Utah

Faltering

In a place that’s lacking in diversity, one that doesn’t cultivate an inclusive mindset at the individual and collective levels, broad-based cultural sensitivity and cultural literacy will falter. That’s what it comes down to for me as I look at Southern Utah through the lens of systems theory.

The cultural literacy here is concentrated in teachings and the culture of the LDS church and influences everything and everyone, even those outside the church. That focus leaves those who aren’t members out of social events and social support systems while tending to reinforce small-minded and small-hearted views, at least in this part of the state, about those whose identities aren’t accepted, aren’t represented, or have been historically misrepresented in and by the church. If you don’t believe that, ask me when slave day stopped being celebrated at the local schools. Ask my why it ever existed here in an area folks still insist on calling Dixie. Ask me about the Confederate flags folks fly and display on their trucks.

The selective cultural literacy here is why I experienced no fewer than twenty-seven frictions when attempting to participate in a local literary event, from five different folks centrally and peripherally involved in that event, on seventeen different occasions. Those frictions rose to the level of discrimination in eight cases. The others involved invasive questions about my gender and sexuality, othering, negating, trans erasure, and trauma erasure. The forms of discrimination included ableism, sanism, and gender- and sexuality-based discrimination.

Nobody here can see what happened. They literally can’t see it. The lack of cultural sensitivity and cultural literacy is what allows folks to feel entitled to probing about my gender and sexuality as if I owe them an explanation, to treat me like I’m scary because I have bipolar, to tell me talking about my trauma isn’t appropriate, and more. These attitudes and behaviors also have the effect of expunging me and folks like me from local events, from the local university, and from the area as a whole.

But they really don’t see it. They have no idea. To them, I’m a troublemaker, a problem, someone who’s just hastily making assumptions, not responding to a suite of valid experiences and real erasures that have been occurring for eight months and, outside this event, for five years, which is when my husband and I moved to Southern Utah.

It won’t change. This place won’t change. But what’s happening here underscores why we need more understanding, not less. More inclusivity, not less. More cultural literacy outside of one specific culture, not more of the same. We need these things across the country, but Southern Utah is where their effects are felt earlier than in other places and more painfully and more deeply and more consistently, all outside of a larger supportive community. There is no larger supportive community here unless you believe those intent on gaslighting you into thinking there is or that there is no issue here that isn’t all in your head.

Beating Back Blackbirds

I went to Storm the Mic tonight at Art Provides in St. George, Utah. This is the energy and community I’ve been looking for here in Southern Utah. Things finally aligned in a way that allowed me to attend. I also read three of my poems. It’s the first time I’ve done so in more than eight years.

It was important for me to read tonight. If I didn’t do it, I’d never do it. And poems can’t just live on the page. They live in us, through us, and between us. We have to give them breath. They move through our bodies by way of our lungs, our throats, our mouths.

Poems are like instruments. You can’t leave an instrument in its case or just open the case and peer inside at all that bright metal or dark wood. You have to get it out and say it/play it.

I left poetry and the poetry community eight years ago after an especially traumatizing situation that made it impossible for me to continue writing. I vowed to never write another poem. And I didn’t until I had a cancer scare last summer and started talking with some friends of mine, poets who never gave up on me, who kept loving me and checking in on me year after year. One night, after talking with one of those friends, I decided to write a poem to wind down before I went to sleep.

“Boys are beating back blackbirds. Houses hoard the sunrise. / This autumn is unmetered, a dream of wind and shovels.”

Those were the first two lines. I knew I was in trouble. Poems were still there, inside me, surrounding me, eager to be transcribed. Poems waited for me, too, all those years. When I returned, they weren’t even angry. They just flowed.

“This room. This rock. This rough sand. On my shoulder. / On my stutter. On my girl skull. On my hinges.”

Oh, I was in so much trouble. But it was good trouble. This time, poetry would be nothing in my life but good trouble. I could tell. I could feel it. I was home, again, in these words that twist and dance and break and stammer all around us all the time. I could catch them and engage in deep play, deep exploration.

