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May Day Memories

01 Sunday May 2022

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What is it about the first day of May, anyway? If you’re Neo-Pagan, it’s a major holiday (Beltane); if you’re in organized labor, it is a landmark in the fight for an eight-hour day–and if you’re a Morris weirdo, it means getting up in the pre-dawn and preparing to do this.

I come from Morris weirdo roots: About 35 years ago, my then-husband and I ran into an enchanting woman at a convention who was wearing all sorts of interesting buttons, and she told us about Morris dancing. It sounded interesting; she was smart and sexy; so we went and got sucked into the ravenous mouth of Tradition.

I’ve always felt a little weird being a Morris person, seeing as the tradition is English and I am BIPOC, but our local team in Madison, WI was completely welcoming. (I was later amused when I did my DNA and discovered that a full 55% of my randomly-compiled DNA comes from Britain anyway.) My knees crapped out on me early (yay titanium!) so I didn’t do much dancing–especially as I am also bad at knowing my right from my left. Instead, I became our team’s Jack in the Green. This traditional role (there are several, called characters) usually is played by the village blacksmith, who is gotten properly drunk and then put into a wicker tree-shaped frame which is then decorated with greenery. (You need the blacksmith because that thing is sheeping heavy.) Instead, I wore green everything–tights, tunic, and a cloak I spent hours and hours sewing leaves upon–and green greasepaint.

This greasepaint fooled at least one lady into assuming I was white, and I had the nigh-numinous experience of Being Behind the Color Line as she explained to me that she wanted fertility withdrawn from her sister, who was *oh horrors* Consorting With A Black Man. (At least she didn’t use The Word. This has given me some real sympathy for you pale folk–I couldn’t think of a blessed thing to say to this woman, because when I’m truly in shock, my brain grabs some popcorn and just watches.)

I loved being Jack. I had an ailanthus twig (about three feet long) for a wand and a pair of fish puppets. I didn’t even try to not move my lips–here’s a tip: If you focus on your friend as if you’re listening, the audience does too once it realizes it can’t stare at your jaw waiting to catch you at it. It was a huge amount of fun, and freed my deeply squished Performer. (I’m an introvert whose large black wardrobe stems from years of being BACKstage.)

And the fertility is real: My body used to “have late periods” every so often; basically my progesterone would cut out at about day 37 of my cycle and I would miscarry. So I was on heavy-duty meds, but still no baby–until we started Morris dancing. Baby #1 was discreetly conceived while we were illegally camping out at the May Day site, and Baby #2–who just showed up at random. much to our surprise–was medically confirmed two years later to the day. Hmm, magick: I’m watching you now.

And then life changed, and I ended up here in Massachusetts. I was too busy to bond with the local team, and Morris faded into the background of my memory, until this morning.

My son (Baby #2, now 31) lives with me, and he was brought up doing Morris. Just now, he packed up his bells and his flute, and hiked off in the freezing pre-dawn to meet up with the local teams on the banks of the Charles, all ready to dance the sun up once again. I have a rotten cold, so am staying in this year, but I’m delighted he’s there. It’s a bizarre little ritual, but it’s ours.

On Arting

26 Saturday Feb 2022

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Art is inherently scary. What the sheep does it mean, all those countless people falling prey to what is really a neurological illness—being compelled to endlessly create, whether it be Moby Dick or a hand-knitted scarf? Art makes no sense, really. Never has; I think that’s part of what the resistance to abstract painting and sculpture was all about: It swept aside the screens and forced us to seriously consider the implications of the saying, “Art for art’s sake.”

Art is the result of the universe reaching out for eternal fruition; we artists are the very tiniest tips of the Creator’s fractal. Sounds great on your resume, but actually it’s kind of a pain in the sheep. Forget all the high-minded words over What Art Means and stop agonizing over the weight of your content, you precious flower, you. Instead, create—endlessly create. Let it flow out of the parts of your body which you use as your art tools—because if you don’t, you will get sick.

