sweet | salty

happy birthday, do fun stuff!

2010-08-30T13:00:18Z

My friend Ryan has a little boy. And a girl, too, but he made an album for his boy, because in his boy's head is a mystery that needs to be solved. Do Fun Stuff will give money to medical mystery-solvers. And it's good music, but if you know Ryan, you know that already. You can trust stuff he likes.

Ryan asked me to interview RickoLus, one of the musicians on the album. I said sure. I yawned. I said I guess so. Then I checked out RickoLus. Now I'm all blushy.

Buy Do Fun Stuff. Help wade through the mystery of Ryan's boy. It's sweet music that'll make you and your kids smile. ~ Kate

Hey, RickoLus. You're one of those starving creative types. So am I. When I treat myself it's with beer, parmesan cheese, and time away to write. What's your indulgence? You know. That stuff that makes you feel like you shouldn't do because you're an artist, and parmesan cheese makes no sense for artists. Unless you're Heidi Montag.

Cigarettes, beer, coffee, good conversations. Sometimes all of those at the same time. They're all pals anyway, and are terribly hard to turn down.

What's the best show you've ever been to? Tell me about it.

Three way tie. Jonsi this year in Denver, CO. Really never seen anything like it. All around. Tom Waits last year in Jacksonville, FL. I don't think there is anyone who can run a ship like this man. I've never felt so close to someone and so far away at the same time. The Flaming Lips during the Soft Bulletin tour in Atlanta, GA. It felt like a giant birthday party for everyone there, I've never felt anything like it since.

What's the best show you've never been to? Tell me about it.

When I was 13, Nirvana came to Jacksonville and played at the Moracco Shrine Auditorium. My folks didn't let me go. That was in 93'. We all know what happened the year after that.

Your music and videos are dreamy. Literally dream-like. This makes me wonder if that's what your life is like all the time. That aesthetic has to bleed into how you cook supper and how you get around from place to place. Do you dream about stuff like tax accountants and paperclips?

I guess it's part of the romantic disposition to be a bit more dreamy then usual. I have that condition. I don't know exactly where it comes from, but it colors everything. I pay attention to combinations of aesthetics and sometimes change those things to make whatever it is I'm doing seem more romantic from my point of view. Or sometimes choose to go to certain places because I think the aesthetics work better with the dream I want to dream when I get there. How this looks to a spectator may be nothing like it looks to me, but that's not important, everyone is responsible for their own dreaminess.

You don't usually make music for kids. How did you approach it?

I tried to make the least amount of sense as possible, because kids don't make any sense, that's my favorite thing about their perspective.

Creativity is this massively pregnant woman who wants nothing but porridge porridge porridge all day long. Then no more porridge, dammit. Then it's malteasers. Bag after bag after bag. What are you craving right now? What are you obsessed with that's feeding the massively pregnant woman in your brain?

Ancient Greece, sea shanties and cassette tapes.

You wrote a song for 'Do Fun Stuff' called 'Adventure'. Here's the deal. You have six hours to experience any adventure you want. Money is irrelevant. So is geography. So is other stuff like death or danger or the likelihood that a dead or dangerous person might join you. What do you do?

I would find a time machine and travel back to 1918 and get on a ship heading for Antarctica.

Do you remember the moment that it dawned on you that you could make your own music?

I don't think I ever thought I couldn't, but I'll tell you, it really took hold was when I was introduced to recording. I got a Tascam four track when I was fourteen or fifteen, worked a landscaping job for two weeks during the summer to get the money for it. My friend had let me borrow his before that and I knew I had to do whatever to get one, hence the landscaping job. But that really opened the idea up for me, when I could record my own music. I think it was the fact that I could finish something myself, and listen to it, hold the tape in my hand and say "I made this". There is something to that. A certain validation.

How is creative work possible when you have bills to pay? Not that I'm assuming that you pay your bills. I only pay my bills in the parallel universe I've invented, in which creative people bathe in imported venetian milk. I just want you to tell me how you do fun stuff in a world that's fun-averse.

