Bad Object: Bikini Girl

 My mother kept two photographs of me tacked to her kitchen bulletin board throughout my years in college and graduate school. In one, I am twelve years old and have dressed up as a flapper in a real 1920s dress, black with maroon flower appliqués on the skirt and maroon lining that continued onto the very flapper, long narrow sash at the neck meant to tie in a bow at one shoulder and drape down the torso to the hip. The black velvet turban I am wearing is also period, having been worn by my maternal grandmother during that decade. An exaggerated cupid’s bow is my mouth. My legs are crossed coyly. I am a dead ringer for Clara Bow, but for the faux beauty mark I’ve penciled above my upper lip. In the other photograph, I am thirteen or fourteen, soaking wet on the front porch of the second house we lived in on Olive Avenue (the last house we occupied as an intact family). The Saturday Night Fever beach towel stretched triumphantly behind me I have taken to The Floral Plunge downtown near the recycling center every weekday for the entire summer for two summers running. The occasion is my sister’s eleventh or twelfth birthday party. Lanky and wrapped in her own towel Phen Trahn, my sister’s arch-nemesis and best friend is standing to one side and a little behind me laughing. (Phen and Sarah always competed for the highest test score. Tran won a little more often than Sarah.) I am wearing a brown bikini with tiger-like black stripes arranged in a triangle on each cup and in lightening bolts pointing toward or exploding outward from my hoo-ha on the briefs. My pose is triumphant, legs apart with one foot forward, knees slightly bent, hips thrust forward, arms raised above my head so that the iconic, Statue of Liberty pose of John Travolta hangs down behind me like the cape of a superhero. When each of these photos came back from being developed at the CVS Drugstore at the new Redlands Mall, I loved them. By the time I sent them away, I hated them.

I loved the photos because I looked good in them: pretty, well formed. They were just the sort of photo one’s female relatives would unselfconsciously tack to a bulletin board or frame in silver and display in the living room, and then to which direct the attention of visitors, those visitors politely opining that one is indeed a lovely girl. My mother-in-law’s house is full of photos of this type: herself and my daughters—big smiles on pretty faces, nice clothes on special occasions. (There is a single photo of me in my mother-in-law’s house—a wedding photo in which my hair is an elaborate Elizabethan up do studded with pearls and my gown is dark champagne with heavy white pearl beading. My makeup is perfect and I look as lovely as I’ve ever looked as an adult. In it, I weigh somewhere around 270 pounds, give or take 20, where I have hovered for at least one decade, maybe longer. I am fat in this photo. I’m pretty certain visitors are not encouraged to look at this photo. It is not one that is trotted out into the den, as I am not a show pony. As one of my husband’s childhood friends explained when I was complaining about always being sent out for office support jobs instead of office work jobs, “There are show ponies and there are work horses.” I took that negatively, but it now seems maybe I should have considered his comment more carefully: The receptionist and executive assistant does, after all, require “front office appearance.” Maybe the crushing dysmorphia I carried through my adolescence followed me into adulthood? Why do I even bother posing this as a question? Of course it did.

Hyper-compensation is one of the cruel ironies of dysmorphia. We bulimics, anorexics, disordered eaters, and food addicts are fashion-obsessed habitués of the cosmetics section of the drugstore (along with the diuretic, laxative, and purgative aisles). While we are certain that what we see in the mirror will send children screaming for their mothers, our costuming is perfect, our makeup worthy of Kevyn Aucoin. While I was on my knees in a pepto bismol pink bathroom sticking my fingers down my throat, friends were saying things like, “You’re so cute and shubby, Gordita,” “you look like a plus-sized model,” and the most damning, from the mother of a friend, “Your graduation portrait is lovely: the only thing wrong with this photo is you’re fat.” Underneath the perfect outfits, artfully coiffured hair and the carefully applied cosmetics is a little girl who knows she has to work harder at it just to be presentable, or in the best case, ignored. (As a chunky adolescent, being ignored is better than the boys’ moo-ing at you in the junior high hallways. Being invisible is preferable to pretending you don’t hear people calling “Hey, Romeo Void!” or calling you “thunder thighs” or “fat bitch.”)

Dear friend, Amelia recommended Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty-- the story of Ann Patchett's friend, the poet Lucy Grealy, whose face was the subject of her own book, Autobiography of a Face. Grealy suffered cancer as a child and wore the scars of chemotherapy and dozens of reconstructive surgeries as an adult. Truth and Beauty has obsessed me for the past couple of months. Usually when Amelia recommends a book, I order and read it promptly. Like a carbohydrate rich meal, this one loomed as both repellent and attractive. At least a year passed before I purchased it. At least another half year passed before I opened it. I read the first chapter and closed it for another couple of months. Then I took it to work when I started a new job—something to read in the lunchroom—and I was face down in a pile of… nutritious greens? Or is it chocolate? Particularly extraordinary, beyond the fact of Lucy Grealy’s life experience, is Patchett’s description of how dysmorphia works both ways. Patchett describes Grealy’s personals ad date with George Stephanopoulos, and the ego gratification Grealy enjoys in telling the story of the date. At a dinner party, Grealy tells the story and another writer asks if Stephanopoulos knew she was disfigured prior to their meeting. This question sucks the air from the room and from Grealy’s lungs. She runs from the room.

In that anecdote is a truth I recognize in myself: the dysmorphic indulge in believing they are just like everyone else, perhaps even attractive, or in my case, exceptionally attractive. How is this possible? Do we not have mirrors to look in? Do we not notice the size of our clothes when we pull them from the closet? Here is my theory: the same disconnection from reality that allowed me to function walking down the hallways from one class to another at Cope Junior High, allows me to focus only on my face in the mirror, to see only the outfit as I imagine it in my head (as opposed to how it looks on my body in the mirror), to filter through what people say or do not say and chose what makes me happy or least at peace. Here is another theory: it is the constructing of such worlds, actively piecing together a sustainable relationship to reality (which ultimately isn’t reality at all) that has fed my facility for imaginative thought. My self image is the product of three funhouse mirrors arranged as for a fitting area, reflecting back and forth, no single image accurate, or and here’s the scary part, no warped image is inaccurate because self image is, ultimately, something that only exists in our minds.

Further horror: I identify deeply, not with Ann Patchett, but with Lucy Grealy, and it’s not the MFA and the poet who petered out thing. It’s Grealy repeatedly asking, “Do you love me?” “Do you love me the most?” “Will I ever have sex again?” It’s the sex almost exclusively outside committed relationship because you have to take it where and when you can get it; you know what they say about beggars. It’s the endless search for who I am because believing something positive is so very fleeting and difficult. Because believing something damning is likewise unsustainable and ultimately defeating. Neither the worst case nor the best case is the truth: the truth is unstable, refracted across the faces of loved ones and strangers and my bathroom mirror then negotiated between all those perspectives before gathering into a smoky image that threatens to materialize as something substantive and focused only to implode on itself and disappear, replaced with the latest warm greeting or disapproving look of assessment.

