Being an artist (and a citizen) in and of Detroit

Memorial Day flags at Historic Elmwood Cemetery, Detroit

Other artists and writers I am sure can relate to the feeling of being "stuck." For me, this was a stuck week. Some of it has to do with having lifelong depression (which can be oft-quelled but never shooed from the yard for good), some of it the fits and starts of both long-term and short-term projects and the sometimes huge cycles of not-doing that have to accompany the frenzy of doing in turn. And perhaps some of it has something to do with being in a lurch of life, not knowing where I will be making my living and being more than a little at loose ends with myself at a strange crossroads in middle age. Being stuck. Becoming unstuck. Jolting myself forward from stuckness to renewed creativity. What is your formula? My formula is pretty simple. My formula is to drive around my city on mini-vacations, road trips 15-minutes at a time, location-scouting and eyes-open wonderment of somewhat varying amplitude and oscillation...something like this: 

"Sumafasores" by Gonfer - en wikipedia. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sumafasores.gif#/media/File:Sumafasores.gif

Today, for the sake of this post, my wandering was blue.

And today found me in one of my favorite spots in the city, inside the gates of Historic Elmwood Cemetery. For me, cemeteries in general are a place of sublime quiet and reflection. I like a cemetery full of mixed-up architecture, more than a little historical intrigue, some shady spots for sitting and thinking, and one that is a good cross-section of the area where they are located. And I always seem to end up there when I need to get grounded, no pun intended.

After a rainstorm this afternoon in which I ran errands, the sun started to come out and I decided to hit the road to see my old friend the cemetery. But, me being me, I was running a little on my own clock (cue Steely Dan's "Time Out of Mind" as the soundtrack here, but ignore the heroin references, kids). And, thus so, I arrived at the front gate at seven minutes til 7. The security guard was getting ready to lock the place down. "You know we close at 7?" "Yes," I answer sheepishly, "I was just hoping to get some photos of the Memorial Day flags on the graves." "Well, OK," he answers, a little begrudgingly, "but I want you out of here by 7." So he let me through the gate for a quick drive. 

Inside, the place is much more vast and circuitous than you could imagine from the road outside. It ranges up and down a few small hills and has some quite nice in-ground mausoleums. But I was on a mission. Flags. Photographs. 7 p.m. And then I found the above photo, right next to the road, festooning the resting place of a WWI veteran and in front of a lovely line of monuments of varying age. It was bright, it was hopeful, it was what I was looking for. The intersection of life and death in a place remaining still where things are moving at a crazed pace all around. Less than a block away, 2,000 bicycle riders from Detroit Slow Roll were filling police-closed streets before riding the heretofore unridden by cyclists en masse track of the Belle Isle Grand Prix which takes place this weekend. It is a huge deal. And, in true oppositional form, two blocks in the other direction is the scene of a recent local tragedy. A young mother was discovered, unthinkably, to have the bodies of two of her own children locked in a freezer chest while refusing to admit they were even missing. Celebration. Tragedy. Bounty. Devastation. Detroit never seems far from having dichotomy in every single situation.

And, letting this wash over me in the quiet of the otherwise empty cemetery, I feel the jolt of rebalance. But within this sphere of thought, I can't help but wonder what is next up for Detroit. There is a huge land-grab going on here by entrepreneurs from L.A., NYC, Berlin, Sao Paulo, "otherwheres." They all want a bite of what artists and musicians have found to be true here in an affordable and very supportive community of hive-minded individuals working our tails off to unblight a vibrant infrastructure and to prolong the history of all arts in a city rich with texture and talent. But living here is something that has to be experienced and "earned" in both street-cred and hard-knocks. It is the secret handshake of the property crime. It is the slitted eyes of we-never-had-working-streetlights-before. It is the familiar fear that the great-grandparents living in that one house on the block might freeze to death if someone doesn't check on them during the next cold snap. You have to live here to get this, to BE this. And to see property snapped up left and right to people who are hoping to build expensive downtown utopias and serve $20 hamburgers to hipsters, well, they haven't gotten the memo yet that, in tattoo terms, if you haven't paid your dues in other ink first you haven't earned that right to ask for a full sleeve. We may very well have bitten off more than the city can digest and this could be a very bumpy couple of decades ahead. 

All this, rushing through my head full-force, on my 4 minute drive back to the front gate where the security guard waits patiently in his car to let me out of the closed gate at 7:05 and call the place secure for the night. I thank him abundantly for being patient and letting me in at the last minute. "Did you get your pictures?" he asks, smiling. "Yes! It was just such a beautiful evening and I love the late evening sun on the flags. The cemetery is just so beautiful after Memorial Day!" "It sure is! Now, are you sure you got all your pictures?" "Yes. I am all set. You have a great evening. Enjoy this lovely weather!" "You too, young lady, you too. Have a Blessed day!" And with a click of the remote control gate, I am back on the road. The floodgates of art are open, the floodgates of Detroit are open, but the cemetery is all locked down overnight because, in true Detroit form, if you don't lock it up tight, someone will steal your $^%# in a heartbeat. 

Being ultra-choosy in a hook-up world

This past week was a weird one. It was the 3-year anniversary of the implosion of my last relationship. No doubts that it was one that needed to implode, but it was still really hurtful nonetheless. What have I been doing since then? I have been getting to know myself again, getting back into old creative habits, and doing the things I love to do with friends I really care for. What have I not been doing? Dating.

Almost a year ago, when I was still in a kind of shock over the abrupt end of what I considered a very serious relationship, a good friend asked me how many dates I had been out on since the breakup. Without a second thought, I said, "Zero," and I was met with a look that was somewhere between complete shock and abject pity. And for the longest time I wondered what would possess someone to react that way. Then I stepped back and started really paying attention to what was going on around me in a way I had not before. There was a whole hell of a lot of completely drunken and casual sex going on all around me. And I really didn't care to join in. Not in the least.

All of my life, I have been "monogamy girl," with no regrets. I made a horrible mistake in my first marriage (other than the first mistake in being 19 and being married) and I have tried not to let history repeat in every way since then. Don't get me wrong by any means. I totally respect my friends with open or polyamorous relationships, nontraditional bonds, sexuality of every shade of the rainbow, but I know better than to think any of those solutions would make me happy. I am a straight girl and I would like to spend my life with a straight dude. I still hold out hope that the right guy is out there for me, one that can be all the flavors of my personal ice cream shop and finds the same in me. As singer/songwriter Ani DiFranco once sang, finding acceptance for all of who you are is difficult and being an unusual woman, I am more than my cover just as Ani is more than her "32 Flavors."

But it is tough to put yourself out there and venture without getting hurt, to risk derision, to lay yourself bare to someone who will most likely like you "if only you could change a little bit." And it is even more terrifying when you have had a relationship in which your every flaw (of which you are perfectly self-aware) is thrown up in your face at every turn. It is a shark tank. And I do not feel comfortable swimming with the sharks. So, 3 years on, I am out in the water in a boat. It is a small boat and I am a little terrified. OK, more than a little terrified but I am here. 

Over the last 7 months, I have dipped my toes over the side of the boat twice. For a hot second I thought I might like one friend-of-a-friend. And I wrote a single note which was instantaneously rebuffed. That's cool. I value honesty more than anything. That isn't to say it didn't spark any self-doubt of my spirit, my self-image, the very core of "being a woman" (of all things), but again, I am not deluded. I know I am getting older and everything that comes with it. And today I have a current crush which is well on the way to not panning out for any number of reasons listed above or not. I am sort of OK with that too. Hey, if I am not what someone wants, why force the issue? Honest girl. Single girl. Monogamy girl. Zero date girl. I am all of those things. 

So let the sharks circle in the hook-up zone, I will never jump overboard. Let the lighthouse blare the siren song of giving up and being alone forever, and I refuse to answer the call and head back to shore. At least the stars in the night sky are pretty from out here in the waves and I have plenty of time to just think and to just be who I am. It is as close to uncomplicated as a person can be in this age of instant sexuality and little gratification, and I, for one, will take it over the other options any time at all.

Personal archaeology and probable paths

This past week I have been digging into my archives, both on paper and online, to unearth poetry I have published out into the greater world. Unfortunately, some of my best work has gone offline with journals either folding or starting over from scratch and I am without screen captures of them as they appeared. Without being overly sentimental, I am trying to catch what I can of what is left out there and do a better job of archiving my work in the future. That is the positive portion of this exercise. There is indeed a future. I have found that writing is a great deal of what I have felt was missing in my life lately and I am making a concerted effort to get back to it while not letting other creative ventures fall away. It will be quite a balancing act, but not one I am unfamiliar with. 

