national blogpoon's christmas vacation

Dear friends of this blog,

I'm taking a couple of weeks off to get my holiday on. Please pour yourself an eggnog and warm yourself by this hollow gif, and I'll be back to my normal Wednesday posts on December 31st.

Skoal!

Love,
Tina

friend

There’s a card in the Tarot, the Six of Cups, that I have a special feeling for. Some cards play one clear emotional chord—boom, happy; boom, tormented—but the Six of Cups shifts around. It’s slippery, it refracts the light differently depending on how you look at it. Some decks attach one-word meanings to the face of the cards (which I hate because that sucks the nuance out) but in those decks the word for the Six of Cups varies in a strange and pleasing way. Innocence. Nostalgia. Goodwill. Sorrow. Pleasure. I like that there’s no consensus on whether this card plays a minor or a major chord. I love the Six of Cups in the same way I love Pachelbel’s Canon in D, which I think remains ridiculously beautiful no matter how overplayed and ground into our consciousness it is. They make the same sounds, they attack the same feeling.

While it can signify a few different things in a reading, the Six of Cups often references friendship. Sometimes it heralds the return of an old friend, sometimes it points to a feeling of loss. It’s tricky, like I say, this card. It’s soft on the outside, but it has something piercing at its core. 

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while, and also not wanting to do it. 

Friendship has been on my mind. I’ve been thinking about it more frequently and with more fear and reverence than ever. I lost a major friendship last year, and another friendship may be in critical condition or worse, and…how do I want to say this? If friendship is a warm cabin you can shelter in from the elements, then my own cabin, the place in me where my friendships take place, has a door that feels like it’s come off its hinges. I feel the wind a little more in here these days, hear it blowing louder, think more frequently about the dark outside the cabin, and what might be out there. Anyway, it’s a vulnerable feeling and a protective feeling all at once. I sort of don’t want to let anybody else in until I make repairs, but I can’t make repairs if I don’t let anybody in.    

Conflict.

I have great friendships, beautiful friendships, current ones, very sturdy. Let me go on the record acknowledging that and giving thanks for that right away, and I’m going to talk about a couple of those ones more here in a bit. But I can see more clearly that these are treasures that, as with all things in the world, can be taken away, or wrecked, or can fade. This whole enterprise, this being alive thing, is precarious. Care must be taken, and even then, there are no guarantees.

I was talking to my mother-in-law* this morning about this vulnerable feeling, this instinct to protect myself, and she wisely pointed out that going around trying to protect yourself all the time is a bad move. You’re just going to miss everything. And then I think about those Buddhist monks who make sand mandalas, so laborious and intricate and beautiful, and then as soon as they’re done they sweep them away. They know the score. Yes, it’s going to go. That’s fine. Until then, build the shit out of it. 

*She’s not the mother-in-law of popular consciousness. Larraine is snuggly as any of my best girlfriends. I say that because I recognize that the phrase “I was talking to my mother-in-law about this vulnerable feeling” is just begging for one of those record-scratch sound cues. 

**********

When I was a little girl living in New York, my best friend was Allison Pykett, as I’ve mentioned here before. Allison and I met in kindergarten and rode together until my family moved to Seattle at the end of third grade. We rode past that, too, writing letters and paying cross-country visits until I was 13 years old, and then we drifted apart in the purest way, time and distance melting the bond by themselves. No angst, no ouches, just a clean dissolve. 

She’s the first person I ever called on a telephone. I remember that maiden dialing voyage: standing in front of the old beige rotary phone, taking a deep breath, lifting the heavy receiver, sticking my finger in the “9” hole and—screw it, here goes! I’m a woman now—pulling the dial all the way around. Then I did that six more times with different holes, and it got realer with every number. I felt powerful and too wide-open all at once, the way I still do when I call a friend. Nothing is new. Allison’s mom answered, spoke to me sweetly, and put me on the phone to my friend. 

—Do you want to play?
—Yeah, come over.
—Okay.  

Success. Nailed it. Phones are go. Friendship is working. Off to walk the four blocks to her house. 

**********

Do I want to make new friendships? I think so? I don’t know? No? Maybe? Of course?

On the one hand, there’s nothing like being in the company of your great friend, loving/seeing and being seen/loved, warts out, unbuttoned, dishing it all out, hearing all the dish, plotting, snuggling up, railing, chilling, all of it. It’s some of the finest nourishment on the planet. It’s that stuff that the elves gave Frodo. It’s waybread, that company, it’s that little silvery drink. Your friend beefs you up when you’re low, brings you back from the edge of death. How do you even talk about the blessing that this is? In my worst moments, there it was, and I went on, lifted up.

On the other hand, what a roll of the dice. Jesus. Terrifying. You let somebody in past one layer, and that goes well, but then what about the next layer? That might go well, too, but what about the next one? You like me now, but wait. Just wait. Broom’s coming. 

