A Week in Portugal

Surprises: the water off the southern coast of Portugal is cold. Really cold. North Atlantic drift cold, if the maps of ocean currents can be correctly interpreted. But this unassuming corner of the Atlantic sitting outside the Strait of Gibraltar (and therefore removed from the storied Mediterranean) looks like the warm bath tub of the Caribbean. And the steep, crenelated cliffs along the beaches like something out of a fantasy movie.

I first considered Portugal as a destination after reading Frances Mayes’ A Year in the World several years ago. She wrote about the spring she and her husband spent in Lisbon, the Alentejo region, and some of the northern towns. She raved about it. Then a friend told me she’d been there, and another friend visited as well. On a where-to-travel-next mission a couple of years ago, I tentatively looked into the Algarve—the southern coastal area of Portugal—then decided on Maui instead.

But after a run of obligatory trips to visit family and friends, my boyfriend and I decided that this July we would do a European getaway, just the two of us. The last country we’d visited in Europe was Croatia and we weren’t sure how or if Portugal could top it, but what the heck: we would go.

If only the travel gods hadn’t expressed such rampant displeasure with the earthly beings trying to cross oceans, our trip might have got off the ground as planned. Instead, a “broken bracket” on the plane delayed our flight out of Denver for an hour and a half, causing us to miss our connecting flight to Lisbon from D.C. Once we made it to D.C., we found we couldn’t fly to Lisbon until the next day (since July is the start of the high season, all the flights were booked). Forty-two weary and pissed-off passengers who had all missed international connections scattered to area hotels for the night, food vouchers in hand, and waited it out. After most of a day hanging around a Marriott, chatting up the restaurant staff, and trying out the gym, we crossed our fingers, headed to the airport, and flew seven hours overnight to Frankfurt, then another two hours the opposite direction to Lisbon the next morning. The delays and continental zig-zagging had effectively lopped off more than a day of our vacation.

In the Lisbon airport, through the random kindness of a stranger, mercy was finally had and we were able to jump the enormous queue at the car rental place, retrieve our Volvo, and get on the highway. Advice: don’t drive on Portuguese highways when sleep-deprived. While the roadways are modern and exceptionally well-maintained, the drivers go at least 20 miles above the posted speed limit. Keeping an eye on Google Maps while trying to stay awake and steer straight while being blown past by what seemed like the whole of the country in a terrible hurry was about all our rattled nerves could take.

When we reached Lagos, a small-ish coastal town and our home base for the next several days, we couldn’t find the hotel. By now, near comatose with exhaustion, unable to communicate with each other or the GPS, we started having flashbacks of Croatia when we were randomly dumped off by a surly and unsympathetic taxi driver who had no actual idea where our hotel was. Fortunately for us in Lagos, it turned out we were literally right there; our hotel—like streets in Portugal—simply had no sign.

We parked, checked in, and from that point on, Portugal opened its arms.

Lagos was and still is a seafarer’s town, founded more than 2,000 years ago and presided over by a statue of a priest and an ancient fort. The town’s history follows the nefarious roots of colonialism by once being a hub for the slave trade. What’s left of history now is an open square surrounded by old architecture, a serene church, narrow cobblestone streets leading every which way, and a section of the original city walls. Modernity brought a boat marina to the water’s edge along with condo buildings, duplexes, beautiful glass houses, and tile-roofed gems to the surrounding hillsides, hinting at foreign investment and ex-pat paradise.

But we avoided staying in the town proper and did what we always did: booked something close to the beach, Porto de Mos beach to be exact. Among the well-traveled, the area around Lagos is considered quintessential Algarve. The beaches that run the perimeter of the land here are segmented by those famous cliffs, studded with mystical, implausible rock formations, and punctured by watery caves. The sand is clean, the sea clear, the sky cloudless, and the sun hot enough to warm the bones of the British, Germans, and northern Europeans escaping their dreary climates. Since we’d already warmed our bones earlier in May (in Mexico), we had no set expectations, except to find lounge chairs in the shade, a place to get a cocktail or two, and a breeze to waft away our jet lag and the worst of the political animus we’d left behind in the U.S. Oh, except that we did expect warmer water. Instead, we learned to hold our breath before dunking ourselves up to the neck. Thirty seconds was about all we could muster. We never could figure out how people were able to float around all day without going numb. But perhaps that was how: they were numb.

More surprises: at Campimar, one of two restaurants on Porto de Mos, the servers hustled non-stop, working 12-hour days with only a half day off per week (and it wasn’t even considered the height of the high season yet). The same servers working the lunch crowd were there at night when we’d venture down for dinner and to watch the World Cup games. They were friendly, good English speakers (since our Portuguese was nil), and blessed with a playful sense of humor. You could joke with them, smile at them, tip them, ask for a recommendation, gesture for more wine, and they navigated each transaction with genuine good-naturedness. We were reminded of Mexico and the country’s legendary hospitality. Here was a proud working class defiant of the way others in the world saw them.

At dinner one evening, we sat next to a retired Swedish couple who had picked up and moved to Portugal several months prior. They were spending their first official summer in Lagos as new Portuguese residents. Why? Because Portugal—if we were understanding them right—allowed them to live on their pensions tax-free for 10 years. From their newly built three-bedroom condo near the beach, they had walked down to enjoy monkfish kebabs and wine. On the walk back to our hotel later that night, we passed a British man on his phone saying to someone, “The weather has been a sensation.” We understood this. A livable town on a livable coast in a friendly and open country with—yes—sensational weather. In her book, Mayes remarks upon how it is possible to stumble upon a new place and decide immediately that she could live there, and how strange it is to live somewhere else all the while never knowing. I told my boyfriend that if the proverbial feces hit the fan, we could live here.

We spent a morning traversing a “cliff walk”—or path—that ran alongside the cliffs of Porto de Mos. Runners and bikers and those out for a casual stroll with dogs in tow met us coming and going, but for the most part the walk was peaceful and quiet. Signs warned us of the unstable earth. Inching to the edge caused our stomachs to drop. Below and far out to the horizon the sea stretched, with odd striations of rock just under the water’s surface. I wondered what caused this geological feature. On another morning, we trekked to Campilo, a beach that can only be reached by an endless descent down wooden stairs. At the bottom, something you can’t effectively describe except with inadequate phrases: every inch of the sand littered with people; a tunnel through the rock; the incongruously frigid water in shades of turquoise, green, indigo; paddlers and kayakers weaving around the rock formations; the constant urge to take pictures; the small corner we found for ourselves against a cliff face; and the people crowding in non-stop—to see, to wade, to sprawl in the sun. “Campilo is my favorite,” the man at the hotel’s reception desk had said, “if you can do the stairs.” The stairs, though, were nothing. It was the masses of people that had to be negotiated.

In town, we tripped over the cobblestones, did our tourist duty and bought souvenirs, and ate dinner at bustling restaurants. Seafood in rice, pork, stews, whole grilled fish, fried potatoes as accompaniment, and always outstanding bread and olives to start. Heavy food for a summer climate; I had been warned that weight gain was a given. I had also learned about vinho verde from my friend Kelley, a “green” wine light in taste and alcohol. Not big drinkers at home, my boyfriend and I found ourselves ordering bottles of it for dinner and had a glass or two with every lunch. We ordered a pitcher of tinto (red) sangria one evening while sitting on the roof of a three-story bar, listening to soft electronic music under the sky at dusk, next to a couple of hippy Germans sharing rolled cigarettes. My boyfriend and I looked at each other. Something about the vibe . . . “Like Burning Man,” we said.

Each night, the breeze blew off the cold water and chilled everything down. In the mornings, the sun rose in a fresh blue sky as we headed down to the hotel’s breakfast buffet and entertained ourselves with the wizardry of the coffee machine, sipping multiple cups of café con leite. Our room at the hotel was apartment-style, with a fully outfitted kitchen and a washer/dryer. On the first day in Lagos we had found a huge grocery store akin to Whole Foods and bought fruit, cheese, crackers, sliced meats, wine, hummus, juice, water. We ate snacks on our private terrace. I did laundry. Not just a livable town, but a livable hotel. The whole area had the laid-back quality of California with sunburned tourists lolling on colorful beach blankets and strolling barefoot into the restaurants, with nothing much to do but respond to the instinct excavated from deep within to stare upon the blue horizon, wondering—as the Portuguese once did—what was beyond.