It occurred to me that I should at least know what Lucy Grealy looked like before I claim any kind of emotional kinship. She looks far better than I expected. She had a pleasant face, a face that looks to have begun basically attractive and then became damaged some around the lower half. I claim no physical parity with her. She prided herself on her lean figure, her coltish legs, Patchett writes. Her relationship with food was torturous in its physicality, not emotionally; my tortured relationship with food is mostly joyous lately and began and remains a problem rooted in psychology more than in any difficulty in merely swallowing. I have no problem swallowing food in great quantities.  In fairness to Grealy, I suspect she would rather have died than be fat. She made a point of being thin and muscular. There is no mention of her ever believing that when people fall in love they fall in love with the person, not the body. That is a bromide people who are fundamentally attractive like to believe about themselves, so that they have some confirmation that the gifts offered to them have some origin in the attractive party’s quality as a human being, rather than as an object. (Tell the pretty girls they’re smart and the smart ones they’re pretty.) Lucy Grealy probably knew very well that “will I ever have sex again?” was a legitimate question. I would caution that while the answer is “yes, of course,” it is the circumstances under which the marginally attractive copulate that are the bitch.

When I was newly bulimic and attending junior high school, I went to the multiplex at the Carousel Mall in San Bernardino with Brian and Monica, and Brian’s parents/my godparents Nancy and Phil to see The Elephant Man. It remains one of my favorite movies. The stage play also remains one of my favorites. For the next decade, whenever I needed a good cry, I watched The Elephant Man.  Do I identify with John Merrick? Of course. Who doesn’t? What kind of person does not carry some kind of damage that makes him fear he is ultimately unworthy of love? Or too damaged to accept love when it is offered? Or too self-involved to be of any use to anyone who might attempt to love us? When asked why it is one of my favorite movies, I used to talk about canted angles, subjective film making, fine performances, beautiful cinematography. Yeah, that’s all true; The Elephant Man is movie making of the highest order, but the reason I weep like a penitent pretty much from the opening scene on is that I feel John Merrick’s pain. (And yes, I’m aware of how melodramatic and self-indulgent that sounds.) Deep down, some of us are freaks whether or not others can see the evidence of our criminally malformed souls and bodies. One of us, one of us . . .

People like Lucy Grealy (and me) who genuinely have a defect are excluded from the diagnosis of Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) put forth in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, that is to say, part of the diagnosis for BDD is that the perceived disfigurement is merely perceived and not actual. When visiting a therapist, Lucy Grealy would likely have been excluded from the diagnosis as she did, in fact, have a facial deformity. Likewise, people like me, who are genuinely fat, fall under some other rubric of mental illness when presenting with BDD symptoms.  Nonetheless, being me being fat trying to figure out who I am and what I look like in the world of other people feels crazy. Truth and Beauty in many ways points to a similar crazy in Lucy Grealy. Further, when I read through the list of symptoms, that crazy person sounds an awful lot like someone I hold dear: me. (I wonder if the advice psychologists are supposed to offer us freaks is similar to that my mother offered me. Do they lean forward and offer in kinder words, stop being a freak?)

Back to the photographs: when I sent the photographs away, I did so in response to a question posed by my mentor: Did I remember or know what I look like thin? After age 14, I never again looked the same size as my skinny peers. These two photographs were iconic in my household as the best evidence of what I could have been—a person whose non-existence my mother mourned, hoped for, and tried in her own adolescent way to encourage into being (the advice “just stop eating,” a Venus De Milo membership as my 14^th birthday present, a refusal to buy “nice clothes” until I reached my goal weight, the frantically tearful pronouncement that I had ruined the beautiful body she had given me). Sending the photographs away in the mail purged them from my mother’s house. I probably wanted to purge them from my mother’s psyche and my own. By my early twenties, I was determined to prove that the person I was, whomever she might be, was lovable. (How could my mother love me, if she were still mourning the girl she didn’t have?) Tucked into a letter that likely contained many other less interesting observations, the photographs traveled along Interstate 10 from Redlands to Pasadena, arriving at the home of my professor like so much weapons grade plutonium—what else could a photograph of a bikini clad, 13 year old girl mean to a college professor? Needless to say, it is highly likely that the photographs no longer exist.

Bad Object: Musings from the Periphery of Femininity

I have been a bad object for as long as I have wanted to be a good object. During my preschool years, my sister and I spent a lot of time with the sons of our mother’s best friend at the time. The eldest boy was obviously smitten with my little sister who was closer to his age. I asked him if he thought I was pretty too. He considered my question and after a while answered, “You have a better personality. Sarah is prettier.” (I know, I know, but these are the children of college professors; that is the way he spoke.) A half-decade later, my godfather confided that he would much rather be me than my sister, implying that the benefits of intelligence outstrip the fleeting and superficial magic of beauty.

As an early teen, my best friend Dayle and I spent a fair amount of time with a boy who was 18, an orphan who lived in a garage conversion and had his own car—paltry solace offered in part from a sympathetic aunt and the Social Security Benefits due orphans. While Dayle and I looked nothing alike, we were a fair match on the continuum of beauty for a couple of years when I could still be considered thick, as opposed to chunky. Where I was thick, she was plainer of face. Her hair was a beautiful natural red, but it was thin and lank. My hair was thick and full, but medium brown of no distinction. She was petite with huge boobs. My boobs were huge too, but I was curvy from head to toe, solid, while Dayle was waifish. She was not skinny, but there wasn’t an ounce on her body to spare. I, on the other hand, well, I had not completely puffed up, but you could see it coming—clearly I would either grow 3 inches taller or grow up to be the plumpling I am. The 18 year old was in love with Dayle, and there was nothing I could do about it.

As we aged, Mike had the hots for Dayle, too. Tom wanted Dayle. Keith, the blond guy we met at Pizza Chalet wanted Dayle. Everyone wanted Dayle. Hell, sometimes I wanted Dayle. Some of the guys who wanted Dayle figured out that they would have more undisturbed time with Dayle if they brought along a homely friend for me. Why homely? I don’t know, except that perhaps I have hugely over-estimated my success at being a good object at that time. The friend proffered for my consumption was invariably not only a little chunky, like me, but also, not particularly attractive as a person—neurotic, creepily shy, or damaged in ways that paled to my own. Perhaps I have also underestimated my own damage and its obviousness to others. Maybe what others saw in me was more accurate than the person I saw when I looked inward. But, then I think about the damage my girlfriends carried during those years and know that I was no more or less damaged than any of them. The theory that damage is unattractive just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. In fact, the girls with the most serious afflictions were often the girls who had boys lined up anxiously awaiting their turn.

