ramblings

It’s 16 or so below zero here — the Cody weather says -16, and I’m too lazy and warm to get up and look at either of my thermometers. I like cold weather largely because surviving it allows me to feel morally superior to people who live in more temperate climes. But in a perverse way, I do enjoy the cold, and the way your nostrils freeze and thaw with every breath, and the frost on the insides of the windows, and how very bright and crisp everything seems, and the crunching of the snow when you step on it, and the ice formations everywhere. I walked around my house this afternoon trying to pound my windows back into place so I could get them shut properly before I put plastic up over them, and I discovered that somehow the faucet attached to my leaky hose had come on, and there were ice sculptures at all the places where it leaks. I don’t suppose it’s good for the hose, and I rather dread what it may have done to the water bill, and I hate waste — but it looked beautiful and fantastical — a pleasure dome with caves of ice and all that.

I’ve been thinking this evening, on the eve of my thirty-third birthday, about the time around my twenty-first birthday, when I was a junior in college and terribly depressed. I had a dinner party for my birthday, although I had to hold it several days before my actual birthday, since I had a nine a.m. final the day after my birthday, and so my friends had to go out and buy the wine. Everybody had some role — wine buying, dessert making, music selecting, cocktail shaking — and it was one night in that time I remember fondly. And I even remember my actual birthday fondly. I went down to the patrol office at the midnight shift change to say hi, and my friend Jack, who had the same nine a.m. final I did the next day, talked me into driving the shuttle. “Hey, if we can’t be hungover, at least we can be exhausted!”

But tonight I’m thinking about another night from around that time. I was trying to take my finals and pack up all my belongings and get them moved into my friends’ basement. I was moving off campus the next semester, and I had to be out of my dorm room but couldn’t yet get into my apartment. The girl next door to me was taking my room, and she asked every time she saw me when I was moving, and every single time I told her not until I was done with my last final on Friday morning. Anyway, when I wasn’t working, I spent my time packing up my room and studying. I had one book out that wasn’t part of my studying regimen. It was the text from my Romantics class, an anthology edited by Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling, and I wasn’t at all sure why I’d left it out, until one night, unable to concentrate on anything else, I opened it up to Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight“:

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry
Came loud — and hark, again loud! as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude. . .

It is not really a poem about my situation then, or my situation now, but one of the things I’ve come to appreciate as a librarian and a reader that I did not appreciate as a writer and a teacher is that sometimes literature is not so much about what it is about as it is about what it needs to be for the particular reader in a particular place and time. A story isn’t yours once you’ve told it: it belongs as much to the people who read it and come to inhabit it as it does to you. And so tonight I’m thinking about the secret ministry of frost and the quiet moon, and I hope both are working their magic over you all, wherever you may be.

There are many reasons to hate Facebook (and many reasons to like it, to be sure, but I’m not going to address them here. Incidentally, if you are reading this on Facebook, it’s because I have my personal blog feed into Facebook so I can contribute there without actually going there). But I hate Facebook primarily for one reason: Facebook always tells me I’m fat.

I do my best to keep updated with AdBlock and Greasemonkey scripts and other things that make the web a prettier place to be, but it doesn’t seem to matter: invariably, when I log in, there’s an ad there telling me I need to get rid of my muffin top, or that I can get a flat belly if I just click on this link. What truly astounds me — and frightens me — is not only that Facebook thinks I’m fat, but also that it manages to focus on exactly the parts of my body I feel least secure about.

Mind you, I don’t think I’m fat. At least mostly I don’t think I’m fat. It helps that I can remind myself that I once weighed a lot more than I do now, and I tried very hard not to think I was fat when I weighed thirty to forty pounds more than I do these days.

And most of the time, I’m fairly successful in this mode of thinking. I have some advantages. I was raised to believe weight was irrelevant when judging character. I have never had a doctor tell me I need to lose weight. I was fairly well shielded from popular culture for most of my childhood. I spent summers for over a decade at an all girls’ summer camp where they focused a lot on acquiring skills and had very few mirrors.

