In Lost Memory

One of my great fears in beginning this Buggy Face project was that it would devolve into an online dairy, a place for my daily grievances to find some air, thus boring readers and myself and keep me from doing the real, meditative work that building budding essays requires (whatever the hell that means). But you see, my life keeps happening daily and there are unplanned events I must think about, write about, try to figure out. This feels the logical place to do it. I've abandoned my yellow legal pad of blog idea notes for the knotted thoughts. They need a form.

Yesterday a friend died. To say the word friend seems so wrong and inaccurate, as I only met her once, though the word acquaintance feels improper too, and that one's worse, as it's distant and cold. She was a woman I knew. And I cry now for what is lost.

I met Errin two months ago at Megan and Mindy's retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains. When Brock and I walked in their cabin for the big party on Saturday, Errin was instantly the most likable person in the room. I'm not romanticizing this because she's gone now; it's simply true. She had two dogs, Matrix and Lupin, and she loved that King and Nola showed up. A lot of Megan and Mindy's friends, and Megan herself, are not dog people. Errin was dog people, and people people. She sensed that Brock and I knew no one there, and she came right up and started asking questions. Haply, she had a fuck-up brother and we decided he'd pair well with my fuck-up sister. We laughed a lot, and while there's no way not to be maudlin when describing a dead person's laugh, she had a fucking great one. Meaningful, you know? It wasn't an easy laugh, she didn't laugh when something was halfway funny. Oh, she'd smile, because she was friendly, but when something was funny, the laugh was earned and it was hard and deep. She bent over when she laughed, slapped her knees, just like in the movies. Except that she meant it. Here's a picture of us talking. She's in the middle, in the pink:



Showing you this picture makes me slightly guilty, as if I'm proving to you that I knew her, and am worthy of writing this, of suffering something as a result. Death writing is difficult, perhaps even more so when the writer is not intimately connected to the dead. But even that previous sentence, though I feel it to be true, brings enormous guilt: here I am, implicitly apologizing to my reader for bad writing, for not having enough at stake here, because I'm writing about a death I was not intimately close to. Yet all the while I'm still feeling something, for her and her loved ones. And also, yes, for myself.

Last night I came up to my office to finish yesterday's blog. Brock walked in and said dinner was ready. Upon just seeing him I started crying and saying I didn't want him to die. Don't want my mother, my Lala, my sisters and friends. Again I'm a child and insisting we'll be the lone cases, I'll find a way for us to avoid death. Bugginess will protect us. I'll wrap every loved one in a big blanket and feed you with my love, and insist we never drive a car again. C'mon, we can make this work.

Annie Dillard has this stunning, impossible essay in her book For the Time Being. The essay, and the entire book, asks us how much individual lives matter. Think tsunamis, she says, think war and destruction and all those billions of lives. She asks the reader:

"What were you doing on April 30, 1991, when a series of waves drowned 138,000 people? Where were you when you first heard the astounding, heartbreaking news? Who told you? What, seriatim, were your sensations? Who did you tell? Did your anguish last days or weeks?"

This happens all the time, we're perfectly aware. How can we grieve for them all? Of course we aren't supposed to, it's perfectly okay to reach a greivance quotient, but how do we accept that notion if it's one of our own? World, you must know, that there is no one out there like Brock, like Rosita, like Lala. The loss would be more than my own, it'd be yours, world. But you don't believe me, since you have so many. But I'm telling you! I'm screaming it to you in your air! Should I stick my head in your Atlantic, try insisting underwater, what real loss is?

I know, I know: maudlin.

Another disturbing thing about this death, other than the fact that it's a death, and my greiving quotient is long and firm, is that, like so much other daily news I find, I learned this through Facebook. Megan sent out the announcement yesterday evening. Here's what it read:

"rest in peace, errin vuley. errin was a dear friend of mindy's and mine. she was killed instantly in a car crash this morning. errin worked tirelessly on behalf of a wide array of non-profit groups, and the city will suffer greatly for her loss. we will all suffer for it, especially her partner, dana, her brother and her parents. she had a deep belly laugh that one could recognize easily carrying across a pitch black auditorium."

What also distresses me is that I don't have a right to feel distressed. This woman was on the periphery of my life, a Facebook friend. I don't write this blog in hopes of consolation for my loss, because it isn't mine. It's Megan's and Mindy's and Dana's and the loss of so many others. I'm actually in the perfect position to do the consoling, because Megan and Mindy are my friends. But the thought of calling them today is impossible. I actually picked up the phone as I scrolled through the Facebook pictures (I should not have been doing the latter) and began weeping. For this loss, for the loss of Broc and Jen, for the infinite losses that will come my way despite bugginess and all the love radiating even through my toes. The toes, and the love, will someday go.

Here's my paraphrase of the news report, which I found on the online Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

A woman, Errin Vuley, 35, was driving on Memorial Parkway at 8 a.m. this morning when a car coming the opposite direction crossed lanes and slammed into her minivan, where she died instantly.

Where she died instantly.

What the role of technology here? Did reading the news report make her death more vivid for me? Did I imagine myself in her seat because we all drive on highways at 8 a.m. going off to work, going off to life? Am I mourning her death, or my future one? And can I still be a good person, please?

And thanks to Facebook, where Errin had over 300 friends, will her funeral be better attended? How many Facebook members die per year, and what do we do with their accounts? Do we continue to write our feelings into a void? Will her partner Dana be better fed and consoled these next few weeks because Mindy is using Facebook to coordinate as I type?

