Category: TODAY

more postcards

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This is a story I am telling for someone else and it’s about someone else but I’ll probably creep in, being me. In this story, the person who commissioned the tale (sometimes called the “patron”) – the patron saint – has a thing that they do obsessively. If it were bad we would call it an addiction but it is not bad so we don’t. Every day, several times a day, sitting in a cafe or a museum or at a table while waiting for other people to get their shit together (that’s me, sometimes called a “cameo”). Then we gather all the things together and take them to the next place. Sometimes other people partake, me (again) consistently, but also lately a friend in Antarctica which makes for interesting images. I don’t know why I’m being coy. My traveling companion is an artist and a relentless correspondent who makes and writes postcards, and when we travel together I also write postcards, which is fun. Then we go to the post office and try to mail them, which I submit is not fun but she thinks it is. She wanted me to write about one post office and the very nice postal worker who gave us peel-and-stick stamps and was very helpful in general but I am not a good commissioned artist, I am not compliant even when I like the orders so I will tell here instead how she tried to give stamps to another postcard addict and wound up crying because when you meet someone who loves things you love it can break your heart open a little in a very sweet way. Then we mailed 30 completed postcards (2 were mine) and went to a museum and bought more postcards and also some pretty paper and went to a cafe and wrote to people near and far that we are thinking of them, and then I wrote this, which is the pure and simple truth.

kataben

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I was fascinated from probably age 12. I pictured a world of women with strong features, full lips, thick hair that tumbled in coils down flawlessly smooth backs. In university, one professor told me not to visit until I’d let go of the idea that it was fixed in time and I knew he was right so I didn’t try. I went to islands, seaside resorts, towns that disappeared in the off season. Blue roofs and white stucco walls, winding stone streets hostile to cars and flimsy shoes, the soundtrack to Zorba in every cafe, garlic and feta on every table, olives on the plates, in the oil and in the soap, every place a potential postcard and wish you were here. Sunrises or sunsets to assure me that life had gone on longer than I could imagine and would continue to. 

Now I’m finally circling the actual mountains, the remaining structures (faded but amazing for being there at all). We’re down at the sea now; we’ll be in the center next. I have no expectations of meeting any gods though I do think a lot about beauty and how it assumes different forms. The only English we hear is when we speak it. Every word is made of different letters that blur on the phone before taking shape as something I sometimes recognize. The rooftops are bars or solar panels, the streets have sidewalks except when they don’t, and the music everywhere is a recorded version of a song I know but as if played by a band in a second-rate hotel. The sunrise still renders the clouds pink and purple as bruises, bursts through and blinds us.

We wash our clothes in the sink, walk single file past indifferent cats and walls crumbling or covered with graffiti or both, talk about aging and friendship and authenticity, eat garlic and feta and olives. I am not forgetting the rest of the world, which does not let you forget, but I am, in these moments, happy. 

obrigado

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The feeling of not belonging is particularly keen for a single person during the holidays, when one being uninvited feels unwanted and even unwelcome. And the same one, if invited, feels it as a courtesy, a kindness, pity for the stray cat. It’s odd that the times when I had family and invited similar strays I felt like I’d won some marvelous extra but I don’t usually feel like a marvelous extra now that the tables have turned, barking my knees on the edge of a limited space that comfortably fits one less me. The feeling that you should earn your keep, sing for your supper, or at least put forth fresh daily conversation topics. Blush with shame later when the person who invited you inevitably says something about how they don’t usually do things the way you just did them. We don’t usually eat that with our fingers. We don’t usually drink so much. Worse: we don’t usually feel like we need to keep the conversation going for no reason. 

The story you told yourself before you left is the same one you tell yourself every morning and evening. Be gracious. Be kind. Compliment everyone at least once every day. Everywhere is interesting so anywhere is good. Be flexible. Be a leaf on the wind, a twig in the river, go with the flow. 

