Ostinatos

Good morning fuck everything I love you.

When I say We got a really good deal on a refrigerator through Costco, what I’m really saying is, I’m old. I give up. Where’s my print newspaper? Where’s my wall-mount phone with the really long cord that I can wrap around my neck like haha just kidding before I untangle myself right as my lips start turning blue and hey! a place for the tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter and oh, some Zima would be great on this little shelf right here.

I dreamed I got together with some poets over Zoom, and we were all so tired we just took a virtual group nap together for an hour. I feel like this could be an actual thing.

Little horse, little girl with no rider, little whine, little winny, little weakness.

The neverendingness of the Epstein abuses mirrors the neverendingness of trauma from such abuses. Trauma is a wound of the present. Epstein is a wound of the present for anyone who’s experienced the kinds of abuses he inflicted on so many women and girls.

I am a ghost haunting a ghost.

Five-word argument.

Me: Quit being so loud.

Him: Dude.

I’m not saying the past never happened. I’m saying I can’t catch up to it.

I think it’s possible to eat too much bread and drink too much zero-sugar soda.

I took a weird nap and feel strangely absent from my life.

Has the corn sweat gotten to some of y’all? I’m just asking.

Your empathy is hollow if it stops short of embracing those with mental-health issues. Even worse if you’re a sanist who uses those with mental-health issues as metaphorical punching bags. We need you. We’ve needed you for a long time. Shape up. See us. Stand alongside us. Fight for and with us.

Why does intergenerational trauma in families persist across three or four generations? In part because things happen again. Like ostinatos in music, traumas repeat themselves.

From a comment on a friend’s post: The terror in my past has come into my present (see also: our past, our present). The hatred in too many hearts has come home to roost. The ignorance and indifference of many others allowed this to happen, got us here, will keep us here. Save your thoughts and prayers. Examine your own bigotry, your sanist language and beliefs, your ableism, your classism, your othering even as you call out other forms of othering. Examine the ways you cut people like those affected by this executive order out of your lives, out of your literatures, and out of your hearts, out of your minds. Yes, out of your minds. Now is the time to get educated about what’s happening, what’s always happened in this country to entire classes of people. People like me. But way more than just me. Now is the time to act—well. To act in the name of justice, not just put earrings on the pig of injustice.

I will not go quietly.

The executive order I just posted about is terrifying. Criminalization of those who are unhoused. Forced indefinite institutionalization. Sweeping surveillance of anyone with a mental-health disability. Let that sink in. The worst of our history, the history most folks never had to learn about, the history that affects the most invisible of marginalized and othered people, is back. It’s here. Who is paying attention. Who cares. The ship is sinking and it’s not even a ship. It’s a coffin.

Also, we have to work at changing bigger stories, cultural stories. We are at once within ourselves and also in the world at all times. Narratives exist at all levels and are often invisible because they’re taken as universal truths. Marginalized folks are in a unique position to help bring about these changes in stories, in storytelling, just by being storytellers. Living with a mental-health diagnostic label and having lived experience with extreme states is something that necessarily marginalizes us, but we have power, individually and collectively.

Two Bullock’s orioles, a male and a female, just landed in the shrub in front of my window. I think the female is the one I took to the wildlife rescue for treatment after a window strike and later released here at our home, which is also her home. If you felt the ground shake a little wherever you are, it was from my heart exploding with love and joy. The epicenter of that seismic activity was Toquerville, Utah, latitude 37.2310016, longitude -113.2756992.

I was thinking the other day about how those who haunt. The way haunting exists in our culture is almost always a form of othering. It’s never rich white dudes who are doing the haunting. It’s always someone oppressed, marginalized, different. There are a lot of stories about hauntings around the psychiatric hospital where my mother worked. People use ghosts to discriminate against the dead, against whole classes of people. That’s clear. There’s also an empowering haunting, or at least one that’s seemingly empowering. The narrative of someone who can do in death what they didn’t do in life. But I’m with you or at least your speaker here: We don’t win by haunting others. But the haunting often occurs in the others, in their unresolved feelings about how haunts and how and why.

Lines that appeared as I moved from dreaming into wakefulness this morning:

Sometimes / we need to be / a vast wild land
To burn / and burn in turn, pinyons / and more
pinyons, fire and more / fire

In the game eat, marry, kill, I am all three.