Leave it to the living to ask strings of impossible questions to the other living, so that they can absorb, perhaps greive too, and have some dinner, drive home from work. As Errin did, as I do.

One last distress: I just thesaurased "distress" because I felt I'd used it too much, I needed another word. I found some: agonize, torment, afflict, aggrieve, painful, dreadful, worrying, harrowing.

Because I'm a writer, you see. I tell you about my feelings, about what it feels like to know someone who no longer has feelings, who's no longer a someone. I've got to use my tools, I've got to get things right.

Good Person

A few weeks ago Brock and I participated in the Baton Rouge and Nola stops on the Gulf Coast Poetry Tour. Technically this event could be a line on our c.v.’s, but when a colleague asked us upon our return how the readings were, my first thought was, What readings? New Orleans, as it has its whole life, excuses bad behavior, and even though I was only hours removed from the flu, we engaged in some anyway. Morning hot toddies and midday beers at Molly’s, moving my car off Royal at six a.m.—still buzzing from a few hours before—so as to avoid the street sweepers, and being handed a croissant by a bum for, presumably, my life efforts. “Take it,” said the guy, a mainstay of the streets. “I don’t need it anymore.” The poetry of the academy was tangential to the poetry of the city.

Thursday afternoon at Molly’s we drank at the open window with Vince and Chris. High Lifes were a dollar, but with a pathetic boo face I insisted on frozen Irish coffee: “I’m sick.” As the boys spoke their exceptionalist nonsense, another boy approached in the costume of a Bible salesman: white cotton ball cap, plaid shirt tucked into high-water khakis, earnest glasses on his face. In one hand he carried a guitar case, in the other a pack of tarot cards, and in his shirt pocket a flask of whiskey. There is no way to adequately describe how ridiculous he looked.

“Oh, hi Paul,” said Chris. “What are you doing here?” The Bible salesman knew Vince and Chris from their old apartment in Baton Rouge, the same neighborhood Brock and I were carjacked in a year and a half ago. This guy, Paul, tells us he’s been sleeping in his car for three days now and wants to make it as a New Orleans musician and will read Tarot cards in the meantime just to get by. He’s psychic, he says. He doesn’t need the cards, but they help. Give his readings a structure.

“Like outlines, in writing,” I say. “I don’t always use them, but often they’re needed, you know, for structure. I’m a writer.”

Sometimes I introduce myself this way, especially to people whom I expect never to see again, just to try out the professional term. It’s always disheartening to be forced to tell others, I’m a teacher. Growing up we all knew this was the job of choice for those who had no other skills. Now I’m here dreaming the dreams of every teacher in existence: yes, I teach during the day, but in my mind and heart I’m Michelangelo. I’m an artist! scientist! filmmaker! archeologist! Often I want to introduce myself as a Good Person too, but I figure pairing that with being a writer doesn’t make much sense. At some point I’m going to have to choose.

Paul wanted to read our Tarot cards, but gave up almost immediately on Vince and Brock, who literally turned their backs to him when he advanced with the cards. Chris and I were more amenable, and during Chris’s read Paul discovered he had a girl problem: there were two to choose from, and decision time was nigh. When Chris asked repeatedly which one was the right choice, Paul just looked from the cards to Chris from the cards to Chris from the cards to Chris. Then, “Oh, you know.” That was all. Chris shook his head and ordered another beer.
My tarot reading followed, and it lasted for more than two hours. I wasn’t sure which parts of my life I should be curious about. Foremost I wished to ask about my writing, whether or not it was worth a damn, or whether the world would feel it’s worth a damn, but figured that would rescind my previous proclamation. Like, if you’re a writer, why do you have to ask if you’re a writer? Instead my questions to the cards were along the safe, general lines: would I make it okay in this life, would my mother-grandmother-sister-husband? The results were mixed. Mother, good life, check. Husband, good life, check (though apparently, he’s currently working on “the wrong book”).

Here is my future, condensed on this more palatable black-and-white slab: I will try to have children and fail. Some of those children will try to live and fail. My sister will meet a better man, have a chance to change her life for the better, but will likely screw that up, unless I stop her, and it’s likely I’ll be unable to. My marriage will go well, until it doesn’t, and I will have to make decisions and change myself if I want it to work, but I probably won’t. Sooner than I think my grandmother will die, but she will die with no regrets about her life though I will have many, thus it will take me years, probably the rest of my life to get over her death, and as for my own death—that elusive time a long way down the road—I will be infinitely regretful of all the mistakes I’ve made, and I won’t have Lala’s peace of mind. I’ll want a second chance, and as I go into whatever that other place is I’ll rue that people don’t get one.

First I wondered whether I got this reading because I told the guy up front we didn’t have money to pay him. Yes, I’d buy him a beer, but that was it. Then I wanted to joke that perhaps one of the dead children he saw was from my abortion eight years ago, but it didn’t seem the time for dead baby jokes.

Thing is, as Paul read my fortunes I tried to look and behave very grown up. I was wearing an extra special teaching outfit, one of my long consignment shop skirts, and I made sure to sit with my back straight and legs crossed, and to wear my sincere listening face. Paying reverence to his skill, I asked him reporter’s questions of how others have reacted to readings, what he does when he encounters skepticism or even contempt, how the cards are read, exactly, and whether or not he’s ever been wrong, and if so, if he feels guilt about that. But all the time I was thinking, I can’t believe in this shit. Because if I believe in this shit, it will kill me.