The more vulnerable the girl, the more likely the boys were to pursue her, damaged or not. I was not vulnerable. There was nothing soft or inviting about my personality. I made few concessions to modulating my personality for the comfort of male companions. I want to say that my body may have been soft, but my heart was hard, even at 14 years old.  However that isn’t the full truth. I wanted desperately to be wanted, cherished, consumed, devoured, swept away, taken, held rapturously in the embrace of physical and emotional symbiosis. What I was not was accommodating. I did not and did not understand how to conform my behavior or appearance to the narrow bandwidth in which women are supposed to exist. I was a bad object.

Costuming was a problem. Also, I couldn’t get the makeup right. In eighth grade, my mother said I looked like a whore, but before I started wearing the full face of makeup my friends encouraged, they had said I looked too innocent, too much like a little girl with tinted lip balm on a clean face atop fashions my mother helped me select for their timelessness and the tastefully demure impression they were supposed to impart. By the end of junior high, no one commented anymore. The complaints from all quarters died down as I reached a sort of homeostasis. One friend admiringly opined that I looked like a plus size model. High praise that, but not what I wanted to hear. Plus sized models were freaks, freaks no one wanted to make out with in high school where I was headed. I had finally gotten it right: I fit snugly into a cultural role, but it was one that wouldn’t get me the results I wanted. Teen aged boys aren’t interested in plus sized models. Very few full grown men are interested in plus sized models. I had managed to fail upward, but I was still failing. More than costuming and cosmetics, the problem, clearly, was my body. My body was wrong.

Unfortunately, even then, I knew that the bodies of all women are wrong. None of us could be skinny enough. None of us could have breasts large enough, and if they were large, they weren’t pretty enough. None of us could have buttocks free of cellulite and fill out a pair of jeans nicely. None of us smelled like summer fields of newly mown grass. We looked like normal girls with pussies that smelled like pussies.

That knowledge made it easy to say, “Fuck it” and become a punk rocker. My friend Laurie cut off all my permed curls in the lounge of our alternative and experimental education program one high school afternoon. When I came home, my mother cried, “You’ve ruined yourself!” Apparently, plus sized model had been good enough for her. Teen aged boys aren’t particularly interested in Goth queens either, but the power inherent in being vaguely intimidating can be more intoxicating than the power inherent in being desired, especially when being desired is a rare occurrence and being intimidating can be a comforting and consoling constant.

Ruin is an interesting concept in the world of the failed object. Existing in the narrow bandwidth of culturally acceptable female self-presentation often means (or meant in the early ‘80s) avoiding looking or acting like a bad woman, a slut, a whore, a woman unsure of her own worth. Conform because the person you emerged from childhood being is incorrect, but be confident in the new person you present, even though she is, at best, a sock puppet with yarn hair and smeared pink lipstick hastily pulled on when the rules changed. I was already “ruined” in my own mind at 13 because the person I knew as myself was inadequate. However, I was not yet “ruined” in my mother’s mind because I was a virgin and was still presenting the scrubbed face, soft curls, and daintily dressed girl child she felt was appropriate to my age. No one was sophisticated enough at the time to emphasize the only socially and personally useful concept lurking underneath all of these rules: self worth.

My godfather tried to explain the connection between self worth and sexuality through stories: When he would go on leave in the Army, he and his friends would always try to find the ugly girls so they could score easily. Before that, playing on the rooftops in Brooklyn, he and his cousin would play with the boobs of a neighborhood girl who, amazingly, would let them. And this signaled an insecurity in her that they exploited. He felt bad about that looking back.

The combination of demeanor and costuming that signals self worth has escaped me in every context save church and office, where the uniforms are easy to mimic. Demeanor I’ll have to get back to you on…still working on figuring out how to be sexual but not desperate, how to desire and still invite desiring. Sort of.

I do want to be “diminished” by the ogling stares of strangers. When I was 13 or 14, I had a French terry cloth shorts set in a coral-tinged pink. The cloth clung to my body. The t-shirt had a deep neckline, and the shorts were short. I would change into this outfit after school and mount my new ten-speed to ride down Olive Avenue to the construction sites just before Teracina Street. I sat up straight as I pedaled past the construction site. The workers whistled appreciatively. I went back again and again. I was a good object in that moment: They wanted to fuck me. Unfortunately, I knew enough to know there was something wrong with full grown men who wanted to fuck 13 year old girls, even if the 13 year old in question could pass for 20 in the right light, with enough atmospheric perspective to blur her still baby face. 

That self-consciousness is part of being a bad object. Consciousness of one’s attractiveness, of others’ reaction to one’s attractiveness, of the larger cultural context of attraction and desire is fundamentally counter to being a good object. Guilelessness is what is needed. Guilelessness is one of the reasons some people go searching for “barely legal” porn or purchase “schoolgirl” costumes for their female sex partners.

The passive role of desired object is hard to get right. Apparently I’m supposed to be desired while not being degraded by said desire. Everyone should want to fuck me, but no one dare? No that’s the domina. She exists outside these petty rules. Everyone should want to sleep with me, but it should be clear that I am not available? That’s the good churchwoman or wife and mother. That may be the age appropriate role for me now, but it’s kind of boring. Everyone should want to fuck me, but be a little bit unsure of whether or not they would meet my demanding expectations? That’s closer, but not quite it. Be fuckable, but unfucked? Closer still, but still not quite capturing the complete picture. Desired without being complicated by one’s own desire. Lacking guile. Lacking the intellectual means to purposefully inspire lust. One’s attractiveness must be accidental, instinctual, untested.

I left high school convinced that the world of admiring suitors was not one with which I would have any familiarity. When I turned 18, I got my first tattoo, a black heart with a dagger through it. I was hard hearted. Cynical. I assumed that whatever was going on with the hearts of others wasn’t something in which I was going to be able to participate.  I assumed I would be able to fuck other similarly desperate and/or disaffected souls. I went to parties dressed to amuse myself and with no illusions about being able to hookup. It just simply wasn’t going to happen. Sometimes I flirted aggressively, knowing that my overtures were easy to dismiss at best and frightening at worst. I bludgeoned the man-children around me with an adult sexuality born of an encyclopedic familiarity with Penthouse letters.

With almost no real experience, I went years without so much as kissing another person. Then when my need outweighed the shame inherent in possibly failing, I would get as drunk as I needed to be and find someone, anyone. I now know that this pattern of behavior is similar to that of some closeted or uncomfortable gay men, which may explain my deep affinity with gay men. Gay men get me in ways straight men never will.

