Miss Smith Goes to Washington: A Vagina Travelogue

I’ve always had trouble with quiet respect. It’s not my way. It’s not how I roll. I’m not sure quiet respect is in my DNA.

Yet there I was, standing at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., trying very hard to offer it up in the name of democracy. The trip itself was part of my academic work. I had been invited to co-lead a 90-minute poetry workshop for the Split This Rock festival with colleagues Madeline Wiseman and Aimee Allard. The least expensive airline ticket I could find required a five-day stay. So I called up a few friends I made during my undergraduate work at the student newspaper, bought a ticket, and made peace with the idea that like it or not, I was going to spend five days in a big city.

I had been asked to come to a poetry festival to help others learn to shout their embodied poetry. I was in Washington to shout back to war, to injustice, to all the things that make our human lives feel or seem inhuman. Quiet respect was not on my agenda. In fact, according to the program issued by the festival, I was there to deliver a loud and enthusiastic presentation, "Fatty Girls, Imaginary Cocks, and Vaginas Built Like Bookstores: A Workshop on Writing the Activist Body." Perhaps I could have managed silent reverence had Lincoln actually been there. Giving his marble effigy the sort of respect one normally gives the sick, the injured, seemed ironic no matter how stoic his likeness seemed as he sat, his hands forming sign language, forever entombed in the Parthenon wannabe designed by Henry Bacon.



As I stood to take this photo, I listened to a hundred or so tourists as they shuffled in quiet respect. Part of me wondered if the statue ever tired of living in a perpetual funeral wake, if it ever wanted to get up and shake out the kinks. I wondered, too, why sculptor Daniel Chester French posed the President as if he were waiting for a shoe shine at the airport (or for the sake of historical connections, the train station).

The writer in me, however, did marvel at Lincoln's speech engraved in the wall of the monument. And I envied how people actually stopped to read the entire text, to comment (quietly of course) on its value or historical significance, or simply to capture in digital pixilation, the words Lincoln so famously scribed. The rhetorician in me liked this reverence for public speaking, even as I joked (quietly of course) about how grateful I was that none of my drafts would ever be cast in stone.

I stood there for half an hour, watching people as they soaked up history, wondering what story they would tell to those waiting for them back home - wherever that home turned out to be. But half an hour of quiet respect was all I could manage before I felt twitchy and out of sorts. My friends and I continued our walk of the National Mall, mostly because I had performance poetry to do and statements to embody.



You know, you can't get a "VAGINA USA" t-shirt just anywhere. I had to make mine. I have a few of them, actually. Over the last year of public poetry performances, I've shambled off to Hobby Lobby for requisite supplies. I have short-sleeve and long-sleeve versions. I have received and filled orders from audience members who wanted one of their own. And somewhere in Boulder, there's a guy wearing a vagina t-shirt on stage as he plays his bass guitar. As my mother says, "That shirt gets around."

In preparation for my trip to D.C., I had found flag applique patches to iron onto each sleeve. I used embroidered, red and white letters for my patriotic blue version of this shirt. Despite the obvious affiliation to the United States in iconic red, white, and blue, I can't say that reception of this performed poetic piece was well-received. In our post 9/11 world, a vagina patriot walking about the National Mall makes people nervous.



Tourists at the back yard fence of the White House, for example, gasped and pointed. This prompted security to quietly walk toward my vagina, to scope out my behavior and see if I fit any of their memorized profiles. As they did, my friend Christopher said, "You know, they have snipers on the roof up there." I zipped up my coat and wandered away.



After a flock of tourists whirred by on Segways, I stood before the most phallic of the monuments and posed for a photo. I tried to pose as a super-heroine, to act as if standing around Washington proudly displaying an anatomical term was perfectly normal. It wasn't. And the more I thought about this, the more I wondered how the iconic representation of my female identity made visible the unease I felt quietly every day.

Though I am a "hard-boiled worldly wise woman," as Jean Arthur was in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," I lack her gentle and wise ways. Thinking in terms of that film, standing in front of a monument, I thought of how her character was cast to know what the male senator did not: How a bill gets proposed and considered.



In my university work, I'd call Arthur's role in that film as a "literacy sponsor." But as I stood in front of the Washington Monument, I thought of how rare the female is embodied in our national treasures. I had walked miles of the National Mall that day, and I didn't see women portrayed as real people. They were abundant in representation as angels and goddesses, as iconic representations of abstract concepts such as justice, but they weren't represented in the everyday weave of our country's struggle to maintain Democracy.

