217. UNDERWIRE ALERT. QUICK! RAISE THE TERRORIST THREAT LEVEL TO RED!

From the Archives

(May 2006) I finally rolled into my driveway after a long day of traveling and, as my pal Cin (who picked me up from the airport) said, I can tell you’re completely exhausted, Medea, because your voice sounds different.

Yeah.

Mostly, though, it’s different because my reconstructed shoulder is hurting like hell from hauling a suitcase and laptop all over creation.

Lars and I left the Village around 10 this morning and I’ve been traveling ever since. Took the subway to Grand Central Station (while reading a scene in Carole Maso’s Ghost Dance that occurs in Grand Central Station), then hopped the express bus to LaGuardia.

Sat around for an hour and a half reading (after my underwires alerted security to the fact that I have big tits), then sat in the Atlanta airport for another two hours before finally touching ground here.

Cin took me out to dinner afterwards and we talked nonstop till she pulled up in front of her house . . .

. . . where we discovered that someone crashed into the driver’s door of my cute little car!

Fortunately, a young woman came running up as we were studying the damage and fessed up that her new-driving mom was making a U-Turn and hit me.

Whew!

•

So. Back in the nineties, the village of Chapel Hill produced a poster showcasing the coolest doors in town.

After staying at Shulamith’s apartment yesterday, I decided that someone should cop this idea and produce a Bathtubs of the City poster.

As any struggling artist (who isn’t subsidized by Daddy Warbucks) knows, the bathtub is seldom in the bathroom in low-income NYC apartments. Instead, it's usually somewhere in the general vicinity of available plumbing (and smack dab in the middle of the kitchen or living room, in most cases).

Shuli’s tub is by the kitchen sink and in clear view of any location except the toilet in her apartment (and, if I lived there, I would make a collapsible tabletop that fits over the thing).

Anyway, Lars and I stayed there last night because Shuli is currently in the hospital and we needed to take care of her cat this morning anyway.

(Actually, Shuli is not just in the hospital, but also currently believes that she OWNS her building and the two buildings beside it, and she demanded that Lars hand over the keys. She also said that Lars is dead to her and shoved her out the door. And she insisted that her own cat is dead, even after Lars showed her photographs of us petting the cat.)

Poor Lars. She’s a good friend and went back for more abuse today because she knows Shuli will remember the visit when she’s back on her meds.


So, understandably, I’ve been thinking about Kate Millet’s Looney-Bin Trip a lot today—especially because Shuli discussed the premise with Kate in detail as she worked on the manuscript.

They both assert that people with mental illnesses have the right to choose whether or not they take medication and both insist that medications blunt their brilliance.

This is a complicated subject for me, since my mother has an adult-onset suicidal paranoid schizophrenic disorder which caused her, at various points in my childhood, to OD in an attempt to silence the voices, and wrap the piano in tinfoil in an attempt to silence the voices, and douse her children with witch hazel or Lysol or whatever she believes at the moment would keep us safe from the voices at that moment, and to ultimately shoot herself in an attempt to escape the voices.

These occurred while she was off her medication as we were trying to get her help (but when she did not yet qualify for help because she was not deemed an immediate threat to herself or someone else).

We did manage to involuntarily commit her twice—a legal procedure that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy—and this forced her to take the meds that keep her relatively functioning and, frankly, the meds have kept her on a fairly even keel over the years, so I have to say that I disagree with Kate and Shuli (but understand their resistance to meds).

They see the meds as blunting their brilliance, but it seems to me that mental illness is the real culprit here and not the meds.

Sure, mania can convince you that you are filled with brilliant perceptions as you crank out reams of writing (been on mania-inducing drugs; done that), but it can also convince you that your neighbor's mailbox requires you to kill them.

We're all familiar with those sad statistics too.

And the fact of the matter is that Shuli is not brilliant when she quits taking her meds.

Instead, she overflows her bathtub until the ceiling below hers collapses and sets her living-room floor on fire and stands in the middle of her apartment screaming until the police haul her away.

What a shitty-ass situation all around.