**********

Allison and I are sitting across from each other on my basement floor, humming The Mexican Hat Dance and passing back and forth a sombrero in rhythm. 

Ba DUMP Ba DUMP Ba DUMP 
Ba-dada da-dat-da DUMP  

The idea is that the sombrero gets slapped onto one of our heads on every two-count. We’re ba-dump-ing fast, in a frantic rhythm. It’s hilarious. We’re dying. This is the most hilarious thing of my whole life to that point, all six years. And it’s stupid, we’re not doing anything but passing a hat, but it’s the best. We keep going and going and the humor is amazingly durable.  

********** 

Once, about a year ago, my friend Barbi and I went to the movies. We made a last-minute date and she picked me up at my house and we were both raggedy and undone in our sweatpants and general I'm-not-leaving-the-house clothes, but we were going to Mountlake Terrace where nobody would see us, to a movie theater where they bring you real live food to your seats, so we ate cheeseburgers and chocolate chip cookies and I drank a margarita because I wasn't driving and we snuggled up in our dumb clothes in public and watched The Wolf of Wall Street. I want us to have that same date again with a different movie. (Barbi, I'm asking you right now, right in front of the world and everything. This is like one of those proposals people do at sporting events over the Jumbotron. You'd probably hate that, but marry me for this date anyway.) 

**********

Dicey news. I’m facing a demotion. This is what happened: Allison and Tracy Munz were playing outside Allison’s house, out on Woodland Drive, when a car drove by. Tracy thought that the car might hit Allison, so she pushed Allison out of the street, thereby apparently saving her life. So a code of honor that’s never come up before dictates that Tracy now be Allison’s best friend, since she saved her life. I’m going to have to be her second-best friend. It’s hoped that I’ll understand. I’ve just arrived at Allison’s after this close call with this car driving by, and we’re all standing out on the street, me and Allison and New Number One Tracy Munz, and I’m just hearing about this. 

Allison informs me of my new status in a kind and matter-of-fact way, and Tracy looks partially regretful and partially hopeful.  

Huh. Well. Wow. Okay. I guess I do, I guess I do understand. Tracy is usually kind of a mild, dare-I-say mushy presence, so it’s not like I’ve been hip-checked aside by some mean little cow. This is a good deed that’s just spun out of control. So, okay. Well, shit. 

(My demotion didn’t last long, but it introduced the notion of shakiness into my conception of friendship, just the way a tiny trembler lets you know you’re living in earthquake country.)

**********

I don’t call people enough. I never have, but now with two children I really, really don’t. Some of it is that I’m talking all day. I live with five other people: my husband, our two children, my brother and my mother. I love these people, but that’s a lot of talking. And with children, talking isn’t always casual chatter. There’s a lot of urgent talking, the kind that requires projection. So at the end of the day, I’m usually talked out. I don’t want to use my voice any more. 

So I don’t call people enough, and then when you don’t call people or otherwise communicate frequently, you both have more to talk about when talking time comes, and so the phone call feels bigger. 

But more than anything I have a horror of imposing myself on someone who would rather be doing something else, and I assume that most other humans would rather be doing something else than answering a phone that I’ve made ring. 

Whatever. If reasons were wishes, cows would have wings or something. Having reasons why doesn't pay the friendship bills. 

**********

I remember sitting on the couch at an old friend’s new place, and something was different. I’d taken my shoes off, as always, and curled up expecting to stay a while. This was a long-awaited visit, so we’d be snuggling on into it, I figured. We started talking, but the talk never settled. I mean, we talked about everything that was important, we talked about all the things you’d talk about with one of your best friends, but it all felt technical and phoned-in. It didn’t settle. We didn’t unbutton. I started to wish I’d left my shoes on. I even started to wonder if she'd prefer me to have left my coat on. I wondered when I’d made the transition from “best friend” to “kindly old aunt who could use a good visit now and again”. Everything looked right and sounded okay but something didn’t transfer. No nourishment. Sterile feeling, like a house staged for market, or a showroom. You can’t live there. 

**********

We’re at Allison’s. Allison has found a coral lipstick that used to belong to her grandmother. The lipstick is ancient and waxy and has that broken-down old powdery floral smell, but it’s lipstick, so it’s a priori going to work. We smear it on. We’re wearing leotards—Allison’s is black and mine is dark green—and long fringed leather vests. 

The concert is about to start. We’re ABBA, the blonde and the brunette lady thereof. Tickets are sold out. The concert will take place in the mirror. We’re either performing or watching or both.

“Waterloo!*” 

*I only know that one lyric—“Waterloo!”—because I doesn’t have the album at home, but Allison doesn’t care if I fudge. It’s about the vibe of the thing.

We look sexy as shit. We should dress like this every day. Later, in other news, we agree that we have both seen Santa in real life. He was on Allison’s roof, and I offer that he was on mine, too—I figure, why not? What can it hurt?—so she’s probably right that it was him on her roof. Two roofs. It confirms it. 

