Square One

Yesterday, the ever snarkful (& smart, so, what - can I now invent ’smarkful’ in addition to ’snarkful,’ also not an actual word?) Simon Goetz offered the following, um, pearl of wisdom with regard to incipient Fourth of July celebrations:

Guys are prematurely shooting their colorful loads of Freedom all over the sky’s face. It’s scary and gross.

That effectively summarizes my feelings about the gaudiness factor of the present holiday. I hate its noise, its slobbering drunks running around with variously dangerous explosives, its crowded parking lots and jockeying for fireworks-watching spots at various parks (when I cannot find a way to plead out of the activity, and/or I’m guilted into going because the kids love it and they’ll be sad without me there), and, of course, its inevitable July 5th sob stories about unsupervised children who blew off their limbs the night before.

On the other hand, there’s the inherent sweetness of the way my teenager woke me up this morning: “Happy Independence Day, Mom!”

Which got me thinking about some stuff.

As I’ve mentioned recently, we’re moving. Only next door, but it feels much huger than that, because it involves going through the accumulated detritus of a decade, giving stuff away, figuring out what’s important, making proactive decisions about what happens next.

When I moved here, I was getting out of an extremely bad situation. I didn’t have the luxury of making such proactive decisions about the way I did want to live; I was only clear on the matter of how I didn’t want to live - how I couldn’t live, for one more damned moment.

A poem I wrote around then (ca. 1998), addresses some of this quandary. It’s called How the Exile Came to Love the Foreign Land. It concerns, among other things, the complexity of sexual identity, the ways in which our “choices” can be simultaneously products of bona find “agency” and of coercion (even where such coercion is entirely accidental and circumstantial). I had been living for years as a lesbian, and I was making the radical life change of going back to men (or rather, to one man, with whom I’d been lovers during the summer of 1990), and my reasons for doing so ran the gamut from genuine desire (despite my best efforts to compartmentalize and disown my previous heterosexual experience - and specifically, mine with him - I’d never stopped loving him) to dire necessity (I had to get myself, and, more importantly, my child, out of our miserable, dead end situation in Minnesota, and I had nowhere else to go). It wasn’t, shall we say, the smoothest path via which one could hope to enter into what would eventually (in 2001) become our married life.

And because everyone I’ve shared it with (including, most generously, the above-referenced Simon’s conspirator in copywriting and much more, Ainsley Drew) keeps telling me it’s some of my best work, and since my slacker ass still hasn’t made any sincere effort to publish it (or anything else, since 2004 when I stopped sending out work, just when I’d started “publishing well” - which is another topic for another day), I won’t use the whole thing here. But I will use an excerpt, from its closing stanza:

Guarantor of my asylum:
I wish I could be uncomplicated
adopt your customs without question,
happily digest your food.
All I can pledge is my allegiance
rendered honestly
with a broken tongue.

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As I finish this post (begun hours ago, then deferred while we went to a July 4th party, then came home, where on the basis of a developing migraine, I begged out of going back out again to go see fireworks and took a nap instead), my husband is out with our girls and some of our friends, and judging from the sounds outside, the fireworks have finally stopped. They’ll be home soon, and I’ll be happy to see them, glad as I was to be able to pull away from them for part of this evening, to disengage from the annual ritual of explosives which still holds little excitement for me (though in past years, I’d done my best to “just go along” with it, and many other essentially alien customs, instead).

It’s not that I’m ungrateful for what we have here. But in recent months, I have been coming to terms with the fact that I’m not entirely happy with how I’ve been living. So I’ve been taking certain baby steps toward my own assertions of independence, from going back, as I did last November, to being a vegetarian (so, no longer simply “[adopting his]customs without question/ happily [digesting his] food”), to embracing new music (when I married an especially well-connected metalhead, I eventually came around to certain hardcore genres which had been alien to me in the past; this is not to say I’d lost my hunger for other sorts of sounds, most recently as evidenced by my falling wildly and almost inappropriately in love with The National), to traveling on my own to North Carolina every 4-6 weeks to visit my best friend from my early high school years (we write well together, and have a brilliantly good time). Individually, these steps may not seem very substantive, but cumulatively, they represent something of a sea change for me, long overdue.