I pay bills, but I don't know if the world is necessarily fun-averse, that seems more dependent on perspective. The creative stuff is just something you have to make time for, and if you're really in deep you never really completely stop doing it. You're always working in a sense, just to get that one moment of pure intangible whatever. After doing it long enough it becomes almost automatic, like breathing... or defecating may be more accurate.

What's the worst thing to happen to popular music in the last ten years? AUTO-TUNE crap. I just answered for you. Ignore that. I'm not the musician. You are. What's the worst? What's the best?

The worst and best thing to happen to music in the past ten years is the internet. It's taken what was once an lake and turned it into an ocean. It's cool because it's so vast, and it's boring because it's so vast. Funny thing is, it's the same as it ever was.

The other song you wrote for 'Do Fun Stuff' is called 'Imagination'. Has your imagination ever made you feel weird or apart or lonely? Like the rest of the world is all made up of tax accountants? What do you do about that?

Sometimes I'll see something and feel like everything in the universe is coming together right where I'm standing and it's so beautiful I feel like my chest is going to explode (in a good way). Then I tell someone about it and they're like, "I have no idea what you're talking about." I get bummed for a second then think, Oh well. your loss.

The universe is coming together right where you're standing. Listen to Do Fun Stuff here. Then buy it. It might make your ears explode. In the good way.

the air that precedes November

2010-08-23T12:00:08Z

The crickets sing at the end of summer. The height, maybe. No. The end. The end is the height. It's the height and then CRACK like that you need slippers in the morning and you start wondering about how dry the woodpile is. The window of your brain has been redressed and it includes a diorama with pumpkins and haystacks. Because that's what a brain does. No matter how sophisticated the manner of its thinking, a brain wants to wear brain-shaped acrylic sweaters with bedazzled kittens and reindeer and bluebirds and witches on broomsticks. Brains love the SEASONAL aisle. So, right now: pumpkins.

The crickets are urgently loud. They know they're almost done. This new air cuts summer off with a sharp and discernable edge and everybody feels it. All of nature says Hurry up! Make noise! We are almost a going-to-sleep. Joy, the duvet. Awake at 6 AM I peer through the window at mist so thick it looks like ice. I wonder if I'd see my breath out there. I want to. The daytime warms up and tricks us into thinking the summer hangs on but the night and I have a secret. It knows and I know too.

I want the canoe and I want my boots. Big-ass boots. That's what I want. And nubbly sweaters and wooly tights and jeans that feel like girdles. You know. The heavy, restrictive kind that make you feel all tucked-in. I want all the windows thrown open, our bedroom a meat locker. I want to huddle under feathers that feel four feet thick. I want stews and porridge and mittens and woodsmoke and bats. I want to finish the next book. I have to, by November. I am jaw-clenchingly wanting of that. I wake up in the meat locker with my face squeezed shut and sore with wanting. I soothe myself with what I said to my babies: Limp and loose, limp and loose. That's the way to be. Except with my babies I was talking about pooping. Not writing.

Still.

How's the air where you are? What's it make you want?

hot pink and fingertips

2010-08-12T13:14:14Z

"You gotta barrel through," she says. "It's egocentric to be sad. You have to stop thinking so much about yourself. You have to think about, you know. All those Poor People. It's not about YOU all the time. That's what I told her."

(Her daughter might conceivably be sad, just a few months past her Event. A big event. The kind of event that makes me feel protective of her despite not knowing her well. We'd asked how she's doing, and there it was.)

I open and close my mouth a few times. Justin murmurs agreement for the sake of removing ourselves as neatly as possible. He takes my hand and we walk down the grass toward the wharf. We stand with our backs to the water, facing the house, a wraparound porch overflowing with pearls, khaki pants, and yacht club insignias.

It still hangs in the air above us. Egocentric. I need someone else to say something. I've said enough. I try lamely to push past it.

"Look at all that beige. Do you think there's anybody interesting up there? Do you think there are any criminals up there?"

