The Gift, short story

That's it. The rest is history. And history is never as interesting as what your imagination can give you. History is what you get when the projector gets stuck.

It turns out that art, like everything else, is what some people do for a living. Art, what passes for it, is a commodity. It is just one more thing to pay for, lug home with you, borrow, or steal—hurtar para dar por Dios, as it says in the dictionary.

If I could rouse any interest, I would start a support group for people committed to art. I would circulate a petition, start an internal movement to bust people out of the art hospital. I would get a witness to say that I were healthy enough to live on my own, to make a decent living. What is stopping me is thinking that I am bound to the commitment I made to art as a child.

One way to make something real is in solitary confinement. Some people walk with God and honor their commitments. Those people may live anywhere on Earth except in the limelight.

Lock-up, I queried. Where is lock-up?

I would not have asked where lock-up is had I known it would seem forensic. The first thing you find out in lock-up is that God exists. In other situations you could just dismiss this information. In lock-up that is impossible. The second thing you find out is that God is everywhere, even in you. Your job as an artist is to come up with a reasonable gift to present to God.

Most people who go into the art hospital never get out. They just get moved to more comfortable quarters. Some of them, the invalids and life-long convalescents, live on the deluxe wing. The worst thing is knowing that deep down I want to stay. I would show no sign of resistance if they offered me a room with a view. "Put the trophies over there," I would tell my students from my comfortable bed.

For about one month out of solitary I would have appreciators. There would be no question about it—I had served both God and man. After that, if I managed to do anything more, they would give me students. It is very strange, these students. They come from miles around to be put in the hospital with you. Most of them are starving and craven. Usually it is because they had a parent or step-parent who belonged in one hospital or another themselves but who managed to hold on by sheer will power to the world outside. Then values changed, and these offspring lost the wherewithal to define their own existence. There are millions and millions of them, and their numbers are growing. There will never be enough beds.

The easiest wholesale solution is for everyone to drink their gift to death. That way is the most popular, but it is not the only possibility.

If people were willing to open their minds a bit, they could find constructive uses for creative energy. They could leave the hospital, even for day trips, and no one would blame them for changing their minds. They could write to their congressmen. They could volunteer at shelters for the homeless; better yet, they could go on the road with Jimmy Carter and build habitats for humanity. They could sing in the church choir. They could grow a garden. They could raise their own children. We do not need as much art as we are making. There are many other things we need more.

Some people, women especially, go the sex route. They devote their ingenuity to making themselves as sexy as movie stars. Artists can never be worshipped as mindlessly as movie stars, but some of them come pretty close. Other artists, the men especially, sleep around or mulch up their brains on fame.

The very lucky few get shipped back to solitary confinement. Most of these do not know they are lucky, chosen. They think they are being punished for bad reviews. They think bad reviews cheat. They think good reviews tell the truth.

There is no need to worry about art. Art in its ideal forms stays safe. Real art resists being the object of attention. It directs your gaze, and it swings in you forever.

Of the inmates with windows, every year, one or two of them, the purest at heart, beg to be let back into the cell. They are afraid they might jump. That would be going beyond the call of duty, something no one might say. They say that they have learned their lesson, and they promise all the real powers-that-be that they will work harder this time. They sign statements to that effect and they apologize to their loved ones for the emotional and financial turmoil they have caused and will continue to cause until death. (In some of them, the very exemplary, this bad behavior will be held up as customary, even as tax-exempt.) They say goodbye to them and vow never to look outside themselves for companionship or diversion again. Of course, it does not last. Pretty soon someone or something better comes along.

They all have one thing in common. They discovered their gift in the first place because they needed a friend, so they made one up. They kept on making things up until they had a world. Now that they have real friends, and sex, you would think they could just let it rest, but they can’t. They still have something to prove, so they put their name on the waiting list to perform their very own, original talent shows in the seasick cafeteria.

Most of the shows are the same, except in detail. It is rare indeed when someone gets the wind whipping through your grapevine. These days most anything is acceptable as an offering—a stick of wood, a drum roll, a shitty conversation ya had with a friend. The ones who feel ashamed of their limitations almost quit.

It was better in the days before promotion, when having a gift meant something in Latin. In God, a token to His allness in your smallness. A simple nest egg.

(1991)

Published in Mad Hatters' Review, issue 10, 2008.

Working Numbers

A more expressive list than of my achievements is of the occupations of men I know. These are just some of them:

1. Er ist passiert.

2. Israeli, army, b. 1963, now residing in Vegas.

10. National Guardsman/salesman, Lieutenant Colonel, b. 1960.

<--- arryl="" moonie="" p="" the="">

3. Composer/musician, book and music dealer, b. 1950.

4. Curator of Doc Films, U of Chicago

5. Manic-depressive scholar named not after but coinciding with the name of a TV evangelist, howling porch

6. Married now and teaching, poet who suggested Houston, Irish balladeer

7. Archangel, Poet/songwriter/artist/musician/construction worker/historical renovation technician, b. 1956.

8. German ex-con tax evader last removed to Vegas

9. Poet/Brigham Young MBA, b. 1966.

11. Sports reporter, cookie ajar snatcher

12. Baby of the family, pot-smoking Hurricane Hugo watcher

13.Man with the long hair

14. Renaissance doctor, Mike

15. Hockey player/bookseller/radio broadcaster/teacher, b. 1956.

16. Jerome Washington, Right to Write

17.N.A. poet (what's that?)

18. lyric poet surrealist, fine featured

19. Working magazine writer

20. One-night wrong carpenter

21.Genius lost writer, successful professor

22. Iowa poet who brought me my 29th birthday

23.P.S. of 2 in Hoss Men, Garrison

24. Teacher of children missing one testicle due to cancer

<--- jungle="" out="" p="" run="" safety="" slip="" the="" through="" to="">

25. Bar founder

<--- gave="" p="" step="" th="" visitor="">

26. Novelist and literary critic

27. Royal Shakespeare Actor

34. Sculptor

35. Rock musician, b. 1960.

Construction foreman, b. 1954.

44. Radio talk show host, b. 1950.

45. Motorcycle salesman/photographer, b. 1956

Avant gardenist, b. 1957.

50. Millionaire/Poet, b. 1957.

51. Geography professor, b. 1950.

52. Pastor, b. 1949.

53. Professional foosball player/maintenance worker, b. 1968.

64. Where I belong

66. Guitar player, nurse anesthesticist
67. Baseball player

Of those, nos. 3, 15, 26, 35, 44, and 50 wanted to marry me. I wanted to marry 3, 7, 15, 35, 44, and 50. I should have asked 45 to marry me as my first proposal. I intend to copy down these numbers and use them for lotto. 45 and 35 got married later and divorced. 15 and the sculptor, I think, never got married. No. 9, the actor, and the foreman got and stayed married. 26, a novelist, told me much later, "If someone hasn't been married by 38, something is wrong with them." What was wrong with us -- no. 15 and me? We might have made a good, tall couple. What numbers go I?