102. COMFORT TOTEM

From the Archives

(June 2005) This is how you know that Medea is sick: I am curled up in bed on a summer afternoon in my blue-polka-dotted white flannel PJs with happy red piping, drinking diet ginger-ale and eating a bright orange bowl of artificially colored (and flavored and...) mac and cheese with my well-worn Tony the Tiger spoon ... and I actually put on clothes to go to the store to buy this fake-tasting stuff!

Got the spoon after saving cereal box tops as a kid and still pull it out on bad days. It’s how I comforted myself back then and I guess it still works as my little comfort totem.

Am pretty certain that I have a good old-fashioned sinus infection, but really don’t want to go to the doctor. Hence I’ve been lying here saving up my energy as I surf the Web and pop echinacea and hope that I recover.

Molly Ivins’s Alternet article begins ”The Texas Legislature gives itself a huge retirement pension and, the next day, cuts retirement benefits for teachers. Welcome to a Republican-ruled state.” The wonderful (but sobering) title of her article is THE VIEW FROM THE OWNER'S BOX. Ivins also notes “You know, it's one thing for Republicans to run year after year railing against government. But once you win, you got to run it, people.”

I love her spunky smart self, but she strikes me as someone who may be lonely deep down in her heart. I hope I'm wrong though.

Also checked out the Free Will Astrology site.

I’m not actually into astrology so much, but Rob Brezsny is really cool and insightful and always references obscure and fascinating things that make me think.

My horoscope this week is particularly interesting, given that a friend just informed me that a (now well-to-do) ex of mine apparently still tries to live up to my values where money is concerned.

Huh.

I’m not really opposed to money—you can do a lot of good things in the world with it, as Paul Farmer can assure you—but I do hate to watch the way so many Americans spend it and am continually appalled by what we throw away. I also refuse to sell my soul for the sake of having more money and try to make decisions that further the care of my soul first and foremost. I want to be fiscally comfortable, but don't really care about keeping up with the proverbial Joneses otherwise and view conspicuous consumerism and those horrible McMansions as pathetic commentaries on our emptiness.

I also took enough advertising classes to recognize marketing manipulation when I see it.

I do have "money issues” though, as this ex pointed out to me on more than one occasion. Grew up in a working poor family that struggled, but have spent most of my adult life around people from solidly upper- or upper-middle-class families. This translates into sometimes feeling out of place around folks who assume that their references include me—and, well, they don’t.

Here's reality: Poor Americans are hyperaware of the fact that they are considered failures by their culture (and their current president). They're are aware that they are believed to be stupid and unmotivated by the more well-to-do around them (even though they often work two jobs in an attempt to keep up with their bills). And they're aware that their poverty makes people who have more feel uncomfortable.

We grew up knowing we were Other.

My best friend and I talk about this and how differently we grew up. Her family of origin was working class, too, but in a mostly working class town. And there were very few books in her house. My family of origin was working class in an affluent town, yet our house was filled with books—architecture and philosophy and science and art and history and arecheology—and my father spent a lot of time talking about philosophy and ideas. We struggled financially though, in part because he was a dysfunctional creative type who made consistently bad financial decisions and turned down raises that required him to relocate because, as he said, "I like where I live. It's beautiful here. And my flag is stuck down here."

All-righty then.

I'm also aware that my education and professional employment require me to spend most of my time around people who do not live the way most Americans live, that I spend most of my time among the most highly educated people in the country.

But what's that MLK line: "We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing oriented society to a person oriented society."

Yea. That about sums it up for me.

Anyway, here's my Free Will Astrology reading for this week, which actually does tie into what I've been blabbering on about:

I live pretty simply, and often have an allergic reaction in the presence of people who have their own jet airplanes, travel with personal servants and style consultants, drink $300-a-bottle champagne, and vacation in palatial spas on private islands. Having said that, I am duty-bound to report that you now have an astrological mandate to indulge in as much extravagant pleasure as you can afford. Your watchword for the week comes from Frank Lloyd Wright: “Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.’"

