6000onions

As I was driving home from work tonight, talking out loud to myself – well, talking to Batly, my car, because that is so less crazy than talking to myself – I saw a raccoon. It was a small raccoon crossing Riverview Drive and I stopped to let it pass by and said, Hello, Mr. Raccoon! which, I then thought, was awfully patriarcho-normative of me, because it could well have been Mrs. Raccoon or Miss or Ms. Raccoon or even, of course, the Honorable Raccoon. But! While it was a lovely raccoon and I have not seen a raccoon in a while, it has nothing to do with this post. This post is about what I think I might actually honestly genuinely be planning to do starting in the spring!

Which is, in the short version, to sell my house, quit my job, get rid of most of my stuff and put the rest in storage, take a chunk of the money from the sale of my house, buy a camper van or a pickup with a cap, and drive around America for a year or two. With Perdita, a laptop, a smart phone, several cameras, a futon and a camp stove. And by America, I mean America: all of it. Canada. Mexico. Maybe even all the way down, as far as you can drive, to Tierra Del Fuego, that improbably named end of the earth. Maybe up to Alaska, because I have always wanted to go to Alaska. I want to see all the places I have never seen or at least those I can drive to. I want to see all my friends, who are scattered all over the continent, conveniently scattered, actually, so I can go from place to place to place to place and mooch showers. And while I’m at it, I want to take a lot of pictures, be better about updating this blog and maybe write a book – everyone wants to read a book about a middle aged woman and a dog driving around America, right? Heh. But at the least, maybe I can figure out what the hell I want to do with the rest of my life.

No, I’m serious. Really, honestly, serious. As death and taxes.

I have just been getting unhappier and unhappier and feeling more and more trapped and eventually, enough is enough. I am dirt poor, but I am land rich, and this half acre of prime West Asheville real estate would probably sell for enough to keep me going for a while with some left over to buy a little house with a little yard in some saner real estate market somewhere. Somewhere that I could even find a job where I could sit down and have weekends and holidays off and make enough money to actually live on without freaking out every time I spend $20. Somewhere, some small paradise – that I will find during my wanderjahr.

I thought when I bought this house in the reeling, terrible aftermath of my mother’s death in 2008 that I would never leave it. I will be buried from this house, I thought, perhaps even in the backyard or the side yard next to my cat Pebble although okay, that is pretty fucking creepy except think of the joy it would bring to some hapless digger a century in the future. I mean, everyone wants to find a skeleton and I would be delighted to be that skeleton. That is the bones of the thing, you see: there is a finite amount of time left before I will in fact be a skeleton. And I am not, after all, sure that I want to spend all of it in this wacky 60s West Asheville house, working in the bookstore, barely scraping by and grumbling about my children in the basement. It has been, if not an entirely good, than at least not an entirely bad and definitely an interesting seven years, but I think it is time to move on. West Asheville no longer feels like home to me: it is too expensive now, too trendy, too full of hip and earnest wealthy young people and slightly less hip but definitely earnest wealthy old people. I am just a poor slacker malcontent middle aged person, and I don’t fit in. West Asheville has changed, I say, and I want a divorce. Really we have both changed, I know. I thought in 2000 when I moved here that I would never leave again, that finally, for the first time in my peripatetic life, that I would have deep roots and stay in one place. And I did, longer by far than I ever lived anywhere before. And it’s been great, but. Well. Perhaps I was not meant to be so rooted after all.

So I am not getting younger and eventually – not all that eventually, even – I will be, like the Queen of Bohemia is now, bounded by the edges of my living room and that will be enough for me. It isn’t enough now. I don’t have a career – let’s be real, while I like being the Director of Fictions and I love my coworkers and mostly enjoy my job, it is not as if I am leaving some big old capitalist Career, here. No, I used to have one of those – well, sort of – but now I have a job. And jobs come and go. My children are all grown up. By the time I was the age of the youngest one my oldest one was four and I was divorced, so yeah, they are Grown Up. It will actually be good for them to not have a mother around for a while. I love them and they love me and it’s time we stopped living together. It’s time for us to spend some time talking on the phone once a week and irritatedly braving holiday traffic a couple times a year for a rushed few days of slightly resentful togetherness, as is our American birthright.

And the Queen of Bohemia? That’s partly what moved this whole idea from the realm of driving home talking to car fantasy to the realm of you know what I am going to do this because goddamnit I am. If all continues as it has been these last few weeks, it looks like she may well be moving somewhere awesome where she will be safely taken care of, and that will be the for the best. I will call her every week and that will be okay.

I am scared! This is a crazy idea! I can come up with a million and one reasons why this is a bad idea! And yet, you know, if I don’t do it now I will never do it and there will never be another time as good as the time right now.

