I went to see "The House I Live In" last night and it was really great and moving.  Music was good, too.  I was offput by the framing narrative of the Black housekeeper the rich white boy just loooooooved, but facts are facts, and it appears that the white boy loves the Black housekeeper and he became a filmmaker. Get over it, liberal honky.  

It appears that many people know that the War on Drugs and the prison system are institutionalized machines of destruction for the people we hate and fear.  This makes me love people who care and then sad that all that caring does what, exactly?  I have worked for DCFS and the Juvenile Justice system and have seen the good intentions of clueless people slice up hearts and families.  Everyone just moving along, sick feeling in our stomachs, either confused at why everything is working so poorly or confused that no one seems better or grateful for all our help. 

My mother is threatening to kill herself as she awaits trial for the illegal thing she did while on lots and lots and lots of legal drugs.  I thought the film would focus on the law enforcement and the racism and the things I already know and talk about all the time, which it did, but it also talked about addiction. That it exists.  That it hurts those who just want soothing.  And the stories in the movie made me think of the hurt people that hurt the people that hurt me, and the compassion is feels like too much.  This doesn't happen often, but I'm in it now, skinless and so sad for all the sadness.  My mother, her father, his mother.  My mother's boyfriend, his aversion to white rice, his Vietnam trauma and near death from drinking.  His father, who "died in a gutter--literally, he died in a gutter."

The night before my sister made me watch "Looper" and sobbed with me as her husband and our cousin stared at us.  We cried for the cycles of abuse and loss and for all the little boys with no motherlove.  We cried for ourselves, too, of course.  We did not get a great deal of motherlove but what we got we miss, terribly.  I've always known that I had love to give in a world that needs love.  I am grateful for that knowledge--the one thing I know. I have signed up for every job and cause that is supposed to transmit this love to the world and, of course, this makes sense: sometimes it feels useless and puny.  Sometimes I feel punished and drained and hypocritical. 

I'll take care of myself--I'll hang out with some kids tomorrow, go see my therapist.  Signed up for an art class. I'll forgive myself for eating too much ("if only we were the type of people who work out when they're sad," says sister) and for not being in love and for having not yet adopted the little Black boy I feel destined to adopt.  Forgive everybody.  We are trying so hard.

They kicked me out of jail

This is overly dramatic but looking at many of the blog entries I've written and not published in the last six months, I was feeling really dramatic and tortured. One is called "I'm living the Milgrim experiment." And I felt like I was! I felt so awake and thirsty and fearless, watching the souls I love get either more bruised or less alive. It felt really massive and took over my whole brain. I would try to relax and get perspective and still end up feeling like I was in a spiritual struggle on the level of Star Wars. I may have lost and by losing, I may have won.

And now?

I walked into that place three years ago and already knew what was going to happen, and then forgot to remember because it was happening. That's no one's fault. And then I couldn't leave; I couldn't quit; I had fallen in love with the kids and staff and the Fight, so I dared them to fire me and they did. They continue to act like dicks, for that is what they are, shady and small throughout, and I act all righteous and intense, for that is what I am, and so it goes.

Now my job is managing my anxiety and having faith that everything is going to work out okay. I'm suddenly broke and without the identity I had before, so my little sister has me watch Jerry McGuire ("Even the cover looks like Catcher in the Rye.") So I took my stand, and then this happened, and then the next thing will happen.

I'm also trying to get ready to miss all that love. Little Sister and I went home real quick to meet the new baby Martin, Future CEO, and to see the Cousins, so that should tide me over; a sleeping baby on my chest and one million jokes, jokes, jokes with boys is concentrated good vibes on the level of love from locked-up kids.

I'm applying for jobs, meeting professional contacts for lunch, cancelled the cable TV, cashed in some spare change, and soon I'm going to the bank to figure out what is an IRA? I'm assuming it is not The IRA, which by the way, is another example of power corrupting. There was a heart-breaking journalism piece in the recent McSweeney's, did you read it?

