second to say that! There was crossover, and stop looking at me and insinuating with your silence that I'm a liar. You know how I am: crossover is to be expected. I'm surprised you don't really understand that, after all this time. Plus, my eyes were closed except for the knitting statement. Clearly you don't remember when the doctors told us about my episodes of somnambulence- they're to be expected. They are to be planned for, is what I got out of that appointment that you don't seem to recall.

I dropped back into my nap almost immediately after you looked at me with your patented stunned expression. The unicorns had moved away from my podium, which hurt my feelings a little so I hung back and watched them. "Tchk- you all think you're so pretty and whatnot, but you all don't know how to dress yourselves" was what I was thinking as I watched them herd to a storefront. But it's really hard to stay mad at a group of mythical beasts who truly are quite beautiful in a light, sun-dappled way. I wonder if they could teach me the method of looking sun-dappled everywhere you go. Anyhoo, it turned out that the store they went in was not a store but a tailor's shop! The tailor was a gigantic frog. I shit you not.

You keep acting like you don't believe I was dreaming. You think I can control this? You're the one who's dreaming, then. You are. If you think I can control it then you are dreaming, my friend.

I'm just about to finish, thank you very much. There I was, in this frog-owned tailor's shop, and I was about to offer my apprentice services as a general gopher and aspiring knitter when I woke up. Yes! We were in the produce section, and you had told me something really vital about produce (I remember that much) like an allergy or very strong preference for onions. I couldn't remember what it was, exactly, so I decided that you must have had the onion thing and I put a five-pound bag in our cart. I'm amazed that you didn't see it before we got home, frankly. It's five pounds of Valencias, which were the best kind based on thier high price.

The bag of onions was a token of my esteem, and the fact that they make you queasy doesn't negate the spirit in which they were purchased. Frankly, I'm  the one who should be insulted. So...Ok, yes, I guess it was a bad day. Is that what you needed? Yeah, it was a bad day. I have a lot on my mind- I have to learn how to knit before I go to sleep again.

A New Christmas Treat

Oh, Xanax is a good drug. It keeps to its' name, so seventies-era B-movie effective, where the good (or bad) doctor hands the young intern a pill and says, "This will calm you." Then the young intern is practically swaybacked with calm, almost indecently relaxed.

Ok, it's not that good. But it did take an edge off, a really mean edge that had been widening all day; someone I know and see regularly knew it and asked if I wanted one. First I said no. But the tightness I felt in my solar plexus was just not giving any, despite all the deep-breathing I attempted to do (gasp in white healing light, choke out black negative light...) The person that I know- not a doctor- asked me if I wanted it again when I told her about the gasping, and I said yes, and we went to the car, and my person got a bottle of them and handed me one. "This will calm you" she said.

Slowly it did. By the end of the day my jaw was loosened to such a degree that I had very little pain anywhere in my head, which I have decided to take as a Sign: the lounging facial muscles were my little pre-Xmas miracles, proving, in a very underdoggy way, that my head can be much less painful and also that I need to consider all sorts of new angles on my Fibromyalgia. My pain could be attributed to my anxiety.

And here I come back to  the B-movie, the part where the doctor says "Yes! It's all becoming so clear! The childhood fear of the Void, as expressed by hiding under tables, was the Sign that was telling me that there's some free-floating anxiety, which is why I dream of things such as ping-pong balls and green tomatos falling on me randomly, which is why I cannot eat them fried, and which is why I can never watch a Mary Stuart Masterson movie without vomiting! IT'S ALL SO SIMPLE!" Because if there's anything a chronic pain sufferer wants- more than xmas, more than fattening foods, more than anything in any Skymall catalogue ever- is a simple explanation for why thier bodies feel the way they do.

So now I'm looking forward to my next dentist appointment, wherein the dentist looks at my mouth and says, "Hey, you didn't grind any of your molars to chalk yet, and four months ago I thought you'd lose at least eight of them!" And I'd get to smile in an easy, just-chatting sort of way, and say "That's because I got me some Xanax, bitch!" and hold up a giant baggie full of a few hundred pills. (Or few thousand- I'm not sure how big the pill is and how many it would take to fill up a giant baggie. Also, I wouldn't call someone a bitch unless they were a female dog. I'm just an old-school feminist, I guess; plus, I think calling everyone bitches is just lazy.)      