He says nothing, contemplating the people on the porch. In those moments, Justin's always piped up in a diffusing way. Never mind that or Look I see an eagle and it's got something in its mouth. He's quiet. He doesn't tend to... be about himself. This leaves me to be about myself all by myself.

I sip wine from a rented glass. I can't say a single word. I'm overwhelmed with wanting to say to her daughter Hey I just made soup. It's a selfish Tunisian recipe with roasted tomatoes and peanuts. Come on over. Justin speaks.

"Do you ever wish you had Tourette's syndrome?"

I startle.

"I mean, like, F-FUCKYOO!!"

A mouthful of Pinot Grigio goes down the wrong pipe. I cough and laugh too loudly. Three people turn around. He does it again like he needs to, and I'm so grateful that he needs to, and I double over.

"F-F-FUCKYOO!! FUCKYOO!!"

+++

In New York City I stood there a while and stared.

I told him I felt kind of obligated to show up at BlogHer's Grief and the Internet panel. He stared back at me. I told him that it might feel a bit like... I don't know. It's hard to articulate. Like a circle jerk. Which is ironic. Maybe I just didn't want to be in a room full of women sobbing at the spectacle of it all, at the mere proximity of trauma. Not that I mind that they do. Maybe I didn't feel like uncorking all that just then. Maybe I was afraid of sitting there stone-faced. Maybe I'm a cynic who thinks too much. I asked him if he knew what a circle jerk was. He said nothing.

He looked like a complex man. Dark but the kind you can't tear away from, not ever. I wondered if, perhaps, he was sad. If he didn't spend enough time contemplating plights. You know. Punjabi slums and Sudanese clitori and harpooned whales. Plights that might have elevated him beyond the selfishness of his own pain. I wondered if he lacked a rich woman to remind him.

He said nothing. He just stared back at me, a match.

+++

In New York City, everything struck me as art. Women with short skirts and butterscotch legs. Suicidal yellow taxis. People yelling and horns honking, in a hurry, in the deepest middle of the night. New York made me hungry for input. Strangely, I didn't spend much time seeking that input at the conference. I just wanted my friends, and interesting things to stare at with them. I felt meta-averse. I was a bottomless pit for handmade ravioli.

In Soho, shops and bakeries and corner vegetable stores have little conveyor belts that open up onto the streets like storm cellars, steep chutes for deliveries. Resident cats pad up and down, twining around passing legs, shedding.

I don't know anything about art. And so I watched people react to it. Looking for cues, maybe. I'll admit to that. It was like being in church. There's a way you move along. A grace you give someone in the midst of being upheaved. You shuffle around a lot. You sit down, stand up. You feel stirred and expansive despite a lack of academic context.

Pain and abuse and sex and loss and anger and hunger and confusion and wealth and labour and the way it feels when some celestial fingertip reaches out and taps you on the top of the head and zaps you all the way down to your feet with something larger than what you already know of yourself. That's what I saw.

People stand in front of art summoning that fingertip, aching for it. Walls hung with wanting and hurt of epic proportions.

It was beautiful.

Too beautiful to barrel through.

New York gave me vertigo.

Me and miss Maggie Dammit. Thank you, schmutzie.

New York gave me friends, again, people I'm still trying to explain to Justin. She's so... they're... it's not... he's... I can't. So I don't speak much. I just walk around and smile, all full up.

Some of those people are in pictures here. One of them isn't - he squirms out of frame. I landed at JFK, dropped my bags off at the hotel, and went to The Gap to get fitted for a few new outfits. Then I went to Soho and Ryan shot photos. It was surreal, and incredible to watch him work. There's more to come of it, we hope. But then there always is, when it comes to him. He's a creative entrepreneur, like so many others that gathered in New York.