(March 5, 2006, updated February 26, 2014)

Happiness in Love

Slightly different version posted December 11, 2007, 00:26:00 CST:

The wedding was to have taken place at the spout, at the fish mouth of the fountain, where the ice had stopped its tumble from the bubbler, that in summer entertained the old and the children and caused the others to look for pennies in their pockets and purses, pennies to cast to the feet of nudes. Parish priest passed over, the pastor was to have given the order of service and the man, the groom, a handsome daredevil of rectitude, was to have given his hand to the woman, the bride, the statuesque caregiver of whispers. G. had had this in mind the entire time, asking how does this? wearing white mink for winter, before supper. Given savings. The running arm of love of one man for one woman who saves him, each day mattering a little more than the next, each day mattering a little more than the last. Each day mattering more than the thirst. How in this loving matter only loving matters. The man, the woman, the footpath. The lovers heard early in the morning at their water. Pouring water for coffee from the tap. Arriving graciously, cautiously, warily, safely to nest. Talk of love on the phone. It was an easy conversation. The love was a bumper crop. The love was coming out noodles through the receiver. He loved her more than he had ever loved anyone. His happiness was complete. She let him more than she had ever let anyone love her. The happiness was a tablecloth for a picnic. The happiness was the carpet in the hallway. The happiness was the wall behind the painting. The happiness was the sky behind the cloud. The happiness was the seating in the Saab. The happiness was the carrier, the weekend, the chimes. The happiness was not among the people or women who were to have witnessed it, who could not be clear about or without it, who were in it, whose own happiness was phrased in book order—she, her happiness was to have been a seal within eternity, in the Wednesdays of life.

Cock Rock at Maple

Posted November 1, 2007

Autumn Kilt: 2 weeks earlier

Posted November 1, 2007

Waylaid (1999)

Friday, March 23, 2007, 05:31:00 CDT:

Examples of fears I live with: You are a traveler. When I returned to my hometown, I started going to A.A. This was preprogrammed in me by a therapist who due to her religious background tried to require it of everyone in her clinical office who drank. I had been asked to go to a therapist due to “bipolar disorder,” something I was told I had though I didn’t have mood swings—rapid, horizontal thoughts followed by slow reactions. I had vertical liftoffs and low electrolytes. At its peak, I felt like a helium balloon that had stopped at the ceiling in my living room and drifted downward but did not deflate.

When you first learn of bipolar or other mental disorders, you are hit: The doctor believes you have a major mental illness for which there is no test or cure. Later, you realize more. Therapists make money, doctors do, pharmaceutical companies do. With one or two strikes against one and credits easily erased, could I—could anyone—emerge not-parked from that economic-underground-airport-tunnel system? Having friends helps, but what if you have low-balling, Hollywood-style friends? What if you or your friends have moved?

A.A. presupposes that newcomers to the group have done bad things to other people. They think it makes a better story instead of a worse one. On the whole, my life, as only I could have known it, defied drinking stereotypes. It had pleased me in remarkable ways. Once you agree to begin A.A., it is expected that you will stay amongst them for life. Here, except for pockets in the Midwest, people in general are TV-heads who rarely read except self-help and who show little appreciation for the arts.

There, meaning South, my drinking (mostly beer) was in the spirit of friendship. We went to an evening actor’s bar that was not violent and not a pick-up joint. Actors met there after rehearsal. There was a pool table, a jukebox, lit candles on small tables. No one had a car accident until once. Hardly anyone was stopped by police. I went there too often: That was what I had done. Worse, I didn’t know it might be lowbrow to go out more often than my friends or to go out alone. My friends didn’t know that my therapist disallowed boyfriends except hers. She expected me to desert my life for 12-Step rec rooms even before anyone had introduced cocaine. Celibacy was her idea of birth control, something we had had excellent instruction in as teenagers at the teen clinic where I had lived. I didn’t suspect her of these subtexts, but I felt vaguely defiant. I didn’t feel like watching TV after a day of grading papers and writing. In that mix of sports and religion, TV was what there was of virtue. I thought bars were nicer.

There were a few other “wrongs,” depending on how far A.A. wanted to take it. I had ever had sex without being married. Some of the A.A.s were having divorced “sober sex.” One of those, a self-regarding sex goddess and mother of two Asian-American children, had started dating a retired African-American football player while still married to her Chinese doctor husband. She had a friend in Hollywood, whose publicity photo she flashed at women’s dinners while urging sex on everyone. I believed her coaxing us was healthy, and she needed a team to keep her culturally challenging life as a single mom going; besides me, her team were single moms without teams. She was a realtor, who, like lawyers, made money at divorce. I was not a landowner. At first they pitied me for it. Later, they wanted to skewer me for it. Sex, as I realized not without embarrassment, was the privilege of divorced landholders. The group’s few marrieds slept in separate rooms.

Outside the story: my feminist approval of the realtor as a woman in business; my later sense of her pretense as Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct; my feelings of friendship for her and the other members of the group; my affair with a man whose wife had suggested it, who was herself, as I left out then, attracted to black men; his later decision to have children with a woman who was next in the group; my caretaking propensity for alcoholics, heightened after I left the meetings fully programmed; my failure to find other or paid work. (Writing is not work.)

The women, including me and except the sex goddess, had fallen to domestic violence. Those women were fat. Violence, including spiritual violence, was protected in the A.A. meeting. The men were universally passive about reports of it, and the women tried to be serene. I started to realize that the schisms between sex and sex and violence had contained hypocrisies related to being Catholic or to inter-religion, when I tried to leave. Without relapsing, I had a serious breakdown in my isolation. Many of my friends had been Catholic, and I had left myself little place to turn. My best friend, speaking long distance, called me a loser. She and her boyfriends—numerous and simultaneous—would be more successful and married. Her drinking would not lead to A.A.

When people demand a bad story, one with murders and suicides in it, ordinary sinners who had liked church as I had, might feel caught as under a lamp. I postulated that in our places, Jews and Catholics had been like the ink on the page, the words, the lines. Protestants had been like the spaces, the paper, the page. Protestants watched in the setting but not each other in the setting—we got to the point of staring straight ahead—quiet and forgetting to tell the story to our page. We were sheets. Some of us were trees that fell in the woods. We would tell the middle of the story, stories about purpose and the quiet in life, about age, about the long span between birth and death. They would tell stories about birth and death. They—?—would live well day to day, even happily, and had many friends, but nothing compared in pleasure to the day the switch came, a day to ditch friends.

My writing teacher wrote that the Holocaust (what I thought of) is not the only or not necessarily “the disaster” in Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster. I learned from attending A.A. that recovery from A.A. is never possible.

A woman feels burdened to spend an hour with her friend since they are not men. Now, to write that with all the artistic command of language I ever thought I’d had.