********** 

My youngest son, Fred, came home from school yesterday with a picture he’d made of how he’d spent his Thanksgiving. In the picture was the frame of our house with sky above/grass below, and in the frame was our dining room table and chairs, and my friend Morgan and her dog Maisie, who in fact had come over for Thanksgiving. The rest of us were AWOL. We must have all been in the bathroom or something.

Maisie, who’s a tiny little schnauzer-y mutt, looked like a giant fluffy friendly ram, and Morgan was a red-lipped siren wearing yet more red, standing with her arms wide out for a hug. 

I love this picture. Morgan’s our girl, all of our girl, and if my children draw her likeness unbidden, that tells you how far she’s inside the bullseye. 

Year 2000. This was our first date, our first friendship date. We’d known each other peripherally for a few years, Morgan and I, but one night we ended up next to each other at a bar and we had the classic forehead-slapping, I-could-have-had-a-V-8! realization that this is a hot one right here, this is a kindred spirit. So we made a date.

We arrive at Cafe Flora early on a June evening, with sheaves of our favorite poems all bundled up for each other. We were going to do it right from the beginning. Here, a me packet: I’m this, and this lights me up, and this. A little Rilke, a little Wislawa Szymborska, a little Edna St. Vincent Millay, some Hafiz. Oh, man, a you packet. Give it. 

Dinner is great, but Cafe Flora’s not enough, not even close. We’re not done. We have to go somewhere else. It’s still light. Woodland Park. We’ll go to Woodland Park. -How the hell did we choose Woodland Park? That’s not near anywhere we were. But we go to Woodland Park and sit in that never-say-die midsummer dusk, and we talk, and peel that onion deeper and deeper, and we both confirm the feeling that we’ve kind of left the normal planet and we’ve traveled to some timeless in-between place, like we’re hanging out somewhere eternal that only happens to look like Woodland Park, like we’re old friends meeting, beings who have never not been friends. 

**********

I don't know what it is with me and my bathroom, but I can't take a shower or wash my face or do anything in there without thinking about the friendships I've lost. All the dark feelings and cranky thoughts that leave me alone all through the rest of the house swarm me when I go in, and I'm constantly having daydream summits with these lost ones, telling them how it was, asking them why it was, lecturing them, having imaginary encounters where I act like it's no big that they're gone. It's like a friendship graveyard wifi hotspot in there. I'd like to heal these things because it's good for you to do that, but I'd also like to heal them so I could have a plain old shower once in a while. 

**********

I’m working on this post tonight and I get a friend request on Facebook. I don’t recognize the name immediately, and we don’t have mutual friends, but glancing at her page I see that she looks like a cool person, so I confirm it. A minute later I get a note in my inbox; this is an old friend from 4th grade, with whom I used to play dress-up in my yard. I remember her. Yes. We were only in school for one year together, so we didn’t hang for very long, but her mom had just found a certificate from me in her childhood stuff, a certificate in which I’d honored her as The World’s Greatest Friend. 

Whoa.

**********

When we move away from New York, shortly before my ninth birthday, I go visit Allison one last time. I’m wearing a dark red and white pinafore and dark red sandals, and she wraps a lei around my neck and prepares to take a picture of me. So I do the hula, both arms to one side making a wave. I’m smiling in the photograph, but it’s a sad hula. I don’t want to leave her. 

Aloha.  

on black lives mattering

None of these words I’m about to write are the best words. If I wait until I can write those, I’m going to be waiting too long. There are better things to say, and people saying those better things better than I’m going to be saying anything today. But there’s no time to waste. There’s too much wrong. It’s time to move. 

I have two white sons, ages 8 and 5, that I love with everything I've got. Like a normal mother, I worry about my children, and some days that worry ramps up to straight fear. My kids have both been hospitalized for severe asthma—my littlest was nearly admitted to the ICU a couple of months ago—and watching them struggle for breath makes my heart do things I don’t like it to do. Those are my worst days as a parent, the days when my children are in jeopardy. 

I don’t have those days very often. Most days the standard-issue mother worry shows up as a sort of light vigilance. I know where they are, I have an ear out for them, I have a readiness to leap when necessary, but I can go about my business. 

When my kids are sick, too, they’re up against a neutral force; they’re up against their own malfunctioning bodies.  And there are benevolent forces in place to protect my kids. They have doctors, they have hospitals, they have medicine. When they’re struggling, kind faces greet them every step of the way, and we as worried parents are also met with kindness.

There are other things in the world I worry about, of course. There are threats to my children that threaten all children, and all humans: gun violence, climate change, etc. But those things are not targeting my children especially. 

The level of fear I have on my worst day as a parent of white children, that’s the daily dose for the parent of a black child. If you have a black son, you know he’s going to be considered a threat just by being alive. If you have a black daughter, you know she’s going to face the double dangers of racism and sexism. 