Let me repeat that: You. WILL. Get sick. Physically, spiritually, psychologically. You are already fragile—a receptor made from conception to tune into the highest frequencies—and you will spend a higher amount of time than Average Joe on bodily maintenance. Sorry about that. And that’s if you are a good bunny and create, create, create.

If you don’t, you get what I will call spiritually constipated. All that untold, unsung, and unbeaded Stuff just piles up on itself, like the chocolates in Lucy Ricardo’s assembly line. Moreover, your poor little Universe Antenna is straining itself to the utmost to reconnect. This results in all sorts of nonsense. For me, it worsens my mood, causing a spiral in which it becomes harder and harder to function. It also turns up my fibromyalgia, and my ADHD batters itself against its physical cage like a frantic bird. Yuck.

Don’t spend too much time erasing and editing—that’s all very well and necessary, but unless you have a slot open for an endless slew of new art, the revision process can devolve into a comforting nanny who shields you from the nasty Universe.

Create, create, create.

Off My Meds

18 Friday Feb 2022

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Just when you think you’re jogging along in your OK-enough-I-guess rut, Sheep Happens.

I am an N and a J (the other letters flip-flop on me depending on my mood when I’m taking the test), so I make sense of the Universe by logic and deduction to the best of my ability. So I *think* this all started when I got kidney stone surgery last year.

My urologist put her foot down, having seen me many times for this, and I ended up with an endocrinology workup which showed that all I needed was a huge mucking dose of Vitamin D. So I took it (am taking it still), and as a result. . . my mild but chronic depression gradually faded away.

As many before me have likened it, it was like some cobwebs got swept away. And gradually I noticed that my years-old anxiety seemed to be ratcheting up. We raised my mood stabilizer—and it actually got worse.

In a phone session, my prescriber and I had a simultaneous epiphany: It wasn’t anxiety, it was an extra-pyramidal effect called akathisia. Bad news. I needed to come off the drug.

We tapered me off relatively quickly because the akathisia is really hellish (think of having had too much coffee and wanting to shake out your entire body, all the while some brain chemical or other is saying “Danger, Will Robinson!”), and here I am.

At first, the “anxiety” morphed at first into plain old fear: What will happen? I’m off my meds! Aieeee!! Visions of my manic episodes flashed, coupled with terror of their depressive partners. Would I go back on the rollercoaster?

Well, not necessarily. My life is really stable right at the moment, and while I was on the drug, I did a decade’s worth of work on the trauma that pushed me onto the ride to begin with. I figured, there are other stabilizers out there we can try if we need them, so let’s poke our nose out and see what the world is like.

And the answer is, really intense! It’s sort of like being on an epistemological acid trip. I feel a little naïve. All those years the drug was keeping me stable, it was doing other things as well—and it turns out that those things meant it was buffering me from my emotions. And both my PTSD and my ADHD are like kids on a holiday right now: Whooo hypervigilance! Focus? What’s that?

Yet despite all, it feels like a normal and healthy process. My brain is Doing Stuff as it readjusts to life without the drug, and I kinda need to stay out of the way.

The first thing I noticed was that I am experiencing pleasant sensations more intensely: Washing my face was its own mini-epiphany of the joys of warmth and friction. Of course, there’s a flip side: I have become what a co-worker charitably called “irritable,” partly due to my getting a lot less sleep, I suspect.

(I am still on a fistful of pills, what with the heart disease and fibro and all, as well as the possibly-not-as-needed-now anxiolytics. But in the recovery world, they’re just the backup singers.)

So in short, I am having a neuro sheepstorm. I took advantage of my accrued leave, and bugged out of work for two weeks, almost before I said anything I really shouldn’t have. My plan is to just catch up with who I am now and what my dealio is: I’ve lost 100 pounds; I turn 60 this year; my creative process has been on a slow but persistent uptick. And now I’m off my meds.

Because Trade-Ins Aren’t Yet

24 Friday Jan 2020

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This is what happened this morning: My Inner Critic has always been my worst enemy, only I didn’t know it; and then last fall I started chanting and meditating, and my karma changed or something. A capsule broke open inside of me and I began producing more energized work, and started owning my skills. Et cetera. Your basic epiphany, size medium. Moving on.