On our last night in Lagos, we went back to Campimar and watched Britain vs. Croatia surrounded by a large table of Brits and a young German couple. Everyone was drinking, cheering, joking, cursing. The Germans were smoking. The British wives ordered beer after beer while their husbands switched to espressos. Behind us, the rest of the diners watched with indifference. When Britain began to fail, the German girl got excited. I was with her. I, too, wanted a new team to win. Finally, long past 9 p.m., the Brits decided to nurse their defeat by ordering dinner, their children still happily chattering at the table and running down every so often to play on the beach in the last of the dwindling light.

In the morning, a cliff walk in the other direction during which we stopped cold. The walk took a turn, went downward in some one-person-wide temptation of fate and continued up into the distance, so steep and precipitous that my afraid-of-heights boyfriend couldn’t go further, and I wouldn’t. No sense in falling to our deaths on such a perfectly lovely vacation. We packed up the car and left.

After a white-knuckle drive through Lisbon to the rental car drop-off, negotiating roundabouts three and four lanes deep with—once again—no discernible street signs, followed by an Uber ride with the delightfully conversational Nuno who had lived in Paris and Barcelona but had come home to roost in his boyhood city, we arrived safely at our hotel. I have never been to Paris or Rome; my experience of classic European cities is reduced to London. But even I can see that Lisbon is underappreciated in its beauty and character, from the architecture—rococo mixed with art deco mixed with modern—to the colors—soft pink, mint green, yellow, cherry red—to the palaces behind iron fences and ornate statues in the middle of every roundabout and the cobblestone inlaid with swirling designs, to the hills and parks and shuddering trams straight out of the 1930s, and the graffiti that isn’t an eyesore but somehow adds texture and life. I fell in love instantly.

The young doorman directed us to a restaurant down the alley behind the hotel, where—inexplicably—three theaters stood in various states of function and repair. Apparently, we were in Lisbon’s “Broadway” district. The tucked-away restaurant had a garden, a covered terrace, and good food, and was disturbed only by the complaints of a trio of middle-aged British women wanting vegetables and refusing the inevitable bread. My boyfriend and I were quizzical: “You mean, you can just say no to the bread?” For us, never. We walked off the bread—and everything else—by wandering the Avenida de la Libertad, a main thoroughfare through the city that’s lined with shops, restaurants, and hotels. We stopped at an open-air café, one of several along the shaded center plaza, and had a nightcap. In the morning, we would go home. Not enough time. Just a taste. But a torrent of reasons to come back.

Thankfully there were no more travel delays—just the headwind from the jet stream and the aching joints from sitting too long next to strangers and the extra shenanigans of baggage claim, finding the car, paying for parking, and speeding once again down familiar highways—all to reach what is livable to us, but knowing, now, what else is out there.

Blue

At the end of June, the days near one hundred. The sun makes me sticky and the clouds bring no respite. But still I look out my window and see swaying green trees and blue sky and thank providence all over again that I live in Colorado.

In July the flowers begin to frizzle, their colors and the green of the trees saturate into spilled paint, deepening and muddying and blurring. Smoke from the wildfires makes the sky yellow and brings screaming sunsets at dusk. Somewhere behind them, the blue is hidden.

In August, we simply wait for September.

In September life accelerates again. Kids go back to school. Jobs pick up. Everyone takes a breath during restorative cool nights before we have to worry about the cold days of winter ahead.

In October of this year, the shadow of Mars retrograde reaches its termination and the madness that officially started on June 26—what madness, everything is mad—will show us its end point, its truth and its consequences. That’s what the astrologers say anyway. With every end point, every truth, every consequence we have experienced already, what fresh fork will veer off the road and divert all of us with it, what fork we haven’t already stumbled down, slept upon, lolled beside in stunned inertia.

What new fork brings us to November, to a month we have to care about, a day we have to lay claim to, in a year on its way to ending, a year we’d all sooner forget but cannot.

What fork, those of us who are bone-tired are asking. What fork will give us liberty or give us death. What fork will reveal itself to every traveler, for we are all travelers—the brave among us, the separated, the crying, the angry, the inconsolable, the resigned, the stoic, the ecstatic, the pathological, the pure, the silent. The ones who have not noticed they are even traveling at all, and will not, until some time later when they wake up and discover they are in an unfamiliar place.

This is the work of Mars, god of war, the astrologers point out. Not to destroy like Ares, but to bring peace. Peace that won’t be apparent for a few more years, for the stars play a long game. No, first there must be madness. Amnesia. Bloodthirst. Trickery. Cost. There must be something in each of us that breaks down. There must be reckoning.

The work is of the haul, the uphill climber, the ascent into altitude where there is less oxygen but an infinite view. Where the blue is June blue all the time. Where it pieces you back together, holds you in suspension, and opens the flow of memory: “Oh yes. Yes, I remember. It doesn’t repeat. It rhymes. And we can simply end the verse when we decide to.”

Committed Youth

I admit that I like to pile on the youth sometimes. I don’t mean the eternal (and frankly tiresome) old saw about millennials. All the millennials I’ve known are smart, capable, responsible, and altogether lovely go-getters. What I mean is just youth in general. “The young.” Those people in their teens and twenties. Standing there with their shiny ambitions and unfamiliar problems, their chances like apples on a tree ripe for the taking. Those people who are still the centers of their own universes only because they haven’t accumulated enough life experiences yet to show them otherwise.

I just found out the barista at the coffee shop I go to on Wednesday mornings is 27. He has a scattering of tattoos, a mustache instead of a beard; he’s amiable, fast-moving, makes an almond-milk latte with a heart floating on top. I’d thought he was at least in his thirties. But I don’t really know him. I just know that a small part of me envies his youth. It’s hard not to. What’s he done so far? Where’s he been? What does he really know? Doesn’t matter. He’ll find out soon enough, and I suppose that is what I envy: the finding-out-for-the-first-time part. Those moments when something becomes patently obvious, when knowledge cracks through, when understanding crystallizes, when you know you’ll never be the same again.

I would like to be there when this 27-year-old barista has one of those moments.

Just as I wanted to be there when the kids walked out of school today.

At first, they would have felt a growing exhilaration, a defiant sense of their own power. Some of the teachers and administrators no doubt discouraged them—because of their own limitations. When kids challenge authority, it brings up deep-rooted fears in adults about not being big enough or important enough. It makes people face the uncomfortable notion that conformity may feel safe and moral, but it kills vitality and possibility. I’m sure, though, there were others who encouraged the kids. Yes, exercise your First Amendment rights. Don’t worry about what might happen today. Enough of us will support you. Go. This is your time. This is your time to get out there and be heard.

At 10 a.m. they spilled out of classrooms, out of doors, onto the lawns and sidewalks, a milling mass of them, maybe with signs, maybe shouting chants. Once they made it through the doors, the exhilaration strengthened. Yes! We’re outside. We’ve made it thus far.

Not everyone took it seriously, I’m sure. Some participated just to get out of school. They were the ones shoving each other and laughing, shiftless stances and hands in pockets giving them away. They didn’t really know, didn’t really care (deep down inside they wanted to know, they wanted to care, they felt somehow alien out there, but they weren’t mature enough yet, not courageous enough yet, their journeys hadn’t brought them to an understanding of the broader world and their place in it yet, and so they shuffled along, just happy to skip biology for seventeen minutes).

For everyone else, the next step would have been to commit. Really commit. They stood outside, they chanted. They marched. Cars driving past honked their horns, drivers and passengers threw up peace signs, rolled down windows and waved. The kids waved back and cheered, energized by the effect they were having. A few detractors frowned, yelled their displeasure. In some places, the news reporters inserted themselves into the thick of it, or hovered around the edges with microphones and cameras, speaking fast, scanning the crowd, getting jostled along. The shufflers tried to get into the shot. They crowded in behind the reporters and grinned; they told their friends to watch for them on the news that night. Others, the ones with the messages, the ones with the fire in their guts, got pulled aside by the reporters. They were interviewed, slightly breathless but articulate, despite the nervous thrill rising up in their throats. Those are the ones we’ll watch later tonight and admire—openly or otherwise.

