ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things
The first time I remember seeing you was when I was in 7th or 8th grade. I was 13 years old and full of the anguish that comes with that age plus the added sadness from still feeling not quite at home where I lived, the idealized longing for what I'd lost. There was a "poets in the schools" thing, and you came with Arthur Butler to my school and both of you were so much cooler than I'd ever imagined poetry to be. I loved poetry but thought it was like, mostly spinsters and sadness or long rhymes or both. Together we all wrote poems about what our names sounded like, smelled like, and you didn't choose mine to read which hurt but less than I was usually hurt by these kinds of things. I was enchanted. It did not feel like children writing forced rhymes and acrostics, it felt very adult and exciting.
The next time in university. My best friend and I would adopt people and follow them around campus and report our findings; this may have only happened once but it became a way of thinking for me so it feels like many times. I adopted a woman with a fascinating haircut and a face lit with an inner processing that I guess I'd call Slavic now, that kind of watchful calculation that is simultaneously present and a million miles away. My friend picked you; her report was more interesting. Sometime later, you came to Kathryn Hohlwein's class and read "Howl" with spit flying from your mouth, you were howling. And then you both talked about how Ginsberg performed it, what choices you were making when you did it differently. I was 18, maybe 19, writing furiously by then, and thinking about writing all the time, but I hadn't thought about performance and poetry together, and a door opened.
I know you were friends with my friend, but I don't know when you and I became friends, I don't know if it was friendship, it was mostly you talking with overwhelming passion and volume about something and me listening. Which is fine; you knew more than I did. In my recent move I found about a dozen drawings you'd done when you lived in my apartment, which I had forgotten about. A month? Two? The thing about forgetting is that half the time you don't even realize you've forgotten; it's just gone. I remember going to an event you organized, a tribute to Jack Kerouac, and I had a necklace I wore all the time and Victor Wong bent to look at it, touched me briefly, and I told everyone for years that Victor Wong touched my chest and that was my nearest brush with celebrity. But I remember feeling like part of something, to the extent that I ever feel like I belong; in my mind I am on the periphery of wherever I am, but just feeling like I belonged in the room at all was incredible.
You organized so many poetry readings that they blur together, but I remember one that I was in with Arthur Butler and Scott Soriano. You introduced me to the concept of how mismatched performance was messy and potentially the most beautiful. Arthur, all rhythm and images (and the 13-year-old in me crowing with delight), Scott put a steak on his face and sang "Au Jus", and me with sad girl poetry. My family came, Arthur Butler talking to my sister. I remember Ann Menebroker came to one reading and stayed after to tell me she liked my writing which is just, the honor is so much. It meant the world to me to be treated like I mattered, doing what I wanted to do.
Looking back it is stunning to me that you never tried to make anything sexual about our relationship, back when I was young and impressionable and probably would have done anything for your attention, which you just gave freely. I remember two women that you were with, in the time I knew you, and that you spoke of them in glowing terms, as artists in their own right, not as muses. I find this remarkable now.
You could be very loud, you could be very rude, you rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. You were self absorbed like I guess many artists are. When I was in my 30s we were back in touch for a bit, and we'd sit on the floor of your apartment listening to music and talking about poetry and talking a lot about people who didn't understand you and your genius, but we also talked about my life. I paid for dinner and you paid me back in paintings, which I cherish. Your health was never good, and we fell out of touch; the next time I tried to find the number didn't work, and you never figured out social media, and I thought: well, not everybody needs to stay in contact. It seemed to me that you might have been dead, and I have lost enough people before they die that I know their death isn't the end of anything for me, other than the end of a possibility.
I don't know why I took the news of your death in October so hard. I hadn't seen you in two decades, I think. And I don't necessarily wish we'd stayed in touch; I don't think I had anything to teach you and you had already taught me so much. By example: Be chaotic. Do what you love. Plunge into things and let the world catch up. By warning: Don't care so much when people don't like what you do. I'm working on it.