Maybe we burn our bridges so we can learn how to swim.

There’s always one cicada here in the desert who’s like, “I DID IT! I MOLTED ZZ ZZ ZZ ZZ ZZ ZZ ZZ ZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZ!”

I dreamed I chewed up and ate my own teeth. Just now. I fell asleep and dreamed that. The fillings went down hard.

My mother was my home. My father was my grave.

Seven-word argument:

Him: You’re too angry.

Me: You’re not angry enough.

I saw my therapist this afternoon. We talked about Andrea Gibson the whole time. In the last sixty seconds of the session, I almost started bawling. I got to my car and drove to a nearby store. I started writing a poem in my head, something inspired by Andrea. It started with the lines: “I used to think a soft man / was safer than a hard woman. / I was wrong.” A Journey song came on the radio, “Don’t Stop Believing” or whatever. I pulled into a parking spot and lost it. I just lost it. Big Ugly Cry as People Walked Past the Car lost it. May we all inhabit our lives. May the lines between where we want to be and where we’re wanted intersect over and over and over like tightly braided sweetgrass. May the rain keep falling. May love conquer all. Goodnight.

I dreamed that a human being is a consequence, not a personality or identity or instance of individuation. A consequence, often of war in one form or another. I dreamed that war is a consequence, not an inevitability or glory or necessity. A consequence of humans in one form or another. There was more to the dream than that, but humans as a consequence of wars and wars as a consequence of humans are the parts I remember.

Yesterday, I came across my birth announcement in The Norman Transcript. The announcement has both my parents’ names and says I’m their “daughter.” I wasn’t their daughter. I was her child and his object. I weighed nine pounds when I was born—a real don’t mess with me weight that I still carry to this day.

If you feel like you don’t belong, create spaces where you and others belong.

I dreamed God’s name was Plumplum. We were supposed to give Plumplum plums. We gave Plumplum everything but plums.

So many of the jokes folks with mental-health issues make are at our own expense and reflect our internalized self-loathing and oppression. I don’t know how we can empower ourselves and each other when we’ve bought the othering, dehumanizing narrative hook, line, and sinker.

The world is a dumpster fire, and Midnight Facebook is telling me to pull my belly button in.

The Keep Utah Wildfire Free messaging on the socials is ironic, given that Utah is anything but wildfire-free right now.

Midnight Facebook: Hey, do you wanna see a video about getting rid of a senile wart using two pieces of dental floss?

My thermometer said it was 115 degrees while I was out today. We may be in a severe drought here in Southern Utah, but there’s plenty of moisture IN MY CROTCH. Just call me Dana “Wet Nethers” Henry Martin for the rest of the summer.

If money’s being poured into it, it’s not good for humans, for all living beings, or for the environment. Especially these days. We are what’s being bought and sold. The whole damn planet is at an endless auction called the Live Earth Market, soon to be the site of the Dead Earth Memorial.

When I say it took me five years to love Southern Utah, what I mean is 320,000 canyon-equivalent years and 125,000,000 cliff-equivalent years.

Every year of your life translates, roughly, to 64,000 years in canyon time and about 2,500,000 years in cliff time.

You have taken more than 1,653,600 breaths this year. Keep breathing.

Woke up on the wrong side of a hyperrealistic dream that revealed too much about the world, and about me, to me.

The words that appear most frequently in my manuscript Crude are you, me, water, and mother.

Water is just a form of ice, and it turns ice into water. In the game of Rock, Paper, Ice, where Rock is riveting power, Paper is a papering over, and Ice is ICE, be water. Water always wins.

I’m reading an account of a dusky grouse who attacked two hikers up in Park City, Utah. The bird ran toward them with his ruff and tail up and started pecking at their legs. He followed them for a long time before retreating. This is probably because there were chicks nearby, but I’d like to believe wild animals are just done with humans, especially the ones who can afford to be up in Park City.

Some folks are so othered that they are othered by others who are othered.

Like, I dunno. I see a bird and think, Maybe we can go on.

I feel like the dog in Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains.”

I imagine a future in which humans are “de-extincted” by beings who are humanlike but not human.

Did we really think we were going to die pretty?

Every time I see the word migration, my eyes conspire with my mind to rearrange the letters so I see what I want to see: my mother’s name, Mignon.

Share this:

Related