Love. That’s what it is. Writing poetry is an act of love, an act of care directed inward and outward: community care and self-care. It doesn’t even matter what we write about. It’s all love, ultimately. Love is—didn’t Thich Nhat Hanh say this—the act of being alive not only within but also because of uncertainty and pain. (I’ll find the quote and update this post when I do.) The upshot is: What isn’t love? It’s all love.

“Night of deep crimes. Day of mirage ceilings. / During each, an orchestra of fire between my ears.”

Darren Edwards does an incredible job hosting Storm the Mic. I’m so thankful for him, for everyone who attended and read, and for Art Provides for letting folks use their space. They are literally providing for artists, poets, and writers when all three are so desperately needed.

Blood Work

I’m basking in the afterglow of running the gauntlet of angry Utahns waiting to have their blood work done at the draw station when none of the phlebotomists managed to report to work, so another staff member who knows phlebotomy had to step in, even though that’s not her job.

The people in that waiting room were hungry because these are fasting tests. They were sick and old and impatient. They had things to do or nothing to do that they’d rather do elsewhere than at the draw station.

One had a repairman coming. Another needed to get back to his morning gardening. A third was assessing the situation from a systems-theory perspective. Things weren’t run like this when he worked in IT for military hospitals, he told me.

A fourth tried to jump the line and complained bitterly when he was told he couldn’t do that. A fifth ran through the halls with blood dripping from her arm where the needle had been inserted for the draw.

And then there was my favorite, an octogenarian who turned to her husband and shouted, “Well, this is going to take forFUCKINGever” loud enough for everyone waiting to hear.

Also, even with all the peeing I do day in and day out, there’s one time I can’t pee. It’s when someone tells me I need to provide a urine sample and hands me a clear plastic cup.

Dana for Mayor

My day hasn’t gone as planned. I went to get lab work done early this morning only to find out the orders were never placed, which means I won’t have results in time for my appointment with the specialist who (should have) ordered them. This is the doctor who, in part, is following my cancer status, so the labs are important.

I came home to an attempted identity-theft scam that Jon and I both had to deal with immediately. Things like this are happening more frequently, and they’re harder to identify. Someone tried to hack one of my online shopping accounts just three days ago.

I commented on a story in The Salt Lake Tribune in support of a gay mayor in one of Utah’s cities. Someone else in the queer community, another Utahn, saw my comment and thought I was saying the opposite of what I was saying. Their response was to tell me that I’m attacking the mayor based on his sexuality, that I’m not being Christlike, and that I’m so ugly-looking that they’d never live in a city where I was the mayor. Humph. I have many grumpies around that set of assertions.

My Fitbit died. I have no data whatsoever, and I rely on that data for my health and mental health.

I drove half an hour each way to see my therapist, where I hoped to talk about the parts involved in my strong feelings about the SLT commenter calling me an unattractive, unkind homophobe, but the therapist forgot my appointment, which means I drove for an hour for no reason and have three exiles I need to deal with on my own now rather than in therapy. (Exiles are a type of part in the Internal Family Systems framework. It’s not ideal to be exploring them alone.)

These are all small problems in the larger scheme of things, and they’re counterbalanced by an incredible conversation and connection I had with a fellow poet today. We talked about organization, one of my favorite topics, and poetry and community and dogs and mountains. I mean, it was good stuff.

Also on the plus side, there’s my sweet dog. And my relative ability to handle all these relatively small problems. And my view of the laccolith, which I can see now that the clouds have started to dissipate or move on or whatever clouds do.

Oh, and someone ran over a raccoon in our neighborhood, so there’s also that sad occurrence. That’s another item for the negative side of today’s +/- list. I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t been making that fruitless round-trip drive to see the therapist.

You can file this under grumpy with a lower-case g or grumpy with a capital g or dumpy if you also think I’m so unattractive you would never live in a city where I’m the mayor. The last part of that sentence was written by one of the exiles. She was called ugly by her classmates almost every day of her life from preschool until she was well into puberty. We’re working through it.

A Cascade of Bad Choices

Several alarming news stories have run in The Salt Lake Tribune over the past several days. They all have ties to Utah and involve children. I can’t be more specific without being censored by Facebook. Two of the stories are linked in my feed if people want to read them. There’s a paywall, but you can get an idea of the subject matter by reading the parts of the stories that are visible.