One of the last questions I asked Paul (a man who, it might as well be said now, as soon as we left Molly’s to go to the next poetry reading, Chris told me was completely not worth listening to, that none of my babies would ever die—he gave my shoulders a sweet squeeze as he said this—and that everyone they knew called Paul by his more accurate name, Turd, because he talks all the time and everything that comes from his mouth is shit) was, “Am I going to be a good person in this life?”

Turd gave me a lecture about the relativity of goodness in the world, how no good nor bad people exist, only good or bad perceptions of human behavior. And while this was indeed a bit of gobbledy-gook, I wondered at the obsession of women—especially women like myself who’ve done many mean things in life, and hurt many others—to be considered good people. A woman I know just broke another man’s heart, and as he rails against her for doing so, all she can keep reminding him is, “Okay, I hurt you, yes, but I’m still a good person. Right? Right!” It’s as if a bad action paired with an inherent need to be good trumps any ill deed. I want to be good, therefore I am. Luckily for us, Turd says it’s all relative, and we need not concern ourselves with goodness or badness. Just orbs of light floating around, we are. Just clusters of molecules.
“Hail Hitler,” said Vince. “It’s just our perceptions, that’s all.” My boys, sensing my readings were awful and I was being too polite, were ready to shut the Bible salesman down.
I’m not perfect, though. Turd can attest to that. When he said that I, as opposed to Lala, would die with major regrets, I thought two things simultaneously: 1) Why does Lala get to die with no regrets and I don’t? Why does she get to be more special? and 2) Do you know what I’m thinking right now, you Turd?

But aloud I said to Paul, “I’ll die with regrets. So you’re saying I’ll die human, then.”

The Fine Art of Being Looked At

I spent my prepubescent years collecting baseball cards and Cubs stats, hanging posters of Ryne Sandburg and Mark Grace across my walls and being a less-than-mediocre ball player myself. In school I was friends with boys and girls alike, but the guys were more fun to talk to, they were mean about more fun things, and they acknowledged I knew a little about baseball. For Christmas seventh grade year, my blond homeroom buddy who sat right in front of me alphabetically, Robert Cagle, got me an Ernie Banks figurine, which I placed at the center of my shrine to all that was baseball.

In all those years Cagle and a lot of other boys and I were friends, I don't believe any of them looked at me once. And now, all these years later, I must accept that my baseball obsession was a facade of the flimsiest kind: all I wanted was to be looked at, be my gorgeous friend Stacey Barbaro with her Julia Roberts mouth, to be desired.

Heavy stuff for twelve years old, and I credit Lala for developing both my horniness and obsession of all things pretty at an early age. From the time I was born I was destined for Greatness, according to her, and above all that meant Beauty. And it was no small challenge to be raised along with a blond, blue-eyed future model, someone who, wherever we went, people commented on her adorableness. Strangers off the street, in the market, on the playground, looked at my stepsister Dezi's face and just had to say something. Meanwhile I was inconsequential and only noticed by way of comparison (the silent question in all their eyes: why is that one brown and big, while this one tiny and white?).

Friends now, my husband, my mother, might roll their eyes, Brooke, you're so beautiful, they'll say. But here's the trick I never meant to play: I'll never believe it. Not out of false self-deprecation, not because it isn't polite for a Southern woman (really, any woman) to admit that she's beautiful, but because I will never forget the longing of those baseball years, a time when the only time I was looked at was when I stared in the mirror and asked, When? When? When will anyone ever love you, eyes-nose-mouth-brows-forehead-face? At the time I was developing an awareness that I was supposed to be somebody in this life, that this was what meant the most to me, I was pretty homely.

One of my early 20s' favorite poems was Stephen Dunn's "Beautiful Women," in which he expounds his theory that there are two kinds of beautiful women in the world: those that are beautiful and have always been so, and those who live a double existence, as they are beautiful now, but once weren't--thus they live inside the shell of their former selves and look out to you, grateful man, with humility, gratitude, and pure love. Brock introduced me to this poem because he believed that I didn't believe I was beautiful, and wanted to prove that I was. "See?" he said, "you're this kind." Every other woman he'd ever dated was born a princess. Seriously, I'm talking pageant winners and prom queens and cheering captains and daddy's girls. Perhaps he intuited that I'd gone for years unlooked at, because when he looked in my eyes and didn't look away, I wanted to sink to the ground. Oh, I'd been looked at in that sexy way before...oh, lots of times. But Brock was telling me something different with his gaze. It was not objectifying at all, or I didn't see it that way. The gaze asked, Who are you? How did you become this person standing in front of me? He couldn't have known I'd waited twenty-three years for a set of eyes to ask exactly these questions.

This subject comes up because being looked at, or not, is something I still struggle with. Last weekend we went to a friends house to watch the big LSU v. Bama showdown. Late as we usually are, I walked ahead of Brock into the already sardined living room and every last one of the fifteen people looked at me and said, "Wooooooo." Because these acquaintances all knew I was an LSU alum, they assumed I was coming to cheer against their team, so this woooo-ing was only semi-contemptuous. But what really paralyzed me was knowing that fifteen sets of eyes were on me at once. What is it like to be any one of them right now? I wondered. What are they possibly perceiving about me at this moment? These questions have almost nothing to do with looks, I tell myself. I wonder if they can possibly know that I try to be a good person always and slay myself when I'm not.