They weren't at the Korean War Memorial.



They weren't at the Vietnam Memorial, either.



Instead, their names faded into the background with the other 55,000 who had given their lives during the Vietnam war. I thought about that as I stood watching people approach that wall to get a penciled relief of a loved one's name. I thought about that absence as I looked at flowers and other offerings left at the memorial. I wondered why it was so difficult to place women equally in a park dedicated to democracy and its history.



I wondered, where will my granddaughters leave their roses when I'm gone?



Gender politics within democracy was a silent war, an everyday battle, a conflict with innumerable casualties we forget to count. And as I walked the nation's capitol wearing a t-shirt that caused people to whisper and stare - or even point - I wondered what was so frightening, so unmentionable, about that word on my t-shirt, on my body. Of my body.

At the end of the day, I found myself standing on the Supreme Court steps. The weather had caused most tourists to return to their hotels, or to seek solace in restaurants. I recited a poem on those steps, with only my friends and a lone security guard as an audience. And even as I claimed my Constitutional right, even as I held firm to the First Amendment, I still felt like an interloper, a tourist, someone who wandered in and would wander out. I smiled anyway. No need for quiet respect, please.



As for the workshop, I had an incredible experience. Poets from all over the world were there, packed into a room as we explored what it means to "write the body." I wore my t-shirt there and delivered a poem I first wrote for the Nebraska Writing Project about sound and poetry. We worked through what it means to perform or embody a poem, out loud, in our own voice. A woman from Pennsylvania performed her draft about being a lesbian in a macho town. Another woman from D.C. wrote about how being a mother has given her a whole new perspective about poop. A poet there to sell chapbooks to help her best friend pay for gender reassignment surgery asked me if she could buy a Vagina t-shirt. We exchanged contact information. Before our session broke, I offered to create an anthology of our drafts if everyone would share email addresses with me. The idea was received with great enthusiasm. Before our session ended, I asked everyone if they would pose for a photo. After a lot of wiggling and giggling, I stood atop a desk in the Thurgood Marshall Center and took a photo, capturing a history, hoping for our futures.

PRESSED: A Revision

In my Nebraska kitchen, feet on cold vinyl,
slopping whiskey in my late night coffee cup
makes me think of balance,
Zen medication charred oak casks,
a Kentucky koan, bourbon Buddha
sort of question, about my original face
before my mother and father were born.

Yin and yang coffee cream swirl blossoms,
Oneness, a fluid still eye of Emptiness staring at me,
cup handle eyebrow raised
as if waiting for an answer.
Insomniac’s inquiry, burning sepia anointing oils
and incensed by my own nerve to write …

Midnight, my writer's church, rises
from my prairie thoughts, the flatlands
of all those bad decisions that led me
from the lush Northwest to barren February
fields that winter of '92.
It was a hard winter, brimming with bruises
and hunger, with nothing much in my larder.

Leaving him was like uprooting a tree -
you never know how deep the roots go
until you pull. But I settled here,
in this place of grassland and humidity,
cecada chirp and unrelenting winter chill.
I stayed, I rooted
for a sense of home, belonging.

Standing in my Nebraska kitchen,
looking at a stack of books and papers,
feeling the burn of whiskey
and a little ghostly shame,
I realize I pioneered backwards,
heading East instead of West,
a traverse of reversed ruts
leading home.

Unbalanced, without lotus truth floating
in my reflection, no Right or Noble Path -
just this burning sense warming my palm
as I raise a potter’s cup to my lips.
I’d better come up with something,
let the words sing in their Tibetan bowls

or at very least embrace October’s chilling blade wind
slicing through the window screen, the impatient
tapping as moths seek sanctuary at the sill,
the heartbeat of symphonic humming
as crickets rub their violin legs –
and dark roast night rolls over my tongue.

Sipping, warmed, I decide my original face
was paper white. Unwritten.
And my midnight church the only home I need.

NeWP Winter Writing Marathon: Walking Into Words

(PHOTO: E.F.R.'s inquiry notebook)

Foot recovery is going well. I'm mobile (always a plus), and I'm doing all the rubber band exercises I was told to do. It looks like I'll be making a serious attempt at climbing by mid February. In the meanwhile, I'm intensifying my workouts. Just this afternoon I bought a serious pair of walking shoes with all the geriatric support a woman recovering from an injury would need. They ain't pretty, these shoes, but they keep my foot in the right position and that's all that matters. Not quite orthopedic; not designed to make my butt better; these Avia walkers are the Volvo of shoes: "Boxy but good."