Power buys you the right to stop asking questions of your own behavior, and that's the greatest dope, right? To just zone out into a soft land of self-acceptance. Which appears, sadly, to leave no room for accepting anyone else, or maybe that's just me. So. I'll be over here, not watching TV, not spending money, just trying to remember that everything is going to be okay.

I graduated from Unicorn School! There was a last bit of performance art and I still have the markered word "Surrender" visible on my right forearm. These kids notice everything I wear, say, and do with my hair, but don't notice that. God love 'em, they think I'm weird enough.

I got lots of great things out of the training, and they are all rolling around my head and my body. This is where the surrender comes in--what next, what next, what next. It feels solid that whatever follows Kid Jail is going to have to be a Big Deal, at least to me. I will need three to four regular jobs to fill the emotional space of this monster. And it is a monster, the embodiment of our culture, now, just as much as records released for Japan and good art. Here's where Fear reigns and we trade in Black bodies to make more money for high concept dinners. My co-workers, the ones thrown scraps of Kid Prison Power and a bullshit 'Doctor' title they purchased from chain schools, they refused to unionize, and bad feelings are staying bad all around. I'm neither dissappointed or surprised, I'm just watching fear motivate more fear, and watching how hard it is to pretend that these kids are ours, and their mistakes aren't our fault.

I'm worried I'm going to float right out of here because I can get so heady. I don't get that heady, though, because at some point my face is flaming and I've covered a sheet of paper in direct quotes that don't mean anything to anyone but me.

They talk about the stupidity of "this system" and I imagine giants standing on the necks of children and mournfully saying "these shoes" while slowly shaking their heads.

Someone wrote something around 9/11 time, and it quoted someone else, someone like Blake or Keats. Google it. The point was that nothing should be feared more than a giant who thinks himself a tiny man. Our head guy, all white hair and false teeth and Cook County sleazebag swagger, he repeatedly utilized the Hobbes quote that "life is nasty, brutish, and short" while discussing the fact that our contract may be challenged. Get this: the Beancounters are demanding receipts! They want us to be accountable for the public monies we have been spending! My God, it's like Abu Gharib up in this piece!

He is using this Hobbes quote in a jail filled with poor Black kids to illustrate the tragic nature of how he might lose his right to golden shoes. These kids, their lives and bodies, are grist for the capitalist machine of Chicago. We no longer run the stockyards, but we are making money off bodies.

A boy showed off his torso to me tonight, refusing to put on his shirt. When I left for Canada on Saturday, the super-max super-punitive subprogram had been shut down because someone from the Law had seen it and realized it was Illegal and a Bad Idea. I felt vindicated! But it's back already, and here's this kid with his shirt off and learing at me and I'm pissed. I call him a jerk, he's not getting any attention from me tonight. And he starts kicking the metal door, crying that I called him a jerk. Suddenly I realize I'm a fucking monster. This boy is SLOW. This boy is NEEDY. This boy wants to show some lady his pretty chest and so I just calmed down and he put on his shirt and he showed me a halo move that helps him calm down. He's retarded, guys, and poor, and his brother's in here and he's sorry he was a jerk, he tries to be respectful to women cause his dad beat on his mom and his brother beats his babymama and he tries to be okay with women.

And I remembered not to be a defensive ass, the End.

2011 and it is resolved:

I have to get this art book finished
Get the poetry book out
Wrench my charity money back from the grubby hands of these horrible people
Paperwork completed
Get a new job

When I get the new job, I'll have time to:

Date everybody
Play drums in a band with Cuddles
Write THE book about Kid Jail
Hang out more at the Chicago Freedom School and 826CHI
Exercise

And boom! it's winter, I just got it. That joke wasn't funny anymore last month and I just now got it. I hate all my thick clothes and my boots that keep me warm and dry. I only want to eat beans and pizza and lay on my couch complaining that I'm on my couch. Here is the most apt metaphor of where I'm at, in my life, right now, but it involves some set-up:

I decided to drive a 1998 Jeep Cherokee to Unicorn School in early January, an opportunity to see friends with babies in Pittsburgh PA and Auburn NY, places I, to be honest, would not be visiting otherwise. From one angle this was the perfect plan, and it was the heart angle, so that's what I did. Babies and friends and new cities and not work are all things my heart likes.