Of course, it is about looks too. If they think I'm beautiful, they'll more likely to think of me in these honorable ways, because the eyes are capable of so many lies.

I can imagine a different scenario at a party where I know only a few of the guests. Everyone's got a glass and small groups take up respective corners--the typical scene. If I've showered and spritzed and painted that old desire will come drum-beating through my belly again: I want to be looked at, I want to be looked at. And if these looks aren't happening, I can imagine how unhappy it would make me. Maybe I'll have an extra glass or two so that it's easier to lead my body and face with my loud voice, and people will have to look (though obviously not for the reason I want them to). Although at this point in my life I've captured the ultimate gaze from the man I love, the desire for simply being looked at still remains. Along with the simultaneous desire to not be looked at, which comes along with the weight of knowing oneself, and hoping others can't see that person--that you--right now.

But this isn't what being looked at should be about at all. It should be the purest of maneuvers. You, Brooke, in the laundry room, being humble in your humility. You, Brooke, so dedicated to doing things correctly that you take the extra moments to turn Brock's gold-toe dress socks right-side-out. In your humility you don't need him to know the lengths you go to for his happiness. Meanwhile, there should be a great good camera in the sky capturing all of this. Here is Brooke, world, if you want her. If she's not good to look at, you can just turn away.

Writerly Habits: A Defense of Dark Arts

As it's November 15th today, an official midway point on this project I'm becoming increasingly dubious about, I've decided to use this as an opportunity for reflection about who I am as a writer and who I want to be. Before I began writing this I thought, well, this entry won't count, it will be my blog's version of a bye week in football. Because it'll be easy just to say, oh look, here are my writerly quirks and foibles. But now that I've posed this as a sort of redefinition blog (defining things being what I strive to do most in life, and struggle the most with), I'm scared shitless.

Dubious. It's a word I like to use a lot. Probably because, like my experience with a lot of words, I pretty much always knew what it meant but wasn't comfortable using it in my own writing, but I read another writer who was in love with it, so I looked it up for a final time and fell in love with the word myself. I believe said writer is Saul Bellow, who wrote Herzog, which I read this summer, and which I didn't completely understand. But oh, how those dog-eared pages persist in my mind. Will I go back to them ever to extrapolate some meaning? Probably not. Because while I do desire to know what I'm reading and find out what I don't know, there's the constant fear that I will die before the best books out there to be read are indeed read. By me. While that makes me sound like Dr. Faustus and one might presume I'm ready to sell my soul to the devil, that's not quite accurate. I don't wish to know it all--I'm too lazy for that--but I do want to experience as many books as possible, feel whatever it is they offer, whether I understand them fully or not. And if I don't quite get everything you say, Annie Dillard, oh well, fuck it. Reading about lizards is boring as balls anyway.

In writing I like to curse a little bit because I do so much in life. I'm sure some would see this as a moral failing, as a weakness of mind, as not having enough vocabulary at my disposal to express with. This is certainly true. But, I'm also of the mind that the writing voice should sound at least a little like the writer's speaking voice, and since I verbalize fuck-shit-piss dozens of times per day, some of this must be included on paper (or on blog). (An aside: in college I had the best t-shirt ever. It was black, and in white letter it read, "Fuck you, you fucking fuck." I'm pretty certain someone I literally fucked stole this shirt from me, but surely he was a fuckhead, and only hope that me and my shirt taught him something--anything--about life. Like how to talk good.)

Another element I'm careful about is the way I start sentences. Very rarely will I start with either of these two structures: "I_______" or "There is/are." Thank you Rodger Kamenetz, my thesis advisor, for pointing of how profusely I used these sentence constructions without aesthetic purpose. Seriously, it wasn't like I was going on about "There is" this and "There are" that for the intention of refrain or litany or some other poetic crapola. At that point in my writing career, just as I was finishing an MFA which would purport that I was relatively successful at the art of writing, I simply didn't pay attention to my sentences. Hopefully I've improved in this area a bit.

Hopefully. Speaking of hopefully, I fucking love the adverb. All kinds and of all sizes. Sometimes I'll adverbize a noun, creating new words altogether, such as adverbize. This doesn't always work well, but if you can't play fun games with words sometimes you might as well be John Updike or an earnest writer with similar dickish qualities: you must do this when you write, real writers never do that.

Can I rail against Stephen King for a moment? He is a terrific writer, da da da da da, but...he's got way too many rules in his On Writing book. It makes me dislike him immensely. Any writer who expostulates on what real writers do as opposed to, what? unreal writers?, is as far as I'm concerned, a clown. Yes, hard and fast rules and how-tos sell books, but it seems these versions of advice are for left-brained thinkers who usually don't gravitate towards writing anyway. (Another aside: when I was in elementary school, and we learned the difference between the responsibilities of the right and left sides of the brain, I became convinced that the right brain was good and equaled to god, whomever he was, and the left brain was bad and equaled to the devil, whomever he was, and I just had to be right brained, because I wanted to be the disorganized, misunderstood yet charming artist, and figured I would become so because: well, I was right-handed. Oh, the seven year old logic! Probably every goober kid like myself reasoned the same thing.) Look, I'm not above the fray--I own probably every famous how-to-write book on this good planet--but the thing is I don't take them seriously. If I find five useful elements I consider it success. There are no real or unreal writers, but there are assholes, and as long as I'm not being too much of one at any time I consider myself to be okay.