But it doesn’t seem to matter: there is something so insidious about the idea of being fat that it seems it’s impossible to escape. Girls at camp spent a lot of time in front of those small mirrors, and some years there were girls who were sent from camp to the hospital to be treated for anorexia.

And I don’t think it will ever matter what I weight, or how my clothes fit, or how I actually look to the rest of the world: every time Facebook tells me I’m fat, I’ll think I am. And that’s why I hate Facebook.

A few days before Halloween in 1998 my mother hauled me out of the chair I’d been living in and into the car and into the hospital, where I signed a great many pieces of paper, including the ones that said I was committing myself to the psychiatric ward. I seem to remember that I was riding in a wheelchair, although that seems unlikely, since surely my legs were still working, even if I wasn’t inclined to use them. But the wheelchair is an appropriate metaphor (although I realize this is about to be hugely insulting to wheelchair users, for which I do apologize): some one had to push me, because there was no way I was going to move anywhere unless acted upon by an outside force.

I was what they call a voluntary committal, which is to say that I was not ordered into the ward by a judge. I would not say, however, that I went voluntarily: I was not volunteering for anything at that point, although I suppose if God had said, “Hmm, we need someone who’s willing to die,” I would have stepped forward.

Due to the vagaries of medical fads and the travesties of managed care, psych wards nowadays function as little more than holding tanks for the suicidal. As soon as they decide you’re not going to do yourself in, they let you out, regardless of whether or not you feel any better. As Kay Redfield Jamison points out in Night Falls Fast, this discharging is not a particularly good or helpful policy, since a great many suicides occur just after people are let out of the hospital.

The psych ward was, I suppose, useful to me in one way. I loathed the place. It was small and crowded; the windows didn’t open and the blinds, which were set in between two panes of glass, could only be tilted, not raised or lowered. The furniture in the main room was uncomfortable, and uncomfortably close to one’s fellow residents. The smoke leaked out from the smoking room. The TV was always on. If you sat in your room to read or think or just not be around people, they marked you down as unsocial. There was another little TV room where you could watch movies borrowed from the hospital library, supposing you could get someone to go there for you, or had privileges enough to go by yourself. They would not give you caffeinated coffee, not even in the morning, though they’d sell you pop at 8 p.m. They had an alarming fascination with your bowel movements, or lack thereof. And they would not let me vote.

Somewhere, in all my stacks of paper, I still have an evaluation form they sent me after my hospital stay. I have been carting it around all these years because I keep thinking that someday maybe I will be mellow enough to complain about the experience without screaming, but that day has not come.

I was only on the ward for five days, but I was under the highest level of lockdown the whole time. I could not leave the ward, no matter what, not even in a straitjacket with multiple attendants. That meant I couldn’t go to one of the many absentee voting booths set up around the hospital during the weeks before an election. I asked every doctor, every nurse, and every aide I saw. “How will I be able to vote?” Not one of them answered me. It was an off-year election, and I suppose that most of the other people on my ward, who mostly had schizophrenia and were fairly heavily medicated, were perhaps not very in touch with current events and thus not as interested in the whole business of participating in the democratic process as I was. But I was appalled.

So I suppose you could say that it was, in the end, my belief in democracy that saved me from depression. I worked as hard as I could to get out of that place. I spent all my time in the common room and played Yahtzee with people who didn’t know where they were. I watched day time television. (Seriously, all the stuff they tell you is bad for you in the outside world they totally push in the psych ward–the place is smoke free now, but when I was there, I swear the answer to every complaint was “go take a smoke break” or “go watch TV.”) My mother very kindly started bringing me coffee in the morning. It was, for some reason, permissible to have someone bring coffee to you, but they’d only give you decaf. I ate the horrible hospital food and stopped making extra-big circles around the COFFEE option. And it worked, I guess. I was discharged on election day. I walked the four blocks home to my mother’s house, got in my car, and drove to my polling place.