And besides, the other day on Twitter I saw a post from a photography site I follow and it said, 10 Tips for Taking Pictures of Foxes and I laughed and thought, yeah, is the first tip Find a Fox? Because honestly I have only ever seen a fox maybe three or four times in my life and only on one of those did I get a picture and then it was a pretty terrible picture. Today at work I saw an old book, Travel Photography Tips or something like that, and it was full of awesome pictures of monkeys and ruined temples and papyrus boats, the tips, clearly, being to travel to cool places. To be, in short, where the foxes are. I am not, usually, where foxes – or monkeys, or papyrus boats – are and when I am, like my brief encounter with the Honorable Raccoon this evening, I am not prepared to take pictures because, you see, I am too busy with all the minutiae: the come home from work, take son to work, feed dogs, hurry, hurry, worry, worry. But maybe it doesn’t have to be like that forever, world without end. Now, perhaps, this is my chance, and my last chance at that, to be there, where the foxes are, with time to stop and take a picture. So I think I will do this thing, this crazy, irresponsible thing. Don’t let me chicken out.

Hi. Remember me? I used to have a blog. Well. I wish I could say that a whole lot has happened since my all too brief fall vacation – hell, I wish I could say that I was sold into white slavery, thrown into an opium den, nearly sacrificed to the Great Ancient Ones, escaped by the skin of my teeth through antediluvian tunnels under the Appalachians, joined a secret society of sorcerers dedicated to stamping out evil and eventually made my way back to the bookstore, all without wifi, which is why I haven’t updated – but it would not be true. Entirely true, that is.

I did start writing a novel for Nanowrimo: a horror novel based on that vacation – not the vacation itself, it was awesome – but the town, which has taken scarecrow fetishization to a high and unholy art. I had great hopes but as usual it only got to be a few pages long and then I stalled out altogether again. Ah well!

Mostly I have just been going to work and coming home, stopping quite occasionally at the Desoto Lounge, seeing my friends and relatives here and there, making food and eating food and resultantly attempting lackadaisically to diet, keeping up miraculously with the picture of the day and, um, I think that might be it. Making some art, here and there, which has been nice. I am quite happy with some of it and thinking there may be more. Whoo! Let’s see, what else? I took photos of small children and their grandparents at the preschool where Audrey works, for which I will be rewarded with a pool pass next summer. I went to my friend Charles’ semi annual fry party. I didn’t do anything much for Halloween. Thanksgiving was very nice; Audrey and Miles and Miles’ girlfriend Jordan were here along with my friends Kyle and Jay and Bill who came over for dinner and Helen and Zen who came for dessert. There was enough food that we ate Thanksgiving steadily for a bit more than a week. See above re, diet. My brother gave me his old iMac and I have been trying with limited success to transfer my computer life to it. Which I have sort of given up because the learning curve, it is steep. Macs don’t make sense. I took a couple of days staycation and I went and looked at a few nursing homes, which is a whole other topic in itself. I took Theo to the vet and paid $135 to find out that he is healthy, which is still annoying me. And right now I seem to have a cold.

Time has sped up lately, which might be a function of age or might be a function of this wildly technological era in which we find ourselves flailing or might be the zeitgeist or might be a sign of the coming apocalypse or maybe it’s climate change: I don’t know. I just know that one minute it is August and the next time I look around there are Christmas lights everywhere. I am a bit disheartened and down these days but I think, as my mother used to say (I paraphrase, here) that if you can look around you at this world and not be depressed you must not be very bright and so the hell with you. Also it’s probably the cold, because things are more or less okay, really. I mean, we are still very very poor and that takes a surprising amount of time and energy. But the bills are almost paid and we pretty much have a roof over our heads (don’t stand in that one spot in the living room and you’ll be fine) so, all good! Anyway, I have just added August to the July – December gallery page, and there was much rejoicing. I will get to work soon on September. And October. And November and then, oh lord, December. It takes about three hours a month, phew, but hey, I think it is worth it. See what you think!

Whooo hoo! Momentarily I will be boarding my trusty 16 year old green Saturn, Batly, and heading out to parts unknown, or, well, unknown to me, anyway: Ellijay, Georgia. I am going to meet my dear friend Elizabeth in a cabin – ok, apartment – in the woods and for the next three days we intend to drink too much, eat too much and lie around doing pretty much blissfully nothing except possibly we might go tubing or, equally exciting, window shopping in swingin’ downtown Ellijay. Why Ellijay? Because she lives in Birmingham, AL and I live in Asheville, NC and my limited Google map skillz indicated this place as roughly halfway and AirBNB indicated that there was a place to stay that we could afford. So, hurrah! I have packed the cooler with wine and cheese and cucumber infused vodka! I have made bruschetta topping with the last tomatoes and basil from the garden! I have dithered ridiculously over what to wear, particularly when you consider that I am going to rural Georgia, not Paris, France. But I have everything, I think, or hope, and it’s all packed into the quilted patchwork duffel bag the Queen of Bohemia bought at the Portobello Road market in the 60s and I am OFF. Only about an hour or two later than I planned to leave, too! Small miracles! I will be back on Wednesday with way too many pictures.

