The Marj Memoirs

Mother Theresa was a Cowgirl

2009-04-07T14:48:00.008-04:00

Funny, coming back here, I feel like I'm coming back to someplace significant. Like driving down M66 into the river valley that was my childhood home. Maybe the most significant thing that has happened in my absence is that life has gone on. Dollar stores proliferate.

People are populating, blogging, facebooking, twittering... the world is full of ambient noise. It is an abundance of insignificance.

If this were a yearly Christmas greeting, I'd say... "I'm TOTALLY in love with Morrissey (I TOLD you I could never be happy), I am still "teaching" and becoming more jaded-like-my-father. I miss some things. I, an obedient daughter, have many regrets, one being that I failed to devote my life to homeless people in India who have no human being who will sit beside them as they die.

If I could only be a cowgirl.

Holidays, Birthdays, Happiness, Sadness, Mothers and Friends

2008-12-17T05:05:00.003-05:00

Why am I grouchy and sad and overwhelmed?! Oh, I remember why. It’s Christmas! Not only have we co-opted a day that is about love and sacrifice and made it a selfish capitalistic orgy, but we have placed expectations on ourselves that doom us to failure. I cannot make everyone in my family a scarf. I push myself to the edge of sanity making ONE scarf.

I think part of my melancholy is about my mom, and what the holidays were like with her. I can’t rise to the level of wonderfulness that she was, and I miss her. Life wasn’t perfect, I mean my dad was a mean depressed drunk and all, but my mom was beautiful and giving and loving and you KNEW she loved you. No mistake about it. Her departure really left a hole. Especially during the holidays, and my birthday. She never forgot me. She was the one I knew would always love me. She was funny and popular and knew everybody in town and everybody loved her. I rode on her coattails. She was so unlike me, and she knew me so well. She was a master at making me laugh, she knew I had hives because I was stressed (when I didn’t have a clue), she never read a book, she was loyal, she was basic, she was full of fun, she held the family together, she was mine.

I am acutely aware that one day my own kids will be dealing, each in their own way, with my departure. I hope they remember that I was THEIRS. Everyone needs someone that really sees them, and really loves the shit out of them. Even if they aren’t perfect. Even if they drink too much. Even if they swear. Even if they don’t read books. Even if they failed or if they succeeded, or if they left, or if they came back again. These days I just try and love my kids unconditionally and discern where our relationship will take us.

Happy Holidays, Friends. This year I am most thankful for you. You know, I think my mom would have really liked you.

“What is the feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? — it’s the too huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. “

I Think I See My People

2008-11-15T05:04:00.003-05:00

Credit: NASA

I was taken by this image this morning. Maybe because we’ve been caught in the election bubble for so long. We are so short-sighted. GM is delaying the release of its’ next gas-guzzler until January because they are afraid they won’t get any bailout money, and Jennifer Aniston FINALLY talked shit about Angelina Jolie. We can’t see two feet ahead of us.

I think this is my new home! When I am 90 I will travel across our solar system and enter a new one, a stranger in a strange land (like all of us), though we shy away from complaining. We are thankful for little things.

Change Must Come from Us

2008-06-25T07:39:00.002-04:00

"... by the very design and scale of national politics, no presidential campaign could offer more than a wink and a nod to true participatory politics. Activism isn’t something that happens on TV for a general viewing audience, but at home with real people who aren’t watching the tube at all. While a president can provide some inspiration – Oprah-style, if need be - for a whole lot of people, the executive isn’t the locus from which real change occurs. As president, Obama could enact policies that make activism easier to accomplish, jobs easier to create, and corporations more easy to resist – but this activity itself would have to come from us." - Douglas Rushkof

Globalism=Imperialism

2008-06-17T10:42:00.003-04:00

"Globalization is an attempt to extend corporate monopoly control over the globe."
- Michael Parenti

One Winter Soldier's Tale

2008-05-27T20:46:00.002-04:00

American News Project

War Talk

2008-04-26T08:28:00.009-04:00

While the democrats fiddle about, the Republicans have big plans for winning the election:

"The nation's top military officer said yesterday that the Pentagon is planning for "potential military courses of action" as one of several options against Iran, criticizing what he called the Tehran government's "increasingly lethal and malign influence" in Iraq." (The Washington Post)

It doesn't matter how much propaganda we are fed, or for how long, or that we KNOW it's propaganda! Through our silence, we give permission.