Appears in slightly different form July 8, 2011 and April 20, 2014 at Fictionaut

WπHπAπT 1

Monday, November 3, 2008, 04:37:00 CST:

I've had email problems recently so don't know if my last email reached you. I had asked what if anything you both felt was new re: prosetics volume since I scoured the web in 2001. An answer to my question came today in the form of Biting the Error, an anthology from 2004 from the editors of Narrativity where I had posted a query in 2001. You probably already know this. I read several reviews of the book, and it seems the New Narrative, begun in CA in the 1970s, was a retort to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers (excuse me for omitting equal signs); its practitioners by extension today are sometimes queer and transgendered and for some of them, the goal is sex writing. The sex of writing. On sex writing, more in a moment. About LGBT, there's little on the web about transgendered wo/men, and by that I do not mean wo/men who wish to become the other sex surgically nor who believe themselves to have been born the other sex or transvestites. I mean transgendered as in transgressed, to the point of not feeling membership in one's own or the other gender -- or perhaps gender transcended --personally or aesthetically. On sex, what more is there to say about American censorship? I write sex fairly well, and could, perhaps should, but it isn't what I was thinking about censorship -- elitism, politics, aesthetics, beliefs, competition -- when I was thinking it in the early 90s. I went to ebr and started reading archives, something I hadn't done in a while. There has been quite a lot of new scholarship on postmodernist writing practices among African-American writers. That I'd followed in the form of African-American modernism or post- by definition. I'm at this point thinking there's less reason to do an anthology of essays unless we have something "other" to add to the argument that personal cultural marginalization creates/demands formal experimentation. It -- experimental -- has been defined as marginalization for now. Linearity is reportedly a bugaboo in Biting the Error, and according to one detractor, the book doesn't pin down what fails whom why -- writer/reader -- when and when not, in "linear" narration. I don't know if you saw Zadie Smith's dismissal of postmodernism in the recent NYR of B – postmodernism has concluded as a limited experiment, she writes. I see much more than she to love about writers such as Swift and Barthelme and Borges and Calvino and Lorrie Moore, and in the shorter fiction forms. There are hidden topics -- one is failure, either of the artist to create significant art -- to claim or suggest aesthetic or other marginalization as a limitation unrelated to that -- or for the art to fail to succeed with a wider audience. And commercial issues. WπHπAπT is the change in language practices that people are wary of or unable to control or define, especially in terms of prose/fiction? Defined as: Style, design as opposed to form, though "formal" creeps into usage, as in "formal innovation." Even as "etiquette." Dismissed as "voice." But look, a writer I met here who wrote a memoir of her family is teaching experimental writing around the country. It's not based on how she writes but perhaps on whom she likes socially or whom she reads. I read another roster of names of professors of experimental writing -- one I went to school w/ who wrote in the modernist and Southern traditions – yet whose practice pieces read like he was imitating Mark Twain. That was young or early, a difference. I imitated, too, one writer per story, for 12 stories –- I’m guessing -- including Barthelme after he had died, like a daughter impersonating a father. Prose inventors. Prose inventions. Inventions in prose. We could invent a litmus test for that and explicitly declare what it is. Or not.

I wrote too soon that I could get financing. I am more solvent than in 2001. I'm caring for a nasty alcoholic day and night and meeting many people while befriending few -- I can't easily use the phone at home because he's so often ranting unprintables. The computer is supposed to be off-limits, but I prevail and use it, anyway amid a hailstorm of accusations that using a computer is the real mental illness & that bipolar is fake. A din. A stinking and loud place. He must be the “producer.” Am possibly moving possibly an hour faster than here on the Hudson -- details pending. Not to a man, for a man nor myself a man.

I'm working here w/ a Stanford Ph.D. who thought of everything 7 years after my frame of reference though she's 7 years older than I. Stanfords apparently don't believe in cw as training and have tons of academic cw credits and credits w/ the non-academic poetic community. To the point now of thinking that the only point is to write as well as I can.

WπHπAπT 2 at Fictionaut, July 24, 2012: http://fictionaut.com/stories/ann-bogle/w%CF%80h%CF%80a%CF%80t-2

Ms. Sandman

Sunday, January 21, 2007, 23:49:00 CST

Dear Dr. M.,

It was women, finally. RB was my teacher in Houston. She had built a reputation as a novelist, which she cared about more than the reputation she had built as a feminist. When she was my teacher, she wrote a “blockbuster” turned into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson, but it wasn’t a story I cared about: a perfect white upper-middle-class family to whom one bad thing takes place and the ensuing complications -- what they lose. In reality, RB was [sophisticated and] a down-to-earth earth mama type I personally liked. She had a little shrimp of a husband who was good to her and an educator in his own right, though not a professor, an educator of high school students, and two grown daughters, who had, naturally, all made good decisions in life.

Our student group were seen as people who had almost all come from bad families. The school picked the handful of perfect cheerleaders who had grown up -- we were ten years past high school -- and promoted them to careers as poets and writers. The rest of us they duped, paid us a pittance to work 60-hour weeks and left it at that. Economics is so very important to my discussion.

We were taught, via United Church of Christ and in our early Presbyterianism (as children), that we have one life -- not many, not karma (which is from Hinduism and should not be correlated to Christianity), not afterlives, though there is an afterlife. In our tradition, afterlife was “transcendence and light” and hell was “exile from God.” "Transcendence" meant without bodies, as did "exile." Soul was elemental to worship; spirit meant harmony in the beauty and peace of nature. My religious, yet private inner interpretations were good for me as a child, not harmful. Religion becomes even more important later, since it is more likely to include rather than to exclude people, as employment excludes.

Class is an issue. Those who knew where they wanted to find themselves later had boasted -- your father was a lawyer; Leni’s was land rich; Rona would marry -- and planned accordingly. I had not boasted about all the professions that were in my extended family: my father a corporate microbiologist, teachers, farmers, dentist, chemist, photographer, woman physicist, psychiatrist, business woman, women-behind-the-men, behind the women and children, news broadcaster for Time-Life, and the others. Little financial help came from home due to my mother’s tight rein on finances.

No one encouraged me otherwise: I needed to earn a low wage to survive. You and Leni saw yourselves as the rich girls in the group and didn’t help us psychologically toward survival. Men needed us to be lower than they. The men I knew were not prospering financially, often, but were in the arts. I was not raised to “marry for money,” either, so it did not occur to me to try to do so -- I gave all of it away -- help especially -- for free and got little help in exchange. I had to file for bankruptcy. Rich men I met later wanted to be patriarchal toward me, and I was and am resistant to that, still.

If even one person had known me better: my mother, my father, you, Rona, Leni, other friends, Barry -- someone might have learned that I had wanted to major in comparative literature, not in English, and not in English THREE TIMES, but no one did know me well enough, and there were no academic advisors at any of the schools I attended except at Binghamton, and my “advisor” there was not paid to be an advisor; she just was one, my professor in Shakespeare and creative writing, since it was needed, and she realized it. That degree (M.A.) was my favorite.