So I lost my shit on Twitter last night. Twitter is a bad place to lose one’s shit, in part because it’s where I usually go to say things like, wow, I sure lost my shit! And now that I have done it on Twitter, I don’t have anywhere to say that. Which is probably why I’m saying it here, but also because I sort of want to examine what it was exactly that made me lose my shit. The immediate cause was yet another bad meal in yet another overpriced West Asheville restaurant but there’s more to it, more underlying that issue. It would be easy to say, well, I was just drunk, but, uh, I wasn’t. Or not very.

I went to the bar with some friends after work, had a couple of drinks, met my friend Jay there and the two of us decided to go out to eat. This is expensive for me, eating out, and I’ve been doing it more than I really should lately – I really shouldn’t do it at all, like ever, like period, full stop, never – but, okay, let’s just go somewhere cheapish. How about this place nearby? OK, let’s go there, I went there once when they first opened a fairly long for West Asheville time ago, it wasn’t very good, I never went back. But let’s give it another try. Well. It was a Saturday night so I suppose I should have expected it: that place was packed. It also had a huge TV screen going and tons of hip young people in their twenties and thirties and many, many shrieking children. It was bright and jammed and loud and horribly trendy in a kind of weird fake way like you would expect more in the suburbs: yeah, no. So we said, okay, let’s go somewhere else, what about this place? Oh it is too far to walk, I don’t want to drive, let’s go to this place, I went there once, when it first opened, it wasn’t very good, but let’s give it another try. It was mostly deserted, which should have been a clue.

It has gotten kind of absurdly tough to be a vegetarian in Asheville, which is interesting in its own right and functions as a handy metaphor for a lot that has changed here in the last five or so years. This used to be the most vegetarian friendly town maybe anywhere, but, no longer. I think some of that is that the children raised by vegetarian hippie parents have all grown up and demanded bacon and lots of it but some of it is, yes, the gentrification and standardization and, oh god, I could and probably will go on and on. Suffice it to say that there is not a lot on the menu at this place – or at any place these days that isn’t purely vegetarian – for vegetarians. So, of my two options, I ordered a beet burger. A beet burger, it turns out, is some beets beaten up with egg and flour, fried, and served with half an avocado and a slice of tomato on top and a pot of mustard. That’s it. No discernible seasoning. No sauce. No anything, really. I looked at it and it looked at me and I tried, I tried slathering mustard on the beets and then I thought, what the FUCK am I doing? This is ridiculous. Worse, this is $9 worth of ridiculous and I’m hungry and it takes me about an hour to earn $9 and I don’t want to work an hour for unseasoned beets. It is not like it’s hard to make a sauce for beets, you know, you can do a sour cream one with dill or a white sauce or a tzatziki – there are options here. Mustard should really not be one of them.

So I sent it back – I have hardly ever done this in my whole life but I did it last night – and the waiter was very nice, which is why I overtipped him for taking it back and I got the stinkeye from the kitchen crew and paid $10 for a small glass of Spanish bubbly white wine and so by the time I got home I was in a fine mood, let me tell you. I had a similar fiasco at a different West Asheville restaurant about six weeks ago and so I thought about that and about the pizza we ordered from a West Asheville place about three weeks ago that took two and a half hours to arrive and when it did was stone cold and nearly inedible anyway. And then I thought, who the fuck were all those shiny people watching football with small children, what was that bright, sterile, trendy place and where did my neighborhood go? Where am I? There didn’t used to be a lot in West Asheville but what there was was dependably mediocre and affordable and comfortably grotty. Now, what we have is so expensive it is enough to break my admittedly tiny monthly budget and it’s pretty much horrible across the board. The only really good restaurant meal I’ve had in Asheville in the last YEAR was at Kathmandu. And that, in this “foodie” city, is bullshit and a goddamn shame.

But then, the taxes keep going up and the water bill has just gone way up again and meanwhile, the infrastructure is crumbling around us and there is less coming back to the citizens than there used to be and that is a goddamn shame, too. There are probably more cops, but there are less festivals. Well, you have to pay more, they say, because there are more people now and so the infrastructure needs fixing. Well, hello, perhaps the ones who lured the new people to town should be fixing that. Maybe the developers who have added more than 30 houses in a six block radius around my house in the last three years should have to pay a rather hefty percentage of their budget into infrastructure updates. Maybe we should say, FUCK NO, there can not be any more growth. Maybe we need to stop this shit. Enough, you know, is enough eventually. Or so you would think, but it is too late anyway.

