Yo' the Man, I'm the Man

I am becoming the man I didn't marry.  "Stop saying that," protests a male friend, apparently noticing my breasts more than my tongue in cheek.  "But it's true," I say.  Look at me:  dog-tired feet up on table, ripped and muddy jean shorts and smelly T-shirt, favorite well worn work boot odor wafting up from below, swilling a beer before 2pm.  I swear, I am as woman as they come, but lately I've been mindfully, aggressively, obstinately chinking away at the gender mystique barrier like pro-capitalist German's at the Berlin wall, and I'm as sore as an athlete.  Its a big job and as I'm still living with the Phantom Man, its gotta be me, or the job ain't gettin' done.

My first junction box!  Booyah!

What is the 'Gender Mystique Barrier' of which I speak?  Back in the '70's we had Friedan's 'Feminine Mystique', Gloria Steinem, the Equal Right's Amendment, some very nice tea, and much more to ponder.  Four decades later, I can solidly claim that there is nothing that mystical about the 'feminine', except perhaps that it's based on money, or leisure, or man-power (literally), that I don't have.  Afternoons sipping mint juleps with the other desperate housewives while admiring each others' pedicures, complaining about our husbands and bragging about our above-average children is not an experience I've had the privilege to enjoy.  My toes are not that clean, nor do I have much time and energy for fashion, except the Reno-Depot kind.  But mostly, the problem with the feminine is that its not practical.  It doesn't get the trench dug, the wood stacked, or the shelving installed.

First attempt at framing-- requires attention to detail.  Shit!

Yet it is expected of us.  Without it we are sexless spinsters wearing pleated pants and sentenced to eternal loneliness and abandonment by normal society.  My more cat-like sisters have figured out how to play coy and helpless as some kind of currency on the gender market, as a sort of feminine crowbar with a plunging neckline, but I am just too bow wow for all that.  Yet my gender socialization holds me in its talons despite my willingness to forgo the manicure and says, "well ma'am, you just can't do that."  What is it exactly that I can't do?  That part is not entirely clear although it most often involves wiring or levers or some kind of power tool that is only available on the man market, transactions made in the back room of the bar, or behind the garage, when we ladies are not looking.  But wait, who said that I can't do that?  Was it my father?  My brother?  The guy at the hardware store?  Well, sometimes it is and for some strange reason, I believe them.  There is nothing worse than a trip to the man-store to hammer in my gender insecurity.  Hours and hours I wander around, looking for supplies, interviewing staff and customers, trying to make decisions, totally ineffectively and at great cost.

A very nice monkey

But a few months of observation, layers of dirt and cash out later and I am slowly learning, a monkey could do most of this stuff.  A few of the right tools, some common sense, and a bit of background with legos and tinker toys are enough to qualify anyone, including me.  You wouldn't believe some of the mistakes the monkeys make.  Hot water in the toilet?  Vapor barrier-- whoops, we forgot!  I love and appreciate my monkeys but from now on, I'm doin' it myself. 

Tweet Tweet

I got an iPhone yesterday, why am I capitalizing the P?  It wants me to tweet.  I don't want to tweet.  Maybe I should tweet!  Everyone else is tweeting.  How did tweet become a verb?  Can I make up a verb?  I want new verbs like I want new foods.  But I don't know if I want this gadget in my life.  First of all it has no geography.  No buttons.  I like buttons, you can find them in the dark.  The fake buttons on the iphone are too small for my fat, square, guitar player fingers.  Hey this thing is a racist, it presupposes pointy slender fingertips.  Well maybe not a racist.  But you know.

It wants me to make a lot of decisions about how it controls my life.  Buzz, superBuzz, or MegaBuzz.  Expresso with that ma'am?  Buzz when I get a text, a call, an email?  I can't get any of this shit to work anyway.  How do I put it on fucking silent, just tell me that!  So far the iPhone is making me very grouchy!  Do they have one that gives massages?  I'm in.