These were all mistakes -- not knowing even one person who knew me was a mistake, one you had not detected, and you were likely the most astute (about the psyches of other people) of all the people I had met up to that point, perhaps still. No one taught me to pursue what I wish, what I most want. I did that in terms of sexuality, because that was taught -- to define our sexualities -- but we were not taught to define ourselves outside of sexuality and writing.

It is gay, another gay thing, that gay men have sexuality, and no one else, almost no one else, does. Women are not allowed to have their own sexuality, still; it always creates cataclysms and judgment if she does. And most men are conformists and fetishize the women’s bodies and demand that they be crafted and petite and free of body hair, heads dyed blond. Or else they are VERY mean, indeed.

It is still my sexuality, to be with a man, and I stick to it. The ex-Catholics involved with giving therapy turned that into an illness, one treatable at 12-step groups: heterosexuality. They have no message for me. Those "doctors" were supposed to be nuns and nurses, so they became high-paid “therapists” instead and converted each drive inside someone to illness, disregarding sin and traditional teachings unless it came from other world religions. I do not place you in their group as a therapist because your training was so extensive by comparison to theirs -- they really had none in us nor we in them -- but they are supposed to supervise us.

None of them knows a thing about employment. They ought to be held accountable for leaving their religion so sloppily, for insisting on a privilege system that doles out joy and families and physical comforts and appropriate work to the few, while reserving great swaths of bad life for the many. It is not something that is supposed to be able to happen to trained people -- more trained than they are -- yet it does.

Father-time

Sixth post at Ana Verse,  Friday, January 20, 2006, 02:13:00 CST

For about four years, between 1987 when I wrote a 120-page novella, and 1991, when I wrote a 300-page literary opus that dealt in God, Hamlet, Oedipus, and a shielded version of my love life and that clinged to my deepest desire to love and respect humanity, I suspected that I might have been molested as a child by my father. The suspicion was fearsome at first; nonetheless, I quickly accepted it as an excusable aspect of family life. I was much more ferocious on the subject of adult male violence against women who were too trusting of them. After I was attacked in my apartment, I asked my father, in near hysteria, whether he had done such a thing. "No," he said emphatically, an answer I have upheld to this day. I was too beside myself to tell him about the recent attack, out of a different sort of worry or fear. My father was a good but not a rich man, a microbiologist not a doctor, a churchgoer not a Jew or an atheist, a WWII army veteran who stayed in the US while his cousin was shot down over France. We were living in holocaustal times, just following the first US attack on Iraq. That nervous, yet important exchange, not the best and fortunately not the last in what had been a dear father-daughter interest, was not on record.

Six months later, when two fellow graduate students took me to a psychiatric "hospital" in west Houston, no one mentioned false or blocked memory theory, but I was drugged. The woman graduate student was a Republican from southern California and told me it was CIA. I had worried intently that the graduate students at the school I attended were document thieves and village copiers, and to some extent, I know that they were kids; a few of them were wonder kids.

I realized, but not in time to save my own or his life by thought or deed, that the block or difficulty was my own in living in our times. No one I knew deserved my love or trust, except my touchingly humble father and a very small and unrelated group of good souls I had had the positive fortune to know. Instead, I had trusted too many for too little reason. I had given too much ear, when less ought to have been required. I had withheld my dislike too often. I had learned to be a minor to every major whiner around. Life might have kept its curve had I cultivated my heart and not only my mind.

What is a blog? What is a bogle?

First post at Ana Verse,  Monday, January 16, 2006, 10:14:00 CST.

What is a blog? What is a bogle? What is a day off from doing nothing? From "nothing doing." What is a sun sign? What is a moon? What is a tsunami? What is a fraction? What is caring disorder? My favorite therapists (of eleven) were one, Murray, M.D. (adjustment disorder & suburban housewife neurosis at 17 -- there were violent boys in our neighborhood who had enacted domestic abuse against me, perhaps as witnessed in their houses and about which few could actually afford to care since the alternative in education terms would seem to have been boys' schools all over again); four, Ms. Siebert, MSW (who resembled a happy, well-adjusted suburban housewife and mother herself and who served as a mother for me in urbania); five (Dr. Hall, a terrific male psychologist who gave no diagnosis but who suggested something my adorable friends got later -- a longer form of psychoanalysis intended for writers and artists), six (a psychiatric resident named Griff who refrained from diagnosing after a domestic assault, even though I told her that that plus writing were causing me to feel uncharacteristically religious); eight (Susan K., MSW); nine, (my all-time favorite, Deb Otto, MSW) and eleven (Dr. Honebrink, Ed. D.). Total years in therapy: Exactly eight. My worst therapist was number 10, Daniel Carlson, M.Div. He mocked me for wearing nice clothes into the city and wanted me to list every lousy person I had ever met, something I refused to do. My seventh therapist, in retrospect, was Micki Fine, M.Ed.

Micki acquired me after Dr. Alan Hurwitz had diagnosed me with bipolar disorder in 1991. Religion and writing were related to mental illness, afterall. I had hoped I had just been hungry. Micki diagnosed me with PTSD right off, as if she were in a little quarrel with psychiatry. For three years, she got me to go faintly where I did my work, and she sneered at what I did for play: visit a quiet actors' bar. When I got a boyfriend three years later, she diagnosed me with a need for five twelve-step groups (AA, Alanon, Sex Addicts, Co-Sex Addicts, and Coda). My Ph.D. was toward English not toward chastity. She might have said to me, as my boyfriend's mother had said to him, 'You're not an alcoholic; you're a friendoholic." Or, "You sure are attracted to Catholics, aren't you?" But she didn't say that. My Catholic drinking friend, who had the same therapist, had five boyfriends, not five 12-step diseases. She was without diagnosis beyond having had a violent dad, her PTSD dating back to childhood; other writers we knew, gay or straight, had what is usually termed by the uninterrupted as "lovers." Love to the Catholic clinician sounded like a lifelong disease in certain men and women who are unauthorized to have it with members of the opposite sex.

Many years have flown by since, many of them without my active participation. Without meaning to or wanting to, I have ''achieved" eight years of adult celibacy; the only good one of those was my first in sobriety. My pelvic area aches for interior toning, for massage. I have dull-looking skin and my muscles look like loners. Micki was wrong about love and sex being only for the designated or the few and to speak of them as unnecessary.

Almost everyone we knew was wrong about beer. Whereas before, I had accepted the general definition of alcoholic as someone who drinks a lot of beer, I now know it to be a mixed determination. In fact, I now know that beer drinkers are better people, even if they do run into aches and groans associated with their favorite form of sour dough. True, they're likely poorer people, but the men are more handsome. The women are a little swelly, perhaps, and may run an occasional sinus infection, but isn't it better to drink a few beers than to pill-pop (as if for recreation), to let her get a little braggy in her laugh now and then, her teeth a little bucked, than to brand her a bad mother when she isn't even a mother and wasn't one and will not now be one, despite a furious insistence on who she was as a person (I was a native Minnesotan Swedish/English/Scottish American Protestant young writer!) and a glorious capacity to reproduce still? Ice cold milk, milk with ice in it for me, then. Rounds.