The getting has something to do with understanding what it is to be deeply, desperately sexual and not be able to effectively deploy that sexuality in the world with any hope of receiving the approval of others. (Undesirable women who have the nerve to still desire reap the rage of men. Our existence is cause for anger. I can piss men off sitting still reading a book, perhaps the more so for having a dim glimmer of what I could be if: If I wore the right clothes, if I lost fifty pounds, if I bothered to wear more than lipstick, if I were younger, if I were myself skinny, dressed by a stylist, and twenty years younger. Otherwise, I am easily ignored. Otherwise, I am invisible.) The getting of me by gay men also has something to do with a particular bearing born of a need for dignity despite the indignities of unmet desire. All of which is to say, John Waters would worship me. David Sedaris might be deeply fond of me; John Wayne would find me distasteful were he alive to pass judgment.

Being a good object ripples across a woman’s entire life, not just her sex life. Being a good object is a moral imperative. Consider those good Christian ladies for whom appropriate clothing, hair, makeup and deportment are part of what it means to be a good Christian lady. For these women, it is important to be desired by not only one’s own husband (which, let’s face it, is shooting ducks in a barrel), but to be desired by most men. Being mildly desired is part of being pleasant and of good cheer. The unstated, and probably unacknowledged, goal is to be desired by all the men at the Knights of Columbus hall, and at the same time put forward the impression that none dare ask. Desired, but unsulliable. Hence the deliciousness of stories like the Marquis’ “Justine.” Hence the anger, playful and good-natured or not, behind such stories and fantasies. The underlying theme being, Oh come on, lady, you know you want it.

[Note: Beloved said that paragraph gives him pause because that underlying theme is part of the thinking that justifies rape.  Yes, it is, but it is also why men have rage about or toward bad objects: all women are responsible for the lust or lack thereof we inspire in others. How we are perceived is our fault as is how people (male people usually) react to that perception. That slippage (being responsible for the reactions/actions of others) is one of the sources of the complexity of BDSM relationships. Who is in power if the passive object is responsible for the psychological state and physical responses of the active subject?]

The imperative that we be good objects and at the same time "not want it," while processing the anger of men over whether we have succeeded or failed (both equally occasions for anger and/or resentment) is a double bind that made me miserable as a young teen. As an adult, playing with that anger consciously is deliciously fun in multiple contexts.

Being a good and moral object means making an effort to conform to societal norms of beauty, but not slipping into the dangerous and threatening waters of the seductive or in any way erotic. When I was a couple of years out from starting my period, my mother was anxious that I style my hair and wear some lipstick before leaving the house. Dark eye makeup and red lipstick, however, made her even more anxious.

Aha! you say, what about the MILF? Thinking naively that you have unraveled my brilliant analysis of beauty bondage. Oh please, get over yourself, I counter. I have spent more time obsessing about this than you have spent in lifetime aggregate styling your hair. The MILF falls under the cleansing male ownership of a husband, and is therefore not sullied. The MILF is not a young single mother in the popular imagination. In the popular imagination the MILF is a middle-aged, married woman of some civic and moral standing in the community. She is the MILF, not that whore who lives up around the corner with her husband. She is the MILF, not that hot piece of ass with the kid. She is the MILF, not my friend with the toddler. MILF is other: she exists in relation to the friends of her own children (and perhaps some of her husband's friends) but the term originated with adolescent boys owning up to their fantasies about some of the mothers in the neighborhood. The MILF is wholesome in her fuckability. It is precisely her lack of overt sexuality that is so titillating. Her tight jeans are accidentally delicious. Her big breasts got that way the old fashioned way, breastfeeding. Her subtle use of cosmetics and carefully pleasant while not the least bit purposefully seductive dress place her in the middle-aged section of the neighborhood occupied by the bespectacled hot nerd girl, who likewise is accidentally hot.

The bespectacled hot nerd girl has a hot bod, but it’s hidden under baggy and practical clothes. Her face is beautiful, but without any makeup it’s hard to distinguish her among her more colorful twenty- and thirty-something peers. She identifies as a mind primarily and does not conceive of herself as particularly attractive. Popular mythology says she’s a ravenous sex fiend when you coax her into relaxing enough to show you the tigress inside her. Her emergence as a popular icon, I would argue, coincides with the emergence of raunch culture. As it has become acceptable in some circles for young women to wear T-shirts proclaiming “Slut” and “Porn Star,” that is, as it has become acceptable for young women to admit sexuality and sexual longing, the hot nerd takes the stage. This is progress, but the hot nerd is still responsible for the actions and reactions of others in ways she shouldn’t be, and her hotness is partly due to her lack of guile.

When I was in school there was much discussion of “rape culture.” I don’t dispute the prevalence of “rape culture,” but I have problems with any political or philosophical rubric in which I cannot, in Trent Reznor’s words, “fuck like an animal” or be fucked like an animal. Nine Inch Nails’ song “Closer” received more tsking and headshaking than it should have back in the ‘90s. The psychological complexity of the song was lost on many. I like to fuck. Five years from now when I am fifty, I expect will continue to enjoy fucking. I am not anti-sex, and want to stress that to question rigid definitions of attractiveness and gender roles is a position far from anti-sex. Rather, I am planting a flag of conquest for all the aging women of questionable attractiveness who nonetheless enjoy a sound rogering, a vigorous fuck, an active sex life.

Cracker Barrel: Love Thy Neighbor?

Many years ago, I watched Out in America, an HBO documentary including the profiles of a cold call stockbroker whose coworkers painted a Jolly Roger on the hood of his black sports car, and a woman working in the kitchen of a Cracker Barrel in some backwater state—I want to say Alabama, but it could have been Mississippi or any of those other southern states whose public image is indelibly linked to images of children grinning under the mangled and lifeless guest of honor at a lynching or photos of the car in which civil rights activists were last seen alive. The third profile was of a man who lived in some similar backwater who was murdered because he asked the wrong man for a date. His friends and relatives were interviewed one after the other, alongside a dirt road, in front of a two-pump gas station, or outside the bar in which the greatest number of people last saw the man alive.(http://www.andersongoldfilms.com/films/documentaries/oaw_au.htm)

The woman worked for many years as a cook in the kitchen of a Cracker Barrel restaurant. She and her lover were raising a son who attended public school. Cracker Barrel corporate issued a memo delineating corporate policy that no employee of Cracker Barrel could be homosexual as the employee’s sexual orientation or “lifestyle choice” was not consistent with the public image of the corporation as a family friendly establishment. The woman figured the memo wasn’t about her; she didn’t interact with the public. She was back in the kitchen cooking. Her manager interpreted the corporate policy differently. She was terminated. She sued. During the lawsuit, her son suffered exactly the kind of bullying abuse at school one might expect. She eventually won her lawsuit. I like to think she took her money and moved north and coastal.