Before I do anything else, here is a capture of the first poetry I was ever actually paid for. Yes, real money, by check. Most poetry journals pay in copies if they are printed and if online, not at all. But then again, the prestige of being selected for some is fairly great when hundreds or thousands of other writers are competing for the same spots. I never did cash that check, and I never did get around to framing it as proof I was doing something I loved for money, but here is the work that got me remuneration. (From Issue 16, Winter 2006 of Ducts at ducts.org)

Second up is a piece from an online magazine I really revered over the years, Eclectica. There are not really words to express the emotions roiling up when I found out they had chosen one of my favorite pieces of work for their October/November 2005 issue. I pulled this screen capture but I somehow wish I had every issue of their journal in print in my own library.

As for the other work that is missing either temporarily or permanently from journals such as Horse Less Review, Pettycoat Relaxer, and nthposition, I will find the hard copies somewhere and keep fingers crossed I had not edited them them at publication. But life is a road map and the best miles are yet to be routed. And in light of that, I am unveiling new work I have been sitting on for a few days. I can never just throw something right out there until it feels right and this one finally does. Hope it resonates a bit with you.


On Lightning Ridge

On Lightning Ridge, the people wore gingham
  honestly with no pretense or airs
The bright checkers flitted in and out
  of sunlight patches, butterflies
in hand sewn folds, as if they would
  light on the ground and slowly sip from
drops of errant lemonade.

On certain days, when the air was
  camphor blue, the checks lay lazy
on beeswaxed floors, dust motes
  whirling to the keening of doves
daydreams put to music on forgotten
  phonographs as lovers caressed the
yesterdays away.

My life as a "Hamster Brain"

Years ago I realized that I had a set of personality traits that made me who I am. They didn't necessarily make me unique from anyone else, but they made me operate under a certain set of rules and parameters that I have since both lovingly and disparagingly termed, "Hamster Brain." Within this post I will disgorge those traits and try to put them in as much of a concise description as possible to hopefully shed some insight into how my creative process works and why it makes me act like a tiny overly furry and somewhat caged mammal. And, believe me, it is both an amazing amount of fun and a crazy drive back to the cosmic pet store to turn myself in for either cash back or an even trade for an animal more suited to a life among humans. This, dear readers, is the life within the cerebral cortex of Mesocricetus auratus, the common Hamster Brain.

First of all, why did I even begin to call myself a Hamster Brain? It all goes back to college when a close friend of mine began calling me out on a series of both stunning feats of klutziness and outrageous forgetfulness of the most mundane tasks. I would become so hyperfocused on studying, writing, doing art, researching, taking photos, watching movies, that I would forget to eat, forget to sleep, and forget to pay the rent or utilities. You have seen the hamster in the cage, running wildly on the wheel for extraordinary stretches of time until finally it crawls over to the water bottle and drinks for ages, never seeming to slake the thirst? That is hamstering. It is forgetting biology and going on pure instinct. Only for me personally, my instinct is to stuff things into my brain instead of stuffing food into my cheeks. When I read a book, I read "a book," a whole book, barely putting it down for long enough to use the restroom or get a glass of water (and forget about eating an actual meal). When I edit photos, I am inside the program for hours at a time until my eyes are red and irritated and my fingers are clawed from holding the mouse and typing. And when I am working on new art projects? I dive in to research like I am hiking the entire Appalachian Trail. I don't stop until I have a full plan developed with contingencies for all steps along the way and ideas of where to procure every supply and how, precisely, the finished project should look barring design changes. It is all a stuffing-the-cheeks behavior that makes multi-tasking (though possible) improbable. And have you ever interrupted a hamster on the wheel? Well, it goes spinning out of control and lands in a fluffy and confused pile across the cage. You got it. Do Not Disturb when I am in the zone.

The very worst of it is trying to plan things that are off the beaten path, even if I desperately like them, want to try them, or need to do them (yes, overdue bills, I am giving you the stink-eye). I am a tiny mammal of habit. I don't necessarily do things in pattern, but I definitely have a territorial stomping ground, what I call the four corners of the cage. If I am not sleeping, eating, bathing and toileting, or creating the most grand of shredded structures known to hamsterkind, it has a tendency to fall of the radar. Have I planned to go see a favorite band or to a new gallery? Not on the stomping ground path. Was I supposed to call you at 3 p.m. on Tuesday? If the phone did not appear in the middle of my food dish, I probably forgot, didn't I? Am I supposed to meet you across town at that new restaurant I wanted to try as well? I am probably circling the block trying to reconfigure my path because how to actually get there is not computing and I might be freaking out a little. I say with all sincerity that I do not mean to blow off personal obligation and that my friends and family mean the absolute world to me, but that I am stuck here in this cage, doing my hamstery things as I have done every day of my life, and sometimes you need to rattle the lid, tap on the glass, or throw me a mini carrot to get my attention. I mean well, but Hamster Brain is an entropic zen state of mind. The more I concentrate, the less the out-of-the-ordinary gets in and sticks to my schedule.

As an adult, I have developed a web of coping mechanisms to deal with being Hamster Brained. If I can pay a bill automatically, I do. I send myself a multitude of reminders, alarms, alerts, e-mails, and inventively placed notes that will jar my memory on important dates and appointments. And, dear friends, I blurt. Heavens help me and may all friends past, present, and future forgive me, I blurt in every single way possible in almost every situation there is. Did I think about something I needed to say to you during a conversation? That thing is going to spring out like a crazed salmon swimming upstream for the last time in the middle of the point you are making because if I don't say it, it is gone forever and a day. Hopefully I have something handy to write it down on so I don't interrupt you, but more than likely I have, I am, or I will interrupt you at some point in our history. Please try to understand that it is not with malice that I blurt, but that that tiny blue butterfly of inspiration or reminder is flying away before I even open my mouth or stick a finger into the air to make an open-parenthesis in your part of the conversation. And besides blurting, I hoard communication. If we have talked about something and I really wanted you to know more (or you have asked for more info), I will write you ill-timed messages in staccato succession, send several emails stuffed with links, or post and post and post on your wall until it is all out there. I am not some stalkerish loon, it is conversely the overzealous habit of caring for you that forces me to make a point. Because once I am off in another direction or corner of the cage, we may not speak again for days, weeks, months, *ahem* years. Believe me, if I have you in my life, I care for you deeply. But my regularity of social skills leave more than a bit to be desired (in my own opinion if not anyone else's). I know that this has led to both a breakdown of many relationships in the past (both love and friendship) and that it is bound to happen many more times in my life, but I am putting it out there into the blogosphere in true blurting fashion that the Care and Feeding Of for Hamster Brain includes a modicum of understanding in the reasoning of my shoddy intimate communication skills (and life skills in general). And gently throwing mini carrots my way to regain my attention is both accepted and appreciated because as a Hamster Brain, I do often forget to eat regular meals and I may bite when "hangry."

I know that I part of a larger breed of other Hamster Brains in the universe, some of whom I have met and blurted extravagantly with and most of whom I haven't (since you are probably nose-down in the next great invention or novel or solution to the universe as a whole). And while I am not writing this in apologistic fashion, I am hoping that a few of you will actually understand where I am coming from in my overblown metaphor. I am that hamster in that cage. I know there is a huge world out there to explore. I yearn for a larger Habitrail to lead the way to new adventure and places I have never seen before. This is me. And I like carrots.

Dreaming is free

Awake from one of those dreams that seems at the time to be a life-changer, but too tired to fully wake up and actually start changing my life, I am thinking instead of the paths I walked to get here, listening to a soundtrack of trains, and thinking about the things that are calling me to stay. Two decades ago, Detroit was a dream to me. In fact, it was on the verge of a trepidation. I was living in Norfolk, a small Southern city, and Detroit was nothing but a blip on the distant radar screen. But the terribly rainy night in the summer of '96, rolling past the ghost of Michigan Central Station, I knew it felt like home. Something called out to me then and something is calling out to me still. I feel as if I belong here.

But going back further, I think it is time to reexamine who I was growing up and who I wanted to be at every stage of the game. I have never been one to hide behind a persona. I am pretty much who I present myself to be, a flawed pseudo-punk/hippie chick/art geek, not too good at the mechanics of adulthood, and just wanting to exist in a beautiful world. I don't want to "be" a career, I feel no call to own expensive things, and I certainly don't want to have to fit in. I am a consumer but I don't want to be consumed by it, you know?

So, back to the roots. Back to who I thought I wanted to be at 5, at 15, at 25. Where do I measure up now? And what has fallen away that I feel I am missing? These are the things I need to rediscover in the coming year. I know I am not done growing. I will never be done growing. But what is going to make me feel as I'd grown strongest and best by the end of my life? Those are questions for a more awake mind and for one that has given up control and let the dream take over. And Blondie did say it best. "Dreaming....dreaming is free," in so many more ways than one.