The Cool Report

August 3, 2006

another girl to figure out (2)

no reason to break here/

want to tell her kinship to it

blue save them walked past

phone legs of dead Lady

black woman save them

victim standing just inside

betrayed her gray cherry

comfortable guilty long name

configuration of all mother

beautiful shades of protective

touches head lay nose whites

know French therapy bill

college man strong enough

August 3, 2006

In a message dated 8/3/06 2:05:45 AM Central Daylight Time, talan@ORG writes:

I do apologize for forwarding those emails. That it went off list was
disturbing, which motivated me to forward them to the list.

Again, I apologize.

Apologize

I've been thinking about this for a day or two. I wondered whether to tell my boyfriend about it -- that people had gone abusive on one of my email lists -- that c was in use and mfa. That I called men a b. I am a mfa, afterall, a master of fine arts. Which my boyfriend isn't. I did ask him what he thought about Mel Gibson going wacko upon his dui arrest, and he said he didn't have time to think about Mel Gibson. We were looking at the fields near his house. We went to a county fair with rides and livestock. The cattle were furious. I thought of their lives. They were angry men, basically, slated to be killed and eaten. His little boys, 3 and 5, were having fun on the rides.

There was and is a lot of bad language around town. We heard it on the 4th. The girls were saying, f me baby, f me in the butt. Who talks that way? A whole group of kids.

So for now, I just forget about it.

I think Mel Gibson should have called a producers' meeting after The Passion of the Christ, once he was rumored to be an anti-semite, then had a press conference about it. Instead of blowing up later upon arrest.

At our school, the gist was that sexism and even misogyny were acceptable or at least tolerable. I liked that school least of all my schools. At the other ones, none of the ism's was acceptable or tolerable, and we had these noticeable gaps: like not enough black students in our courses.

August 2, 2006

In a message dated 8/2/06 12:21:56 PM Central Daylight Time, tsavagebar@COM writes:

If you wake up every two or three hours, you may have sleep apnea. ... You should see a sleep specialist if you think this might be the case.

Today I went to the office of my Lebanese psychiatrist. There was a pamphlet in the waiting room warning parents about a practice called "pharming" -- the young people are buying rxs without rxs over the internet and taking them for recreation. This is really too bad that drugs are so everywhere. I really think "drugs finance wars," but the connections are mysterious (of course). I am working on helping a very good public speaker who was a drug addict try to help combat addiction at the school level. We are making some progress that way. And I knew a wonderful American exec. in Japan who quit drinking (saki) who now helps meth addicts in Oregon -- what a strange world. But I'm sure he's very good at it, enlightened. There was another article in the doc's office about snoring. If you snore, it could be sleep apnea. Thanks for recommending that anyone with sleep issues get them checked.

August 2, 2006

another girl to figure out

no reason to break here

want to tell her kinship to it

blue save them walked past

phone legs of dead Lady

black woman save them

standing just inside

betrayed me gray cherry

guilty long name

configuration of all mother

beautiful shades of protective touches

head lay whites

nose know French

therapy bill college

man gone me

strong enough heart

August 2, 2006

It gets better after this... all back channel of course...

On Wed, 2 Aug 2006 02:08:13 EDT
AnnBogle1@COM wrote:
>In a message dated 8/2/06 12:55:03 AM Central Daylight Time,
>talan@MEMMOTT.ORG writes:
>
>
>> On Tue, 1 Aug 2006 22:48:57 -0700
>> "August" wrote:
>> >fuck u cunt
>>
>
>you crowded bitch.

Re: Forward these remarks pussy ass:

At 11:28 PM -0700 8/1/06, Talan Memmott wrote:
>Since August seems to think this is COOL!,
>I am forwarding...
>his latest, greatest work!
>
>
>
>On Tue, 1 Aug 2006 23:25:47 -0700
> "August" wrote:
>>Forward these remarks u straight-up ho:
>>
>>
>>Ya better run boy
>>i'll dump a shell in your chest
>>
>>keep it very cool
>>or i will bury you
>>
>>u are not hot
>>i've got the top spot
>>and it will not stop
>>
>>mother-fucker, this is personal
>>
>>you're a bitch and straight-up ho
>>
>>fake-ass bitch
>>
>>i mean this and i said this
>>
>>i'll take u to the streets and get gangster with it

August 2, 2006

Progress Report

There is a drug made in Japan called ABILIFY. It is very expensive: $300 for a month's worth or more. I've tried that and other new anti-psychotics, and it's the best one (Geodon, Zyprexa, Seroquel are others); I like it better than those due to the fact that I experience no side-effects on it, just a little drowsiness. It feels, in other words, completely normal to be on it, yet I believe it has helped stabilize me physically when I couldn't do that on my own -- my weight was too low before I went on Abilify. It doesn't actually make me stop thinking on the dose I take (10 mg.), but I bet if you took a higher dose, you might be able to quiet rowdy thought. I have profoundly mixed feelings about med's, especially due to my recent realization that the med's probably finance world war, and I'm against war, and the med's could hurt your liver and kidneys -- though mine are still fine, but I also went three years without being able to stabilize myself or my own weight without a low-dose tranq. Without anti-dep's, my brain turns to a pile of vegetable peels in the sink. This is all very sad. I used to be just fine without any medications.

How did I end up back on Wryting-L? I had unsubscribed then all of a sudden I'm getting posts again. That's all right. I'll read the list for a while.

Good wishes.

July 28, 2006

Cool

I wrote short stories steadily until 1991, at the advent of the Gulf War, and would have continued, certainly -- one of the war stories from '91, "What Kiss," was published in '93 in Gulf Coast -- except that a boyfriend of three months assailed me and threatened me on an answering machine tape then took a position in my department, despite a kind of quiet protest coming from my corner. It is, I think, obvious how hard it would be to protest anything successfully. The upshot for me was that my relationship with my own writing was threatened, never to return to the steady flow I had enjoyed with it. I have only written two short stories since then but have written other things. My weblog is a notebook of mixing genres, something I was pioneering then, in '91.

At a party at school, our "head of class," not the best writer nor the worst, a gal, really, announced to my table that my voice was glamorous and that my friend was cool. We are still in this condition. She is cool; my voice is kind of nice or sweet.

My writing voice, however, is male, often, authoritative, sometimes.

I would make a reading tape, but I don't have audio on my pc.

Popular

We were popular in 4th grade, that group of girls, and then I was again at 25 (up to 25 more childish attacks had threatened my becoming) -- and then again at 35. By 35, I was only popular in AA.

