Word After Word

January 1, I always make 12 resolutions to not keep; I’ve always made resolutions. Since I first found out about them when I was a kid. My lists are always some version of BE MORE GOOD.  

I don’t think keeping them is the point. They act less as Instant Massive Great Changes in my life and more like guardrails. The resolutions keep me pointed in the right direction, moving me forward; they show me the edges of the path I want to be on.

Over the years, I have gotten more organized, lost weight and kept it off (thanks to Orlando), published books, made new friends, started yoga, given up desserts (thanks to allergy and intolerance, not resolutions, but still).

I’ve seen changes not because of the resolutions. I must make them for other reasons. So, I think they should be named something else. The Twelve Slippers. (It would be a euphemism). Or the Goals for the This Lifetime.

The word resolution comes from resolve; it means to reduce something to a simpler form.

Actually, resolutions complicate your life, they don’t simplify it. Any change you plan to make is going to consume huge amounts of space and time in your life. This year, maybe you should title your list “The Complications I will Invite into my Life this year.” That would be more accurate.

Resolve also means converting complex notions into simpler ones, the act of solving, the act of determining. But these promises we make to ourselves completely work against this language. The word solve comes from a word that means “to loosen, to free, to pay, to release, to atone for” and means, among other things, “to cause to go into solution.”

I’m sure many other people have already thought of this, but maybe this year the lists should be more like:

Ten Things I Will Let Go.

Five Things No Longer For Me.

Four Forgivenesses.

Eleven New Bad Habits To Welcome In.

Delicious Complications For Me

Solve and resolution imply we will find an answer or a remedy but stating a resolution ensures we will not find an answer or a remedy, but rather muscle forward, forbidding ourselves to do a thing we do.

Maybe instead of a year, I’ll use a day or an hour for my canvas this year. “Resolutions for seven o’clock this evening” has a nice ring.

The point is, resolutions complicate life. Life is already so very complicated. But I still need them. They make straight lines of chaos. I like them. They’re good to laminate!

Resolutions are more like imaginary pets than solutions. They take up a lot of room and require much attention if you keep them alive by thinking about

DJ is home from the armed services, on leave for a week over Christmas. I interviewed him in his dad’s living room.

How was Basic Training different from what you expected? 

I expected more push-ups.  [DJ drops to the floor, and in front of the Christmas tree, where the ornaments include a paper cut-out of a hand imprinted with his tiny hand in paint, a photo of him blonde and skinny and wee, serious kid grin on his face, framed by puzzle pieces, He is doing one-handed push-ups, yelling TI—training instructor—style faster, faster faster trainee now on your back flutter kick faster what’s wrong with you. Flipping on his back, he does the flutter kicks. On your face! on your face now! he yells. The dog is licking his ear, in a worried way.]

Then he says, “Look at your little tail, Cubby. It’s furious! Calm down, little Cubby. Calm down. Remember your ear pressure points! Woo sa. Woo sa.”  [The dog is given an upsetting acupressure ear treatment and DJ is redirected to the sofa.]

The interview continues….”We were talking about how it was…”

I smiled a lot. [He opens his new book].

Did you get yelled at for it? 

I did. Trainnee what’s so funny you think this is fun?  We just didn’t do that much physical. I thought there be a lot more turning into a man stuff. That was a native thing.

[By native thing, DJ means negative thing. By Koisk he means Kiosk.]

What was the worst part of this experience? 

The clothes.  So much clothes! I can take getting yelled at. I can take folding clothes. But so many clothes. I never planned Basic would involve so much clothes. I don’t mind wearing the clothes. It’s making them all nice. See those shoes over there? They should be nice and shiny. Polished to a high shine. They’re not. They’re not at all. It’s terrible, those shoes.

The menial tasks. I’ve never been one for menial tasks. So yeah. Less time folding clothes, more time turning into a man. 

What did you love? 

That I’m busy.