Being with these people is so invigorating. They're writers and photographers and artists. They counteract beige, every single one of them, and I can't ever seem to get enough.

sights

2010-08-04T21:00:00Z

Two Italian guys with jackhammers. A man and a woman drink diner coffee as if there aren't two Italian guys with jackhammers. Chinese radio. I can't stop looking for Denis Leary. A jaywalker stops in the middle of the street to take a picture, his back to traffic. He almost gets hits by a cab. He seems surprised. BROADWAY. Sun-baked urine. I wonder where the great big hole is. I'm almost afraid of stumbling onto it. It's just so damn big. RADIO CITY MUSIC HALL. Stop looking for Denis Leary. Men with carts push Halal and fresh-baked pretzels. Cigars. Perfume. GRAND CENTRAL STATION. Pretty New York girls walk with purpose, always alone, always on their way somewhere, wearing gladiator sandals and wedge platforms, skipping around Italian guys with jackhammers like one great big dance.

I'm here. I've never been to New York City before. Straight off the plane, I was treated to a styling session here. I'm going to do a shoot -- in front of the camera -- with this guy. A few of my photos are in a show to benefit the Gulf Coast, and god, there's just so much to do, so many people to see. It's going to be great but I don't want to inundate you with wankery. So for the next few days, I'm going to come here with little bits and weird moments and stuff I see. It's my first time here. I can't believe it all really exists.

If you've been, what was your first impression of New York City? Best moment? Scariest? Anything.

good writers don't

2010-07-27T12:00:44Z

On top of her shoulders is a face-shaped sign that reads, in Barnum & Bailey ornamental all-caps, TWO-TIME GILLER PRIZE NOMINEE! and where her eyes should be there are two electric stars that flash with that flourescent-bulbed BZZZT. BZZZT. BZZZT. And she's nice, very nice, but the niceness of her fails to outweigh the weight of what she is.

"Is this your first book?" she says. BZZZT. BZZZT.

"It is." I tug at the hem of my skirt, which suddenly feels too short. I look past my lap and regret that my flats are bright green. Everything about me feels girlish. Next to a TWO-TIME GILLER PRIZE NOMINEE! I have pigtails and orthodontic headgear.

+++

You know how you see crows, and they're always hopping along the side of the road, looking like they don't need anybody? The group nods, and I wonder how many of them have been to a writing workshop before. I haven't. They always look alone but really, they're a little travelling village. They're odd and hoarse. They don't chatter. They're either quiet or they're screaming. They always look like they're up to something. They band together to figure out who's left their garbage uncovered.

If you're a writer, you're going to feel lonely sometimes. But every now and then you'll come across someone and you'll see it in their eyes that they're like you. Watch for those people.

Luke, the 15-year-old with the gigantic notebook and the world inside his head, smiles.

+++

Is it so wonderful, writing? I don't know. It's romantic and indulgent and optimistic, an inherently defiant act. It is a squawk that hopes to coax the squawks of others. But it's hard bloody work both greenlit and sabotaged by ego.

At a writers' event this past weekend, I was one of three. The other two had done it before -- the headliner appearances, the readings-as-performance-art, the teaching and lecturing. They get reviews in the Globe & Mail and people argue about their books at swishy dinner parties and they write with artistry, adult fiction, while I am on the internet, either tangled in the death of my son or compensating with douchebags and half-naked Scotsmen. They ask kindly how it all came to be and I mutter the word blog behind my hand because I suspect the sum of what's here, but I haven't looked lately. So I do. I look, imagining the grimace of a literati.

I scroll and scroll and scroll. I note the word pussy used three times, once with capitals and exclamation marks. I get points for avoiding the word 'awesomesauce' but I lose points for almost throwing up on the side of a highway. I see rants and despair and I see that I'm much less resolved than I thought I was. Then I see the Humpty Dance. There is a no-fault clause for the writing about Liam but the rest is an increasingly directionless knee-jerk, a counterpoint. I write occasional darkness. Then I write hot pink with watermelon-scented glitter so that you don't turn away. But it's cheap tricks, all of it. Happy clown / sad clown. Either way, I wear bright green shoes and I can't look a Giller Prize nominee in the stars.