It was a long time, and a lot more ups and downs, before I really got better, and even today, there are parts of me that still aren’t always better. This year I’ll be spending thirteen hours in a chair at the Meeteetse Town Hall ensuring that the machinery of democracy is working smoothly. I know most of the people who read this will vote, or have already, but I’d urge you all to think of anyone you can who might be prevented from voting and try to help them get to the polls. My mother now works in the psychiatric department where I was once a patient, and she assures me that everyone there will have the opportunity to vote this year. I hope that’s true for everyone on the outside, too.

As for me, I’m still cynical as all get out, and I still think voting is the least thing you can do to make the world a better place. But it’s still important to me — so much so that, you might say, voting saved my life.

We all know, or know of, people who crash and burn, the mad ones, the ones whose candle burns at both ends, who end with a bang, who burn out instead of fading away. They are common enough, in fact, that I am able to write an entire sentence about them using other people’s words. The rock stars, the drunken poets, the strung out artists, the ones who get Rolling Stone issues dedicated to them, whose graves inspire supplicants, who put the chic in heroin chic and the manic in manic depressive.

I don’t in any way mean to denigrate the sufferings of these people, which are real, and troubling, and which surely do as much to detract from their lives as they do to enhance their art. But this weekend brought a sad reminder that there are other kinds of suffering — less blinding, perhaps, but no less real.

I first read about David Foster Wallace’s death via my friend Steve’s FriendFeed post. I have rarely been so grateful to have an online community. Watching the comments on that post, and later posts by Steve and Steven and Rochelle and Jessamyn, I was bouyed somewhat from the awful shock of it because I was connected to so many people for whom the news was equally tragic, and in some cases more so.

My cousin Jennifer gave me a membership to the Quality Paperback Book Club when I graduated from college, and one of the first books I bought was A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. I knew Wallace because his story “Girl With Curious Hair” was included in the anthology Voices of the Xiled, which I bought, I think, on some New York City trip in college, and I was just starting to think that essays were perhaps my favorite literary format. The book didn’t disappoint; a decade later, it’s still on my shelf, and I still crack up every time I even think about the title essay.

I remember the boyfriend, later husband, of another good friend talking about how he and some friends always meant to take a pilgrimage to Bloomington-Normal to go pay him a visit, although they never did. I remember starting Infinite Jest and thinking it was marvelous and wonderful and crazy and then stopping sometime in the middle of a footnote and not getting back to it, though I always meant to.

Just this morning I was talking to a library patron about Wallace and about how sad we were, and about how both of us had started but not finished Infinite Jest, and about how guilty we felt, me because I bought a remaindered copy; she because she gave hers away.

Today at work I checked through all the various blogs and things I regularly read, and I came across the New York Times story that quotes his father, who talks about how Wallace had been taking medicine for depression for twenty years, and how just last year medication had started to fail, and in the past year new things had been tried, new medicine, no medicine, ECT, and how none of them had ultimately worked.

And I was reminded of how cripplingly, dully, horrible depression is, how unromantic, how difficult. We think so often of the mental illness of artists as being of the crazy, manic, candle burning at both ends sort, and in doing so we forget that just as often it is the sort of unrelenting, boring, deathly illness that probably plagued David Foster Wallace for years, that has plagued me at times, that I believe probably ultimately killed my father, who killed himself when he was only about a decade older than Wallace was at his death.

There isn’t any really happy conclusion to this. I don’t have a policy proposal or even a pat remark, except to say, as one does in so many situations, that it is terrible that things should have to come to this for us to take notice.

PS Steve has a good collection of links on DFW.

I am, as I write this, on call as a home support volunteer for the Radical Reference people who are at the Republican National Convention. So far this has not entailed any actual work on my part, but that doesn’t mean that things haven’t been happening. It’s very weird in many ways to be so far from it all. My best friend lived in the Twin Cities for a decade, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time there myself. And

My friend doesn’t like election years because they seem to divide people too easily. I don’t like election years because I feel like none of the divisions create any spaces I can claim.

I’ve always felt that elections in the US are basically about choosing which flavor of capitalism you’d like. I got that from hanging out with the socialists, of course, but that doesn’t prevent it from being true.