The documentary must have aired over a dozen years ago, but I haven’t forgotten it. And until recently, I had never eaten at a Cracker Barrel restaurant, despite many road trips on which a Cracker Barrel would have been a reasonable alternative to a steady diet of gas station snacks and Happy Meals.

Visiting Cracker Barrel was a socio-political experiment in expanding my cultural literacy as much as a dining experience, like ordering grits, fried green tomatoes or fried okra in the South. I live in Indiana. There are Cracker Barrels everywhere. This surprises me as much as seeing a Waffle Hut in downtown Los Angeles might. Or a rebel flag hung on the flagpole of a house in Province Town or Fire Island. Indiana was a Union state, and yet rural southern Indiana is dotted with houses whose front porches are hung with Confederate flags. Paddle faster, I think driving past them.

A Confederate flag snapping in the Atlantic breeze above a house on Fire Island. Now, that’s an image! There is no way for anyone encountering such an image to not giggle a little at the incongruity. Like Lee Iacocca and Liz Taylor zipping around on Harleys, a Confederate flag on Fire Island would be ironic; it could be nothing else. It would be a smartass decoration for a hoedown-themed brunch or a wry attempt at annoying despicably self-satisfied and pretentious neighbors. No one in the real world of college degrees and gainful employment takes such things seriously, right?

While watching Sunday Morning a few weeks ago, Beloved huffed in annoyance over the report that a majority of polled Americans do not support the Health Care Reform bill. The poll asked people whether they supported President Obama’s bill. A majority said they did not support the historic reform.  However, of the majority, a large percentage believed the president didn’t push for enough reform: they believed he didn’t go far enough. The newscaster reporting this failed to mention the point that a majority are glad it passed and most of those people think the bill was watered down and should have done more, more not less, to piss off Republicans and corporate interests. 

My beloved said, “This is exactly Bob Cesca’s point!”

Bob Cesca wrote in a recent blog post that America is a left of center country but has been convinced that it is something else.  Cesca argues that various media and polls frame the political debate with the presupposition that to be liberal is to be un-American. The questions asked in polls skew the results that wind up in the news. Bob Cesca opined that what these polls really ought to ask is whether or not the poll participant is a “vaguely gay elitist who hates America.” I said, “Hey! I need that on a T-shirt!”

http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/Despite-America-s-Temper-T-by-Bob-Cesca-100924-779.html

Beloved said he’d look into getting me a t-shirt, and added, as he does often lately, that we really do live in two countries: one educated and urban, the other uneducated, disempowered and rural. Together, Beloved and I often marvel at the skill involved in convincing that other demographic that the Republican Party is actually on their side. The American Dream (anyone can make it, any Joe the Plumber can hit it rich if he works hard enough, prays hard enough, does what needs doing) is held before the workingman like a sad and withered carrot. Sad and withered!? Sad and withered?!

Yeah. You heard me right. Sad and withered. Sure that stuff happens. People win the lottery. People settle out of court for undisclosed sums. People start with one corner shop and soon have twenty. Oh. Wait. Wal-Mart put all of those guys out of business. Ok, people start with one Taco Bell franchise and buy another and another until they own fifty. Sure. That stuff happens. Far off in the distance, and to someone else. In forty-five years on the planet, I’ve been acquainted with only one person who has gone from something to millionaire in a private jet. Notice he started as something, in this case, a dentist. 

When’s the last time you heard of anyone going from the crap side of Anytown to Central Park East? (Rappers and rock stars don’t count. Athletes either. Why? What percentage of the American population are they? 2 percent? Less than half a percentage point?)

Most of us get as much education as we can (or as we can stand) and vie for the sweet job at the Wal-Mart distribution plant, with City or State government, UPS, Federal Express, the airport, a hospital, or Eli Lilly. That’s the list for central Indiana. Failing one of those, the service economy always needs wait staff and sales people.

Back to Cracker Barrel. Cracker Barrel is decorated nostalgically. The nostalgia is, apparently, for a rural “country” America of a long gone past: low country farm house architecture with a big front porch (like the one in the happy ending of the movie The Jerk), washboards and simple wooden board games (checkers and the golf tee game) that harken back to a time before the era of the high tech. There is no place for a computer in this decorating scheme. Admittedly cash registers are complex pieces of technology, but they don’t scream “digital age” the way an Apple desktop might. Inside the Cracker Barrel, even the registers are concealed behind board and batten siding like that one might find on the side of a barn. A small family farm barn, not the big corporate feedlots and dairy barns that comprise the majority of the beef and milk business nowadays.

The gift shop portion of the store includes children’s clothing, candy, country wall décor and knick-knacks. A large display is devoted to novelty candy in packaging from the first half of the twentieth century. Cracker Barrel is Christian, not spiritual, nor does it cater to any other concept of God. Bill Gaither books and CDs  are displayed for sale, as are Gaither-endorsed china platters and wall hangings. (The menu features Sunday Dinner specials.) Automobile parts—sparkplug boxes, cases of engine oil in early 20^th century packaging are displayed in tasteful tableaux on the tops of shelving units in the country store. Cracker Barrel is agrarian: farmer’s popcorn still on the cob is offered for sale, the objets d’art offered are made of cornhusks or decorated with barnyard animals, milk cans of many colors and sizes are used as display receptacles for toy swords and princess wands. Note, though, that this is an imagined agrarian past of bucolic small family farms, not the squalor of subsistence that I would argue exists solely in Appalachia as the only remnant of family farming.

Decorative wall hangings in the dining area include late 19^th century portraits of ancestors one can only assume represent the glorious past now Gone with the Wind. (One, having grown up with a Southern mother, would be familiar with the complex set of associations such family objects carry.) Tin advertisement signs for cola and other products from the early 20^th century, notably not Coca Cola, but brands that are either fictional or long defunct hang on the walls around diners.

Cracker Barrel is the antithesis of the digital age.  Cracker Barrel is agrarian. Cracker Barrel is nostalgic for an America that existed at least 60 years ago, maybe longer. The oil lamps on the tables touted in a current billboard campaign along Interstate 65 come from a newly industrial America before electricity made it all the way out of the major cities. One of the wall hangings is a sign extolling rural electrification projects. Cracker Barrel imagines a world that is not urban, sophisticated, or by extension, liberal. If Cracker Barrel were a movie set, I would place the setting in the late 1920s and 1930s but the only set dressing that pushes Cracker Barrel further into the 20^th century are the nostalgia candies for sale from several decades spanning the middle of the 20^th century and the sign for rural electrification. Overall, this is an imagined rural community left behind, blissfully untouched by the complications and stresses of urbanity, technology, and an information age economy.