I just, I don’t know, I am tired of this. I used to love my city and my neighborhood and I used to be okay with being poor – but now I am poorer than I ever was before and it wears on you after a while. I need to fix my roof and my plumbing and a whole host of other things and I can’t. I will probably have to beg you all for money to pay the house taxes this year and eventually, you know, this sort of thing gets old. It was one thing when we were all in the same boat – and I think there are a lot more of us who are a lot poorer than people will admit to or say out loud (which is the subject of whole other essay I want to write someday) but lately, in this neighborhood, I feel like the odd one out, the last surviving poor person and sometimes it is very goddamn tough to go on being nice about it.

I went to the doctor for my UTI, which turns out not to be a UTI after all but instead something that nobody knows what it is. Maybe kidney stones. Maybe, huh, who knows. My doctor checked all my lady parts, even unto doing one of those vaginal ultrasounds that are not much fun. I have an ovarian cyst, hurrah me, and, she said, sounding dissatisfied, “Your uterus is completely normal. Absolutely ordinary.”
“Wow,” I said, “Go normal uterus! Rock on in your ordinary way!”

So whatever is wrong with me, if there is indeed anything wrong and I’m not just making it up, is a mystery. My kidneys hurt and my bladder hurts but I have no other symptoms, so, oh well. These things happen and I guess I will just go along. I got another prescription for antibiotics. I think instead of taking them I will fill it and keep the drugs on hand for the inevitable apocalypse that signs and portents say is coming along any day now. It’s not doing it very fast. Sometimes I think I’ve spent my whole life waiting for the apocalypse and I am not the only one: every single day almost we have somebody coming in to the bookstore asking for either books on how to deal with the end of the world when it happens, like how to grow crops and kill people, or fictional books about how very tough fictional people have survived the same. There is a whole thriving sub genre of these, ranging from the apparently infinite action adventure series of the Outlanders and Deathlands, which I suspect are not written by just one person or indeed necessarily by a person at all, through the slightly better thought out works of Margaret Atwood, Peter Hellman and Cormac McCarthy. And then there are the current crazy screeds written by A. American – the A stands for ANGRY, of course it does – which have been trickling slowly in and rapidly out of the shop.  Everybody likes a good apocalypse yarn.

I have noted before that people seems to expect that as soon as the apocalypse comes, everyone will immediately start killing each other. I kind of doubt this – yes! There is a place where I am actually somewhat less cynical than the average American! – but I am in the definite minority. I just have trouble believing that the only reason people are not out there murdering 24/7 is the presence of the Code of Law, which is to say cops and marble city buildings. I think people generally would prefer not to murder other people if it can possibly be avoided. Among other things, it’s so messy – and then you have a corpse to dispose of, which is not easy. I know it isn’t easy, because my dogs murdered a possum last week.

The first I knew of this was last Friday, when I got home late from work, crawled into bed and turned on the window fan, which, along with the whole house attic fan, is what keeps my home bearable during the summer months. Alas, the air the fan brought in that night was not just air, no, it was, like an early John Waters film, in full on Odorama. To my sorrow as the owner of predators, I am familiar with the smell of Dead Things and this was indeed vintage Dead Thing. I thought about going out to deal with it but I’ve seen enough horror movies to know that venturing out into the darkness to find a Dead Thing seldom ends well. So I just kept tweeting (twitter was made for stuff like this; I love twitter so) burying my nose in the pillow and bemoaning my fate. The smell came in waves. Things mostly do.

A couple days later, after writing a bad poem about the dead possum on the front door – have I mentioned that I painted the inside of my front door with chalkboard paint? I think it is the single most genius thing I have ever done, no, seriously – I got my son, who by virtue of being male is the Appointed Disposer of Dead Things in our sexist household, to get rid of it. He put it in a trashbag with the shovel and thence to the outdoor trash can, which will never recover – the smell was, uh, pungent. “It’s kind of interesting,” he said, “how things decompose.” And it is, actually: the fur all falls off first and then it goes on from there, or at least I think it does, because I can’t look longer than necessary to note the absence of fur, which does not improve animals aesthetically, no, far from it. Although I think bald men are actually quite sexy, so there is that exception.