All had their phones out, taking pictures, videos, posting immediately and often to social media. Like lightning, a capturing everywhere of this moment. A capturing of youth. Fresh, brazen, defiant. Committed.

Committed youth.

Something has crystallized. Something is new, different, everyone is saying. Was it new and different when college students protested the Vietnam War? Maybe. Was it new and different when black students walked into white schools, ending segregation, staking a claim to the inherent rights of being human? Depends on your grasp of history. Was it new and different that for many years students didn’t do anything at all? No.

We in white, middle-class America were conditioned by parents, teachers, society to focus only on getting a good job with benefits, saving money to buy a house, squirreling away for retirement some day. We were conditioned to believe that “choice” existed in consumerism only—where it belonged. Here, choose among patio furniture and car insurance plans. But don’t worry about the slow strangulation of corporate government on our two-party system. Don’t worry about social ills; they don’t really concern you. Vote if you want to, portray the image of civic duty, but that’s not where you really need to pay attention. In fact, don’t. Those who are called to politics will figure it out for us; ultimately, they’ll take care of everything. Yes, it’s a long and storied tradition to complain about this country and our politicians, but it’s unnecessary for citizens to do anything about it. Just worry about yourself and the family you’ll someday have. Be practical. Be reasonable. Be indifferent. Don’t ask questions. Stifle your curiosity. Go watch football. And for heaven’s sake, if you start to figure it out, don’t tell anyone.

What’s new and different this time? I’m not asking the question to be cynical. I’m asking to be scientific. I need evidence. I need a randomized study conducted over a period of years. Even so, I accept that it won’t show everything. A young person committing to something is not always empirically observable. The new neuropathways cannot be seen on the outside. Whether or not an 18-year-old votes this year or in the next presidential election isn’t the only measurement of change. Whether or not gun reform happens as a result of a collective movement of suddenly awakened students isn’t the only measurement either. These are big measurements, yes—important ones, of course. They may indicate that a real difference is being made. Kids across the country are counting on it, anyway. And they should. Hope and idealism are the roots of change. Without it, you drift with the wind.

But there must be more that we don’t know.

The final step would have been after the seventeen minutes were up, when the enthusiasm melted into acceptance that the kids still had to go to class today, that those teachers who had been tolerant of their First Amendment rights nevertheless expected them to be back in their seats. Shit, the kids probably thought. Even the shufflers felt it. Enthusiasm caught is hard to come down from. What now?

Here’s what: The day will progress. There will be stories tonight, texts, questions, more social media posts. Tomorrow the kids will still be talking about it (and some of the administrators). There’s another march coming up in a couple of weeks. Planning ahead is not necessary. These days, you don’t schedule. Things materialize. And you are either swept up and absorbed into the nucleus or spun out like an electron. Congress will do nothing; the kids will do more. They’ll chip away at each other’s resolve until a decision is made.

But as I watch this unfold, strangely I find I have nothing to criticize. Either enough kids are committed, or there aren’t. Lord knows I wasn’t committed to too much for a very long time—how can I judge anything that happens after today?

I don’t need to.

The 27-year-old barista lives in a different world than I do. My teenage nieces do as well, and my college-sophomore nephew. There is nothing for me to measure if we are not living in the same world. This is the key. I can’t judge this movement, these kids, through the same lens that I judged myself or anyone else my age or in my generation, or in the generations before me.

Yes, we have been around longer. We are the ones who are wearier and warier and hardened and cynical and rigid—and also desperately, despairingly naïve. We realize we know less than we thought we did. Maybe we never knew anything at all. We participated less in society. We had less compassion, for ourselves and others. We kowtowed too much to a system we weren’t sure we believed in. We let activism be a hobby for someone else to have. We didn’t make anything happen when we needed to.

But we’re trying to now. We’re late to the game, but god damn it, we’re showing up, signing up, organizing, listening, calling, marching, allying, running for office, wearing t-shirts, waving flags, giving speeches, saying prayers. We are fired up now because we can’t afford not to be. And we have the checkbooks or the accrued time off or sometimes, with a little luck, the support systems to back up our efforts. That’s why we joined the resistance. It’s about time, many of us say to each other. It’s about time we did something real.

But on days like today, we learn that we are not enough. These youth—the youth of today—are more than us: more is riding on them, more will be asked of them, more is important for them to learn, more urgency is needed for them to save what may already be dying, more of their ingenuity and fortitude is needed to resuscitate and re-imagine a hamstrung democracy.

This makes us sober. A hush falls.

The crack of knowledge is painful, no matter what age you are.

There is a time when every generation admits that the next generation must somehow win the battle. We have to clear the field; they have to pick up the armor. We have to trust; they have to engage. We have to gracefully step aside; they have to aggressively step in. We know we are at a tipping point; they don’t know enough to be paralyzed with fear.

No matter what happens, no matter what we achieve or don’t, none of us will ever be the same again. And it is then we begin to see that finding out for the first time never stops and youth is just a relative term.

Catheters for Editors

We used to joke about catheters.

Hook us up so we could sit for our eight-hour shifts without getting up, because getting up was dangerous, because all hell could break loose, and did—often. Because in the middle of quarterly earnings, when the shit was coming fast, when the deadlines were way too tight, when everyone’s faces were strained and grim, the catheter could be the tiny merciful difference between outright peeing ourselves and daring to burn two minutes in the bathroom.

Wishing for catheters was just one of the weirdnesses about being an editor at what was then one of the world’s largest newswire services. Back then, we split the market with our main competitor. At any moment, we or the other company could gain a half percentage lead, and then the sales people would pounce with a bombastic furor while the rest of us rolled our eyes, because sales people are the same no matter where you go.

Only in this world did anyone understand that “xmit” meant “send.” As in, “Send it over the wire.” It also stood in as a handy euphemism for the male orgasm. Only in this world did we read each press release aloud to each other before xmitting (although, I don’t think reading aloud has ever induced an orgasm, but I could be wrong about that). We read them aloud so we could catch anything with our voices that our eyes had somehow missed—misplaced commas, duplicate words, wrong phone numbers.

When I was hired and made it through the three months of side-by-side hand-holding that amounted to my training, I was already figuring out that my job was not only weird, but rare. We were English and Journalism majors, occasionally the more vague and dubious holders of an International Relations degree, working not for The New York Times or the Washington Post or the local business journal, but working in corporate America for corporate America, upon which the stock exchanges and the SEC and the C suites of most large organizations around the world relied to deliver—either by law or because of vanity—corporate America’s most “important” information, and thereby prop up the coffers of America’s most sanctified figures.

Funny thing was, most of us editors were liberals. We didn’t even care about corporate America.

What we shared, instead, was a bizarre and unhealthy love of good grammar. We used the Oxford comma with relish. We knew AP Style inside and out, knew by heart every standalone city and state abbreviation. We could read through tables upon tables of financial information without falling asleep, absorbing every number, dollar sign, and amortized amount across four, eight, twelve columns. We found mistakes in the headlines, in lead sentences and boilerplates, and exclaimed again and again, “Doesn’t anyone even read these things before they give them to us?”

Finding “pubic” when it should have said “public” was a big deal. You could get a lot of kudos for that, by the client and your boss. In fact, your boss could win clients away from the competition over a save like that, increasing yearly profits by double-digit percentage points (in theory). But you? (Meaning me.) The one who caught it? (Me.) Never a raise. Nothing monetary. No share of the wealth. Just kudos, with a back slap and a smile.

“Coding” for us was not HTML, but scanning through a mile-long list of five-letter references that each meant something different. City, state, country, region, Europe, Asia, Africa. Dog lovers, cat lovers, energy, pharmaceuticals, technology, television, sports. Media advisory. Embargo. Hold for approval. Correction.

Correction. Holy hell. Never did you want to find yourself having to do a correction. And never, ever did you want to be doing a correction of a correction, which happened in our office once, reaching legendary status—and not in a good way.