Cracker Barrel must then serve as a salve and comfort to the masses who identify with this particular brand of Bible Belt hospitality. Somewhere in the meaning of what it is to enjoy dining at Cracker Barrel lays an explanation of why those living far from even the margins of any constituency that could be said to benefit from Republican policy would believe in the rhetoric of the Republican Party.

Policy is not rhetoric. I find it difficult to believe that Cracker Barrel types agree with Republican Policy except where it must coincide with the more craven race baiting and fear mongering rhetoric that wins elections. Is it fair to say that true blue ‘Mericans, These Colors Don’t Run types are vaguely racist and homophobic? Well . . . if we did a full mouth of teeth count among those Americans brandishing sock monkeys at political rallies . . . what would those poll numbers be?

Wait. Sorry. Disrespectful. All too easy for elitist Left Coast me who has always had access to dental care, if not dental insurance, to cast dispersions on those who haven't and don't. What I meant to say is maybe there's a statistical correlation between owning clothing with John Deere or NASCAR logos and having a neck that is slightly red? Sorry. Someone stop me! It's hard to summon compassion for people who frighten us . . . and maybe that's the point here.

What I meant to say was—maybe people who are overwhelmed by late capitalism with its lightning fast processing speeds, its global village of ideologies complicating homespun truths that were once so comforting, its Fox News with constant reminders of which people of color are most frightening this week, its Entertainment Tonight with those horrible drunken lesbian girls flashing their bits and pieces, its Negro Presidents, its fierce competition for good middle class jobs that have evaporated with the fall of the unions—maybe those good, honest, hardworking people who used to be guaranteed a certain place in the world because they and all their friends always had been guaranteed a steady job, a decent home, and a neighborhood school free of the kind of shenanigans going on in those crazy urban neighborhoods—maybe those honest, hardworking people aren’t getting their slice of the American Dream Pie anymore and they’re looking around for someone to blame.

Fox News is already telling them morning, noon and night. Glenn Beck will tell them where blame belongs. Rush Limbaugh will tell them. The PTL Club has been telling them for years. The Republican Party will give a wink and a smile while tapping its toes to the faint strains of banjo music. And when all of that noise gets too loud, they can retreat to a quiet Sunday Dinner at the local Cracker Barrel where they can imagine they live in a small rural town, far apart from the syncopated frenetic rhythms of the big city. They can sit in rocking chairs on a big front porch and smile beatifically at neighbors who are easy to love because they look and act so much like themselves.

While I've Been Away . . . Virtually

While I’ve been away, I learned to play World of Warcraft, not very well (level 46 Night Elf, a level 10 Troll named GoatEater, and a level 7 Rogue named Wllndorf). My friend, Gamer taught me to play. Away from my friend’s taunting and frequent retorts of “Such a noob!” the snowy world of the rogue is a peacefully quiet, almost meditative environment. Doing quests and running dungeons with the elf is more visually stunning; Elune’s temple and the city of Darnassus are beautifully awash in the colors one associates with airbrushed renderings of Pegasus flying over rainbows, and being able to fly a Hippogryph over an animated ocean as the sun sets over ships docked at Teldrassil is a virtual experience that’s worth making it to level 20 (or maybe that was the prerequisite for getting a “mount”—mine a white saber tooth, which looks like a huge tiger). It is exactly this sort of slipshod attention to the details of the game that most annoys the gamer buddy who introduced me to the virtual world.

Gamer buddy thinks the details of the game lie in gear scores, one’s ability to remember that “stam buff” means Fortitude spell, knowing which characters are able to pick locks. Apparently it is important to have a guild because there are benefits associated with membership. So far, I have only been able to make use of the guild to the extent that I know whom to pair with for dungeon runs based on the guild membership list that includes character levels. (A 46 can’t be paired with an 80 in a random dungeon. No need for despair, Whobbs has offered his services as my tank!)

One night on the docks of Darkshore, a level 80 Night Elf approached my friend and I and chatted us up. We ran a few quests, told a few jokes. My friend excused himself to run a raid, and I was left chatting with Kainis alone on the docks. We “friended” one another in the game. Soon after Kainis checked in with me whenever he saw I was “ingame.”  Which was helpful.

One of the pitfalls of being a “noob” is that finding your way back to the entrance of the dungeon (in which a fire monster, troll, or scarlet zombie monk has just smote you) can be next to impossible, especially if the charming man who has introduced you to the game fails to mention that the little torches leading away from the burial ground will take you directly back to the dungeon. Or maybe, I’m just too big a “lame fail noob tard” to have figured that one out on my own.

Kainis would frequently ask how I ended up in the middle of nowhere (since he could see my location on his friend list), and he would talk me back to the dungeon or the cemetery depending on how much I wanted to continue pretending I knew how to play. (From the cemetery a player can resurrect with the angel who hovers there, transport “home,” and be done with the dungeon run.)

One night I’m playing in a dungeon I’ve never been to before and whose burial ground is in the middle of some crazy desert landscape with cliffs, and I am so lost for so long that my dungeon mates have “kicked” me. Not only am I running around a desert full of monsters who want to kill me, but I have no one to ask for help because once the group “kicks” you, you can’t talk to them anymore. Out of nowhere Kainis messages me: “I see you’re in the middle of nowhere. What are you doing out there? Are you lost again?”

Being the knightly dungeon master that he is, he offers to come to me and help me home. He does find me and leads our toons to the top of a cliff where the toons lie down beside one another and we proceed to talk about the sort of thing single men and women discuss when they find themselves alone under a desert sky atop a cliff. I confess: I talked dirty online with Kainis, which may or may not be his real or assumed name either in real life or in game. 

 “But wait!” you say. “You are not single and the night sky is not real. Further, you are not a night elf, nor are you six feet tall and weight maybe 140 pounds with a huge portion of your total weight being devoted to your gravity defying purple cleavage!”

Cognitive dissonance, I believe, may be the term we’re looking for here. It is and it isn’t. It’s real, but it’s not. It feels real, but it doesn’t count in the same way meeting the real man behind the toon, Kainis, at a hotel midday would count. Or does it?

This may be a quaint confession in the minds of some. Twenty years ago a friend confessed to me that he liked to call 900 number chat lines to masturbate while talking with women who he was fairly certain were middle-aged pros who could no longer support themselves on the street. In my mind, there is a parallel here—anonymity, assumed personas and pretend bodies (every penis huge, every woman beautiful), the gentleman’s agreement inherent in the zipless fuck (that agreement being continued anonymity and emotional detachment), the pay-to-play element of gaming and 900 numbers—and the parallel is unsavory.  I couldn’t take communion the next day because the act of contrition in every mass just didn’t seem adequate to my sin. In my mind, I had been intimate with another man. My husband thought I was being silly.  It’s nothing like actually being intimate, he said; it’s virtual.