Like so many other people in the country/the world, I’ve been glued to the television and the internet since word came down that Darren Wilson wouldn’t be indicted for his killing of Michael Brown. I’ve been on Twitter listening to the anguish and outrage of the brilliant black women and men I follow there, I’ve been reading all the articles posted by my friends of all races. 

You know how you wake up some mornings with a pit in your stomach because you have something on your to-do list that’s overwhelming? You have some task that feels a little or a lot past your comfort zone, a little or a lot beyond your capabilities. And you can’t pass it off to someone else, you can’t delegate it. It has your name on it. You can’t sleep through it, either, or hit the snooze alarm. It’s on deck right now. 

I have that pit in my stomach, writ large. I’ve had it there for a while, and I’ve been putting off getting up and facing it properly. But what’s dragging me the hell out of my bed now, what I can’t wipe away and I won’t wipe away is the image of all the mothers, the mothers who have to tell their black children the truth, the truth that they’re not safe in this world, not how it is now. And worst of all, of course, but it can’t go without saying, is the image of the mothers who lost their babies to this kind of brutality. That’s the abyss. 

I read Keesha’s post this afternoon, addressing white moms like me. 

 This is what I need, dear friend. I need to know that you are not merely worried about this most tragic of worst case scenarios befalling my son; I need to know that you are out there changing the ethos that puts it in place. That you see this as something that unites us as mothers, friends and human beings. 

 I don’t know Keesha, but I hear her, and I care about her, and every woman out there like her. She’s in pain, she’s in The Pain, and she needs more than talk, more than our tears and our head-shaking and handwringing. I don’t want to paraphrase her words. I want you to read them yourself. (Go, read, click the link.) But she needs us to read up, and to speak up, and to take action. 

So it’s up now. It’s on us. If you’re white like I am, then no matter what your other challenges are, you are the lucky, inadvertent recipient of white privilege. If you bristle at the term “privilege”, then I want you to read Karla McLaren’s piece, How to Be a Privilege Traitor, which helps suck the shame out of the word and leaves it like it is, a plain fact, and furthermore, something to work with. We have to use our privilege to dismantle this fucked-up, unjust system, and we have to dismantle the racism that lives in us. Don’t get excited and think you don’t have any lurking in you, either. I know I have some lurking in me, and it’s not because I’m a shitty person. It’s because I’m a product of a racist society, and so are you. So we better get our eyes working properly and find that racism in us and admit it and root it out. 

I haven’t been speaking up on this like I should. For one, I’ve been afraid of conflict. I don’t dig it. I’m not a natural at it. But I’m going to have to get natural at it, and get good at taking deep breaths and summoning patience and getting in there and mixing it up. The other thing that stopped me from speaking up was the false idea that I needed to have something really good to say, something original, something newly helpful. But who is that for? That’s for me, that’s for my own ego. Who needs to play the freshest instrument in the orchestra? We need to help that sound get loud, and that’s all. I can beat a plain drum plainly, if that’s all I have. So if you’re holding back from speaking out on the subject of race and racism because you think you don't have something great to say, good news! We can say simple things with feeling, and we can amplify the voices of the people who’ve been on the front lines since forever. And then we can read and learn and listen and get out there and up our game. 

I don’t know how to do this, I don’t have a great game plan, and I don’t have great words. But other people have done a lot of thinking about this, and advice is out there. Like so, from Janee Woods:

Becoming a White Ally to Black People in the Aftermath of the Michael Brown Murder 

 Time to fly that plane, even if we’re not that confident in our flying abilities. We’re out of time. Somebody else is going to get killed. 

More later. In the meanwhile, #BlackLivesMatter. It needs saying until it sinks in. 

P.S. If you're white and you have criticism about how black people are responding to the latest news, I say this: keep your eyes on your own work. That's not your business. You have more than enough of your own work to keep you busy. And if you're having trouble comprehending black rage, The Case for Reparations, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, is required reading. (Oh, screw it, it's required reading for everyone.) If you're not feeling it after that, I don't know what to say except you're going to be a lot of work for the rest of us. 

sunday school

The first time I took communion, I was six years old. I was not a Catholic, or any other type of communion-taking Christian, it's important to note. This was my first time in a church. I was just a plus-one visiting the Lord's house for breakfast. 

I didn't grow up going to church. My parents and grandparents were Theosophists, and Theosophy isn’t exactly a religion. Some Wednesday evenings my mom and dad would go to Lodge, which was a Theosophical discussion group that batted around different topics week after week, but there was nothing on the books for kids. My spiritual education was whatever I picked up around the dining room table.  

My best friend, Allison Pykett, had invited me over for a sleepover at her house the night before, and we’d planned that I’d tag along to church in the morning to keep the party going. The Pyketts were Catholic, and their church was gorgeous and cavernous, with dark wood pews and elaborate stonework. The mass itself was confusing, and I was amazed by how smoothly Allison and her family knelt and rose and sang and sat and thumbed to this and that page in the hymnal. Trying to keep up with them felt like following along with some elaborate aerobic dance video while doing silent karaoke to a song I’d never heard before. 

