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.

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.)

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am sitting outside in Paris @ cafe Les Deux Magots (waaaaay Hemingway!) having an espresso and getting ready to walk over to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas’ house, then on to where Joyce wrote a good part of Ulysses. There’s your geek stuff for the day. XO, DRB

Can I just say? How rad is it that one of my dearest friends in the world not only throws down as lead screamer for Richmond’s own Grammy-nominated metal band, but also gets me as the literature dork I am. (And who was also my very first regular reader, in this blog’s first incarnation, in 2003 or so.)

Love you, Randy. Have fun out there and get your butt back home to RVA safe and sound. (And note that I waited a full twenty-four hours before posting this. Wouldn’t have wanted you to get stalked by Parisian metal fans or whatever.)