Square One

So, as I have griped previously (no surprise that it should be in a post concerning a specific book), we are moving. Yes, it is only to the house next door (same landlord, has a bit more space, better insulation, etc.), but damn is it ever stressful right now. Particularly for me as I try to weed through the 1,000+ book collection I have amassed over the last decade at this address. In the last 48 hours, via the “keep your stuff out of landfills at all costs” project, Freecycle, I have given away something in the neighborhood of 300 books. Of my efforts to organize the surviving volumes, earlier this afternoon, I remarked on Twitter:

Screw alphabetical order. Books shall have 2 categories: ‘Yucky’ (sad/scary nonfiction/reference) & ‘Yummy’ (best of fiction/memoir/poetry).

(and then, later:)

(And don’t remind me that there’s plenty of crossover between the categories! Today I have *zero* tolerance for ambiguity, despite the bio¹.)

So, as if I don’t have enough diversions that enable my slacking off on the packing, I thought I’d take a moment to distinguish what I mean by the “Yummy” and “Yucky” delineations. Mind you, I only had my crappy camera phone with me when I snapped these shots in what will soon be my new office next door (also: what appears in the two shots still doesn’t include all the books, even after the purges of the last two days). I’ve made some little notes on the Flickr pages (click through to read) for some titles of note.

Books that are yummy (click through for notes on individual titles):

Books that are yucky (click through for description below picture; photo’s too grainy to really make out any of the titles, which is just as well, but my reasons for classifying them in the “yucky” category are best explained on the Flickr page):

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¹ At the moment, my bio on my Twitter page reads as follows:

Suspiciously tolerant of ambiguity. Owner of “colorful” history. Eviscerates sacred cows. Sometimes devastating, sometimes funny. (NOT for the faint of heart.)

It’s been a weird week. Sunday, I saw what was, perhaps, the best show of my entire life: The National (playing, as it were, at the Richmond venue called The National). That show deserves its own post (delayed though it may be), but what I want to convey here, as efficiently as possible, is what happened afterward.

Namely, I kind of fell apart, for a laundry list of reasons I won’t elaborate on here, except to say that for me, extraordinarily awesome moments are often followed by the sense of getting bitch-slapped by the Universe (sorry, I mean Universe). Also, I become excruciatingly aware that certain of my (mostly verbal) excesses can attract strangers, while alienating friends.

That’s always going to be a hard thing for me to wrap my head around, but on Monday, after deciding to go on a week-long hiatus from Twitter (where most of my excess verbiage gets spilled), I started keeping a running list of things I wasn’t “tweeting” (in the peculiar parlance of the medium).

Perhaps not surprisingly, the list of things I wasn’t posting there became far more unmanageable than if I’d been posting them as I went along. In a way it was good, because while I have certainly erred on the side of non-self-censorship on Twitter, there were some things that were really freaking me out (some of them devastatingly sad, others just as devastatingly - and inappropriately - hilarious) which even I wouldn’t have been comfortable with posting publicly. That stuff had to go somewhere, or I was gonna lose it.

I made it all of two days into my intended week-long “hiatus” before realizing it had been rather ridiculous of me to even try. So, after a few friends had seen the crude list (crude in the sense of raw, but, yeah, there was certainly the other crude, too), I came back, I’m pretty sure, for good. I hope that in doing so I don’t alienate or overwhelm the people I care about most (on and off Twitter), but if that does happen, I’ll be a big girl about it and just deal.

And now, thanks to my pal Mogrify (@mogrify on Twitter, main website here), I have discovered Wordle, a tool via which I can share with you (at least a visualization of) the 74 things I didn’t post to Twitter. Without, you know, actually saying what all those things were, and causing all sorts of undeserved discomfort for the people I love.

Here, then, are some of the relevant words that arose (from which y’all had best not infer any particular thing or things)*:

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* You can also click here for a larger image with easier to read words.