Yes, the catheters could’ve come in handy. Dribbling gallons of digested morning coffee into plastic bags so we could—in addition to editing and coding and calculating time zone differences faster than you can add one plus one—give our fullest, most emptied-bladder attention to client quirks. Such a whimsical term for the mightiest of rat traps. Almost every client had one, some as long and convoluted as a patient’s post-op instructions:

Never change any punctuation. (What?! Even if it’s flat-out wrong??). They prefer not to mention their company name in the headline. (Company name in the headline was our sacred company policy, something you dared not overlook, something for which you had to pull out the boxing gloves and prepare for a fight…except, apparently, in this case). Always include Education and Entertainment trades. (That’s odd: this company is oil and gas). Call Susanna before Noon PT with wire times Mon-Thurs, and Ed with wire times after Noon PT. But if it’s after 5 pm PT, then call Jackie or Ellen and leave a message. Call only Paul on Fridays and over the weekend; call his cell phone first and leave a message, then call his home number. During earnings, all releases are Hold for Approval, even if they say release ASAP. Call Paul to confirm when the release is prepped and Susanna will call back with approval.

And that was just the first paragraph.

But not being able to get up for long stretches of time, being wholly submerged in competing priorities and watching the releases that still needed handling stack up on the screen of your newsroom monitor, knowing that it was only going to get busier as the day wore on—no, that was not even the worst of it.

The worst of it was the OCD. During my seven years as an editor, I could not leave my home without touching all four burners on the stove, checking the knobs to make sure they were all pointing to “Off,” and then touching all four burners again. Sometimes I could do this ritual once. Most of the time I had to do it three or four times before I could leave. At my most entrenched, I was doing the stove burner thing five or six times before I could leave…and regularly dreaming about my job…and plowing through press releases during the day without ever making a mistake, without ever not catching someone else’s mistake.

No one understands this kind of record now. Mistakes are funny, cherished, forgiven by default these days, if noticed at all. Back then, mistakes—whether you actually made them yourself or got caught up in someone else’s—were the equivalent of pressing, without permission, the red button at the White House and having every single leader of the free world burst into your office in apoplexy (although, even that kind of calamity seems to be met with casual shrugs these days).

My OCD on the job was sometimes so debilitating I turned to my supervisor in tears, unable to xmit, as I checked and checked and checked everything again and again and again, terrified that I had missed something, absolutely unable to trust my own eyes, certain of my immediate firing.

We were bleary-eyed, harried, big drinkers after work. We sang karaoke together, ate lunch at the Indian buffet, panicked in unison when something went wrong. We dated each other, broke up with each other, tormented each other. We were a strange and dysfunctional clique, thrown together at the mercy of greater forces and a consistent paycheck.

I briefly worked at headquarters in San Francisco, one of the busiest offices in the company. But it was in Denver where I spent most of my tenure, and schizophrenic in another way: just as crazy during quarterly earnings but absolute crickets when it wasn’t.

That was another weirdness: we could do whatever we wanted (within reason) during down time. I wrote a whole novel. One guy studied for and got his real estate license. Less ambitious activities involved reading the newspaper or a book, doing crossword puzzles, playing “Trivial Pursuit,” running the office football pool, calling into radio shows with answers to the noon quiz, helping the marketing team stuff envelopes, taking a nap. Not acceptable: watching porn.

Down time, however, could turn quickly and without warning into up time—into strap-yourself-in, hold-onto-your-hat, insert-catheter up time. Into up time ruled by instructions.

Everywhere we turned there was a list of lengthy instructions, taped to the alarm clock, taped to wire baskets, taped to bulletin boards, taped to our computers, taped to the server when it needed backing up. Instructions about holidays, vacations, time changes, filing, monitoring clips, transferring our office’s newsroom when we closed at night to the office handling our clients during the graveyard shift, in Cleveland, Seattle, Phoenix, elsewhere. Instructions and rules and procedures were God, and we editors were its lowly subjects, bound to it—to the last letter—by fear and threats.

Instructions and rules and procedures were necessary when money was on the line. Someone else’s money, that is; someone else’s stock.

As a result, there were screaming clients of all varieties: PR agency people, IR agency people, CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, communications departments, admin assistants. Never have I worked on behalf of so many scornful men, so many scathing women, sunny voices going crystal-cold when told something they didn’t want to hear. We were supposed to be nice on the phone, helpful. We were supposed to take their last-minute changes without sounding annoyed. We were supposed to smile and bite our tongues when they called up demanding to know, “Why hasn’t it gone over the wire yet?” and refrain from sneering, “Because you keep calling me with last-minute changes.”

That was in the late 90s and early 2000s. That was when 9/11 happened and the Denver office was shut down for the day because someone thought a Secret Security faction housed in the same building made it a possible target. That was when the tsunami hit in Southeast Asia over Christmas and every release we handled was about donating profits and services to those who were affected, each company clamoring to be the most charitable. That was when “corporate social responsibility” became a thing. That was when people still faxed. That was when I thought having a job that paid me benefits and gave me a decent amount of vacation days was the best I could wish for, that there was surely not much else out there for me, an idealistic Journalism major who had nevertheless not gone after a career at The New York Times. That was when writing—my own writing—was still something of a pipe dream.

When I stopped being an editor, my OCD went away. I realized I had other skills, other aptitudes. I realized a small company had just as many problems as a large one—just different problems. I relaxed a bit. I made new friends, indulged in new flirtations, skirted new break-ups.

I still never made any mistakes.

Well, OK, maybe I made a few. Somewhere. But I don’t think about them.

I get up now. I walk around. I see the world outside my window.

I still remember all the standalone cities, but I don’t touch the burners on my stove anymore.

I no longer think in great detail about the necessity of catheters.

The Slant of the Sun

I remember the slant of the sun on the wall.

I remember the honeycomb, just so, on the pancakes you made. The rest of the day, a blur.

Until that night…when I lay on the couch with your hand on my leg and let the tumult of many months well out of me and soak into your pillow. You didn’t say a word. And I did not know I needed that until you gave it.

I met you, when the strange blue jellyfish washed ashore and died on the beach—every June they did, up and down the Pacific coast. You saw me first, standing by the side of the road, the ocean to my right, a mountain to my left, the breeze whipping my bad haircut, and my clothes impractical for nature and the chill. You drove past, you told me later. I couldn’t understand how I’d attracted you in such a flash. But a fine breeze will stir up mystery in anyone.

As wedding guests gathered, we ran the trail the next day—you saw me wheezing, bent over, unable to. It was the poor sleep I’d gotten, the lower altitude. It was you, I wanted to say, watching, judging. When we came through that grass tunnel to the deserted beach, I was free. Put my arms up, my face to the light. I was still young back then; you could see it on me, the years ahead. I could feel you looking at me. I could tell you were plotting the next several hours.

The wedding, the reception, the walk up the hill in the dark in my high-heeled sandals. The lighthouse was a piercing carousel above us. Your hand on my back. Your arm helping me down. At the party later, your attention made me squeamish. It was the DJ I wanted. He spun the records, let me try out his headphones. I tried to talk to him, but it was too loud, and he was busy. My bad haircut is turning him off, I thought. There was a movie star there, married to the brother of the bride. Twenty-four hours before, I had stared at this brother as he walked through the door, kicked in the gut by his beauty. Now I stared at her, the movie star. She had bad hair, too; on her, it was charming. Everywhere, people were lovelier, better, more sophisticated than me.

But had they seen the jellyfish, I wondered. Had they touched reasonless death.

The night reached a climax. There were practicalities to consider. I sized you up. Shorter, balding, strange, you were. An architect. A snob wearing a suit from the seventies, with a cocktail I didn’t know. A marathon runner. A question mark.

You took me back to the place where you were staying, and you kissed me, and kept kissing me, and we strangled and bruised each other on the couch until morning when I finally got up, battered, high. A fork in me. All the differences between us. Would you scale them, I wondered. Did you even have to, with the life you lived and the friends you had and the places you went for fun.

You had asked me something: had I ever been engaged?

No, I laughed. One way, I noted. One tiny way I was more evolved.