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And as I wrote the above words, “a sea change for me, long overdue,” two things happened simultaneously: midnight arrived, and my husband came home with our daughters. (Apparently, there was quite a delay with the fireworks, something about a baseball game going into extra innings? Whatever.) Seems fitting.

Now, when I tuck my tired kids into their beds, I’ll be able to say I hope they had a fantastic Independence Day, without any ironic twitching. That, to me, seems worth some very sincere celebration.

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.

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.

Tonight, I received an extraordinarily strange inquiry, via myspace (of all avenues):

My first reaction was to laugh. Really, I mean, what the hell was this dude talking about? And I posted this to Twitter:

Actual email rec’d: “I’m researching the ‘memory eraser’ drug propranolol & came across your comments.” Uh, WHAT comments? I can’t remember!

And really, I couldn’t. But it rang a sort of distant bell, and tonight after I’d showered and gone to bed (intending to set a record of sleeping for two nights in a row, after last night’s unusual success), it finally hit me, where it was I might have made comments about this medication, and I sat bolt upright and headed for the computer. (And therefore, in all likelihood, cursed my chances of sleeping tonight.)

Back in November of 2006, my friend Chris had posted an article to his blog, “Propranolol, The Memory Pill.” He discussed a segment on Propranolol he’d seen on 60 Minutes:

Propranolol is a beta blocker that is sometimes used in the treatment of hypertension and migraines. The Sixty Minutes segment The Memory Pill looked at its use for treating post-traumatic stress syndrome. Apparently, one of its effects is to lessen the intensity and immediacy of traumatic memories. Various patients… showed astounding improvement after years– even decades– of suffering from severe PTSD…

Chris goes on to speculate about both the promise and the potential pitfalls of such a biochemical solution to what are, ultimately, both sociological and psychological problems. And I, apparently, left some lengthy comments:

This is fascinating and terrifying. Certainly, I’d love to be less impaired than I presently am by posttraumatic stress. In the last two years of being forced to reopen all manner of proverbial “worm cans” by the truckload, my basic functioning as a human being is markedly worse than during the period that preceded this one, during which I was just stuffing it all.

But all of one’s memories, even the horrific ones, are precious, and I’d be a shell of myself without an intact power of recall.

If a magic bullet type of pill were out there that muted the debilitating effects of posttraumatic stress, without actually impairing or altering memory in any way - something that perhaps made memories easier to work with, I’d be the first one to sign up for it, but I can’t imagine there could be such a convenient shortcut through all the horror and rot of it. (”The only way out is through” and all that…)

Chris replied:

I don’t know… judging from the people they interviewed, that’s exactly what this drug does– it doesn’t alter the memory– they can still recall everything– it just makes it less immediate/threatening/overwhelming.

I responded at length concerning my past travails with medications I have taken (while also participating in psychotherapy) for PTSD and anxiety (in addition to bipolar and ADD), expressing definite skepticism, but finally concluding:

…if there is something out there that could help to facilitate me getting through this particular impasse of late, without fucking me up further in the process, I might have to overcome my reluctance and try it.

Okay, a few things:

First, this still seems to me like some wacko science fiction, instantly evoking The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, perhaps my second-favorite movie out of the last five years (after Magnolia, which also addressed highly volatile matters of memory). The plot revolves around a fictional process of “targeted memory erasure,” undertaken in response to personal trauma, and its surreal and ultimately devastating (but also illuminating) consequences.

It’s a tempting idea. And certainly, I have no shortage of profoundly traumatic memories that affect my daily ability to function (impairments one might not immediately sense from my writing, but which, alas, you would if you lived with me).

But it also strikes me as inherently and profoundly dangerous. When so much has been taken from me, and my capacity for memory (however traumatic in nature that memory may be) is all the power I have in the world, what consequences could arise from monkeying with the brain chemistry that keeps those memories encoded?