I worry sometimes that by moving to a place where my vote, at least at the presidential level, truly does not count, I’ve just stepped off the edge of the political world and turned into the sort of person who is happy to sit on the beach (or in my case the mountain top) and watch the world as it burns. Of course, I’ve always said that voting is the least thing you can do politically, especially voting for national office. It stands to reason, therefore, that I ought to be able to go on doing the other political things that I do, such as volunteering with Radical Reference. But distance does make a difference. I can hardly imagine attending a candlelight vigil — much less a rally — any more, and yet I used to do that sort of thing all the time. I wonder if by being so far away from meetings and conference calls and marches and coordinating committees I am also far away from the things that they stood for, if I am losing my grip on them. I talk to people all over the country, and sometimes even the world, almost every day, and since they are almost all librarians, I have often a lot in common with them. In the last couple of weeks, though, reading blogging and tweeting and whatever the hell it is we do on FriendFeed, I’ve started to feel like I’m talking to people who mostly don’t know me at all, and that’s a little disturbing.

Of course, it’s good to be exposed to variety. It’s good to consider other viewpoints. But I think again and again of the story about the man who kept proclaiming his beliefs, even when people thought he was crazy. “Why do you keep speaking?” a young man asks, and the man says that sometimes he keeps speaking to change the world, and sometimes he keeps speaking so that the world doesn’t change him. That’s what I’m doing, I hope, these many years after the very first New Rambler.

Elizabeth Wurtzel went to law school and has now penned a frightening op-ed for the Wall Street Journal .

It’s good to be reminded that no life is over till it’s over. Call no man happy until he is dead, indeed.

It stays hot — even here, at 5797 feet — too late on summer nights for me to be able to go to sleep at a reasonable hour, which explains at least in part what I’m doing up at this hour writing and making chicken stock. Well, it explains the up part. The chicken stock part is because I have this chicken carcass that needs to be made into stock, and it’s way too warm during the day to heat up that much for that long, so I figured I might as well do it now.

The writing part is just a sudden desire to try to articulate a few things I’ve been thinking about.

I spend a lot of time thinking about my online presence and its various manifestations and how those have influenced, and in some cases created, the friendships in my life. Of course, I also spend a lot of time online, tinkering with various aspects of this presence and talking to my friends and my “friends,” and so it is perhaps not surprising that I think about it quite a bit, too.

At the moment, it breaks down kind of like this

• This here blog is supposedly the real me, but it tends to get neglected far more than anything else.
• lis.dom is the library me
• Facebook is the place for people I went to high school with and other strangers from the past to find me. I’ve had a website of some sort or other since 1999, so it’s not like I’ve been hiding, but I guess a lot of people who don’t really want to find you are down with finding you on Facebook. I used to play Scabulous on Facebook, too, but I couldn’t keep up.
• Flickr is where I always intend to put more pictures that I forever intend to take.
• Twitter is on hold while I sort out my relationship with it.
• FriendFeed is where I spend most of my time.

By next month, of course, all of that could change.

I was just saying today to my friend Steve that (and I quote, from my own IM transcript): “I also sort of wish this kind of thing had been around when I was young and convinced no one else had my problems — although that may be a function of being young, not of medium.”

Reading, it has always seemed to me, serves two purposes: it reminds you on the one hand that there are a lot of people who are not like you and that on the other hand there are a lot of people just like you. I’ve always thought of reading in that sense as meaning reading books, but reading FriendFeed will give you much the same experience. And that means that those of us who face the world best by reading about it suddenly have a whole new place and way to encounter the world.

I might well have found some new world just as wonderful by some other route, but I think I can’t discount the medium in this case. The medium isn’t the message — as the Twitter-to-FriendFeed defection showed, I think a lot of us don’t feel brand loyalty — but it is the means (and perhaps someday we’ll have social network protocols as the means?). All those invisible ones and zeroes, all those packets pinballing around through the network — they make this thing, whatever it is that we have here.

I am trying to regard it as one of the blessings of this summer that I have not yet had a bad peach.

Given war, natural disasters, the collapse of various financial markets, deaths, and anxiety, it doesn’t seem like much of a blessing, but I’m trying to think of it that way.