I have 14 days to decide if I want to march down this road with all the other tweets I mean twits, and if I have enough wherewithall to guide this tool towards making my life easier and better, not let it guide me to having my head face down in the little gadget all the time.  I remember boycotting Facebook for about 5 yrs.  Since caving, it has led to some positive events.  A rideshare.  An event I didn't know about.  Some little box typing communication with someone I actually really know and like who I wouldn't otherwise be 'talking' to.  Discovering how we are all linked through chains of acquaintance.  Stalking my favorite local celebrity.  Planning a hit on a local politician.  But I digress.

The point is as everyone says to get technology to help us, not control us.  So where is the silent button on this thingee?

Extreme Love

I know this woman.
She is all tenderness, and tendony, inside.
She makes pie.
wonderful, delicious love-pie, that she loves
because she loves, 'cause she's alive and
She loves pie.
Well, who doesn't?

She loves the pie and she loves the people who buy her pie.
But she hates the pie too.
She hates the hot, dirty kitchen (which she loves, because she do)
and she hates all the days gone by
sweating up to her elbows in blueberry goo.

And she says that she hates it but this is what she does.
She makes pie (and sushi) and loves it, because.

I visit her in her kitchen, where she rolls it all while bitchin'
and her six cats prowl around the margins
of her skinny, beefy-muscle, pie-making mama vibe.

She picks up road kill animals
and makes puppets from them because
she can't stand to see them die
on the side
And I used to think this was gross.
I mean, this girl's got a baby deer corpse on marionette cords
hanging just next to her bed from the ceiling
and to my mind
this i just some sick semi-taxidermy action gone astray--
"But... its because I love them so much," she says.
She say.

And now I get it.
This is just Extreme Love.
Love so convicted, it hauls back the dead
and strange as it may seem, they hang from a thread
beckoning with their hollow skin
and dead eyes.
Meanwhile, in the kitchen
she's pounding out more pies
working out the kinks in the dough with a roller
rolling up rawness in a sea-weed stroller

She wants a child yesterday,
so hopefully, tomorrow.
She wrestles with her discontent while
delicately shifting ingredients
in some new and tangy recipe.
Why does it go this way, she asks,
does it have to be?

With tears in her eyes now, she stifles a guffaw
and her flat bellied laugh spills all over the floor
'cause her neighbor just burst in from the back in a bra
and he's SO high... on something strange...

like fungus, or deer poo, or vegetable brain.
She has to sit down now, she's laughing so hard
and its time for that beer that makes it more bearable--
there's 30 pies finished, so nothing's that terrible.

I love her.
Like, Extreme Love love her.
Like, toss 30 excellent pies into the dumpster, love her
or fling-your-body-in-front-of-a-train to stop her
like
Haul ass cross-country in a three wheeled Ferrari
to put your arms around her in a crisis.
But she does not ask me to do any of this.

Because she's practical, not strategic.
She's tactical, and tactile, and heck, I'm allergic--
to the six cats, that is, not to her
so she rolls herself into them and falls asleep as they purr.

The next morning she's up early, and at it again
pounding her dough-flesh into raw pastry good-ness
that she imagines will bring joy into other peoples' lives...

The woman's got dreams

Meanwhile, there's pies.

I Hate Americans

Oh Canada! July 1st is nearly here and Oh Boy! Kate and Willy are coming! (Now... who is it, Canada, that you think is ridiculous?) Maybe now that the Canadian dollar has trumped the US dollar by 4 cents we can finally stop hating Americans.

I was an American once. It wasn't so bad. For years and years I held on defiantly to that title from this side of the border, just to get in your faces, until a recent dunk across into the US made me realize I've actually grown uncomfortable with wide open vowels and large toilet paper. Oh I'm not saying that I'm Canadian, exactly, although I do carry both passports. But I have to admit, I have developed a somewhat Canadian sensibility in many affairs over my 13 years in residence. In other regards I remain definitively Yanquoise/Nouvelle Yorkaise-- daring, innovative, bold; welcoming to a disarming degree (if you're Canadian) direct, entrepeneurial. But my NY schtick has had a strong northern filter slapped on it; ie, I'm more in control of my cultural default settings.

Speaking of default settings, lets talk about hate. I mean, more specifically, lets talk about anti-americanism.