From the brain angle, my Evil Bosses all but told me I would be fired if I tried it; I haven't driven for more than an hour since 2001; I am terrified, terrified, petrified of winter driving; I would be driving through America's Snow Belt in early January; and as soon as I got in the ride, the stereo turned out to be held together with Elmer's glue and the rear view mirror fell off.

Still staring at the mirror in my hand, marvelling at my own strength, a possible new job called. Of late I have been receiving too many messages from the Universe, and that's the truth. 'But what does it mean?' I yell to the Universe, messages in both hands. Which is good? What is happening?

I was sad driving through Toledo because with my mom lost to mental illnesses and my Dad moving to Cali, my connection to Toledo will be reduced to the overly-orange mental pictures of a not-that-great childhood. I waved. Outside of Cleveland I hit the shit and it was 25 mph in zero visibility, cars strung together in a necklace of terror. This is moment-to-moment living, for me--I can't see, and I'm scared, and I want to stop the car and just wait for it to pass.

And surprise, there's the apt metaphor: I can't see what's next and I'm scared and I'm wondering what the fuck I was thinking--what the hell am I doing, following my heart on adventures all the time? I'm not a character in a book I'm an actual person--but whatever, it's too late, stopping would be death and I just have to keep going, assuming that I'm not going to die in the next few minutes and that something awesome is in store.

And there was awesomeness--baby boys and little girls, friends and their cozy homes. Everyone settled in and making families. I got to the Mountain and the topic was community. The questions were:

Who am I?
Where am I going?
Who am I going with?

I'm not sweating the first question. The second question, good Lord, and the third question I've been steady asking since I quit drinking. I've been asking it all my life, but when I quit drinking I was really, really, really asking.

No answer yet so I'll keep going and this snow will let up eventually.

Dude, Rob Brezney really is a crazy wizard. He told me to update my blog and so I'm doing it. And speaking of wizards, I made a wizard hat for a friend last night. Yesterday I took a mental health day, the irony of which is not lost on me, a person routinely called "Mental Health" over a crackly prison overhead system. Because it's my job, not because it's who I am. If I were called what I am all the time, then you would think my name was Ms. Funny Jokes Hot Ass.

Yesterday morning I woke up with a headache and sore throat but I powered through, I got dressed, had an outfit all worked up, and then was suddenly paralyzed with dread at the idea of going to my job. I took to my bed. It was very dramatic like I was in a Russian novel. I was able to move only after I had phone-typed an absence email to one of our adminstrators. After that I could breathe and I could walk. I walked through the hip neighborhood north of me, just walked and wandered, and sometimes felt at home and sometimes thought how the fuck does this place exist? How can there be a whole John Fluevog store when I haven't seen anyone in Fluevogs since 1997, and then it was only three people? How are there so many people in coffee shops? I called off work, but did everyone? Did everyone go to a meeting yesterday in which their co-workers cried at the lack of respect and waste of talent they witness everyday?

The other thing that happened was that I saw some party pictures on Facebook and my thoughts and values regressed to age 15, when it was obvious and a real fact that everyone on the face of the Earth was happier, more attractive, and having more fun than me. Combine this mindset with my growing Unicorn Consciousness and my own terrible lady body with her waves of estrogen and moon magic and I lost my ever loving mind, I mean I went crazy, all weeping and feelings and raising my mascara smeared fist to the sky.

I sewed my way out of it, thankfully. And now for emergent themes:

Books: I have to order the books from the book benefit for the kids. I have to put the poems from Poetry Circle together as a book and have a Book Release party. I have also signed up for a project with the Paper Crane to make a book and then fill that book from January until March, at which point it will be displayed, possibly printed.