And these have been just ordinary grocery store peaches, not the wonderful ones that I bought thirty pounds of a few years back that were selling from a roadside stand. These have just been on sale at the grocery store for $1.49 a pound, and I get a few every time I go, and they’ve all been good.

I never used to like summer much — school was out, which many people liked, but as school was something I was good at and summer activities were mostly things I was not good at, I sort of missed it. Fresh fruit was sort of my consolation prize for summer. It was hot and muggy and people were forever telling you to go play outside, where it was even more hot and muggy, but you got fresh peaches, and strawberries and blueberries and cherries and plums and melons and even mulberries, which are not really very good but which I ate in large quantities because we always seemed to have a mulberry tree in our yard.

I was a late-comer to cherries. I’d always thought I didn’t like them, since I never liked anything cherry flavored. Then the summer we were fourteen I stayed for a week in New Jersey with my oldest friend, who was living there with some family friends for the summer. We went into New York City almost every day, and when we got out of the train station, we’d walk along until we found a fruit vendor, and Sara would say, “We’d like a pound of cherries, please.” Then we walked along the streets of Manhattan, eating cherries out of a brown paper bag and spitting the pits into the gutters. We’d walk and eat until we’d finished the pound, and then, more often than not, we’d happen upon another fruit vendor and say, “We’d like a pound of cherries, please.”

I don’t eat cherries in quite that kind of quantity anymore, but as soon as I see them in the supermarket, I buy some (and then, because I am old, I take them home and wash them and put the pits I’ve spat out into the garbage can) and think about being fourteen and fifteen and seeing New York for the very first time.

So on days like today when the world seems to be not too great, which is how it generally seemed all the time when I was in high school, I am trying to be thankful for fruit.

Teen: You’re walking?
Me: Yes.
Teen: Where are you going?
Me: Home. It’s four blocks from here.
Teen: Wow, four blocks is a long way to walk in the rain.
Me: [jaw hits ground]

People in my town, upon learning that I walk from place to place, tend to regard me, kindly, as mentally ill. Of course, I am mentally ill, but I the cause, I think, has more to do with genetics than with my chosen form of transportation. If anything, I probably don’t walk enough: most days I walk the four blocks to and from the post office and back, and while I suppose this is more walking than some Americans do — quite a lot more, at least in the rain, to judge by the conversation I had this afternoon — it pales in comparison to the amount of time I spend sitting in front of a computer. I thought about that as I was walking home, and so when I got home I thought it might be a good time to go for an actual walk, one whose purpose was simply to walk, not to get from place to place. It was drizzling slightly, or trying to, and turning cold, which meant the golf course would likely be empty, and so I changed into boots and layered on my rain gear and off I went.

(Yes, we have a golf course in my town. 351 people, 9 holes of golf. The course is laid out over a ridge and its surrounding lowlands just south of town, and in addition to the nine holes, it has a great many home sites, most of which remain unsold and none of which have been built on yet. I will rue the day someone does build out there, as I tend to regard the place as my own private nature preserve, but I’ve been informed that, due to bureaucratic tangles of which I remain happily ignorant, it will be a long, long time before anyone builds there.)

I walked for over an hour, mostly up on the ridge, keeping away from the roads, which are all named for surrounding mountains and formations: Phelps Way, Irish Rock, Pinnacle Rock, etc. I am reminded of what Billy Collins says about the naming of subdivisions: that Pheasant Run and Deer Creek are not descriptive but elegiac, honoring the creatures that were displaced so that development could occur. The mountains have not yet been displaced, of course, but some of them have been mined and drilled, and others will surely follow.

When I got home, I pulled a tome off the shelf and sat down to reread Thoreau’s “Walking,” which seemed to me to be the thing to do. I thought about copying out a few paragraphs and leaving them in conspicuous places around town, but doing so would undoubtedly be a further indication of my mental illness, so I did not. The funny thing to me is that for as odd as my walking is considered here, I am, according to Thoreau, no kind of walker at all. Happily, Thoreau wasn’t completely convinced that he was much of a walker himself:

It is true, we are but faint hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, neverending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, — prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again, — if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.