As part of my recovery, I joined Nebraska Writing Project veterans for the 2010 Winter Writing Marathon on Jan. 23. Each season, the NeWP hosts one of these writing/walking events that encourages writers to claim spaces/places, write for awhile, then move on to another place/space. There were just under thirty participants this winter - a marathon record - and we began our journey at the Sheldon Art Museum on the UNL campus. For me, one who has been forced to rethink physicality while waiting to heal, who has been craving climbing the way some crave recreational drugs, it was a magic day. Not only did I write, I walked!

After dividing our large group into five smaller ones, we hit the streets of Lincoln. The day was balmy for January, though the sunny sky gave way to the gray of winter just as we set out. My group stopped first at The Coffee House for a cup of joe at our first forty-five minute writing session. We sipped coffee and wrote, then before heading off to our next destination we shared our writing. NeWP marathon participants are asked to simply say, "Thank you" after another writer shares a draft. It's an intimate way to get over the fear of writing and sharing your work. I think this is why I like these marathon opportunities so much. And I must admit, it just felt damn good to be out walking in a pair of real shoes, even as the tendons in my foot and ankle ached. Recovery that involves writing is the best kind, I think. My first poem of the day:

(PHOTO: "Torn Notebook" by Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen, 1996)


ANTIQUITY

The bones don’t carry the load
and my curves are wider than they used to be.

The hairpins are now straight-aways,
the pert mountains have eroded to drifting

foothills – or what could be foothills if
gravity proves as constant as Newton claimed.

Such is the topography of middle age. I can’t
decide if my body’s failing me or coming into

its own, like the Roman Coliseum or the
Greek Parthenon. Sometimes, it seems

my mind leans like that Tower Pisa –
an architectural wonder, true, but

not where you’d want to set up shop.
I don’t know why I am so surprised

to learn I could not stave the evidence
of time, that my doctor would say, “mammogram”

and mean it every year, that my old bones
wouldn’t bear the weight of my young ideas.

But I am. I look for time the way
I look for my car keys – late –

with someplace to go, wondering
what else I’ve lost, forgotten.


(PHOTO: "Fallen Dreamer" by Tom Otterness)

From the CoHo, we moved on to try to get into the Tugboat Gallery, one of the many studios occupying the floor above Novel Idea Bookstore and Gomez Art Supply on 14th street. Unfortunately, the gallery was closed. So my group hung out in the commons area among the studios, listening to artists work on projects as we worked on our own. In that forty-five minute burst, I created a poem best described as an "ambitious mistake" (a designation that goes to most of my errors).

We then moved on to the Great Plains Art Museum - an architectural monument to honor the color beige. The bran interior leaves one wondering if the interior designer was colorblind. Sitting there for half an hour, I wrote this poem:

MUSEUM

Ivory, beige, taupe, wheat, shell – so much
Sensibility in this textile interpretative Plains dance.

I wish there was some amber, perhaps
the brilliant blue of April sky, maybe

the swaying red of seductive summer sunsets.
Is this a Cornflake museum in sensible shoes,

an architectural ode to utility?
This is not the Nebraska I know.

It’s not the palette of my colorful life ripe
with artists, poets, writers, and musicians.

My wagon ruts lead to smoky jazz
underground poetry potlucks

and the burnt umber of my poor choices –
But the mural of my great plains,

the tapestry life led to settle,
isn’t hung in this burlap place.


At the end of the marathon, all the participants gathered at Misty's to eat dinner together and hold a public reading of their favorite writings from the day. If you've never done a writing marathon, I highly recommend trying one the next time you're out in rock country or chillin' in your favorite town. Sitting around, taking in the sights of everyday life can focus one's writer eyes, make small things grand, important.

After dinner and goodbyes, I headed to Indigo Bridge Books in The Creamery Building at Lincoln's Haymarket - my new favorite place to hang out. Not only is this place an independent bookstore, it's got a fantastic and cozy coffee shop inside. I bought the one Kerouac book I didn't own, sat down with a cup of coffee, and enjoyed the night sounds of my writing life even as my foot ached from a long day of walking into words.



(Originally posted on Rheterica, this entry is part of my course portfolio).