Walking my dog today, while feeling especially weighed down by impossible questions, I slipped back into a mode I haven’t much occupied in recent years: what can only be called prayer.

If asked to explain my faith, I could only tell you, entirely in earnest, that it is first and foremost inexplicable. (Because it’s faith.) And that there is a level at which it feels specifically sacrilegious to so much as try. I could tell you that I am influenced by paganism and Buddhism and Christianity (most specifically, Quakerism), but this, to me, is also like trying to explain my musical proclivities. I listen to everything from Nina Simone to The National (going to a show tonight) to Queen and Lamb of God and Ella Fitzgerald and Otep and Maria Muldaur and the Distillers and The Pixies and Stevie Ray Vaughan and Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash and Ani DiFranco and Suicidal Tendencies and after all that, would you be able to come up with a handy category for my tastes? Of course not. So, too, it is for me and faith.

So I was praying, in my way, asking for some kind of sign, as I have lately been feeling myself to be at a crossroads. (I was also at a literal crossroads as all this was forming, in its necessarily inchoate way.)

Then I looked down, and saw this (click through to either image as hosted on Flickr for further ruminations, if desired):

And then, no sooner than I had uploaded the image from my phone, this:

Okay, Universe… next time I’ll try to be more specific in my questioning. But thanks for this, the images are resonant; the dollar bill will undoubtedly be spent, and hopefully the bird will find its way to wherever it was going, and I will find mine.

Folks, at the end of this month we will be, I’m afraid, moving.

Granted, it will only be next door, to a house owned by the same landlord (with marginally more room, so finally the girls will have separate rooms and, therefore, can hopefully avoid killing each other), so there will be no specific inconvenience or expense of a moving truck, for example.

However, we’ve been living here for a decade now, and the amount of life’s accumulated detritus is positively staggering. Efforts to pare down the loads of completely useless crap we own are… floundering.

But every now and then, going through boxes, I find some super awesome prizeworthy shit. Like this children’s book, an acquisition from Diversity Thrift (where the cool people in Richmond shop, thank you very much). (Coincidentally, I am of the thinking that the “cool” contingency of Richmond consists of broke ass people like us.)

(Click through to Flickr for larger images/detail)

As anyone following me on Twitter will be all too keenly aware, I’ve been listening to an awful lot of The National lately.

So, I’ll understand if no one believes me, that the title of this post actually didn’t start out as a reference to Daughters Of the SoHo Riots, a track from their 2005 release, Alligator. I will confess though: I just spent the last ten minutes at SongMeanings.net, reading through various folks’ speculations about just what in the hell that song is “really” about. I still don’t know (a video was pretty, although the opposite of illuminating), but it’s still a gorgeous song, and these lines are certainly resonant:

Everything I can remember
I remember wrong
How can anybody know
How they got to be this way…

And while it’s quite possible I’ve had this album in such heavy rotation, that the suggestion to write something involving “daughters” and “riots” was thereby embedded in my consciousness, the fact is I’ve been staring, for sixteen years now, at a very different piece of media involving daughters and one very literal riot. Namely, this one:

From the AP Caption:

Elvira Evers, who was 38 weeks pregnant when shot in the abdomen in the Los Angeles riots, has given birth by Cesarean section to Jessica. The bullet struck the baby in the abdomen.

When the LA riots happened, it was this particular image and news item, out of the enormous number I absorbed, that I found most difficult to shake. Knowing that this particular human being’s entrance into the world had been so literally, viscerally marked was something I couldn’t get over. I clipped the image from the newspaper, slipped it into a Mylar sleeve, and somehow, through a million moves and traumas in which I’ve lost the vast majority of my worldly possessions, I managed to hold onto it.

The original clipping remains on my office wall. Whenever I get stuck with my writing, thinking about my own difficult origins, or those of my own daughter, who came into the world in her own uniquely traumatic fashion in July of 1994, I look at young Jessica Evers. She’d be a teenager now, not much older than my girl, who starts high school next year.

And I wonder where she and her mama are today, and how they are doing.