I’m glad you like your present. [While we talk, DJ is reading the book I gave him for Christmas, Steven Colbert’s I Am America. Which is to say he is applying a Colbert flow chart titled “are you gay?” to his brother, his father, and the dog.]

I love this Stephen Colberg. He’s hilarious. I can’t take this back with me. Let’s see if boot camp is gay.

[Boot camp is not gay.]

            And the interview is momentarily interrupted again:

            Jake (also on couch, reading): It’s Cole-bear. Cole-bear.

            Junior: that’s what I said. Colbergh.

            Jake: you say Colbergh. It’s Colbert.

            Junior: he’s hilarious. This Colbergh. I love this guy. But who is Margaret Cho?

            Jake: AHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

What was the first night like? what were you thinking?

That “This is going to be awesome.” But there was not time to think. Those first six weeks. No thinking. People were frightened out. People were crying.

You saw?

Or they said.  We lost a lot of people. Way more than usual. Some were recycled. Others go home. Not suited for military service. NMS.

But we didn’t even do a ton of PT. I thought there’d be a lot more.

What was the food like?

College. The whole thing is like college. You get a little choice. You get four slices of bread and some rolls and the bread is your utensils. You have no time. You have no time to eat. Or shave. That first day shaving, it was a war zone. I’ve never seen so much blood. You stop taking utensils after awhile. You just use the bread, to scoop up. Slap it on. Go.

How is it now?  Really happy to be out of there. There’s still the drudgery. But now we have our computers and our candy back. 

And you are the student instructor? In charge? What’s that like?

Well, what’s it like, having your boss?           

We all say woo sa a lot.

When you are in love with the work.

It’s very dangerous to revise when you hate/fear the work, when you feel like you suck as a writer.

1. Tamales from Mi Favorita

2. Red Escada coat and new boots

3. Friends coming over

4. Prayer angel from Rosemary

5. My mom still laughs and has her preferences

6. Cherries

7. Music from West Africa

8. Gluten free bakery items!

9.  Gorgeous photo of Jake and the Bug

10. Warm house, old Christmas lights, flowers in every single room of the house.

What should I do?

Sometimes “Do Nothing” is a good choice but it is a lot harder than it sounds.

I’m having such a hard time figuring out how to help my parents. They are both so severely ill, vulnerable, sinking fast. The situation with them was extraordinarily complicated before these treacherous new illnesses.

I think, most of the time, what I should do is: Nothing.  So much harder than Doing.

Before the new illnesses, it’s kind of like my parents default illnesses were dangerous under-trained stunt pilots, using really ancient airplanes that no one knows how to keep in proper working order anymore, or ever did. They took great mortal risks on a daily basis. I worried all the time. Now, the new illnesses have dissolved their silver wings, they’re out of gas. But they’re still up there, my parents, flashing around in the sky, careening at great speeds, falling, icing, yawing. It seems like someone should be doing something, namely me. “It’s like a two year old out in the road,” Dr. P. told me. “You do not think. You go! You need to go!”

But I’m not.  I’m doing nothing. It’s consuming.

What got me thinking about all this is my friend K. who has an Alzheimers mom still-living-alone in the sky, too, and when K and I talk about what she should do, I realize (you can always see it in other people’s stories better than your own) K. can’t really do anything. There’s nothing to do. Her mom will live alone. Her mom won’t do anything to help K worry less. Something will happen. Right now, I think K. should Do Nothing.  (So easy to tell someone to do this, really hard to practice at home alone.)

I remember the last time I ran out into the road to rescue my mom—I got hammered by a semi and she, like in a cartoon, sat in the middle of the traffic, grinning, fine, fine, fine.

It’s so hard to live this way, waiting for tragedy in the form of small metal planes aka parents to fall on our heads and knock us out.

Some parents organize themselves for the children. But I think that’s really rare, like happy holidays or perfect SATs or finding The One and getting a great book contract in the same year.

Instead of intercepting the story and acting all co-author salvific, galvanizing the situation with good deeds and guilt, maybe it’s better to walk alongside the story, as it unfolds, quietly.