I'm not the addictive type, just so you know. And I know that certain pharmaceuticals can be abused in their administration and in thier blah blah blah, blather, alarmist crap, Reagan-era stereotyping, blah blah. I've stopped an addictive drug cold-turkey because I didn't like how much I was taking, despite the hesitation of my very knowlegable doctor (hint: don't go see any of the new 007 movies while withdrawing. Maybe on a tv would be managable, but just not the big screen.) I don't expect to get a perscription any time soon, really, but it's just so damn fulfilling to think of a little ball of chemicals as being just the thing. It calms me.           

Is this what it's like for you, too?

There's a shitstorm a-comin'. I can feel it in my face.

So, yeah, there's some tense times ahead, and I find myself walking with ambiguity (because ambiguity has legs, and likes long walks.)

"Ambiguity" I say, "Should I enter the fray with metaphorical guns drawn, hackles displayed behind my neck so as to make myself appear larger, or should I become cool, like Spock when he's basically waiting out whatever insane tirade Kirk is on so that he can finally chip in his level, science-based opinion?"

"Definitely go with the first. You want to be on the offensive on this one." Ambiguity doesn't mess around with words, which is what drew me in to It in the first place.

"It seems like we're all so comitted, so ruthlessly optimistic about things like our children's prospects or the proper methods of parenting, that I wonder: why bother trying to be detached? Everything is so personalized that even common ground, universally understood norms like being nice to people and not doing gross things in public, has reasonable people frothing at the mouth. And, and..." I trailed off because there was something circling in the breeze just to my right, and I wanted to see-

"And what? Finish your thought. You need to do that more, you know. I can't advise you if you're not going to complete a sentence- I was never good at guessing people's thoughts. You all are so retarded." Ambiguity was working on being less caustic, but It would slip sometimes: old habits and all.

"Don't say retarded." I looked at my friend, who was smiling at me.

"I meant slow" It  said, "and hurry up. We're almost to the end of this path, and I don't have the extra half-hour today."

"All right. So, detachment is just another form of personalization, right? You get to claim to be the one with the clearest insight, because you have the facts. You're calm enough to get them, you know? It's just another way to be superior, to, to prop oneself up in an argument or crisis or what have you. So: what to do? Should I embrace the cause, then, just fling myself into this white-hot mess and strike out when I myself am struck? Will that be satisfying? Because I just want to feel concrete about my decisions. I want to look back at them from my rocking robot-chair and squeak out some certainties about what I'd been like back then. If you see what I'm saying."

"Kind of. You are over-thinking this, honey. Just...whatever you do, embrace that. Smile while you do it. Jesus Christ." Ambiguity was frustrated with me, and I felt some chagrin but didn't mention that I felt it.

"Don't take the Lord's name in vain" I told It.

"Why not?" Ambiguity asked.

I said, "that's an excellent question." And then I took Ambiguity's hand.

Grieving

Grieving is essentially forgetting.

The human mind is this unwieldy ball of complex mechanisms, with its’ gears and engine-like emissions and tell-all chapters and trapdoors that are right out there in plain sight. There are lots and lots of highly trained specialists, many more than the nine-months-from-now appointments might suggest, who’ve told us that, and who have ridiculously complex visual aids to back up said claims. The idea that these persons are just in it for the money doesn’t hold, given that their student loan debts must be literally crushing. So I believe them. Yet the mind also has a few tools that are just as blunt and as simple as they need to be, and one of those tools is forgetting things. A perfect example: women who have more than one child. Why on earth would they want to split themselves in half that more than once? And the fathers: do they want to wake up again after an insufficiently refreshing three hours of sleep just so they could wipe shit from a baby’s ass for fifteen minutes, then have to wake up again in a half hour to argue with someone about who’s turn it is to get up and do it again? So we forget what it was like, for the good of the species. It’s gotten us far. We forget how many times an experiment’s failure made us fill with despair and alienate our loved ones, and so we persevere and invent vaccines. We also carry on and keep trying until we create the first viable pair of downhill skis, because it’s a joyous thing to do, and we’re intent on seeding that joy anywhere snowy and steep enough. Perhaps it’s gotten us too far: we can see unspoiled wilderness and forget that it’s there for a reason and that last time we tore it down for the plywood there were dire consequences.