And then it was time for communion. Allison had warned me that this was big shit, and we’d agreed that when the time came, I’d stay in my seat. I wasn’t a Catholic so I wasn’t supposed to have any. But when everybody got up and scooted over to get in line, Allison switched plans on me and told me to get up and follow her. 

I was seized by dread. What about the thing we’d talked about before? I was busting a taboo! I wasn’t supposed to be up there! What would happen when you did something wrong like that in a church?? I hadn’t been apprised of the consequences so I was picturing every kind of bad thing. But Allison pulled me into line and no adult stopped me, so I was swept trembling into the waiting-for-communion river. 

We inched closer. I prepared for the priest to yell or smack me in the face or toss me out a window. And then we were up. Allison went first. The priest smiled down at her, she opened her mouth and he put a wafer on her tongue. 

Then it was my turn. The priest smiled down at me with the same smile he smiled at Allison, the same smile he smiled at everybody in front of us. He didn’t ask me to show my papers or identify myself. I scanned his eyes, trying to read his mind. I determined that he must know that I was a visitor. How could he not know? He knew, and he knew some loopholes in the rules that Allison didn’t know about that made it so this wasn’t a big deal. That had to be the situation. He was ready with the wafer. Nobody was calling the cops. 

So I opened my mouth, and tried to speak to him with my eyes—I hope you know what you’re doing—and then his big clean fingers were in my mouth (it was weird to have a man’s fingers in my mouth and have that man not be my dentist) and the disc was on my tongue. It had happened. I hoped this didn’t mean I’d converted to Catholicism. I knew that was a discussion my parents would have wanted to get in on.

Then we shuffled over to the right, and someone gave me a little pleated paper cup. Since I was already possibly up shit creek having swallowed the wafer as a pagan, I figured that a blood-of-Christ chaser couldn’t do that much additional damage, so I drank the dark, sweet liquid and put the implicit lie behind me. And if I didn’t tell anybody I was probably Catholic now, then I wouldn’t have to go to confession to tell anybody about it, so that was also a good deal. 

**********

After popping my strange-holy-temple cherry with Allison, the post-sleepover church visit always gave me a voyeuristic thrill, no matter whose house I’d slept at and whose religion I would be invading in the morning. I crashed all kinds of churches: Catholic, Mormon, Lutheran, Christian Scientist. Most of my friends were churchgoers, and their parents either didn’t mind dragging me along with them or they were flat-out worried for the state of my churchless soul. Either way, I was jazzed to be along for the ride. I felt like Jacques Cousteau, gliding into brand-new spiritual-tropical waters, observing all the brightly dressed fish going about their religious customs. 

I don’t know what I was imagining would happen in church, what exactly I was so excited about. I guess I wanted some God. If God was such a huge deal that everybody interrupted their Sundays at home to dress up and get in the car and drive to some special building not on a weekday, then there must have been some supersweet action going on in there, and I wanted to feel it. The friend I’d be accompanying was invariably blasé, being subjected to this ritual weekly, but my heart would beat a little faster as the parents drove up and parked and we filed into the church. A little fear in the foyer—will they stare?—and then I’d be safely in the pew with my temporary adopted family and a man would start to talk. 

I was always rooting for the priest or pastor or reverend or minister to say something exciting—Bring it, sir! Make the lights flash around my head! There are lights, right? Holy lights? Let’s get ‘em going!—and I waited for the moment where the man would spill the good stuff. 

Welcome child. Prepare to have your mind blown. This is why I have this job. I’m Doug Henning, I’m David Copperfield Times One Million. I have God up my sleeve right here and I’m going to let him out…..NOW!

(((BOOM FLASH CHOIR WINGS MUSIC OF THE SPHERES))) 

My expectations were possibly jacked up a touch past the point of fairness. But if God wasn’t going to crash through the ceiling and embrace us all, I was at least hoping for something like a spreading warmth, some kind of deep, Christmas-y good cheer to bloom in my heart as God’s representative held forth. I held out hope every time, and was disappointed every time. If PowerPoint presentations had existed back then and I’d known about them, I’d have said that church services pretty much felt like that. 

But hold on! Sunday school was next! We could still squeeze something rewarding out of the venture! 

I loved Sunday school. Like I said, there was no place and time in Theosophy for children to talk about the divine, but I was still interested. Too bad for me, though; Theosophy was for grownups, unless you were my older brother, who could participate in Theosophical discussion as fully informed and articulate as any adult, and often more so. But the discussions I listened in on at home were all a little over my head and nobody was bringing anything down to where my head was, so I was benched by default. 

Sunday school, on the other hand, was 100% kid-sized, and I was champing at the bit for some discourse. The teacher would slip us a brightly-colored book or comic and we’d read the day’s selection and talk about what we read. The regulars mostly slumped in their seats and didn’t bother raising their hands, as I’m sure I would have done if I had to participate week after week. But this happened for me maybe four or five times a year, so I felt like I’d been handed some kind of hot classified CIA document, and attacked the material with insane verve. My hand shot up constantly. 

