Monday, February 26, 2024

Kiite Kure: The Reason I Write

Eeyore and Piglet gazing up at the sky
Walt Disney's "New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh", 1988

I was eleven when my family relocated out-of-state. Before this I lived in a neighborhood with several kids close to my own age, and had an intimate group of friends at school. After this I briefly became a charity case to a small group of fifth-graders assigned (in my presence) to my care, and my awareness of the fact ignited the first embers of some serious social anxiety.  To keep a long story short, by the following grade I had lost motivation to brute force my way into any pre-established peer groups. 

I listened to the other kids echo their parents' disgruntlement at the steady stream of immigrants from my state and I internalized their disapproval, transitioning my perspective on the move from one of adventure to estrangement. Instead of the intrepid explorer that had set out, I came to think of being Californian as something inherent and inalterable to my identity, making me an outcast among my new peers. 

Prior to the move, my only frame of reference came from children's television; which taught me that I would be welcomed with open arms. Naively, it never occurred to me that these fictionalized depictions might not be representative of reality, and I was naturally unprepared for the bullying, rejection and exclusion.  The shock left an indelible mark on my outlook; if things on tv weren't true, what else couldn't be trusted?

cat hiding under covers
Edwyn hiding under the covers

This is when my introversion first asserted itself.  Rather than defy the negative rhetoric and forcibly ingratiate myself to my new classmates, I retreated internally.  This is also when my sexual orientation and gender incongruities first became a social impediment, since neither the over-loud and rambunctious boys nor the over-cautious and delicately dressed girls held appeal for me.  Gone were the days, it seemed, of coed games of "Red Light, Green Light" and "Red Rover", of monkey bars and jungle gyms.  Now the only game was "Dodge Ball" (a survival game where the object is to avoid being energetically assaulted by a targeted volley-type ball), and the teams were always gendered.

I spent my recess periods, Eeyore-like, posted under a tree, contemplating how much had changed and what it all meant.  What life was actually about and what truth really was.  Of course, my anti-social behavior was quickly flagged and reported to my parents, and I was discussed by the adults in hushed tones of growing concern, which informed me that I had become a problem.  I endeavored to correct my behavior by identifying and establishing a relationship with another outcast among my classmates, without knowing the reasons for her own alienation among the kids she'd grown up with.  

I soon learned.  She would say anything that would play to her advantage, and smile sanctimoniously as she tore others down to improve her own standing.  Friendship brought no immunity from the machinations of this young Rita Skeeter.  Impervious beneath her halo of self-certitude, she twisted and manipulated the truth expertly before she was even into her teens, betraying my secrets and besmirching my character to anyone who would listen.  Any conflict I shared in confidence became outsized evidence of my social delinquence on her tongue, which she promptly reported with enthusiastic embellishments in order to then educate me on my deteriorating reputation and wayward ways.

pet rats sleeping in hammock
Photo by Annemarie Horne. Be kind to rats.
At the end of that year I mustered the courage to inform her that our friendship was over—which earned me a graphic depiction of how her brother had tortured and killed a pet rat I'd entrusted to him (subsequently confirmed false)—and I had thoroughly lost all interest in pursuing relationships just to satisfy the adults that I was not, myself, dysfunctional.  Barring one or two further anemic attempts, my self-imposed isolation largely prevailed for the duration of my adolescence.

I think the only things that prevented my complete social impairment were my family, peripheral osmosis of my extroverted father's easy manner with people, and the much more manageable social province of the pre-corporate internet.  I carved out my niche on Geocities and cultivated a small handful of close friendships with others who belonged to my obscure corner of the unbridled "world wide web".  We chatted daily over ICQ while watching Nickelodeon and MTV together, and developed our html shrines to the unsung celebrities of the American voice-over industry.  We were animation nerds.

All of this is to say that the majority of my life became very internal.  My activities were independent: reading, drawing, watching cartoons and developing my code.  And thinking.  I thought about everything.  I thought a lot.  Any subject that crossed my path deserved extensive and meticulous contemplation.  Love.  Death.  Sex.  Religion.  World politics.  Social justice.  Subjective experience.

Consequently, I had ideas about things.  And when a subject arose in company that I had given some scrupulous thought, I was eager to share and have my contributions considered.  I was able to find traction in certain forums online where I could anonymously debate without age or appearance influencing my credibility, but at home was another story.  And I suppose because my father was the least receptive to my input, his validation became, in a way, most important.  His opinion was the glass ceiling that I needed to shatter.  It galled me to no end when I would go unheard on an issue only to have him adopt a similar perspective because of an article or book where a complete stranger proposed similar points.  My mother and I joked about getting ourselves into print to be heard... if only it were our words that were sanctified on the page.