Now, your average Canadian will not openly admit... well... uh... anything really. Europeans, on the other hand, will tell you straight out that they hate Americans and then they will tell you why. Some of their explanations will make sense. In fact you may agree with them, and return to America as an anti-american American, (as I did, years ago) which is probably a positive thing in a nation of people awash in a lack of self-awareness and self-reflection. But Canadian hatred of Americans is different. Its friendlier. Its couched as humor, or sarcasm. Good wholesome beer-hall hahaha, can't you take a joke? Its in-bred. Its passive aggressive, and its completely socially acceptable. Its default, man. It isn't intelligent, or insightful or politically astute. Its knee-jerk, its mainstream and its elementary. Its bullied-kid-turned-JD Salinger gang of boys. Freaks out for vengeance. Luckily it is backed by very little fire-power, comparatively. But its culturally lethal, nonetheless.

Now what is bizarre as an American (who is no longer an American) is the bipolar experience of being hated and adored. In my individual experience, being American has earned me strange brownie points with other immigrants-- members of many groups who have been broadly disenfranchised, endangered and displaced by US politic and policy in either direct or indirect ways. "Oh!", they exclaim, brightly. "you're from The States!" they glow, putting their arm around me, pulling me in a little closer. "You will come to my family, for dinner. You will stay as long as you like. You can live with us!" I love these people. But why? Why are they not dripping with anti american hatred? Maybe it is the 'we are in this together' immigrant experience, bonding in the face of the relatively cold and insular Canadian cultural climate. Or maybe they want to associate with my US citizenship and the perceived privilege and opportunity it might afford. Or more likely, they recognize the difference between a government and its people, many of them having witnessed and experienced corruption in their own governments at home. Perhaps, for some reason, they just plain like me. Or maybe, they are just being very very polite, and are secretly seething below the surface.

As for you Canadians, I being kind-of one of you now, it is kind of understandable. Canadians take for granted a government that mostly does represent them. It is hard for them to imagine a dichotomy. They are outraged by the fluke election where a party sweeps into power without popular, majority support, whereas, I am always dumbstruck and bewildered by any dynamic groundswell of the people that manages to impact the actions and policies of any government. Its really about privilege, and sense of entitlement from a semi socially liberal democracy that has the comfort of the social welfare net in the background of Canadian lives. Its the 'well, you can always go on welfare' mindset that gets everyone of the accountability hook, instead of the do or die cry of 'give me liberty or give me death'. With the rate of unemployment and homelessness down south these days, death wins out more often than not for a lot of people. And no, we do not all share the views of our government. In fact, there are 30 million 'progressive' Americans whose political views and lifestyles reside somewhere in between the NDP an the Greens, with an added dash of innovation and communitarianism. That is almost the entire population of Canada! Put that in your snide and smoke it.

So don't teach your kids to hate Americans. Look to form alliances, liase across borders, celebrate the contributions from both sides, and open your minds. Me? Oh I can hate Americans on a bad day, if I want to, because I am one. Well, I was one. Well, anyway. You get the point. And go ahead, Oh Canada, have a grass fed hamburger and enjoy your extra day off. But stop wishing me a Happy 4th of July and then sneering behind my back. I don't do patriotic holidays anyway. Because national borders, insofar as they divide us, pit us against each other, and sic us on each other like a bunch of rabid boozed up soccer/football/hockey fans, are not all that much to celebrate, if you ask me.

The Angels Singing

Imagine, if you will. Imagine a force so powerful, it has the ability to shift the totality of your every microcellular vibration 180 degrees in a split second; from inside to outside to upside to downside to right-side up; from backwards to forwards, from frazzled to peacin’ out, from insomniac to sleepin-like-a-baby, from screamin bitch to sighing smiling happyface, for the skies have opened and rays of light like tendrils of god’s ET finger light-beams are shining down upon you! Imagine this moment of utter physio-energetic transformation that happens in an unseen instant; how it creeps around the corner and suddenly and quietly pours hot fudge sauce all over your life, (or at least upon your outlook.) And all of a sudden you’re like Oooooooooooohhhh you are swimming in the silkiest fudge sauce ever known to man, even European ones, while whipped cream clouds drift lazily by and cherries fall gently like dew drops from the heavens. What is this moment to which I refer? I’ll tell you what. I just got my period, beeoitches, and the angels are singing!!! All at once, I am floating on an endorphin laced magic carpet ride barely touching the treetops of reality and the world is all celebration. There’s a refreshing breeze in the air, the stars twinkle inside my heart-heart like a million fireflies come to life from inside. Simultaneously, I feel the insistence of earth power pulling down, down through my womb through my legs and feet, tension pouring out of my ether, releasing with the blood to fertilize the earth, unburden my soul, and I am free! I am free! Thank god almighty, I’m free at last!

