Dear Alice...#AliceIsLove

 

Dear Alice,
We are contemporaries, so you are not my ancestor. I’m a little older, in fact, starting on this crazy disability journey while you were just a determined gleam in someone’s eye. We talked online a few times but I’m never sure how much people remember about me when I do that.  It seems that possibly my name might not mean much, but that we’d have a reference in common and that you would say “Hey, how’s it going with (Vexing Disability Topic #12) that brought me into your feed, but, probably you’d remember it better than I am right now. What set you apart is that you would actually know *what* strand of bullshit an online acquaintance was actually trying to pull apart *right now* and it’s not fucking great;

(I wish I could have told you about that, too, but it’s too long a story to type for metaphor’s sake, though I am probably planning to post this. Suffice to say, from what I heard from your friends this morning, you probably would have been tickled about it.

Your feed gave me a glimpse of what disability community would feel like, and though it seems contrary to the spirit of today’s events, I’ll always be angry at Elon and, indeed, Nature Herself for taking that from me, since I have it so seldom, and in such tiny bites. My disability community fits together more like Italy, back when, or maybe even Yugoslavia, It makes me sad that I’ve never had an “Oh, my tribe at last,” crip story, but I’m too tired of trying to convince myself I have to try to make it sound  good for you, wherever you might be as  I write this, having cancelled my zoom registration to make room for your real friends instead of my fangirl-who-doesn’t-understand-the-assignment self.

 Maybe that’s why I like to hide behind characters when I write thoughts like this; I usually make them better and bolder than I am. They get to win and so far? I don’t. I get to live to tell the story, though, which, in deference to today’s occasion, I’m trying for the first time in ages to make a good thing instead of rather unfortunate—it would still be nice if the next chapter was a banger—either with or without(hopefully with!) an actual bang or two.  Right now, I don’t see anything…it reminds me of after college when I had “detail-oriented” on my resume and didn’t realize there was a typo in it—guess I can take “visionary” out of my bio, too, right?

I used to wonder if you had a secret, sometimes. Not that I pulled out the full-on “How does she do it?” trip on you like an old lady in a supermarket, but, sadly, thinking about you *has* made resenting those people just that little bit harder(which, okay, it’s always hard to give up the hobbies of a lifetime, but if I learn something, I’d survive.) Sometimes I thought it was as simple as “Greatest City” vs.  “Oh, I changed planes there once. Damn, it’s hot.” Or that I never got to be Erika in the way you got to be Alice—trust a writer to believe that bylines save past the point she should know otherwise, and, you know, I do have some clips.  But am I a phenom? Since I’m still Ms. Hannukah  a great deal of the time, I guess it’s safe to say “No,”, but if we arm-wrestled, I would absolutely win, which, given the competitive mess that is the United States, maybe ought to be more satisfying?
Still wish we could have been friends,

Erika J from Phoenix

 

WIP Wednesday...

 I think I still like the first version better, both because it just flowed out, and it was less ambivalent. But I did get some good feedback, and maybe I'm not the only one looking for a new beginning, here.

The part of me that looks for signs and omens think it must mean something that there is a Greek restaurant so close to our hotel. It’s not as fancy as our Occasion Place at home—call it El Greco or Malaka’s (Though, really, as I massage my run-over toe, I feel like the one jerkoff here) but it has jaunty blue-and-white tablecloths and smells like herbs and lamb. It feels like a good sign, especially for a trip that feels like such a compromise between “I” and “We”. Hopefully, Kevin will actually be as happy to see us as he was in his messages and it’s not just the comedy-troupe version of “We should get together real soon,” that nobody intends to agree to. The “Never on Sunday” music playing in the restaurant almost makes it feel like a real vacation, but my toe *really* hurts. I curse and rub it again before my girl comes back and catches me bent-over when she looks as fresh as a spring morning that, quite frankly, tries just a little too hard. (I help her do it—my first conspiracy.)

People usually smile when my girl and I step out together, as it were, both because she is getting more surfer-girl blonde by the instant, in addition to her being conventionally lovely (with a twist, as my acting teacher might say.) When they see me, what average people think they see is a conscientious older brother taking little sis out for a constitutional, or maybe, more likely, a stepbrother who has buried the hatchet., since we don’t really look alike. They love seeing me guide Corrine’s chair…up to the time that we might kiss and then their faces change in ways I try not to think about.