It was those differences that incited me to change. To get another degree. To shore up my goals. Bolster my confidence. Spit-shine my mantle of woman desired, woman admired. To change meant getting rid of him first, the old him back at home, the him that had haunted me for years, the him that had never, ever worked out.

School beckoned. Another Pacific city.

Before I made my escape to the edge of the continent, I arrived on your doorstep. A last hurrah, they called it. We had a good night, then a bad one. You were not really available, it turned out. There was someone else. And your couch was as fine a place as any to tell me. I don’t want you, I didn’t say. What I needed was the friction of a human body without walls.

Because…I hadn’t let go of the old him back home, truth was. He’d let go of me. And I hadn’t bargained on your rejection. Didn’t know your secret moral dilemma.

The sun on the wall was orange in the low evening light. I closed my eyes. The music was Brazilian, a woman singing.

I cried. You listened, waited, sat with me.

We went to bed. You came in close, arm over my ribs. There was a reverence. Human pain is familiar, baked into our bones.

Weary gratitude lulled me to sleep.

In the morning, my flight home.

The sun on the wall was bright again, in a blue sky, above a green meadow. Someone painted that for me, you said.

Squaring off what would never be anything other than a time, a person, an experience shared. No bleeding edge to the soul, no dirty canvas revealing the rest of the story. Just the sun and the sky and the meadow in a square. And you standing there.
And me leaving. Forever, maybe…

Reditus

It’s been a really long time since I talked about writing.

I started this blog years ago when I was determined to be a writer (re: do more than just fill notebooks at home, in private, with no one to read what was in them). I thought I’d write confidently and prolifically about the craft and business of writing, as I was growing and learning. But since then I have drifted far from that center to explore whatever was interesting to me. Turns out I didn’t want to be bound by one idea of what I should be sharing. Turns out I’m not so good at having a unified message.

I’m coming back to writing today because I’ve lately been thinking about how much it’s changed for me. Whatever fount of creativity I’ve been clinging to over the last few years has dried up and left in its place a well from which I must plumb. What at times was lustfully overflowing is timid now, underground, waiting to be coaxed to the surface. What may have been exuberant in its offering is now withdrawn. Everything in life is cyclical—even this. And I find myself in a new cycle of thinking more and creating less. Air-dried and thirsty in the desert. Remembering the feeling of being soaked.

Practical reasons, I can guess, for this new state. If I want to be analytical, I can say that much of my time not spent on my paid work is spent dealing with the current political situation and my newfound activism. A worthy reason, some would say. I also wrapped up final—final final—revisions on my second novel earlier this year—a novel over a decade in the making—so maybe my brain and my soul just need a damn minute. And because I make a living as a freelance writer and have to come up with words on demand for other people in other industries about which I usually know little but must learn a lot immediately, much of my energy reserves go toward those left-brain exercises…not to mention the near-constant search for new work and worry about not having enough. Worry is a creativity killer, I’ve found.

But every writer has these problems. None of mine are unique.

That is what we tell ourselves, too, to sound lofty. To show that we understand the tribe. “I get it,” we writers say to each other and close our eyes in sympathy. Notice my sudden use of the word “we” instead of just owning it. A layer removed. If I say “I,” I might cry.

I’m coming back to writing today to peer down the silent well. What’s down there? What have I been overlooking? What roots cling with naked tenacity to the stone sides? What thin layer of muck at the bottom hides an ecosystem of blind and primitive creatures feeding off soil and water? What hides in the cracks, unbidden? I don’t know yet. I can’t see. My eyes need time to adjust.

I’m coming back to writing because it used to be that it could help me process my emotions, learn about myself, learn about others. But I am weary of others, weary of myself. And my emotions are on lockdown until I jab their soft underbellies with a choir singing Om So Hum, and only then do they release themselves and course in rivulets down my cheeks.

My grandmother died. I want to write about her. I cannot find the words.

And so I cry.

And yet everything is bound up. I don’t know from one month to the next what will make itself known. Where are my old notebooks with my old stories and essays? Where are those old swords piercing the veins of truth? But when I read them, I don’t recognize the words anymore. Who was I back then? What did I dream about? Where did I go?

I’m coming back to writing. Because I have to.

I’m coming back because Richard Bach says in Illusions, “I will not let you go until you set me, in words, on paper.” There is something…something…that has not let me go yet. Has chained itself to my ankle. Has let me drag it down the street and into my apartment and on vacation and into work meetings and into lazy-Sunday breakfasts where I can continue to ignore it, and ignore it, and ignore it if I want to.

But if I say it here—I’m coming back to writing—maybe the chain will break. Not to release the craft. Not the business. Not the façade of enterprise and ambition.

The roots, God damn it.

Maybe I will see the roots, the primitive mud creatures, the pearl in the furthest crack.

There.

Luminescent with meaning, round like the earth, cradled in the universe. Here for me to pluck and bring into the light.

The Drive

How does he know that I will be careful with this? Because I might not. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.

******

Devin drives with the windows down and a heavy metal band shrieking on the stereo. I’m next to him, staring ahead at the two-lane road, wondering how I got here. This is how, I think: summer baseball, a warm evening, the last of the afternoon thunderheads moving away into the distance, and that seam of gold that appears in the sky after the storm. I was just sitting there on the bleachers, watching the game, when Devin approached and smiled, and his dimples smiled, too, and his eyes were shy.

“Want to go for a drive?”

I looked at him.

“I have to drop something off for my dad.”

I remembered the rumor—was it a rumor?—that his dad was sick with cancer. I didn’t remember how or where I heard it. All I knew was that Devin and his siblings lived with their mom in town, and his dad lived somewhere else.

I said, “OK.”

Simple as that, it seemed.

The other thing I’m thinking, there in his pickup, is that it should have been Mitch all those months ago when April and I sneaked out and crept the two blocks to Devin’s house because his mom worked at night. The four of us, Mitch and Devin and April and I, sat in Devin’s basement and played strip poker; nothing else to do, underage in the middle of the night. We were nervous, giggling, as we unhooked our bras under our shirts and pulled them free. Devin and Mitch stripped down to their underwear. That’s as far as any of us would take it.

But then we were making out with each other. April was across the room with Mitch, and I was under Devin on the couch. I knew Mitch was furious. I could feel it, feel his attention on me even as he fumbled around with my friend. Devin was quiet, deliberate, with the broad shoulders and dead weight of a man. We kissed for hours, and between the kissing and the weight of him on my body, I was breathless all night. The next day we pretended it never happened.

******

He drives us away from the game, out of town, past green corn fields and twisted trees and irrigation ditches, the smell of manure and rain-soaked alfalfa blowing by—away from civilization, perhaps miles and miles away, I consider, into the dark blue on the eastern horizon. A paper bag by his feet ripples in the wind from the open windows. I catch a glimpse of the edge of my face in the side-view mirror, my lips held tightly together.

We don’t talk on the drive, but he has a look of serenity on his face. He always looks serene.

He was serene that night, too, when he lowered himself onto me, pushed his tongue into my mouth. What am I doing here?, I’d kept asking myself. I had never been interested in Devin before. He was just a guy I knew. He had always been just a guy I knew, with a high-pitched giggle and ears that stuck out a bit. Mitch was the one. Mitch was the first boy to slip his hand into my jeans as I suffocated against him on a late night, who told me he was in love with me during hours-long phone conversations which tied up the line and pissed off our families. Mitch was a bragger and a fighter. He walked with a lope and a head bob, hands balled into fists, always on the lookout for a rumble. Mitch was also a game. I could roll around with him, his panting in my ear, my bra undone, and then get up and leave him and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. I could string him along and laugh about the other girls he tried to date and tell him ridiculous things like, “I know you better than you know yourself,” because it sounded sexy and enigmatic. And maybe it was to him. He always came back for more.

I wanted to be crushed into that couch by Devin, because I didn’t have to think about what he would say or do afterwards, and what I would say or do in return. I wanted a moment when I did not have to calculate. And I wanted Mitch to see me having that moment.

******

The road is almost dry and the air rushing through the windows whips my hair across my eyes.

