Catalog

After 3 + years I've finally reached a point in writing this novel that I printed it out on paper.  It's like a return to paper in a way; I actually wrote all of it in cursive in notebooks and then typed it in, and then wrote some more on it in the laptop, excised a lot more, wrote more, revised, cut, reinvented, re-imagined, wrote more in notebooks, typed more in, revised, excised, capitulated, rethought...  

I started this thing June 2015 with a desire to write a visceral serial-killer kind of gig with a big old sense of humor and a messed up plot.  As I wrote and wrote, though, I found myself falling in love with the people I was having to kill, as well as the killer.  Because of that surprise discovery of love or whatever, I had to cut about half, about 200 pages of what I'd written.  I've stowed it away to work on maybe later, but what was left was the spine of what I printed out yesterday.  I found out I wanted exposition, I wanted intimacy and oddness and I wanted to find out why I want to write while I was writing.  

I guess this is why:  to stumble upon a voice I hear all the time and yet never gets spoken, to be able to carefully mic that voice and record it and then carefully transcribe it and find a structure for it to live in.  Or in literary terms:  a plot that will carry the voice out of itself, into realms of wonder and creepiness and exultation and yes love.  That's what I think I've done here, but it ain't finished yet.

It's currently 227 meticulously edited pages.  I think it was F. Scott who said or wrote, "Write drunk, edit sober," and that's kind of it in a nutshell.  I was open and flagrant and overt and flowery and grabbing at everything while writing in cursive in my notebooks, and then I'd set that shit aside and come back stone-cold and wide-awake and I'd type it all in and then chip away at the faulty log-cabin I'd built with words.  I'd excise the curlicues, the eager-to-impress flourishes, the dialog that tells you what you don't need hear.  Cut and sliced until I chipped through a wall and found that voice was finally where it was supposed to be, doing what it needed to do to have meaning enough to merit a book.

"Bob Anderson" is the name I gave to this voice.  He's the narrator of the whole thing, and his life is unfurled inside it.  It's a small and inconsequential life, but it somehow made me want to work really hard to convey it without pride or sentimentality, but with a sort of just-got-off-third-shift empathy you can't fake.   

I have a file on my desktop marked "NS 2018," and inside it is all the stuff I cut, word-docs labeled all kinds of things:

All the crap I cut but did not want to lose.  But I had to lose in order to get what I needed.  That's writing, right there.  Add I've been writing for, Jesus, 30 years.  I don't think you'd call it "professionally," but maybe "as an adult."  I've been writing poems and short stories and novels that long.  I've published about 60 short stories in journals and magazines and online joints, 50 or so essays and art reviews, 1 novel, and 2 books of stories.  I've gotten a couple nice awards, some good reviews, some rotten ones too.  I've taught writing to a lot of college and post-college students.  I've done maybe 20 or so book reviews for different magazines and newspapers too.

But I've actually done and written a ton more than that of course.  Not bragging just cataloging I guess:

• 25 years trying to help figure out ways to support people with developmental disabilities better so that we see them as equals and not charity-cases  
• Co-founded a couple of art studios/galleries
• Written 4 unpublished novels, 30 or 40 or hell even more stories I did not send out, so many crappy poems as to be uncountable  and journal entries (I have about 96 notebooks dating from 1988) and so on as to be uncounted too.

All of that work has gone into the writing of this thing called Numbskull.

I think I won't be finished with it for another few months.  Then I'll be looking at the best way to proceed.  This time, though, I have written it without worrying about its departure.  In fact I dread losing it to the world.  Weird but true.  Writing it has taught me not just how to write better, but how to live and work and "be" better too.  I don't know why this happened with this one.  Maybe it's because I'm 53.  Maybe it's because I finally found a way to convey what I need to convey without having to explain or poeticize or whatever.

Or maybe it's just because I say so.  Hell who knows?

I'll keep you posted on its journey to wherever.  Right now though I'm going to read through the paper copy I've printed out, red pen in hand.  Total old-school.  Feels good.

Get It Where You Can

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is a big old-fashioned summer movie overstuffed and draggy in many aspects, but also strangely exhilarating in others.  It tries really hard to be what it is, and trying so hard gets to places inside your head you don't think it could.

Case in point, a scene involving the evil military overlord of a project in which dinosaurs from the gutted, lava-drenched amusement park have been Noah's-Arked to a secluded mansion basement in order to be auctioned off to rich oligarchs and others, for military and other eveeeel purposes.  Above is a photo from the scene.  Ladies and gentleman, a dinosaur specifically and genetically designed as a "killing machine" devouring, literally, piece by camouflaged piece, that tough-talking military-industrial-complex 4-star General.  It is breathtaking, the CGI butchery, and the setup is Dream Fulfillment 101.  The general is a one-note villain without any redeeming qualities (he even drops a "nasty woman" comment in there somewhere).  He is a stand-in for MAGA-ites all across this Great Nation, and until I saw this scene unfold I really did not understand the visceral wear-and-tear all of this Donald Tweetstorm crap causes.  I like to not think about it actually.  I have a tendency to shut it out, to joke it away, to do whatever I can to work through it.  Resistance is futile a lot of the time.  I was in that cage with that dinosaur, applauding its savagery.  Dream come true.