But lets back up a bit. There is no greater hell than PMS. PMS should stand for something meaningful like ‘Please Massage this Sister’. Or ‘Puffed up Manic and Stinky’; or, ‘Possible Murder Suspect’. Or ‘Please Manifest Sex’. All of the nasty with all of the needy, colliding in one body, mine, yours, with a great array of un-delightful and specific physical symptoms, say, swollen tender breasts, or a migraine, perhaps? How about some searing low back pain, sore feet, an aching, sad heart, chronic resentment, manic mean lust, ridiculous cravings, insomnia, or persistent anxiety? Perhaps just aching teeth, skin eruptions and eczema, night sweats, weird dreams, hot flashes, the impulse to shove everything you see into your mouth, or a soul tearing massive crying fit to break up the mundaneness of never ending exhaustion, exhaustion, exhaustion.

Do you know what? I deserve a fucking medal every month for enduring 5-10 days of this miserable crescendo without killing or hurting anybody while other people are skipping down the street, whistling dixie. “Is it really that bad?” you may wonder. Fucking YES!! Who knew how bestial we all are, how controlled by biological cycles? When one minute I can be entwined and entangled in the slowest, most unbearable web of I-hate-everyone-and-everything-and-I’m-sick-and-tired-of-it-all, and in the next second, literally, I am the essence of god’s glory, the mist on an angels’ eyelash, and earth-godess-mama drawing all of life to her bosom’s embrace, well, then something whack is going on. Yea, it’s nature folks, doing its finest work, so fuck you, nature.

And so why bother with culture at all? When in the end of the day, I am but a moaning, bloated cow, desperate for some burly farmer’s hand-action, why do any other kind of posturing? I’ll tell you why. For the sake of your children. For public safety-- law and order. For traffic calming and reasonable driving behaviour on America’s highways. For God Save the Queen. For decorum or civility of any sort. For table manners. For sidewalks free of spit. For the pledge of allegiance, and church going grannies. For making it through the workday with your bra still hooked.

Ladies! We must, against our every peri-menopausal and pre-menstrual demolition engineer instinct, control ourselves. We must, as I do, harness all our self discipline, and reign it in, using all the underwire, willpower, masturbation and chocolate necessary. We must endure until that pivotal moment when the entire universe reverses itself with one smooth turn on its axis of evil and the blood comes flowing (out of us, not them), releasing flocks of doves in a ruffle of wings and choir robes as cherubs break out into a bombastic, celebratory anthem, just for us.

God knows, there would be absolute mayem otherwise.

Another night in the car

I love the car bed and I love my laptop and I love my lungs. Too much inhalation of mysterious particles to which my body doth protest, too many days in a row and here I have landed once more, sleeping in the car tonight with no better option, and this time only semi-prepared—I could stand another blanket or two, to be honest. Nobody wants to hear about suffering, especially due to weird allergic reactions that are incomprehensible to most, even to me, who has had them all my life, following generations of family members with the same. I am, quite frankly, homeless, and this, because of strange and uncontrollable circumstances. Not financial ruin. Not alcoholism. Not war or natural disaster or fire. Allergies in transitional times. Say freakin’ what? And this is not the first time it’s happened. Tell someone you are homeless because of allergies and they will think you are a certified nut-bar. Well, call me crazy, I just don’t give a ---- anymore—
Really.

