National Poetry Month

In case you haven't been aware for the last five days, today is the sixth day of national poetry month.  I have to say, I like a fair amount of poetry and I hate it when people claim to dislike it categorically .  To me, that's like saying you hate all vegetables when you've only ever had peas and carrots.  There is Swiss chard, broccoli and many a variety of pepper, ya know?  There are ee cummings, Ben Lerner, and Matthea Harvey (in case you hated Shelley, Chaucer, and Shakespeare in high school.)  I like poetry because of, well, the poetic license.  You don't have to describe something like you would for a detective's report or a scientists observation.  A good metaphor is a beautiful lie or even an ugly one that tells more Truth than the truth, and I like that.  I'm blunt and I'm a Virgo, but that doesn't mean I'm always such a literal motherfella every moment of the day.  Poetry is unshackled and unshackling. 

Some of my favorite kind  poetry has rhythm and often assonance but not rhyme, which is pretty common in slam poetry, so for today I'm posting one of my all time favorite slams, performed by two women speaking as the internal and outward voices of a trans man, often in perfect unison.  Incidentally, if you've ever tried to perfect a vocalization like that, you can appreciate the unbelievable amount of work that went into this perforance, to say nothing of the unbelievable emotional rawness of it. 



I used to get great praise from teachers for my poetry; now I'm out of the habit and I feel like I'm writing complete shit.  But, I am writing again, precisely because it's National Poetry Month, which lots of Twitterers have turned into national poetry *writing* month.  I'm a lot more prepared to commit to a poem a day than I was to commit to writing a 50,000 word novel in November for National Novel Writing Month and I think the practice of writing whether I feel "inspired" or not is an excellent one.  Creativity is a discipline which requires regular practice like anything else and I don't really care that I'm writing shit.  It feels like turning water on in a summer home; it comes out it nasty rusty spurts until it gets flowing again.  There's no other way to get it flowing than to just do it.  Perhaps some of you will participate, or interact with others on Twitter tracking their month with the #NaPoWriMo hashtag.

Cheers, and happy reading, writing and watching
Xoxo
Pistol

My First Person Arts Story Slam

Embedded here is the story I told at a First Person Arts story slam.  I had a LOT of fun doing it and it made me want to start writing fictional short stories based on my (ridiculous) life.  Since I've been blogging here as much as possible and trying to generally organize my life post leaving Penn I haven't done that, but I definitely hope to at least tell a story at another slam sometime soon.  In the meantime, I've actually started interning at First Person and I'm absolutely loving it.  More on that later.  For now, I leave you with my wonky ass story:

(Also, check out the story by Chase on the same night.  She was the audience favorite and had me in tears I was laughing so hard.)

How to divorce a concept

1) The beginning is to ask why. This often may not occur to you to do in the face of conventional wisdom, a boss, a parent, etc. For example, you suggest a new idea like going back to school, changing careers, adopting a dog, adopting a child, adopting a new political party, spiritual belief or religion. This is then countered with "but you have to," or "but you can't..." And then fill in the blank. You have to: have insurance, give two weeks notice , get married, see the dentist every six months, eat your vegetables. You can't: just up and change like that, upset your father, be a starving artist, live on rice and beans.

Now here's the hard part: ask why It usually doesn't even occur to us to question thing so ingrained as the need to steadfastly pursue a steady income and health insurance, at least if you come from white, middle class parents like mine who believe it is your first and foremost concern to have a job with a steady income and insurance. I'm lucky to be queer, to have friends that up and change their sex and/or their gender, lucky to know a whole bunch or radicals and hippies and freaks who meditate, sculpt, pray to God, pray to Kali, pray to the moon, or maybe don't pray at all. For me, I'm surrounded by questioners and asking why has become as strong a reflex in me as offering the ingrained rules is for the people who do it all the time.

Advanced technique: ask why without having an answer yourself. For example, I've already figured out how to counter why I should need insurance and can quickly rattle off "why should I worry? I'm healthy, vegan, I exercise, and haven't needed medicine in years. If I get cancer I'll go bankrupt curing it and then start over or I'll die. Who gives a shit?" The harder and scarier thing is just to ask "why" even if you don't even if you don't have any answers yet. If you're really and truly lucky, you might get possible answers to this questions, arguments for both or many sides, and a chance to explore the possibilities. More likely you'll get some more conventional wisdom, platitudes, cliches, and some shit your great grandmother thought made sense in 1911. Remember, the person doing the offering isn't malicious. Then again, even if well intentioned they may well be shit and an obstacle in your path who needs to get out of the way or learn to support you, even if they don't understand you.