Again, I'm going to try and head you off. This is not a plea. You don't need to tell me that the second book, if I manage to finish it, is going to be awesomesauce. I'm humbled to the point of being frozen solid and if you say nice things about the myriad of mind-blowing ways that I've used the word 'douchebag' in the past few months, I will throw the collected works of Giller Prize nominees at you. Tread carefully. Those books are HEAVY.

Instead, tell me about a humbling moment in your writing, art, sports, life. Anything. Tell me how you managed to leave the hotel room and fake it, so to speak, despite that crushing humility. And tell me what happened after that. I'd really like to know.

two lesbians and a bagpiper walk into a bar

2010-07-23T12:00:47Z

Really?

THIS IS THE SKY. THIS IS THE SKY IN KATE'S BRAIN.

I'm 37 plus one day and I didn't know what to say about it, and so I told you about how other women are afraid their aged horniness brands them without particularly discussing my own aged horniness. Then I put up a photograph of the sky and said Here's how I feel about being 37 which is pretty much like writing a tribute to my mother's hands, and about all the mothering she's done with those hands, and how soft they are, and how they stitch quilts and authors, and then call that a treatise on motherhood, and give you sugar cramps.

Being 37 incites equal measures of panic and confidence. That's all.

In a hurry to eat cake, I dragged the sky into it and it's bothered me ever since. I laid there at night and had a nightmare about a posse of radioactive suits who said, in robot-voices, METAPHORICAL OVERLOAD. DECONTAMINATION COMMENCING. I woke up and tweeted about the writers' remorse and some dude in Scotland said, "You can delete that, you know." And I said, "Scotland Sucks!" And he said, "But six months ago you wanted me to wear nothing but a sporran and spoon porridge off my bare chest! I'm GLASWEGIAN!" And I said, "That was before you agreed with me that I should delete a crappy piece of writing! Which is agreement on the crappy part!" And he said, "You called it crappy, not me!" And I said, "Scotland Sucks!" And he said, "You're a tart for sheep and everybody knows it." And I said, "FINE, GOD!" And he made that guttural disapproving sound and I totally swooned.

I made you hum showtunes against your will. I made you think I was talking about blueness or clearness or sunshine. I'm not going to delete it, though. My Gershwin stands, even though it's not at all like a good stiff porridge. All is resolved. That's the first and last time I post because I feel like I should have something significant to say when all I have is "Woe, the bloat!"

Wait. Crap.

+++

Two lesbians and a bagpiper walk into a bar.

The bagpiper's name is Iain with an extra 'i' because everybody knows that the extra 'i' gets you a lot of tail, at least outside of Scotland.

As we walk along we gather more. A gaggle of women. A crazy old guy dancing by himself on an empty floor, beet red, his shirt unbuttoned almost to the waist. Everyone watches the crazy old guy. Everyone is beaming. He does pelvic thrusts more earnestly than I've ever seen anyone do anything. His shirt is soaked. We cheer. A college kid insists the lesbians Need To Find The Right Dick. One listens earnestly because she is kind. I know what she's thinking. She's wondering how a boy like this will make it in the great big world. He's wondering if he might be The Right Dick.

We stumble from a pub to a gay bar to another pub to the waterfront and then I'm crushed on a dance floor and they're playing this and I'm just drunk enough, just barely (because I am a mother and am, therefore, alcohol's kryptonite), to be truly thrilled. I have never been so thrilled. NOT EVER. We sweet talk our way past the lines. The bagpiper does this, naturally, a prince of New Scotland with the extra 'i'.

There is no punchline.

Two lesbians, a bagpiper and I walked into a bar, and then another, in each encircled by very old stone permeated with the drunken sweat of two hundred years of Haligonians. I don't do this anymore. But I did. Time elapsed. Consumption. And then, lemon-flavoured revelation washed down with a 3:00 AM burrito: "There is no cougar. Only being. It's like... just like... THE SKY!"*

*With appreciation for Justin, who always features in my sky, who stayed at home with the kids, and who tolerated my story of the bagpiper just barely, and not without arguing the impossibility of the bagpiper having been a gentleman practicing ciad mile failte.

a skyful of maybes

2010-07-20T12:25:11Z

"This guy back there... this guy..."