NEIGHBORING PROGRESS

(PHOTO: The view west from the courtyard of my apartment complex)

I’ve been thinking about my neighborhood, its scars and potential. For the last several weeks, I’ve been walking from my apartment to my office on campus. As I've walked, I’ve noticed just how much “progress” has changed our landscape. The construction and its possessive nature, the ways in which a company can come in and fence us out of our own neighborhood, has been difficult to ignore. The harsh colors of warnings, from the “road work ahead” to the “Danger: Hardhat Area” signs have become prolific and traffic cones seem to emerge from the asphalt with the same tenacity as dandelions in a front lawn.

The Antelope Valley Project is a huge infrastructural undertaking by the City of Lincoln. Though I can see the merits of the project, including lawmakers’ goals and ambitions sought on behalf of the citizenry, all that recognition requires a “future vision” that blinds many of the present. Construction on the project displaced many of my neighbors. Though they were “paid well” for their homes according to a Lincoln Journal Star story, this compensation has done little for those of us still calling the neighborhood home.

Debris, machines, and chain-link borders have begun to seem like permanent landmarks in my neighborhood. Walking to campus in the morning, the din of construction and the snarling commute traffic are an assault to one’s ears. At night, with so much of the landscape darkened after the loss of so many streetlamps, my neighborhood takes on a post-appocolyptic movie set aesthetic.


(PHOTO: The parking garage project at Antelope Valley Road and Vine streets, yet another UNL construction project)


(PHOTO: UNL parking garage project site at Antelope Valley Road and Vine streets)


(PHOTO: Antelope Valley Project, on the south side of Vine across from the UNL garage project)


(PHOTO: Just beyond the project sign, a vast darkness unfolds)

It now feels dangerous to walk home alone, something I didn’t feel before developers tore up so much of my neighborhood. Building on this sense of loss and displacement, UNL began work on the Whittier School just beside my apartment complex. For months now, the sounds and sights of a large-scale remodeling project that includes a geo-thermal power experiment beneath its eventual parking lot have been my neighbor.


(PHOTO: Traffic blurs by on the 21st block of Vine)

Again, the progress is promising, but the present is rather depressing. Residents of my student-housing complex lost their playground early in the project, so families with children have lost their place to take their children in the afternoons. We also, in the name of “good drainage” lost a beloved, 30 year-old crabapple tree that once stood in our courtyard. Between our buildings is a sea of cement, void of any vegetation or life.


(PHOTO: The courtyard between the two family housing units, where our tree used to be).


We will never again see its bold pink flowers from our balcony. Every spring for five years, my daughters and I could look out our third-floor sliding door and see nothing but blossoms. It was beautiful, and we loved all the color it brought into our whitewashed apartment, with its industrial carpeting and blank walls. This summer, we endured the blinding glare of lime and the radiant heat of concrete. Many nights, as we sat down for dinner, we expressed how much we missed that tree.

Each nice day we’ve had since “phase two” of the project began, opening the windows and doors for “fresh air” brought far much more than we wanted. The noise, the smell of tar and diesel, wafted through the windows as did the silt of progress as bulldozers moved earth all day. I’ve spent far too much of my time trying to keep up with the dust that has settled on everything in my apartment. Even with the windows closed now, as November chill settles across the land, the dust works its way indoors.


(PHOTO: The Whittier Project at night, as seen from the sidewalk at 22nd and Vine streets)

Everywhere I walk, the city and the university are working on infrastructural improvements, from the new physics building at 16th and W, to the new traditional student housing on 17th and R, to the valley project at 18th and Vine, to the Whittier project at 22nd and Vine – all is under construction.


(PHOTO: Traffic blurs by at 22nd and Vine streets)

I sometimes feel lost in a sea of concrete, dirt, and rubble. The road slicing through our neighborhood, the Antelope Valley Highway, is designed to make getting from the industrial north side of town to the suburban and comfortable south side of town easier. It’s a project designed to support economic development to the north, and neighborhood developments to the south. It’s clear, having lived in this mess for the last three years, that it’s not a project for this neighborhood.

There are no plans to construct a grocery store or support local businesses. Even the MoPac bike trail goes over 27th street, my neighborhood’s business district. Whenever I see the bridge, though I’m a cyclist myself, I think of Robert Frost and a line from one of his poems: “The only way over is through.”

As the city works to bridge its industrial north with its residential south, I wonder what will become of those who live between these two goals, the rabble of low-income residents I call neighbors and friends. What will become of this section of town, long after north and south residents have been given the path over it instead of the invitation to travel through it?

What will residents be shielded from seeing, from accepting? How will my homeowner neighbors feel years from now, when the highway hum of those traveling to more privileged places is constant, and unyielding traffic of thought?