Virtual. But it feels real.

My trash-talking gamer friend talks trash on-line like an adolescent boy. Trash Talk, it seems, is the lingua franca of the gaming world, combining entries from The Urban Dictionary website with dozens style assignations. Gamer delighted himself with introducing “me” as “a top into chocolate sauce”—which is not anything you would want to be introduced as (unless your fetishes ran in that direction—think German shitze films, which I feel compelled to note I’ve never seen and in which I have no interest).  My toon fell into the role of providing comic relief: My elf would ask, “Are we talking about ice cream? I prefer chocolate ice cream, no topping, or vanilla with fruit, but I’m really a savory foods person. I like my fat with salt, not sugar” to the virtual howls of my dungeon group.

There are many things I’d never seen prior to entering the virtual world of gaming and gamers. The Internet certainly gets its freak on. Lemon Party, Goatse, and Tub Girl are iconic images of hardcore fetish the savvy send as links to noobs. The unsuspecting open the link and freak out, to the delight of the epic. Lemon Party didn’t freak me out—just seemed like a threesome of middle-aged men enjoying one another’s company naked. I have no judgments about Goatse, but I do worry for him; while it is his body, that can’t be healthy. Something about Tub Girl just doesn’t seem consensual, and that really bothers me, as does the dark video involving a man and a horse in Seattle. I sincerely hope the accompanying news stories are a hoax—otherwise, I have been unwittingly duped into watching a snuff film. My imagination, my sexuality, I don’t run anywhere near as dark as that stuff. If images leave the realm of the consensual and enter the realm of the tragic, I don’t want anything to do with them. Unfortunately, once you’ve seen something, you’ve seen something.

Have I done something though? How responsible am I for the feelings of the man lurking somewhere out there behind Kainis? Is it possible to hurt someone in the virtual world? Am I accountable for the promises my toon makes? I think the answer to all those questions is “YES, absolutely.”

My impression, though, is that many people would argue with me. They would say the lack of accountability is the point of the virtual world. They would say it’s all theater, make-believe play, pretend. They would say the power of the virtual world lies precisely in its ability to nullify the signifiers at play in real social interaction: class, race, gender, education, beauty, experience, age, geography, you name it. In the virtual world, we are who we say we are and no one will know any different. In the virtual world, I look like Angelina Jolie in Hackers and I’m a super smart, super confident 29 year-old vixen who owns not only her own sexuality, but likes to make anyone who takes an interest in it into her bitch. I wear shiny shiny, shiny boots of leather online.

Over the last few months I’ve “met” many new people—a stunning variety of personalities. Scuutor was especially helpful ingame; he helped me with gearing up my toon and explained some of the benefits of guild membership. My game realm, Proudmore is home to LGBT gamers. One member of the guild was a 16 year old exploring her real world options in the virtual world of gaming. She had a girlfriend in the real world, but allowed as how boys were not icky entirely. The adults in the guild, of whom I may have been the youngest, surrounded her protectively. The tone and content of conversation shifted rapidly to coming out stories and college entrance essays as soon as she revealed her age. The members of BloodBathandBeyond are models of virtual accountability and ethical behavior.

Some relationships I’m still confused about for a variety of reasons. “Stranger” may be ready to hire an attorney and sue me, or he may just be pushing for more talk of the sort we started out throwing at one another. Whichever the case, my husband said, block this guy. And I did, but not from chat. Because the conversation we shared was intense and edgy, part of me feels responsible for whatever psychodrama I lifted the curtain on. While we were talking, he asked if I were “real,” and I answered, “Yes, I’m real,” but I qualified that I was “playing” with him. “Pretend,” as any actor will tell you, feels “real” whether it’s in person or online, physical or virtual. And then he said something to me that I had said to my gamer friend; “It feels real, though.” If he needs to talk with me again, he can.

When I said, “It feels real, though” to my gamer friend, he had reduced me to tears ingame. By that, I mean I was sitting alone at my keyboard with tears trickling down my face typing furiously about how unfair he was being. I was frustrated and my feelings were hurt. I was trying so hard to master World of Warcraft, and nothing I did that night met with anything but taunts and criticism from him in the public chat line of the dungeon group.

Even in a pretend world, levels of public and private disclosure are in play. It was one thing for Gamer to taunt me through private “whispers,” quite another to be dressed down in front of the dungeon party or, worse, on the trade lines, which broadcast to the entire virtual city. Before I learned these distinctions, I accidentally told one of those stories (for which we only use the “whisper” feature of messaging in real life) on the guild chat. Or, at least, I think I did. When one of the female guild members whispered, “Are you ok?” in response to what I thought I had told only Gamer, I realized my mistake.  I was too embarrassed to pursue confirming my gaffe, and rapidly realized that no one but Gamer knew who I really am, in real life. How embarrassed can I be on behalf of my toon? She isn’t me, after all, is she?

“In real life,” IRL in the virtual world shrouds itself in hazy golden light. In the virtual world, to reveal one’s irl self is to invite the possibility of irl friendship. Irl friendship is revered online. Other players defer to irl friendships. If Gamer revealed to a dungeon party that I was his irl friend, the tone and content of conversation changed to align with his tone and level of familiarity. Even on line, on a LGBT server, in a world populated with men pretending to be women (albeit of various species), the socially prophylactic properties of falling under the “ownership” of a man are at play.

Irrationally, one would expect the virtual world to conform to our fantasies of a libertine world unfettered by the signifiers that shackle us irl. The only problem is that we inhabit the virtual world and bring ourselves with us when we log on.

First Fruits: Not Barren

We are called to offer the universe the best of what we have to offer. This arrangement works out nicely as it is often in our best work that we find our most joy. Even before I could read, it was clear my greatest talents lay in language. I attempted my first novel, a romance, when I was in third grade. It was three typed pages long. It was horrible and endearing. The following year, I wrote doggerel poems for my spelling words instead of sentences and read a few dozen Nancy Drew novels. Writing is my succor and in it, I am saved. And yet, the idea that I am meant to write whether anyone else thinks so or not, I have struggled most to accept. More than my mortality—it is easier to accept that I will cease to be, than it is to accept that I am meant to do something that might not be exceptional, but that even to me might be merely acceptable.

Acceptable to others? Accepting that following my calling might be humiliating at best has been its own struggle. The calling is what it is. The harvest is almost beside the point: the planting and tending make the garden. There are no fruits without gardening. The choice, then, is between productivity and barrenness.  Better to yield a few withered yellow zucchini than maintain a patch of rocky soil.