Be Here Now

2008-03-30T09:11:00.006-04:00

in love
continually
with life perhaps
(being shy) may require

1. detachment

"It’s not about impressing people, it’s about moving them. I always found my mother extremely moving because she had no boobs. The girl who has the perfect body, like Betty Paige, freaks me out. My son writes on my jeans with big markers; I’m always writing poems on my arms with black pen and cutting my hair very short on the sideburns to have a profile like Napoleon. I like having those weird, tweaky things. It’s a stupid girl thing, but it’s better to not look your best so that people can imagine that the best is really much better [laughing]."

yes 2. laughing
3. a drug or two,
while 4. wearing these shoes

sometimes helps
5. a dalai lama memory
6. sidestepping (not even)
around spongy ground
full of melting snow

bangs cover your eyes,
migratory
bird.
I sing!

Love Struck

2008-03-21T07:42:00.002-04:00

"A color blind country is a false hope. Martin Luther King jr. did not want us to be colorblind in the sense the concept usually used today - he wanted us to be love-struck by one another. Being love-struck by your fellow citizen means embracing their humanity - which includes their color, culture and history." - Cornel West, in Rolling Stone

Ain't No Time to Wonder Why...

2008-03-13T05:31:00.006-04:00

What happens when you have an unbridled military-industrial-neocon complex?

Adm. William "Fox" Fallon, top U.S. commander in the Middle East, last of the Vietnam vets in the high command (The Man Between War and Peace), submitted his resignation as head of Central Command. According to former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Patrick Lang, Fallon told him, upon taking over at Centcom, that war with Iran "isn't going to happen on my watch.(antiwar.com)

"...the Bush administration intends to go out with a bang – one that will shake not only the Middle East but this country to its very foundations." - Justin Raimondo

Photo by Peter Yang

Best Cover Ever

2008-03-02T08:52:00.006-05:00

"A time comes when silence is betrayal."

2008-02-27T05:30:00.005-05:00

"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." (Rev. Martin Luther King)

Strikes, Boycotts, Mutinies, Desertions

2008-02-24T20:10:00.004-05:00

"Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war. Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens. (Howard Zinn)

Monday Burn Millay

2008-02-22T03:20:00.008-05:00

I can relate to conflicting desires. But Americans' protection of the English Language while simultaneously hating it, just bites. I can't decide if I am irritated more at the English Only movement or the anti-intellectual stupidness (duh) of those who say Obama is nothing but pretty words.

"If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none."

George Bush, with his fifth grade English ability and his encouragement in the face of catastrophy to go shopping, is destructive. He's a fireman with no books hidden in his ceiling vent.

“So, when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world, there was no longer need for fireman for the old purposes. They were given the new job as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges and executors. That’s you and me!”

Two terms of Bush has dumbed us down. We don't want them fancy words, we don't want to learn no foreign languages, we want action. We want war! We want continual war! We want to feel superior! Goddamn it, we want sleeping pills!

Well... maybe not. Maybe two terms of Bush has given us more appreciation for language. I, for one, am not in the least conflicted about my desire to experience language that is creative and life changing. At best, language is art, and why wouldn't we want to live our lives as if we were making art? Why wouldn't we want to enrich ourselves through learning languages, finding the right word, and beyond that, through acts of kindness and friendship and mercy and love? Why wouldn't we want to keep growing, getting smarter, appreciating those who can teach us things? Why wouldn't we appreciate the pretty words of Obama? The movement to elect him is a manifestation of our desire to be better.

"Stuff your eyes with wonder ... live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that ... shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass."

(Quotes and Title)

I Remember Chrysanthemums

2008-02-03T20:03:00.000-05:00

Orange fields thick with flowers stretched across the moon to your doorstep. Constant warm winds blew spicy petals into the atmosphere, spinning, floating, forever preserved in a museum of weightlessness. There I once observed you from a distance on your knees, singing loudly a song that couldn't be heard. Your fingers dug through rare dirt, copper and stone, bone and teeth, sand and flint, searching for some thing that disappeared long ago.

Love Is The Key That Unlocks The Door Which Leads To Ultimate Reality

2008-01-20T07:36:00.000-05:00

"There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood."