In other news, I went to the Mountain State Fair before it opened and helped out hanging some of the artwork, which I used to do every year but haven’t in the past four or five. I have always kind of liked doing it – it’s fun to be at the fair before it opens and it’s fun to see what people have entered. I don’t do the judging anymore, though, because one year I insisted on giving a blue ribbon to a ballpoint pen drawing of Ozzy Osbourne on a napkin instead of to one of the lavishly framed PBS painting show inspired laborious oil landscapes which are so popular and I believe there was something of a stink about it. The fair is not really a hotbed of groundbreaking contemporary art, go figure. I also used to always drag some suffering friend or family member along, sweetening the deal by throwing in cocktails or at least beers in styrofoam cups. This is also not what you are supposed to do, but hanging weird art just goes better with vodka.

Also, then I get to take brooding melancholy photos of ferris wheels.

And that is all I have to say this week, but hey, the gallery is almost totally up to date! Even July is done, so look on my works ye mighty and be mildly impressed.

I have a UTI, which is to say, a urinary tract infection. I am prone to them, as are many women, although in the States nobody ever talks about it and in fact everybody kind of acts like it’s some sort of unusual, secret, shameful thing. I was lucky to get my first one as a teenager living in Spain: nobody made a big deal out of it and my French friend Sylvie said “Ah. la cystite!” which is what I still call it. Cystitis, the Brits say, and I was happy on first encountering Caitlin Moran to discover that nobody makes a big deal out of it in the UK either: they just pretty much figure you’re going to have it now and then. In Spain they, or rather Javier the doctor, the QOB’s friend, gave me some green pills that made me pee orange and some blue pills that made it all go away. And over the next many years I have had it here and there and now and then and the only time it’s been a big deal is when I don’t have health insurance or the doctor gets weird about it, which happens.

I am a bit miffed though about having one right now, because cystitis is one of those Judaeo-Christian punishing illnesses: you generally get it from having too much fun. Which is to say, it’s also called honeymoonitis because you can get it from having too much sex – wait, well, too much? Anyway, a lot of sex – you don’t get it from your partner, by the way, it’s from the friction. Basically, it’s a physics based disease. Heh. You can also get it from hanging around in a wet bathing suit, so, see? Fun. You get it from fun. I have not had either of those varieties of fun in a very very VERY long time – and it occurs to me that it’s been EVEN LONGER since I had them in tandem – so this bout seems particularly unfair. But then, ascribing ridiculous religious reasons to why bad things happen is one of the rabbit holes people fall into in this country and I don’t want to go there. Next thing you know I’ll be picketing funerals. I do think, though, that this is why nobody in the US has a healthy normal approach to cystitis and instead act like it’s some kind of particularly skeevy STD, like crabs or something.

However! Let’s stop having fun and instead return to the health insurance part. I have health insurance now, and I have a doctor, or, well, at least I have a doctor for my lady parts. I keep meaning to find a doctor for the rest of me – necessary, clearly, as shown by the shoulder episode: you can take your shoulder to the gynecologist but she is not going to understand it  – but I haven’t gotten around to it. Cystitis is not really a lady part thing except that it is – we ladies have a much shorter and I think thinner urinary tract than the gentlemen do and so ours tends to get clogged more easily than theirs does, or so it was once explained to my non medical school attending unless you count WebMD brain. At any rate, it’s sort of hard to say whether it falls under the purview of the gynecologist or not. On the theory that it did I called mine up and, I am utterly delighted to report, she called me back and called in a prescription and all I have to do is go and pick it up. I don’t even have to pee in a jar, hurrah, hurray, oh frabjous day. More or less. I do have to go to the drugstore over by where I work which meant that on the off chance of encountering a coworker I had to put on a bra, which I would rather not do on my day off, but whatever. First world problems! BUT.

As I hung up the phone it occurred to me that this is middle class privilege in action in America today. If I was poor – poorer, I mean, which is astoundingly, horrifically possible as I know to my sorrow – I wouldn’t have health insurance. Don’t talk to me about the ACA – in NC at least it doesn’t work because our psychotic state legislature did not expand Medicaid and thus, if you make more than, hmmmm, I think it’s like $12K a year, or if you make less but are not either over 65 or under 18 or permanently disabled, unless you have an extra $80 or $200 or more a month, you still don’t have health insurance of any kind. Nothing has changed here since Obamacare happened. Well. So if I had woken up with cystitis – actually it started yesterday and I’ve been trying to stave it off with the unspeakable horror that is real, undiluted, unsweetened cranberry juice but no dice – and I didn’t have insurance, than this is what would have happened.