Just then, the metal band achieves a moment of grace and a song comes on—a ballad—that rings out so powerful, so soaring with longing, that it fills my entire being and raises the hair on my arms. I look over at Devin. I want to tell him to pull over, to stop. I want to move toward him across the seat and take his face and kiss him. I want his tongue in my mouth, his hands on my body. I want to straddle him. I want him to grip my legs. I want him to do more to me than we did on the couch. I wonder if this is how love happens. I wonder if I am a brave person.

But I stay where I am and yank my hair to the side. I draw my knee up and hug it to me.

After awhile we turn into a dirt driveway, drive down it, and park in a cluttered yard next to a ramshackle house. Everything—the house, an assortment of sagging sheds—is a scratched kind of gray. The leaves on the trees are shriveled and the yard is full of weeds. A yellow dog of uncertain breed wags its tail when we get out of the pickup and follows us to a screen door. Inside, everything is dingy and the rooms are barely furnished. It smells like mold and old cooking. I follow Devin through the kitchen to a bedroom steeped in tea-colored light. I see skinny knees, an arm; someone is sitting on the edge of a bed holding a cigarette. I shrink into myself and don’t know where to look.

“This is Nina,” Devin says and the skinny, smoking person nods.

I don’t know what it’s like to have a sick parent, or divorced parents, to live in a sad little house all alone, to sit in a bedroom day in and day out with nothing but a cigarette for company. All of a sudden I am stunned, surprised that I am here: there is nothing I can offer.

Devin hands his dad the paper bag and they start a low, murmuring conversation; it feels too private for me to hear. I slip back through the kitchen to the living room and wait in the dimness, holding myself very still, feeling my heart beating. The dog peers at me through the screen door.

I think about Mitch. He drinks juice boxes like a child. The dark hair on his upper lip is rough. He is taller than me, and gangly, with bad posture. His hair is cut into a mullet. He loves motorcycles and dirt bikes and drag racing—things I don’t care about. He is handsome and yet squalid. He makes me squinch with embarrassment, makes me think “white trash.”

I think about the last time I was with him. He came over when my parents were out of town and we made out all night until the sun started coming up and I had to kick him out. I had to shove him toward the door. I had to cross my arms and plant my feet and make my voice angry and threatening so that he would leave. Elsewhere in the house my sister and brother slept. I was worried they would hear me, find out, tell on me. When he finally left, I locked the door behind him and watched out the window until he was gone. Then I went back to my room and lay on the bed and tried to sleep, but I couldn’t because I was so worked up, because Mitch was everything that I did not want, and I didn’t understand anything, why I did what I did with him.

******

After several minutes Devin comes and finds me and asks if I’m ready to go. I dart my eyes around, expecting more. I wonder what was in the paper bag—could’ve been medicine, food, anything. Money, I think with a slow prickle. Then I also think: maybe he didn’t want me to know.

But the fact that he asks me if I’m ready to go—the fact that he wants to know what I prefer, when we are here, in this broken-down place far outside of town, with a person he must care about who may or may not be dying, who may or may not have enough money or food or medicine at any given time, and he’s asking me what I want, as if I might want to stay, put my feet up, hang out for awhile—is something I don’t know what to do with and I am stunned all over again. If nothing else, he is polite, I tell myself. But that’s not right. It implies there is nothing else, and there is—it floods me—so much more.

“Sure,” I say as brightly as I can. I want him to know that I am fine, that this whole thing has been fine. That I have noticed nothing, judged nothing.

I walk with Devin outside to the pickup. The broad stretch of his shoulders is hunched now, his head down. I watch the way he has to leave his dad, and a strangled feeling rises in my throat. I don’t want to kiss him anymore. I want to hug him.

We pull out onto the two-lane road and head back to town.

Now is the time to bring up that night.

But still we pretend.

******

A week after the night at Devin’s house, I ran into Mitch, who told me that he’d been calling April a lot and that they might go on a date. April was my friend, but she was also my main competition, and for a quick moment I was fired up, my mind searching for a nasty thing to say to him. He beat me to it. “You’ve been replaced,” he said, but I just laughed. Temporary, I thought to myself. He’ll be back. I don’t want him back, but he’ll be back all the same.

He called me a few days later.

******

The setting sun is streaming over the road now, spreading a watercolor of orange and purple behind the mountains, and the air is so fresh and light that I want to hold my head out the window and close my eyes like a happy dog. But I’m anxious, too. I just want to get back, back to the baseball game, back to my friends, to the familiar corners of my world. Where parents don’t have cancer. Where the houses are neatly painted in reassuring colors and the grass is clipped and green. Where my throat is not tight with an intimacy I probably don’t deserve. Where Mitch stops calling and Devin is still just a guy I know and we don’t have this moment between us.

This is what will happen: Devin will leave me at the chain link fence by the field. He will drive home to his mom’s house and go inside and maybe eat a little dinner that she’s left out for him. He will play video games with his sisters and stay up late watching Letterman. He will sleep shirtless, one arm thrown over the edge of a rumpled bed. I will walk home to my house and yell “Mom?” when I go inside, and do the dishes because it’s my night, and I won’t be able to sleep at all because that’s when my mind wants to spin the most. Our individual lives will speed up and whir along their fast and separate tracks, unaware once again of the other.

But he doesn’t know that I will hold that drive to his dad’s close and guarded. He doesn’t know this because he just wanted a friend along, and somehow he understood that I was one, and that there would be no need for questions, no need for further comment. The glimmer of this knowledge will blink and go out, blink and go out for years to come, arriving like a torch in my hand I didn’t know I was holding when other friends are raw with need. And I realize that the game with Mitch doesn’t have anything on this experience with Devin, who I will still, from time to time, recall kissing and being crushed underneath on a couch in his basement, the memory of which will slowly fade into just something I did once, back when, before the drive.

******

Devin doesn’t say a word the whole way back. I rest my head against the seat, keep my face turned away from him. He drops me off at the field and I walk home. When I go inside my house, I don’t yell for my mom. Instead, I stand in the kitchen, my hands on the counter, looking into the back yard. I see green through the square glass.

The phone rings.

I let my hands drop.

Adventures in Activism

Day 1: Alice falls down the rabbit hole.

Day 2: Attend post-election protest. Become an activist.

Days 3-5: Take off for a weekend in Palm Springs with your boyfriend. Cry on the way to the airport. Let the trip become a respite from the shit storm. Relax pool-side. Play golf (or rather, ride in the golf cart while your boyfriend plays golf). Discover that the golf course serves the best Bloody Mary on the planet. Have a conversation with Sara, a Mexican server at the hotel, and learn that already her seven-year-old niece has been harassed at her elementary school. Discover that there is no respite from the shit storm.

Day 9: Hear about the Women’s March. Sign up.

Day 14: Have coffee with two old friends. Share jokes because everyone just needs to laugh and laugh and laugh right now.

Day 16: Thanksgiving. Avoid politics. Have stiff, polite conversations instead. Wonder if you can hold it together.

Day 31: Engage in a politically charged conversation at a nice restaurant in Vail with good friends from out of town. Realize over pasta and wine that these people you’ve always liked and gotten along with see the world in a completely different way. Marvel at how this happens. Be humbled by it. At the end of dinner, hug one of your friends and tell him, “You know I still love you, right?” Laugh and smile at each other, but then notice he doesn’t join everyone for drinks after dinner. Wonder, briefly, if you are the reason why.

Day 34: Write a letter to the White House about the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Day 36: Get a reply from the White House.

Days 37-51: Compile a reading list. Obsessively bookmark and share news articles. Obsessively watch Democracy Now and Link TV. Read The Best Democracy Money can Buy and lie awake in a panic for three nights. Wonder if everything is a lie and always has been. Remember to verify.

Days 52-55: Go to Florida with your boyfriend and his son to visit your boyfriend’s parents. Avoid politics. Take a zumba class with his mother. Play golf (for real, this time). Realize, hilariously, that this retirement community north of Orlando, the one you like to make fun of, is turning out to be another kind of respite. Be grateful for it. Go out to dinner at a French restaurant in downtown St. Petersburg with friends on New Year’s Eve. Feel normal again, if only for a night.