Can you really make a difference? Yes.

This has been quite a week of reading rants. And the reading has led to more critical thinking than I have done in quite a while. There are hundreds of thousands of armchair critics pointing fingers about wasting drinking water, unfair police, racist policy, politicians on vacation, and I only have one thing to say: Do something about it. Think ALS and breast cancer are getting more attention than the disease you or your family is experiencing? Well, fill us in and get us up to speed on awareness. Did you know that Lewy Body Dementia is on the rise and is far more debilitating than Alzheimers? I didn't either until I had a friend suffering the shock of it through hospitalized parents. The only way to get past the stigma is to put it out there. Do you think the police have too many rights and privileges in a democratic society? Then bring a discussion to your local community on how it can avoid the same situations we just saw from a distance. Adding fuel to a fire already raging is counterproductive. We should be outraged enough to be talking to our friends and neighbors about better rapport with law enforcement. It is our right and our duty. Scale your rage into workable points and goals and demand that your local officials take them to regional officials, to state officials, to federal officials, to international think-tanks.

Let me ask you how many times you step out of your comfort zone to volunteer in your local community each year. And this isn't about volunteering at the inner city soup kitchen on Thanksgiving Day, this is about the other 364 days of the year when the children that live next door might not be getting breakfast on a weekend morning because there is no free meal without the public school. Adults are the ones who lob the threats back and forth, but children are the ones who suffer the most. Regardless of your religious affiliation or political affiliation or complete lack thereof, children are the only hope we have of making changes. It takes a village to raise a child and that isn't necessarily a village half a planet distant, it is a village you live in and contribute to.

Is it popular to say I grew tired of all the finger pointing in the news this summer? Well, no. Is it too much to ask that we find something positive in our lives daily to share with our fellow humans to give us hope for another day on this planet? Probably. But we should all try.

I will leave it at this: Every society has extremes. If extremes make you uncomfortable, do your best to come to terms and an understanding with a moderate form of the extreme. If you feel uncomfortable at a homeless shelter, donate time to stock a local food pantry. If you have an uneasiness of mentally disabled adults, perhaps try volunteering for a pet therapy program for rehabilitating patients. If you fear death, hold the hand of one patient in a hospice facility. The only way we can become more human is to do things with actual humanity in them. And these, dear friends, are the stories we should share with each other over coffee, in a public park, with children playing in the distance. We should live at living.

My septoplasty story (or, How I got the center of my nose removed and put back where it was meant to be)

If you know me, you know I can be a bit boisterous at times. As a child, I was a totally bouncy trouble factory whether at home or in the wilds. And I had grand ideas of how to amuse myself while my mother was doing the serious business of grocery shopping. One Saturday morning in 1973 (I think...the photos are long gone at this point), we were at the local grocery store (Radford Bros., North Main St., you might remember it) and I was marauding in the produce aisle. A produce clerk was filling up a center of the aisle bin with gourds. Stacks and stacks of decorative gourds all piled up inside this giant red and chrome Studebaker of a produce bin. I had been on a Richard Scary drawing kick and I saw animals in those gourds. Birds and monsters, and dinosaurs and Maurice Sendak wildebeasts. And I had to get a better look. So I hoisted myself up on the side of the bin to get a better view. Something felt wobbly and I froze in place. That is actually the last thing I remember for a while. I was wearing a short sleeved shirt and the chrome lip of the bin was cold on my arms. And then it tipped over on me, gourds bouncing everywhere, and I was pinned underneath. I don't remember that part at all. My next memory is of a fireman looking down at me in his big helmet and shaking his head, laughing a little, picking gourds off of my stomach. There may or may not have been commentary about what kind of trouble I had gotten myself into, but my mother had called my father and next thing I knew we were rushing to the county hospital emergency room in the station wagon.

My next memory is of a doctor wiggling my nose and saying, "Yes, that's broken all right." With all the luck of the universe, the bin didn't totally crush my skull, but it sure landed across my face, both cheekbones and my nose taking the brunt of gravity before the bin hit the stack of empty cardboard gourd boxes thankfully still sitting there in the aisle. In 1973-ish there was no such thing as mending a broken nose. I got an ice pack, some baby aspirin, and a lollipop. And then the next day I got to dress up in a ruffled white dress and tights and patent leather shoes and be baptized into the Methodist Church, looking for all intents and purposes as if my parents had beaten me within an inch of my life. There was a lot of explaining to do that day and I was promised both Jello and Jello Pudding so I was having none of that waiting around the church thing my mom was wanting to do.

Skip forward to age 12 when I was learning to swim. I could not breathe out of the right side of my nose. Every time the swimming instructor told us to go under the water and blow bubbles in the baby pool (ah, the indignities of learning to swim at an older age), I would end up snorting a nostrilful of water. There was none of the turning your head and breathing in through your mouth and out through your nose of swimming for me. It was breathe in through my mouth, go under the water, breathe out through my left nostril, come up and breathe in through my...nope, snort a nostrilful of chlorine that was not cleared out of the right side of my nose. I was miserable and never swam with my head underwater again. I became the ultimate Zen master of floating on my back in the pool for hours and hours.

Fast forward to college where I was out at a club with my (much younger) boyfriend who had never been slam dancing. We stood at the edge of the "pit" and watched, he surfed in and out a few times, and then just decided to stand there next to me. I was wearing glasses. I did not want to smash my glasses. So, instead, the drunken buffoons standing next to us picked up their even drunker friend and threw him at my face. Broken nose number two, no health insurance, full time college student, not even enough gas in the car to get me out to the hospital where I knew that nothing would be done anyway. Not even a lollipop this time around. And it made my nose much, much worse.

I have lived with this crooked and even more crooked prow for forty years, sleeping with my mouth open and waking up with woolen teeth, having a chronic drippy nose because I could not sniffle on my right side, biting a blood blister on my lip to force my cheek muscles to flare my nostril open. And those horrible up-the-nose selfies? One nostril was tiny and one was huge, with my septum doing a funky pokey-outey thing on the side I could actually breathe from. And one day, roughly 4 years ago, I ended up going to an ENT for a complicated ear infection and the doctor looked up my nose and said, "Wow, you know you have a completely blocked nostril, right?" and I affirmed his observation. But what was I to do, thinking that my health insurance would never cover rhinoplasty. Then, last summer I was poking around on the website of my latest insurance coverage and found a listing for "septoplasty, " as in the insurance would cover septoplasty but not cosmetic rhinoplasty. What was this septoplasty they speak of?!

Of course, the first thing I did was to go to YouTube and watch a septoplasty video. Please, don't ever, under any circumstances, go to YouTube and watch a septoplasty. You do not want to see someone's face being chiseled like a jack-o-lantern (unless you are into that kind of thing, and at this point I say, ewwww, Dexter, out!). The gist of the procedure is that the septum is either removed from the interior of the nose and shaped/replaced or partially detached, reshaped and re-anchored, all through the nostrils. I am a total wimp and I have no idea how I decided to go through with the surgery, but there gets to a point in your life when you are so tired of compensating for something physical that you just have to power through fixing it. This was my time to barrel through the construction barriers.

The rest of this post is the tell-all, describe-all, nitty-gritty of the surgery procedure and the recovery process and it is really not pretty, but I am hoping that it will give someone (anyone) a better idea of what to prepare for and what to watch out for in recovery. Some of these things are hints I wish I had beforehand, some are things I never would have thought of. But I hope that they are indeed helpful details.

First of all, I had to go to my regular physician to be cleared for surgery. This had to take place within 30 days of the actual procedure so think a little in advance. I needed blood work, an EKG, a basic physical, and to review all my medications for the surgeon. Both of my doctors' office staffs were very helpful in getting all of this paperwork filled out, triple-checked, and filed with my insurance company. There are no shortcuts, just be prepared to write a lot. I had already met with the surgeon for a consultation and he took a look at my nasal passages to confirm that I was a good candidate for the procedure. I didn't have any other procedure done so no MRI, no x-rays, not any other tests. It was an obvious break with an obvious deviation. If you have sinus polyps, need external or internal rhinoplasty, or have other issues with ears or nasal passages, this is where we will really differ. The cartilage of my nose was in the wrong place and it needed to be separated from the plane of my face, the area above my front teeth and the dividing line of my nostrils, reshaped and reattached with a scaffolding of sutures. So, here we go.

A month or so in advance, I arranged to take time off work over the Christmas into New Year holidays. I took 10 full days and I needed each and every one of them. More about that later, but please do not expect to go back to work and be functional in your life for at least those 10 days. If you are up and around and ready to move then you are getting the bonus plan. I stocked up on Ensure and V8 juice as well as things like soft granola bars, chicken pot pies, and pita chips. I wasn't planning on chewing being as painful as it was, so you might want to think about some nice soups and chunky stews. Do not plan on chewing unless you have to as a last resort, seriously.

