And so it begins

I've been worried about this winter since it started getting colder. You don't want to be too dramatic, if you are me--it's so easy so let a slow grayness seep in that it's usually best to not name it. Plus everyone else is in so much more pain than me, usually. I try to find ways to integrate pain into how I see everything so that it doesn't stand out, right? It's in the fabric of my days, which isn't really supported by my culture, but whatever. It works as well as anything.

The loss of whiskey and wine woke me up to even more pain, loneliness, awareness of processes between people; made me more tender in general. I don't seem to be able to hide, either; it's my day job, my house is no refuge, Cary Tennis has cancer and is scared. A shiny boy kills himself, hearts are broken. If I thought that immersing myself in pain, getting right into it, would protect me, well. I was wrong. I think it means something but I don't know what.

I'm going to Shalom Mountain soon and I hope to take some magic back down to get me through this winter; I think big painful things are coming, even though I might be wrong: I'm torn, because I don't want to be wearing the wrong glasses but I don't want to be blind-sided, either. I think I just want to write that I'm scared, and also hopeful, and that if you are hurting, I get it. I also want to put this out there, in light of all of this, including my continued heartbreakingly simple interactions with these little girls who give me the clear and brutal impression that they feel they have never been valued or listened to before:

"What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured." --Kurt Vonnegut

In order to assuage any guilt about not updating this blog enough, I direct anyone who finds this to read Cary Tennis' advice column on salon.com. He's consistently amazing: kind, loving, funny, compassionate, eccentric. And he writes nearly everyday. Initially he was just a source of good vibes and thoughts and writing, although of late we have converged on a path he doesn't know exists, and every column is a punch to my solid gut. "Dear Mother Disliker"? The thing with an advice columnist is that I'm not simply converging with him and what he writes, but with the presenting problems of the salon.com readers writing to him.

I am not alone in disliking my mother. And like the lady who has awoken from her OCD slumber, I'm on a path. I'm like the dozens of letter writers who struggle with drinking, who want to know how to love people more, who want directions on how to live a good, decent life. If we can agree that a major feature of our common American life is a focus on the superiority of the individual desire, which intersects with capitalism in a major way and results in a soil rich for the production of narcissism, then I believe we can also use an advice columnist to remind us that our problems are collective and our solution is complex but doesn't involve thinking less, feeling less, or buying more.

On the me tip, I'm like a perpetual "Stayin' Alive" video, I'm strutting around trusting that something fantastic is happening, with occasional breaks to stop strutting and crouch, terrified, at in the middle of the sidewalk because...you know...being alive is terrifying. And then the music starts again and I'm back to hustlin'.

While my computer is broken, this is my update, typed on a computer shared by four people in an office shared by 15--

My Gramma Downey passed, and she took my alcohol consumption with her. Seeing her crazy daughter (and my mother!) for the first time in five years, all drug-addled and unable to recognize her children by face or voice, well, that helped, too. I'm straight edge again! Except for the fish and the periodic cigarette and the occasional 'bump' when the party's flagging, I'm pure as Ian MacKaye, 1988.

What could he be saying?

The debate re: whether or not I am an alcoholic rages on between friends and Sister and myself, a little bit, but in the end: my Grandmother was an alcoholic, and my mom is that and so, so much more; some of the cousins have it, the unquenchable thirst following that first beer. As it stood I had a maximum of two hours of pleasure from drinking for every six hours spent worrying about money and calories and behavior and the eventual destruction of my eventual children's lives due to my eventual descent into alcoholism and Borderline Personality Disorder.

To sum up:

"It's the right thing to do."

And I'm happy about it, which is the most important thing: my happiness. Fantastic things have been falling into place, as well, although other excruciating happenings prevent me from thinking that I fell from drinking into life's great jello pool of predetermined goodness. Constant bliss and good luck happenstance would be boring anyway, and would not provide me with enough funny stories or teeny tiny reminders that being alive, while often mind-blowingly tender and precious, is also ridiculous.