-Rev. Martin Luther King

Dolly Once Loved Carol Channing

2008-01-19T09:49:00.000-05:00

Checking my e-mail a minute ago, I realized I have reached a time in life where a "rebate processor position" doesn't sound promising. Not that rebate processing is great work, but turning the banal and mundane (like spam) into creative ideas and projects has always been an interest. I once worked as a mangler in a laundry at Yellowstone National Park, and the old me, on seeing spam in my inbox that said "rebate processor position" may have given it some thought. Just for the hell of it. Something fitting to write under "head mangler" on my resume. I have always liked collecting experience, experiencing life as art. But I feel a shift.

Does getting older mean caring less about things? Once Dolly loved Carol Channing. There was something about Carol Channing that she just adored.

Maybe Carol Channing's ability to play musical instruments and be the life of the party. Or the way she always looked nice, put on a big toothy smile.(Dolly was always encouraging me to "smile!") She also had a high dose of my mother's biggest asset. In fact, not long ago, in the town where Dolly spent most of her life, an old friend of hers told me, punching the last word:

"Your mother had personality."

These days, in the assisted living facility, Dolly could care less about Carol Channing. Or her old friends. Or her husband, who has been dead over 20 years. She doesn't care about looking nice or putting on a good face, either. She has changed.

Am I losing interest in the things that have always interested me? Maybe I'm afraid that my mind just won't work the same anymore, like Dolly's. And afraid that the strings that bind me with interest to people and ideas will no longer hold. I want to hold onto my big toothy smile, keep myself up, learn a musical instrument, but you can't be the life of the party forever, can you?

Toxic Simplicity (Britney and Me)

2008-01-06T06:50:00.000-05:00

I could quickly become as crazy and hysterical as Britney Spears simply by reading the news. World news, national news, celebrity news, all has merged into a manipulated parasitic mess. It is a cynical lens through which I gaze, with little hope in sight. On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind. The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.

I hit my head against walls. I tear my hair out. Or did I shave it off? My job has made a fool of me, the thought sends me reeling with longing toward a toxic simplicity, some post-apocalyptic time of wandering, scrapping for food, creating fire with sticks and shelter with branches. I crawl into the walk-in closet where I am the best mother in the world. And I give it up. Don't leave me! Don't go! ...I must say what I feel and think in some way--it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.

I need to test my meddle. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do? Things can get out of control so quickly, and any small change can send life reeling toward chaos. Hysterical, I need to be tied down. It's for my own good. My husband calls the authorities he is worried about the gun that he gave me as a gift, when he loved me. He is concerned for my well-being and is knowledgeable about my psychological state. He is rational, he knows best. My man ties me down, he drives me away with sirens blaring, he tells me everything's OK, he checks me into the hospital, he gives me drugs he calls me "baby" he calls his lawyer, he changes the constitution against me, he is the school principal, he is the president, he is the doctor he is the father, The Man, my lover. I live onlyto please him.

I have removed the silicone implants, I have sworn off botox and willed myself to face torture before being the life of the party. Three hundred men could not stop me from leaving this place. If this is Britney's fate, this is my fate.

"Good-bye. I am leaving because I am bored." -George Saunders
_______________________________________________________
(all italicized quotes from Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (1899)

Happy Holidays

2007-12-24T08:12:00.000-05:00

Farm Security Administration: Christmas dinner in the home of Earl Pauley near Smithland, Iowa. (Circa 1935)

This Particular Game

2007-12-21T01:45:00.000-05:00

Tired. Of this particular game, I say we play
Another game of an entirely different origin
and design.
A. Game. Where. instead of motion and gesture
We create a new language
Formed entirely of words of love.
and wine.

Words of love, you say words of love
Burping, swilling scotch, tipping and pointing
You asshole, you fucking existentialist, don't you know
you ruined my fucking life
in the process of constructing yours? Ouch! My eye!

This is an eyesore, a damned walmart where
trees should be
and I can no longer find my way home.

This geography. This flat landscape.
Within it a damsel with long blond tresses (no victim) whose braids twine around billboards and blocks of gray concrete (a heroine!) snake under highway overpasses (chanting words of love) climb rusted shell oil monuments and twist through foreclosed homes and vacant lots (no one dare climb) scans the nearby hills

Where children wander,
searching for parents who have already disappeared.