It was very strange and happy to meet up with someone (the Jewish man) who had had a poem published in The New Yorker when he was only 19 in a rec room in a little side town in AA. He had lived for 18 years as an international business exec. in Japan and was then 50. His wife had vetoed a poetry career. I couldn't agree with her decision. He was really a very wonderful friend and knowledgeable about literature and religion and not in any way a cw program man. He was intending to write fantasy now that he was divorcing. I'd like to know when I think about it -- if cool is what he was. He was more mature and well-liked. He gave the impression of being someone who had taken the stairs down fifty flights away from a downsizing; then there was nothing corporate for him to do here in the U.S., our nation’s logic. I think he was more cool upon reflection.

Even if he did not like my friend, the Jewish woman in our group, I was her ally; I was his, too. (I think it worried him that someone might try to matchmake them since both were divorcing, and I could see it not working that way, since he was more conservative and she was more reform.) Then he left town to take a job, and the group got really horrid without him there. It was like a Tarrantino movie with lots of death.

One night when she wasn't there I stood up for her and was hit, at my car, and the police interrogated me after I called them.

July 27, 2006

Error on Ron Silliman's Blog

This mislinking at Silliman's weblog has led me to read something from the voice of an outsider, for a change, and I'm glad of it, even though Carlo Parcelli mostly steps on toes in his piece. The prose, instead of seeming too strange to read, strikes me as being strong -- it's some sort of lit. crit. tapdancing -- and reminds me of reading at Baraka's website. I was impressed by such extended use of analogy throughout a lengthy essay even if it does rely on outsider terminology. It is so thorough in its dismissal of so many writers: Perhaps IT is supposed to be a seminal critique. John Gardner's ON MORAL FICTION, though certainly polite, stepped on toes, too, albeit a different set than this does. And it goes to show that no matter how politely one goes about it, it is a difficult thing to suggest bias. Remember that Gardner chose Guy Davenport as one of the best writers then living, while simultaneously dismissing many of the fashionable crowd of the day (1982?).

July 26, 2006

“House Nigga and Field Nigga” (Flashpoint) by Carlo Parcelli:

Paraphrase: by terms of Parcelli’s essay, I myself am a paranoid field nigga who reads mentally stable house niggas most. You might say that is a good thing, too. Sometimes I do read a fellow yellow field nigga or, better yet, a red free nigga (I wish he had given a fuller bibliographic list of those). In fact, workshop consists in reading field niggas' work. One or two of those will advance from the barn to the house. The rest will leave the barn and go back out to the field, temporarily stoked on field niggas' fallible styles and untested awareness, to try to survive reading life outside comfortable halls and rooms.

This might seem too rude to mention: an alcoholic man actually called me a "niggy" once because I'd been cleared out of AA for trying to stand by a Jewish mom in there who was getting evicted from her real house and torn away from custody of her daughters by her ice-cream-scarfing, woman-hating, fat dreck of a husband from Wyoming. Standing up for someone who is in the right, against public resistance, is the opposite of selling out. Weird thing is, later, there really is no world outside of AA -- by house masters' terms -- poetic AAs want in the house, too; and there are only a few places for ex-barn fallows like us to shelter. May go ask the fox.

It's understood that pharmaceutical co's have picked up in U financing where the Cold War trickle down left off, but I wouldn't have known that in 1991.

June 29, 2006

Economic Messages

This just in from "Absolute Resolutions Corp": a balance due of $48.54, passed on to ARC by CIRCA POETRY, another debt management concern. I owe them for a hardcover copy of TOUCH OF TOMORROW, published by The International Library of Poets, that featured my poem, "Florence's Weekend" on the first page. I signed off permission for another poem "It's the end of a cycle" without requesting a copy of that volume, THE BEST POEMS AND POETS OF 2005.

I decided to try vanity press with my first ever published poems due to the fact that I was avoiding giving the appearance of competing with MFA and PhD poets I had gone to graduate school with in Houston. They had known me as a short story writer and somewhat hasty essayist (most of the writers there wrote VERY slowly).

With the help of a friend, I had paid off a pile of my bills one year: it equalled six years worth of hefty interest, medical costs, clothes from Target, toiletries, other incidentals, etc. The cards charged off ("R9") on the indeterminate day before my friend and I paid the tab. That means in credit terminology, the banks (6 of them) took a tax write off because my payments were seven months late, then on the following day the banks received their payment in full, including nasty "legal fees" not needed to collect from me. My credit rating is still too low due to the R9s even to rent an apartment, though I owed nothing. This is a far cry from where my credit was ten years after I started as a worker; still, there's little I can do except write letters to the bureaus. I’m feeling proud that I have wrecked my credit further due to a poem.

The job I had from Feb. to June of this year I gave to the next person, without being fired, for my near-catatonic inability to get out of the car and go into the stores where I was scheduled to start gathering retail data. My boss and supervisor were nice beyond compare when I told them I was suffering a fear of leaving my car. Agoraphobia -- fear of the marketplace -- fear of open spaces. I was earning much needed extra income from that job. The boss was so nice, in fact, he invited me to call back in August when I might feel a little better. What caused my near inability to leave my car? It isn't poetry, but it might be writing-related.

Google Adsense disabled my account due to my invalid clicks but left these blank patches on my weblog where the ads for how to blog used to be. I wrote to THEM, too, and told them that many of my readers are sophisticated bloggers themselves, more sophisticated than I, who will not click on ads for how to blog. I learned that Google was getting paid at least $1 for each of those, yet I was getting paid closer to a penny a day. I see that my friend, Robin Reagler, advocates for wonderful poetry books at her weblog, Big Window. That's for the best.

June 24, 2006

Praise to Vernon Frazer for his letter.

Thanks to mIEKAL aND for asking, "how many potato peelers and window washers are there on this list?"

Hats to Ken Wolman, a fellow SUNYionian.

Regards to the writer on SSI, the winner who worked as a custodian, and all those who write because they say they have to and feel that economic questioning, necessity, and reality make for reasonable debate.

Quite a number mentioned scamming; one man at his weblog quoted my letter headed by the statement that I ought to be smacked.

Women on the list are apparently unconcerned with how to earn $10,000 per year, which is both a good indicator and for some reason not good for my morale.

After jobhunting every fall for eight years, I got an offer to teach in China. I adored the man who offered me the job. He said he liked my credentials and c.v. I reflected about what was listed there: the courses I had taken, including women writers and modernism, but not only: 40 courses and seminars in English alone, covering three degrees, German proficiency, creative writing, and liberal arts. I didn't go to China, however. I would have gone there in debt wearing their clothing. I was afraid to owe even $4,000 (what I still owe) living overseas.

So, again, if I get up to solvency, options I don't have now might open up, but it has been a very long haul. My health is good. The unemployment started at age 32.

No one suggested, as they did in chunking out the community college jobs in Houston: women can just get married. Considering that those men were looking for heiresses and lawyers to marry themselves, I don't know which men they thought might marry us: creative writers making $3,000 per semester teaching four nights a week.