Around the turn of the year there were delightful 'look back at your life' directives from the newspapers and lady magazines. I love them, I eat them up. Something asked about the most creative moments in the past year and I realized how much I love running groups. Or really, how much I love coming up with ambitious ideas for groups. 'So I'll do more of that!' I decided. And revised my poetry group with the boys to be more hippyish and concentrated.

Everything was all mapped out and coordinated and it's been two days of chaos and mismanagement. Today alone we spent 30 minutes shuffling between three units, collecting girls and dirty looks. Well laid plans all mucked up is frustrating enough, right? Especially when the plans are something you are invested in, so imagine a time that happened to you. Now imagine how much that sucked, and then imagine the whole time that girls are cussing at you and staff are giving you dirty looks. When we finally had a space and the group had dwindled to 6, and the quiet room was a public room and a movie about Jesus as a drug dealer in the ghetto was blaring across the room, and my precious Borderline was making a massive attention seeking mess, but I could finally breathe. I was able to see what a tense White wreck I was, and haven't I learned? Nothing works here. It's broken.

The other thing I've learned is that these fucking kids are no fucking joke, and once I admitted my frustration and explained my vision, and took just a touch more abuse and a touch more love, we got into the swing of things and had some really nice moments.

A list of demands for my man of letters.

I'm currently reading "Of Human Bondage" and it's converging strangely with the new Harpers'* I am concurrently reading. Last article in Harper's is a review of a book about William Hazlitt, and the first line is "From Samuel Johnson to Christopher Hitchens..." so you know I'm down from jump street. Along with the Maugham book I took out from the library was a Samuel Johnson collection and a fictionalized biography of said-same Dr. J. What do these guys--and Susan Sontag--have in common? They are "men of letters": "an intriguing combination of critic, sage, scholar, journalist, and dilettante...a public intellectual...combining the erudite with the popular." I also think of bell hooks. I often think of bell hooks: she is my north star: who also has (apparently like this Hazlitt they are talking about) an abiding empathy, the "rigorous and imaginative compassion" of DFW.

Where I'm going with this is--well, first things first, forget astronaut or ballerina, I want to be a man of letters. I'm also wondering what a man of letters actually does in the media-determinationist post-capitalist world in which we find ourselves. So often the revolutionary thinkers were those that undermined prevailing ideas, but as we now operate in a near constant state of advertising-driven idea-flipping, bombarded by letters, covered in silly letters, awash in loud letters, well then. My hope is that the fluffy icing will always be fluffy icing, and that the sharp mind of a pure heart will always cut to the center of discourse. We can only assume the best of a cake or cake metaphor.

The "Of Human Bondage" thing comes in for illustration: how I reminisce for a time of simple class warfare and prim Victorian oppression, for I would be a hipster libertine. Now, however, I find myself a true Catholic in a world of easy want and insincerity. I blame Ian MacKaye and Kurt Vonnegut both.

The mid-twenties narrator, Phillip, he's running into every example of foolish libertines and delusional adherents of the Good Life and I'm at this ridiculous job where I just learned they are teaching "Criminal Thinking Errors" and Freudian constructs to the boys on the fourth floor, the ones going to big kid jail soon. What about a little love, people, what if the skills you need to steal a car and lie to the cops are the same skills needed to get a good job and run an investment firm? Where is the art in life, the right for everyone to feel the smug compassion that is my daily fuel? Are there people who still can't see that their misbehavior is your gentlemanliness, that their delinquency is your success?

My demands: I demand a man of letters who can finish the ideas I start. I want no Demitri Martin-type shorthand replacing insight, but neither will the cruelness of this world lead my man of letters to kill himself or become a pickled and fusty conservative. I want workaday imagination, vigorous compassion, and enough sarcasm to keep him or her alive for the duration.

*This issue's short story contains scenes around Toledo and is called 'the Blade.' It's Denis Johnson-reminiscent and a silent shout-out to Toledo: it's both these things!

Question: anxiety about your lack of anxiety is called what?