Finally, there is the oddity of this: That some comments I’d made more than a year and a half ago on someone else’s blog could come back to me today, A) via my profile at myspace, of all things (uh, dude, if you’d followed my blog link from there, and thus found my dedicated contact page here, I’m not really sure why you went with the myspace route rather than regular email, but okay!), and B) I could scarcely remember having made the comments in the first place.

Memory’s weird. I could recount in vivid detail, for example, things that happened to me on April 13, 1984, or on September 11, 1993 (among other historically traumatic “September 11s”), but right now? Damned if I could tell you where my driver’s license is, what I did with the tax forms it turns out I’m going to have to refile because of an IRS error, or my keys.

Such is the nature of the beast. And it is a beast. But is it a beast I want to disturb, or attempt to neuter in some way? Would I be better able to use my existing memories for the purposes of writing (which, besides taking care of my family, is really the only purpose I have left that hasn’t been inexorably wrecked), if they weren’t so traumatically charged? Or would the writing itself also be “neutered” if I did that?

It’s a tough and terrifying question. If a means existed whereby I could blunt my traumatic responses without altering the memories that first gave rise to them (and this qualification is critical), it stands to reason that I could be far more productive as a writer than I presently am, rather than less so. I could do more works of sustained narrative prose, rather than poems (which is not to discount the value of poems; it just happens that for me, poems are often “placeholders” for more deeply necessary, deferred works of prose).

Or the very notion of this medical “solution” to the problem of traumatic memory (whether in fiction or in presently accepted and/or developing medical practice) is a dangerous mirage, an attempt at cosmic “cheating” most likely to end in ruin.

This morning I’m listening for a second time to a podcast I’d downloaded weeks ago, and hadn’t gotten around to playing the first time around until just yesterday. This is the broadcast for the habitually brilliant This American Life’s episode #354, “Mistakes Were Made,” which originally aired on April 18th of this year. You can hear the episode in full by selecting the above link. (Your options are to play it for free through streaming audio at the website, download as an mp3 for $.95, or purchase the episode on CD for, gulp, $13.00.)

There’s a prologue, just under eight minutes, that’s interesting enough, but if you’re pressed for time and you want to get to the utterly amazing story at the heart of this broadcast (Act One: You’re as Cold as Ice¹), you should feel free to skip ahead; you’ll want to be at about the seven minute, 50 second point. (It’s hard to do this in an exact way with streaming audio, so if you’re doing that, just sit tight.)

This is the story of a man named Bob Nelson, a perhaps unlikely historic figure in the science-fictionesque would-be “field” of cryonics. His story makes for quite the parable on “unintended consequences” and “getting in over one’s head,” and one to which, curiously, I can relate, based on my own past failings (for example, my brief, hilarious-and-yet-truly-awful tenure as the acting President² of Richmond, Virginia’s chapter of NOW), and the failings I’ve witnessed in others, both strangers and loved ones (although, to be fair, the failings I reference here were, generally speaking, on a far less spectacular and shocking scale than are evident in Nelson’s tale).

But more than exploring the “unintended consequences” and “getting in over one’s head” motifs, Nelson’s story exposes some very fascinating truths about the very nature of truth. In the trainwreck course of Nelson’s involvement in cyronics, this man became a master of the art of rationalization. Soon, his rationalizations had metastasized into a pattern of deceit so profound that, even now, in his attempts to reconcile everything that happened, he seems authentically unclear as to what actually happened. In short, he lied enough that he came to believe his own lies.

This is different, it seems to me, from the variety of deceit that is inherently malicious. In the interviews which comprise this broadcast, Nelson left himself utterly open to having his narrative challenged - and indeed, disproved. Had he been maliciously deceitful, he would have been far more artful in his deceit. He would not have, for example, granted such open interviews. (A wise attorney will not place a defendant she or he knows to be guilty on a witness stand for cross-examination; so too, a liar who means to cause harm with his untruths will be far more dodgy with his or her approaches to narrative.)