Patience: we turn to Cary Tennis, who says:
"...being patient is...breathing with all the intensity of a lover. It's being as vibrant as a leaf. The leaf is attached to the tree. It's filling with the green blood of time. It's perfoming daily the miracle of photosynthesis...in the opening we make when we stop doing the compulsive, answers are scattered like acorns. We can stoop to pick them up. That is what we mean when we say, 'Be patient.' We mean focus on the few feet fecund earth around you. We mean take the gifts strewn about your feet."

I cleared out a lot of stuff in this last year and then expected the new world to rush in. It has crept in, it is moving in, but I wanted a rush, I wanted yet another Tremendous Adventure. I think that my adventuring is ended; I think I'm supposed to be like a leaf on a tree in Ukrainian Village. There is more than enough around me, that's for certain. Cousins having babies, jobs having crisis, old friends meeting new friends, new outfits all the time. It's nice, it's real lifey.

Here's me, just chillin' with my unicorn

Secret Celebrations

...are not so secret when you talk about them on the internet, but I couldn't make it to an AA meeting, so facebook is where I announced my year sobriety. It worked, man, I got the props I needed and a tall post stuck in the sands of the interweb. One year, right? I thought it would be difficult like a battle, but it was more like a breakup. A breakup with a sexy loser that's an acknowledged problem but whom all your friends still like.

Between you and me, blog, today marks yet another milestone. Today we herald a secret victory: the fruit of digging up the past and showing it to light. The triumph of will over trauma, of bravery over shame, my hand exercising dominion over my past. Temper all these words with deep breaths and laid-back calm, because I'm way into yoga. Your garden-variety vanquishment.

This is how things feel now. The brutal, stabby struggles of my first thirty are gone. Lately I'm a sturdy boat gauzed with serenity, just taking it in. It no longer makes sense to say that this job is crazy--yeah, no, I get it. The reason I loathe the martyrs walking this place, pinning their hopes on incarcerated children, isn't just because it violates my code of ethics, but because it makes you a citizen of Creepytown.

You can't rescue people you don't even see.

Maybe they have sonar, or know something I don't. Whatever. I have regular old eyes and hands and a relentlessly critical brain that is getting really good at liking me without having to see me as the center of the entire Universe. It frees up time while making insults easier to take. Oh, if insults were sugary candies, I'd been on my fifth set of dentures.

There's this little Polish dude, 13 going on 63, who is an old-school hustler always trying to cop a hug. He's good for a laugh, as is the slow girl going through coke withdrawal who giggles at the most obscure things--not my best material, but like "You said that funny, you said it with your eyes." I've stopped pretending to change lives and now draw awesome calendars-of-the-month that are also coloring sheets. These are the tiny joys I clutch in my hand as the administrators of this place reveal themselves to be not merely incompetent but actively malevolent.

This building is pulsing with the desire to create the world in our image, and it's gross. Keep this in mind. It's time to start thinking of where I'll go when I move on, and then not be that surprised when I end up altogether somewhere else.

St. Patrick rid Ireland of the snakes which were eating all of the potatoes. The fat cats were going to shut down the potato mines so he got together with U2 and Seamus Heany and put on a racy burlesque show to raise cash and morale for Catholics. Divinely inspired, the boys decided to strip to their "staffs" which spooked the snakes into beating oceanic retreat.

St. Patrick wasn't even Irish. He was captured and enslaved during the chaos of the Toledo War and taken via the Great Lakes all the way to Ireland. It was his beautiful singing voice and orange hair that set him apart from the other slaves. "God loves a ginge," said the nuns at the orphanage. And they raised him to be a good potato miner and a slow, sensual kisser.