I'm saying no to the PhD program to which I was just accepted. I only sporatically abide by sober standards of behavior but I always know where I'm supposed to do--and I'm supposed to pay off this damned debt. School will not offer funding for a part-timer, and I can't afford to go full time. Also, I don't want to go full time, because as sick and stressed and heartbroken as this job has made me, I am not done with it and it is not done with me. Who quits a job in this economy? Plus, I'm thinking I'll go for the big brass ring and apply to University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. The name alone used to sicken me! I wanted to attend the School of Dismantling The System! These days I'm not so sure. Now I want to be where the power is, the power of money, class, and prestige, where the books are leather and the buildings Gothic. It seems that I will always be an outsider, and there is no better place to be outside than the inside, right?

Outside of the outside is either inside or nowhere. I'm too angry to be an insider and too much a lady for nowhere.

In the meantime I will prompt my gifted co-workers to their greatest, and attach my name to their accomplishments. I will coast on the great expectations of my friends and family, who assume there is genius in there somewhere, under the hair and head cold. That's right, Chicago Winter. You get one last punch in.

Katrina asks me why I no blog no more, and I have no good answer. In the absence of a good answer I will just go ahead and blog, and then I can say "Katrina, what the hell are you talking about?" Because, you see, I'm blogging all the time.

For instance, I'm doing it right now, at work.

Remember when I thought my non-standard work schedule would be calming and centering? It has been; I am now cooking all the time, and doing yoga. I'm also deeply infatuated with a married co-worker and it is frustrating and great. Due to the sad-pants direction in which I'm heading, I'm trying to get my date on, in person and in Internet. In person, I try to talk to nice guys with beards and spend less time with charming and shallow alcoholics. On the computer, I chose chemistry.com because it involves my favorite of the soft sciences--personality tests! They are choosing men for me based on colorful pie charts, just like the village elders would have, had my people stayed in Ireland and Ireland developed pseudo-scientific Power Point-style mating rituals.

It's nearly my year anniversary here at Kid Jail, and since I love a good retrospective, I have been comparing my year at the last job with my work here. In a sweet convergence, I will be leading a Trauma-Sensitive Care training with the line staff this month. Of course this was the training I desperately wanted to lead at the residential center, but seeing as I was the Training Coordinator, it was more important to sort resumes and discuss the finer points of dental coverage. Man, that job sucked!

Following a big conference I attended in November on "Trauma and its Aftermath" I suddenly knew what I wanted to research for my PhD and applied to Jane Addams. I was watching a panel with the great Bessel van de Kelk and His Eminence John Briere and it just hit me, and continued to pinch and shock me until I was forced to speak out on the last day at the last paper presentation. I was on holy fire!

Since the application, however, I have had the time to deeply question my choice of research and of schools. In developing the handouts for this training, however, and thinking endlessly, endlessly, constantly about these kids and cultural conceptions of these kids and communities and crime, it's pretty obvious that I am supposed to pull at this thread until it no longer keeps me up at night or causes me to cry on the bus. This equation has worked well in the past: what is it that makes you cry, St. Renegade, what is keeping you awake at night with empathy and rage? You should probably make that thing your job. In fact, you should blog about it.

The plan, then, is for increased blogging on the following topics: 1. Dating and 2. Various inchoate weepy thoughts about children in Chicago and the meaning of life. I can also write about vegetarian recipes, urban teen language, and missing my friends that have moved away. Coming soon.

It took me a long time to post that last thing, even though negative is easier than positive. I can type furiously in my mouse- and MRSA-infested office about a bad day much more easily than a good day. After a good day, I float out of work, buoyed by co-workers and children, and the beautiful facets of human suffering and healing. I sit on the bus and imagine I'm glowing. If I wrote about poetry group, or the children who look at me with sad and loving eyes, well: that hurts more, and would take a better writer. I'm trying, yo. You never want to brag, right? You never want to take credit for something that should be as easy as breathing. Like, 'I showed someone respect and compassion, and it moved them'. This should happen all the time. Blogs should be chock-a-block with kindness and respect. The fabric of my life, what with the work and the empathy, should be as mundane as tollbooth operation appears to be. Alas, alas. It seems to stick out. And so I say: I can write about Ponytail, and this bitch yesterday that tried to hurt me, but really? What I am not equiped to write about are the amazing times, the group last week in which I was crying, when D. reached out to K. and offered pure and loving support, in jail. In kid jail. I can't write about how the younger boys gather round, how they can still receive loving praise and you watch it fortify their bones like milk. I still don't know how to talk about D. and what she gave me, when she sat in my lap and screamed about everyone that had left her. Why is it so much easier to trade my crazy kid stories for kind looks and free beers when what I actually want to talk about is how much it hurts when someone loves and trusts you and you don't know why; it's like they handed you an egg made of gold, and you are a trampoline artist. Take care of this, they are saying. You think: what the fuck? I'm honored, but I fucking jump on things for a living.

