Saturday, September 29, 2007

Invisible Jazz (diary, September 29, 2007)

I tried to send photos to my email address but to no avail. I want to show the garden past peak, what it looks like to be winding down, to be turning autumn in its leaves, the leaves on the ground, the withered flower stalks.

Last night we went to a poetry program at Bedlam Theatre called Invisible Jazz. It was a show about women being sexy (and a man named Wonder Dave being sexy), which in many ways was a shame because there were older people in the audience who probably came for the jazz & the language, as I did. It gets to be costly after a while to cast all women as sex objects, for them to cast themselves as sex objects, because little remains after that display is over for them to do, besides clean the house, and I think the younger women know it and think they can defy it and that it will be different when they turn 40, but it will be the same, not different, and there will be little for them to do besides clean the house and sometimes to look ridiculous dressed as aging prostitutes -- as there was one woman dressed as a prostitute dancing with her old man last night, and she was not so young, and she looked ridiculous, and if she were wearing clothing that showed joy or experience, she might have looked, actually, prettier, and had even more fun. Who wants to dress like a prostitute at 50? It's a story.

I was wearing a cat suit with cowboy boots and rusty fringe-leather jacket, but I was steadfastly asexual the whole night. I was on a date with a poet, but we are asexual. Perhaps if I had not been killed by a Catholic Recovery brigade, I might know where to fit physically into this universe, but not-killed is not what happened. What happened did.

The jazz, when it rolled around at midnight or so, was terrific, not least because it was poetry-jazz. The artists were Christopher Shillock, Tabatha Predovich, and Minnesota Spoken Word Association's E.G. Bailey and Sha Cage.

A few days earlier: Tuesday morning I found the lump in my right breast. I doubled my dose of Wellbutrin, an anti-depressant, which I should have done sooner. I bought chewable vitamins, since all pills, including nutritional supplements, now cause a gag reflex in me. The doctor did a manual exam on Friday and found nothing too strange. The lump had subsided, might even have been a wasp bite, as we had many wasps circling the yard, and my mother was bit a few times, and the bites swelled. I'll get a standard mammogram in late October.

The doctor is an old-fashioned G.P. and remembers me from ten years ago, when my disposition was sunny, and I had friends and a boyfriend -- really a long time ago now -- he said yesterday, to remind me, that I am one of his favorite people, and it was good to see me "back." "You know," I told him, "I had a really dreadful years-long series of manic-depressive episodes, but it's better now."

The people I know got to have jobs; I'll never know what they know about being respectable white people, even though they are supposedly writers, and writers are the liver of the country, and they'll never know what it might be to be white people without posts. Will they? I feel like I have to be private here: I did recently gain a post and would rather not discuss it, except to say it's good & right & high time.

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