Maybe Jesus was like this! And maybe he meant this! And given the dilemma you’re laying out, I think I might have done this! And I think this means this! 

That I kept any friends was a little miracle in itself.

**********

I was a little bit envious of these kids, my friends whose churches had super-popular Jesus for a mascot. He was everywhere. He was the People’s Choice, the ratings juggernaut. Theosophists didn’t have anybody like that. We had people like Helen Petrovna Blavatsky and C.W. Leadbeater and Colonel Henry Olcott and Annie Besant. Have you heard of them? Probably not! And we had some obscure, off-brand Jesus-like spiritual masters: Master Kuthumi, Master Morya. I bet you haven’t heard of those guys either! All the kids are drinking Coke and we’re not even drinking Pepsi or R.C. We’re drinking, like, hemp soda. It gave me agitas. 

**********

One Sunday morning when I was ten or so, I was home and flipping through the religious programming on all the different channels. They were talking about Jesus on every one. I thought, well, this isn’t fair. If Jesus is who everybody says he is, he’d be up for being friends with anybody. Surely you don’t need to go to one of his churches to get in on this. And I decided to test it out and befriend him on the spot. I mentally placed Jesus in the room with me, and aimed my friendship pledge into the air where I put him. Nothing happened, I didn’t feel any kind of glowing hand on my head, but I did feel good and satisfied in the way anybody does when they’ve bypassed the middleman.    

please hold

This week's post is getting postponed until next week, as I'm doing some writing for some other places for dollars and there are deadlines. See you here next Wednesday!

anna stesia

A few years ago I had some surgery, and surgery, while it buys you pain, also buys you pain meds. There are probably some noble souls* among us who don’t exult when they find themselves in position to take heavy narcotics, but I’m not one of them. A nice little prescription for some Percocet or Vicodin is the dangling carrot on the other side of whatever crappy something-or-other I’m going to have to go through to get it. 

*or chronic pain sufferers—a tip of the hat and an apology for the above bit to you guys, all of whom I’m sure would love nothing better than to be able to get off the pain meds. I see you, I note you, and I’m wishing you freedom.

So I had this surgery, and afterwards I got to spend a few weeks in bed hopped up on Vicodin. Every time I laughed or sneezed or coughed it felt like I was getting barbecued from the inside out, but you know, I didn’t laugh or sneeze or cough that often. The rest of the time I was sailing in a warm haze, watching Netflix and eating the entertaining snacks my fine husband brought in to me. 

The only problem with the Vicodin was that it gave me horrible, vivid, rubbery dreams. I had to stop taking it every night by 8:30 or I was doomed to wander until dawn in the grossest parts of my subconscious. I asked my doctor if he could give me an alternative, and he wrote me a prescription for Tramadol.  

I took Tramadol for one day, beginning at 1pm. As soon as it kicked in, hoooly smoke. The high was the sweetest in history; I’ve never felt anything like it before or since. I felt like I was wrapped in furs riding through heaven on a parade float. A revelation. Tramadol. Jesus. I was the luckiest lady ever to get cut open. 

You were supposed to take a dose every four to six hours. My feeling was, hey, let’s make it four. The four end of this schedule is where the party’s at. Why let this feeling fade any more than it needs to? As soon as the minute hand ticked over to 5pm, I popped in Tramadol No. 2. 

I thought I was a genius until a couple of hours passed.

Here are some of the common side effects of Tramadol: 

(I’m not going to list them all because you have a life to live and there’s no time.)


• agitation
• anxiety
• constipation
• cough
• diarrhea
• discouragement
• drowsiness
• feeling of warmth
• feeling sad or empty
• feeling unusually cold
• fever
• headache
• heartburn
• irritability
• nausea
• nervousness
• shivering
• sleepiness
• sweating
• trouble concentrating
• unusual feeling of excitement

Here are some of the rarer ones: 

• change in hearing
• clamminess
• cold and flu-like symptoms
• confusion
• difficulty moving
• disturbance in attention
• false or unusual sense of well-being
• feeling hot
• feeling jittery
• flushing or redness of the skin
• goosebumps
• headache, severe and throbbing
• hot flashes
• loss of voice
• muscle aching or cramping
• night sweats
• tightness of the chest
• trouble sleeping
• trouble breathing

And then there are all the side effects that you have to call your doctor/head to the emergency room about immediately, but this isn’t a PSA and this post isn’t about prescription drugs even if it really seems like it is right now, so I’m not going to list them. 