"This poem is called 'Time of Sorrow'"

Mr. Wallace's suicide continues to resonate, or it weakened the glass enough that bigger bowling balls landing on the windshield over my heart made some big scary cracks. Today I am watching a documentary in which a girl, out from foster care and juvie, screams wounded insults at her drug-addicted mother. I am sitting next to a girl with acute Borderline Personality Disorder traits, like: she cannot take in any genuineness and so judges and deflects, loudly and with the aid of teeth-sucking. "[tsk] she so stupid [tsk] her hair ugly [tsk] she be blowing me, she don't deserve no mother [tsk]." My grief over my mother was summoned by the documentary, but my hatred of her and my hatred of my hatred of her is sitting next to me like Kryponite, if Kryponite was human pain, and Superman was a social worker. I am so raw by the end of the film that I nearly ram the glass with the A/V cart in my rush to escape. It was carnage in there, girls crying over their cancer-ridden mothers, their sad lives, their existences, buy my girl is running for her room, making sure that we all see her tear-stained face and hear her anguished cries. I am certain that she isn't feeling anything. I want to smoosh her face. I want to reach into her empty self and fill her with empathy pudding.

Cut to the boys group and all their bitching and moaning. This one kid--I shall call him Ponytail, because he is mean--obviously does not want to participate in the spoken word group. "So go." "I don't want to go." Continues to cuss under his breathe, attempts to screw his face up into a shank and psychically stab me with it. "Okay, everyone who wants to be in this group, raise your hand." He does not raise his hand. "Okaaaay, everyone who didn't raise their hand, step out." He does not step out. "I want to be in group." "Well, you should have raised your hand. Step out."

And then it begins. "This is some bullshit, some fucking bullshit, etc..." He is pouring me a heaping helping of the word stew commonly called 'M.F.-ing' in corrections lingo. Usually I know where to place myself in the mental terrain of these interactions. There are boundaries. Clearly, kid was looking to M.F. someone. Plus, the stupid and selfish rage of adolescents cannot be overstated. You can bitch all you want, but I know I asked you justly, and you must justly obey. You, kid, are in jail.

There is also Spazzatar, a young man greatly underserved his share of intact genes, nutrition, family life, or social capital. I try to remember that they are puppies, you know? Cute puppies you see near a dumpster, having been bested by the other dogs, and you move closer, like, "Hey little buddy! Aw, buddy, what happened to your leg?" and snap!, Little Buddy is baring his teeth and lunging and hiding his hurt leg from you, you fucking monster. Spazzatar's bared teeth take the form of a high-pitched voice he uses to repeat and mock everything I say. I feel like the worst group leader in the world. I am a terrible person, a fat white lady pouring effete syrup on nasty little kids that would rather punch each other and mock each other to death. I wonder what I am doing with my life, I should be on Project Runway. I should be doing a job that never ever hurts. I am going to quit, and find a job that does not want to kill me.

Couple things:

I'm working on a plan to update this more as a personal challenge! I love personal challenges!

Also, from Laura Miller's article on Salon.com about DFW's suicide, we get this: to counter exhausting self-consciousness he practiced a "rigorous and imaginative compassion." I scribbled it inside my pocketbook I liked it so much.

And finally, I'm entranced by this spam email I read, imagining it's like an internet rune by which I can tell my future, or maybe a cryptic map to millons of Nigerian dollars. You tell me.

"Lila Thomson" CaseyexhaustBlanco@wikipedia.org

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