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Blurred portrait of my father with Edgar Allen Poe action figure in foreground, April 10, 2005, Ashland Coffee & Tea. Click through to image as hosted on Flickr for further notes.

I have mixed feelings concerning writing about him, as well as not writing about him, beyond fragments sometimes embedded in photographs, infrequently shared.

Whatever. He’s my dad, and he gave me (among other things) a love for writing, without which I’d have been dead a long time ago.

Some teenagers would kill to go to a Lamb of God show - never mind the luxury of VIP access and such, since we’re friends of the band members, in particular, vocalist Randy Blythe (as discussed recently) and guitarist Mark Morton (whom my husband has known since the seventies, and I’ve known since 1990). Here’s my girl at her first (and thus far, only) such show:

Now, contrast that with the same teenager’s reaction to a Jonas Brothers’ show? No contest!

The funny thing? At the very event where the latter show occurred (Virginia’s State Fair, 2007) we also hung out for awhile with Randy, who gave our daughter some good-natured grief for her lack of enthusiasm for the metal genre.

Well, no one can say we’re not exposing the kids to a… variety of cultural experiences.

With Lee, some lake in Minnesota, August 1994. Click through to image on Flickr for explanatory notes.

Longtime readers (in my various blog incarnations) will be familiar with the name of “Lee,” the woman with whom I spent four years in hell Minnesota¹. More recent readers can still access some of the backstory here; old entries about this relationship, for better and for worse, did not survive the blog-deletion-and-starting-over I did in April.

No, that wasn’t her birthname; rather, “Lee” was short for the name to which she’d changed hers in court, which was deliberately derivative of the name of Aileen Wuornos. Note: she has had yet another legal name change since. Fortunately, she did not feel it necessary to acquire new legal names for each of her variously vicious, excessively passive, and other personalities. (I am not, incidentally, being metaphorical here in referencing “multiple personalities.” Someday I’ll have to write about that fragment of her known not-very-affectionately as “Mrs. Hessley.”)

Anyhow, this is her, leaning against me as I’m attempting to nurse my infant daughter. We will skip, for now, the exceedingly complicated story of how I acquired said daughter, who did, in fact, save my life. Suffice it to say that being with Lee carried certain risks, such as being dragged through an underground odyssey involving such places as a downtown Minneapolis homeless shelter (the notorious “410″). And that while what happened to me there was against my will, I made a conscious choice, after I learned I was pregnant, to keep my daughter², and have not regretted it for a moment since.

I’ve blurred Lee’s face out of respect for her privacy (I haven’t spoken to her since 2001, although she continues to send my daughter and me bizarre pieces of correspondence by postal mail; my daughter will be permitted to access these only upon her eighteenth birthday, I long ago decided), as well as because, let’s face it, it was kind of fun to blur her face this way!

Oh, and you may notice there is a bruise on her leg. Click through to the image as hosted on Flickr for the story on that (mouse over the image to access the annotations).

Those with academic library access may also consult the November, 2000 edition of Violence Against Women for my poem, How the Fugitives - Two Women Writers - Tried to Love Each Other and Survive for yet more background.

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¹ Actually, our journey started in Seattle (the city I loved, which we had to leave after an ex pimp of hers from Chicago figured out where we were), continued through Fargo, ND (Fuck those Coen Brothers for stealing the title of the movie I otherwise would have written about that experience; this angst is made all the worse because of their film’s ineluctable brilliance), and on through Minneapolis, St. Paul, and outlying areas of the Twin Cities.

² Anyone who imagines my not having an abortion, after such an event, is inconsistent with my lifelong commitment to women’s reproductive freedom needs to review the dictionary definition of the word “choice.” And any anti-choice asswipes who would exploit my decision, and its ultimately happy outcome, in support of the idea that women should be denied access to abortion services, or have such access granted in only very limited circumstances, can fuck right off.

Fish Face, ca. 1987, originally uploaded by vmarinelli.