So drawing has been a big issue for me. I draw fairly well, when the winds are right and the gods are satiated, but I have a whole insecurity bouquet about it. One of them has been working with oil pastel, which I tended to turn into an overworked, insipid mess of visual porridge.

Thing is, I hadn’t really noticed that my technique had changed! I know that I got up one day with this drawing bursting out of my seams and just threw it down on the paper. And it worked, in that Material A went to Location B and stayed there despite Challenges C–QQ of making the piece happen around that particular stroke of greasepaint. I drove it, it didn’t drive me. Woot! It was like that night when the clutch went up and the gas went down without my sweating blood over it.

Well, maybe not entirely like that night, because that next morning I had to drive 1100 miles, following the moving van while wrangling a child passenger. If the pastel technique came in the mail, the standard transmission technique was delivered by a divine first-baseman kneesliding towards home, wings curved against his landing.

Why is it that we tend to dismiss the skills we’ve committed to muscle memory and don’t pat ourselves on the back for them? Let’s give it up for walking, knitting, oh GOD driving, using chopsticks and (you just did it) typing! I bet you can add to that list. But we all go yeah, whatever, everybody can do that and some people make my mad skills look really lame, mumble.

I think this is part of the bad Western habit we have of discounting, mistreating, and ignoring our bodies. Childbirth isn’t the only time amnesia kicks in; stop for a moment and remember when you couldn’t do the things on our list–hunting and pecking, ending up with a twisted, grubby third of a potholder, and trying to merge onto the Beltline. Your body has learned a lot of tricks, and since trade-ins aren’t available yet, it’s time we made these tricks socially equivalent to long division, reading, and remembering the names of the people you go to services with. Now there’s a toughie, but that thing you did when you cut up your tofu chop yesterday–woot!

This essay is dedicated in love to Al, the guy who taught me how to tie my shoes.

Looking for a Word

03 Saturday Feb 2018

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(Just skim the two paragraphs of techie art neep if you’re not interested in paint. The essay proper begins below them.)

I just participated in a month-long journal challenge with a group of women artists, and Got Religion–I discovered a new medium! It’s Japanese watercolor, often called “gansai tambi” as that’s the ad blurb used by the manufacturer to describe them.  (It literally means something like “vibrant aesthetic.”) I majored in what I suppose I must now call Western watercolor in college, making full sheet (22×30″) color field paintings (think Rothko, only busier) and thinking I was having the time of my life. Then fast forward thirty years and here’s this stuff that made me squee when I unpacked it. (Disclosure: I had a $50 gift card from doing a survey, and went on Amazon. The 36 pan set, three water brushes, and another six-pan set of metallics left a buck and change on the card; YMMV.)

Part of my honeymoon joy is being forced once again to learn what stuff does–the great thing about the big abstracts I did as a kid is that it showed me pretty much every trick Western watercolor and its French cousin, gouache have up their sleeves. It’s a little like gouache, a little like either sort of tempera in consistency, and behaves on paper like nothing else I’ve found. The pigment is crazy thick and you need a lot of water to make it behave like . . . watercolor. Sigh . . .

Anyway, I whacked out a basic image to use as the Tribe of Tiger cover and came back to the computer because the sun was in my eyes. I noticed, almost as a by-the-way, that I was ecstatic. It was very much a body feeling–a combination of terrific sex, a filling breakfast, and a satisfactory trip to the loo. Oh, and the best coffee. I feel this way every time I make art I’m pleased with, and even when I’m depressed, it makes me feel at least some better, at the very least while I’m making something.

I thought to myself, “Weird. I guess sex is the closest many people get to ecstasy.” Maybe joy too. I don’t know how that makes me feel. Am I right? If so, am I being kind of snobby to feel a bit sorry for them? Or is this more about me being abnormally unimpressed with sex?

Don’t get me wrong–I’ve had some great sex. It just doesn’t hit the same spots as, say, the smell of oil paint, which makes me tremble and moan. I have similar reactions to music I like, which is to say, much of it, but maybe particularly early music (think Byrd and Tallis).