• I would have had to either come up with the money for Sisters of Mercy: $200 or the ER: also at least $200 but they ask for the money at the end instead of the beginning so you might be able to get treated for free, just at the cost of your eternal credit report forever.
• Or I could have taken off work tomorrow, thus forfeiting a days pay, and gone to the free clinic at ABCCM, where you have to show up at 7 am and sit for an hour and a half in line and then there is no guarantee that you’re going to be seen.
• Then I would have had to pee in a jar and wait.
• Then I would have to pay full price for the prescription, Cipro, usually, which is probably not cheap if you don’t have insurance.
• And all this would have bankrupted me, so I just wouldn’t go, and instead go on with the cranberry juice and prayer regimen with the result that possibly if not probably it would go into my kidneys and I would end up at the ER really sick.
• AND PEOPLE WONDER WHY THE FUCK THIS COUNTRY PAYS SO MUCH MORE FOR MEDICAL CARE THAN ALL OTHER COUNTRIES! HINT: IT’S NOT BECAUSE THE CARE IS INTRINSICALLY BETTER!!

What would solve this problem, class? UNIVERSAL SINGLE PAYER HEALTH INSURANCE!

And that is our rant for today. Anyway, I’m going to the drugstore now, so enjoy and count your cystitis free blessings.

Somebody tweeted “This is the Summer of Watching Helplessly” and I, along with many others, retweeted it because it felt so damn true and then a few people picked it up from me and tweeted it on and, yeah, here we are: tweeting helplessly. I have been watching the news from Ferguson, MO, primarily on Twitter and on Metafilter – the best way, I find, to get my news for the most part – and I keep wanting and even, occasionally, starting to cry. I get so angry and so depressed and just, jesus. I can’t even. Even.

I wish that people would listen to hippies. I know, they’re annoying as fuck, I can’t stand them either, but look, they were right about the neonicitinoids killing the bees – not that anything is being done about that except for, uh, the occasional hand wringing article in Mother Jones – and they were right about the police, the rise of police power and the problems, to put it mildly, of the increased militarization of the police. Post hippies, we the punk ass generation were also right about these things and yet, fuck, goddamn, here we go again. Here we go again and this time, the gloves are off and the real force of the horrible, seemingly eternal, casual racism in this country is right there on display. And you know it’s all just going to go underground again and you know, FUCK THAT. FUCK THAT. Bring it out. Bring that demon out kicking and writhing into the light of day and let’s look at it: in the USA in the 21st century it is okay for the police to shoot young black men. No, really, it’s okay. It’s okay in Asheville and it’s okay in Ferguson, MO and it’s okay pretty much anywhere.

I don’t like cops. In fact I fear and pretty much loathe them and I don’t know what would have to happen for me to call on one, but I doubt there is trouble enough in the world. Why? you say, the cops are here to help us, you say. Unfortunately, I have probably more reason than most nominally middle class white women to dislike them: if we were black, I think there is a very good chance, by which I mean about an 85% chance, that my son would be dead now. We have failed young men in this country, young men of every color, but they mostly don’t shoot the white ones.

Someday I might tell the whole story of what happened from 2008 to 2012 in this family, but not today. It is not entirely my story to tell, after all, but here is the gist of it: my son as an angry, troubled teenager got himself into first minor and then rapidly escalating major trouble. For this he went to jail, repeatedly, starting with the time at the age of 16 when he was kept in the Buncombe County Jail for four days and three nights without any way to reach me – at that time inmates were not allowed to call cell phones and all we had even then were cell phones and my boss, not understanding, being a middle class white woman, refused all calls from jail – and he might be there still except for a chance encounter with a public defender friend of mine. And that was just the beginning of our four year journey to hell. My son, as you know if you know me, has had a rocky road his whole life: he has multiple learning disabilities and a variety of other diagnoses involving lots of initials, including ODD, which is to say he mouths off to cops. The cops in this town, who have always made a point of hassling him, partly because they routine harass teenagers in this fucking wealthy tourist destination and partly because he’s a big, mouthy kid and partly because his friends come in a wide variety of colors and sizes and partly because we are poor and partly, okay, I grant you, because he fucked up many a time, really don’t like him. And although he now holds down multiple jobs and works his ass off and does not get into trouble and I am incredibly proud of him, they still don’t like him and they still want to harass him and, by extension, me. Fuck tha police, indeed.

They decided, at some point, that he was a gang member and probably a gang kingpin at that. This is a kid who at that point was too ADD to find his fucking shoes most of the time and as I told a probation officer in a fit of fury, if I thought he had the ability to mastermind a gang I would have worried far less about his future. That would be why I had 12 police and probation officers show up at my house in full riot gear one day in 2010 and search the house and the yard from top to bottom, while I stood there in the kitchen, wondering if I should make coffee, or what. Awkward! They found, eventually, two broken down paintball guns and a collection of fake Samurai swords that had been hanging on my son’s bedroom wall since he was 9 and a machete that was on its way to be used for brush clearing in the trunk of his car and, then, somewhat later, during a sudden second search of a now emptied room, a rather surprising whole half gram of marijuana. That was the day when our comic relief was his friend, handcuffed in my living room as I stood there, unbelieving, trying to wrap my mind around this, was told that his pink ribbon tattoo, a symbol of his mother’s fight with breast cancer, was a clear gang marker. Yeah. We never got the swords back, by the way, and I imagine they are on the wall of a cop’s kids bedroom now.