There's a parallel world where I am still there, writing.
There's a parallel world where I am still there, not writing.
In both of those worlds and in this one, you changed my life. I'm so grateful.
You guys I'm still so tired. Moving really takes it out of me, it turns out, and having stayed in one place for such a long time makes it harder. It's not like money where you save it up; it's like a muscle I haven't flexed. I measured and measured and measured and moved a bunch of stuff from the old place to the new one only to semi-sheepishly return it a couple weeks later when it turns out that centimeters aren't the only thing that makes stuff fit. On the plus side, the young man I hired to help move the furniture over turned out to be quite nice and I hired him for other projects as well. In Czech, they call a handyman an "hourly husband" and I hired an hourly husband who came out to install some lights and didn't bring the right tools and broke one of the things he was supposed to install and and bitched about my taste and also stunk up the place, so he was kind of like a traditional husband except at the end I had to give him money instead of whatever a traditional wife does with someone like that. I was pretty bummed about the whole situation but then I called the mover to ask if he also assembled furniture and he did so I dubbed him my "hourly son" and I have adopted him as my own, in an hourly way. He does not stink.
The things we do and do not pay people to do and the things we do and do not get robots to do and which things we take pride in and would never delegate and which things we delegate as soon as our income bracket can afford it are very interesting to me.
Despite a pretty significant paring down of things I still have too many things. My sister, who is a much nicer sister than I deserve, came to visit and helped me put up my art in ways that make me feel surrounded by beauty and she tried to help me weed out the books but books make me feel safe the same way a stack of sweaters or a drawer of neatly rolled scarves does, so I need to look at other areas. Some years ago I saw a photo of Georgia O'Keeffe's home with just a few dresses (hung on nails on the wall, I think?) and I thought how much I would like to be like that. Not minimalist in all things, I think that ship has sailed, but at least in clothes. A few really structurally interesting pieces that I wear all the time. The problem is that I think I'd have to be structurally interesting in the same way O'Keeffe was, and as I realized when I recently saw a photo of myself, what I usually look like is a pile of laundry. Clean laundry, but still. But I don't think clothes is what I'm going to pare down either.
A lot of things delight me lately – I like my new home. I've dealt with some quite lovely people in the last couple of months. Work has been improving after what felt like a multi-month slump that had me really doubting myself. I auditioned for a play that I was not in charge of and got cast and enjoyed knowing that I can still learn lines (not a lot of lines, but if I can still memorize at all it means a great deal to me), and that I can still slip into a character in a way that pleases me, to stop being Anne for a minute and take on the heart of someone different enough that it's interesting but familiar enough that I can still say what I need to say. I've read things for pleasure and been pleased. I've watched some pretty good plays (Vanya was amazing; People Places and Things more disturbing but such a creative set). I've been irritated by people too, and annoyed by work, and frustrated with projects not going the way I want, and with my own limitations, and with the amount of crap that has to be waded through before you can swim at all. And I don't even want to talk about the amount of time I've wasted thinking about politics without feeling like I'm learning or growing in any kind of meaningful way. But in general, mostly good. And I'm optimistic that now that I (finally) have internet again and mostly know where things are even in the dark, I'll be back to a rhythm in which I sleep and live and get things done in no time.