Hey folks. As you can tell, I’ve been a tad ambivalent about the blogging thing lately. (But not, as usual, about the twittering.) And since I have no dignity (and also because my asshole husband already put this photo up on Facebook), I provide it here, as an exhibit to the wonder that is youth.

As my notations to the image as hosted on Flickr (click through if desired) make clear, I really have no idea what prompted this particular makeup and costume situation. I can say that all the adults in the household were high as kites and engaged in a long, mad medley (a “jam session,” if this very phrase will not cause you to faint) comprised of such classics as Bob Dylan’s Tangled Up in Blue, Procol Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale, and Eric Clapton’s After Midnight. (Which, I am quite certain, it was. By several hours. And yes, probably on a school night.)

I also recall that I had a partner in this crime: my then-foster sister (a friend from school, whose mother was an even flakier hippie than mine, and thus had simply decided to move to the other side of the island without her), who was dressed and dolled up in an equivalently surreal manner, only I have no photographic evidence of this fact; you will just have to take my word for it.

I also know that when she and I came out of the bathroom, with the intention of seeing how much we could freak out the adults present (they tended to be rather unfreakable, so there was something of a high threshold to get over in that endeavor), that the medley had shifted to a rousing rendition of House of the Rising Sun. Which apparently is some ballad concerning a house of ill-repute.

Naturally, my mother would later seize upon the symbolism of this moment, in that I, her daughter (never mind her generally faultless foster-daughter), had, at the very moment she and her pals had been singing about whores, had come out allegedly dressed as a whore. (Though I’m sorry, but when I look at this picture, I think more “surrealist 1980s clown” than “whore”; plus, there is the detail that I was a bored teenager, who was making a fish face.) Then again, this was my whoredom-obsessed mother (for whom the end result of all equations fell along the lines of “daughter, you are a whore!”) whose perceptions and interpretations we are talking about.

Not that I’m bitter, because of course she has provided me with a lifelong stash of rich material to work with. (For example, the work in progress titled Tangled Up in a Whiter Shade of Pale Blue: The Random Years.) I am nothing if not blessed with (!@#$%^&*) material!

Because I have about fifty other things going on, including a few stalled blog posts and an increasingly urgent need to pack for my trip to Greensboro tomorrow (my BFF is treating me to the Amtrak fare and a long weekend’s mutual writerly support, yay!), but I also feel like shaking up the uber-serious mood of this blog ever since that last piece posted, and finally, because I have been inspired by a dear friend’s adventures in (ahem!) ‘art’ criticism, I give you… this.

Please understand that I do not, in any way, endorse the practice of taxidermy. (FFS, I’m a vegetarian!) But I happened upon this… thing in a bookstore near VCU (which, in keeping with its catering to eccentricity, is open sometimes, closed at other times, with no predictable pattern to it), and I just didn’t quite know what to do with the surreal image. So of course I’m foisting it upon you.

…And, what was even more inscrutable? The other end (business end?) of said chipmunk¹:

(Note: If you couldn’t make that out, the lettering says, The rule of consciousness is near. Um, okay, WHAT?)

Which, to me, doesn’t make me a lick of sense, but maybe I’m just not enough of a ‘real artist’ to get it.

I suppose this would be called, by aficionados of the form, either ‘mixed media’ or ’sculpture.’ (And/or ‘animal cruelty,’ ‘crap,’ and ‘OMFG what drugs was this person on when they made this thing’ by others.)

Let’s say we agree to call this ’sculpture.’ (For the purposes of argument. C’mon, just play along.)

If, indeed, it is sculpture, how did it get there? Is this ’student work’? And if so, is it, by any bizarre chance, the work of a student in VCU’s Sculpture Department, ranked again by US News & World Report as the top program of its kind in the country?

(Clearly, stranger things have happened.)

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¹ Unless it’s actually a squirrel and I’ve got everything wrong. It’s not like I’m an expert in differentiating between varieties of taxidermied rodents, okay?