On the foible end, I should really try to stay away from the smaller, simpler, less interesting adverbs I use like toilet paper: very, truly, extremely, really. This was a grading weekend for me, and as I turned over profile after profile essay while on autopilot, I came across something astonishing: a student in love with the very. No, I mean, she was really in love with very. At some point obsessions of this magnitude have to be enumerated, and out of sheer curiosity I counted the verys and in a paper of five pages there were thirty-seven. Some would argue that reading bad writing hurts your craft, but I'm here to tell you I now refuse to use very in this very blog in anything but an ironic way, and I'll be wary of the word for a long, long time from now.

Often I'm guilty of the worst writerly (and human) sin there is, and that's insincerity. Especially now that I'm forcing myself to write a blog per day, and I'm forced to create some semblance of a running, coherent theme in each entry, the process sometimes involves saying stuff I don't necessarily believe to be true. For instance, in my Erudition of Texts blog. Midway through I pontificated about not understanding so many rap lines because they're about Jesus, and I just can't do Jesus or the Bible (which is stupid: at the very least I should be aware of the gospel gobbledy-gook for intellectual reasons). Now, on one level this is true: many references in life and lit that I don't get are Biblical/religious ones. But I don't think this is a preoccupation of the rap community, as I asserted in the blog. Rappers' preoccupations are with themselves, which is the very reason I didn't understand the Jay-Z line I wrote about. He was referring to a Young Jeezy line, and I don't even know who the hell that is. It's a tacit rule of mine when considering which rap artists to give a chance to, that if they highlight in their name some allusion to their small size or age and conflate that with the idea that small size/age is something to be admired, I simply cannot listen and wouldn't mind if the FCC hauled them all off to jail for being so misguided (and that's a double fuck-you to you, Lil Wayne).

Things I love to do in writing: start sentences as an introductory phrase followed by a semicolon. Write litanies, write long, discursive Proustian sentences which I hope make sense, though they often don't, compose long connections through ands, or long refutations through buts. I love to italicize the word worth italicizing. The digression is another friend to my writing, and I don't mind setting if off either by dashes or parentheses (and I hope the reader doesn't mind it either). I love the deft analogy, the hearty image, and recognize they're the hardest to conjure of all the dark writer's arts. At least for me. I love, most of all, that I still love doing this, even when I feel sucky and want to hide under a blanket of chocolate to avoid all pain.

One fiction workshop in graduate school (if only you all know how miserably embarrassed myself that entire semester with my inability to construct a fictional story) our teacher asked for everyone to go around the room and comment on one another's writers ticks. All I remember is my exchange with my best friend Ashley. I said she was in love with parentheses, and she said I was in love with the semicolon. Hopefully now both she and I live in a writer's world in which we love all punctuation, but I can tell you one thing that's for damned sure: I'm out of love with the semicolon. Seriously, I used to use it all the time, and now, for some reason, that warped-looking wannabe comma is an affront to my aesthetic vision. Like, I hate to look at it.

But even more than that I don't like to write grammatically inaccurate sentences. A few weeks ago I finished reading a memoir called The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard, and I tell you the book is fabulous and I recommend it to all, but damn, did this writer ever divorce herself from the semicolon! The thing that really bothered me about her lack of it, though, was that she used a comma--a comma!--to separate two independant clauses (two independant clauses that, by the way, did not include an appropriate coordinating conjunction). Basically she was using a comma and pretending it was a semicolon. Here's the kicker though: a few times in the text, Beard used a semicolon in places where the correct punctuation to use was a comma! This concerned me immensely. I thought, what the fuck, can she do that?! Who says? Why can't I do that? If I do that, if I break the rules it's taken half a lifetime for me to learn, will I forget them? Will I become way stupider than I already am, or worse, a bad writer?

In a gigantic leap of faith, I'm going to end this blog by answer my own distressed questions: who says I can do it?--I say. Those who love to read me say. I can do that. I won't forget what I've learned. Occasionally I'll start a sentence with "I ______," or I'll be so very in my writing, and that will be all right too. It doesn't mean I'm bad, or wrong, or that I should quit this blog or any other project I take on. Overall I'm just figuring things out, more than twenty years after I decided it would be super-cool to be super-right-brained, and imagined how neat it would be to write about myself and my creations in a diary forever. Exclamation point.

Tending the Garden

When Brock and I first met, what impressed him the most about me was that I ran every day. Often I'd be late to meet him at The Chimes where he'd be on his second Turbo Dog, and I'd be all sweaty and stinky, but he liked it because (besides his being slightly tipsy) it was all a part of taking care of myself. We started going to the gym together before we were even a couple, and somewhere along this path he grew to love me. And it's in no small part a credit to my two-a-days.

Not that Brock nor I are vain. As I type this I'm wearing very coarse pink flamingo pajama pants, topped by a long-sleeved white tee with a blue Snap Fitness shirt over it since it's a bit chilly upstairs in my room. Oh, and my hair has gone three days unwashed. Brock's no better--he's wearing his Saints cap backwards, his workout gear, and we both still smell like the gym. It's just that a part of all this--working on our bodies daily--is what Brock calls tending the garden. The analogy is not brilliant but it's apt: an overgrown garden loses all its beauty, and it's difficult to tell what the garden is supposed to be at all. Same goes for human body.