There is a sea, for which you are grateful, and the tide rolls in and out every day. There is a sun and you raise your face to its warmth and track it across the sky as it rises and sets. We find it beautiful, we imagine Sisyphus happy, and at the end of one city we put everything back into the suitcase and roll to the next place.

much muchness

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Many things have happened and I am trying to figure out how to write about it, both in the internal way of expressing myself and in the more external way of trying to figure out the templates on a new blog site. It is not going well.

travel travails

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Through the magic of the internet I've been watching people who are neurodivergent or "neurodivergent" (meaning they think they are but don't have a diagnosis) and some of it has been interesting. One thing they talk about is masking vs. being authentic. I'm currently on an airplane and the little girl behind me has kicked the seat pretty relentlessly for 9 hours and grasped the back of my seat and pulled my hair in the process several times. I know she is a kid, I believe that plane travel is difficult for everyone and especially children, and I have empathy for the mother deciding that letting the kid make me uncomfortable (surely she knows) is a reasonable price to be seated next to someone who is not currently screaming. But this is how a lot of the "authentic self" talk feels to me: like permission to do what feels natural at the expense of making other people uncomfortable. And part of my response to that is irritation on two levels — first, that I don't like having my seat kicked and second, that I regularly choose to sit with my own discomfort so as not to make others uncomfortable, and isn't that the price of being among others? There's a certain lack of empathy in this that I don't like. That you can need to self soothe in ways that are obvious I guess I understand but once it's disruptive to others… Maybe you don't get to do those things, if you literally can't do them without your comfort meaning someone else's discomfort. 

I don't mean discomfort like that when I'm in a museum and there's someone in a corner sort of quietly rocking back and forth or "stimming" as the kids these days say, cause I understand art can be overwhelming and I think everyone should be able to explore that edge where the beauty of it is too much. 

But like, moaning loudly in a restaurant to the point that I can't hear my dining companion is discomfort that I consider unacceptable. Restaurants are not a necessity. 7

Of course with airplanes it's important to remember that the reason we're all uncomfortable is a choice by corporate airlines to make people less comfortable by making seats closer together, thinner, etc. and I curse this compromise of our space in the same breath that I celebrate that we now have flights affordable enough that children can even be on the plane. I was once a parent conveying a child across an ocean and a continent and it ain't cheap, I know. 

But I also wish that the way we acknowledge our own inconvenience could be expanded to consider the inconvenience of others. Like if the mother could at least point out to the child that she's pulling my hair and that's not nice? Could we all compromise our authenticity and even our own comfort a little, in the interest of continuing to occupy the same spaces? 

Part 2, coming later (maybe): nobody is impressed by how quickly you got the suitcase out of the overhead bin and stood in line, anxiety-masking weirdo. You don't need to worry THAT much about other people. 

like pearls in a rosary

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postcards

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Beginning at about age thirteen I was a consistent writer of lengthy letters to people I missed. Part diary, part longing. If they wrote back (maybe half as often, if I was lucky) I would spread their letter out beside the next one I wrote, to make sure I addressed everything. I think of this writing now and I love how much I wanted to understand and be understood and I also think it must have been a little suffocating.

In my twenties, I kept a diary which cut down on the letter writing a little but not much. A fair bit of my diary from that time is about letters I've written for which I am awaiting responses, eagerly and sometimes angrily. Can you believe that I waited a minimum of a month for an answer, and can you imagine what that did to me if the month stretched to two months or more?

 
Conversely, the invention of email and the ability to immediately communicate to someone what was going on in my thoughts and my life cut back the diary quite a lot. Who was I writing that diary for? vs a letter and the potential interested audience, the possible provocation to interaction. Plus I had automatic copies of everything, so it was still a diary. But it made me a worse kind of crazy to write and wait for a response when it still took a month or months and whyyyyyy.
 
In my forties, I started blogging, and what I learned to do with this was disentangle myself from a response. Maybe someone who knew me would read it, or maybe not; maybe they'd write a response or maybe not. It was the purest writing I did, because it was not about feedback or publishing or a desk drawer. It was releasing a thought into the wild. 
 
Then social media arrived, and writing became about the response in a way that was worse for a lot of people than letter writing had been for me. Having survived the anguish of an unanswered letter, I think I enjoyed social media without letting it get too close to my heart. It still sucks what it's turned into and I mourn the updates from a range of friends.
 
HOWEVER in December at the unmitigated prompting of one textual apothecarian, I finally started writing postcards and: wow. Here's what a postcard is: it is a brief format writing (like a social media post or a short letter) without the expectation of response. You get a stack of stamps and you stick them on a stack of cards and then when you're waiting somewhere for something, you write a postcard instead of looking at reels or whatever, and then you send it and forget it. You can do that with diary entries, too. But as opposed to a diary, the primary message of a postcard is: thinking of you. A response to a postcard is not required or even expected; the format plus slow mailing times means your message is necessarily brief and complete in itself. 
 
I'm pretty good at seeing folks when I'm in their towns, but the world I have chosen is large and I'm always missing someone. This seems like a very mentally healthy way to address (literally) my longing, rather than amplifying it. Also a tiny act of rebellion against the powers that control other ways we connect.
 