The day of the surgery, I was allowed only 4-6 ounces of water to take morning medications with (and I was the last patient of the day on a Friday). No ice, no hard candy, no chewing gum, no cough drops. You will be very dry and very hungry going into pre-op but better that than have to reschedule. I had my procedure done at an outpatient surgery center and they were absolutely top-notch at the preparations and recovery plus you do not have to deal with normal hospital traffic. Highly recommend that route if you can do it! Prepare yourself to wear the most pajama-comfortable clothes and slip on shoes because, yes indeed, someone will have to help you dress afterwards. They are serious about the zero-jewelry, zero-makeup, zero-lotion, zero nail polish rules. It was not a problem for me, but why even bother pushing it. You undress and put on a gown and all of your clothes and shoes go in a big baggie that will follow you through the building from station to station. Dress lightly and don't bring a purse or wallet. I did, however, bring my Kindle with me and I am very glad I did. Ask in advance if your center has wifi and if they will let you bring a non-phone electronic device.

In pre-op, you get an IV right away. You will be a little dehydrated so if you are anything like me, you will have a couple of bags of IV solution before you even hit the operating room. Your nurse will go over medical history, drug allergies, and confirm your name and procedure at every single step along the line. This is how they gauge your alertness as well as confirming your charts are following you. The most important step for me was planning in advance to ask for an anti-emetic patch. Ask your doctor's office beforehand so it is in your notes, ask your nurse in pre-op to confirm, and when your anesthesiologist does the pre-surgical interview, he or she will confirm what medication you will receive in the patch and how to care for it. General anesthesia causes many, many people to become nauseous upon waking and to remain incredibly nauseous for days afterward. If you have ever gotten motion sickness, you absolutely want to go over getting that patch with all of your medical staff. It was a life saver for me as I can get a good motion sickness going on an escalator. You absolutely do not want to vomit after any kind of facial surgery. Besides the fact that it will be incredibly messy and painful, it can cause severe infection and the pressure can actually undo the work your surgeon just did. It is no joke.

To this point, the IV needle was the worst part of the day. Once I got my patch installed, I was much happier and less queasy and I had a nice repetitive game set up on the Kindle to play while I was waiting to meet my surgeon for the pre-op pep talk. At some point your assistant anesthesiologist will bring you a relaxing preparation for your IV. If you are very, very anxious, you can also ask for something to make you drowsy and you can sleep through until the end from there on out. This is the final stretch. After meeting with the surgeon, I closed up the Kindle, took off the glasses (that stuff got put into my clothing bag) and I got wheeled down to the operating room. Everyone introduced themselves and then I got the mask, whereas counting down from 100 only makes it to 98. Then, tahdah, someone is calling your name and asking you to wake up.

My recovery nurse had a huge cup of water and some Teddy Grahams waiting for me. You get the snack of your choice and all the water you can drink. Again, if you get the anti-emetic, you will be all ready to eat some food and drink some nice cool water! This is a surgery that requires intubation so your throat and esophagus will be tender and scratchy. I wish I had brought some hard candy with me for the ride home. The next half an hour to an hour will be all about making sure you are ready to get up and move around. I had a serious gauze packing up into my sinuses and the nurses were instructed to remove it as soon as possible. I am so glad they did that while I was still pain-free from the surgery because it feels very, very odd like an Egyptian mummifier is taking your brains out through your nose. It is a huge sense of pressure and then a rush of a very empty relief behind your cheekbones and eyes. Be prepared for weirdness. Then I got the "moustache bandage" which is literally a big piece of gauze taped across the nostrils to catch any remaining blood seepage. The first day and night, prepare for a small flood of heinous liquids. Your nurse will give you dressings and instructions on when and how to change them properly. Here is another caveat for you. The tape is horrendous on your face. I broke out in a crazy rash and changing my dressings was like tearing off a couple layers of skin from my cheekbones. I have since heard that you can ask for a first piece of tape to be put down before the dressings so you will be removing the tape from tape, not from skin. Other people say ask for a bandage before the tape. Just beware that the tape can irritate the holy living crap out of you.

All this is still in recovery. You still have to deal with going to the restroom and getting dressed. And, yes, you will absolutely need a nurse or someone else with you. It took me at least an hour to get control over my knees and I could not even lace up my own crosstrainers. I had some fun conversations with a couple of the nurses, and my friend who drove me was nice enough to deal with taking care of my prescriptions. If you can get them filled there, do it. You do not want to be sitting around waiting in a pharmacy in the condition you are in. You will not be sure what planet you are on for at least the next 8 hours. Do not plan on doing anything critical in your life. Just making it back and forth to the toilet in one piece will be all the decision-making you should be allowed until at least the next day. Plan to sleep sitting up for a few days and nights (I bought a Wondawedge pillow and it was perfect but you can also sleep in a recliner chair). And you will be thirsty like the desert for the first three or four days. I also bought a warm steam humidifier for my bedroom. The moist air was heavenly!

If I can give you any advice at this point, for the sake of all that is holy, please stay on top of your pain meds! I got both a Tylenol/Vicodin combo and a horsepill of an antibiotic. Take those pain meds exactly when they tell you to take them. Do not try to tough it out and see how badly it hurts. It is going to hurt like ungodly hell. You do not want to know that kind of hurt. Just take them, stay still and keep your mind occupied on other things. I watched a lot of television online that I do not remember. Rewatch all your favorite movies on Netflix. Veronica Mars and Buffy the Vampire Slayer? You always wanted to watch those again, right? And you still have that anti-emetic patch behind your ear. Leave it there for as long as your doctor said you could. I left mine for three days. Perfect.

Now here is the gory part. The first time you change your bandages, you will be horrified. Your nose is going to be completely clotted up with blood and sutures. Leave them alone. Do not touch them, do not even try to look at them funny. They are directly connected to pain receptors you did not know you even had. Neosporin with pain reliever will be your best friend for the next couple of weeks and be very, very, very delicate in the application process. The tiniest bit of pressure will make you see stars and tweeting birds like Roger Rabbit. Total knockout of yourself. Also try to avoid any clothes that go on over your head. If you biff your nose by accident in the next couple of weeks, you will swear words you didn't even know you knew. I know I was the victim of two self-biffings and I will never forget the pain as long as I live. Your face will hurt, your teeth will hurt, your eyes will feel as if they are out on stalks like a snail. Taking those pain killers like clockwork? You betcha!

And you say at this point, "OK, but was it worth it?" Oh, heck yeah, it was worth it! At the end of my painkiller script, I was pretty much fine. I did switch down to Tylenol for the funky feeling I had above my front teeth (but after all, they had a chisel up there). I could breathe out of both nostrils for the first time in 40 years. Now, the fact that it is the most bitter winter in Michigan since I have lived here? That is unfortunate. The cold air hitting those previously-protected sinus cavities is like someone shoving a sharp, frozen chopstick up my nose even today, a month to the day after the surgery. The strangest thing is that I have two pretty much symmetrical nostrils now. I wasn't expecting that! My face looks different! My voice is also a little different and I have a muscular pain in my jaw because it is changing my bite. I do not have to grind my teeth sideways in my sleep any longer to be able to breathe. I would say to expect some of the unexpected, not all of it bad, but some of it really, really unusual.

And here is what you have been waiting for...the downside of it all. My only real drawback to the whole procedure to date (one month in) is that my sutures did not dissolve. The first three weeks I felt as if I had barbed wire in my nostrils. It was a tender, crying pain. Imagine grabbing all of your nose hairs and yanking them out...that sting constantly for hours and hours. That Neosporin with pain reliever literally kept me from ripping my own face off. Just be prepared in case you are suture-resistant like I was. In fact, this afternoon, *TMI ALERT* I blew my nose and sutures came out. They were sutures I did not even know I had from way up in the bridge of my nose. My cartilage was quilted back into my face like a finely laced doily. And I rushed into doing some things I should not have done. Shoveling snow? Don't do it. Carrying heavy laundry up and down the stairs? Don't be an idiot. Thinking of going to the gym? Do you really want your nose to go flying off your face and across the room when you overexert yourself (a hyperbole, but still...)? Just think a LOT more about what you are doing and how much pressure you are putting on that little chicken breastbone in your face. You will be thankful later.

