SURVEYLAND

"Why not get paid to give your opinion?"
"Why not get all your make-up, perfume and fancy toiletries for free?"
"Why not receive snacks in the mail, postage paid by the producer?"

Why not?

God knows, I always have an opinion.
I like to smell good, all the time.
I do snack...(smile)

I've sent my resume everywhere else in a hundred mile radius looking for employment.

Why not, indeed?

One week later, a hundred and five e-mails in my SPAM BOX every three minutes, twenty half-hour surveys that ultimately include a "Must Choose At Least Two Free Offers" on the final round of survey "questions" (all of which are for such scintillating products as male-enhancement pills, diabetic supplies, (I do NOT have diabetes!) or elderly power-chairs...) none of which I am even vaguely interested in; OR, half-hour surveys that finish with a final line informing one that, in order to get the "Free" product, for which you have spent the last half-hour taking the inane questionaire, you must now give your credit card info, to cover the "2.99 postage and handling", in order to receive the "free" reward.
You know the old saying, about getting screwed coming and going?  Well, this is an apt application.
I know.
I have been told numerous times, to beware anything that looks "too good to be true". I have also been informed that you can never get anything for nothing. However, my thoughts, my actions, my considerations, my life-span moments-- aren't they all worth something?

 Why should there be a "minus" after them? This survey business is a swift kick- in- the- teeth--as well as elsewhere.
Oh, yeah, and the "free products just to try"--I have only actually received offers that were totally free, twice. (And then, only the offers came--NOT the samples.) So much for that come-on.
Somewhere in cyberspace, there are probably a few surveys that actually are interested in customer feedback. They may actually offer something for your time. Probably. But, they aren't on FaceBook or on the side-ads that pop up every few minutes on-line; they aren't side-barring Yahoo nor Google nor Amazon.
I'm just saying: this fast-track to a wee bit of pocket cash came up empty.
Surveyor Beware.

If it weren't for my family--intense and unrelenting as they are--this writer would be scratching her notes in the mud, under a bridge, somewhere. (If it was in L.A., in the dust, on the pavement.)
   
   

THE HAPPIEST AGE

33. That's it. Then, it is all downhill. Previous to it, it is all uphill. So, I guess The Christ checked out at His happiest moment.
Brrrrrr.

Well, maybe Palm Sunday, the Passover dinner prep with friends, all that cheering...but still...33?

I don't remember 33, per se. I do remember lots of dates, a job, three thousand miles between me and my blood family, a semi-legal and usually driveable car, a community with need for my "talents" surrounding me, and holy land to live on...my own studio...publishing gigs, reading gigs and sobriety at its beginning...so, yeah, some parts of 33 were stable and hopeful and at the very least, quite sunny. However, I remember a lot of heart-aches, too. I remember AIDS becoming AIDS. I remember semi-closeted lives and bad drugs and bad hair and rich people with too much and poor people with nothing and a sense of swimming through jello--with just enough light to see that there was "something" on the other side...but not what. Not even sure I could get to the other side.

Now I am at 55. Experts say that I have a good chance of making it to a hundred. But, if 33, with all of its pitfalls, challenges and problems was the happiest I will ever be, who the hell wants to make it to 100?

I know, I know, perhaps "happiness" isn't the point. (It would be nice, however, to stop for a moment in this circus and just feel, just for a second, that "I am happy." To know it; own it, and then move on).

I am not alone. Most of the people in my close and extended life are going through idiotically huge challenges and tough times. Others cling to this "I am happy and positive and all is right in the world we only have to grasp at this..." I have never been able to grasp this. The Dark Side has always been walking next to me and knocking me in the head any time I turn around to sneak a peek.

I was so happy to hear the philosophy of owning our "Dark Self" and embracing and learning from it. Now I would like to get back in balance. While I don't want to have to attend Up with People parades and "I Am Fine and You are Okay" lectures, I am ready for The Lighter Side. I am ready to stop the interior sobs and rejection and stalled life and to move on, out of the cold.