Walking as I did last night, I noticed one sign tossed down at the end of the construction fence bordering my apartment complex parking lot. Some signs have been around so long, you don't even have to read them. The reality is obvious without a sign - the signified meaning unfolds "always already" under construction.



Even so, as overwhelmed as my neighborhood seems to be, others are paying quiet costs. The Matt Talbot Kitchen, has been turned into an island among the construction path. The kitchen served 105, 702 meals in 2008 to near-homeless and homeless clients, and is a crucial support center for those seeking outreach. Before “Phase II” of the construction began, MTK clientele could get to the kitchen easily. Today, spray-painted signs point the way to the center in what could be an imperiled path now that the light of day ends before supper.

I'm not sure what I'd want to tell city officials or university planners. They knew they would disrupt the neighborhood and environment. Homeowners, which represent a minority of those affected by the project when compared to renters, were paid well. But those of us lacking such privilege must live here, among this debris, and somehow call it home.

PRESSED

Slopping whiskey in my midnight coffee cup
makes me think of balance,
Zen medication charred oak casks,
a Kentucky koan, bourbon Buddha
sort of question, about my original face
before my mother and father were born.

Yin and yang coffee cream swirl blossoms,
Oneness, a fluid still eye of Emptiness staring at me,
cup handle eyebrow raised
as if waiting for an answer.
Insomniac’s inquiry, burning midnight anointing oils
and incensed by my own nerve to write …

I’ve got nothing. No lotus truth floating
in my reflection, no Right or Noble Path -
just this burning sense warming my palm
as I raise a potter’s cup to my lips.
I’d better come up with something,
let the words sing in their Tibetan bowls

or at very least embrace October’s chilling blade wind
slicing through the window screen, the impatient
tapping as moths seek sanctuary at the sill,
the heartbeat of symphonic humming
as crickets rub their violin legs –
and dark roast night rolls over my tongue.

Sipping, warmed, I decide my original face
was paper white. Unwritten.

POSTAGE PAID

(PHOTO: My feet at the corner across from City Light Books, Columbus Avenue, San Francisco)


As Kenny Rogers once sang, "You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, and know when to run."

I didn't. And now, as penalty for both my optimism and confidence, I have a personal profile on eHarmony.

I never thought I'd sink this low, get so far into personal debt that I'd hock just about anything, including my pride, to make things right. Two months ago, I agreed to a wager with my best girlfriend. I had just mailed a confessional love letter to my best male friend I've ever had and was confident he would respond in some way.

"Even if he doesn't return my affection," I said boldly, "he'll be willing to work to keep our friendship."

My friend snorted.

"No, really," I said, stirring sweetener into my coffee, "he'll understand. I just needed to be honest. I felt as if I were lying all the time."

She rolled her eyes. Tabitha, after a rocky marriage and treacherous divorce, became a love cynic. She has been "Out There" - the mystical space fortysomethings call the dating "scene." I haven't. In fact, I've spent the last four years avoiding that place, with its singles bars and online services, learning all The Rules, only to discover He's Just Not That Into You. I've come to accept my personality as the most effective birth control I've ever used. I know my limitations. Even in casual conversations at the few parties I've attended, I've learned that as soon as a man asks me what I do, I'm off his radar. There's something about being a woman working on her Ph.D. that is off-putting to a single guy on the party prowl.

But my best friend Thomas (not his real name), he never wilted or feigned interest in my work. We talked about writing all the time, invested in each other's creative work, shared similar interests, and laughed at everything. There were a million reasons to be great friends, and over time those reasons made me think we could be more. While he was working out of state, I sat down and wrote him a letter.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have.

Despite the miraculous nature of parcel post, how one can spend less than fifty cents to send a letter anywhere in the continental United States, it seems my Marge Simpson stamp was nothing more than the ticket price of interpersonal disaster. As I sat in front of the main branch in Lincoln, Nebraska, holding my letter in my hands and trying to will myself outside of my car, I knew that as soon as I dropped my letter into the mailbox marked "Out of Town," my life would be changed. It was raining, as I recall, the sort of light misting that rolls in late at night during the last hurrah of summer.

I traced his address with my finger, picturing the land between Nebraska and Nevada, the prairies and deserts, the mountain passes of Wyoming and the expanse of the Salt Lake in Utah. I had driven I-80 between Lincoln and Sacramento many times to visit my mother. I could picture the blue Sinclair flame towering above the refinery at Sinclair, Wyoming. I could see the enormous Chevron truck stop in Salt Lake, where my kids and I once stopped to eat and how we felt that meal all the way to Elko, Nevada. I thought of the Salt Flats, that enormous expanse of white and all the messages we saw carved in the salt along the interstate. We had stopped then, at an enormous metal tree sculpture, just to carve into the sandy salt with our heels, the proof we had been there.