It's kind of pathetic to admit, and maybe it's just what it is, but this whole era, this whole ordeal takes its toll in ways that can get conjured without a lot of provocation or even reason, without thought.  Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is a beautiful and stupid thing, but in that moment I was having a spiritual/feral connection to something far sadder and deeper, the anger and resentment caused by a dictator and his me-first fixations, his stupidity, greed and cross-eyed dedication to whatever he sees fit to say and do and cancel and revise.  And also all his minions and fans out there spreading his gospel and spleen.

That jazzed-up dinosaur feast was a sort of pledge to allegiance re-calibrated for these stupidly horrific times. 

Stop and Think

Yesterday I was in a meeting with a bunch of smart and capable colleagues, but we seemed to be unable to figure out how to talk to each other, outside of stating our solitary purposes, listing complaints, and finally there was the weather.  It wasn't a work meeting with an agenda.  It was an informal get-together at lunch for all of us who work in the same region, and although we work within the same bureaucracy we have different jobs, different approaches.  Different philosophies.  I've given "different philosophies" its own sentence status here because I think that's what made the whole shindig feel awkwardly unnecessary (at least to me):  the differing ways of comprehending what we are trying to do totally got in the way.  

I felt out of my element with these folks, but also somehow above-it-all, quintessentially shut out, but connected to some other stratosphere, some other form of culture.  Although everyone at this lunch was interested in supporting people with disabilities to the best of their abilities, we seemed to have conflicting ways of looking at, and probably doing, the work.  But we couldn't voice those conflicts because we were so busy talking about our own little realities and problems and crises.  

"Philosophy" might be too big of a word here, but what other word is there?  

Here's Merriam-Webster's elucidation:  Philosophy is "the pursuit of wisdom: a search for a general understanding of values and reality by chiefly speculative rather than observational means: an analysis of the grounds of and concepts expressing fundamental beliefs." 

It's values I'm talking about, beliefs, set aside from observation.  That gets scary when you're sitting and eating a grilled chicken sandwich with people who also are dedicating their work lives to helping people with disabilities, but "help" and "support," if they aren't defined outside of systems definitions, if they aren't given a philosophical scouring and inspection, become concepts that slip into discussions of "what works and what doesn't work," as in:  there are some people who can be a part of their worlds, get jobs, have friends, have real lives, but there are other groups of people who can't because they have significant, complex disabilities.  Once that dichotomy gets placed on the table, and there isn't any way to address the values/beliefs/philosophies behind it, the discussion takes on its own sad and tired momentum.  Anecdotes become the main form of discourse.  "Worst case scenarios" take over the way we talk and respond and communicate.

We always end up at a standstill:  if we had more funding, it we had more staff, if we had a better community, if we had better psychiatrists, better family support, better etc.

All of that stuff about needing better support is of course very valid in the lives of people with disabilities, especially people who are labeled with a variety of disabilities, but also wishing for better becomes a way to jettison the discussion on how to make things better.  It becomes a cop-out camouflaged in professional exasperation and eventual despair.  "I guess we'll just need to keep trying" becomes the way to codify failure.  

Of course we need better supports, but we also need to know pretty specifically and meaningfully just what those better supports would be supporting better, if that makes sense.  Because without that kind of an eye on the prize, the reason for doing anything becomes rote activity, becomes an exercise in blowing off steam.

I guess maybe that is what these lunch kinds of meetings are about, but I really feel a link was missing, words were missing.  We didn't know how to discuss anything because we did not have an agreement on what we might want things to mean.  For me, every professional discussion I'm going to have is about how to figure out better access for people to the actual world they're living in, not the program they have to go to.  I'm going to try to guide discussion toward jobs, relationships, freedom and justice and all that, for everyone, no matter what degree of disability has been attached to their person.  With that in mind, then, the lack of resources, the lack of whatever, becomes something we have to work on, but also something we have to negotiate realistically to still get whatever we can done in the meantime, and as we do that we often discover the unsurmountable is surmountable.  "Health and safety," in this context for me, is a baseline, not even the beginning of a journey, but the launching pad for connection, for what's next and next and next.  

If we have a discussion about philosophy first, getting it all out there, then the complaints about what is lacking might become more real.  The reason for trying to solve problems might get attached to something other than the problem being discussed.  We move forward in whatever way we can, whether of not the world and the system and everybody else is ready.  