One of the other women tells her to slow down, to breathe.

"This guy what?"

"What guy?"

"This guy back there... he called me a... a... c-c-cougar!"

There's a Kate inside me that's 50% good samaritan and 50% bitch and that particular Kate thinks, at that particular moment, Dude. You're wearing tight white pants and black gladiator stilettos and a low-cut beaded top and you look, you know, KINDA HORNY.

Thankfully, Polite Kate has control over my mouth 75% of the time and Polite Kate says, "How old are you?"

She shakes her head vigorously and sways from the recoil of it. Someone else asks her the same question. She shakes her head again, this time with her hand over her mouth.

"I'll bet you twenty thousand bucks I'm older than you." I think I am.

"No way." A splash of rum and coke lands on my foot.

"I am. And if I'm not a cougar, neither are you and that's because I look kinda, you know, most days, LESS HORNY."

"There's no way you're older than me."

"Am so." I hope I am.

"Are not. I'm a cougar."

"Oh come on. How old are you?"

"34." She might have said bank robber or arms dealer or chronic farter for the look on her face.

"I'm 37 on Tuesday." I might have said Here take this backhoe full of $100 bills or Any man who calls a woman a cougar only makes a statement about himself or My name is Willy Wonka and I am here to save you from yourself for the look on her face.

+++

Inside my head it looks like this.

Sometimes it's pea-soup fog and I can't see for shit. Or sleet rain. But it's there, and it's never been there before. Autonomy. This knowing that if I want something, I may as well take it or make it or at least try.

I am not afraid anymore. Today is Tuesday.*

*and there may be stilettos.

all jammed up

2010-07-09T12:40:31Z

Justin: Hi.

Kate: ... ... ... What?

Justin: I said Hi.

Kate: Hi.

Justin: What's up?

Kate: ... ... ... Nothing.

(a slightly noxious-looking cloud emits from Kate's ears)

Justin: Your brain just farted.

Kate: ... ... ... What?

Justin: Your brain just farted.

Kate: Sorry.

Justin: What's up? You don't say anything. You just sit there chewing on the end of your finger. What's up?

Kate: Nothing.

+++

I haven't been telling him but I'll tell you. I look like I'm six months pregnant. I need to stop eating bread. And cheese. And butter. And salt. And beer. Or maybe I'm just old. Maybe this is what happens when you're eleven days away from 37. Your belly and your brain go flaccid at the same time. Ben plays with it, my belly. He pokes it and giggles when it springs back. It's not supposed to spring back. It's supposed to be an unpokeable or at least suckinnable wall of taut skin. And the grant... oh my god the grant. If I get the grant I can write. But I haven't been writing. I've been staring at the manuscript. Every few days I open it up and stare at it and it stares back and then I close it. This year's June cut my legs off at the knees and I'm not recovering from it, at least not creatively. June cut my legs off at the knees and my arms off at the elbows and so I can't type or move and I'm just sitting here feeling all chopped up, and all I can do is spit to defend myself against people who think that all I need to do is Choose To Not Be Chopped Up, like all those sad-looking cripples who should really just choose to grow their arms and legs back, even the ones who are mostly smiling and happy. And I saw this thing on Facebook the other day about this woman whose doctors warned her she was in danger of having a premature baby but she thinks doctors are EVIL and OUT TO RAPE HER WITH THEIR CUTTING, SLICING KNIVES either that or their GOLF CLUBS and so she decided against the BABY-KILLING ULTRASOUNDS they recommended and lo! her baby was born full-term and it was all JUST FINE and not only JUST FINE but damn-near ORGASMIC. Why? Because she TRUSTED HER BODY. And all of a sudden I am enlightened. People who think I am missing the opportunity to Not Be Chopped Up are, in fact, closeted members of a cult that worships The Secret. And I feel much better because I already know that people who prescribe The Secret after they've decided that you are TOO NEGATIVE are certifiable douchebags, and so I feel somewhat better now, with my newfound understanding. And so it's all that. That's what's on my mind. My jelly rolls and being 37 and money and fiction and clients and all of it fizzling and softening and drying up and a going-to-sleep and oblivious, self-congratulatory twits that make me want to hit them over the head with the contents of an entire NICU. And that would hurt. Really. It would. It's a lot of machinery and electronics and rubber tubes and stuff. And doctors. Big, nasty, mean, egomaniacal doctors and all their instruments of womyn-hate.