But mostly, I thought of Lake Tahoe, where he was working that summer. It's a beautiful, blooming glacier lake tucked in the Sierra Nevada mountains. While growing up, I had spent many lazy days there, sunning in summer or sledding in winter, usually with my dad. My best friend was living and working in the places I remembered best. Ghosts of who I was were there, where he was becoming who he is.

As mist clouded the windshield, I mustered up the courage to send the letter. Eventually, and with the sort of breath-holding one does before jumping into a swimming pool, I jumped out of my car and ran to the office doors. They opened with a mechanical "whoosh," and I slipped into the tiled vestibule. Without pause, I tossed the letter into the slot and ran back to my car. Driving home, I turned on the radio for company. The song that played, Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle," made me want to cry. I had just sent a message of both confession and solution, knowing deep down he didn't return my romantic affection, but hoping for the possibility I was wrong.

I wasn't.

It's been two months since I sent that letter across the country. I've had many long hours in Lincoln, questioning my decision, wondering how I had become so foolishly romantic, and grieving the loss of my best friend. He was my most supportive writing ally, and I often gave him my essays to read and consider before turning them in for class or publication. It's been difficult for me to work without him, to press on without feeling the loss. Tabitha, though a great friend, doesn't much care for workshopping and the like. She's not a writer. She's also not one to forget anything.

Sitting over cups of French breakfast tea at our favorite cafe, she reminded me of our bet.

"It's time for you to let go, kid," she said, then took a bite of her scone. Chewing and talking - she's the ultimate multitasker - she listed all the reasons she would hold me to that bet. I had been so confident in my assessment of Thomas, that I had stood by him even as Tabitha insisted he'd let me down. I quickly replayed our conversation in August, the one we had the day after I had mailed that letter.

"You'll see," I had said, "and when you lose this bet, you will have to go to the 'Single and Forty with Jesus' class at Berean."

She laughed, nearly choking on her coffee at the time. Tabitha hadn't gone back to her church since her divorce.

"Well, Missy," she had said, "When he puts his head in the sand and leaves you hanging, you're going to get online and dating."

"Fine."

"Deal."

I should have folded right then.

Months later, as I sat in a cafe with Tabitha, knowing the silence I had received in response to my letter had spoken volumes, she had called my bluff.

"You darling," she said with a grin, "are going to get on eHarmony for one month. I'll pay for it. But you're getting on there just to get your feet wet. There are other fish in the sea, you know."

I shook my head. Not one to welch on a bet, I sat with her as she pulled her laptop from her bag. While she created the account and asked me all the survey questions, I sat there feeling the fool all over again. But part of me wondered if the online experiment would help me, in some small way, to rethink my relationship with Thomas. I wondered, too, if I'd get any matches at all. Though I didn't want to be online, I also didn't want another silence. I didn't think I could handle more rejection, this time, of my superficial yet allegedly earnest, digital representation of Self. Just in case you're happily married and don't know: The dating world is a special hell in our Internet culture.

It's been just two weeks since that day, and Tabitha is quite proud of herself. I've received ten matches a day, mostly from men in Omaha who are over fifty. Despite my survey answers indicating that education and reading were very important to me, all of my matches have been men who confess to reading "less than 2 books each year" and like hunting, fishing, and/or football. I have only responded to one inquiry, from a man named Jason. After a few brief exchanges, I learned he was divorced, angry, and certain all women were scandalously unfamiliar with the role God has in mind for them.

I've learned, too, that there are many men lurking online who just want sexual gratification, who aren't, despite eHarmony's advertising about soul mates and marriage, there to find either. So losing a bet has meant winning a view of Internet dating that is downright depressing. Even Tabitha is on the verge of admitting her plan is flawed, even as she swaggers with pride at her ingenious victory, at knowing my best friend better than I did. Tabitha, bless her, is a tad bit competitive.

"You just have to get 'Out There'" she said yesterday.

I chuckled. Thinking of the virtual spaces I've occupied of late, and all the social complexities I've witnessed on my computer screen, I grinned.

"Out where, exactly?" I asked. "The Internet is a non-space, Tabs. There's nothing 'Out There' I haven't seen right here, in the real world."