There was one extraordinary exception to this pervasive sense of irrelevance.  When the unmoderated bullying and violence at my high school became sufficiently egregious, my father gradually agreed to take me home with him for the lunch period.  Those were some of the only times that we would talk one-on-one.  I would ask him about what he was reading, which was usually politics and world news, and he would listen and engage with me seriously in discussion.  We joked that we would solve the world's problems each day on our lunch hour.

graphic stating: the world is saved
The World is Saved music video, 2011

But these interludes were a strange aberration.  By the end of the day, we were both at wit's end with our own stress and respective misery, and exchanges were more often terse and argumentative, relegated to the sordid affairs of ordinary life.  Homework, chores, rules and expectations.  Attitude and gratitude.  He and I fought.  He and my mother fought.  He and my mother fought about he and I.  Alice was no longer in Wonderland.

As my teens wore on and my misery increased, so did the volatility of my moods and the emotional component of my words. These things outraged my father and diminished me in his estimation as a rational agent.  I became much more reluctant to open my mouth or reveal my own thinking.  My listening skills, already honed to perfection in public school, extended to the home as I shared little and less.  Instead I allowed the tempest to rage unchecked in my own head or, at best, unloaded the overflow into journals. For years I screamed, insatiably, into the void.

And that is the origin story.  That is, in a nutshell, why I overthink and the reason I write.  Why I've sometimes wandered down paths that others have yet to tread.  And why, at bottom, I have the excessively common, incurably human, but arguably obsessive need for my signal to be received by other islands of consciousness in the cosmos.  I don't put a lot of weight on my own importance; just writing these words feels laughably egocentric.  My experience is as unique and as universal as all the rest. And yet, with the rest, I labor under the burden of existence; of being a mote of light in the universe that is curiously, inexplicably, self-aware.

I suppose in the end, it is all just to say, listen to me:

I was here.

cave art photographed by Tory Kallman
cave art photographed by Tory Kallman

 

Sunday, September 10, 2023

The Tree Spirit

A great, gnarled tree stood silhouetted in the growing autumn twilight, treetips softly kneading the stream of an evening breeze, even as they stemmed from a pillar as unwavering and composed as the gods.  The trunk, larger at its base than ten solidly built men, rippled against the tapestry of dying light in knotted fists and rolling swells of sculpted time, so that it was not apparent that a barnacled slope, clustered in the crook of a rugged cradling arm, was only a guest in its embrace. The vagrant gradually pooled into a distinct set of swells as it separated itself, branching away from the steady firmament of earth's own cathedral arch. Like a tree spirit taking shape, head and shoulders solidified in the goblin light — when colors run and lines bleed as on wet canvas — so that the extremities seemed to remain conjoined to the tree, even as the second trunk resolved itself in miniature.

The onlooker, enraptured to bear witness to this supernatural scene, observed as the colors receded with the waning sun and the contrasts settled into a soft monochromatic collage that was momentarily more discernible in the gentler afterglow of the star's over-saturated kiss on the horizon.  The tree-turned-tree spirit now appeared to her a ragged boy with shaggy hair, barely out of his tens, yet gazing down at her with eyes as old as his host and as tired as the ancients'.  

Though hesitant to shatter the ethereal silence, she lifted her voice with the deference of one before an altar to inquire who he was and where he'd come from.  Either in reticence or reply, he raised his head, eyes leaving hers to settle on the distant stars just beginning to assert themselves as the local star receded behind the veil of Earth.  "Perhaps," she ventured, still unsteady in her own newfound adolescence, "you should come down from there and head on home."  The whites of his eyes circled back to hers and seemed to consider - whether her person or proposition she could not tell.

The silence surrounded them as thoroughly as the river resumes the contours of the riverbed, and for a span of heartbeats the space seemed untethered from time.  At last his small frame flexed against the billowing branch, hands coming to rest on his perch as his shoulders slouched forward into the posture of one preparing to jump.  It was in the breadth of this small movement that the dying throws of light articulated the reedy ridges of rope wreathed about his neck.  "Wait!" she commanded — but too late.  The small figure had thrust itself forth from its precipice and sliced an inevitable arc through the air, falling to earth.  

Reflexively she turned away, reluctant to decipher the soft "thud" that cut through the siren scream of her own racing heart.  Turning back, she found a scarecrow of a boy stood before her, a head shorter but with eyes resolute.  The noose about his neck resting abreast his collarbone as innocuous as a necklace, the business end hanging unfrayed and impotent at his back.  "Did someone put that one you," she asked as the tempo of her pulse gradually recovered its customary rhythm, "or did you put it on yourself?"

The word returned so softly she was not sure it was heard so much as felt: "Yes."

Slowly she lifted her hand, reaching for his. As he did not recoil, their fingers connected - the back of his hand conforming to the curve of her encircling palm as neatly as it had blended to the crook of the tree.  She compressed it in hers.  It was as solid as the branch that had born it and as warm as her own.  Gritty with the dust of the earth, it impressed an answering pressure.  She thought something flickered in the hollow of his pool-black eyes, though it might have been just the sky reflected there.  