As for writing, the feeling is more subdued, possibly because I’m not getting as much sensory input, and it’s more draining. But I still come away from good sessions feeling like this is why I’ve been put on earth.

So what do y’all think? Especially other creatives–is it better than sex? Is it ecstasy? Or do we need a new word?

Journalish Entry

27 Saturday Jan 2018

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inky hand

Who’s procrastinating? I am! I am!

My still foggy brain figured out how to add the photo and still have text next to it; faithful readers with sharp memories will notice this as a new skill. Yay me!

I’ve been depressed for most of the past two months–Christmas cheered me up, which makes me feel shallow and trite, but there it is. (Can a person be trite? Sure they can. We’ve all been trapped at that business dinner.) It’s not that I spend hours gloomily musing on Being and Nothingness, it’s more that I don’t know what to do. (As in, read a book or play a game. As far as Being and Nothingness goes . . . ) Worse, once I figure it out (if I do), I spend seemingly hours getting it done because I am far more easily distracted than usual. This is a common symptom of depression, but I have ADHD, so who can tell?

I am open to suggestions. I can’t take meds, because I either have a weird reaction to them, or they might make me manic. (Trust me–or trust those who’ve been close to me–you don’t want to see me manic. I don’t do anything amusing like start new religious movements, but I do end up in the hospital. Pity. Being manic feels great! Which is why it’s so hard to treat.) I am working my WRAP plan. But here’s the hell of it: If I am trying my best, if I am doing something borderline productive (like blogging), it means I’m having a good day. If I’m having a bad day, I can’t even focus on a video game. Arrghh.

In other news: Although I have been faithful to my protein shake breakfast, to the point where it now feels normal, I’ve only lost about five pounds. I had it pushed a little lower, but the holidays snuck two pounds back on. Sigh. (This matters because I am due for bariatric surgery this spring, and I must lose 16 pounds so they can maneuver around my massive fatty liver, cuddled around my stomach like a protective bloat of tick.) However, I have dropped my application off at the Y, and the guy who Does That will come back from vacation any day now. Sigh. Seeing as I don’t get a surgery date until I see their shrink (March) I have some time. It’s only 11 pounds, right?

Tribe of Tiger (this year’s NaNo and the third in the kitty series–Eureka, published here, is in the same world but is not strictly canon) is SO close to being finished it’s a bit scary. I’m at the point where the next two or three paragraphs will wrap up the main action. There must be a name for this feeling that I should kill somebody off for it to be good art!

I’ve been doing more visual art lately–got involved with an art journal challenge. Seeing as I wimped out on Inktober, I would have been more reluctant, but, golly mo, my daughter makes those blank books! So I begged one that had some invisible flaw, and have been having a great time. Sure, I’m behind, but it’s an improvement over Inktober’s 12-day performance. (To be fair, what slowed me down then was lack of scanner access; I learned from this mistake and have been doing just fine snapping pix from my phone.)

OKCupid (deliberately not linked because drive-bys) used to do this thing where they made you pick three words to describe yourself. So I guess right now they’re fat, depressed, and creative. I could do worse.

Listening to the Silence

23 Tuesday May 2017

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I have left my noisy urban home for a few days, and am now in a very quiet place. All I can hear other than my own little noises is the dripping of my friend’s cat bowl, which makes a teeny recycling fountain to keep the water fresher. Strange to tell, instead of being relaxing, all this stillness has done is underscore my own disquiet, which I tend to keep buried like a secret shame.

When I realized Things were burbling up from my inner cesspool, I opted to turn off Pandora and stay with the cat bowl and what I call “microcries:” bursts of blubbering that last about 15 to 30 seconds. It’s sort of like crying constipation–that’s all I can get out at a time, although I feel myself to be a very cistern of tears.

As previously noted, I’m a random crier at the best of times, and I’m getting closer to deciphering why, or at least a maybe-why. I think that when it’s triggered by something heartwarming, it’s because my heart is in reality feeling cold and lonely; if the trigger is heroism, I am afraid that I myself am weak and helpless.