This crazy geographer I went on a date with -- he told me, among other things that he is a Marxist, that I am "too thin for farm life," that he had been his family's breadwinner, that his wife stayed at home until the divorce then became a well-paid R.N. He said he had never met another woman like me in comparable financial circumstances -- I am seemingly set in a comfortable house in a beautiful part of the metro area but am staggeringly poor. He had had to refinance his farm when his wife wanted to go her separate way, and it left him feeling against the community property law in his state. He needs a housekeeper and told me to be a waitress after I had sent him my c.v. He said there was someone teaching English at his U who couldn't speak English. ETC.

One of my brainstorms has been to study housekeeping. You who do are smart to teach reading -- I used to do that and liked it better than teaching writing. If someone were to teach house cleaning locally, I would sign up. To be really good and content at that would possibly get me somewhere.

It makes me uncomfortable that so many people I know (three?) know Bush but no one I know knows the Clintons, Gores, Kerrys or Wellstones.

June 22, 2006

Dear bloggers and visitors to blogs,

What about advertising? I am not presently in a position to have sit-down (face-to-face) conversations with other bloggers, but I have done a little reading. I recently signed up for Adsense with Google. On my first day, I clicked on my own ads so many times, I temporarily shut down a little church website on how to blog. I felt stunned and horrible for doing so; then I read the policies and learned that clicking on my own ads is strictly prohibited. Nonetheless, I earned $40 that day, which lasted 15 hours, a little better than $2 per hour. Yesterday, I followed policy closely and earned just under $3 for the whole day. Today I have earned zip. Also yesterday, I ate a rather lousy sandwich that cost $34. How could it have cost so much? The beers (I drank almost 3 Coronas since they didn't have Rolling Rock) cost $5 each. My friend's Miller Lites cost $4. How could beer cost that much? How could advertising on my website cost so little? My blogging days tend to run long. I usually stay at it on a simple day for three hours, a harder day for ten. If I were earning $10/hour for advertising, I would be content and also would feel nicely employed. That would equal $240 per day.

$250 per classroom hour is what our least-well paid teachers at U of Houston were earning. Each made $18,000 for the semester s/he taught one undergraduate and one graduate workshop. It was one of those teachers who regarded me as one of the best writers currently in attendance at the school. Not best I would have thought since I am a Democrat. We were earning $21 per contract hour to teach and grade undergraduates 15 hours per week. Typically, I put in 30 hours -- we had 54 students apiece -- so undercut my own pay by half in order to do a more thorough job grading student papers. Today, I would be very lucky indeed if an organization offered to pay me at graduate school wages.

In Minnesota, where I have lived for ten years, pay is usually $10 per hour, up from $7.50 ten years ago. Those jobs require a high school diploma. Housing and food have gone up dramatically. Much teaching here is done on a voluntary basis. It may be possible to win more than a p-t class or two and therefore earn more than $4,000 per year. To tutor, which I prefer, I need to advertise. I need to wait to do so until the school year starts.

I am hoping to earn $10,000 per year that I now lack, and this has been true for seven years running. Creative writing as an enterprise is leaving me feeling genuinely put out and fatigued. I have so far foregone $400,000 in earnings due to having chosen to study cw as a field, and that number is only going to go up. I am dependent on the government for health insurance and family for sustenance.

My informal rank at Wisconsin, by Lorrie Moore, was top 2 or 3 then in attendance as an undergraduate; at SUNY-Binghamton, it was 1 going in, based on writing sample. At Houston, I got the fiction fellowship going in. Politically and aesthetically I was a little left and a little offbeat.

I would like to hear from anyone who has figured out a good way to earn $10,000 per year. I have had 30 jobs and don't really want just another one.

June 21, 2006

re: feminists with low-cut blouses

In a message dated 6/21/06 8:48:59 AM Central Daylight Time,

sumaurer@COM writes:

> marfa and austin

W'assup with Marfa? (That's pussy backwards in Texas.)

I was the sixth of seven editors, the last only a man, who worked for J.B. Poindexter after my graduation in '94 from U of Houston cwp on an account of a ranch he had renovated near Marfa. The account was Mr. Poindexter's own, a fascinating and already-well-written tale about llamas and hand-cut adobe. I did the editing work without ever visiting the ranch. The rooms in the b & b went for $400 per night. He met me sometimes in the kitchen of my little garage apartment, with the full light coming in on four sides, to go over the editing changes; sometimes in his palatial condominium just outside the 610 Loop; and sometimes in his office suite in a downtown skyscraper. The brass plaque outside the suite door read J. B. Poindexter, Corporate Raider. I was acting fanatical about use of the semi-colon, probably due to what C. Michael Curtis had written about the semi-colon, and C. Michael Curtis had liked some of my short stories in the 1980s. My phone rang at 8 a.m., and it would be Mr. Poindexter calling about a particular semi-colon in the 120-page document -- I had made liberal, but correct, use of them throughout the text, like sprinkling it with a minced bunch of Cilantro. How bizarre to hear a message about semi-colons from such a prosperous and busy man first thing in the morning; I had a new boyfriend, myself, and not one who'd pondered the use of the semi-colon much; he thought in songs himself. I earned $30 per hour for doing that good work.

May 26, 2006

Speak Then Read

What you never had

for your sorrow

for the work you do

Got you love enough

to be content?

Who but you

can argue for yourself?

I've got the troubles

of mine to suffer too.

We are in a boat alike

When we say yes

We are in a boat alike.

. . .

Speek den Reed

Wut ne had yoo

fore yer sarro

fore de work yoo doo

Gott yoo luv

eenuf fore to bee

cuntent?

hoo but yoo kan

argyoo fore yoreself

ai gott de trubbels uv

mine too suffer too

wee arr inn a bote alike

wenn wee say yess

wee arr inn a bote alike

(Madison, WI, 1982)

Irish Salad

Scandinavians settled in Minnesota because it resembles Scandinavia. This morning I vomited salad I ate last night at an Irish pub. The salad was called "chop chop." I paid $19 for the food and two beers. I met the owner, whom we help to become rich by our simple appetites. We were rich farmers from Scotland and Sweden. He is Irish but unlike other Irish people I know, Irish-American people, he is from Ireland and is red-headed and swarthy and muscular. He imported the mahogany bar from Ireland. I wish my simple appetites might feed two in our decision, instead of helping him if he's a tax-evader, like so many of the restaurateurs. Asian restaurants serve vegetables with love. Overnight, I felt drunk, as if headed for hangover, but I hadn't drunk enough alcohol to cause it. What caused it? Superstitions dialed in sleep. Today I was thick with religious devotion. I had thought about delicious corned beef and cabbage, not to be served at that public house on St. Patrick's Day. I wanted the Irish of Binghamton, the fire department, and the Irish of literature to comfort me. To avoid this unwanted drunkenness not caused by drinking. I was so balanced before it was revealed. Ladylike reserves be restored to me.