But I can't tell him that because if I tell him that he'll get angry and he'll say Why do you pay attention to douchebags on the internet who say things like that? They have no idea. And he'll look at me, right at me, with eyes that have seen the same things I have. They say these things, these insane and ridiculous things, and it makes you crazy. The internet is a giant douchebag magnet, Kate. He was 72% correct last Tuesday but today, he's only 34% correct. There are nice people on the internet. Really, truly, lovely people. There are people on the internet who only look like douchebags when they dress up like douchebags for Halloween. They're so lovely that when you're all jammed up with douchebaggery, they send you a picture on twitter of a DOUCHEBAG DOLL. And then, just then, you'll love the internet.

I'd tell him this, all of this, if I could just find a way to start. Because if I did, he'd pull up his shirt to pinch 3.75 millimetres of skin around his midsection and call it his spare tire and he'd make me look closely at the top of his head, insisting that he's bald. And he'd say Let's crack open a couple of beers and we'll get old together, Kate. And I'd say Okay. I'll try not to fart.

on the fluidity of being almost-37 and having a soul that's one-half marshmallow banana

2010-07-01T12:00:00Z

I make an effort to act casual, which is thinly veiled gobsmacked staring no matter what you do. I feel simultaneously envious and protective of her, my niece. Her entry into years 13-21 makes me grimace -- either on her behalf, or in memory, or both.

She stands in line for her ticket and reaches into a bag of popcorn and tells me about taking math tests in German and French and I tell her where to get a cute summer dress in the city and I just can't believe it. I held her in my arms once. Well. I might not have. I was probably too afraid she'd be contagious -- if not her, the condition of motherhood in her proximity. But still. I held her, a baby.

+++

So many words tossed around to encourage self-congratulation. Authenticity. Realness. Courage. And I can't help thinking what I think: that courageous people don't reflect upon their own authentic truth. They don't have the head space. And they don't invite others to comment on the awesomely authentic truthiness of their authentic truth. They're too busy surviving whatever non-internet-based struggle they face to contemplate the implications of audience and perception.

The only time it's worth congratulating someone on how real they are is if you're hoping they might show you their tits.

It's like when you're thirteen and you're crying about how that curly-haired mean girl at school screamed BITCH! at you from one end of the school hallway to the other because she thought you thought her boyfriend was cute. Which you totally did. But she didn't know that for sure. And besides. He thought you were a total loser and told everybody that, and so why does she care if you thought he was cute before he humiliated you in front of the Amherst Ramblers hockey team and before she screamed BITCH! at you from one end of the school hallway to the other?

So you're thirteen and you're trying to impress upon somebody the gravity of it all and that somebody gets a vaguely impatient look and then they say it:

Just Be Yourself.

Which self, exactly? I have a lot of selves.

VERIFIABLE INVENTORY OF KATE'S TRUEST AND MOST AUTHENTIC SELVES*

The self that is compelled by the idea of looking like a circa-1986 prostitute, or at the very least, the heroine of a ZZ Top video
The self that can only wear slutty shoes for 43 minutes without blistering
The self that continues to persist with sluttiness beyond blistering until feet leave a splatter trail of blood only detectable if the lights suddenly come on
The self that objects to objectification
The self that objects to a lack of objectification
The self that likes the smell of dirt
The self that thinks people who run because it's raining are not to be trusted
The self that gets squealy in high-end drugstores
The self that owns a pair of synthetic adhesive sealskins and bets that 98% of you don't know what they're for
The self that is a better parent than you are
The self that is a worse parent than you are
The self that detects a lack of humility in others before they know it themselves
The self that thinks she is The Shit
The self that is selfless
The self that has a secret bank account flagged FOR HIGH-END DRUGSTORES
The self that screws off people who think they know what they're talking about
The self that earnestly wants to know what you're talking about