I do many things. I sing, draw, make jewelry, mother, befriend, love. But I feel as tottery at most of it as I do when my physical therapist cajoles me into trying to stand on just my right leg. (Almost everybody is a little lopsided at this, but I’m a champ at lop.) The only thing I really have is the writing. The sheeping writing, which fails to make me any money or gain me any renown, and which will likely continue to fail to do either.

All I am is the writing. That’s what’s at the bottom, behind the tears, underneath the depression, and despite the failure.

During this quiet afternoon, I went to the extent of Asking for a Sign, first in what passes in me for silent meditation, and then just talking out loud. So many people tell confident stories of hearing a Voice, either from outside or within–why not me? Although my faith isn’t what I’d call strong, my belief in the possibility of a Higher Power is stronger than my fear that #45 will turn America into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and that’s something, isn’t it? But nobody came to my outreaching self-pity party, leaving me to confront what I have, what I know.

Perhaps all I’m really for is the writing. Maybe one or two people will be reached by the words that start at my core and ooze from my fingertips. They will laugh, cry, feel less alone or freakish; they will feel a kindred spirit. My fiction will keep them company for a bit.

What I hear, what I know, is just the writing. And sometimes it is barely enough, but it remains.

Tide Change

28 Tuesday Mar 2017

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Because I can’t meditate (I am a trauma survivor and get jumpy if I feel myself losing conscious control of my body), I had to find a way to dump stress after the New Year’s heart attack. So I cut back my hours at my day job down to one day a week, and that will stop in May. I will be picking up more editing work, and that will fill the financial gap, but belts will be tightened around here.

I made this decision about a couple of months ago, and have until now been too busy with the editing to do much else–somewhere along the line I acquired the Protestant Work Ethic, damn it to blazes. But now there’s a lull, it’s a gray Tuesday morning, and I’m here in my sweats debating getting another tea so I can finish this post in one sitting instead of going back to bed for a half hour: Now what?

Above my desk is a copy of a Batman meme: It is the crisp and elegant Batman from The Animated Series, pointing his finger at me. The caption reads, “Quit Procrastinating/Work on Your Art.” I’ve put in a decent word count recently–finished the sequel to Long Leggedy Beasties!–and so this Lent I decided to do an hour a day working at visual art. Like most of my Lenten disciplines through the years, it’s most conspicuous for its omission. I did complete the T-shirt design needed for the day job, but that was because I had an external deadline. Other than that–

–I’m blocked. You don’t know how happy I am that I’m at least finding words to put on this screen. I started a weird little story about an autistic girl on a bus, who has just met a mage and his familiar, although she doesn’t know it yet–and I’m stuck. I listened to my beta reader and tore out half of Max’s sequel because I sorta went off topic and threw in the kitchen sink (an age-drenched failing of my work in all media), and now am doing the stare–write a sentence–stare–write three more–stare–wander off method, known to writers everywhere. And don’t get me started on Damascus. I’m just glad I have a solid beta reader to point out the screamingly obvious. Sigh.

I also have to self-pub Max and get him out of my system. I tried finding an agent for him, and nobody bit past the can-I-see-three-pages stage, and those were the agents, I discovered, who reply to all queries that way. (I wish they would just put that in their requirements; it would save a lot of raised hopes.) At least a few people have read Beasties and been kind enough to compliment me on it, so this way Max will get his chance to do some people-pleasing.

I just wish I didn’t feel that doing so means I’m a failure. The market has changed, that’s all, and the good thing that it brings is that some people will read my stuff. Maybe not as many as would if I had a big publisher doing advertising and whatnot, but some.

So much for going back to bed. The 18-pound cat is stretched out on its bottom half and she has a stronger character than I do in terms of my getting up the gumption to remove my loving pet who just wants to be near me. Time to soldier on, watch closely, and try to see what life is saying to me.

Tears, Idle Tears

05 Monday Dec 2016

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I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair.

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, . . .

