I Should Have Written About Community

 

Maybe I should have written about community.  Because, as obsessed as I have personally been with the question of what a public and adult disabled female voice sounds like—probably more of a thing if you have a voice that’s not always clear in your own head, as well as one people are not used to hearing. Maybe it’s not a thought enticing to publishing pros, who, in turn, are trying to decide what engages the book-buying public, to whom, despite everything I’ve been dreaming forever(and that sometimes makes me feel I’ve been at this a long time,) my flashes of activity might look like signs of sunstroke. If I take my eagerness for a hugely validating capital-M Moment out of the equation, it makes every bit of sense for the people with novels that aren’t hope on a hard drive to get the blog posts first. 

 Fifty-something or not, I’m still a rookie, and one who was lying to herself when she thought that getting into the magazine without the aid of First Stories would put to rest a lot of her questions about her overall gifts.  It helps.  But maybe not as much as I imagined it might when I was sending out the six, or eight, unpolished or possibly unfinished stories that the magazine, rightly, as it turned out, failed to pay attention to.  (Maybe I’ll finish one of them, though there are a few that I will chalk up to experience as the moment for police procedurals, at least from my outsider’s desk, seems to have passed. Not that I nailed anything with them but a passable-for-a-chick-from-the desert Richard Price impression anyway. )

“I am Queens Boulevard!” except for all the ways I am so clearly not. Maybe Phoenix doesn’t have much of an identity, either. Maybe thinking of us as working it out together might help me feel better about the other reasons I have to stay. I generally love a project..

I couldn’t have written a more traditional PI story, though.  Not without cribbing so violently from other writers that it would make “Murder By Death” look like a documentary. I don’t really know what “lone wolf” feels like. Maybe not that great, since the bottle of scotch in the desk(or in the case of the women, a punishing-sounding exercise regimen) comes pretty standard, much like the office with the dead plants. 

I have never run five miles, much less felt depleted because I skipped a day or a thousand. I have only rarely solved a problem due to some individual effort of mine—and if you add in my need for personal care—don’t ask, if you think identity struggles don’t go easily with blog posts, you have seen nothing compared to all that stuff—my Individualism count plummets to about one, depending on how fast I can get this post out.

Part of me still wanted to lie, or at least research my way into hiding all that—I’ve done it before.   So the form I halfway love, and my form, that I halfway don’t, had to adapt(pun not intended) and make “Wedded Twist” possible as a PI story where the hero gets help when she needs it.

The Masthead For The New EQ

 I'm an Author in theLatest Issue

As usual, feeling a bit like I don't belong, especially since they didn't use my blog post.(Yet? Who knows?) 

Lots of Conflicting Feels, No Takes...

 but the Platner story would feel different for me if our government didn't feel so damn illegitimate. The Senate *should* be an august body that you should have to be good enough for, but is that what really happens?not really.(If we need it to be, how do we do that? When I was eighteen, I would have said "Women!" and I wish I could still do that, but I've met more of us.)

People can change a lot, but some acts really are things you can't take back, I suppose. War is hell, also. I liked what he said, but anyone could have a scary side and I could see that his could be scary. Even though I like his ballsy attitude. 

still hate Susan Collins, who has found many means to screw millions of Americans against their will all the time. But she didn't touch them and she used her inside voice, so, moral. 
Brett Fucking Kavanaugh.(But yes, always want better candidates than that! Obviously...) But he gets to decide very important things constantly and Collins backed him up.  (And if you say he's illegitimate now, people act like you just found out about Santa.)

Standards don't work if they're this one-sided./ But doesn't that make us the good guys?(does it, though?)

Pop-Princess Happiness Isn't Transferable

 

Fandom these days is leaving me feeling like I’m missing a gene as a lady, right?

 Because the last thing I feel like doing in the brief reprieve before the gates of true meteorological hell that is July in my state open up and unleash their full fury is debate whether Tay and Travis are wearing tulle or taffeta. I really don’t get the Swift phenomenon (Katy Perry’s songs are at least as good in my uninitiated opinion, and she is following more of the pattern that untold hours of “Behind the Music” might lead me to expect and finding more joy in interpersonal relationships as she hits a career valley.) I didn’t ponder Taylor for the same reason I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about why people who grew up behind me prefer sour-apple candy to lime for their green-candy wants. I might not agree with it, but it’s not for me. (In pop years, maybe I’m Lucy the cave-woman.)   

I don’t think anyone is interesting enough for the kind of saturation coverage that she gets, but it gives me plenty of time to wonder how one might run an empire with one expression—admittedly a peaceful and happy-looking one—on one’s face at all times. Sometimes I think of her like a Beefeater that I either want to break up with uncontrollable snorting laughter or totally disgust, depending if I’ve had a happy time that day myself, which, mostly not, lately.