I think that is more than you would ever want to know about septoplasty if you are thinking about having it and perhaps more about me than you ever wanted to read if you didn't. Everyone is different, but I can already see this as a game-changer in how I exercise, how I sleep, how I deal with asthma, colds, and allergies, and how my facial structure holds up in the upcoming saggy years of my life. For all of the getting used to and all of the minor discomforts, I am very thankful to have had a great outcome and a smooth recovery (albeit one I should have lengthened a few days). And to all you labored-breathers, talk to your ENT. I should have done this a decade ago! A hearty, and well-oxygenated, cheer!

The Mental Dumpster

This is apparently the week that my ex-love moves back in with his family. It is a weird, falling feeling. I am picturing all of my photos, all of my emails, all the clothes I bought for him, the computer equipment, and all the furniture I had bought for our life together bundled into a proverbial dumpster. The letters and photos are probably already burned, the emails erased, and I am sure all of the clothes and furniture are residing at a local charity shop and it just feels a little empty. I mean, I am not a stuff person at all, but the fact that a whole year can just be erased like this is more than a shock.

I am healing, bouncing back, growing up, growing older, trying to stay on the path, moving forward, feeling sad...all the mixed up emotion I have been through over and over again. And I know I sound like a broken record. I got involved in a situation that was none of my business and I totally got what I deserved. Yes, I did it to myself. Yes, I knew I would crash and burn but I thought I could beat the odds. I am no gambler but I gambled on love and lost.

If there is a lesson I am trying to take away from this, it is to stop second-guessing myself, to stop being angry and bitter, to let the past go and know that I had love, and to move forward. It seems like a mountain range rising up in front of me and I am a tiny ant wondering how am I ever going to get that far. And, trite as it sounds, the only way is by six diminutive legs, one step at a time. And, universe willing, I won't get stepped on along the way.

Soaking up bliss

Tonight I stopped for a salad on the way home from work. I had just finished a late work day at the office and knew I had to hop out of the car when I got home to mow the lawn so I decided preemptive food was the best option. Plus there is just something so satisfying about a big bowl of salad on a summer day. But I digress, as I often do.

I was roughly halfway through my meal when an older, married couple came over and sat in the reading corner in front of me. They smiled at each other, they talked about their days and compared notes on positive things like a walk, good news from a friend, and (the cutest thing ever) they shared a soup and salad meal between them. Watching them (and inadvertently catching snippets of their conversation) just made me so relaxed and happy. That, I thought wistfully, is true love.

So often lately we are presented with the very worst the world has to offer in relationships because "dysfunction sells!" But absorbing all of that negative emotion has got to be bad for us. We are either shaking our heads and berating their lack of decorum (among other things) or we are taking some sort of sadistic pleasure that our lives and our relationships are better than theirs (yes, I have been guilty of this too). Wow, what an unhealthy way to experience life.

But this ten minute interlude changed my whole day. It cheered me up and rearranged my stress levels. It put me in a positive mindset for a busy night ahead and it made me think about my past and about my future. This is the kind of relationship I want for myself in fifteen or twenty years. Heck, it is the kind of relationship I want now! The smooth comfort, the lack of drama, the ease of conversation, the non-awkward silences, and the occasional touch over a tiny table. Every situation does not have to be dire. Every moment does not have to be planned. Every faux pas and misstep does not have to be recorded and fired off like ammunition.

So this weekend when you are out, look around and see who chooses the drama and who chooses to accept the bliss. And think of which of these people you would rather spend time with. And if it is indeed true that you get back what you broadcast out, what can you do to become the person or the part of a couple you really want to be. Self-fulfilling prophecies aren't always a bad thing. Take your happiness and reflect your love.

Desert island diss

Over the weekend, I stumbled over the British TV series "Monroe" in which James Nesbitt plays a brilliant but snarky neurosurgeon with a thirst for scotch and a love for music. The camera-work in the show is lovely and similar to the style used in "Scandal" where surfaces and angled glass give you a feeling of listening in to private conversations and eavesdropping on confidential information. That aside, it was the music and the surgery that made me think of a couple of weird days back in Tidewater Virginia.

Almost one month to the day from moving in to my new apartment in the swanky district of Norfolk called The Hague (tudor mansions subdivided to death into a dozen apartments or more per building), I came down with a fever and a serious case of abdominal pain and vomiting. During my overnight sleeplessness I helped catch a fugitive criminal (another story altogether) and I realized that I had no friends to drive me to the hospital which was actually only a few blocks away. The next morning I ended up in urgent care with a surgeon who said I had an ovarian cyst that had to be removed, pronto, and how soon could I check in to the hospital in the next city over. Immediate freak-out. I called the one guy I had just met who worked for me in the camera store I managed and asked him to drop me off on the way in to work. And there I sat, alone in triage.

Hospitals have two effects on me. The first is a resignation to the antiseptic smell and the herding of the patient-cattle from station to station. The second is a budding anxiety of wondering exactly what the staff is going to do to me next. I spent a great deal of time in hospitals with my mother who suffered from heart failure. From the age of four or five, I learned how to talk to doctors, how to do CPR in case my mom was in cardiac distress, how to call for an ambulance, and when to be really concerned that her ankles were swollen to the size of basketballs. My hospital stay was sandwiched in between her bout of Bell's Palsy with stroke-like facial paralysis and her final heart surgery which led to hospice. And there I sat in the orange and tan triage of an overly air-conditioned and strange hospital, alone, in a very flappy and flimsy surgical gown.

I was staying calm and asking my questions but, holy crap, I was sitting there by myself in pre-op, in the decade before iPods were all the norm. I was resigned to listen to the staff pages and machine noises and gurgles and groans of other triaged patients. And I was starting to freak completely out. In the television show, everyone had their iPod and their family sitting on the bed laughing and joking while attractive young nurses and doctors reviewed their charts and asked what they could do to help. I had a cranky elderly nurse with a bad perm and a teenage orderly with neck tattoos slapping a dirty mop against the wheels of my bed. It was as un-sexy as any free clinic on a 100-degree day in a big city. And some music really would have helped make it more bearable or at least more ironic.

Then came time to be wheeled, triage bed and all, down to the pre-op ward where I was given my IV and a first round of anesthesia. This is where they stole my eyeglasses. I mean, I am as blind as Velma without my glasses and they took them off my face without any explanation and popped them in to a plastic bag on the back of my bed. Super-freakout-level 2. There is a male nurse fiddling about with my IV and now I can't even see what he is doing. A total blur with a taste in my mouth like fresh copper pennies. I sit there for a half and hour or so, freezing my cookies off (what is it with those thin hospital sheets?!) and, huzzah, my operating room is ready. Off we go. Without music. Blurry. And copper-tasting. Oh, the goodness a song or two would have done me at this point. All I remember before the anesthetist made me count backwards from ten (I made it to 9 and zonked cold) was a huge bank of pinkish white light, my surgeon's face upside-down and the fact that I was in an actual refrigerator. Brrrrrrr.

On the show, this is where the awesome Mr. Monroe, Neurosurgeon, would have started my Desert Island Disks on the operating theatre speakers. I could have had some sonorous Pixies, some classic Who, some gentle Bach, some soothing Bowie, and even some '90s alt-rock du jour. I am sure I would have remembered none of it but it would have been interesting to have some music in my subconscious to stop the level 3 freakout of laying unconscious and sheet-clad in a very cold and bright room with a gaggle of strangers poking at my reproductive bits. This would have been a perfect venue for two of my favorite albums of 1993, Morphine's "Good" (and "Cure for Pain") and Thomas Dolby's "Astronauts & Heretics," so perfect, in fact, that in my mind, I have inserted them in to my get-well memories from that month. But there, in the hospital, in post-op, I was coming around from the anesthesia without a soundtrack.

If you have never been intubated, wow, I envy you. I woke up to a crazy, choking, gagging pain and I must have flailed around like a tuna for a minute or two before I got a nurse's attention to rip the contraption from my esophagus. You know that scratchy pain you get from a very sore throat? Yep, it goes all the way down as far as the tube goes and no amount of coughing will make it better. And cough?! Forget coughing. I had fresh abdominal incisions. There would be no coughing because I had aliens trying to escape from my belly. After a tiny cup of water with a hospital straw (don't you love hospital straws? I do!), my doctor came over with a big grin on his face and asked how I was feeling. And he told me what he thought was the funniest story...the fact that I had not, in fact, had an ovarian cyst. My ovaries were actually quite spiffy and healthy. Instead, I had an appendix that had come so close to rupturing so many times that it was nothing but a big inflamed bundle of scar tissue. He even kept it in a jar and was going to write a paper on it (fat chance, buddy...give me my vestigial intestine back!) as my white blood cells were never indicative of the problem. The funny thing, he said, was that they were already in my abdomen in north-south laparoscopic incisions and to get at the appendix, they had to sew me up and do east-west incisions. "You," he grinned, "got four incisions for the price of two!" And he shook my hand and walked away laughing.