Dancing with Dolly

2007-12-05T07:35:00.000-05:00

Dolly's veined hands jerk up.up. on wires leading to monitors and bells. Then down.down. her head rests, slightly tilted. "Wirepuller," her dry mouth open.open. close.close. "make me dance!" Propped-up on the hospital bed, catheter controller, pelvis twitch, underpants down, door open, audience peers in.

"Wirepuller, make me sing!" Knobby fingers swing upward in arcs and a scuffy little song, accompanied by bells and monitors, begins. A duet, mother and daughter, a little soft shoe accessed from the far reaches of memory, a little Mack the Knife, a little Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, as we drive past pine trees decked with holiday lights, closed businesses, she wrapped only in blankets and hospital footies, me driving lost in the snowy Michigan night, something of a party.

We have something of a party! A crazy little drive, a reckless adventure, but soon I recognize this landscape, this street name, where we are going.

Dolly thinks someone was sleeping in her bed when we get to her home. "Why is it so messy?!" She wants to tidy up, tells me to fold her blanket. I, mimicking myself, throw it on the floor. "Dolly! You are such a neatnic! I'm coming over and mess this place up very soon!" She laughs and I slide her nightie over her head. "Go to bed," I direct, but leaving, I glance back down the long hall and she is still there, in her long nightgown, peering at me playfully from behind her open door.

Making a marionette dance requires three movements, a walk, a wave and a bow. It takes practice to make the marionette do all three together. Always grinning, hand jerking up.up. in a final wave, controller rocking from side to side like an airplane dipping it's wings, I walk away.

Walking the Dog

2007-11-03T08:16:00.000-04:00

"Oh my god. These woods are so enchanting, I must stand very still right here in the moment, and listen to that lone bird that sounds like some sort of teradactyl as it zigzags in the gray-blue sky above me. Shhh. Leaves crinkle underfoot, and that tree trunk looks like a drawing of a tree trunk, the detail and perfection almost overwhelming. It's alive."

Her brown hair, which she hadn't bothered to wash in two days, lay heavy on her shoulders in what was either stylish straightness or unattractive clumps, she couldn't decide. "If only my hair bounced and weightlessly separated in gusts of November wind in the sunlit dusk."

"Let's talk about you.' Wouldn't that be a good first line? That line says it all," she thought. "Selfless from the get-go. You'd hardly need anything else! Eureka! The form has to philosophically agree with the content. The form may be more important than the content." The dog tugged at her leash as she walked unsteadily through deep moss. Glowing green lichen softly lit her winding path and cracking branches echoed in dense patches of sky beyond, where the people were.

"If a dog pulls on its leash, does it mean you can't control it?" Behind sun glasses she had watched other dog walkers in her neighborhood, especially the thin blonde woman who, she thought, was younger than she, and appeared to have it really together. She could be seen frequently running in stretchy technical fabrics that move moisture away from the body and are made specifically for that purpose. Her dog wasn't on a leash and walked obediently beside her.

One day she and dog-on-a-leash approached the woodlot, and running-woman bounced past, greeting her with a heartfelt "Hi." She was mortified at her voice, which squeaked a strange and high-pitched "hello", crackling like a transistor radio. "Heel!" she said a little too loudly, with authority. "Should I hold the leash with my right or left hand? Which looks better? which better conveys dominance? which is correct? what would Cezar Milan advise?"

The woodlot is a place for strange encounters, she thinks. A liminal place where rules of the surrounding neighborhoods can't reach. She vows to sew every person she knows a special design on a small piece of natural fabric of special color for each, with one word attached, a word that is especially for them, that shows she has looked deeply at them, and pondered their existence. She wishes that her mother, or perhaps an insightful and wise teacher, had given her a word.

Emerging from the woods onto a street lined with modest houses with semi-landscaped lawns, she reaches under her jacket and tugs at the too-short cotton undershirt which her daughter had left at home on her last visit and now was riding halfway up her back. Yanking it down and pushing its edge into her slightly too-tight jeans was getting old. She imagines midwestern women peering from behind their livingroom curtains, like her mother used to do, holding their Dawn Dish Detergent that cuts grease in one hand and a dishcloth with pictures of wine bottles in the other and wishing they were thinner, and their hair was longer, and they again resolve to walk every day for 45 minutes just like that woman with the really cool hair who is walking by.