Looking around for what I should be writing about, I only see that struggle that everyone is attempting to weather. I only see the neon colors which others try to coat the horror with and pretend that it is 'no big deal'. I wish I honestly felt that we had several "33" high points in our lives--if only as rest stops. Places where, if we have to take on the next big challenges, we at least could pause and refresh and take in the coolness we've acquired.

For my friends who have "made it" and are, indeed, truly joyful, fun-filled, successful, employed, engaged, held dearly in the arms of a beloved--be it child or lover, who have found their bliss and are rewarded by a Universe congratulating them upon the discovery, though I sound like Scrooge, I am, honestly glad. I congratulate and applaud their rewarded efforts.

Really.

However, it doesn't make me feel better about my life. This ain't ever how I thought it would turn out to be. Not even close. I know it could be a helluva lot worse. I could be in a war zone; a cholera epidemic; an AIDS village in Africa. I could be dying in a gutter in an Indian city, with nobody around who gives a damn or knows my name. I could be a homeless teen in America. I am none of these. And I am aware.

I could and should remember the Zen ideal of righteous action and doing things not for their outcome, but for the sake of doing them well. Perfectly. Focused. One thing at a time. Sometimes I am also aware of this and internalize this and accomplish this. Sometimes I just sit. (Still, it ain't how I thought it would be) Not at 33.

So, once again, another Easter and Passover passing by. I hear, on one side, the terrible lamentations of some and the rising hurrahs of the others. Where do I fit? What am I suppose to analyze, write about, think about, care about? What would Jesus Christ say, about turning 33? Was it His happiest year on Earth ? I'd love to sit down and ask...


        

DIVING INTO MY WRECK

I have been processing the passing of Adrienne Rich.
I have been reading the tributes (flowery but too few outside the literary public...she was more than a brilliant American Feminist Poet...).
I have felt inadequate to raise my hand in memory; to add my story to the accolades already created.
Then, I remembered: we all have something to share that will be valuable far beyond where we place it. Perhaps in cyberspace. Perhaps in a comment passed on at a water cooler. Perhaps in a classroom of kids or adult students. Perhaps in a blog, read in the middle of a particularly tough night.

So, in honor of the fallen warrior-wordsmith, Adrienne Rich, I throw my memories into Space, and wish her Godspeed to the next Incarnation.

I first "met" Adrienne when someone at the Women's Center at Wells College pushed a collection of her poems into my hands. We were working on a wild weekend of arts workshops and wanted to make sure the poets were represented. It was the late 1970s, in upstate New York, outside of Ithaca. (Ithaca, land of Cornell and Ithaca College and the Ithaca Poets. Land where I had just landed--and would later come back as a published poet myself--but not yet. Not yet.) At this point, the idea was simply to saturate Wells College with "women's poetry".

At the time, Wells was an "all women's college"--founded by Henry Wells in the 1800s--the man most remembered for Wells Fargo's beginnings. Wells was where upper class women went to get an incredible education and to stay out of trouble, far from the City and close to Hobart, Cornell and other credible colleges filled with men. But things were changing in the 1970's. Even Wells' women were getting stirred up; liberated; a wee bit rowdy. Women's fairs featuring women's arts and crafts and demonstrations and speeches and performances were becoming der rigeur. We wanted to make sure poetry was on the menu.

Adrienne Rich's work blew my head apart. It wasn't just "women's poetry" with "women's issues" stated boldly and clearly and in plain womanspeak (as was a lot of stuff being published at that point). No, Adrienne Rich's work was complex. Using both modern forms and classic poetics, Adrienne Rich took the hidden lives of silent women and exploded them into academia in a way that couldn't be trivialized. Her work was raging and ranging and took me inside a world of words that had been closed to me. I could "join the boys' club" of poetry in a way that hitherto hadn't been allowed.

(Virginia Woolf wasn't a poet...)