The next half-day of my overnight stay was gory, painful, sadistic ("If you don't get out of that bed and urinate in the next hour, I WILL catheterize you! C'mon! It was a simple band-aid surgery!"), and embarrassing. It took me 45 minutes to swing a leg over the side of the bed, attain crab-walk and carry my IV (on a coathanger?!) to the bathroom, during which time my IV line was too low and started sucking blood out of my arm (I got yelled at for that one too). And instead of getting back into bed, I was told to get dressed as my check-out was in an hour and I needed to do four laps around the floor to get the inflation gas out of my belly. Oh, how I could have used an iPod then. Or even a little transistor radio with a single earphone. A little melody would have gone a long way as I surveyed my swollen stomach and my couple-dozen stitches, especially that pouchy incision on my left side that looked like a shirt buttoned up wrong. And then I got a ride home from the same guy (thanks, Alan! Friends for life!) and listened to the following music from 1992, where surgery (and life) was certainly not like it is on TV:

Ministry - N.W.O.
The Cure - A Letter To Elise
Suzanne Vega - Blood Makes Noise
Screaming Trees - Nearly Lost You
Peter Gabriel - Digging In The Dirt
Toad the Wet Sprocket - Walk On The Ocean
Sugarcubes - Hit
Soup Dragons - Divine Thing
Sonic Youth - 100%
Tori Amos - Crucify
James - Born of Frustration
daDA - Dizz Knee Land
Catherine Wheel - Black Metallic
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Suck My Kiss
L7 - Pretend We're Dead
E - Hello Cruel World
Beastie Boys - So What'cha Want
Ian McCulloch - Honeydrip
Cracker - Teen Angst (What The World Needs Now)
Thomas Dolby - Eastern Bloc
Concrete Blonde - Someday
The Church - Ripple
Talking Heads - Lifetime Piling Up

The creepies and the crawlies

As if you could not tell before, I am not having the most stellar of summers. So far, I could call it the summer of 4H, with the h-words being heartbreak, heat exhaustion, hermitage, and heebie-jeebies. I do admit to not being much of a summer person. With the translucent skin of my ancestral rainy sea-coasts, I have a very difficult time regulating my body temperature and a hot day usually ends in a sunburn or a total faint. I am a severe weather wimp. The fifth H of the summer, hydrology, has left my sixth H, house, full of the stagnant rainwater of a wet Michigan basement and a plethora of the weirdest insects I have ever seen outside a tropical rainforest.

Somewhere in June, I lost my yard to weed trees. If you know mulberries, trees of heaven, and elms, you know that they have enough growth-power to eat a whole continent in a decade. They are the kudzu of the northern climates. The thing that is keeping me from donning the pith helmet and wielding a machete and weed-whacker to conquer the lost empire of my yard? Mosquitoes by the truckload. Lawn moths by the blizzard. Spiders by the gazillion. Ants by the army. I am by no means an insectophobe either. I have spent many a happy hour indoors watching the cobweb spiders bungee-jump down from a moving ceiling fan (this has serious comic value if you have never seen it happen!) and I did have (until an unfortunate package delivery) a favorite mailbox jumping spider who greeted me daily. I hang out with the bumblebees, cheer for the hummingbird moths, and delight in the fireflies. But this mess is just an insanity of bugness.

In a late-night ATM transaction, I was mugged by fishflies by the hundreds (my Southern friends know these nasty little bugs as mayflies, the stinky little dragons of freshwater lakes). They were in my car, on my windshield, in my hair! AGH! Every morning I have to brave the gauntlet of spiderwebs between my front door and the car (dozens each day) and the still-kicking catches of dawn they contain. It is way too much to deal with. Mowing the lawn kicks up so many critters that I must have eaten a mouthful of winged things the last time I cut the grass. My skin crawls to consider the things I have run across and it is only mid-July.

Yes, it could be worse. There was the memorable night a few summers ago when I arrived home to be greeted by a giant leopard slug on the side of my toilet bowl. Limax maximus (with an emphasis on the maximus) is a big honking Winnebago of spotted slime. They are the carnivorous Terminator of the slug world. I have no doubt they could choke down a field-mouse as fast as any snake. And I will not even mention how they mate. It is too weird for words and it is a photo you cannot ever scrub from your brain. But, thankfully, this slug was solo and I was still overwhelmed with sliminess until it took the inevitable waterslide into the municipal plumbing system.

So, this summer has not been quite that bad. But let me tell you about basement spiders. I have a particularly pugilistic history with the dreaded longbodied cellar spider. There is just something about their weird legginess and the crazy, jumpy dance they do in their webs when you bump into them. And you will definitely bump into the webs of these prolific weavers. They do not give me the full-on arachnophobic scream of a hairy crawling dinner-plate, but they are just so insidious. Yet, I try to leave them alone as they have a hearty appetite for the other crawlies that will actually bite me. Except for yesterday. Yesterday I arrived home to find a beauty of a specimen, sleek and black and the size of a good coffee mug, having moved in at eye level above my toilet. Peaceful spider or not, I grabbed a washcloth and (pee-pee dance and all) smacked that spider into the stratosphere. I don't go hanging about in the joists of my house, so they should not be weaving where I need to be relieving myself!

And now it is cicada season. Fairly soon, I will be crunching their discarded carapace droppings between my toes and having that uncanny feeling of being watched by the tree bark. Life was so much simpler when it was all ladybugs and grasshoppers. The childhood of kicking over the smallest anthill and watching the ants rebuild is long over. And one day soon, yard-bugs, I will put on a full-coverage outfit and spray myself down with bug repellent and take over your ill-gotten kingdom. Your days are even more numbered, insects. Enjoy them while you can. *evil laugh*

Post-mortem of an unpairing

Last night was another round of nightmares about the end of my most recent relationship. After months of self-recrimination, my mind started playing back the comments and situations that hurt me most. And if I need to put this whole drama behind me, I need to 'fess up about it all. This falls under the category of "TMI," so please skip this post if you prefer.

First of all, I endured many rounds of being compared to someone else. I do not care if it was a positive or a negative comparison, you simply do not voice these thoughts to another human being. Feel these opinions all you want, but do not tell your significant other that they are better at something, more beautiful than someone, or even that they show you more attention and love. To me, at least, those things do not prove anything to me but that you are constantly thinking of that other person and that I am not respected on my own merits, just being judged on benchmarks you have developed through someone more important to you than me. Every comment was one more drop of pain, even if you meant it as a compliment.

Secondly, I grew up with a parent that suffered from severe and untreated paranoid disorder. My mother would befriend me and squirrel away personal asides to use against me in arguments and when she did, she used them with skill and serious poison. If you have someone in your life that has a serious psychiatric problem, perhaps you understand the hurt that is dealt in these types of situations. If you do not, you have no idea how much a single comment can destroy. In my relationship, I voiced one moment of self-doubt and, in true form of my deceased mother, that moment came back as a death-blow to a stable relationship. A self-doubt is a SELF-doubt and, like pillow-talk, it should never, EVER be used against the person who voiced it. I doubted the worth of my creativity. Then it got thrown back at me as, "I will not love you if you don't really stick with your art." How many writers, artists, and performers have lost the most important relationship of their lives because they were doubted? Probably every single one because I truly felt as if I could not have been shredded into more pieces. And I still do not even though I have come out of my depression and slump to a period of great creativity and all I can think of is, "Yes, he gave up on me. Wish he could have been there to see this. Too bad."

So here I am having nightmares about missed trains, lost grocery lists, misplaced books, forgotten phone numbers. They are figurative representations of the deep spiral of emotional undercurrents I try to hide from my daily work life and my personal interactions. They are glaring error messages of my failure. When I pinpointed the personal communication differences, I was ignored. When I begged to work the issues out through a counselor, I was abandoned. When I expressed a true emotion of regret and a wish for his happiness, I was rudely told to go away with a righteous indignity I never would have thought possible from the love of my life.

It has taken this long to finally realize that it is done and over. It has taken this long to stop crying for hours a day from a physical loneliness and an emotional destitution I have not felt since being a teenager. I admit defeat. I own heartbreak. I see that I am broken and I am picking up my doll-parts and threading them back together as best I can. I can't say that I will ever completely get over this, but I will get through it. Ah, the roller derby bout of life. Just keep skating. I am.