2) If you ask why and don't get a good answer, divorce yourself from the idea.

Advanced technique: get a divorce yourself from the entire system on which that idea is based. For example, some transgendered people change their sex from male to female or vice versa and end there. Other trans folks, regardless of how they do or do not transition their sex, come to the realization that, regardless, sex and gender as binaries are false and do not exist as described in biology, psychology, or society at large. The second group are using the advanced technique, and teaching the rest of us something truly fabulous and wondrous and amazing.

Likewise, I've recently divorced myself from a steady pay check, but I'm ready to divorce myself from the entire concept of validation of achievement through discrete digital values including, but not limited to, the numbers on my pay check, grade point averages, scores on individual tests or other assignments, batting averages, job reviews expressed as a number, the number of pages I write per day, the number hours it takes me to memorize a scene by rote, or the number of blogs I post in a week.

One of the great hallmarks of the modern world is to quantify things. This is by no means a terrible thing all of the time. The percentage of my laptop battery that is charged is a valuable number that can help me plan my actions to best benefit my productivity. Believing I have achieved some adult rite of passage by earning a paycheck isn't valuable, at least to me. It is certainly not valuable to ask how many pages I wrote this week.

Do you know what I did do this week? I looked at an affirmation in the Artist's Way that seemed really silly, like a straight ream of New Age horseshit, and I wrote it down and I responded to it with every cynical and mean and unsupportive thing I had to say. Afterwards, I responded to my own cynicism with kindness and support that I didn't know I had in me to give to myself. And I just sobbed and let it out, and then went upstairs and painted a whole new affirmation on the wall so I would remember what was really important. So, does it matter if I wrote a paragraph or a page or an epic novel? No. It matters that I forget that men aren't supposed to cry and that I "should" be earning a living, or that I should be doing anything at all other than exactly what I was doing which in fact was amazing and transformation and healing. I stopped trying to do anything at all other than create and nurture the best possible me I could be and I had a real, honest human experience. You cannot quantify spiritual and emotional growth. The weather yes, the human experience, no. That's how I'm working the advanced technique (this week).

3) Be willing to be validated, rewarded, fulfilled, clothed, fed and brilliantly happy. On the surface this looks like a no-brainer, but it's not. Some people find it emotionally, spiritually and/or physically easier to stay where they are than to go someplace new, especially if it involves risk getting there. And let's face it, it takes risk to get anywhere interesting or rewarding. So yes, this seemingly obvious thing is actually an important step.

4) Be willing to be scared, look like shit, have no money, and fail. Let's get personal here. I asked why I should have to give two weeks notice to an emotionally abusive boss, so the last time she pulled her intimidating, immature, publicly humiliating bullshit I decided it was, in fact, the last time. I walked out, found another computer and worked from there, emailed her saying that abuse wasn't an option, and I wasn't coming back to the office until there was a solution. The next working day I called HR but they were already in the office and I got fired. I am willing to be scared, look like shit, have no money and fail. I'm not willing to be abused while I sit in a cubicle I hate, not making the art I would love to make, just so I can have insurance.

If your job is the only ill effect on your mental and/or physical health, then ditch the job and BAM, insurance problem solved. I know that's not an option for everyone, and sometimes you ask why you must keep a miserable job to have insurance and you get a very good answer like you have a congenital condition and will die without your prescription coverage. Asking why doesn't mean you'll always get an answer that changes everything, but if nothing changes then at least you have a reasonable explanation as to why, at least for now and maybe for always, things are the way the are, and not just "because I said so."

Now I have to be willing to be scared and possibly broke if my former employer contests my unemployment benefits. I have to look like shit. (I'm out of exfoliant and it doesn't seem like a reasonable purchase just at the moment.) I have to be willing to fail at an unemployed actor who is waiting to hear about his application to return to college. I have to be willing to fail to get in. I have to be willing to fail at getting a job serving, or even bussing tables. I have to be willing to fail at paying my rent and having to move to my parent's house, be homeless, squat an abandoned house or rely on the charity of friends or family. I have to be in an emotionally and possibly physically and financially precarious or even dangerous place. But this is divorce. It might end quietly and fairly in mediation; this might be the knock-down drag-out fight of my life. I have to be willing to get hurt and, if you're divorcing a concept, so do you.