Two years later, the love of my life, almost twenty years my senior and a full-fledged "adult", took me to Ms. Rich's summer reading close by. In a humid, dark room, filled to capacity, on a sweltering mid-week evening, fueled with wine and whatever else wafted by, the audience welcomed Ms. Rich as she took the stage.

Elfin, ageless, walking (even then) with a cane, she explained about her ongoing battle with arthritis, and made jokes about her feeble mobility. Her hair was short, straight, a little raggedy. Her face was sun burned and freckled, but devoid of make-up. She wore only black--but the kind of New York City black that stated: "I am someone worth paying attention to."
Even at the end of August, it seemed appropriate and cool.

Her words tore into me via her mellow voice. I, like most of the audience, was familiar with their impact in print, but this was the living word. This was Spirit. This was something fine and rare and that we would all grow hushed from and want to take home and consider, like a secret gift given by a more secret friend.

 I was high from Adrienne Rich and her performance.

My lover wasn't amused. In fact, suggested I get a ride home with the newly divorced husband of another poet-friend of ours. (I did. We shared a beer. A ride. Adrienne's work .It was enough.)
When I reflect back, it wasn't the heroism of any straight man daring to give a woman a ride home from Adrienne Rich's performance that is so remarkable. (He knew I wasn't a foaming-at-the-mouth radical...)What is remarkable is that he was as moved as I, by the work. He was soaring and wanting to extend the poetry-rush, too.

When I got home, my lover still wasn't amused.

Ironically, two months later, three thousand miles from anyone I had ever loved, I again met Adrienne Rich. This time I had fled upstate New York and was in LaLaLand, trying to prove to anyone still interested, that I WAS a writer; was a real-life artist (Not a poseur!); and that recording and interpreting this life was a worthwhile venture in the world. I was trying to survive on my own--without contacts; without "the System"; without the love of my life--who had decided that I couldn't share what I didn't possess. It was a tough landing.

Adrienne Rich had been invited to the L.A. Woman's Building. The international organization for women in the arts. I had been hired to organize their anniversary celebration and to "anonymously" (for grant reasons) edit their publication--"Spinning Off". As editor and organizer, I got to meet and greet Ms. Rich. She, of course, had a slew of contacts in L.A. and didn't need my wrangling. But we did get to have a short conversation in the space that passed as my office.

She was looking a bit more ragged at this point--the arthritis not doing anything to heal. She had to sit on the edge of a chair. She was still dressed in black--still using the cane--still devoid of make-up. But she had sunglasses and a new haircut. She was still ageless. I was more enamored than ever.

I couldn't tell her about the loss of my love. Or my runaway antics. Or wanting to prove my place and worth in the world, as a writer. But somehow, she read the pain in my eyes--along with the worship, I'm sure. She touched my arm and told me that things would get better. That I needed to write--no matter what. Needed to say the things I saw and felt. Needed an authentic life. Not to give up.

Then, the BigWigs of the Building (yes, even in those most Feminist of Times and Places, there was a hierarchy...)came and whisked her away for a dinner before the reading--a dinner I wasn't invited to. My friends arrived and we sat through the performance, me holding back sobs.

See, Adrienne Rich's words took me down into my own pain--even as she explored and explained her experiences. She brought me to the surface of my own wreck--made me swim away (for a while) and get an extended view, through the waves. She helped me salvage whatever could be taken from those days and use them to create new art. She gave me strength and breath when I couldn't breathe. Mostly, she reminded me of where I had come from. Of home.

Over the years, whenever I could, I would catch a reading or an interview or the newest book. I remember, too, the year one of my poet friends in Los Angeles was nominated for a Lambda Book Award in the same category as Rich. "Yeah, fat lot of chance any of us have against HER!" the poet muttered to me. But, it was said with love.

Of course.

Because, Adrienne Rich's work enabled all of us to keep on writing. About our lives.

May the angels receive you. May you have tea with Virginia and the other writers in that Heavenly
Cafe in the Sky.

Gracias.