*NOT INCLUDING SELVES DEEMED SHAMEFUL, GREEDY, GROSS, CATTY, UNHYGIENIC, OF LOOSE MORAL FIBRE, OR OTHERWISE UNCOOL, OF WHICH THERE ARE AN ADDITIONAL 32

+++

When I was thirteen, I was a highly-functioning basketcase. Then I grew up a little and became the cleverest idiot at Queen Elizabeth High School. I had no idea what Myself was. I wanted to be her so very badly, this elusive Myself. It was always just this paralyzing crush of confusion and selves.

So I wailed, and continued to wail, and tried desperately to look like I was Totally Not Wailing until I was 21 years old. That's when the Universe decided it was time for me to see Justin standing at the bottom of an escalator. And that he should be wearing a nubbly fleece, and that he should look hairy and unkempt and delicious. And the Universe knew that Justin would be patient but not patient enough to be into wailing. And so, halfway down that escalator and three seconds before he looked up, the wailing abruptly stopped.

Justin wanted me to follow him up snowy mountains, so he bought me my first pair of skins. But only after I showed him my tits.

For real.

With a nod to Neil, riffing muse, after his post on figuring out what the heck anybody means by authenticity.

resurrection, his and mine

2010-06-16T18:51:45Z

Every year, even decades from now when my hair is white and my hips are made of bio-mechanical plastic, the night of June 14th will haunt me with that shriek.

At 7:00 AM on the morning of every June 15th for the rest of my life, I will begin a day of quiet sitting. I might light a fire in the wood stove to fend off the scotch mist outside, and I'll just sit, and this is what I'll think, just like this:

was it true?

It felt true.

It felt like we weren't alone.

He went somewhere. Something took him. I don't know where.

I felt him lifted from his body.

Yes. I did.

I don't know what it was, but it was true.

God needed someone to polish the brimstone and reprimand the gays, and so he brought Jesus up. I heard all about it on Fox News. On Jon Stewart. I don't know. I'm confused. Maybe God had a doctor complex. Jesus would be the perfect patient. He would walk into God's office with a birth plan, a life plan, a death plan, and outrage at the medical patriarchy. And God would sigh and gaze longingly at his golf clubs.

Every year, the night of June 14th, Liam will die again. For twelve hours I will cry. Every year, the next morning, I will make a bleary pot of tea and remember that unexpected lifting and grasp at the memory of it, and this will be my ventilator.

+++

My body is unordained. It's just a body. It cannot bear the burden of trust. It is blood and muscle and bone no more or less special than your own, or than the blood and muscle and bone of that damn dog that keeps taking dumps on the beach.

My womb drowned one person, drained the other, and then exploded.

I could get lyrical about it. I could presume to forgive it, except that my womb is a mouthy mofo who thinks anthropomorphic reconciliation is for pussies. (My pussy agrees.) I could take my womb outlet shopping. Strawberry picking. Bowling. Last time I checked, my womb hasn't got any feet. But still. It would kick my ass.

You can't backwards-engineer an experience like this. You cannot will the grief of loss into something called 'healed' any more than an alcoholic can will the end of her alcoholism. It remains, incorporated.

You encounter new goodness and laughter and love. You surround yourself with people who understand that occasional quietness or struggle is not about them, and who never begin sentences with you should unless they end with ...come over 'cause I just made soup. You accept, eventually, at least most of the time. Self-pity loosens its clutch, leaving you feeling blessed and content.

But loss, like motherhood, is not finite. He will always be mine. He will always be gone. I will always have this phantom attached to me, not him but the death of him. And I'll never be sure who is holding the leash.

Woof.