Burn It All Down

Rage.

That's what we feel.

Rage.

I wish I could find a photo of my eighteen year old self, the innocent self that attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who pledged a sorority, who attended fraternity parties, who got drunk only a few times, but one time in particular at a party and afterward when a boy whose family name emblazoned a dormitory took me back to his dorm room and when I felt woozy (I had never been drunk) and said so, he told me to sit down on the bed lie down you'll feel better and then with lie simultaneously put his very large hand at the top of my stomach, just below my chest I think it's called the solar plexus and pushed me backward but I knew in that moment, I knew his hand, and even as I looked up into his nostrils so wide, so long I knew what was happening and my head cleared and I struggled up his hand there and sat up and stood up and walked out the door and ran down the stairs and out of the dorm and on to mine. I don't remember if I told anyone about that, then. I was a little bit drunk. Maybe he really wanted to help me. 

I went to college with lots of Kavanaughs. 1981-1985. The parties, the garbage cans filled with Hawaiian Punch and grain alcohol. The ancient black man who tended bar, at the "cocktail" parties and called every girl Miss and her date's last name, his voice soft as he handed out gin and tonics. The rumor of girls pulling trains. Girls who woke up and had forgotten what happened the night before. The smell of piss and stale beer in the hallways of the fraternity houses in the morning. The boys in one fraternity who hung tampons from their Christmas tree in the entrance of their "house," just at the bottom of the winding staircase where girls and boys far wilder than I disappeared. The secret societies where the most privileged boys belonged, along with professors and alumni, the Castle and the Lodge, their arcane rituals. The parties there where lines of cocaine were sniffed up with dollar bills, where girls' boyfriends had nicknames like "The Doctor," the wink wink of dealers, the wall-crawling thumping of music and ecstasy-fueled camaraderie. The teeth grinding afterward. I knew all of it, participated in little of it, was usually sober, my own boyfriend and his friends drinkers but never all that. There are always choices to be made. I watched it. All rich. All white. The Daddies. The privilege. The entitlement. The racism. Yes, the racism. Antebellum parties with blackface. The laughter. No integration in the sororities and fraternities despite attempts. My grandmama would never pay for my membership if we let black girls in, I read on a slip of paper when we canvassed for reactions. I could never live in the same room with a black girl, another.

I don't think the men on either side really get it, do they. And the women on one side, yes there are sides, yes there are tribes and that is not the real danger. The women on that side who just don't can't won't get it. So much hurt and darkness and once they were little boys and yet, still.

As much as we've been taught otherwise, I say burn the whole thing down. 

Smashing the Patriarchy, Ongoing

I spent most of the day yesterday in my head, not so much navel-gazing (as is my wont) as pondering the universe or as Oliver said when he was little more than a toddler and had recently watched his sister have a particularly grotesque seizure, WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT? WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? I wasn't mulling over Sophie, though. I was mulling over the State of the Disunited States. I was trying not to panic about "healthcare reform" and how screwed we are as women, how screwed Sophie is as a disabled person, how screwed we are as a country with the POS Pussy Grabber in Chief.

I was thinking more about the nature of capitalism, of how utterly rotten it is. I was thinking of socialism and how it's not just for Europeans anymore.

I was thinking about the planet, how it's being raped.

This morning's clusterfuck of presidential tweets and the conservatives' "response" to it struck me as near hilarious. It would seem that they are, of a sudden, aghast at how unpresidential  their man is. We don't need to belabor the fact that he was already the designated Pussy Grabber in Chief who had bragged about his own daughter's tits on a radio show not long ago and talked about blood pouring out of the orifices of a woman journalist who had seemingly slighted him during the presidential debates.

The word women apparently doesn't appear even once in the proposed healthcare bill. The word woman appears only in reference to abortion and pregnancy.

The Republicans/conservatives/capitalists are systematically destroying women, children, the disabled and the planet. Oh, and people of color and immigrants.

We are being told to stop whining. When I called the Pussy Grabber in Chief a POS today on a friend's Facebook thread (mea culpa), I was told that I wasn't being helpful. The response in my tiny little mother mind™ was to smash him in the face. That's the language of the patriarchy,  though.

When are we going to have had enough?

We will, I think, fight back with a ferocious love. Or Love.

I'm thinking Mother Nature.

Earthquakes

Hurricanes

Fire

Thunder

Lightning

Hail

Floods

Remember what it was like to give birth to a human being? If you don't, remember what it was like to be born of a mother?

Yes. Like that.