That experience, combined with the days and days of sitting in courtrooms and taking phone calls from jail, all of which cost money, you know, quite a lot of money – it is terribly, horrifyingly expensive to have a loved one incarcerated – and sending money to jail for such non necessities as shaving cream and aspirin – an aspirin costs $16 in jail, by the way, $16 – and then the long months my son spent in a hellhole state youth prison, months that I pretty much cried every night, left a variety of marks on my soul but one of them is a distaste and distrust for police and an absolute disillusionment and horror of what we laughingly call the criminal justice system in this country, a system that incarcerates more young men than in any other country in the world, in the motherfucking world, that will not ever go away. They used my kid as a scapegoat and if we had been richer, I am pretty sure he would have walked away from everything with a slap on the wrist and no record. As it is he has multiple felony convictions on his record so he cannot vote and he cannot get a passport and his future as a result is confined and limited and yet, you know, with all that we are incredibly lucky because Michael Brown is dead and my son is alive and this is not because they are different: they are not different except for the color of their skins.

This country is fucked. It is so fucked, so badly now that I at least no longer hold out any hope that it can even be reconciled. Maybe there is still time or still a way to rein it in, to rein in the crazy rhetoric, the power mad testosterone and chemical fueled rage coming from the right wing and the police and even the churches, Jesus wept, but I doubt it. I think it’s too late, now, way too late, just like climate change, and I wish I or someone could write a better epitaph for some dream of the US than the one that is being written in blood and human suffering all over the country this summer while we stand by and tweet helplessly but I don’t think we will even get that. To quote the minstrel prince of the hippies, right again, everything is broken.

Tonight at the bar the subject somehow came up – I think it was somewhere in between the possibility of quantum universes and who should keep the dog in any given breakup – of how, when I was 12 or possibly 13, a crow dropped half a bloody dead rabbit on me in the woods. By which I mean to say that I brought it up, because obviously, nobody else knew about this. Well, one would hope not. I was alone that summer afternoon, except for a maladaptive springer spaniel, and since I was already more than half insane with hormones and fantasy novels and a kind of deeply dysfunctional family situation, nobody else ever knew except my best friend. I told her in hushed whispers, because I thought that it meant I was a Witch, and soon More Signs Would Follow. This was before Harry Potter, or I would have spent a lot of time waiting for an owl. My best friend ended up hospitalized for schizophrenia when she was 17 and I’m not sure if she ever really got out. She did, once, and took a Greyhound bus south to visit me in Charleston and it went, well, not well. And Signs did not Follow.

It was the back half of the rabbit and it came down through the pine woods with considerable force and there was a lot of bird shouting. There was a riot of crows, or perhaps a murder, and the branches shook and blam, not quite on me but almost, smack, was half a rabbit with the guts and muscles and so on hanging out among the gray fur.

My friend Jodi said, on hearing this story, that she thought this was the incident that had shaped me into who I was forever, that that half a rabbit had made me forever akin to the absurd. “You knew,” she said, “After that, that anything could happen at any time and there was no sense to the universe.”

“On the contrary,” I said, “It seemed to me that it meant there was tremendous sense to the universe. I thought it meant that I was Chosen.”

It was just later that I figured out I wasn’t. And, yes, that the universe does tend to run to dead rabbits, except when you really need one.

“What did you do with it?” asked a more practical member of our party.

“Nothing,” I said, “I was afraid to touch it. I mean, it was bloody and gross and there it was. I think I poked it with a stick once or twice, because it occurred to me that I should bring it home and keep it forever, or melt off the flesh and keep the bones or something – I had read my fantasy – but I couldn’t quite bring myself to pick it up. And I wouldn’t let the dog touch it and I could just imagine my mother’s response to this appearing in her kitchen and it was not good. So in the end I left it there.”

Actually I continued on my walk and I thought then and kind of think now that I then went through a small time portal and wandered briefly into the edge of a future Lincoln, Massachusetts (that was where we were living that year) but everything was strange and filled with McMansions, another term that hadn’t yet been coined, and buzzing (literally buzzing, like cicadas or downed power lines, not me, it would be another year or so before I discovered drugs) so I went back and through the hissing twilight and the frogs and home again, 12, or 13 or actually now that I think about it even maybe 14, surly, uncommunicative and filled with loathing. And heading into adolescence, full tilt.

Dead rabbits fell on me, yes, but there are other, somewhat less dramatic but just as weird, things I also did when I was in middle school and here, on no particular order, they are.