I have known a great many otherwise innocent people who have lied themselves into corners from which they could not, subsequently, extricate themselves in any meaningful way. For example: a severely traumatized rape, battering, trafficking, torture, and stalking survivor, who was so afraid of her past abusers that she was willing to file false police reports about continued stalking episodes, on the basis that doing so would give her documentation needed to obtain a current and enforceable protection order, should the need arise. But when I found her an FBI agent who was, without qualification or hesitation, willing to pursue a serious investigation of the criminal organization to which her most dangerous of all her previous abusers had belonged? (Her cooperation with which could have garnered her entrance into the federal Witness Protection program.) She completely shut down, was not at all willing to testify. Needless to say, there were unintended consequences she (and I) faced because of these decisions. (And soon, the window of opportunity, during which the agent in question had promised to be available to her, had shut; he was pulled out of state to investigate the Montana Militia.)

What is more? In the course of trying to advocate for this woman (who was my partner at the time; “Lee,” as discussed tangentially elsewhere), it became clear to me that, even when she changed her story - or her rationalizations for the various versions of her story - she genuinely believed what she was saying, each time she spoke. The traumas she had experienced, both in the past and while I had lived with her, were all too authentic; I became painfully well acquainted with the evidence from same (for example: letters, phone calls, having our apartment broken into, receiving hate literature from the same organization to which one of her abusers had belonged). But she coped with this (continuing) trauma through extremes of dissociation - which is, most plainly, one form of “lying.”

And in my own secondary traumatization³, I coped through my own acts of dissociation, accepting as literal truth whatever my partner said, no matter how frequently her story changed. Further, I did my damnedest to convince others of the veracity of each of Lee’s constantly morphing claims. Sometimes this meant exaggerating a situation, but more frequently, it actually meant minimizing it - because nothing, it turned out, made it more impossible to secure necessary, life-saving services (for example, police protection to go back into our broken-into apartment, so we could get ID and other essentials before leaving the state in the dead of the subsequent night) than conveying, to the fullest extent possible, how much danger she was actually in.

At the time, I had not heard of the phenomenon of folie à deux. One of the most painful aspects of my recovery from that traumatizing experience (in the course of which we led a substantively dangerous existence, the details of which are well beyond what I can address here) has been the effort to comb through everything that happened, and with both the benefits and hindrances of hindsight, separate the real from the unreal; what I’d feared - or hoped - was true versus what actually had been true. (What may be the truest fact of all from that time? That I may never be entirely certain of which things were unambiguously true, and which weren’t.)

Whereas folie à deux may be described as “a rare psychiatric syndrome in which a symptom of psychosis (particularly a paranoid or delusional belief) is transmitted from one individual to another,” and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) describes how a person, traumatized in the past, emotionally re-experiences past trauma, and Secondary Traumatic Stress is a kind of “PTSD by proxy,” typically affecting persons in the helping professions, and Acute Traumatic Stress is construed to be PTSD’s precursor (in which the traumatized person is dealing with the events in the present, rather than exclusively past tense), what I was dealing with was the combined elements of all these disorders. As you might imagine, literal, objective truth in all matters (particularly those which were causing my partner and I such profound, visceral, and immediate distress) wasn’t easy to come by. (Although, paradoxically, my basic functioning required that I accept as “literal, objective truth” any number of things I subsequently understood could not have been true.)

Mistakes Were Made. The Women’s Studies scholar, anti-Klan activist and author Mab Segrest, with whom I corresponded in the mid-nineties, and who subsequently met with my partner and me, may have some understanding, looking back, of the “mistakes” to which I refer. (Even when, years later, I met with her again, and still could not articulate the dissonance between some of what I’d said to her in correspondence, and what I subsequently understood could not have been the complete truth.) As might Vednita Carter, who was my advocate when Lee and I were clients of the now-defunct organization WHISPER (she went on to form Breaking Free). As might Claudine O’Leary, whom I did not know at the time (although I’d read some of her underground zines on feminism, poverty, and related issues, published and distributed pseudonymously), but who has, since the late nineties, worked with many severely traumatized youth, from situations not unlike my partner’s in the immediate period before we met (she was nineteen then; I had just turned twenty-two). As might many of my friends and family members with whom I was sometimes in touch between 1993 and 1997. (I remain estranged from many of these loved ones, as a direct consequence of communications I had with them during periods of particularly acute crisis, which they, understandably, found traumatizing; perhaps we might call that “Tertiary Traumatic Stress”?)