I think of my student Tim, who is in crisis this week, and how good it would be if he could Do Nothing.

Oh my parents. My poor baby parents. I love them. It’s like loving a dream. They’re like a Chagall painting: fragile and falling and very very blue-creepy, beautiful, haunted. I’m not trying to watch a disaster like a traumatized bystander. I’m trying to be with them: close, realistic. Doing Nothing isn’t passive. It takes so much courage and patience and heart and vision.

It’s much easier to Do Something. (Call lawyers, neighbors, relatives, nursing homes, nurses, the dementia hotline, doctors, therapists, the moms themselves.) Busy-ness defers the pain, like a couple stiff Rob Roys.

Do Nothing feels like an abdication. But I think it might be pure love, a way of making more room for God.

At the bike shop, where we meet for the indoor bike riding group, one thing that is so annoying and so hard (this might be another reason I skipped three weeks’ of session, in addition to the mind-numbing soul-flattening boredom I experienced in session one): I can’t tell people apart very easily.

Iggy says, when I am trying to figure out, post-op, who a person was, “What kind of bike does she ride?” I never know this either. I bought my bike solely based on one factor: the color. Because the color makes it stand out and easy to locate. (I bought an orange car for the same reason.) Face blind people are notoriously bad at identifying road vehicles (and their owner operators). I guess we’re good in fields, sofas, forests, libraries, and ancient places–zones where transportation is not important.

At the bike shop, the owner/pack leader MC is easy because he acts like the owner/pack leader MC; he has a distinctive voice and a great noggin; he’s super friendly and always really nice to me. (He’s Southern. Love Southern.)

But the rest of the people (all very nice people): they all look like so many other people I may or may not know—it’s just so friggin hard. I’m just never sure who people are, if I know them. (Whining….)

So, I concentrate on the people I do know for certain. Iggy (outing himself as himself by handing me items that belonged to me, and completing a book-sale transaction we’d arranged previously). Spidey. I always know him because he is assembled in the same fashion as a spider. All night I was thinking I was riding next to Spidey (we’d resolved our little wind preferences issue neatly enough) and then I looked down, towards the end of the night, and saw on his trainer the name Pave. Pave is a whole different dude. Pave is not Spidey. I inspected him carefully. Could he be Pave?  Or was Spidey borrowing Pave’s trainer? I’d kind of talked to him, but I could really talk to him because I wasn’t sure who he was. At all. If I’d ever seen him before in my life.

So, intrigued by the notion the cyclists were all labelled via their trainers (thanks, Jeff), I looked at all the other trainers, checking the dynamo labels I could see from my station. I was very surprised by some of the things I learned. For example: Vixen Two was one bike over.  Really? Couldn’t be her. Vixen Two is blonde, and this woman was brunette-ish. So after many miles of endlessly pedalling nowhere, I got up the courage and I asked her, “Vixen Two, did you dye your hair?”

She had. (Not only do I know her, she’s my—formerly blonde—personal trainer.)

It’s really hard (whine) to sit there not knowing people all evening; I used to never leave my house in the evenings (pity fest, but true). I just stayed home. Freaked out and not up to going out and not-knowing people over and over and over.

Now, I’m trying to sit with not knowing who people are and know this for what it is. I hate it though. I hate how hard it is to connect with people I like so much, I hate that I treat my friends as strangers. I hate it so much. I hate that Spidey/Pave remain phantoms, ideas. 

But at home, during the hermit years, it was worse. All I had was myself to not recognize.

Out in the world now….sitting on my bike: oblivious, hopeful, hello.

I knew biking indoors with the group was going to be hard for me but the first session I attended was the longest, hardest, dullest, flattest ninety minutes of my entire life. It was so horrible. It was more boring than math.

It was so stultifying, I skipped the next three weeks, riding on flimsy excuses (bit sick, Orlando Difficulties Exhaustion Disorder (ODED—it’s an actual disorder, for real!), and then it was “I might be getting a bit sick…”).