March 16, 2007

Subj:re:doing time ...

womyn in prison Date:1/16/06 8:01:05 AM Central Standard Time From: AMBogle2 To:Poetics Listserv

 

When one of my California friends got involved in getting archaic anti-sex laws off the books, I doubt she was concerned with or thinking of women in prison. She might have gone to jail herself at one time -- for reasons other than sex -- but it didn't go that way, thank goodness for her. On Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday in 2003 (three years ago), I went to jail for having drunk 5.5 beers on election night Nov. 5, 2002. The legal finding was that there had been no driving misconduct; I had driven well enough (my childhood friend and I had gone out to watch returns at a local pub), but I was stopped about 10:30 because one of my high beams was out for a quarter mile. The other headlights worked fine. My b.a.l. (blood alcohol level) turned out after three weeks of urine testing to be .12 or .02 over the legal limit. Besides the alcohol, they tested for the anti-depressants I told them they would find -- two of them -- plus lithium and an anti-seizure drug. I was in treatment for major as well as manic depression. According to the doctor, three drinks with food is all right, but I had drunk 5.5 beers with just an appetizer. The charge against me was aggravated gross misdemeanor and is likely to cause problems in finding employment, likely for good.

 

The jail, where I stayed for 48 hours, gave me enough information to write a 180-page book, something I resisted setting out upon due to the insult of it. The other women were staying longer than I was -- I had ankle bracelet to contend with at home; they were no longer in apartments and without a way to be on ankle bracelet. Martha Stewart said she preferred jail to ankle bracelet, but I preferred ankle bracelet. The ankle bracelet itself was like a plastic wrist watch that someone had cleverly clamped on above my foot, so my shoes could tell time. There was a box that looked like Darth Vader's helmet plugged in by my new phone line that would send out a red signal if I should try to leave. I could bathe and otherwise move about. I wore a sock under the bracelet to keep it from chafing. I never ended up leaving the house in eighteen days, so I was set free ten days early.

 

Those eighteen days gave me much less to think or worry about than the 48 hours in jail. I read two books while in jail, one was by Zora Neale Hurston about her visits to Haiti and Jamaica. She gives an amazing account of a wild boar hunt. If you get a chance to read hers next to Robert Stone's description of being in Mexico with Kesey and Kerouac and their wild boar, do. The food in jail was dreadful, so it was the next best thing to eating something really good to read of eating the boar with Zora. (The chicken a la king, however, was good, and so were the biscuits.)

 

It's sick that I could write a good long account of those 48 hours; I guess we'd agree to that. Two years later it was still bothering me that the women in the jail were not allowed lotion unless someone they knew brought it to them. There was an epidemic of dry skin, so dry that the women had visible sores. That would not help their chances in finding work and housing when they got out, and yet it was such a simple thing. I wanted to organize something, but I never go to bars -- it would be something for women who do go to bars to do -- sponsor a woman in jail by bringing a bottle of lotion to her.

 

A black woman in the TV room said: "The black women are here for crack and prostitution, the white women are here for drinking and driving. I'm here because I hit someone when I was pregnant." I took her to mean "punched," a cop, maybe. She had held an administrative post with a not-for-profit agency in Minnesota. A woman cop in North Minneapolis had hit a Jewish woman I knew in AA, looking for housing that could remind her of New York, for talking with the woman cop's boyfriend. I had a one-year sentence hanging over my head. Being locked in jail is worse than being locked in your own house. I hope it never has to happen again. It's sad that I have become such a recluse. I prevent ever having to go to jail again by rarely leaving the house and by rarely drinking -- by living in fear of authorities and local busybodies. With money, I would move to a decent city and out of the suburbs.

 

My California friend who was agitating for anti-sex laws off the books for gay men in Houston didn't think of this: How do the police know that the women are trading sex for drugs before they are arrested? Why aren't they simply arrested for possessing drugs?

 

Had I had sex prior to my arrest? Had they thought I had? I was carrying expired condoms in my car (how embarrassing!) -- and they did rip through the car later and throw everything around. My Louise Hay notebook was on the backseat. My head was wrapped in a large black muffler with a Harley Davidson patch on one end; the woman cop must have thought I was a Muslim in the dark of night, in my pre-dented blue Volvo 240 DL 1989, the way she looked at the flipped-over patch. I had voted for Democrats.

. . .

The 180-page version might include:

1. Paul Wellstone's plane crash in October 2002 shortly before the election, Norm Coleman's win.

2. My mother an election judge.

3. My absentee ballot misrouted and not counted in 2008.

4. My correspondence with the alcohol-beat reporter in Toledo, Ohio, a woman, the only reporter in the nation to cover ankle bracelet.

5. Inmates in the jail longer than nine days required to test for TB, not allowed to test if there for less than nine days. Tine test at my doctor.

6. Three-story barbed wire fence outside the window.

7. Hay mattress.

8. Inmates in line three times a day to get medications and see the nurse.

9. The nude, calisthenic, rectal search (and roadside ballet wearing sueded French black lace bell bottoms).

10. Prison blues and grays.

11. The volunteer woman chaplain who asked, "Did you go to college, Ann?" during a board game about life choices. "I finished three times," I said.

12. The beautiful and proud-of-breadwinning prostitute who asked to eat at my table.

13. Weak coffee in the morning, strong coffee at night.

14. The dirty night guard: the infrared light in the eye.

15. Sugar packets smuggled and stashed.

16. Milk for no one, pregnant women.

17. Blue ink on the ham.

18. The T.V. booming.

19. The withdrawal from nicotine.

20. Gum in the hourglass. Clock hand not moving.

21. The woman who asked, "Are you mixed?" in a room big with laughter. Scottish, English, Swedish.

22. Downturned hands and dialect: m'fuh.

23. Cornrowing and pink curlers.

24. Treatment programs cancelled due to budget cuts, so the women could not serve time and get treatment concurrently.

25. I had been arrested twice, taken three times to a police station in my hometown for drinking one beer more than the legal limit. The first time I was 15 and had returned from a school trip to Germany. I had walked out to the park with a can of beer to read Marco Popp's and Robert Raithel's love letters.

26. It was a clinical mistake to be on an SSRI (it caused haircutting).

27. The FBI report returned inconclusive when I fingerprint tested at Girls Write Now in New York in 2008.

28. One of the two charges on my record might have been dropped but the law suddenly changed.

29. Charges: petty misdemeanor for the football player with marijuana in his car who had pushed the woman meter reader half a block on the hood of his Lexus.

30. My lawyer, the former prosecutor with political ambition.

31. Vikings.

32. Vanguard Group.

33. Clay Brown's list.

34. Rollicking Irish happy hour across from the probation office.

35. "Whiskey" plates.

36. Bar soap, Bible, toothbrush in brown paper bag.

37. Stubby pencil.

38. Library shelf hour.

39. Naming the woman judges. (Judges stand election.)

40. Arrest scenes and detailed reports.