"Whatever, Books," she said. She's always called me that. "The point is, you're not alone. Everyone who's single is as miserable as you are. There's nothing all that special about your grief."

"Screw you."

"Books, seriously. You're not the first to get rejected. You're not the first to discover the man you cared for didn't care back. Get over it, get over yourself. I say this with love, you know. It's time."

I thought about Thomas and how he has returned to his beloved Rocky Mountain home. I knew she was right. It is time.

And I'm now "Out There." I just wish I knew where "there" was.

PRESERVATION

Image: Australia Post advertisement



Friday afternoon, I was a featured writer in the No Name Reading Series. It was a great gig, full of fantastic people I know from the English department and the "outside world." Some of my climbing friends came. Another climber, Steph, sent me flowers because she had to miss the reading. It's not often a writer gets to feel such immediate support, to sense the audience reaction to her or his work, to know that a piece is doing its job because the emotional climate of the room changes. This is why I like to read in public spaces. Doing that exposed, intimidating work helps me to get a better sense of my own writing voice. Standing there, the single object in a warm wash of light, reading from your own mouth the words that spring from the heart and mind, I was reminded again about the art of writing, how performance encourages full embodiment of the text. Writing, when reading it aloud to friends and strangers, seems all the more beautiful through the connections between readers and listeners.

I had a great afternoon. I met friends for dinner afterwards, sat around with beers and jokes, talked shop and nonsense. Then other friends arrived, like the political operative Christopher, who was on the now infamous Nebraska Second District campaign for Barack Obama. He's heading off to VIrginia now, to work a campaign just heating up there. So he stopped in with some of his politicos to say farewell and enjoy the dollar Empyrean pints - the new Saturday night special at The Watering Hole. Sitting at the table, I noted that I had somehow found myself surrounded by indie hipster-esque yippy-ish movers and shakers. There was a political party powerhouse at the head of the table, a deputy county attorney, an established photojournalist, an animal rights activist, three poets, three educators, a political operative, and a field director sitting there, talking shop, world politics, and writing. There was a lot of discussion about President Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize and rhetoric, as in, the mastery of the art of language.

I was sitting there, a hybrid poet/journalist/writer, wondering the exact moment my group of friends and acquaintances had become so ... impressive. I felt a long way from the welfare line, the army housewives, and all those trailer park neighbors I had known so well years ago. I recalled Donna, a woman from New Jersey's upper-middle class, who married an Army Specialist. She had a collection of sweaters Linda Richman of Saturday Night Live's "Coffee Talk," would have envied. I remembered Connie and Jimmy, a nice elderly couple who took me and my kids into their hearts at a time when we really needed familial love. We shared holidays, trips to church, Sunday night dinners - a lot of "normal" stuff at the height of my former husband's cruelty. These were people who I snuck into our lives while he was at work, when he couldn't watch or hear us, or keep us from connecting to other people.

In just four years, I've gone from the isolated role of housewife student to this rather strange but sustaining existence, one built on a foundation of writing and erudition, and a love of good beer. Education took me to places I'd never thought I'd occupy, like my permanent table at the library, Paris, the fossil beds of Ashland, Nebraska, UC Berkeley and Boulder, Colorado. I have guest-lectured and given conference papers. I've stood on stages in coffee shops and bars, read or performed my work, and occupied spaces of exposed defiance I would never have thought possible just ten years ago.

Sipping beer and listening to great conversations, I wondered how my writing life went from newsletters I mailed home to friends and family, to national publication. I thought about the awards I've won, the accolades, and how both seem so surreal. Just this week I sat on the other end of the journalistic relationship with a reporter who was interviewing me, pressing me for explanations about the "writing scene" and what it's like to be an "up and coming writer." Me? Up and coming?

Writing is many things to many people, but in my world, writing is what I do to keep breathing. I am often overwhelmed by the visions of everyday life, all those details, like the color of a woman's handbag as she rushes to greet her beau, or the stern, furrowed brow of a man reading the paper in my favorite coffee shop. The smallest of details can slip into my cerebral rooms and rearrange all of my mental furniture. As a kid, I found this overwhelming. As an adult, I find this the well from which I draw all of my writing life.

Like the above image from the Australia Post - what an interesting use of text and people. Writing is at once intimate and distant, when folded and slipped into an envelope, sealed and stamped, then sent away. In our digital culture, most don't take the sort of time it requires to sit down, write out a dispatch, and then send it out into the world. Email is both tedious and necessary, but as much as it glows with immediacy on the screens of our computers, it can't quite assert the same sort of presence the written word on paper can. Which is why, I suppose, I've always preferred to write real letters over clacking out emails.