Horrible, horrible, horrible riding inside. Debacle.

However. Exercise must be had or depression sets in like a fungus. So, last night, I hauled my bedazzled block and my beautiful Bianchi  and my softening buttocks down to Velo-land and Iggy was there. Iggy is the best. With Iggy in the pack, and all of us pedaling, it got off to a vaguely fun start. All us bike shop going-nowhere cyclists were watching a tiny screen where real actual outside cyclists churn across

It kept being fun. When Iggy yelled “car back!” and I laughed so hard, I lost my seat on my saddle. When we went down a “hill” together, Iggy didn’t pedal, he just leaned forward and sat there, hunkered over his bars, staring at the pavement at the exact angle you do when you’re zooming downhill. “Physics!”

Then CookieMonster passed his water bottle back to Vixen One, who rides right by the water cooler and she filled it for him—everyone pedaling RPE 7 the whole time, no one missing a beat. We were moving, we were everywhere. We were together, in the pack, in tiny shorts, just like real cycling, but the music was loud and

I think it’s so creative, riding inside with a group, because you are limited to your legs and your imagination. It’s like being a kid in the backseat of the car, stuck in the parking lot, adults in the store for thousands of hours. You can really travel in a situation like that. You have to. 

At one point, towards the end of the ride, I glanced up (we were on a particularly gruesome hill, all standing up and grunting) and through the plate glass windows, I saw a couple walking past the bike shop, departing from the restaurant next door, beer-thick, with Styrofoam take-out boxes in their hands. They were all bundled in coats and slipping on the ice. It really seemed like they were the ones—no offense—not getting anywhere and we were the ones having fun.

With funny strong good people, led by the visionary MC, hell bent on somewhere—it was a great, great night. And when the video ended, Iggy threw up his hands, all I won the tour! Which he did. And will again.

From debacle to bedazzling.

Esteban told me about his friend Francesca who moved to a medium sized

Not surprisingly, she is a choreographer.

I really love this plan. I think I will have to modify it. One party a year for the next fifty two years? Oh, when poets plan to socialize….it’s never pretty.

“Reading poetry you have to use creativity—your own. A lot of your own,” B said.

Reading poetry is recreating or practicing that exat same thing that happens when you write. You have to stay really concentrated, really focused, on something you do not understand. You have to stay in that no-place. The strategies each person develops for doing that is their creativity.

This is why new writers are constantly urged by their teachers to read, read, read.  It’s writing practice.

During my mid life crisis, a few years ago, right before I discovered face blindness, etc., I got into a habit of reading Easy Books. I’d never read easy books in my life; I thought English majors weren’t allowed to read anything that was EZ. When I discovered we could and no one really cared at all, I went nuts. I binged. I took up mysteries. Now, I’m out of practice reading hard books. My reading muscles got slack.

Reading some harder books—poetry, Flannery O’Connor, Faulkner, Melville, Dickinson, Durrell—makes it easier to write because you can concentrate for longer in that world in that way.

Reading harder books is co-creating.

There’s a wonderful article on face blindness in People by Bill Hewitt.

On the cover of the magazine, which is about The Revenge of the Exes and Who Can’t Let Go, it’s hard to tell who can’t let go, who is the exes, and who is letting go. It’s hard to tell if that’s all the same woman in different phases of revenge, or different women with varying revenges. Paging through the magazine, it’s really hard to tell any of the blonde women apart at all. They all look like Jessica Simpson.

That’s how people look to those of us who are faceblind: normal but more the same than different. The faces simply look alike. In the art that accompanies the story, beautifully written by Hewitt, the faces have been distorted. That’s not what faces look like to a face blind person. I know it’s hard to imagine.

Tee keeps telling me that to imagine blind, you close your eyes. (Which actually isn’t what being blind is like but I see her point which is that you can’t blink and squint and see this way that I see.) That’s because it’s not a vision problem.

It’s something else. And, people in People are the most alike-looking group because their hair and costumes are also very very alike.

But the writing is really great!