The bottom line here is: traumatized people, who may still be in profoundly dangerous situations, develop creative, often dissociative, and thus often fundamentally dishonest ways of surviving on a day-to-day (sometimes on a minute-to-minute) basis, expressed alternately through extremes of passivity and hostility. However, this particular variety of “dishonesty,” in which so many untenable truths may be embedded, is one fundamentally is lacking in malice.

Hearing the broadcast about Bob Nelson a second time around, I remain appalled by the actions of this man, and their consequences for those who became embroiled in his (unintentionally?) twisted narrative. He has, to use the somewhat tired⁴ analogy, “Drunk the Kool-Aid.” (And to abuse the dubious analogy further, one could say his organs have accommodated themselves to his Kool-Aid’s poisons, such that he is now pathologically convinced of his own lies, and his consciousness could not survive attempts toward integration - which is to say, a substantive reckoning with real truth.)

It’s horrible, and it’s tragic, and it’s shameful.

But I doubt it’s all that unique. There are, I suspect, many more “Bob Nelsons” among us.

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¹ The subsequent and final segment, Act Two: You’re Willing to Sacrifice Our Love, concerning spoofed versions of the William Carlos Williams poem, This is Just to Say, is also brilliant.

² Emphasis on the “acting.” (As my friend Kimmy Certa can, I am afraid, attest.) (And yes, Kimmy, I really will write the whole story of that debacle… at some point.)

³ While there is a growing field of literature on what is called “Secondary Traumatic Stress” (see, for example, this book), it is geared almost entirely to persons in the helping professions, rather than, for example, family members and partners of the directly traumatized individual. In my own situation, my role bridged that of “partner” and “advocate” for reasons of necessity and, unfortunately, isolation. While we did, in fact, consult a range of social service, medical, and law enforcement entities in several states in an effort to get competent help for my partner, none of them were prepared to address the breadth of her situation. (For example, I consulted extensively at one point with The Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, but they finally determined they could not have her as a client, as - I am not kidding - she had been tortured on American rather than on foreign soil, which was beyond the scope of their mission.) In lieu of any of the competent, comprehensive services my partner so desperately needed, from social service organizations, medical services (due to injuries as well as malnutrition related to her past abuse), and law enforcement, we were on our own. And since she was still in some measure of danger from her past abusers, we were both in a constant state of terror, in ways that challenged our ability to so much as function - and left us with profound emotional scars. (I addressed these in my poem, “How the Fugitives - Two Women Lovers - Tried to Love Each Other and Survive,” published in the November 2000 issue of Violence Against Women.)

⁴ The reference is also problematic for reasons RadGeek (Charles Johnson) has, quite compellingly, explored.

There was a point in my blogging life when I obsessively checked my Sitemeter stats.

Sometimes this resulted in hilarity. For example, in December of 2004, someone arrived at my site by Googling ryan home alabama thunderpussy +passed out . For those of you who are not of (or as is the case with me, “on the periphery of”) the RVA music scene, Alabama Thunderpussy (or ATP in polite circles) is a hardcore, punk- & metal-infused southern rock band, a recent video for which you can see at YouTube (and yes, I know plenty of the insane blokes in that video). In my blog entry (now unavailable, as it was from many torpedoed blogs ago) pertaining to that and a few other wacky searches that had been revealed by my recently installed Sitemeter, I commented:

I believe this harkens back to an entry concerning a party hosted by our favorite “fake rednecks” in ATP. A stray detail involved my taking a… nap on their lawn, which is distinct from “passing out” per se, thank you very much.

However, the fact that it occurred to anyone to conduct such a search makes me wonder just how many people have passed out on that lawn.

