Archive for September, 2010

Oh, GTFO already

Just about every year around this time, I write something about 9/11. It’s kind of cathartic for me to memorialize the experience, to reflect on how we weathered that day – not knowing where our friends were, struggling to get through on the phones, breathing in the ash – but this year I am particularly crabby.

The radical right wing that now constitutes the bulk of the Republican party (bye bye, fiscal conservatives, please start your own party and stop wandering into the Democratic tent) just loves to talk about how terrible cities are. They particularly like insulting New York.

So this year, I would like to tell them to just GTFO. Stop pitching fits about the fact that we’re diverse places and that you don’t like how we operate and then lament 9/11. If you hate cities, then you shouldn’t give a rat’s ass that we were targeted. No one crashed into or blew up your buildings. No one killed your people. You were completely and utterly ignored.

It is simply not right for you to claim our pain and then dismiss our people. We are only part of your “America” while you’re using the horrific day to justify your behavior. You don’t give a damn about what happened, you only give a damn about being able to hate others free of guilt and justifying your irrational and xenophobic fears.

So GTFO. I’m sick of trying to be civil when your version of the day was a TV show and yet you act like the horrible event we experienced in New York City belongs to you. You were never targeted, you didn’t have to live with the reality of the day – nor did you have to live with the after effects of constant bomb scares and military suddenly present on your daily commute.

Take your 9/12 crap and shove it. Take your famewhore pastor and shove him. Get a damned clue.

2010
09/10
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My voided summer.

I tell you, I just want to take a big red stamp and write VOID across the last two summers.  With our transient homelessness last year and Megan’s completely inhuman course load this summer, we are just hoping next year things will settle down.

There are so many things I’ve wanted to share, especially later this summer, but I screwed up my ability to type with blah blah blah nerve pain blah you type too much blah physical therapy.  This is not the first time massive pain has gotten in the way of my ability to work.

The first time the wrist/neck/arm pain got so bad I had to see the doctor was in 2003 sometime.  It is just too much to be on the computer all day working and then writing at night.  It adds up.  I wrote a draft poem that I still think about when I’m in that much pain and since I’m feeling all stupidly exhibitionistic today, I’m going to throw part of it up here.  It’s not done, it’s not great, but it’s called Pointe.

Before ballet class, we played at it—
six-year-olds timing the enduring tiptoe—
later, physics gave an equation
for the pain, pounds per square inch.

I never put on pointe slippers. Pale pink,
flat nosed, satin ribbon crossing the ankle—
a dancer unveils her feet like Salome,
the reveal is blackened toenails,

calloused yellowed scales.
I didn’t know masochism then,
not obsession or drive,
just no more ballet.
——

That’s all of it I’m going to paste in, but the point is that many of us are driven past/beyond pain and I’m never sure if it’s healthy or not. We work so hard and so much and these movements that will come back to haunt us in the end are repeated without thought. The point is that obsession and drive unchecked are a little dangerous and we wind up hurting ourselves.

What a happy medium is, though, that I just do not know

2010
09/08
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