That's what I'm looking for.  That kind of discussion, that kind of momentum.  I want us to have a "Come to Jesus" moment prior to every professional gig I guess.  

Why are we here?  What's the purpose for all of this talk?  Why are we even trying?  

I hate getting cute, but why not?  I'm going to go the New Yorker cartoon route:

How do you stop and think before you go into the same old routine, the same bitching and moaning?  How do you just stop and think about what all of this is supposed to mean before you move into what's wrong?

Ain't Freedom Grand?

It's been a weird few days.  Good and bad and dreamy and awful and great.  I'm in Orlando, Florida, at a fantastic conference (APSE 2018 National Conference) focusing on how to support people with disabilities to have lives like anybody else on earth;  jobs, friends, places to live, ways to contribute, ways to survive.  It's been lovely to be surrounded by that kind of energy, and to be in rooms with people who are talking passionately about positive but pragmatic solutions, ideas, and concerns.  It's like I can breath.  I took so many notes I don't have any paper left.  

One of the biggest concerns:  the government.  Of course.  What I'll call Trump-nesia, which is the current administration's obsessive need to wipe away everything that was ever accomplished legislatively and otherwise between the years 2009 to 2016.  

Trumps's greed to deregulate, in the context of what I'm writing about right now, is about cancelling out major moves forward in the civil rights battle for people with disabilities.  Executive Order 13771, signed off on in January 2017, (here it is in all its glory:  13771) orders cabinet officials to cut away basically whatever regulations they want to, but in the way this has been implemented of course it's all about drawing a big red line through "OBAMA."  So everyone knows who's boss now.

And that intense hatred has allowed a lot of the federal civil-rights-based laws and guidance for people with disabilities to be jeopardized, especially around the subject of community integrated employment.  Real jobs for people with disabilities, real support.  Guidance concerning the Workforce Investment and Opportunity Act (WIOA) through the Department of Labor, written in 2016, was summarily disappeared almost as soon as 13771 was signed with that Sharpee-sharpness flourish by our new King.  WIOA was a major breakthrough and upgrade in the field, helping to better define what's needed to eliminate workforce discrimination for workers with disabilities.  Now it's gone with the wind, and there's other erasures coming.  Olmstead next?  Or maybe ADA?  And don't forget about Medicaid...

There's hope though that sprang from this conference, from people being informed and outraged and activated and getting it.  The final keynote speech came from Alison Barkoff, a civil rights lawyer who served as Special Counsel for Olmstead Enforcement in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice back in the day (2010 - 2014).  She was scared and angry but hopeful, which is about the only way you can be now.  She ended her speech focusing on what happened a year ago.  When we all got together and laid claim to Medicaid and what it means for people with disabilities.  It ain't just healthcare.  Medicaid funds supports that allow life to go on and happen for people with disabilities.  (I wrote about all that here:  June 23, 2017.)   Knowing that we can do this, that we have to do this, is really empowering but also terrifying because we are gonna have to do it over and over and over and over and over in this era.  

So there's all that.

And I'm here near Disneyworld where the conference is happening.  Which makes the whole thing feel slightly unearthly, like a Kafka novel turned into a big-budget pixelated cartoon.  All this passion and energy around fighting against the forces of darkness taking place in the Magic Kingdom.  Plus the Disney resort I'm staying at is under construction.  Which has an overall Trumpian feel as well:  a resplendent resort where all the staff are called "Cast Members" being added onto, extrapolated, super-sized, beam after beam.  (Picture above.)

And then there's Robert Boremski.  He was someone with autism I knew back in the day, when all of my feelings and hopes around supporting and advocating for people with disabilities really started getting into focus.  He wandered off from where he lived 10 or so days ago.  There were search parties, media coverage, all of it.  His body was found yesterday.  Here's what I wrote on Facebook about him:

I met Robert at a self advocacy gettogether we did back in 2005 in a big kind of wornout hotel and conference center in Tricounty. We set up a room there to make art in and he just came in and went at it without one word. Very gentlemanly and quiet and prolific, making those beautiful simple haiku-like drawings and paintings all day. They all looked like a language he wanted to speak, like a place he wanted to get to. Innocent and ordered and calm. God bless him. RIP. 

That "wornout hotel and conference center" came back into my head, here at this conference center that's currently being renovated.  I remember that 2005 incident with Robert so fondly; it seemed like a breakthrough watching him paint those paintings with such silent excitement, such happiness.  I don't know.  I guess I miss those days, when art felt like it might save the world, when really art just ends saving your soul.  That's a good thing, don't get me wrong, but never enough. 

I definitely felt Robert's passing pretty deeply, even though I haven't seen him in a while.     

Here's one of his paintings Bill and I have :

Gorgeous clarity.  Simplicity.  Kind of like an ee cummings poem.  Sweet and concise but also kind of strange like that, otherworldly.   