At other times, however, I got search terms that were creepy as hell. (Which I need not repeat here. Why put more crap into search engines than is absolutely necessary?) Or unnerving. Like the time someone, from an IP address corresponding to an organization with which one of my exes is affiliated, registered more than 20 page views - mainly in my “exes” category. (A category that no longer exists in this blog’s incarnation.) Or like the almost daily hits from Google on the name of a certain anti-prostitution activist with whom I’d previously tangled. (The first of two defendants listed under heading “Public Domain” at this link in the Minneapolis weekly, City Pages, if you must know.)

And sometimes Sitemeter was really useful to me - I’d learn, for example, that someone had linked to a post of mine, which would give me a quick way of replying back and engaging in sometimes very useful conversations across the blogosphere. (Just because I’m no longer engaging in those - or engaging them in only provisional ways - does not mean those discussions weren’t useful to me; I grew a great deal as a result, and made a number of friends, and thus remain grateful for the experience.)

But there came a point when I was spending more time wondering about my Sitemeter stats than I was doing much in the way of truly original writing (whether on the blog, or elsewhere). Subconsciously, and at first in very subtle ways, I began to censor and/or tailor what I was willing to post based on my statistics. There was a childish amount of glee I’d experience when some post or another would double or triple my site traffic.

Looking back, now, on some of those posts (for instance, one on an especially annoying RSS-feed swiping profiteer who, as it happened, had also once been a speechwriter for George W. Bush), and my own silly reaction to those occasional spikes in traffic, I’m embarrassed. Not because the writing itself wasn’t good (it was, generally, at least alright), and not because I wasn’t making valid points (I was, though I was increasingly prone to employing alternately pissy and dogmatic tones in the process), but because that was never the sort of writing I’d ever set out to do. I didn’t love it. So why was I doing it?

I longed for my earliest days of blogging. Since my archives from same are scattered all over the place, I’ll have to go from memory here, but in its first incarnation, the blog was called My So-Called Writer’s Life. Later it was Perpetual Exile (with a side blog, Minutiae: The Other Blog). Then, Southern Discomfort. Then Vortex(t). Then (as if I was trying harder than ever to alienate people) it was another made-up word: Anachroclysmic. (I have a feeling I’m skipping a few incarnations. Which is some indication of how split, scattered, and threaded through with ambivalence this endeavor has been.)

With each blog incarnation, I’d moved further away from my original intent, which was merely to contemplate aspects of the writing process, along the path toward completing what I was then, without any sense of irony, referring to as “my books” (With the occasional minutiae and random life details thrown in for good measure). This was, of course, back when I was actually sending out - and publishing - work, in bona fide, both dead tree- and web-based publications.

The first thing to adulterate my (inordinately delicate and unstable) blogging process was the introduction of comments. This got me embroiled in my very first blogwar, all because some buffoon, also, coincidentally, with a blog called “Minutiae,” got riled up because I had used that same word in my blog’s title. (The hundreds of other blogs already out there, using the same word - as I soon discovered - were immaterial; because one of his own regular readers had accidentally found my blog while looking for his - and subsequently expressed great enthusiasm for my writing - this guy decided to launch an all-out war. It was beyond absurd.) Of course Minutiae was only part of the title, and it was for my intentionally peripheral “side blog,” but none of that would stop this fellow from leaving me a shit-ton of stupid comments. (Creatively, he signed some of them with my full legal name, setting up a whole “Victoria Marinelli” profile for these purposes, which Blogger subsequently refused to delete.) If I recall correctly, Blogger.com then lacked a capacity for moderating comments; all one could do at first was delete undesired comments, following which a notice would appear in the offending comment’s place, “…Deleted by an administrator” or some other such thing, which to me was nearly as aggravating as the original troll-droppings. Installing Haloscan’s (also far from perfect) commenting system was helpful to a degree, but by then my focus had already shifted, and was less about the writing of books (or even blogs) and more about the strange new community of bloggers I’d found¹.

The second thing to shift my blogging paradigm, of course, was Sitemeter. Immediately, there was an addictive element to the newfound ability to have some sense of who was reading me, what pages they were most interested in, what outgoing links they selected, and so forth. Superficially, Sitemeter made the blogging process less lonely. Now that I had some investment in comments, I had a newfound insecurity whenever a given post didn’t receive comments. But if the statistics showed that I was, at least, being read, that was some comfort, and I felt encouraged enough to go on.