Meanwhile, apropos to, perhaps—but not really—nothing, I noticed in the grocery store last night that there is a magazine called Billionaires and wonder, do people actually purchase this periodical and take it home to read it instead of living their lives? The f*ck?!

READING: Aureole by Carole Maso (mmmm)

LISTENING TO: Until recently, I was listening to KRS-1, because I need a good beat to get me moving. He’s singing about Afrocentric education: you don’t know that you ain’t just a janitor coz no one told you about Benjamin Baneecke: A brilliant black man who invited the almanac. Can’t you see where KRS is coming at?

BEST OF SPAM: Does Ur Cock Hard Enough?

88. THE BLUE WHEELCHAIR

From the Archives

(May 2005) The blue wheelchair sat abandoned by the pond.

I sat at lush gardens tonight till dark, reading. Stopped by Whole Foods earlier and picked up fresh herbs, a loaf of crunchy bread, a lime tart, and some Saint Nectaire cheese that disappointed me because it lacks the complexity of Saint Andre, which was Whole Foods’ comparison cheese.

(I knew I should have gone to the farmer’s market instead and purchased local cheese from the friendly dyke cheesemakers.)

Poured some pinot noir into a flask, then took my food, wine, Carole Maso’s Art Lover, and myself to a little creek that runs between two grassy knolls at the gardens.

A beautiful, heavy-branched willow by the water provided shade over the rough stone bench where I sat. I settled in amongst the irises that kine the boulders that line the creek that empties into the pond and read till dark as the ducks swam around me.

There’s a whole chunk of time during graduate school when I missed films and books that were not directly associated with my studies. Kenneth Branaugh and Emma Thompson were all the rage then, but I had neither time nor money to enjoy such extravagances.

Maso’s Art Lover came out during this period, too, and I missed it the first go ‘round nut, boy, what a find now!

This book is hauntingly beautiful and raw and very, very well written.

Maso’s narrative approach is intimate and disarmingly heart-wrenching and the book brims over with insights and observations and tender quirky moments that leave your entire nervous system twitching.

I don’t believe anyone in the midst of losing a father could bear to read this book, but how wonderful it must be if you find a way to acknowledge that connection as you read.

My own father has been dead for six years now and I could still hardly bear to read this story ... and the declarative sketches of her sad, suicidal mother nearly took my breath away.

Here’s an excerpt from her opening page:

Although there is only a slight resemblance, the man can only be her father. You can tell by the way he moves toward her. As she stands up now I can see the intricate jigsaw shapes their bodies make to fit together. They will gnaw off an arm if necessary to properly fit, bleed at a joint, tilt the head, or nod a little too deeply just to maintain the vaguely heart-shaped vacuum that must always exist somehow between them.

•

Meanwhile, as I mentioned way back at the beginning of this entry, someone abandoned a blue wheelchair by the pond. I’d read several chapters by the time I saw the thing and it was getting dark—cone? rod? cone? rod? and that whole confused sight thing—so I wasn’t sure what I was seeing at first. And the heady scent of honeysuckle was so intoxicating that I almost felt drunk. Meanwhile the ducks splashed down in the water around me as I jumped over the rocks to investigate.

I hiked up the grassy knoll and discovered that, right there by the water, was a well-used faded blue wheelchair with a sagging seat.

Maybe it’s the curse of living through a loved one’s repeated suicide attempts or maybe it’s the influence of Maso’s book or maybe it’s the fact that this garden sits near a medical center. Not sure of the source,really, but can tell you that I immediately thought that a dying patient had rolled herself—and it was a her in my mind: Ophelia, Virginia W, my cancer-ridden mother-out-law, and my sad suicidal mother all rolled into one—down from her room and into this lush, late-spring paradise swollen taut with beauty, and thrown herself into the water.

Sometimes I wonder how a person who does not have a personal experience with suicide might translate such a scene.

BEST-OF SPAM: clytemnestra portraiture. (Hmmm. Perhaps Agamemnon Spam sacrificed his daughter Spam in an effort to make it through a challenging spam editor, then Clytemnestra got revenge in a scene that was captured by a digital portraitist? Now that’s obscure.)