When I am feeling *massively* uncharitable, she sort of resembles an offspring that might have come from a Bambi/Barbie pairing I might have dreamed up in that brief window when I still played with toys but kind of knew what sex is. I can’t believe she’s an It girl, no matter how refreshing it seemed at the beginning that we never came close to seeing her cooch, but, again, more for others! And, nothing like love with a football player to ensure a relationship of peaceful longevity, but, hey, somebody probably pulls it off.

Sometimes it’s funny to imagine myself, in an alternate universe where both my appreciation of Courtney Love (“Live Through This” is pretty brilliant) and my heavy Internet use could happen at the same time.  At least I would know how my life got thrown away if I were part of some grassroots army that thought it was our job to beat back Courtney’s bad press—I might have still been there, like Ringo Starr answering Marge’s letter on The Simpsons, but to Ms. Love’s credit, I doubt that she would accept that.

Maybe it’s Gwen from   No Doubt that makes a better analog—Tragic Kingdom being a big old breakup album and all that.  I suppose I rooted for her to find happiness with her cowboy, but it’s clearly not a chicken-in-every-pot scenario, or Oprah showing up all “Everyone in the audience gets a cowboy!” (Would I enjoy him? Maybe one like Raylan Givens.)

For K, Now More Than Ever!

 I always imagined I'd post something about him one day, and probably not just because he has been one of my best audiences for a long time(among almost too many other things to mention, considering that we've never been around the corner from each other or anything and have only shared physical space twice in many years of association and affection.

We could almost think we made each other up,at this point, except it would be hard to imagine that a voice from my head would love me that much. Since he does,and I have had *some* physical evidence, I have to conclude that he exists.

Like so many other things, though, this didn't take the shape I expected, though I thought of him when I bought a beautiful anthology calledSearch Work  because of the struggles so many, including K, have in the 21st century job search.I've been worried about that, even if I don't believe Real Jobs are golden tickets anymore.(The link is to a livestream of  the book's launch, which explains it better than I can, except I'll say that the designer made the book literally a beautiful physical object that made me wish I had the patience to design an anthology. I'm not sure I do.)

Now K. is having a health crisis, and is even wondering how much he is sharing with the disability community--I hope it doesn't make a bad activist for me to refuse that particular "recruitment", but I care about his happiness even more than solidarity or representation or not feeling alone on an ironically rocky life path.(I'm not really asking for anything right now, just trying to keep this blog where my actual mind and heart are, as usual, barring the occasional bandwagon or bit of emotion-bait,)

But it has always felt weird being me and saying "Get well soon." If not for the media, I might not ever see that as a possibility. People tell me about someone who cut her toenails too close and died the next week.  You know? 

Writing(and file-searching) Crosspost...

Can't find my file, from Dreamwidth 

I'd be more prolific if I didn't do stuff like this! 

What The...Furious Jumping?

 

I don’t want to be cured to watch a movie, indeed if the unimaginable happens, I might waste the first few days taking showers and changing clothes just because I might do it unimpeded, and, speaking of doing things unimpeded, I might spend a few months after that waiting out the incubation period of something or other.

I don’t want to be cured to watch a movie, but there are definitely times when I think my disability messes with my interpretation of the viewing experience.  Like when I thought for the longest time that Betty Draper had multiple sclerosis instead of January Jones being kind of a bad actress that “Mad Men” didn’t want to write for, okay, so that is a bad example, but there are times I wish I didn’t have to bring the kind of baggage that makes “Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind” into a sort of horror movie. 

Sometimes I wish I could have sat there with my Coke and have been like “Interesting challenge, creating a character who is, like, pure id,” or whatever the true goal was at the beginning of “Poor Things” was supposed to be that I didn’t see the same way at all because I, too, have a giant file on me that causes more pain than it ever relieves.(Though I’m not sure how many women, disabled or not, who read about crime as much as I could see in prostitution a path to solvency, adventure, and self-discovery—we could wish that for them, I suppose. Maybe “sex work” is, though.)

Even if I hadn’t ended up liking the movie in the end, it was nice to see something that cared about the script and wasn’t all wrapped up in franchise potential and selling happy meals   .(Would almost like to see those—might end movie merchandising  for a generation for little Timmy to try to collect all the pig-goats, hee  hee!)  I really did like the joy it took in human appetites, too. Nice for a change. I’m glad I hung in with this one, even if mutilation metaphors kind of cloud my spirits. Not as much as being the  true focus of attention at the “Marijuana can mess up your baybeez!1” movie freshman year of high school, though—I try to be over that, and I am really, truly not, especially that my contemporary reaction was “My god, I’m nowhere near that ugly…am I?”