I was all set to write every day. I didn't declare that I would because I thought I would just do it, but then I was derailed by a deep unexpected sadness.
I have been making tons of jewelry, partly because that's what I do when I am alone, which I often am at night. I make stuff. So this time I hauled out all my jewelry bits spread them out all over my desk and in little clear cases on the floor. When everything is spread out it's a constant battle with the cat. I spend a lot of time screaming at Jasper, “Get off the desk you turd monkey!”, while he lords over the pile, trying to eat wire because his brain is the size of a raisin, with only slightly more computational power. If I am not careful he'll make off with half-finished necklaces, dragging them down the hallway while I am in the bathroom or getting more coffee. Then I have to find all the beads and restring everything and he just looks at me like I'm a crazy loud bag of wind, “What's HER problem?”
While I am doing all this deconstruction and reconstruction of failed projects and busted bits, I am listening to music or This American Life or The Moth. Or I watch documentaries (there is such a marvel of free documentaries online.) Sometimes, if the work part is going very well, I am just looking for filler. Just a stupid crap show I don't have to pay very close attention to. This is how I ended up watching "Jersey Shore" (sweet jeebus, what a sadly compelling pile of horseshit). This is how it is that I sometimes watch an entire series while cutting fabric or paper. I watched all of Peepshow (if I had three thumbs that show would get a three thumbs up). I watched a totally boring documentary called "Salesman" which seemed like it could be interesting, I wanted it to be interesting, because the idea of real footage from some bible salesmen in the 50's sounds like it should be interesting. Except it wasn't at all. It was like being stuck in a hotel room with a bunch of really boring dudes who were sad about their bible selling stats and blew off steam by making fun of the Irish.
What I am getting at is that sometimes I am not too picky about the media I land on. Sometimes there is much to be learned by just watching things that kinda suck, as a writer and teller of stories it's helpful to see the breakdown points. I get a kick out of playing Where's Plothole. When I have a long night of Making Stuff ahead of me I just go to Hulu and pick something without any real expectations. Sometimes though, it's so compelling I end up doing more watching than working. Abel Raises Cain, was so fantastic I didn't get much work done. Or “Last Tango in Paris”, my god, that movie. I saw it ages ago with my friend Matt, who invited me over to watch it in his father's psychiatry office in the basement. I was 16. I had a fierce crush on Matthew that never even resulted in a make-out session, so that combined with the content of the movie and location where we viewed it already made it pretty weird. His dad came home and came up behind us, asking what we were watching. He then announced what a great movie it was, put his hands on our shoulders and kind of pushed us together on the couch. Then told us he was going to go upstairs and leave us to it. So the butter scene glowed extra absurd for me. Watching it again nearly 20 yeas later, it still strikes me how strange it was for Matt's dad to nod in approval. (As an aside, don't watch this on Hulu. They chopped off the last twenty minutes of the movie in a cruel act of fuckery.)
And then, even though some part of my brain knew better, I decided to watch When a Man Loves a Woman. It pretty much knocked me over and ran me down. I bawled like a busted sissy at least four times during that movie, and then went to bed in a weepy heap and slept for twelve hours. I woke up pissed off. I put on my glasses and found the insides covered in tear droplets, as though my eyes had just shot out a mist of cloudy private swamp. I spent the day like a hermit, crying for no reason at all. I didn't talk to anyone. I didn't write. I just made jewelry. And I thought, I should be writing, I should be punching something, I should be more and do more. I should stop failing. I should be eliminating things off my giant list of things to do. I should be steam cleaning something. I should be accepting that lovely invitation to sit around a fire with my friends. But, as much as I wanted to go out and be personable, and enjoy one of those rare, crisp Autumn evenings where I come home smelling like a bonfire, I just couldn't trust that I would keep my emotions in check. I don't mind expressing myself, it's just when everything is that close to the surface I worry that I might barf up a torrent of sadness, and I'm pretty sure the hostess wasn't planning on that. I couldn't show up like, "Hi. I am a sad failure, may I drink your wine? Let's make your party all about me. How 'bout a hug?"
When I hit play, I took up my pliers and beads, intent on making. But almost immediately I was struck by a sinking sensation in the shape of my mother. I had always found Meg Ryan kind of bleh, she's cute in a way that was perfect for "When Harry Met Sally", which is a mildly entertaining fluff movie, which is what I thought I was getting myself into. I just wanted a stupid romantic comedy that would give me plenty of room to look away often and contemplate shapes and the way light passes through glass. What I was not looking for was a full on hijacking of my emotional core. It hit me immediately that Meg Ryan reminded me of my mother. And then it hit me even harder. That movie gave me an uncomfortably familiar memory of BEING that eight year old daughter with sad old eyes and a younger sibling to protect. It was me all over again, trying very hard to stay small and perfect, to straddle that line of being a kid when that was expected of me, and being a responsible clean-up crew without taking any credit for it because that would mean saying out loud that often, my mother was not in her body and needed to be protected from knowing that. My mother was interesting, sometimes pretty, adventurous and smart and then, very dramatically drunk, mean, emotionally retarded, scary, intense, volatile, selfish, hungover, incapable and unsafe. And, as a movie, as intense and believable as the shittiest shit parts were, it was still a best case scenario. A woman has a sweet husband, two bright and adorable kids, a good job. A nice house. She gets help, she gets clean, she re-connects with her herself and her family. How nice for these fictitious people.
My mother was pregnant at 17, married at 18 and divorced in her mid twenties. She had two kids, lived on welfare and the charity of friends and various men and lived by making herself into whatever a man wanted in exchange for a few months of lodging. And while HER story is deeply sad and compelling, it bleeds all over MY story. What her choices meant for my sister and me was a whole lot of chaos and moving. Constant. Moving. It meant going to three different schools per grade for most of elementary school. It meant always being the new kid. It meant I did a lot of reading and hung out by myself making silly noises and drawing and being deeply nerdy and watching out for my sister. It meant living with strange men, in their strange man apartments with their man strange stuff. It meant keeping my possessions packable. I am really fucking good at packing. I trained for it like it might one day be an Olympic fucking event. In fact, my mom once moved us into a boyfriend's house where my sister and I were granted night time access to the strange man's weight room, and I got to sleep for a few weeks on a weight bench. Try THAT for balance, here I come Olympics!
I know what it's like the be the punk kid of a mom in detox. I know what it's like to see your drunk mother, crazed and angry, slamming a cast iron pan into a sink full of dirty dishes with a sound that punches you in the heart, hurts your brain and fucks your sunshine. I have watched my mother destroy everything in a room, slamming an electric guitar through the glass of the television, pulling things off the wall and smashing them. I sat through two speeches, once when I was five and again when I was twelve, that started like this, “Your mother tried to kill herself. She's in the hospital.” Unlike a movie, there was no sweet, stabilizing daddy figure who could step in for me and let me vent by smashing my mother's vodka bottles in the trashcan. No adult scooped me up and told me things would be OK. When I visited my mother in the crazy ward there were no swans and wide green expanses. There were other crazy people, and my mother. My mother did not go to AA and come out stronger and more understanding. My mother went when she was forced to go, and she called it a meat market and she hated every second of it. So, watching a movie that took much of the emotional fuckery of life with a raging alcoholic, only to stomp around my memories and make it tidy kind of pissed me off. I realize no one wants to see a movie where things go from terrible to worse and stay unresolved for thirty years, but that's kind of what my movie would look like. Which is why it's hard for me to even write about it. I assume someone is reading this, and if it's really depressing I apologize. I am sorry my movie sucks. You can have your money back.
I clearly have some things to work out. My heart has a basement and it's crammed with shit I don't need anymore.
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