Brock introduced me to this analogy when we first started talking about getting engaged; he suggested to me very softly, eyes averted, that he hoped I'd continue to tend the garden after we were married.

It's difficult to explain this to others, especially women-others, without them immediately striking the extreme feminist pose (of which, I can tell you, I'm also very familiar with): wh-wh-what? Your man is supposed to love you no matter what you look like! You should be able to get big, or get a bad haircut, or look less than stellar all the time, because this is marriage! When women have children they have to get big! Fuck men for trying to take that away from us! Exclamation point!

(Incidentally, it's funny that I wrote that monologue in the voice of my feminist compatriots, because it's actually my own voice. When my old grad school friend J.M. was marrying D.K., it got around the department that D's only deal-breaker would be if J got fat. And, if you don't know J.M., she's blond and blue-eyed with a Cosmo body and face, so it was a true affront to hear he'd said those words. I may have said he's trying to compensate for what I'm sure is a small penis, but I can't quote myself for certain.)

Let me now not defend D.K., who I still contend to be a bit of a d-bag for other reasons, but Brock's idea that tending the garden is of utmost importance in any relationship. Thing is, not caring what you look like is an affront not just to yourself but to the person you purportedly love. It's easy to fall back on the "love me no matter what" trope. Even if I don't care about your perception of me? Even if I've lost all pride? If a relationship means daily work on our spiritual, emotional, psychological connections, why shouldn't it also involve the connection between our bodies? Let's not kid ourselves: wanting to fuck the person you purportedly love is an essential piece to the relationship puzzle.

This doesn't mean having to be perfect, or always looking and feeling beautiful...only that you daily try to be the best version of yourself, both inside and out. (Which is a good reminder today, when I'm ready to inhale the bread pudding Brock bought for dessert tonight. See? Not all perfection: there's effort and reward.)

I bring this up because of a problem I've too long ignored that prevents me from tending the garden as well as I'd like: and that is I have stinky feet. Part of the reason for this affliction is my perpetual attempts to tend the garden. I run about 25 miles per week, and on days I don't run I try to do something--anything--that's vaguely active. We recently purchased a jump rope from Wal-Mart and lemme tell ya it's no easy workout. This brings to mind that tending the garden is essentially a tight rope walk: yes, running is good and necessary and makes you feel like a thousand bucks, Brooke, but take care of that smell, too. And be loving and thoughtful. And expect the same in return, and don't be afraid to assert your need for the reciprocation. Meanwhile don't backslide on your family and job and dogs and world issues that help keep you worried and well-rounded.

Life sure is a lotta work, huh?

As I'm composing this my sister-in-law Jen is going through a breakup that's tearing up me and Brock probably more than it's hurting her. She's ended a long relationship for a lack of work (on both their parts) in this general area: tending the garden. Two people we love have for months and maybe longer forgotten to look at each other deeply, in both a physical and emotional way. Without getting into the details of their demise that must remain private, I can say that all I'm picturing now is the way she looks at a man she once loved--she won't, or can't, acknowledge him. When you've stopped loving someone, a process that takes a long time to complete but which you can often recognize in a moment, you are unable to truly see them anymore. It's like a kid on a field trip, looking at dead art on museum walls and wondering when lunchtime's coming. It's the emotional equivalent of whistling, hands in your pockets, kicking up dirt.

That first analogy might not be an apt one, but it came to mind because this summer when Brock and I visited Baltimore with Jen and Broc, we went to a museum and took pictures of ourselves. Broc and Brock dwarfed by Rodin's Thinker, Jen and I melting over the Cone collection holding the best of bright Matisse. I ache that love can begin because of admiration over workouts, a couple of poems, a look across a table in a writing workshop. And whatever the reason first caused Jen and Broc to avert their loving eyes. Tracking the ending is more difficult. What can a person do to make you unable to see him anymore? Can we count a beginning, middle, and ending of love-loss? Would we even want to if we could?

A decision: I will not allow my gross feet contribute to any grosser ending. Today and every day I plan to tend the garden, and not pine at wished-for love but make it. My feet will soak in sea salt. I'll tell Brock I love him, and insist that he sees me when he says it back.

Frenemies

A couple of months ago Ted Kennedy passed away, and though it was expected, and though he lived a relatively long, healthy life until he was diagnosed with brain cancer early in 2008, I spent the next week crying. Chris Matthews didn't help with his Kennedy Brothers documentary, which didn't say anything revealing or new, but showed clip after clip of the boys in their youths, a time when all they knew to lament was their brother Joe falling from a plane in a WWII sky. Always in the background was Teddy, always buggy, the boy who at fourteen stopped one or another of the Hyannis Port celebration to raise a toast for "the brother who can't be here." Even then he had duende, the intimation of mortality, the knowledge that death is close by and life is wondrous, that the only thing to do is make people love you. Which is what they did when he toasted his dead brother. Which is what the world did, so many times over, because he loved it right back.

The death tore me up. His fight for civil rights, women's rights, health care, the underpriviledged were over. I drank my coffee every day and dreamed of another hero.