I bought 100 postcards. Send me your address if you want one. 

to be of use

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I usually wake up first, the first human in any case, and pour the coffee and feed the birds who never talk to me despite my hopeful chirping. I think they are on strike for people they love more than they love me, but I love the same people more than I love the birds. Check the cats, clean the boxes. If I can make myself remember that it's not that cold, I will go outside and walk past homes breathing various forms of suburban life support, ranging from trees-grass, trees-grass to someone who's really pushed the concept and included a little library and multiple water elements. Some people have miniature creeks. Many have porches with pairs of chairs but almost nobody sits on them, much as Czechs rarely seem to be on their balconies, which I also do not understand. There are neighborhood watch signs co-existing with (and low-key contradicting) the "in this house" signs, which I normally associate with what might be called gentrification but probably not in the suburbs. There are turkeys roaming the streets (not streets, but ways and drives and courts), modern dinosaurs, hopelessly misplaced, their horrible necks a shade of blue I'd say was not found in nature and I'd be wrong. They are very ugly and very beautiful and I am aware of being brave when I pass them which means that in addition to being absurd they are a little scary. I similarly pass people and don't know what to do because it is neighborly to say hello but I am not really a neighbor. I nod and make a hello noise. I grew up here, walked down a nearby road to the bus stop for school, down another to the Goodwill where we sorted through trash and treasure with the bored sophistication of the universal teen. I was, in retrospect, a largely useless human then; my memories of myself are of cleaning and childcare but I think I did much less than I could have done for anyone, including myself. I guess it was four or five years, a span of time, and there were several versions of me, based on the photos I've unearthed. Watching my face emerge from a thirteen-year-old's curtain of hair and pink-and-beige make-up to what I thought was ferocity but to my eyes now still seems soft, almost fuzzy. Was I ever of use. I joked with one friend that we provided free therapy so I guess I listened to people, maybe that was good. In the evening we watch movies that remind us as little as possible of the world beyond the sidewalk, which is frankly much more terrifying than a whole rafter of turkeys. Today I worked and tomorrow I will work again, at the job I'm paid for, and this is how it goes. Sometimes I think about home and wonder what I'd be doing there (colder, grumpier) but home is wherever I am which is, for the moment, here. "But the thing worth doing well done/ has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident." I am, truly, for the most part, happy.

 

southern half

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I'm working on maintaining a constant vague smile in the hopes that my face will freeze that way and save me a bundle on plastic surgery but sometimes I forget. Walking along the sidewalks, when there are sidewalks, all in various states of cracked and crumbled so it's more like stomping along the history of sidewalks with my vague smile and in the course of a block I decide I am a minor film star, on holiday and hoping to be incognito but if recognized and photographed would prefer not to be looking grumpy or sweaty or heaven forbid tripping, and so I hold my chin up, hold my smile up, lift my feet up, and this carries me most of the way home. Well a little sweaty is true. 

On one block along the way a Buddhist monk wrapped in orange stops me, smiling, and I also smile, and he blesses me, touching my wrist and his forehead, and some part of me really wants to believe; would I be saved and happy if I just tried harder? He's touching my life line, head line, heart line, maybe saying something I can't hear over the sound of the scooters zooming around us because traffic never stops even if you might be having an eat-pray-love moment, and he ties a red thread around my wrist so that everyone will know I'm a sucker as I walk down the street for the rest of my stay. He charged me about $8 for the experience and I'm not complaining because I have a story and that's cheap for a story but also I can't get the thread off since scissors are a dangerous weapon I don't carry. I guess as long as people think it's a Buddhist thing I'll count my blessings. Get it?

Negotiating or bargaining is hard because people seem simultaneously very good and very bad at it. A taxi from one place to another costs between 2 and 20 dollars. I'm generally inclined to pay what I'm quoted because I'm not poor and haggling bores me but even a hag has her limits. I walked away from a lot of things I would have bought (and I also unfortunately overpaid for some things that I thought were reasonably priced and would have been, had they been what the sellers said they were). I spend time pondering the meanings of fine as in art as in acceptable as in penalty.

This trip has given me a tremendous perspective on history and politics and people and of course also myself. The micro and macro perspectives that any distance gives us: I am so mortal, we are so different, borders are largely imaginary, home is so tiny and far, home is everywhere. I regret nothing, not even the food poisoning. I'm ready for the next place. 

RIP, BLK

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