Contextualism of grief

Something about the past holiday weekend made me dream grief dreams. It must have been the summer heat as I used to spend a great deal of time at my grandmother's house in suburban West Virginia, hiding from the hot sun behind double-thick curtains. And it is my grandmother I miss but also that house, the expectations and emotions wrapped up in the difficult plaster walls and the nubby square cushions of the rose-colored couch. I can vividly remember spinning around in the scoop-shaped swivel chairs and listening to the tick of the clock on the wall. Even the deep ring of that severe and solid bakelite telephone that still had the 1950s phone exchange number under the plastic of the rotary dial window. I found comfort in the heft of her pinking shears, hanging from the sewing room wall by a pegboard hook. Those shears weighed pounds and I was afraid to even touch them until well into my preteen years, and even then never to cut anything with. But as much as I miss her and I miss the solid walls and floors of that 1920s-built home, I feel no urge to have any of those items. The thought of her parakeet and green orchid painting on one of my walls is simply an anachronism. Her metal stepstool would be out of place in my own kitchen. And I still do not think I live up to those pinking shears.

And with these items in mind, I do not consider myself nostalgic. I am not a collector of things because things with an emotion attached to them but out of context seem to cause more pain than they soothe. I will never again see my grandmother sitting at her sewing table, and listen to her singing a little off-key hymn with a bit of the brogue of her immigrant father. And holding those fabrics and bobbins will not make me recall her as strongly as I can picture her in my memory. I have very few of her personal belongings but I am fine with that. I feel her spirit with me when I need strength. I know that she urges me on through situations I find larger than I can bear. She is the stubborn and forceful voice of my self-worth and my determination as well as the quiet tears of a loneliness heavier than just being alone. For these feelings, I do not need material goods.

In the dream I had last night, I was in her house after she had moved into her room at a nursing home. I was feeding items from her basement and her attic into a portable shredder and fireplace in one. I could hear her pointing at things to get rid of. Maps? I didn't need those maps. Just get in the car and go and see for yourself. And into the fire the huge maps went, state by state. Clothes from childhood? Well, why didn't I cut them up and make something useful. And if I could not make something useful or the fabric was just not right, pitch them out to the curb or down to the church basement for the rummage sale. She had her favorite books but very rarely did she keep any others on hand. While she was still of sound mind, she was strictly utilitarian. It seems entirely out of character to keep something of hers for the sake of frippery or artifice.

When I look back on my own childhood, I have very few items left. My mother swung to the opposite pole of materialism and took up hoarding. Everything she owned had to be binned and destroyed, my own keepsakes as well. Every once in a while I will wish I still had those Tinker Toys or that Sea Monkey Castle, but mostly it is the emotion I was having while playing with the items and not the items themselves. Some holidays (Christmas to be precise) were so full of preparation and hoopla that to even remember the boxes emerging from the attic, the ornaments from the linen closet, the garlands from the guest room, the silver service from the dining room cabinets, that I have moments of sheer panic when faced with winter weather. To her credit, when my mother knew she was dying, she sent me a few items I might want to keep (my sawdust-filled original Winnie the Pooh characters with the velvet worn smooth) and those are still around. But the report cards, Barbies, school clothes, and paintings from my high school art studio classes are long gone to the dump. But I do not really miss them. I remember them. I will remember their context and their situations and I am fine for now. I will start to worry when I start to lose my memories but that is another subject altogether. For now, I am living in a technicolor playback of my life, probably overdramatized and just a little short of stereo.

Mind games

As far back as I can remember, I have wanted to be half of a highly creative power-couple. Linda Eastman to Paul McCartney or maybe Laurie Anderson to Lou Reed. And as much as I wanted to be Yoko Ono, it seems I always end up as May Pang, a magpie's shiny bauble kicked out of the nest or a hazy, forgotten interlude in an otherwise engaging monologue. And many times I wonder if this is the role I am set out to play in the Oscar Wilde dramedy of life.

I have certainly never expected things to be perfectly happy, soundly solid, or even remotely sane, but I do think that I am able to bring some solace to the the bargain. I always hope to inspire some insight or solve some difficult puzzle that someone in the spotlight does not have time to figure out. Over there, behind the curtains in the wings, I am happy to look on and be proud of my beacon of a man while I am scribbling away or stealthily shooting on a project of my own. I have prided myself on being that special someone's number one fan. And I have to say I have been a couple of times, some with more success than others. But in the end, I find myself as May Pang, jilted and slinking away from the peering eyes into my own comfortable shadows again.

To be honest, I cannot help wondering what the hell is wrong with me. Why is it that I am never the one that someone wants to raise children with, to sit and have a quiet evening at home with while music plays from another room, to grow old with? I feel it is some fatal flaw in my character, some ugly scar on my surface that makes men tire of me. And the older I get, the more it hurts. Seems like I should be growing a thicker shell and putting more weapons into the pack on my back but just the opposite happens. I am one more set of flower petals closer to falling open and giving in to going to seed.

I know I am not the prettiest crayon in the box, that I am kind of ordinary and pale and I do not shine brightly in the night sky, but I wanted to be one special someone's personal beacon without being a respite from a rocky shore or just a nice place to spend a vacation. My winters are grey but they have a kind of stillness I have grown used to. My rains are as stormy as anyone's but they are over in just a little while. And maybe some day I will stop wondering where my someone is or why my favorite someone did not love me enough to stay. And when I feel a little more ready, I will roll the dice and keep my fingers crossed for a solid Yoko.

Independence days

I have some rough memories of the Fourth of July celebrations in my life. I mean, fireworks and cookouts and picnic blankets excluded, my summers have been chock full of weird. One of my most vivid memories is of standing at the north end of Main Street in my hometown for the big bicentennial parade and watching rodeo clowns in overalls and leather-tasseled chaps rush by me. At the time, I did not know what a rodeo was. I just wondered why the clowns were cowboys. I thought you could be either a clown or a cowboy. You could pick one or the other but not both. My other memory from that day was the fact that I was wearing a tiny polyester pantsuit. But it was a shorts suit. It was double-knit in hideous shades of schoolhouse red and navy blue and had a matching vest I wore over a white t-shirt. I had on white sandals and the blacktop was scorching my feet with mirage waves of somewhere in the 90 degree range. I wanted a popsicle. Not just any popsicle, a red one. Both sticks. And I didn't care if they melted all the way down to my elbows.

That day was much better than three years before when, on my way out the door to my neighbor Elizabeth's birthday party, my mother found my father passed out up a tree in the backyard with a running chainsaw in his hand. Ah, low blood sugar and hot days. He was stubborn and wanted that oak tree down by the weekend. He had already set the foundation for his ham radio antenna and the oak was much too close. So while my mother called the fire department and the paramedics and ran around in a screaming panic, I was consigned to my room. And in my room I had a perfect view of my father dangling first left and then right in his tree-climbing harness. I could hear the growl of the chainsaw first out of one ear and then out of the other. We didn't know that the chainsaw's motor was on but that the chain's drive mechanism wasn't engaged. I was just really excited to meet all the firemen who pulled Dad out of the tree. That day's outfit was a short white sleeveless dress with red and blue stars printed on it. And I wanted to wear royal blue shorts underneath (so I could play on the see-saw next door without my underoos showing). But I never got to go to Elizabeth's party. It was all over and done by the time my father was settled on the couch with an icy lab beaker of Coca-Cola.

Then there was college. Ah, college. All of my friends that had stayed in town for summer school (the town where I lived year-round) gathered for a typical beer bash on the 4th. Just after sunset, when most of the drinkers had switched from beer to liquor, my boyfriend-at-the-time confessed something so appalling (an accidental stunt that had terrible repercussions) that I decided to walk home. A friend caught up with me three blocks away and tried to calm me down. There was absolutely no calming me down. And I started marching. Four miles in to the six mile trek, I realized that I really should not be out walking alone, drunk, down a major roadway on a holiday known for drunk drivers and the occasional rapist. Just then the fireworks started. I felt as if I was in some bad horror movie, running down the side of the road, startled by the loud gunpowder reports and cars whooshing by next to me in the dark. And when I arrived home, sweaty and sober, I got in my car and drove back to pick up my still-drunk and even more sullen boyfriend. Good times.

And lately, with the state of the fireworks being less sparkle and more loud boom, I just stay home. No snuggling up with someone special on a lawn blanket to watch the colorful show over the trees, no braving the traffic at the city center to get the best rooftop view. Just hunkering in alone and waiting for the noise to stop. In that way, I have achieved my independence. But I can't say I don't miss a little of the drama. Just give me a couple of those white blooming flower finale fireworks and a hand to hold on the top of the hill at the park, then I will be happy.

The creative hamster wheel

I have a few projects going on right now. OK, so I have a plethora of unfinished projects going on at the moment. And some of them are stalled. This post might just be titled, "The inconsistency of the creative drive in artists and writers." If you have a writer or an artist in your life (especially an introverted one), you might just suspect them of "doing nothing" when often the exact opposite is going on. What follows is the life a creative project for me specifically.