No one likes being called white, it's boring. Where's our green and ginger? Where's my right to name myself? I mean, I'm not Irish, but I'm not just another white American lady, with my NPR and my coffee. I have a story and a sense of myself that takes up more than an "I Love the 90s" Special, it threads back to carpets in Ireland, drunks dead in gutters, women dead in bathtubs, basically lots of dead people, inappropriate jokes, and rousing music that makes everyone cry. We are loud in groups, also, as a rule.

What do I do when I want to feel more special than I already feel? I think about these stories that culminate in mine, and most years previous to this one, I would have gone out and gotten drunk to help shoot off the sparks these thoughts create. It's the Irish thing to do, it's our one flaw, we just love to live too much, we live to love and laugh, and we try to fly out of our bodies and workaday lives into greater, richer lives.

But I have decided not to drink again, ever, to remain shackled to sobriety and a story that daily begins and ends with me. You realize you are not that Irish-American, even: you don't have eight kids and you went to college twice and your mom isn't the crippled nasty drunk leaching out your life but a tragic story you haven't seen in years. They had her intervention on St. Patrick's Day three years ago and then went out for beers. You didn't go because you had moved on so hard. You should stop pretending, it's unseemly, you don't want to be just another voice yelling "I'm this." First time ever, you don't know what to do on St. Patrick's Day.

Sunday you get the news that Kevin has had a stroke. Except that Kevin is 25 and in good health and coming to visit this weekend, and we are going to wear green and be Irish-American Cousins together.

This St. Patrick's Day, add another layer to the paint on the walls, peeling and damp. I want to be honest about cultural tropes and poisonous family myths and I want to punish myself for my happiness and my single-minded turning to the light. I want to cut them out because I don't deserve or want all the richness of having a family and a history. Except all of this is blah blah and bullshit because this is how I know Kevin, by being born his cousin, into this family.

Kevin is going to be fine, walking and talking again. He's a stoner and a science fiction reader, tumbles with children and loves alike. He's going to be fine not because he's a fighter--he is not--but because our family fights. They sweep us up in their blurry Cathoholic hysteria and we get to look back at it and mock it.

This St. Patrick's Day I'll be moving on from the Patty Downeys, the Shane MacGowans, and the alcoholic man-boy crushes of near past and concerning myself with Kevin. Kevin is a great guy beset by a tragedy, not a narcissist courting constant immolation. Kevin is an all around quality fellow and I'm sending mad unicorn vibes his way until I get to Ohio and cure him with the world's most powerful joke. Kevin: he's a great Irish guy.

"I want to hold a mirror up to society, and then win the world record for biggest mirror." --Tracy Morgan, 30 Rock

This quote was stolen from another blog that I reached through this other one blog. Tracy Morgan, right? Hilarious. Today is the first day I'm banning myself from Facebook at work, and so that's how that's going.

Just as I start writing on this thing again, I'll probably stop. Little Sister and my favorite Aunt both said, at different times this Christmas, that I should write a book. I always figured I would, but like at age 80, and it would be an Anais Nin affair. However I am now 33 and whatever dramatic shift in figure or temperament that allows for scandalous life of artistic debauchery has not happened. In fact, I get more and more like Laura Ingalls Wilder with every passing day. I should write this book now, before it becomes 'Little House in the Big Woods,' with endless sexy passages about how the joints of the tiny dried herb drawers were fitted.

The idea is to write, plainly, the vignettes of the families, children, and coworkers I have had the pleasure of working via my job as a social worker. The challenge is to do so in a way that is not condescending or exploitative; also, in a way that is funny and enjoyable, on some level. Ultimately the goal is to humanize a dehumanized and hypothetical group of people. Little Sister suggested that the ultimate goal is to contribute to another image of social workers, beyond prairie-skirt-wearing-overworked-and-crying-mess; this has its appeal, and then also I'm disgusted by my own desire to revamp my profession so that it is, in a word: sexy.

On the other hand, I dress ridiculously at work with this same intention.