 

Classes are A Splurge For Me...

 sometimes I think it's sad that even at my most indulgent...still kind of a geek. But to be fair, there's not a lot of "Make Adaptive Love Better Than A Sex Worker" kinds of Zoom content out there, probably.  So maybe it's about what falls into my lap, at least a little.(Which suddenly sounds a bit more provocative than I intended, itself.)

Obviously, updating this blog on a Saturday should tell you I do care about writing, though I was at the bookstore this week and didn't try to track the spot where my book might go. Maybe it has lost a bit of luster as a Reason To Live and stuff, which is probably the right thing, but I'm not always clear on what should fill in instead: I can't really respond with the conventional answers. Unless I want to be a weirdo "pet parent" and proud that my cat catches flies above grade level, or some shit like that, though she is good at it and has my eyes.

That said, writing is an excellent way to figure out what you really think about life and maybe how you might have wanted things to unfold.  I just finished a workshop from One Story  since I got money for Christmas, and it was my first workshop in a few years. It was a good experience, but my inner eleven-year-old with the early-onset meet-cute poisoning is somewhat disappointed that I couldn't convert it into some kind of winter fling as they might do in the million hours of TV she watched.(Some of us might keep in touch, though.)

-If anything, I drove a guy away in this class by pointing out his old-timey ableism and asking, spiritually, if not literally, "Do you even disabled, bro?" which seemed fun and feisty till he pouted and did not come back to class again.  Which I don't get: I fight my way in, not out, which is why the whole generational "slacker" tag didn't resonate the first time I encountered it.(Lucky me--having so much time to reconsider.)

Sometimes I still wonder if I should have let him have "hit a nerve" for the group, but that whole "Maybe you need OT, anti-depressants/ Jesus/ a strong male influence/" thing is so boring for me at this point that I could probably not pretend to be nice about it, anyway.  Bet he cried "woke mob" and got his money back. 

Didn't expect to really like "Sick Girl"

 but I was pretty impressed by watching this movie this week.  I have to confess that these depictions of this kind of illness/ disability...fabulism leave me confused, not because of the flouting of a huge moral boundary--though, of course, lying about cancer is appalling, but, okay, as a person who has been the recipient of pity-as-attention or attention-as-pity(whichever) off and on throughout my life, I wonder why anyone might want that.

(Is that another opportunity I failed to make the most of, looking for respect that I...kind of never got either? About the only place I ever got "Lucky!"-style attention that I was allowed to accept was at Disneyland, I think, which kind of loses its potency as your friends start pairing off and having sex.)

I could really relate to the main character's feelings about not keeping up as everything changed for her friends at the same time feeling that she wouldn't trade, exactly. Also, trying too hard to keep your group together, though suddenly dominating message board threads doesn't look as weird anymore.

"Thanks Again For A Weird Night!"

 is kind of what I would say if "In The Dark" were a person right now. Maybe not being worried about it retaining some kind of "Golden Age" quality kind of works in its favor, instead of against it as we lurch from the guide-dog school being a front for money-laundering, to being a stash house of a sort, to actual gunplay.(That whole storyline doesn't really work for me, but it did give Jess a chance to be calm and competent for a change by using her vet skills to help an unexpected human target.  So I liked that part.

Also sorry we found out so much bad stuff about Dean the cop last season, though his corruption does take on a Jean ValJean quality once we know he got into it all to pay for care for Chloe, who is again a bright spot in Season 2--Murphy is, however reluctantly, a mentor this season, and it is like looking into a mirror, except, again, my hair never looks so good, and it seems that people take her advice, a hurdle I never quite cleared in my few adventures in Peer Support. 

Possibilities, in A Sentence(Poem)

 We are sorry this sentence is still not fully accessible(we've been trying for years)

This sentence is still hung over from a girls' trip.

This sentence is afraid she will be disgusting when she's her mother's age.

This sentence would be in an afterglow with a sentence from another page, but he was afraid of his feelings and turned.

this sentence was born three months premature, so it's a miracle, even uncapitalized.

This sentence is more in love than ever.

This sentence is special because it knows that it ends. 

My Friend Once Wrote That It Was "heroic"...

 that I kept going in the face of, maybe,  self-esteem xeriscaping(Not a lot of spiritual water, sometimes, you know?) She's gone, now, so even a response to my alternate e when my cat died gets some scrutiny that it might not if she were just sitting around eating popcorn in the Bay Area.  Still rejecting the hero thing, cause heroes get to win and I'm pretty sure that I don't. Not to leave another post about self-loathing in here. More to the point, I think Giving Up and Not Giving Up are much more binary for abled people.