It is unfair how much of the work that we have to do in order to be fully human is necessarily devoted to overcoming false narratives. This sentence came to me fully formed while standing in a very long line and then I had to hope I'd remember what I was thinking about and how clearly I was thinking it if and when I was able to write it down. I am so easily distracted. It was probably better before. And I'm pretty sure now it's not an original thought. Letting go of the idea of The One after having been told it's true for years is an example of this, though that wasn't such a struggle for me. But I am of the age that was taught by books and films and television that almost every villain could be redeemed if you just practiced sufficient patience with them (and maybe sent them a ghost or two but mainly that you personally had to be patient and forgiving). This patience and forgiveness was not to be extended when they were sorry because they didn't have to be sorry and it wasn't based on them trying to do better and then you forgiving them because often your forgiveness had to come first, the first step in their redemption was yours. We set up generations of people to believe that "sensing the good in them" was enough. I was talking to a friend who said that she views people on the basis of what they do and she is thus less likely to be surprised when they act how they are. In that conversation, I said I view people on the basis of what they say they are, but even that's not quite true. In honesty, I think I often view people on the basis of the good I think ("sense") they're capable of, and then I'm always knocked flat when they don't do what I expect. But that's the mythology I grew up with. It's not a new thought even to me but apparently it's time for this seat on the ferris wheel of my recurring thoughts to have its moment of a clear view: today's a reminder that redemption arcs are considerably thinner on the ground in real life than they are in Hugo, Dickens, Lucas, etc. It's unfair that I've gone about forming my current view of myself as a "good person" in part because I make myself see the good in people even while their knife is hilt deep in me. I have found myself fighting back the urge (sometimes unsuccessfully) to justify for them how much they hurt me, as if I could somehow empathize them into good behavior. It's unfair because I don't actually think it's "good" of me and certainly hasn't been "good" for me, and yet part of my recent life has had to be devoted to tearing myself away from a dream narrative I was fed and consumed dutifully. I swallowed it whole. I'll see the good in them and then they'll be that good. Delicious! I do still want to be good and kind and empathize. I just don't feel like I can or should give people the unearned benefit of that anymore. It's so hard. You who already know this truth don't get why I'm struggling but take my word for it, it's a bitter pill. But if I'm going to live another five years, and those five years wouldn't involve this pain, feeling betrayed by my faith in people who usually never asked for it, it would be sweeter. Ten years twice as sweet. Maybe that sweetness would be worth more to me than pretending to myself that I'm good. Probably worth a try.
In between working and a spiralled construction project, I've been watching TV which is one of my favorite things to do (I was going to say "favorite things to do to unwind" but no: it is one of my favorite things to do, period). One thing was watching Season 3 of "The Bear" which has given me Complicated Feelings and I wanted to write it down.
Season 1 of "The Bear" was, I think, excellent. It was intense day-at-work stressful to watch in the way that sometimes gets overdone (Aaron Sorkin I am looking at you) but here it felt fine, it felt real, and I felt that the characters were believable (for the most part) — nuanced, flawed, vulnerable, human.
Season 2 felt like the payoff earned for white-knuckle stressing over someone else's job in season 1. Episodes that would have felt saccharine (an aspiring pastry chef gets a fully funded trip to Copenhagen to live an absolute fantasy — a respectful and nurturing educational environment, a European city, living on a houseboat, a cat that doesn't sleep on your face) — because it was prefaced with the realism of season 1, season 2's sweetness felt genuine. I liked how they showed people grappling with how the decision to get better necessarily starts with seeing your own flaws, that insecurity, and how hope can be so terrifying. And season 2's "flashback" episode was gorgeously acted, beautifully filmed, hilarious and heartbreaking, achingly real.
Season 3… Here, I will summarize every episode: Go fuck yourself. I love you. A verse of a song you loved, started inexplicably mid-scene with lyrics that don't seem to connect in any particular way to the otherwise wordless scene (again), and the song cuts off after one verse or less. Go fuck yourself. I love you, but I can't say so. A silent food montage. Go fuck yourself. I'm sorry, but I can't say so. Some nonsense with highly incompetent but purportedly loveable people who in no way would be allowed to stay if this job is really so precisely demanding and everyone is taking it more seriously than a cancer diagnosis. Why do we insist on these bumbling minor characters? Is it so we can keep calling this "a comedy"? I am tired of Carmy's profile. I am tired to my bones of characters who can't express what they are thinking and feeling. I feel like every actor in this is amazing and none of them are being allowed to reach their potential. For example, Oliver Platt can sell the corniest dialogue but I wish someone would give him better things to say. The way this show anvils its foreshadowing would get you kicked out of television writer school. Go fuck yourself. I was going to quit mid-way (see also: Ted Lasso) but then Jamie Lee Curtis made me cry and I'm on a full tangent of my delight in watching people I admired as a young person continue to be people I admire as we all age. Oh, can that woman act. And finally dialogue worthy of someone. I love you. I think, though, that I'd tell past Anne to just watch "Ice Chips" and skip the rest of the season and spare herself the Fak-ing aggro.