He wasn't to be found on Facebook, but that's a source I turn to when I feel so overwhelmed and good-for-nothing all I'm capable of is spying on others and imagining their better, richer lives (this is probably a reason I post so many gloomy status updates). So flipping through friends on this site one day shortly after the death of the last Kennedy brother, I came across the friend I've known the longest, Danielle, weighing in at fifteen years.

First I should give you a background on Danielle. We became friends, basically, because we started having sex at about the same time in high school and trusted each other enough to pass notes back and forth in class ensuring each other that we weren't pregnant. Sex and boys were our mutual understanding and as this was our preoccupation for the next seven or so years, we never stopped to recognize our similarities ended there.

In short, she's a fucking Republican.

There was no way for either of us to know that she was conservative fifteen years ago, or that I was liberal. Clues always abound, but when one is young and a friend says something that just doesn't feel right, one ignores it. The only loser is a friendless loser. (I'm reminded of an anecdote I may have already included in Buggy Face, but which so compels me I have to tell it again: it's the story of my mom walking home from school with her friend in third grade, and they've been let out early because their president has just been assassinated. They walk in silence, as I can imagine an eight-year-old would have a difficult time expressing anything in the face of such a tragedy, but finally my mom's friend spoke up--"Serves that nigger-lover right." And I think of how my mom knew that was wrong, sort of, as she had never heard that word before and could only intuit it was something mean and awful, but how she also walked the rest of the way with her friend. What else was she to do?)

Danielle and I have broken up several time throughout the years, and my argument against her is always she doesn't know how to articulate who she is. (As proof of this, she's often characterized our relationship as one that is nearly perfect--in fifteen years she swears we've only gotten into one fight. And I have to tell her, we're always in a fight! Remember that year and a half we didn't talk? That was a fucking fight!) My downfall as a friend is that I'm constantly try to prod the Real Danielle out of her. About five or six years ago when I was campaigning against Bush more than I was for Kerry, I got drunk one night and sent Danielle an incendiary Myspace message. The subject read:

Why are you a Republican?

It is never a good idea to ask a friend why she is who she is, but there I was, supposedly open-minded, liberal (and certainly drunk) Brooke asking her who she thought she was. I went on to provide a litany of reasons why her conservatism didn't make sense. Her favorite musical artists were U2, Dave Matthews, Coldplay, John Mayer, and several other pansies I'm forgetting at the moment. Do you actually listen to their music? I asked. Do you know the lyrics you recite? I probed. They don't believe in war, they don't care about the free market, they work against everything you support, and you sing along to it. You don't know who you are! I insisted. And I don't think I like it!

Danielle's shorter and much more adult response was, "I don't know what your problem is, but I'm not answering your ridiculous questions."

I deleted her from my MySpace account.

If anything this is proof that we've definitely fought more than once.

Now, years later, after one of Danielle's terrible breakups brought us back together, and now that we've graduated to grownup Facebook accounts, I sat at my desk, post-Kennedy death, and wanted someone on the site to make me feel better, or maybe just make me feel jealous at their publication or something. Suddenly I remembered an old friend I hadn't talked to in awhile, someone who it had been weird with for some time after Obama won but who was still, after all, a friend.

Then I saw her Facebook status: "Oh, God. Am I going to have to hear about Ted Kennedy's death for the next whole month?! I'm going to keep it on conservative radio and Fox. Why don't I always do that?" A guy friend of hers Liked! the status, and said Kennedy's hero's burial at Arlington made him wanna puke, and Danielle agreed it made her wanna puke too.

Not one for leaving well enough alone, I scrolled down her page for evidence of other inhuman/racist/disgusting status updates and came up short, though she did post this insightful ditty:

"Saw the best bumper sticker today. It said: Obama: Jimmy Carter's Second Term."

A Facebook friend of hers agreed with that bumper sticker's wit, and said that day she saw an even better one:

One
Big
Ass
Mistake
America

Immediately I thought I'd delete her from my Facebook account, and then I recognized, no, Brooke, we don't go backwards in life. That won't solve anything. So instead I stomped down the stairs and as I told Brock what I'd read I burst into tears for the tenth time in a week, and I told him I didn't want to be Danielle's friend anymore.

For days I was inconsolable, and when my birthday came and went without a card or email from her, I posted a message on her wall about something funny my stepfather Kevin had done, and reminded her she missed my birthday, and suggested the reason for this was because I was too liberal for her. I was going for witty with a dash of acerbic. I wanted to be in words what a Lemonhead hard candy is in taste.

She sent me an email back apologizing profusely for being a bad friend and asked me how life was going, how Erica was doing with the pregnancy, whether or not Rosita was ready to tear her hair out, and basically all the questions about myself I would've loved to answer...if only I weren't answering to her.

A month later I still haven't responded back.

Now the question is, why? Danielle clearly felt bad for these last months of muddy friendship, but I just wasn't having it. If I did respond at all, I would have to be honest about how her Ted Kennedy comment made me want to tear her eyes out, and she'd get all defensive about her politics, and then I'd say it's not just politics, but about have a fucking heart, which of course would suggest that, indeed, she didn't have a heart. Basically I'm willing to let her be the bad guy for as long as I can.

Then, and I'm not sure how or when this happened, as I didn't label it on my yellow legal pad for taking blog notes, a revelation: I'm the asshole here, and likely always have been.

