There is Nothing New Under the Sun and Love is Still a Verb

Russell Simmons

A dear friend wrote me an email, asking me where I'd been on the blog and why I wasn't posting as often as I generally do. I can't really tell you why, other than I feel a bit dumbstruck and distracted by various things in my life (good ones) and by the shitstorm/clusterf*^k of the last few weeks in this country. I don't have anything more to add to what you've already read about the senseless brutality against black people by police officers or about the monster that is running for President of The Disunited States. I have decided to be as vocal as I am wont to be and even went so far as to tell a particularly dense white commenter on a black friend's Facebook page (you know the kind -- the one that says all lives matter and spends an inordinate amount of time making excuses with rhetorical questions) to STFU. I actually told someone to STFU and LISTEN for the first time in my life. I know there are many of you out there who will read that and raise your eyebrows and think that I should be less angry or maybe more tolerant or more Buddhist or Christian or gracious or whatever, but in this case I was not, and I do not regret it for one moment. The person who was doing all the mansplaining asked me another rhetorical question and then bowed out of the discussion. While I don't pretend to know anything at all, nor that I am able to change everything, I do know when we white people are flailing around and making excuses for something that is obvious and plain to see, and I do take seriously the directive of black people who are asking for us to be co-conspirators and not just allies. I agree with my friend and mentor Lidia Yuknavitch, too, who said the following:

well hell, i'm of the mind that we need all the voices, the signatures and protests, i think we need the calm and eloquent voices, i think we need the riots, i think we need the diplomatic nice people who call for balance, i think we need the agitators and rabble rousers and those willing to risk danger, i think we need all the stories and images and yawps and poems. i think we need it all. radical change does not come from one mode, one voice, one way of articulating. radical change comes from a plurality of voices that rise variously and unstoppably and refuse to shut up.

Tomorrow, Oliver and I are going to our neighborhood police station (a couple of officers whom I know personally since I've called them to intervene in the bullshit goings-on at the McMansion built behind my house) and enquire about how they as a station or part of the greater LAPD are working on non-violent conflict resolution. I'm going to tell them that I'm concerned and upset by what's happening in other parts of the country and hope that they are, too. I'm going to ask them what their policy and saturation is regarding body cams. I'm going to tell them, too, that I will be writing about their answers on my blog.

It's a little thing, such a small thing, but if we could all grab that veil and keep pulling we just might change things.

#blacklivesmatter

Good Cop, Bad Accident, There Are No Accidents

I generally subscribe to a certain kind of chaos theory, as opposed to one of faith that the universe or God has a plan. I believe in randomness, not so much because I'm cynical or privileged but because I don't think certain things have inherent meaning until we thrust form onto them. Does that make sense?

About twenty minutes after I kissed Henry good-bye this morning, told him I loved him and watched him drive off to his first day of school and then climbed back into bed to sleep for a little bit more, I was awakened by the sound of metal on metal -- a sickening crunch that I knew instantly was a crash up the street from me. Sirens began almost immediately, as did the racket of a circling helicopter. I knew that Henry was already at school, but I got up and went out to see what was happening -- a large SUV was on its side at the corner and police cars and men had already blocked off the street and were tending to traffic. It was only 7:15 but already scorching hot, so I turned around and headed back to my house, my heart in my throat.

A little before noon, I ventured out again, this time with Sophie, and made my way up to the accident site which was still blocked off with cops guarding the intersection and the SUV on its side. As Sophie and I made our way across the street, we walked toward a cop, and I asked him what had happened. A woman in the SUV was making a left turn and hit a cop car, he said. Luckily no one was hurt too badly. I expressed relief and told him I had a teenaged driver who had left for school about fifteen minutes before the crash. He said, You know, cars are really safe these days -- they can be in wrecks like what you see, and they're built to take it and even protect the drivers. I felt a smidgen of relief, filed the statement away to share with my friends but perhaps not with my boy. The cop said hello to Sophie and asked me her name. I told him, and then he asked me whether I would mind telling him what was up with her. She has epilepsy, has had it from infancy, so it affected her development, I said. He smiled and told me that his daughter had epilepsy, too, that she'd gotten it from meningitis when she had a cochlear implant put in for deafness. She was physically able but cognitively at the level of a five year old, despite her fourteen years. She was also on two antiepileptics, both of which Sophie has been on and had done an unsuccessful trial of the ketogenic diet. I shared with the cop our story of cannabis oil, how it had stopped Sophie's seizures for the most part after nineteen years and 22 drugs. We looked into each other's eyes and smiled.

A cop and me. There are no accidents.*
















*My friend and writer Carrie Link has taught me this.

Boy Talk, Part 468: On Inspiration

Quick, take a picture of that! I said to Oliver when we pulled up to a stoplight before entering the Target parking garage.

Why, Mom? he replied, Why do you need a photo of a homeless guy's stuff?