Amidst racial tension at work I actually referred to myself as "white chocolate." I am consistently amazed at the following things:

--people

--life

--what I can get away with

--music

Calling myself "white chocolate" is what I mean about getting away with things; this also covers some of my outfits. How my co-workers respond to me is more of a people issue; due to a common homicidal enemy, everyone has been getting along famously. The girl who threatened to kill me is running around threatening to kill everyone; there is a tension/release thing happening every time more than four or five of us congregate. Tension: she is trying to kill us, get someone else to kill us, or get us fired. Release: we are the only ones who know just how deeply nutso she is; also, we make jokes.

A final note: the mood swings PMS provides are the only experience of highs and lows I'm getting lately. A good friend has suggested hard drugs as the solution to my problems. Hard drugs and soft pants: Winter 2010.

This is M's fifth Christmas locked up in kid jail. She was telling me about speaking Creole and how I can find a husband in south Florida and how her Mom fills up trailers with stuff from Good Will and goes to Haiti every year but this year her Dad is locked up in Jamaica and there was supposed to be a money order for $800 somewhere in the house but no one can find it. She also mentioned that despite my constant encouragement she will not become a social worker. "I was looking at you earlier, when you were talking to that girl? And I was thinking 'Why the hell does she work here?"

Right around the time M. was watching me and thinking that, I was sitting with Negative Attention Seeking Shanae and coloring; or rather, I'm coloring, she's making a huge deal out of ignoring me, loudly announcing that I'm on drugs, and demanding that security separate us. I'm just waiting it out--she'll come around eventually and color out of boredom and the shiny allure of markers. Couple seconds later she was clutching a plastic bottle of lotion and telling me to "duck, because I'm about to do something" and I was sort of laughing, saying I'm not going to duck because she doesn't need to throw any lotion at anyone when WHAP she smashes the bottle down on the table and it shatters and there are globs of lotion and shards of thin plastic all over her, the table, and the floor. And so I calmly picked out the shards of plastic and made a joke about wasting all this good lotion while I'm ashy. "Why you picking up all the plastic, you think I'm going to cut myself?" says the girl with jagged scars all over her arms, who tried to kill herself just weeks ago, who has a life story so devoid of warmth that when she acts crazy I just want to congratulate her for not eating humans. "Well, you know me, always worried about cutting" I said affably. Because it's true. These girls will cut themselves with anything.

The key moments for me are that I actually felt affable--that exploded lotion and unheralded aggression can just pass right through me carrying whatever messed up message they were supposed to send and move right on by. That just as I was thinking "Man, I love this job" M is asking what exactly is wrong with me; and also, that I can have tiny moments when if you stay calm and soothing then suddenly everyone is calm and soothing and we're wiping up lotion and making jokes about my scaly elbows.

WINTER [is a bad time to] Fall in Love

I just realized I want to be in love. It would balance the hurt of this world, fill the space where wine once warmed me, smooth the jagged edge between receiving and deserving. Except now it's winter and everyone who has ever loved me is married or inaccessible in a way I don't understand. Somewhere in my brain space there exists a closet that generates wonderful men who have loved me and I haven't seen it in time and that closet will be empty someday, is my worry. They walk out and stand patiently and then walk on to women better suited for them. I'm not sure how much good will toward me exists in the Universe, but I tell myself it's massive. Any time theology slides into math or volume I get panicky. I'm fianlly paying attention but the closet door is closed and there are no sounds coming from inside. Chick magazine advice is just as vapid but now directed right at me. The list of words and songs and smells that make me ache with the power of all the love I'm shedding gets longer and more surprising every day until I worry I'll be permanently flushed and on the verge of tears. The only culture I've ever lived in appears to be all wrong (on this question, to me) and so I'm out in the cold, so to speak. I'll just keep riding the bus, downloading love songs, reading poetry, and drawing nonsense. The last part of my adolescence is blossoming in the cracked jar of my thirties, and what's to be done with that? On the upside my endless empathy can grow and grow as I finally get what the fuck is wrong with teenage girls, and also try to tattoo on my muscles how much it sucks to be outside in Chicago in the winter, alone.