I have read a number of the currently popular genre of book, the “I went and did this thing for a year” book. There are a great many of these about — years without shopping, without buying anything made in China, living as if it were 1900, living according to the Bible, getting all your food locally, making everything in Mastering the Art of French Cooking — and one is tempted to think of something so trendy as a new idea. But of course Walden was the original “I went and did this thing for a year” book. Thoreau even foreshadowed our current concerns about the accuracy of nonfiction narratives — he actually lived at Walden Pond for two years, but he condensed his experiences into a year for the sake of the narrative. And, as Thoreau detractors are wont to point out, he cheated — he ate half his meals at his mom’s house, or Emerson’s house. Thoreau doesn’t include that, but I doubt he would apologize for it: the point was to live deliberately, and he felt he accomplished that. If you want to get hung up on exactly how he did it, go read the chapters on Economy and bean planting again. Edward Abbey also neglects to include the wife and two children who were living with him during most of the period recounted in Desert Solitaire, which seems egregious in some ways. But including the things they left out would make Thoreau’s narrative, and Abbey’s, more like the current crop of books, which are forever agonizing over the rules and whether they are sticking to them.

It’s hard to imagine anything like Walden getting taken seriously today. Try to imagine a chapter excerpted in Harper’s or The Atlantic Monthly. It’s too sincere, and, as Lionel Trilling pointed out, sincerity got trumped by authenticity a long time ago.

It has always been my desire to live closer to the roots of things, to learn by going where I have to go, to get there by my own means, and while I do not deny the genetic and biological underpinnings of mental illness, I’ve always felt as well that the things I want — to live closely, to take my waking slow, to walk upon the earth and not the pavement — are not an expression of my illness by a desire for health.

I am still in Iowa; everything here is still unbelievably sad and horrifying. This is just an attempt to take my mind off all that for awhile.

My father died when I was five and a half, and thus I was effectively raised by a single mother, with a fair amount of help from my grandmother. My two oldest friends in the world were also the children of single parents.

My mother, and their mothers, got a lot of grief from people. People were generally not allowed to come play at any of our houses after school because there was not a Responsible Adult at home. In fifth grade, a girl had a party for the whole class. I went for a bit, but my asthma started to act up from the crowd and the English sheepdog, and so I went to the organizing mothers, thanked them for the party, and said I would be leaving now. I lived a few blocks away and it was, I think, not even dark out yet. They insisted on calling my mother, who was not home as she had, god forbid, gone grocery shopping. After a lot of hemming and hawing, during which I said they could either take me home to my inhaler or they could take me to the ER, they finally took me home — and the next day they called my mother to excoriate her and to tell her that I was having a “panic attack.”

There was an immense prejudice toward single mothers when I was young. It did not seem to matter how you became single — my father had died; one friend’s parents divorced; another friend’s had never really been together. I had the easiest time, but it was still not easy.

I bring all of this up because I was reading through the comments on Walt’s post, and I was reminded of how deeply judgmental people are about family structures. My father’s death was and remains the saddest thing that has ever happened to me, but I don’t think I am less of a person because of it, or that my family is somehow deficient because of my single mother and single grandmother. A lot of people do seem to think just that, however, and I imagine that many of these people are the same people who view gay marriage as such an abomination because it somehow undermines conventional family structure.

I am not a fan of Hillary Clinton, but the adage that it takes a village to raise a child is far older that she is. It suggests to me that our ancestors knew something that we did not: it takes a village, to me, is a recognition that no one’s family structure is perfect, that even two happily married people of opposite sexes may have deficiencies, and that we as a society should strive to help each other in looking after our children rather than tearing each other down for some real or imagined failing. There are people in this world who make bad parents, but there is, perhaps sadly, no one filter we can use to rule them out of the child-rearing process. Or perhaps the inability to filter isn’t sad — perhaps it is a reminder to us that we must always think; that we cannot and should not rely on any single factor or litmus test to make all our decisions for us — and that, I think, is a good thing.