Over time, these ostensibly useful tools had become crutches for me, and as described above, actually changed the tone of my online work and, indeed, the direction of my life. I’d ceded a lot of power to a few functions of javascript. Where were the days of sitting around one fall evening in someone’s backyard in Oregon Hill, learning for the first time that I was being read, only because a friend of my husband’s (who has since become a close friend of mine) said he’d been waiting, patiently, for my next blog update? That small moment of validation had energized me, serving as fuel for several more weeks of the otherwise inherently lonely endeavor.

And now, for me, that’s just it. I’ve realized I’m never going to get my books written unless I’m willing to go back to that place of mostly unadulterated solitude, the intentional embracing of what is often a very terrifying loneliness. While there are, no doubt, others who know how to maintain their own centers of gravity even while engaging in (often very volatile) online communities, time has proven to me that I am not one of them. And while I’m not eschewing comments (I actually really like the Disqus commenting system I’ve recently implemented for various reasons, not least of which because it enables commenters to have more control over their own narratives, across the numerous blogs that are now using it), I am moderating them (though almost everything that ends up in my mod queue does eventually make it through to the site), while I’m also working hard to stay true to my own voice, and not censor expressions I think may be met with disfavor (as I certainly expected would occur yesterday) or bafflement.

Sitemeter, however, just had to go.

So if you’re linking to me (either to an individual post or to my blog as a whole), please don’t assume I know it (much less hold me responsible for engaging in conversations about such links and/or linking back). Those of you - particularly from higher traffic blogs - who may have linked to me in the past may be understandably confused, or perhaps even offended, but I hope you won’t be, because there is no “diss” here - rather, there is just a very determined effort to refocus, to find my way back.

And while I will no longer have a formal blogroll as such, there is an acknowledgments page in the works which will link to almost everyone I can think of over the years who has linked to or otherwise supported me, which will take some time to put together, considering the wildly disparate, gorgeously cacophonous bunch of people you are².

For this same page, I will also be listing some otherwise unsung heroes of my life, who have never had blogs. From Olympia, WA (and now Asheville, NC), for instance, there is my old college roommate and one-time road trip companion Ellane Chandler. (I may never finish writing our take on the Kerouacian experience; perhaps she should take over, since she is as fine a writer as I have ever known.) And before that, from Kauai (but now Greensboro, NC), one of my dearest and most loyal friends on this earth - also a talented writer, with genius, insane wit - Beau-Jacques Handy. And before that, from San Diego (but now Woodbury, MN), I would have to acknowledge the very generous soul in Jen Lewis - who, bizarrely, was in the Twin Cities during the same years I was floundering there, though we could not have known it at the time; in retrospect, I take a certain comfort in knowing we were sharing certain regional experiences all along, like the “Bulletin Board” feature of the St. Paul Pioneer Press³.

Because I am, and will always remain, grateful for the support so many of you have shown me. I appreciate you all.

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¹ Or that, in the beginning, found me. I’m looking at you, AJ.

² I could go on linking like that for days. If I didn’t get to you - and there are so many of you to whom I am grateful, I probably didn’t - indulge me once more with your patience if you can - the page really is in the works.

³ “Bulletin Board” now has something of an online equivalent, but to me, it’s just not the same. You had to see it in print in the actual paper, don’t ask me why.

Between my husband getting laid off last week (with all of three weeks’ severance - Jesus God what are we going to do?), his aunt dying yesterday, and an increased severity of political disillusionment on my part, I’m not much inclined to blog right now.

Fortunately, my favorite living author, Augusten Burroughs, has a new book out: A Wolf at the Table. I’m debating between devouring it whole (as I was starting to do this morning; see below) and savoring it for as long as possible. Or perhaps both. (Devour, then start over. Lather, rinse, repeat.)