Taking Down the Patriarchy

Ocean Park Beach
photographer: Carl Jackson

I've been reading Nobel Prize winning writer Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. Yeah, light reading. Just kidding. I'm reading it in Russian, too. Just kidding. Actually, I'm not into the light reading thing. Light reading makes me feel anxious and depressed, seems to exacerbate my feelings of there never being enough time to read all the books. I feel the same about movies. Reading "light" or watching crap makes me want to throw myself in front of a train. Getting through my days, sometimes, is only possible because of the art of others. Right now, speaking of trains, I'm listening to Anna Karenina in the car as I drive around the shitty. Dang, ya'll. That novel is relevant, and it's not about throwing oneself in front of trains. It's about love and bullshit, about peasants and patriarchy. There's even a passage about doctors and their uselessness that yours truly could have written!

Reading the extraordinary accounts of survivors in Alexievich's book doesn't just give me perspective but highlights just how resilient and dogged and strong, human beings can be, not to mention black-humored (the best humor, at least to me). The oral histories aren't for the faint of heart, though, as you can imagine. They're as much about vulnerability as they are about strength, and that's why, I think, they appeal to me. I have been feeling particularly vulnerable and fragile of late, for obvious reason. Not a day goes by that I don't have some sort of fantasy of fleeing in either body or mind or both, and whether it's because of the poisonous political atmosphere (don't pose false equivalencies to me: #Imwithher), or the thought of living in the same country with those who support or make excuses for you-know-who or struggling with caregiving and Sophie's epilepsy, acknowledging that vulnerability and fragility restores me. Really great literature -- whether it's fiction or non-fiction or poetry -- restores me. Not long ago, a relative accused me of having my head up my ass as far as my politics go. I think she was also pretty disdainful of the poetry that I put up here. I really don't think it's one or the other. For me, the personal is political and the political is personal and the only mitigation is art.

I got distracted. I was going to make this post about my optimistic feeling that despite all the acrimony in the country, I honestly think the patriarchy is coming down. It might be messy, and it might get even messier, but it's coming down.

Here's some "poetry" from Alexievich's book:

Bulgakov writes in A Cabal of Hypocrites: "I've sinned my whole life. I was an actor." This is a consciousness of the sinfulness of art, of the amoral nature of looking into another person's life. But maybe, like a small bit of disease, this could serve as inoculation against someone else's mistakes. Chernobyl is a theme worthy of Dostoyevsky, an attempt to justify mankind. Or maybe the moral is simpler than that: You should come into this world on your tiptoes, and stop at the entrance? Into this miraculous world...

Aleksandr Revalskiy, historian 

Thinking About

Today is the day that ended with me getting my boys back, and I'm glad about that. I puttered around today, cleaning up, organizing my crap, reading some magazine articles, researching Chechen food for the salon on Friday and mulling over the fate of the universe, albeit the universe of my own tiny little mother mind.™ This would include my observations about the first episode of Wolf Hall on Masterpiece Theater (no, I did not read the book, but so far so good) or rather the period that is depicted (16th century King Henry the 8th/Catholic Church/Church of England and all those shenanigans) and how really ridiculous most men look in history when they're striving for power and territory and keeping down the women-folk and the poor. I'm in, though, particularly as the actor who plays Cromwell bears a striking resemblance, even in that sixteenth century get-up, to Dr. Paul Weston, the shrink from In Treatment with whom I carried on an affair, at least in my tiny little mother mind.™

I also had an interesting conversation with a mother who is very active in the movement to defeat the proposed bill here in California that would make every single vaccination mandatory for every single child in the state unless they have a medical exemption or else they will not be allowed to go to public school. I definitely do not support this bill for various reasons, some of which are kind of, sort of, connected to even the patriarchal values that were demonstrated even farther back than old Henry the 8th and his ignorance that it was his mighty sperm that lacked the necessary Y to give him an heir. Basically, that is the fact that I'm not going to let the government or the medical world force me to do anything to my children that I believe will hurt them. That led to me thinking about my instincts (which work quite beautifully, most of the time, with my tiny little mother mind™) and how they tell me that, really, we're on the edge here in 2015, with the dregs of allopathic medicine. Apparently, the libertarian Rand Paul, whom I loathe because I just don't gel with the libertarian aesthetic (or lack of one) or the cult of individualism that it espouses, is probably the best bet to keep out government over-reach (we can throw in medical marijuana, too, here), but it's just the way the guy frames it all that makes me sick, and that's because he sort of denies women's issues in an incredibly patronizing way.

Anyhoo.

Where was I?

Where are you?

We just had one of those very big jolts of an earthquake which evidently registered 3.5 on the old Richter scale and which I'm realizing is probably the reason why Sophie has had a terrible day with lots of seizures, jitteriness, clamminess and otherwise uncharacteristic behavior. I'm certain she senses these things or feels quite exquisitely the subtle changes of the planet. You see? I've brought things right round to the universe and my tiny little mother mind's™ mulling over its fate.