Season 4: Apparently there is a season 4. Why.
So I am a director for a local amateur theater. Sometimes I take it very seriously and I have to remind myself that in a town of half a million only about 500 at most might be interested in seeing a play in English and half of those won't be interested in any particular play enough to come so even though it feels important it's only important on a small scale. Sometimes I have to remind myself that most people do things for fun and when they don't take it as seriously as I do that's really ok. Sometimes I have to remind myself about the value of acts of service. Most of the time I have a good time, it's like putting on plays in high school and college, low stakes classes or extra credit, hanging out with people who are fun and intense and creative. Most of the time it gives me some days of stress and some days of joy and in the end we put on a play and people come and see it. I find people I don't know exhausting, especially in groups; "does not work well with others" was on a fourth grade report card and little has changed. The fact that I've chosen this to do with my free time sometimes feels like a step toward insanity, but the truth is I'm older and tougher than when I was nine and if I pay attention I can usually make up games for myself and retain focus and manage ok, though it takes effort. Since it's difficult for me to socialize without a purpose, this is the most social I've been in my adult life and sometimes at the end of a rehearsal I feel literally drained. But sometimes I can see that we are working together toward a shared goal and then I feel like I drank a pot of coffee and sat on a soft blanket under warm dappled light and fell in love all at once.
Interestingly, because I've been focused so much on the plays themselves I haven't paid much attention to the process of acting. I haven't acted much in the last 30 years and haven't thought about it much — with amateurs, the focus is often largely on learning lines, so it hasn't been that necessary. For me, I just knew there was a part in acting when it clicked and I became a person who responded to the things happening in the only possible way I could respond.
But it's different for different people and a few actors have expressed interest in acting techniques and because I am not a people pleaser but a people dazzler I have set myself up to learn. Acting schools and approaches differ with culture and I didn't want to deal with that when we already, as a multicultural collective, have enough trouble agreeing when rehearsals start, but I learned to communicate about time consensus and I can learn to communicate about acting. To rectify my ignorance over the next six months (as I don't direct a play again until 2025), I bought some books on acting theory and started plowing through them.
I was on an airplane reading one of my books and trying to think of how to apply some of these ideas, which are targeted at people for whom acting is their calling and their work, as opposed to their hobby, and the man seated next to me commented that he taught theater at a university and thus noticed what I was reading and said that he thought this particular teacher had a better theory and approach than another, more famous teacher. Since the previous chapter had been a takedown of the more famous teacher, I ventured that this author certainly thought so, and we shared a laugh. Then they turned the lights off and we went to sleep, flying over the Atlantic with someone I wouldn't have noticed and who wouldn't have noticed me, now something in common. I wish people weren't so difficult for me but on the other hand I never take for granted the small chance encounters where for a moment we share something and for a moment we know our lines and it's easy.
It is unlikely that anything will sting the way once, when you were so much younger, your friend sat down with you to confess that his feelings had shifted and what he had thought was a bit of fun while verbally sparring was actually an attraction and he had to acknowledge it, it wasn't worth pretending he didn't feel what he felt. He'd maybe never felt this way, so absolutely physically attracted to someone he felt intellectually matched with, and emotionally too. He needed to tell you about his feelings. And you in the blush of that moment realizing that you too had feelings, that the only reason you hadn't acknowledged them to anyone including yourself was that it seemed so certain they'd be not just unrequited but ridiculous, like falling in love with the moon. But what if the moon said he loved you, what if the moon said it first? Your heart rushing to the surface of your face. "Everyone will be so surprised," you said. "Even I'm surprised!" And he said, "So… She hasn't told you?" And you realized that ahhhhhhh this another story where the only part that is about you is how well you listen; what a good listener you are. You spent the rest of the night drinking and laughing about his newfound love.