In any event, I now have a place in which to engage my consciousness that doesn’t make me want to scream bloody murder. Or it does, but in a productive, Jesus-what’s-wrong-with-me-I-need-to-be-writing-like-this way. Augusten Burroughs is nothing if not an existential shot of courage, an escape hatch that isn’t such a benign “escape” after all (considering some of my own history that requires a fair amount of confronting; Augusten’s most recent book, notably, concerns his father).

Meantime, you can (almost) always find me on Twitter.

As some of you know, I recently deleted my entire blog. I had several reasons (of which this episode was less an immediate trigger than it was the icing on the hyper-rhetorical cake), but the bottom line was that my life had been overtaken by (overt) political blogging, such that most other subjects and activities had become subordinate.

There was also a growing disgust with the state of political discourse within the feminist blogosphere. Many of the feminist blogs to which I had once looked for nuanced explorations of crucial issues of politics and culture were now doing little besides spewing constant streams of grossly distorting invective against Barack Obama (or what they would oh-so-innocently refer to as “vetting the candidate”).

When I took a deeply felt, authentically diplomatic approach, my would-be sisters advocating for Hillary Clinton generally ignored me (with precious few exceptions - you know who you are). And when I took more of a fighting approach, I began to deplore the sound of my own voice.

Finally, I did a post specifically on the dangers of the Obama/Clinton divide among progressives (using a one-shot opportunity to guest blog at Huffington Post), and while responses were generally favorable (I was thanked, for instance, for “inserting a little sanity into the divisive discourse”), it was also clear that my words could not begin to counteract what was, after all, a tsunami-sized wave of grossly cynical, and sometimes openly hateful discourse.

So, does my about-face with regard to overt political blogging mean I no longer care - passionately - about these issues? Hardly. (Indeed, what woke me up in the middle of the night, provoking me to write this, was a dream containing the audaciously brassy and insistent chorus line from Skunk Anansie’s Yes It’s Fucking Political.) Well then, does it mean my support for Barack Obama’s candidacy is in any way lessened? Most certainly not.

But if months engaging in what had been a labor of love - writing about the issues in this election - have gotten me absolutely nowhere in terms of fostering open, substantive dialogue with progressives’ common interests in mind, why on earth would I continue with that labor now? (For while it is my candidate’s prerogative - and, indeed, mandate - to respond as needed¹ to constant attacks coming from the Clinton camp, I don’t see that my doing so adds to the current discourse.)

Today, as Pennsylvania voters go to the polls, I’m going to impose a total news blackout in this household (from TV to newspapers to blogs to Twitter) until I know most of the returns are in, and my kids are in bed. Because, in the event Clinton’s last-ditch effort to save her campaign, by deploying that most Rovian of all despicably Rovian tactics - using the image of Osama bin Laden in campaign ads, in an effort to scare voters (remember when Democrats were in universal opposition to this practice?) - is successful (where ’success’ would mean more than a marginal victory in this particular state, with significant net gain in pledged delegates), I am going to be incredibly angry. And I’d rather my kids didn’t see me like that.

Whatever the outcome, this time tomorrow, I’ll compose myself again, and deal with whatever comes next. If, somehow, Clinton becomes the Democratic party’s nominee, I will certainly vote for her, because McCain is by far the more dangerous candidate.

In the Huffington Post guest blog entry referenced above, I included in a footnote this somewhat out-of-place comment: Each post I write on the election, I die a little. Extricating myself from these debates, then - despite a constant stream of outrages to which I might otherwise have been compelled to react - has been in the interests of self-preservation, and I don’t regret it.

Going back to something I jokingly said on Twitter, awhile back:

Feminist blogosphere, I wish I knew how to quit you.

I’m happy to say that with this last post, I finally have.

Good luck, Pennsylvania. I hope you’ll vote your conscience.

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¹ As Obama said, in an interview to be aired in full on the Today Show later this morning:

This is an old trick, right? Somebody attacks you and attacks you and attacks you, and when you finally call them on it, suddenly you’re ‘engaging in the same tactics.’ We have been extraordinarily restrained during the course of this campaign and have generally responded only to attacks that have already been leveled at us by Senator Clinton.