During my late adolescence, I had episodes of major depression, dropped out of college and dropped back in.

Slogging through the fog of unrecognized and untreated depression is maddening in itself. On top of the symptoms of depression itself—insomnia or exhaustion or despair or everyday sadness that is notable only in that it never lifts—not knowing what is wrong with oneself is an extra layer of madness. The internal dialogue of unrecognized depression is this: if I can just get enough sleep, I’ll be able to whatever, or if I stay up all night working on this since I can’t sleep anyway, that will help (never mind that it’s the third night in a row), or I’m failing. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I wake up in the morning? Why have I suddenly become an idiot? Why don’t I understand this? Why isn’t anything sticking? I read and nothing gets in. Everything—reading, conversation, people’s names, experiences—washes over the depressed and is gone; nothing is retained. Living in a fog, the depressed can’t see what depression is until she’s left it and is standing on a hill somewhere looking down on its dark mass. As long as she’s in it, her visibility is limited. Occasionally something emerges from the fog or she stumbles into a clearing, but mostly she lives in it, until she doesn’t. Unless she gets treated.

Writing was always the clearing. As long as I was writing, describing the experience, I was safe. Everything else might be a stinking smoking compost pile, but within the context of creative work there was clarity, purpose, accomplishment, even the occasional joy. I never sang merrily with the forest creatures, but the sunlight filtered through the trees revealing the rocks, grass, trees and flowers in the hyper-focus of the bright parts of chiaroscuro.

The problem with creative work that saves us is that it often saves no one else; that is, it sucks. It is interesting merely as the byproduct of some trauma. It often is incapable of standing on its own in the company of the pros. It is precious to us and us alone. If it accomplishes something of value, it is as curiosity not as masterpiece; the literary equivalent of coffee mug scrawls and the twee odes to catastrophe or God sold as framed prints in mail order catalogues.

On a pleasant afternoon, probably a Thursday because we were gathered for poetry writing workshop, some classmates and I were standing on the back terrace of the English and Comparative Lit Building under the shredded bark of eucalyptus trees. I told them ruefully, that I was an idiot savant. I was absolutely certain that the only reason I was accepted to graduate school was my talent: having a spotty undergraduate record and the lukewarm support of my undergraduate mentor, my portfolio must have been the only thing that got me in—that and a letter of recommendation from an important editor. My work and I had charmed him when he took up the post of my mentor, who had taken the obligatory post-tenure tour-of-Europe sabbatical.

When I still felt doors opening along my path as an undergraduate, my editor/teacher/friend agreed to an independent study consisting entirely of sending out poems for publication under his direction. I sent poems out. I got a few published in places astonishing for both their cynicism and lack of editorial standards—Win cash! Poetry contest! – and a few in places astonishing for the chutzpah of their editor/publishers, who were not much older than myself—zines associated with the punk rock subculture.

I did my best in graduate school, but when graduate school was over, I had impressed no one, least of all myself.

I knew I’d had enough of whatever it was that was the graduate school experience. And if that meant I wasn’t going to be a writer, or if it meant I’d be a different kind of writer, so be it. I was exhausted and directionless. Creative work had soured with the attempt to “professionalize” it.  Somehow being a professional writer had become entwined with learning how to teach recalcitrant teens how to write short essays and research papers.

The career center had no sage advice beyond referring me to the job board and suggesting I attend one of the corporate recruitment days. I couldn’t live off the job board offerings, and I didn’t understand how a person with experience mostly in music store sales and university physical plant work would manage to land a corporate position of any type, especially in the thick of the recession that was 1992. (In Orange County, California— an area that includes the coastal wealth of Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, and Balboa Island— people were so desperate, they were voting democratic.)  I didn’t know what to do next.

Sitting at my desk in the living room of an apartment adjacent to what we called “Drug Street” in Santa Ana, I continued to write halfheartedly, promising myself that it would save me.  It would change everything: All I had to do was continue to write and my life would become what it should become.

I didn’t, but it did.

And now, here I am, twenty years later, having tried to find my calling down other avenues. I never really stopped writing. There were always journals. There were extension courses. Novels begun and abandoned. A screenplay about meth addiction and prostitution—begun under the direction of friend whose own gambling and other habits seemed strangely similar to that of our protagonist—also abandoned. Forays into writer’s groups that fizzled out. Letter writing on a prodigious scale. I never really stopped writing, but I never really started either.

I was busy making a living. Getting married. Having children. Trying to find a career. All of those goals are still in process.

Some writing students enter and leave school with a kind of crippling grandiosity. Some students like myself. I never subscribed to the ridiculous ideas about artists being subject to rules different than mere mortals. Sure, there’s much to be learned along the road of excess, but dissipation as vocation just seemed stupid to me. My particular Janus head of doom consisted of grandiosity paired with its ever-present twin, self-loathing doubt. The grandiosity amounted to a delusional belief in my talent as something far different and superior. The truth—that talent is as individual and as common as, well, individuals—floated at the top of a pool of self-loathing around work ethic, procrastination, self-doubt and fallow periods of creativity. Accepting that what makes a writer is work has been hard won for me.

When Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman were promoting their movie Runaway Jury, Hoffman told an interviewer that being an actor starting out in one’s career is hard because you don’t know if you’re conning yourself. The same can be said for writers. You don’t know if you’re conning yourself at precisely the point when blind faith is most needed, that is, when you have no publishing history to assuage worries that whatever made you think you were entitled to a career in writing was wholly misguided and delusional. At precisely the moment when you’re called to work harder than you’ve ever worked in your life, the idea that all that hard work and poverty might net nothing slouches in the corner snickering, smoking a Gauloises. The grandiose can’t help but ask what the point is, if one isn’t going to be A Great Writer. Juvenile. Embarrassing.  But there you have it.

So, there is a pruning process during which the number of writers whittles down to those too crazy to do anything else or too cocksure to admit any other possibility.  I fell into neither category. I just kept writing or sublimating creative energy into other outlets thinking that the world of real creative work was something outside and beyond whatever it was that I happened to be doing at the moment.

Like being in love, having a baby provides an important circumspect vantage point. Having produced a living human being, I’m less inclined toward preciousness regarding my creative work. I’ve made a person: what do I need to prove beyond that? The people I’ve created are a source of wonder and are more remarkable every day. What do any concerns about one’s career status ultimately matter? We are here briefly. We don’t know what’s important until after we are long gone from this life.  Think in astronomical terms. Or geological. What remains of us? What remains of what we do or of what we fail to do? Our actions are infinitely important and infinitely unimportant.

For this lifespan in the millions of years that is life on earth, what will I offer the universe?

All I am capable of offering.