But I'm often disappointed. Few return the gesture - especially when they know they're writing to a writer, or worse, a teacher of writing. So my letters become something other than reflexive conversation. I think they become mental snapshots of my life I send to others, like paper blogs. I'm coming to terms with that, learning to accept that few share my enthusiasm for writing even when that writing could be both communication and a mapping of a relationship's history.

Sitting with my friends, drinking beer and laughing at bad jokes, I still wondered what kind of "personal papers" people like me would be leaving behind for others to study should we become the sort of academic or writer that would warrant such inquiry. More importantly, how will others come to study the everyday lives of a people, as one of my colleagues has done by going to Ireland to see the papers, diaries, and letters left behind by Irish working class women? How will our people archive our lives, the histories, experiences, and correspondence? How will we track our progression as people, writers, and thinkers, when so much of our relating happens in the "non place" of digital communication? I suppose blogging is one way to leave a paperless trail, assuming Blogger will be around when I'm gone (after a rich, long life).

My head was full of these ponderings a I sat at our favorite bar, the carcasses of hot wings and the pitcher corpses drained empty littering our table. I wasn't melancholy, just introspective. So I had a friend snap some photos, and then bid my farewells far earlier in the night than most expect me to - a stunning ten o'clock. I then took my camera and walked to my favorite downtown coffee house. Across the street is a vintage dress shop, and its windows were dressed for Halloween. Beneath the neon glow of "Ruby Begonias" costumes hung against the glass, hovering above a row of brightly colored wigs. A mannequin stood boldly, modeling haute cuture of another time. I took a few photos before heading into the red-walled coffee shop, still carrying the vase of Steph's flowers. I ordered a cup of French roast, sat down with my leather bound notebook, and wrote until my mind quieted.



At midnight, I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. Leaning against a brick wall, I watched women and men pass by in the night, some dressed up in shiny clothes - the kind one wears when trying to impress. Others shuffled past in hoodies and baggy pants, talkin' loud and tough. There was laughter and music and booze on the breeze as I stood, quietly watching the night lives people lead, the costumes of midnight revelry as they ease their way, lubricated by stiff drinks and a lax few hours. Metropolitan habitat, the natives in the pocket of urban life tucked into a suburban sea, neon flowers float on night visions, burn behind closed eyes, as music pulses and tickles the ear, and faint laughter rises above brick and concrete manmade joys, echoes in the alleys, before racing to greet me at the corner beneath a blinking "Don't Walk" sign.

I couldn't decide if it all was a symphony of loneliness or a bounty of life teeming, bustling, a show just for me. A dark-eyed young hipster, her hair bobbed in sharp angles, her sweater dress short and her boots long, stopped to bum a cigarette. I handed it over, expecting her to walk away. Instead, she leaned into the wall, lit her smoke, and blew a big, restless cloud of smoke into the night.

"It's crazy tonight," she said. "I had to step out of there - just too much vibe. You?"

"I'm just taking a break from writing before going home."

"Cool man," she said, pulling a drag as the amber at the end of her cigarette flared. After a pause, as she picked at her teeth with her thumb. "I should write more," she said.

"Yeah, you should," I agreed.

One of her friends called to her, so she quickly tossed the cigarette, stamped it with the heel of her thigh-high boot and shambled off.

I thought of Kerouac beneath the neon light of Times Square, chasing down Bop beats and jazz improvisations, trying to capture the sound of night and the blow of music he would put into words. I'm teaching Kerouac now - next week marks the beginning of my students' exploration of postwar literature from writers like Timothy Leary, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. We just finished with Anne Frank's diary, and Art Speigelman's "Maus I." We're exploring "writing communities" from different angles and genres, while creating a community of our own. Someday, I'd like to teach a night class from ten to midnight, where we meet in the belly of a coffee house, then wander the streets to see what we can see. I thought of that as I put my cigarette butt in the ashtray outside, grabbed my bag and headed to my car. I thought about all the lives unfolding in that moment, under the neon lights in their favorite bars, and wondered what they were thinking.



As Kerouac himself said, "I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."


That's the trouble with the writing life: It's a night that never sleeps. It's full of ghosts, shades of those who have gone before, all of those you love, even those who don't love you back, people you'll never really know, and lives clashing and bouncing up and down the scale, like a bop riff in a smoky club, a wailing into darkness.

And man, do I love that sound.