Anyway, I had a lot of the side effects listed above, but I don’t see anywhere 

THE ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY THAT YOU ARE GOING TO DIE 

or 

CONCENTRATE WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT AND GRAB ON TO LIFE WITH TWO HANDS OR ELSE YOU WILL EXPIRE IMMEDIATELY 

or 

IMMINENT TOTAL DOOM 

or 

HOLY-FUCK-THIS-IS-YOUR-LAST-NIGHT-ON-EARTH-UNLESS-YOU-GET-LUCKY FEELINGS

which I guess all fall under the “agitation” heading. I was sweating, freezing, nauseated, metallic-feeling and dead panicked, and I spent the whole night until the sun came up googling Tramadol horror stories (oh, you can find ‘em), pacing back and forth between the bathroom and the bed, and praying my fucking head off. 

Spoiler: I lived. 

My point is that there’s a downside to sweet, sweet numbing. And that’s what I’m wanting to talk about today. Numbing. The instinct to numb. I press that little metaphorical morphine drip button probably fifty times a day, in all my different ways, because I’m constantly deciding that whatever major or minute level of mental or physical or emotional suffering I’m undergoing is unacceptable and must be stopped in its tracks. 

Nurse! (Candy Crush.)
Nurse! (Web surf.)
NURSE! (Xanax.)

**********

A glass of wine, that’s a nice one. Classy little magic carpet ride to an adjacent reality where it’s always evening and there’s always a fire in the fireplace and the day’s responsibilities are complete and there is no tomorrow coming to bring new ones. Also, wine feels rich, like money, like where there’s wine there can never be dirt or poverty or hardship. I’m in from the cold, insulated. Somewhere a few rooms away, barely audible, Robin Leach is narrating my own personal episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, or I’ve dropped into the Little House on the Prairie where Half-Pint stumbles onto a cache of fool’s gold and the lens goes all vaseline’d while she imagines her family drifting slo-mo through Walnut Grove wearing fancy, blinding white linen. 

I like wine. I don’t drink that enough. 

A beer during a Seahawks game! I’m a lightweight but I metabolize alcohol differently during a tense football game. It just disappears into my system leaving no tracks, it feels like. I’m too keyed up to notice any effects other than not dying from sports-related freakout. 

Pot, we’ve had some times. Eleven years ago, after I broke up with my previous boyfriend and before I met Dave, I bought myself an attractive little pipe and made the plan to take up pot smoking for real. I’d dabbled since I was a teenager, but I decided it was time to take it up as a proper identity. Rakish, unflappable stoner. (I was the very definition of flappable so this appealed.) But my stoner plan only lasted a couple of months because I met Dave and fell in love, and Dave was sober, and also I was in love so I had the best drug of all flowing through my system: oxytocin. (Roxy Music says love is the drug—and who wants to argue with Roxy Music?—but I’m not going to tackle love here. I’m not stupid.) So pot and I parted company until I was prescribed medical cannabis during a long illness a couple of years ago, and that was not the party I’m talking about.

There’s a Buddhist term, dukkha, that translates to something like “suffering”, or “unsatisfactoriness”, and it’s about that “if only” feeling that chases most of us around all day. Oh, the alarm, traffic, my foot, my wife, this job, my neck, the weather, death, pain. Get me out of here! Fix it. Change it. I don’t like it. It won’t do. The idea is that these things that we’re complaining about, they’re not the causes of our suffering. Our suffering about them is the cause of our suffering about them. Those things just are what they are. We supply the suffering ourselves by wishing them different. 

So this is the trigger to get our numb on, these endless flashes of dukkha. You pick your numbing agent of choice—anything from Hershey’s Kisses to Angry Birds to heroin—and you shut the dukkha out. 

All day I enact these micro defensive maneuvers, and I’m starting to wonder just how long I’m going to resist coming all the way alive like this. Because that’s what I’m doing. I’m resisting coming fully alive. I mean, I’m breathing and I have a pulse and I’m conscious for most of the day and I’m walking around, so that’s not nothing, but I’m afraid of something and I keep fighting it off, and I suspect that the thing I keep fighting off is my own life, my own life force, and that seems bad. 

**********

There’s a personality type system called the Enneagram, and I’m really into it. (I’m a sucker for personality type systems of all stripes. They mesmerize me. Astrology, Myers-Briggs, Chinese Zodiac, whatever, I love it all. I’m always trying to figure out just who it is exactly that’s walking around in this Tina suit and I’m open to ideas. Wide. Wide open.) There are nine different personality types in the Enneagram. I’m a Nine, aka The Mediator, aka The Peacemaker, aka The Peace-Seeker, which is the most potentially numbed-out type. According to the Enneagram, Nines repress their anger and squash all their attendant unruly boat-rocking impulses. This makes them easy to get along with, but you don’t achieve that kind of repression without a lot of help, so we’re masters of numbness. The challenge for a Nine is to become unrepressed—wide awake and present no matter what—and in doing so release all that untapped dynamism. 

Not only are there nine types in the Enneagram, but there are three sub-types of each major type. You’re also classified according to what avenue the mechanism of the type expresses itself through most often. So each of the nine types have three expressions: social, sexual and self-preservation. 