Well, to tell you the truth, I am inspired by the things that I see and then the photos that I take, I replied, I'll often take a photo and then look at it later and write off of it. 

I waxed inspirational, then, the kind of blather that I'm sure my boys tolerate only by the skin of their teeth. I think I mentioned the video of the homeless man that I'd watched last night, like tens of millions of other people -- the one where a homeless man on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles is shot dead while being "subdued" by six LAPD. I can't tell you, Reader, how frenzied I felt while watching that video last night. My heart was literally pounding, and while the boys watched over my shoulder, I might have even screamed how much I hated guns and cops and this whole country. I went on and on, basically freaking out about the fact that thousands of people, many of them mentally ill, live in squalor on the streets even as people drive past in cars that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, blather, blather, blather. I might have cried, openly, I was so upset. But that was last night, and when I saw crap strewn all over the street outside of Target, I immediately thought of the video and knew that I wanted to write about it, somehow, if only to struggle with my own ineffectual place in all of this. Because, really, who am I to hate this situation and have no real power and even, sometimes, inclination, to actually do something about it. To tell you the truth, I feel like an asshole for complaining without a means to really help.

Today, I didn't say any of that -- I just made the comment about inspiration and writing and creativity when Oliver asked me why I wanted a photo.

You're a creative person, I said, what gives you ideas and inspires you? He thought for a moment, and then turned the dial of the radio up nearly all the way as we drove underground into the parking garage. All the Single Ladies was blaring out of the speakers in my sexy white Mazda, and I instinctively turned it down as low as it had been turned up. Let's face it, Reader, I'm not a Beyonce fan.

Mom! Oliver cried out and turned the knob back up. You don't turn DOWN Beyonce, you turn her UP. THAT'S what inspires me! He started dancing and bobbing in the seat next to me, doing his moves, and I was inspired, Reader, to actually join him.

A Tale of Tails, Chained

On about hour five of seizures, neurologists, and waiting rooms, I felt a tail, trailing behind me, when I lifted, or heaved, Sophie up onto an adult examining table this afternoon to change her diaper. She had already had so many seizures. I was stifling bereft. This has got to stop, I might have thought or said aloud. I can't do this anymore. I felt the tail, its scales the years, too many years. I drag it.  Later, still more seizures and back in the car, I heard on the radio that traffic was backed up on the 101 North because of some obstruction in the middle of the highway. I'm not sure what the problem is, Kayjon Cermak of KCRW said, her voice attractive, lilting into laughter. Oh, Kayjon, you save us with your tales of road rage and obstruction, mattresses and ladders fallen off of trucks, fistfights on the side of the road, looky-loos. Oh, yes, here it is. There appears to be a large chain in the street, Kayjon elaborated, Watch out for that around Normandie. My car crept onward, north, while Sophie seized. My lips were tight closed, a trail, a tail behind me of years of doing this. I started at the sound of a police whistle and focused on an officer on a motorcycle, weaving in front of me, back and forth between cars, getting us to slow down from 10 miles an hour to 5 and then 0 and then we were stopped, in a line. The motorcycle was directly in front of my car. He climbed down off it, brown pants, the knee-high black shiny boots, the mirrored sunglasses, the bow-legs. He held his hand out, palm facing us. Stop. I think asshole, I see you and we're already stopped in the middle of the 101, where the hell else would we go? I imagine the perhaps tens of thousands of cars behind me, a tail, a trail of metal and stifled bereft. I am not making this up. The policeman turned around and stepped toward the middle of the highway, reached down and pulled up a long coiled chain in his black gloved policeman hands. He heaved it up and hauled it over and just before he reached the side of the road, he threw it, the chain, this metal tail, over the guardrail and into the brown highway brush. He was made for that moment, I decided, and was dressed for the part. When he was done, he turned to us, the front cars, gave us the signal to proceed and climbed onto his machine and took off. The beast moved forward. No gangs to bang or bust or pillaged villages to rescue, no girls in distress or crimes of passion. He could drag a chain, a tail, from the middle of the road and let it go. Let it go. Let it go. Let it go.

Being irked

Really, I'm overwhelmed by cliche of late, including the cliche that is myself, depressed and driving around and knowing that I'll feel better and that Sophie is having so many seizures and really, how many seizures can one have and we are so inured to them, in a sense, wouldn't dream of going to the hospital but watch them and watch them and talk on the phone while watching them and tonight, it's circling again, that helicopter, the LAPD helicopter that circles it seems our backyard looking for what, looking for whom, the sound a dull hum then roar as it nears the backyard, the circle of light the windows rattle then it goes by and there's only the wind with the whir in the back and then there it is again, the dull hum then roar the circle of light and then silence and then the wind the santa ana that makes some people mad with grief with worry with cliche, The Swiss Husband calls it the foehn, said to cause psychosis, madness and migraine.