That wasn't the first and not the last time that you have realized in the middle of a story that it wasn't about you. Nobody else's story is about you; everyone is the hero of his own story. Everyone is their own main character, this makes perfect sense. And sometimes you're not a character in their story at all. No reason for it to sting, though it almost always does, the sting of salt in the eyes and you blink it away.
And now you are more than halfway through life, the sunset years, rich with purple and gold and you want for nothing, happy to be a tertiary character in every story other than your own, swelling a progress or starting a scene or two, so to speak. It's fine. But the other day when you found yourself written entirely out of a scene while someone looked you full in the face in a chapter you'd built and told you how much other people had done as though you weren't even part of it, and the salt rose in your eyes and you felt every relegation fresh, and followed it with a shot of self loathing for ever having thought, for ever having even imagined that anyone would give you top billing or any billing at all. Of course of course of course. It's never going to stop. Keep your eyes firmly on your own work. Blink it away.
I don't understand why we were told that curiosity killed a cat as if this were a reason not to be curious but a lot of people definitely aren't curious and it always seems weird to me. It's fun to know things. When I was younger, before the internet, I would call the library or go to the library to find things out. Flipping through card catalogs was fun. After the internet but before I could look things up on my phone I would write down questions that came up through the course of the evening and then send the answers in a next-morning email to whoever I'd been with when the questions arose. I thought it was a way of saying I'd been paying attention. I've been given to understand that not everyone finds this charming so I don't do it much anymore. But now that we all have libraries in our pockets, I'm regularly flummoxed by people who don't seem to actually care that there are answers to the questions they ask the air. And I'm even more perplexed when people lack curiosity not only about the world of facts but about the people they inhabit the world with. I am the sort of person who has forgotten things like birthdays since I started writing them down on paper, and I stand in awe of people who remember them (or most things like that) but more like baffled when people seem almost actively uninterested in a view of the world that is a different perspective. I have been in situations with people when I didn't want to hear their opinion because I thought it would change my view of them for the worse; this doesn't seem to be the case though. It doesn't seem like a fear of what truths are out there but an active lack of interest in any truth beyond the one they currently possess.
Maybe related: when people describe situations to me based on their understanding of those situations with no regard or interest as to what my view might be, even if those situations are ones I lived through and they did not.
To be curious about why people aren't curious is a Mobius strip that won't take me anywhere useful but at least I wrote it down, this moment of gazing, dumbfounded, at how little some people seem to want to know, even when it's right there. Even the cat got a good look.
This is a drawing of a rabbit. It's just a sketch and doesn't look very much like an actual rabbit; the ears are wrong and it lacks the endlessly curious bunny nose. I won't go on with rabbit details (soft fur, various endearing noises). I'm not stupid, it's not a real rabbit, it's a sketch of a rabbit, and just a rabbit head at that. What's making me personally unwell lately is that for some reason if I say "that's a rabbit" people feel a real burning need to tell me that it's not a rabbit, it's a sketch of a rabbit, or better yet that it's not a rabbit it's a duck. Yes, I see the duck, too. I'm well versed in optical illusions; wait til I tell you the story about that beautiful young woman in a fabulous hat who turned into a hag overnight. But right now for a minute I want to talk about the rabbit. I don't understand why before I get to talk about the rabbit I have to acknowledge all the different ways of seeing it. I know about those, too. I do! But there is something about the particular brand of my fear that is wrapped up with wanting to have the thing I see validated. Maybe it's not there, the creak of the house, the smell of gas, the cold draft from a crack somewhere, and I ask "Did you…?" because if you didn't then I am, finally, crazy. But I don't think I am. Yes, there's a duck there. But… Did you see a rabbit? It's all I want to know. Do you see the rabbit? Because I see it.
tuckova 