It all starts with an idea. And when it starts with an idea, there is a fully formed, technicolor, architectural rendering of the finished project in mind. For me it is a photo I have to take, a project I want to do for the house or the yard, or perhaps the focal point of something I want to write about. At this point I grab one of the five or six dozen notebooks I have scattered around in handy thinking-spots and start scribbling notes and sketching ideas. My brain works in overdrive. It barrels down the highway like a fully-loaded semi with a speed-freak driver at the wheel. If I don't get the details down fast enough, it is gone in the rear view mirror like a billboard forgotten. And great grey garden slugs, please do not ever move my notebooks. Don't borrow them to scribble down a shopping list. Do not write on the back of my plans like a scratchpad. These are my precious blueprints. Even if they look like meaningless doodles and stick-figures to you, they are a mathematician's equation to my idea-brain. I need it for reference or I am lost.

Then there is the thinking. You see me in the front window of a coffee shop, staring out into the nothing of the sky. Yes, my eyes are blinking, but my brain is still careening down the road on that project. It has measuring tapes and power saws and a color pallete and a full spreadsheet of expenses pinned to the side at this point. I will think a lot. I will consider everything. And if I think there is something that will roadblock me, I will usually shelve the idea until I am sure I can pull it off. There is a very full warehouse of inventions in my mind. A whole museum of unstarted paintings and unshot photos are mulling around in their green-room, waiting for their introduction. And mull they do. I will dream about them. They will bully their way to the front of other projects I am working on. They will demand attention in the middle of my work day. And I do not talk about them. That is the secret.

Ever ask an artist or a poet what they are working on and see them clam up like marble statue in front of your eyes? They aren't hiding the fact that they have nothing on the stove burners, they are running like holy hell from the jinx. Oh, we believe in the jinx. Do we ever. We do not want to let our little pink baby mice out of the cage. We do not hand them over for you to hold even if we love you like mad. They are just too delicate at this stage. We are not keeping secrets from you, we are just not strong enough yet to let them stand on their own. The projects, inanimate as they are, are being grown like offspring. Think of them as bonsai trees. There is this tiny plant we are training and gently watering and looking at daily for new shoots and possible insect infestations. You don't hand over the pruning shears to anyone. Not your spouse, not your best friend, not your parents or your child. One wrong slip with those shears and all is lost. Talking about a nascent project is like handing someone the handles of those garden tools. On the asking end, you may think it totally harmless. On the answering side, one wrong word, one eyebrow quirk, one head tilt, and it could be the death knell for all of your plans. It isn't about trust either. I could trust someone implicitly and still not share the project before it is ready.

So, why the secrecy? Why do we fret about the stages of our projects like they mean more than meals and sleep? Why don't we show off every single technique and edit? The jinx is one element but that is not the whole story. When I have a project in the early stages, it may not look anything like the finished project in my head. To me it looks awkward and rudimentary. It is the crayons and paper paste rather than the fine linen canvas and delicate brushstrokes. In my own head, I think you will look at my work and go, "Well, that is as good as you can do?!" And I think you are thinking that even if you are not. Every single time.

And so we go back to the wheel and run a little more. And the next time you ask, we may or may not share. I never show anyone something that I do not consider "finished" and even then, I will see flaws and adjustments and missed strokes and and exposure issues and places it could have been way better than that. But by the time I am ready to show something off, I am both a little geeked out by it and a little sick of looking at it. If you think it is time for that baby to spend a summer at sleep-away camp, it is probably safe to show off. We still love it like mad, but we know that it can stand up to criticism and that it has a little merit, self-worth, and some muscles to run with. I understand that the baby analogy does not really work here because who does not want to show off an adorable, squishy, squeaky-clean newborn. But you would not leave it alone with someone else yet, would you? Nope. That baby is going everywhere with you or you are not going.

So think about that next time you are talking to your creative friends. Just because you do not see the progress, and just because they are not bragging about the latest thing they have going, it does not mean that they aren't loaded down with a full baby-carrier full of artistic promise. They might be wheeling around a little invisible forest of seedlings in an imaginary red wagon. That is the statue face they are giving you. They wonder if you can see the wagon. They wonder if you can see the paper-thin skin of the poems and the tender green shoots of the seedling. And they are full of shock that they might be showing. That is a standard artist reflex. Nothing personal. Just let us run on the wheel a little longer. When we slow down, we will show you what we have been doing. It just isn't done quite yet.

Rapid season movement

Overnight I dreamed about eating fruit from elderberry branches in the snow. It was evening and I was strangely content inside the dream though there was a thunderstorm happening in the awake-world at the time. The colors darkest purple, leaf green, and bark brown made me happy as a triumvirate and the red-winged blackbirds were flitting cheerily around me and singing while they ate berries of their own choosing.

I still feel emotionally wrung-out. It may be a very long time until I feel like a whole human again and I still second-guess my emotions at every single turn. There is sleeping and waking in endless cycles and crying in between, still stopping the memories at the garden gate. I am not ready yet to let them in. There's always tomorrow.

That new-paint smell

When I woke up this morning, it was to the smell of burning wood. A big box of matches or a campfire. But in the middle of the city? Then the acrid smell of singed asphalt shingles started wafting in through the open window. And I was awake, running from door to door inside the house trying to see how close the fire was to my own home. About thirty seconds later, I heard the first distant fire truck speeding down the straight-line road from the local fire house. At 75 degrees at seven o'clock in the morning, you really have to respect the Detroit Fire Department, rolling out in full rubberized gear and helmets to battle summer house fires (and, even worse, summer arson). The roar of the engines pumping water and it was all over in ten minutes. A bad a/c unit? A shorted-out fan? I worry about these things. They pester at the back of my mind like the whine of a gnat. I pull the wires of my own window fans and check them and I put my hand to the motor housing of my ceiling fan to check if it is running hot. Nada. All good.

Then I am making coffee and looking at the acrylic paint I am covered in to the elbows. It was a painting weekend. Well, a painting and collage weekend. I woke up yesterday morning covered to the elbows in gel medium, peeling off my skin like the Elmer's School Glue we used to cover our fingers with in elementary school when we challenged each other to peel a whole fingerprint free. But today it is grey. Neutral grey and Payne's grey, smeared like smoke across the pale skin of the backs of my hands. And rather than being annoyed at the mess, I was rather relieved that I was doing something again that I had not done seriously in years. The itch of the dried paint was familiar like a favorite song.

But how I got here was not so pleasant. The person who I thought to be my biggest fan, my chosen partner for the remainder of my life, fell into a chasm of doubt. I fell in as well, though it felt as if I had been pushed with burning hand prints still on the meat of my shoulder blades. Blindsided. I had no idea there were ever any doubts in his mind because there certainly were none in mine. And after over a month of not sleeping for the nightmares and of not being able to get comfortable alone, I read a horoscope. And that horoscope said, "Remember who you were in your childhood. Get back to your core you." And rather than being the raw half of a torn couple, I decided that I should try to just be me again.

So here I sit with a cup of coffee growing cold and two arms full of flaking paint and a favorite song running through my mind. The smoke is still rolling into the air from the next block over but smelling it means I am alive. I am still alive.

The Drought

In the dream it is dark and there is snow on the ground. People are foraging on the pitted asphalt of a grocery store parking lot for broken gourds and pumpkins that have been tossed out the front door. They talk of soup, of breads, of the meals that will keep them going until the spring. But I walk by them and into the store. It is cold and quiet and composed of concrete and steel, not a very inviting place. Clerks who are stocking the shelves do not make eye contact with the customers, just keep stacking the prepackaged meals and shrink-wrapped snacks in bins and on racks. I have a cart and I am waiting for my love to appear on a break. When he does, we start looking for foods but cannot find any staple ingredients. The only thing the store sells is ready-to-eat food like Army rations. I think that I can go outside and gather some of the gourds like the foragers but when I get outside, there is no food left on the ground. I try to get to the parking lot and I get lost on cul-de-sac roads and traffic circles. I am in a hurry because he has to get back to work. It is my fault he will be late. I feel guilty. I feel inadequate that I cannot provide food. And then, he is gone from the store and I am standing alone in front of an overfilled cart of food with no appetite, starving for nutrients and knowing everything I am going to buy is expensive and empty. It is a vast feeling of despair.

Remembering to forget

The last time he spoke to me he told me that sometimes when we were together he felt like he was alone. Here I was thinking that I was being calm and collected, cool and silent, everything that he needed. Quiet. I am quiet. When I am alone I am quiet. When I am with people I am quiet. I am absorbing every single detail that is happening around me to catalogue and remember so that I can paint the good times in my head, write it down, draw it out. I do not need much. I did not know you needed more. And even worse, sometimes when I am alone, I still feel like we are together.