Day 56: Realize you’re not a victim. Realize that it’s up to you. Realize that you are realizing so many things lately, and that it’s only just begun.

Day 58: Reach out to a random, politically minded acquaintance you’ve met once before. Ask her if she wants to form an activist group. Write this to her:

I’m waking up to a new world in which the people I previously thought would have everything handled—you know, the ones who were actually called to politics and activism as their life’s purpose—would take care of us all and not let things get too bad. That was the problem in the first place. We were all complicit in some way, through willful ignorance and apathy and belief in saviors other than ourselves. If democracy is supposed to be about power to the people, we handed ours over blindly.

Day 60: Discover a local activist group you could join instead.

Day 62: Continue search for paid work. You are a freelance writer. You live an artist’s life. You must eat.

Day 63: Develop an unholy obsession with the actor Tom Hardy and his show Taboo. Realize that escapism is a necessary part of the process.

Day 72: Attend a talk by the legendary Julian Schnabel about the abstract expressionist Clyfford Still. Breathe. Because art is, after all, a long and sustained breath.

Day 73: Join local activist group. See there are already 800 members. Do not watch the inauguration. Have a phone conversation with your mother, after which she sends you a meme: “Change is slow.” Realize why this makes you so prickly. Because, you want to say to her, sometimes change is fast. The Berlin Wall toppled in a matter of hours, and with it an entire regime. One day you go to bed an ordinary citizen; the next day you wake up an activist. Yes, sometimes change happens fast…very fast indeed.

Day 74: Attend the Women’s March with friends. At the bus stop in the morning, witness an act of kindness as a stranger hands over her breakfast to two of your friends who haven’t eaten yet. When bus after bus drives by full of marchers, decide to drive instead. Offer a ride to an elderly woman. For the next few hours, witness more kindness, and unbridled enthusiasm, and even joy—and some of the funniest, cleverest, most boldly defiant signs you’ve ever seen. Go home. Put your feet up. Soak it all in. Realize how important it is to put yourself into the throng, to feel the tangible energy of human bodies pressing forward in spirited resolve, to witness the sheer numbers. Be amazed. Be humbled again.

Day 76: No, you were not paid by George Soros. Yes, this is a grassroots movement.

Day something-or-other: A moment of weariness. Break your own rule about getting dressed every morning, no matter what (since freelancers sometimes have an excuse not to). Instead, sit around in your pajamas all day, glued to your computer, and to the news, and to how things are happening exactly as predicted by historians, scholars, seasoned journalists. Sweat. Eat. Watch mid-day sink into afternoon, still in your pajamas. Look in the mirror at 3 p.m. and be stunned and slightly amused by your own capacity for grossness. Soothe yourself with the thought that Tom Hardy in 18th century England wouldn’t care.

Next day: Get dressed, put on make-up, put on shoes. Leave the condo. Re-enter the world. Notice heart palpitations. Wonder if you are developing an anxiety disorder.

Day 79: Sign petitions. Wonder if your info is going into a database to eventually be used against you. Develop feelings of paranoia and more heart palpitations.

Day 80-82: Host Florida friends in Vail. Spend Saturday and Sunday entirely alone while they ski. Feel deep sadness encroaching. Depression. Feel fear that the world is ending and nothing will ever be the same or even good again. Want desperately just to be with your boyfriend, who is a known island of comfort and security in an uncertain, unknowable sea. Cry and wander around, lonely and distraught, distraught and lonely. Try to pull yourself together when you join up with the group later. Try to explain yourself when you’re alone with your boyfriend. Try, but fail.

Day 83: Walk around the park with your New Age friend. Restore some of your faith in humanity. Bask in the glow of a highly energized human being who is blessed with some kind of second sight into what is real and possible.

Day 84: Indulge your fanciful interest in astrology and research the Cardinal Crisis we’re in. Gain perspective. Appreciate it.

Day 88: Form an impromptu rapid response team with an old work colleague who has also joined the local activist group. Contact your senior prom date who is now a reporter for a local news station. Connect him to a constituent your colleague found who agrees to be interviewed on camera. Get the story on the news that afternoon. Be amazed at what you just did. Realize this is a need in the group that has to be filled.

Day 92: Attend a rally outside a senator’s office.

Day 95: Have coffee with your old work colleague. Appoint yourselves the co-leads of the newly created media team for the activist group. Wonder if you will have the time. Wonder if you know what the hell you’re doing. Wonder if you will fail not only the group but yourself. Shrug your shoulders and do it anyway. Wear your Mother of Dragons t-shirt because it makes you feel like a bad-ass.

Day 96: Vow to aid and abet journalism. Vow to prop up the Fourth Estate. Vow to help them do their jobs. Feel fierce mother-bear protectiveness for the perilous road ahead. Laugh in the face of absurdity. Embrace your true Sagittarian nature: a torch-bearer of Truth and Justice.

Day 98: See that the activist group is now over 3,000 members.

Day 100: Meet a friend for coffee as you do every Wednesday morning. Remind yourselves about self-care. Remind yourselves about the need to bring love and positive energy into activism. Remind yourselves that it is not always about shouting and anger and intensity. And remember also that activism makes it sound like we are separate, standing over there with all the answers. Except that we’re not separate, and we don’t have all the answers. If only everyone understood we love our country, too, and we’re trying as hard as they are to figure it all out. We’re just doing our jobs—finally. We’re just being humans, a demos, practicing our divine right as citizens to wake up, to claim our power, to demand that someone listen, to demand a better world.

Day 200, 230, who knows anymore: Still volunteer for the activist group; still watch the news (sometimes); mostly keep your attention trained on long-form sources of knowledge and information: podcasts, magazine articles, books upon books upon books. Feel fewer heart palpitations. Wonder if this is a sign of the normalization everyone warned us about. Notice the group is over 4,000 now. Think: it’s summer…I just want to chill. Feel guilty about chilling because the fight for healthcare is on. Remember that healthcare matters not just to the populace at large, but to members of your own family. Try to stay focused. Let your mind wander to voter suppression and the environment and free speech, where your true concerns lie. Still look for paid work. Still struggle to stay afloat. Remember that your personal struggle is a microcosm. Watch a video about how to connect with those who think differently. Be humbled (again) by the complexity of human communication and the power of tribalism. Re-dedicate yourself to the cause. Know it will look and sound different tomorrow, and again next week, and again next year. Vow to keep showing up. Vow to bring more love and understanding into it. But also vow to be watchful, wise, and unshakeable. Vow that on your death bed (when you’re at least 94), you can say with assurance, “I did everything I could.”

Twinkling My Roar

I’ve been threatening for awhile to pierce my nose. I realize that sounds as if I’ve been standing in my condo with wild eyes and spittle on my chin, brandishing a safety pin, yelling, “Stand back! I’m gonna do it!”

I was supposed to get my nose pierced a couple of months ago (don’t worry: by a pro). But then in a serenely level-headed moment, I went to a hobby store instead and found glue-on face jewels for $6. I figured it was easier than committing to a hole in my face. I glued one on, took a picture, and sent it to my boyfriend, whose immediate response was: “Cool!” Better than “Hmm,” so that was encouraging.

I’ve already done my due diligence. I read some blogs by people who’d pierced their noses and then felt moved to warn others about all the things they didn’t expect, like how it hurts a lot…and keeping it clean until it heals feels like a full-time job, or torture (which is kind of the same thing)…and, disturbingly, how snot builds up if you get the L-shaped post. I didn’t think nose-piercing was any more traumatizing or maintenance-intensive than ear-piercing, but apparently I was wrong.

Still, I have a pretty high pain threshold. And keeping it clean isn’t so bad when you know there’s a good reason for doing it. Once the wound heals, you can taper off the frequency of the cleaning anyway. And while I admit the snot build-up sounds gross, it seems like I could go with a straight post shaped more like an earring, which would hopefully mitigate that problem.

I have real people in my life who’ve done it. My friend Andrea, for example, who pierced her nose twenty years ago; she eventually replaced the stud with a hoop she got in Turkey, which sounds like the kind of Bohemian Bad-Ass story I want to tell: “Oh, this little thing? I got it in a souk in Morocco when I was doing a camel trek through the Sahara.” My friend Rachael pierced her nose after college. And my sister pierced hers in college before anyone else was doing it.