1. I ate the same lunch every day for my entire 8th grade year. Ham and swiss on rye with mustard, an apple, a bag of Fritos and a Coke.

2. I also wore the same outfit, basically, I had it codified: jeans (I had 3 identical pairs, so one was always clean, all flair, even though that was out and people gave me shit for it) and one of my four turtleneck bodysuits (this was a terrible 70s thing, they snapped at the crotch like leotards and mine were, fashion gods forgive me, ribbed. I had a mustard one, a dark red one, a dark green one and I think a navy one. Even then I would have died rather than worn pastels. The orange pants in this picture were a terrible thing of my mothers and long since banished.) and either clogs or Frye boots, depending on the weather. Remember that I was already 5’10”, weighed about 105 pounds, had neither boobs nor butt nor hips but instead was not unlike a young tree or 2′ by 4″. I had outsize bottle bottom glasses and thick not quite curly not quite blonde not quite brown not quite red hair that my mother was forever attempting and failing to contain with a variety of red rubber bands and barrettes and haircuts that just kept on getting progressively worse until we all gave up and left my hair the hell alone.*

3. A couple years before the above, before the rote sandwiches and jeans, we lived in Connecticut. Every day at 5:00 Star Trek (the original one, the only one, really) came on TV. I kept a Star Trek Diary that year, and in it I wrote down the title of the episode playing that day, so I HAD to get home just before 5:00 because they would only flash the title up on the screen one time, just at the very beginning. I couldn’t miss it. I rode my bike to school and back again, or to a friends’ house, or where ever, nobody much cared where I was or if I was home or, well, I think my mother would have noticed if I hadn’t turned up for dinner, maybe. But that year, I got myself home at 5:00, because the one or two times I tried to get a friend to turn on Star Trek so I could at least catch the title, I was relentlessly mocked. Star Trek was already only for nerds by the early mid 70s. And here I truly out myself: I had a book, a paperback that had the history of Star Trek, a bio of Gene Roddenberry and a synopsis for every single episode ever made (they were long done making new ones by this point) and I checked off each episode. Yes. Since I’m confessing, here, I also read some Star Trek novels. Yup. I did.

4. And then, the next year or so, I wrote a Star Trek episode myself which featured every single person in my grade, which is to say seven of us: it was a small, Anglophiliac and rapidly dying girl’s school with a jaw droppingly beautiful Edwardian campus and a headmistress, a good friend of my mother, who would later go on to shoot the Scarsdale diet doctor. My Star Trek story was well received. Everybody liked hearing about themselves on a starship having adventures.

5. Jean Harris told my mother that it was okay and even normal that I had stolen Fear of Flying off her bedside table and that I would probably survive and not become a nymphomaniac.

6. At a point equidistant between the ones above, when I was attending a different all girls school in a different Connecticut suburb, a math teacher told us about a a googol and a googolplex, which are numbers that are so large, nobody can count up to them or even write them out. They have a million million zeroes, or something like that, I can no longer remember and I don’t want to google the googol and find something everyday and real. I want to hold onto the image of the unattainable that I grasped that afternoon in math class, because I immediately started to try to make it attainable. For the rest of the school year, I filled a succession of marble notebooks with zeroes. The first one had a 1 at the beginning and the rest just had zeroes. I wrote them every time I was bored, which was most of the time in that school, except when there was horrible drama, which was the rest of the time because it was 7th grade in a girls school. I kept on filling my notebooks.

7. Years later, when I saw a Jonathan Borofsky exhibition at the Whitney, I felt like I had come home.

8. That same year we went on an overnight trip, or it might even have been several days, to Cape Cod. On the bus I took a plastic cup and cut it into vertical strips – not all the way but so that it was still holding together – and put it down and it walked like an octopus from the back to the front of the bus and briefly, very briefly, I was cool.

9. On that same bus trip I had to sit next to the most unpopular, uncool, loathed girl in the school and she told me that she was okay with being hated because she knew her parents loved her and that maybe we could be friends? And I felt like the lowest pond scum on earth, because all I wanted was to get the hell away before I caught her pariah germs. And I fled as soon as I could and didn’t look back. But I never did say anything mean to or about her again.

10. The summer this picture was taken, on Block Island, I found a strange hidden place behind the dunes that was full, I mean full, of bird bones, like a silent, bleached, hot, sandy graveyard of hollow white bones. I spent a lot of time there. I brought bags and bags of them home, and my mother thought we would all get lice, or scabies, or something, but eventually she relented. It was a difficult summer familywise.  I wish I still had the bones.

11. I was a weird kid. But all kids, you know, are weird.

*This state of affairs has essentially persisted although I have more or less dyed it into submission.