You see, I've always felt slightly superior to Danielle. I went away to college and she stayed at home, and then I went on to graduate school and met the really Smart People she'd never meet. Though I didn't know this at the time, this was my secret retribution for her having been friends with all the popular kids in high school who drove Mustangs and spoke terrible Westbank English (sadly, I never could make myself do this). She was friends in high school with the girls I can still see on Facebook through the twenty pounds they've gained since then, the ones who thought my abusive boyfriend was cute, but an asshole, and that I was slightly weird, or slightly sluttish (I cheated on said abusive boyfriend and the whole school found out), or most likely they didn't think about me at all. Resentment stemmed from her having been thought cooler all our lives; I couldn't help but concieve what an injustice that was, because of course I was cooler. My thoughts could be articulated and only because no one wanted to hear what I had to say, I rarely spoke.

So when we became grownups I quickly became a child in order to get back at her: I'm smarter than you are (sing-songy voice).

But now that I am speaking I'm remembering what a good friend, Courtney, said about Danielle recently, that she has real liberal tendencies. And she does: the music and caring and kindness and shit, just the fact that we've hung out a lot in life and actually gotten along.

Maybe that's what did it. In thinking about how Danielle can have aspects of her person that she certainly wouldn't check off on a box or questionnaire (I suspect the word liberal makes her gag), I began to consider how that might be reversed. How I revel in my liberalism (short litany in defense of my inherent qualities which I deem liberal: love of the underdog, obsession & crying & caring for everyone but especially those who are really sick and really far away and that I can't do anything about, the fact I was a rising star in the Greek community in college--Greek Woman of the Year, Phi Mu President, etc.--it was because no one else was a hippee and I was the closest thing, my hatred of any injustice, my hopes for the little guy whomever he may be, my aversion to looking good unless absolutely necessary which can be proven by the fact I did not shave my legs or wash my hair for almost two months one year in college). And how when it comes to being truly liberal and open-minded, I often fall short of it.

Some examples of my awful, fascist tendencies: I'm often jealous, and I don't like to share, and I want everything to be mine sometimes, and I want to be loved the most, and I don't listen in fights but play the victim like a champ, which means I don't argue well though I ironically usually ask for it, and am unyielding on a point even if it's for the greater good (utilitarianism: look it up, Danielle) if it's not good for me.

Also, there are a lot of Is in my writing (see previous, or any, paragraph). Which shows you where my interests lie.

Another example is this blog. I'm railing against the indecency of a person who has tried to reach out to me, and I can't be bothered to reach back. You see, I'm busy, Danielle. I'm a professor at a very important football university. Even though I'm not a professor I can say that because you don't know the difference. Thus, I am still smarter than you are.

Do you see how I just can't help but be a real fascist asshole sometimes?

Another problem with this argument is it's a fallacy to conflate liberalism with open-mindedness, because they aren't necessarily the same things. But don't tell Danielle that.

Because I'm still not calling her.

Ra, ra, sis-boom-ba! (Or, Comment, motherfuckers!)

Okay, one a.m. is approaching and I'm thinking maybe I've taken on a lot more than I can handle with writing a blog per day. I've got lots of ideas and they're all labeled nicely on my yellow legal pad, but I don't have the time to make them coherent, well-thought-out, articulate, beautiful. If you haven't noticed, I've struggled even with the simple grammar editing in the past few entries because I just can't! Other work calls and I feel sick about it, but it has to be done (I'm literally sick--I drank half a bottle of Pepto and still I churn).

In my last meta-blog I wrote about the importance of having comments and certain complimentary boxes checked when I signed in. I meant that! Yet I don't see any checks (besides the ones I've marked myself--I can't believe I admitted that by the way--looo-ser).

Also, I'm not asking for anything complex, any analytical probing of what I've written. Admittedly a lot of these ideas are half-baked because, as I've said, I'm currently scattered to the academic winds and must spend lots of time elsewhere (do you sense a running theme here?). (Though of course, if you have time to engage with me--ever--please go for it.) Thing is, I see this as a two-fold project: I want to force myself to write every day and at the end of the month maybe use about a fifth of what I have for...something bigger. At this point I can't even imagine what that will be.

The other fold is that this blog format is sort of incidental. I could type these wannabe essays into Word, but I just like the way this looks and feels. But I can't forget that it is a blog, and has a readership, and has for a week gone unresponded to.

An idea: maybe you all can just schedule your lives around me (I'll send out your email addresses--c'mon, you guys can do this). One of you comments (or box-checks) on one blog (which, by the way, you never actually have to read...if you comment on one paragraph or line I'll be none the wiser, yet oh-so mollified), and then you won't have to worry about reading a thing for at least a week. There are seven of you! I believe! Hope, Change, Dream! All that crap!

What I'm saying is I need a cheerleader. I need a hero. I'm reading 17th century texts and grading student profiles and grading Renaissance tests and losing my goddamn mind.

So if your finger is itching to write something, just do it. Ashley, Amy, Courtney, Emilie, Greg, Gloria, Rosita--one of you for fuck's sakes.

(In a complete reversal of tone, I have to say something to all of you: thank you endlessly for the comments you've made in the past, either through this venue and through email. It means just everything, and I'm truly lucky to have you, and I'll never be as good as you. But these next eighteen days are going to be hell for me, and this is just a reminder that I need you. Tiny, struggling smiley face.)

If you care about me at all, you'll check the Interesting! box. Both the box and I will be so grateful. We'll never be alone in the world again.