I'll say it again:  God bless him.  RIP.

And then there's the Supreme Court.  And the Trump/Putin summit.  And kids in cages.  And fill in the blank.

It's a nasty world out there, and you can really feel it collapsing right now even while a bunch of people are trying to rebuild it or at least salvage whatever vision and version of it they can.  You have to keep on hoping even while you understand the limits of hoping, the limits of hopelessness.  You have to keep trying even though you're sick of trying.    

   

Here's something ee cummings wrote that sums it all up at least for me:

why must itself up every of a park

why must itself up every of a park
anus stick some quote statue unquote to
prove that a hero equals any jerk
who was afraid to dare to answer “no”?
quote citizens unquote might otherwise
forget(to err is human;to forgive
divine)that if the quote state unquote says
“kill” killing is an act of christian love.
“Nothing” in 1944 AD
“can stand against the argument of mil
itary necessity”(generalissimo e)
and echo answers “there is no appeal
from reason”(freud)--you pays your money and
you doesn’t take your choice.  Ain’t freedom grand

 Ain't it though?

You Make Me Feel

We're living in an era now of sanctimonious meanness, where facts and figures get shaped into propaganda and then tweeted out like confetti thrown up into the air to celebrate the end of everything you counted on as being good and right and true.  Every idea and person you thought of as foul and innately wrong is now out of the shadows and staring you right smack-dab in the face.   All smiles, like Pennywise the Clown, except in dress-clothes, standing in the Oval Office while the Pennywise-in-Chief signs yet another executive order that yields yet another rabbit-hole that yields yet another moral and fiscal and ethical black-hole.  It's a process.

Where do you go when the rabbit-hole calls?

I'm finding myself going to the TV.  To a show called Pose, which is on FX Sundays 9 PM.  It is an incredible thing to behold:  a reenactment and gorgeous aggrandizement of a time, in the late 1980s, when disadvantaged, working-class people took control of whatever they could take control of, and found a way out of the black-hole of their era by creating a rainbow path to beauty, irony and cold-hard revenge through fashion and art and kindness to each other.  Pose is about drag balls created and performed in crumbling theaters in NYC, where groups, or houses, of like-minded folks transform daily life into deluxe versions and revisions of what could and should be.  Mostly comprised of African American and Hispanic gay and trans people, these houses become families, and these families become legends through competitions based on categories like Dynasty and executive realness, and at the end of each night beautiful and victorious drag-queens leave with wagons full of trophies.

It's all about hope.  "Hope," of course is a complicated and sometimes even meaningless 4-letter word now, and it's losing, well, its hopefulness, even as I write.  Pose concentrates on a parallel late-80s era of about-to-be-hopelessness, not only when drag culture was finding a way to nourish and grow itself into Rupaul-ian heights, but also when you-know-who was building those towers and opening those now defunct casinos.  Like Athena sprouting from the head of Zeus, our Pennywise-in-Chief has sprouted from the spleen of Ronald Reagan, a gasbag god using Reagan-era bromides to finally cut to the chase, conservatism-wise:  hate, pure and simple, without any of that twinkly-eyed "City on the Hill" bullshit.  And Pose examines that stuff too, so that we can see a world in which the elite control the conversation and yet the powerless become the norm.  That's where the hope comes in for me: witnessing all that glorious drag-queen effort in creating a world where everyone can feel free to roam and strut and pout and preen and know there is another place to get to, to flourish, beyond that goddamn black-hole.

All with a Ryan-Murphy eye on style and stylishness, reverberating with the disco evangelism of Diana Ross and Sylvester and the like.  The look of the show is reality once or twice removed, with silky, sulky lighting and the icy loneliness of the streets dissolving into the purple heat and light of the balls.  Pose is the thirtysomething for this era, a zeitgeisty, high-end, hour-long drama that transcends its pop status by embracing its characters and finding authenticity beyond its initial demography.

Jennie Livington's Paris Is Burning is the ur-text of course.  She's even a consultant on Pose.  But Murphy uses Paris Is Burning's cinema-verite as a jumping-off point into a dream-world and a reality that intermingle without losing the power of either one.  The very first scene in the pilot lets us watch as the House of Abundance clan mops up historical costumes from the Metropolitan at closing time, and then after the caper wearing these items to a ball.  It is the very essence of taking back the power, done with enough of a lighthearted sarcasm and love to make it all seem breezy and triumphant.  That's Pose.

I love every character on this show and every moment and setting they inhabit.  While there's quite a bit of melodrama, there's never camp, except in the climate-controlled environments created by the queens and their houses.  It's a prime-time soap as church, as manifesto, as a form of transcendence and survival.  Every character in Pose is necessary, vital and real.  Especially now.  I've never considered a TV show as such a necessity before.  Watching it is becoming my way out of both rabbit- and black-holes.  It is a retreat in the right direction.