When I first read about this, I was gunning to be either the social or sexual type of Nine, because those sounded cooler than being a self-preservation type. Obviously. But no. Sorry. No. The more I read, the more I recognized myself in the safety-seeking, comfort-loving Self-Preservation Nine. Goddamn it. So turtle-y. The numbest of the numb.  

I don’t love this about myself but I understand it. There was early trauma in my life that was ferocious enough that learning to numb was job one, and a compassionate act of self-preservation. It was a necessity, and the best thing I could come up with. It wasn’t wrong. 

It wasn’t wrong, but it’s not somewhere I'm planning on staying, either. This armor of numbness is outdated. It doesn’t serve any more. And so that’s my big focus these days, coming un-numb. Meditation, yoga, healing work, you name it. I’m pouring it on. 

So what am I afraid of? What am I trying to squash when I’m numbing myself? When I send my little fishing line down into this line of questioning, I get a flash of facing some beast, some kind of enemy, going into a bright hot battle with annihilation at its end. Something wants me dead. Something wants to burn me up. I don’t know what that is. I'm looking at this through a veil, you know? Numbness! 

But practically, in real-life terms, what’s the danger in coming alive? For all of us? Well, maybe there’s a lot of shit that’s not working, and when you de-numb and can see it and feel it, you have to fix it. Maybe your body’s broken, or your job sucks, or your relationship is wrong, or your friendships are unsatisfying, or your living situation is untenable. Maybe something is hurting you. I mean, yes. Something is hurting you. If you’re getting numb, something’s hurting you, even if it’s just your own thought patterns. Ugh. Exhausting! There’s so much to do every damn day already. You want to say there’s more? Extrication or rebuilding or re-conceiving or healing or moving or or or. Fuck. Fuck! Pass the wine. Tomorrow’s problem. 

And we’re not just afraid of the rough stuff, either. 

**********

One of my favorite words is poignant. 

poi-gnant adjective \ˈpȯi-nyənt

1:  pungently pervasive <poignant perfume>

2: a (1) :  painfully affecting the feelings :  piercing  (2) :  deeply affecting :  touching

b :  designed to make an impression :  cutting  <poignant satire>

3  a :  pleasurably stimulating

    b :  being to the point

I love the word, I love the experience of poignance. But it’s unsustainable. That kind of sharpness is for a quick in-and-out, not for an extended stay. 

When I was very sick and in the hospital at the beginning of 2013, I didn’t see my children for nine days. I’d never gone so long without seeing them, but I was too unwell to handle it for that first hospital stretch. After nine days I was ready, and Dave brought them to see me. 

I heard them before I saw them. I heard their footsteps in the hallway, their little voices. My oldest boy was six, my youngest was three. The poignance began its assault as soon as I detected my boys with my ears. And then they rounded the corner into the room, into my line of vision, and I was fully harpooned. Their scruffy, hopeful, tentative faces (so exquisite!); their puffy overcoats, navy and gray; their little pants. Their milky skin, the look and feel of it. Their flutey little voices. The feel of them pressing up against my leg and my sides. If you don’t think I have tears streaming down my face right this second to think of it, think again. It burned, the beauty.  

You can’t live there, not at that pitch. 

**********

And yet.

**********

On my 19th birthday, I hung out with friends at an apartment up on Capitol Hill here in Seattle. We drank and played Scruples, peppering each other with provocative questions. The question came up, “Would you rather live a life of great joys and great sorrows, with extreme highs and lows, or would you rather have a more moderate existence, missing the extremes on either end?” I expected a landslide with me for the former. 

Nein. Two of us opted for the former, and the rest of the room chose the more moderate existence. Team Highs and Lows was all ARE YOU PEOPLE CRAZY? and Team Moderation was like NO, ARE YOU CRAZY? and we both had a point. But I’d vote the same way today. I’ve bumped both extremes plenty and I still say it. 

I have to practice sustaining that sharpness a little longer, is the thing. I think it can stretch out and diffuse into something livable without losing its potency. I think this is the idea. 

I was talking with my teacher, Jim, about the difference between aliveness and stimulation. (Or, no. He was talking and I was listening.) He was saying that we’ve gotten so numb as a society that our craving for stimulation is ramping up just so that we can feel something. Louder, faster, bigger, funnier, sexier, more violent everything. But stimulation, while it gives us a jolt, doesn’t address the thing that made us go numb in the first place.

You know it when it happens, though, the other thing, the expansion of the aliveness within. It’s not contentment, exactly, or well-being. Those are by-products, maybe, of aliveness, or presence. Sometimes everything aligns and you catch it, your aliveness, and it’s not because of the things that aligned. It’s not because of the sunset or the food or the fire or the mountains or the company, whatever was in place when the flash happened. It’s not because of the good news that somebody’s going to live, or that you got somebody back, or you got the job. Those are the curtains opening, not the show. The life that’s running around in you all the time, that’s the show. 

We just keep blocking most of it out.