Unattended

2007-10-27T04:54:00.000-04:00

Last night I saw The Darjeeling Limited. Owen Wilson stars as the eldest of three brothers who persuades his reluctant siblings to set out on a spiritual journey, by train, through India. Owen Wilson's head was bandaged throughout the movie because, we find out later, his character tried to kill himself by running his car into a hill. It was difficult to get the real Owen Wilson, who really tried to commit suicide, out of the equation. Apparently the making of the movie didn't bring the spiritual revelation that he needed in real life.

I wish Georgia and Willa and I could share a spiritual adventure. If only we were able to love each other. It seems like that would feel so good. The earthquake of Dolly's leaving buckled and ruptured our bleak but familiar family geography. Everything is gone.

I arrived at the theater early and waited on a bench directly under a gargantuan poster of John C. Reilly's naked torso and smiling face. An old woman, gripping her popcorn and drink, slumped beside me, and I wished I could take a photo of the three of us.

A middle-aged man on a double-date bought his tickets and strolled into the lobby with an empty popcorn bucket. Demanding a refill from the adolescent at concessions, he winked at his buddy and rejoined his companions. The teenagers rolled their eyes, I stood up, and later, when the movie was over and I walked toward the back exit, it felt a bit adventurous. A forgotten threshold of concrete and black paint, unattended and liminal. Neither here nor there.

Then? I stepped through, to the other side.

All the Simple Things

2007-10-21T20:03:00.000-04:00

Maybe my youthful idealism is wearing off, but I'm seeing things in a different light lately, and in this perspective, it appears that there is nothing new under the sun.

I have fought hard against this perspective. People CAN change. We CAN make a difference. We CAN live in peace. Here's a "for instance", on a small scale: As usual, I went into the school year thinking "this year will be different! I'm gonna tweak this and that, and the students will want to learn, and my classroom will be a wonderland community of learning." It soon became obvious, however, that the same student archetypes are walking the halls, the same teachers, the same administrators... the same ME! This year is simply a variation of the past.

Taken to the macrocosm, people as a species seem pretty much the same. I don't think we're getting dumber, we've always been idiotic. We've always been destructive. We don't mind killing. And we're selfish and greedy. And there have always been those who are different.

I suppose the thing that sets us apart in 2007 is overpopulation. There are over 6 billion of us on the earth, and things are getting scarce. I don't think that's going to make us nicer.

Sometimes I think I long for collapse (Is that bad?). Let's just level this shit we've built. All the McMansions, all the fancy cars and expensive toys and clothes and bullshit that makes me better than you.

I saw Into the Wild this weekend, and I have thought about the movie a lot. Christopher McCandless rejected a sick society and yearned for something pure and good. It was hard to see him die in the end, and I couldn't help but connect his death to all the beauty that disappears around me. All the natural habitat and animals with it. All the farmland, all the simple things. The healthy earth, as we knew it.

Thursday's Child

2007-10-13T05:58:00.000-04:00

Mondays child is fair of face,
Tuesdays child is full of grace,
Wednesdays child is full of woe,
Thursdays child has far to go,
Fridays child is loving and giving,
Saturdays child works hard for his living,
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.

I have never liked to take naps. Strange, since I am in favor of many other forms of escape.

Dolly utilized all her persuasive charms to lure me to bed (she was most definitely in favor of naps), but as a pre-schooler I would not have it. Atop her mountainous bed, while her arms circled, hypnotic, sweet cooing, lovely song, caressing my eyebrows, softly whispering, I wiggled. Eyes wide open, I edged slowly away as Dolly drifted in and out of sleep herself, all her fairy dust squandered.

There was a little girl
With a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead
When she was good
She was very very good
But when she was bad
She was horrid

The blonde bed with matching chest of drawers, dour curtains, thin worn brown rug and sparse surroundings changed shape as I floated to the ceiling. Cracks in the plaster meandered out, toward other rooms, through the green clapboard porch that Dolly painted herself, past spiders and carcasses of honey bees, out screened windows into the world of backyard. Marigolds by the porch, planted by Dolly on her knees in a house dress, grew in time-lapse lurches and I smelled their spicy orangeness.

The sky was yellow and I walked lightly on warm green grass, with the past already behind me and little dirt paths before me, which wound through shaded backyards with perennial gardens, pools of distant sunlight and other uncharted and unknown places.

This is why, to this day, I have never liked naps.