In fact, the preferred body decoration back then was either a tattoo or a navel piercing. I decided against a tattoo when a girl in one of my classes walked in one day and proudly showed everyone the tiger tattooed across her stomach, and all I could think about was how that tiger would st-r-e-e-e-e-t-ch if she ever got pregnant, after which it would deflate into some kind of unidentifiable Rorschach blot, and was that the look she was going for in her moment of (possibly drunk) abandon. I was further validated in not getting a tattoo when a girl I later worked with spent lots of money trying to remove a tiger the length of her calf (tigers must have been the decoration du jour for drunken abandon in the late ’90s), after which her lasered skin would ooze for hours through her business-casual slacks. I guess the permanence—or near-permanence—of tattoos never appealed to me.

My college boyfriend and I thought it would be a good idea to get our belly buttons pierced as a kind of look-at-us-aren’t-we-so-cool bonding experience, but when it came down to it and the guy at the shop showed us the needle he used for such occasions, we hightailed it out of there—without shame, I might add. Some things you just don’t feel bad about not having the guts to do.

But lately I’ve been feeling my guts. I’ve been feeling there is still much to be experienced. I’ve also been thinking that with the world the way it is and the current of dystopian emotional sludge we can all feel and the pressing urge to make it all better while wondering if it will ever really be better again, I understand the singular, sweet relief that self-inflicted pain can bring.

What it comes down to is that I do want the hole in my face. Or, rather, what I want is the temporary pain that comes with a temporary decoration that temporarily alters my appearance in a way that makes me feel like I have free agency again. Free agency to rise up, collect myself, and find the seed of “good” in the world, to find my rightful place, my sphere of influence, to discover my contribution.

The same free agency I feel when I wear my Mother of Dragons t-shirt.

Because while I may be a woman-hear-me-roar on the inside (most of the time, not counting the days when I have no idea what the hell I’m doing), my fear is that I’ve reached a point where that roaring woman is no longer obvious on the outside, at least to the average person I may encounter. I spend 80% of my time wearing workout clothes and no make-up and giving myself errands to run so I can have an excuse to leave my home—which is also my workplace. I drive a Volvo and put stevia in my coffee. I go to bed at 9 pm, for Christ’s sake. There’s no roaring going on here.

I’m also unlikely to expose my inner true colors until we’ve had that rare, Avatar-esque, “I see you” interaction—which only seems to happen in the deep playa at Burning Man or at indie coffee shops with exceptionally chatty watercolor painters wandering by. So if you don’t happen to unearth my roar through layers of rock and fossil on the unending archaeological dig that is “getting to know me,” then it comes down to this: I need to show it. Make it obvious. Make it twinkle, gosh darn it.

While a nose piercing is nothing original at this point, it’s something I know I could do—stone-cold sober, at that. I could try it out. I could let my eyes water for fifteen minutes and get the token bottle of saline solution and listen to the keeping-it-clean spiel. I could even deal with the snot build-up (I think).

I could feel that twinge of nerve endings when I touch the stud. See the flash of crystal in my line of vision. I’d recall it as the time when I sought pain, on purpose, to remind myself of my own enduring alive-ness, and as the time when my inner guts needed to manifest outwardly. Maybe I’d say, “That was the time when, shortly after, I really did go on a camel trek through the Sahara, and then helped build a water-collection device in Peru, and then saved some oil-soaked wildlife, and then became an independent journalist for awhile and produced a documentary with Sebastian Junger. It was the time when I shook hands across the aisle and our protests made a difference and people started listening to each other and a vision began to be shared. Oh, and it was the time when I finally got my second novel published, and stopped wondering about being a freelance writer and whether or not I was living a pipe dream, and for once I found my contribution to the world and just settled into it and smiled.”

“It was the time,” I would say, “when things got better.”

And then I’d bump my nose in the middle of the night and wake up with a screech and remember I needed to buy more saline solution.

I don’t know. Some roar like that.

Stand

For in this land, a man must stand upright, if he would live. – Clyfford Still

Who is Clyfford Still?

He was an artist. More specifically, he was an Abstract Expressionist, one of the early founders of the movement which began in the 1950s and was noted for the use of abstract forms to render the human condition. Unless you’re an art historian or an artist yourself, chances are good you’ve never heard of Clyfford Still, but it’s possible you’ve heard of his contemporaries, guys like Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollack.

Here’s what Pollack said about Still: “[He] makes the rest of us look academic.”

Still was an artist whom other artists revered. Whatever fame or notoriety (or the lack thereof) he would acquire in both the art community and the public at large was secondary. He was the embodiment of art for the sake of art—a staunchly lonely, some would say, but immensely free way to live in the world. He allowed himself a full expression and an unfettered evolution. He did not care what others thought, at least when it came to his art. He simply stood up, on his feet and on his ladders, and painted whatever came out of him. And his paintings themselves not only stand on their own…they soar.

(By the way, if you ever find yourself in Denver, go visit the Clyfford Still Museum, which exhibits and houses the archives of his entire life’s work. You will not be disappointed.)

But this post is not about Clyfford Still, the man, the artist.

This post is about the opening quote up there. Go back and read it again.

Substitute “human” for “man,” if you like. (Inclusiveness of the whole of humanity is a given here, not a whim). Whatever you do or don’t substitute, the message remains the same. And who better than an artist—someone living quite close to the divine—to deliver the message.

To deliver it to you, that is.

Because this post is also about you.

And in the spirit of Clyfford Still’s words, I ask:

If you are to live, how will you stand upright?

Will you get up from your couch today and look out the window? Will you notice the winter trees and the chirping birds? If you live in a city, will you hear the helicopters and witness the masses? Will you wonder at the magnitude of nature in all its forms and beauty and turmoil?

And if you wonder, where will you seek your answers? Will any be found within?

Will you get up from your couch today and turn off the television? Will you ease your mind away from the noise and find a corner of silence? Or will you pace or cheer, cry or rejoice, vibrate with imminent change?

Will you get up from your desk or counter and decide the work you do is a means to an end or an end itself? Will you know that the hours you spend in your weeks and your months will be spent in an effort of love, despite hardship or conflict or despair? Will you decide that you cannot know this for sure, and what you suspect instead is that the tossing river inside you carries only weariness and anger?

Will you get up from your place of prayer, your book of philosophy, having offered your most humble self? Will you discover that you and your god are in harmonious collusion, or suffering a whirling discord? Will you be able to recognize harmony or discord at all? Or will you decide that before you can recognize anything, you must first re-acquaint yourself with your own beating heart?

Will you get up and walk down the street? Will you let your legs carry you to a destination unknown, or to a familiar glow of warmth and safety?

And if you walk through the warm, safe door, will you stay? Will you find it is all you need? Or will you seek the far-off ship and its cold, dark passage to worlds unexplored, to ideas long buried?

Will you get up and embrace the person next to you? Will you turn away in fear? Will you plant your feet and ball your fists and hope that the strength of your stance will hide the terrible smallness you feel inside?

And if you are small, will you soften your stance, hold out your hand, and ask to be touched? Will you receive the touch into every cell?

Will you get up and paint the contents of your soul? Will you sing them or write them down? Will you do it for you, or will you do it for them? Will you peer upon the deepest parts of yourself in all their maniacal sounds and colors? Or will you keep them well-hidden, silent, starved of the light of day? Will the light of day sprout them anyway like insistent roots? Will you watch yourself open and let them bloom free?

Will you stand up today and take a deep breath? Will the first filling of your lungs be a ragged burst? Will your breath be caught, constricted, unable? Or will your breath bring the air you’ve needed…the air you’ve needed for a very long time now?

Will you stand up on your own two feet? Will you climb your ladder? Will you reach the heights needed to look upon the full extent of your unstoppable life force?

And if you do, will you ask what you can do with it, and who you are because of it, and how you will let it flow free?

I ask you:

Will you stand up at all?

Will you stand up at all?

Will you decide to live?

Will you soar?