5) Lather. Rinse. Repeat. What, you thought you were going to divorce yourself from one concept and establish a new one in its place and life would be honky dorey from then until you shuffled of this mortal coil? No, not likely. There's always something else to learn, some other bullshit to unlearn, and a whole lot of work to be done.

@weeklyblogpost - Grid

(Better late than never.)

I think about grids, about living on them, about living off them, and about the Taoist notion that there is no paradox.  (A copy of the Tao Te Ching would be handy here for a brief quote, but alas, I've given away every copy I've ever purchased.  I'm sure I should get another, if only to have it at the ready to pass on yet again.)  Here are the grids I'm thinking about: city streets, life plans, connectivity to electricity and water, and connection to western capitalist life in general.  I'll just stick with the first two for now lest I get especially long winded, but remind me, dear reader, to address the others at some later time.

Here's one of the primary things I love about cities: they are largely laid out as grids.  By orienting myself to a few major streets I can secondarily orient myself to the four major directions on a compass and, even with only a vague concept of where I'm going in relation to where I am, set off confidently in a direction.  If you told me to meet you at 23rd and Tasker I definitely would not have any concept of the specific distance from where I'm sitting right now but I could get there without pausing to consult a map. 

 If, on the other hand, you told me you were anywhere in Fishtown I would envision myself panicking at a series of five way intersections of streets that run with no particular regard for cardinal direction.  Even worse is being somewhere that order is typically expected and then removing it.  To wit, nothing freaks me out faster than Passyunk Ave; it runs through the grid and, if it at least did so on a 45 degree angle I could (maybe) handle it.  It doesn't and I can't.  

Life is invariably more complicated than traffic and road design, and I grew up in Jersey's circles and jughandles so that's saying something about life.  Unlike my walks through the city, I prefer my walk through life to be without such a rigid path.  To continue the city-walk-as-life metaphor this is what it would look like for me: meandering into random homes and buidlings to take in the architecture.  Taking up residence for a month or a year if there were people there with interesting things to teach me.  If buildings didn't look interesting enough to enter and the block seemed to walk around, I might scale them just for a lark.  Why not?

Anytime I've tried to live my life on a logical grid I get drawn off into some more interesting cu-de-sac or labryinth or wooded path instead.  Instead of trying to find a role model who could show me what it looked like to be an artist in a sustainible way, I tried my parent's theory on going to college to get a degree that paid.  The big compromise was going for bio/secondary ed so that I could have a job that allowed me three months off to write.  They weren't happy that I was going to enter such a low paying profession (never mind that my dad is a techer) but it was better than going for English or even Enlish/educations since science and math teachers were and probably are in higher demand.  

As a result I never finished school because I showed up to classes that I hated and I failed them.  I did, however, get consistently high grades in courses such as Contemporary Moral Issues, Art History of Southesat Asia, Global Women Writers and Women and Health:  Power Politics and Change.  I love learning for the sake of learning and I love the intersections I find in seeminly unrelated subjects.  I like looking at veganism through the lens of radical feminist theory and I the Tao Te Ching really helped me understand nutrition, politics, yoga and quantum physics.  I could get a degree where each class logically followed the next and the right series of degree(s), internships and certifications yielded a predictable and profitable career.  I'm glad that lots of people do.  I don't want to, and I've stopped trying.  First of all, none of the destinations seem all that appealing to me.  Secondly, as mentioned in my first post on transit, I think it's all in the journey anyway and that every destination is really just a pit stop, at least for me.  I'll keep on keeping on with my bumbling life path, looking for the transcendtal connection betwen baseball, the Bronte sisters and Panck's constant.

What I'm learning is to meld the two ways of being.  I am walking boldly forward without any idea as to where that will take me.  I will not stop to jusitfy working 16 hour days on film sets with a burrito for payment or tell you how the networking I do there will eventually get me paid.  I don't know how it will.  It might or might not.  I don't know and I don't care.  What I know is that I feel more alive when I'm around the energy of creation that at any other time.  I do not think that getting a degree in art history would be a waste of time if I passed up a steady museum job to be a yoga instructor and freelance photographer anyway.  Just because I'm smart enough to get a degree and use it doesn't mean I should.  I'm going places I love and that doesn't need to satisfy andybody's value system but my own.  I can be happy for you on the grid as long as you can be happy for me meadering through corn fields and meadows.