Listening to k.d. lang’s version of “Hallelujah” at the Canadian winter Olympics and crying my eyes out. No surprise. Loreena McKennit’s “Lady of Shalott” does the same thing to me. The Tennyson version, yep. LOTS of Tennyson (quoted above, ironically), which in this modern day and foreign country is supposed to show my bad taste in poetry.

My YouTube channel is in my blog roll; go there and you’ll see other things that made my fat little chin quiver uncontrollably. (The Marines lip-synching “Hold it Against Me”? Oh hell yeah!) The Muppets singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” probably holds the gold, though. And I don’t feel too bad about “Where the Hell is Matt?” because it does it to at least one of my friends as well.

Times I have cried in my current therapist’s office in the last seven or eight years: 1. I don’t understand this. Strangely, I used to cry at the therapist all the time. Then I found the one who (for lack of a better word) cured me, and after she left–not so much. I have a more collegial relationship with my current therapist, working in mental health as I do. Maybe that’s it–although I’ve cried in front of colleagues. We showed The Pursuit of Happyness at my center one day. I was a soggy tissue basket case. People were polite and did not notice, but I felt kind of stupidly naked.

Indeed, Lord Tennyson, I know not what they mean. Did you?

There are three different types of tears: basal (lubrication), reflex (onions), and psychic (Tennyson). Also known as stress tears, these last release leucine enkephalin, a neurotransmitter and painkiller. Maybe my crying fixation is similar to a bulimic’s vomiting–I feel cleaned out and better after a good cry. (Good cry is defined as one that I don’t try to choke off and which happens by myself–my family knows all about this peculiarity, but it’s still embarrassing.) I have long lashes, and when sodden with saline, every blink deposits a tiny drop on the inner surface of my glasses, like snowy flyspecks. I feel a minor shame and an infinitesimal bit of anger when I clean them off: They are evidence of a behavior I do not understand.

What interests me and confuses me most about my tears is that they are usually evoked by the profoundly beautiful. I remember choking up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a school trip in high school. And let’s not forget perhaps the high point of this: The time I tried to explain it.

It was during that big pre-qualifying exam crunch read in grad school, so I was already under even MORE stress. My (now ex-)husband came into our bedroom and found me sobbing hysterically. I jabbed a finger at Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, and blubbered, “All the little people have left the town, and they’re never coming ba-ack!” Amused, my scientist said, “Yes, dear. Would you like some coffee?”–this being the only possible logical response. Damn thing still makes me cry.

I can’t read moving poetry aloud. Sometimes in choir I have to make my mind a blank while we sing certain passages; I think music is what makes me most susceptible.

I am hereby positing a theory about what I’ll call my idle tears: Although my life is pretty stable right now, it wasn’t always so, and my excellent curative therapist only had two years, so we only scratched the surface of my PTSD from all that childhood trauma. Said trauma was pretty severe–I score a 19 out of 20 on a professional scale of childhood suckage–and maybe it’s still all in there, buried too deep to dream away, but not to cry out.

I just wish I could control them. But maybe the whole point is that I can’t.

 

My Silent Instrument

17 Sunday Jul 2016

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(Written to Genesis’ “I Can’t Dance.”)

I’ve just finished a spot of what my son calls “ADHDing,” which means browsing the net (usually inspired by something on Facebook; this time it was actually from a piece I’m editing) and pulling up YouTube vids by the criteria of “Hey! Let’s go lookit that!” This is by far my favorite way of wasting an hour, but it always ends up making me feel a little bad.

I can’t sing terribly well, and my dancing is a private thing. My photos are all badly composed and only the evolution of the camera saves my thumbs from being stars. I can’t play a musical instrument, and I’ve lost my drawing facility through non-use. And I kinda doubt I have the kind of fantastic patience it takes to do animation. Is this what it’s like to feel dumb? In both senses of the word?

All I can do is write, or so it feels. And I know that’s important, and it has its own magic: I can make people hallucinate sights, sounds, and smells. I can make them feel sad, or make them laugh. I can make them happy. But sometimes that’s not enough. Or is it?