When you have gone for days and days w/o enough oxygen, nothing really matters anymore except that very physiological fact. It even trumps sleep deprivation, its sidekick, which I have also in my company. To make matters even more interesting, my procrastinated upper left dental project has started to ache and swell in the middle of this crisis. There are seemingly no choices, yet my sexi flexi-mind re-minds me that there always are. Things could always be worse. Seen through the roses, this old car interior is like an upscale tent, and there is the nice bed I built into it. I have laptop luxury. I have clean water and I am rurally parked so I have enough darkness to sleep, no police harassment, and pee freely just outside my four doors. The weather is just right—not too hot, not too cold, and hardly any bugs. I have a jug of clean water. I happen to have a Tylenol in my purse. In a state of acceptance of the now, things couldn’t be any better, and they’re not great but they could be worse. The kids I serve as nanny think the car bed is cool and they are right. Seen at best it’s a groovy studio apartment on wheels. Let’s roll…

The biggest evil in this and any challenging situation in life is the worry monster. The worry monster freaks you out and grabs your calm and flails it about recklessly. The worry monster grips at all your innovativeness, creativity, problem-solving power and optimism. It seizes your soul, robs you of sleep and a sense of humor, makes your symptoms worse. The worry monster is the enemy, and must be shot down by any means necessary. Cool tunes, midnight car-blogging, scribble art on the interior, car yoga, absolute childlike behavior, a dedication to the delightful in the most seemingly awful of circumstances; a refusal to be a victim, and a vicious, vicious dedication to ‘glass half full’ ideology in action, or, failing that, to ambivalence at least.

It’s a starry starry night, I am safe, and it is summer. I have a toothbrush and there is no reason for panic, doom and gloom, depression, tears, or nightmares. In this moment I am both the most threatened and the most protected human being on the planet, my experience spanning a wide expanse of lived realities throughout time and space. The car bed is cool. The car bed is eternal. The car bed could be better but right now, it has to be just fine.

Somethin' Gotcher Goat

Hello readers. I’m sorry to have abandoned my Wild Wakefield Blogspot for so many months. What can I say? I got housing-outsourced to Chelsea for the winter where there was just not that much to snack on. I perched (and froze) in a beautiful riverfront what-should-be-a-3-season chateau/cottage as caretaker, binged on high-speed internet, and played with the neighbors’ baby. That’s about it, unless you count the four and a half month battle with the H1N1 or some other kind of arctic bonanza virus that is still tweaking at me from the corners of my immune system. Oh, and I also got paid really decent cash to drive a few Chelsea kids around and fry them up some veggie dogs a couple times a week. Not a bad gig. Overall, I would not report any significant advancements of body, mind, spirit or career. But I did survive another Canadian winter, and if you grew up somewhere else, that counts as an accomplishment.

Not two days back in range of the ‘field, and I’ve already slept in my car twice, sat outside the closed library to check my email, skinny-dipped behind the General Store at 5am, jammed Cajun with Claude and Nathan, had a massive 48 hour asthma attack, chased goats out of my neighbor’s living room, and noticed an oily scum on the surface of Brown Lake. The changes that attempt to wring the funk factor out of our village are increasing: the wages and number of affordable, healthy living options are not. But the thing about change is that as it closes some doors, cuts down some forests, re-routes some wildlife corridors, and expropriates some properties, it also creates some new entryways, opportunities and areas for exploration. At least that’s how the goats see it when a crucial barricade is suddenly left open by a forgetful human. They do not hesitate to leap inside, party it up, and shit all over the place. While I scrub away at hippy dirt and feverishly attempt to vanquish allergic smells from my small apartment on the upper level, the goats are rockin’ out to 60’s vinyl and mixing up groovy desserts that are raw, vegan, and organic. They make me feel uptight and conventional, an experience I certainly am hard pressed to have anywhere else.

The fireflies are back early this year, lighting up fresh sprigs of poison ivy along the roadsides. Its dry and the river is lower than I’ve seen in a long time, but the lake is high because the beavers downstream have been busy. Oil is spewing into the Gulf of Mexico while web surfing has never been faster. Elsewhere, sudden sinkholes appear, Apple launches their IPad, and people stand in line to buy them. I move slowly into Hippy Summer Camp and sleep on a yoga mat, because I do not have a bed, and do hot flashes and night sweats while wading through a delayed and exaggerated bout of PMS—post moving syndrome. Life seems full of increasingly extreme paradoxes, and we all might be going to hell on earth. Or this could be heaven. Its hard to know. To the goats, a broken window presents not problem but opportunity. Not that I completely agree, but I’m just sayin’, I’d pull that window shut next time if I were you.