 Forgetting is simple and powerful. Grieving is forgetting. When someone dies, most bereaved people hear that time will heal, which is true because they will forget the awful shit about the dead person, or the awful shit that the dead person did to them, out of self-defense, which is the best offense, species-wise. We do forget things about our dead, no matter how many scrapbooks we make or how many times we get really drunk on that person’s favorite scotch. We just do- it’s like breathing or copulating. The only thing that will bring some memories back is a specific smell, but then we’ll forget what the smell was, then that there was a memory attached to something we’d smelled in the first place. We’re doomed and blessed to forget: doomed because of the obvious doomy things, and blessed because forgetting clears up space for us to use cherishing the good stuff, or at least the stuff that taught us something. Ideally it’s the good. I can conjure images and words that make me feel bad about how I was afraid of my father because he was booming and terse when angry, but what I remember is his love of be-bop jazz and his bad jokes and how happy he was to be around me and my mother and sister.

This is for my Dad and my father-in-law and everyone else I’ve lost. Mostly, though, it’s for my friends who have just lost someone in their immediate families. You’ll forget soon, except for a few things- and that’ll be better.

angriness

Mr.Swesson (first name: meanie) spoke in what some would call a a gruff tone. "you are joking- say you're joking!" and the part-time pharmacist thatwas serving him had an expression of panic and curiousity. Meanie Swesson tried again. "I cannot have just come here for nothing! Iwent to two other Osco Stores and they sent me all the way here! Did I come to this one- your Osco- to be told you don'tcarry that brand when the llast store assured me you did??" The part-time pharmacist tried to say something. "Sir, if there's a problem with the service, I can get-" But Mr. Swesson interrupted. "I would like to see the manager, yes!" Mrs. Welnow (first name: Ha-ha) had heard the whole thing, and there was much to explain. She thought of the crowded store and bad timing, the freshness of the part-time pharmacist. "Will you need that in a bag or were you just going to stick it up your ass?" Those listening would have characterised her as "frustrated" had they felt it was safe to speak. There was a tense moment, then a series of them, making it the longest -recorded tense stare in store history. Then they both started laughing together, like the whole episode was a big joke.Mrs. Welnow was quite surprised four weeks later when she recieved word that she was fired for terrorizing her employees. She decided to have a word with Mr. Swasson, and she was sure, very sure, that she could keep her tone civil.

lots more pool time

I'd never swum a continuous mile until well after I got FM (with "FM" meaning "Fibromyalgia" and "got" meaning "suffered enough to see a doctor about.") And that is an achievement. Swimming a continuous mile was not a great idea, but I had to do it, because I was at camp, and camp is where one does things like swims for too long and stays up too late to eat vats of molten sugar with ten other people, only one of whom is even remotely expected to act like an adult.

This continuous mile of mine was to impress people, such as my Uncle Sandy, who's a lifelong swimmer and generally lithe person who asked "Really?" before congratulating me. He wasn't there when it happened. My in-laws were there, and I'm not sure which of them I was trying to impress more, but I think it was the children. They've known me as Auntie Jenn, cool but sickly. Or not sickly but whiny, at least. I was probably never cool to them either (the viscous beasts,) except for the one summer when we were all together at a Boy Scout's camp and I swore that I could do it by the end of the week, when it was being counted and legitimised by the Head Life Guard.

It hurt like hell. No: it hurt like you would hurt if you'd been wrapped in heavy-duty rubber bands two days before and were swimming like that. For a mile. I gave my rooting husband the bird because he was getting video of me paddling back and forth in the bitty little pool for 88 lengths and I didn't have the air to just say "AAAAIIIIIGGGHHH, GODDAMMIT!" It hurt worse the next day, which was unfortunate (or just stupid,) because it was the last day and we had to mop floors and pack kitchenware; I was doing that feeling the rubber bands and also the areas around my head and neck where I'd been mysteriously beaten during my drug-assisted sleep the night before. But the aforementioned beasts were impressed and allowed me to feel their admiration, for a short time.

I was pained deeply and I accomplished something hard. I still find it weird that those things can co-exist, but there you go.