The wind rose, rustling the grass and decay around them, and enshrouded within that timeless whisper came the strange words: "I found you," but she could not tell whether they originated from the woods or within.

Thursday, August 20, 2020

One Crisis at a Time

Kizmet cuddling in bed

January was just another year. A year closer to the election. A year farther from the end of graduation and all the promise that entailed. A year closer to midlife.

In February I turned forty. All that I could think about were the wheels of time escaping with my life as I struggled to make sense of where I had come from, what I'd accomplished, and where, if anywhere, I was going.

I was tending the mens' dressing room of an elite wine-country resort, waiting to be paged over the radio, when I glanced surreptitiously at my mobile phone, an unauthorized item on my person, and saw the interfamily exchange: "I hope Kiz is okay." My cat, Kizmet. Scrolling back into mounting fear I discovered an unseen series of anxious appeals: "Kizmet has collapsed." "I'm worried." "Please call."

I drifted past my coworker, dazed as though cranially bludgeoned, verbally stumbled through something about a family emergency to the management and found my way to the employee shuttle stop: a carport canopy lined with retired office chairs. I stood choking on my urgency like a race horse at the bit until at last the shuttle arrived. The driver scowled and announced himself on break as I declared my emergency. He radioed a curt request to headquarters before stranding me on a sea of tarmac with no key to my carriage home.

It was forty minutes before I arrived at my own car in the college parking lot where I was required to park, with still an hour's winding mountain road barricading me from my companion of more than a decade. An eternity removed from the warm body that had daily melted against mine, motoring gently. The tiny toes that clutched my shirt or tapped my face to bring it closer, the plaintive mewling and sandpaper kisses would be swept forever out of reach while I prayed tensely over the steering wheel.

in the wings during rehearsal

Our community play was set to premiere in March. For three months I finished my full-time shift and drove more than an hour to spend a second shift in rehearsal before traveling the long commute home in the night. For no compensation but the love of the craft, we sacrificed weekends, family gatherings, and even missed income to memorize Shakespearean prose and practice the performing arts. It was my return to the stage after a two-decade hiatus.

Three days before opening weekend, we were cancelled. The diverse cast of college youth and veteran performers were learning about the Corona virus; some for the first time. As we sat in the auditorium where the show would not go on, there were protests of time wasted, and more than a few tears shed. We had passed our days collaborating to create something that brought meaning to our lives and joy to audiences; audiences that would never receive the gift of our efforts. Hesitantly, we exchanged hugs; knowing that the unique family we had formed in the womb of that theater would not again converge.

empty shelves

Covid took our art away, and then our income. By April I was neither elite nor essential. I dusted off the drawing board, rekindled my writing. I bought and washed groceries and wrestled with unemployment. I watched the death toll rise, wondering about the lives lost. Would I have encountered them, had they lived? What were their plans? Might we have exchanged a kind word in the checkout line? Would we have been friends? The face and the fate of the world changed dramatically, too quickly to comprehend.

Amidst this tide of death, our disgrace duplicated. In parallel to one of the greatest global pandemics in a century, we suddenly found ourselves thrust back to the sixties. Voices of the past spoke to present ills and unmet reparations. My part in the march for progress doubled back on itself against the revelation that my mother's work remained undone. Horrors of history revealed themselves broadly unknown and, worse, untaught. George, Ahmaud, Breonna. No mindless microbe had stolen those lives. No lawless miscreant but the law, itself. And we said their names, but it did not bring them back. And they were not alone, and they were not the last. Against the instincts of my nature, I donned my mask, prepared my poster board, claimed my corner and raised my fist. It was only May.

BLM protest

On June first, the disgraced authorities targeted members of media and citizens gathered in lawful protest with tear gas and less-lethal ammunition. The blood of those seeking peace was spilled so that the president could declare himself the arbiter of law-and-order, with bible in hand, before a church.

As tensions escalated into July, the media reported Portland and Seattle were disintegrating into tyranny. Conservative media portrayed a war perpetrated by anarchists and insurgents. Liberal media described federal agents attacking everyone and their mother with weaponry disavowed in international conflict, unidentified agents grabbing protesters from unmarked vans to terrorize citizens into submission. The chaos reigned nightly within the space of a city block as my brother, a Portland native, slept sound and the greater municipal area carried on, unimposed.

red light during California fires

It is August now, as I sit gazing from the window of my California home. The green ponderosa pine tower sharply above the dry earth, a trail of quail scuttling nervously over the woodpile as a chopper drones in the distance. A deceptively blue sky belies the fact that we are surrounded by wildfires, waiting to be evacuated. As I pack my bag, I am thinking about something my brother once said to me from the heart of another tempest: "Let's take this one crisis at a time."