Each story is horrific on its own, but together, they’re overwhelming. I cried most of yesterday morning. It was too difficult to process this news, especially given what’s happened and appears to still be happening in my own family, so I engaged in several forms of avoidance, including employing maladaptive coping skills that threw my metabolism off and undercut the work I’ve done following a ketogenic diet for mental health, doing intermittent fasting, exercising, getting the right nutrients, and maintaining healthy biomarkers.

I’m writing about this because I can see how something that’s upsetting can cause someone (in this case me) to do one thing that throws something off, which in turn throws something else off, which in turn throws something else off. Then maybe more bad decision-making gets thrown into the mix as things start to slip, and pretty soon a little movement in the ground turns into a mudslide that swallows an entire house, trees, retaining walls, and more.

Yes, the upsetting thing is upsetting, but the behaviors that follow and aggregate are what drive the mind and body into a state of disequilibrium that prevents a person (still me) from finding ways to sit with and work through what’s upsetting to whatever extend they (again, me) are able to.

Here’s what went down yesterday. Upset about the news stories, I developed a sudden craving for brownies. It was an all-encompassing desire. I went to Lin’s, where they sell Num Bars, which are ketogenic. They didn’t have them. (Turns out, the Utah-based company went out of business.) In my desperation, I got no-bake chocolate cookies instead. (This is when the whole ageism incident happened with the cashier, which added to my distress.)

I came home and ate the whole container of cookies, thereby consuming four times my typical amount of carbs, and none of those carbs were good ones. My body can’t tolerate carbs anywhere north of 50 net grams per day. (I have data from my cardiologist and endocrinologist that supports this assertion. It’s not just a thing I’m saying to be dramatic.)

The rest of the day, I made terrible choices or simply didn’t do what I should have done for my health. I failed to take my supplements. I didn’t drink water. I didn’t do my intermittent fast. I didn’t eat enough protein or, really, anything healthy for the rest of the day. I didn’t lift weights, something I do regularly for my metabolic health. I didn’t exercise. I didn’t meditate. I wasn’t mindful.

In short, one bad choice became more than one dozen bad choices.

Here’s the thing: I was terrified of having nightmares last night based on those news stories. I’ve already had several nightmares involving my family in the past couple of weeks, one of which was incredibly difficult to process. So I sabotaged my sleep before I even went to bed. I’m not surprised that I woke up at 3:46 a.m. this morning and had trouble falling asleep again or that my sleep was especially restless according to my Fitbit or that my sleep score was ten points lower than usual.

What I am surprised about is how difficult recovering is for me. I have a seven-day intervention I do when I need to really focus on my metabolic health. I told myself I’d start that intervention today. I didn’t. Instead, I stayed in bed most of the day. I just now made my way to my computer. My food choices today aren’t great but they aren’t stellar, either. My digestion is hosed, again, just after I got it back on track. I haven’t exercised. It was a struggle just to get dressed, to make the bed, and to make my way to the living room, where I stopped for a long while and watched reruns of “The Conners” as I mustered the strength to get to my computer. I haven’t bathed. My hair is weird. I didn’t even have it in me to put on lotion.

And it’s cold and the days are short, which makes getting on track that much harder.

This all illustrates how a single genuinely upsetting thing can lead to a systemic issue and why it’s so important that we recognize these kinds of patterns. I know I’ve been talking about me, but I’m not the only one who experiences this kind of domino effect under stress. Many of us do, perhaps most of us.

Right now, I’m trying to do things that will help my body recover. I’m starting with water. That seems doable. Then I have to process these stories about children without doing more harm to myself. I don’t know how to do that. Process the stories, I mean. How does one come to terms with the kinds of things discussed in this type of reporting, things happening here in Utah, across the country, and around the world? I want all living beings to be free from suffering and the causes of suffering, but we’re often the cause, and children should never suffer the way too many of us make them suffer.

The Time Capsule of My Body

I feel this sadness spreading across the time capsule of my body. My cells remember this sadness and pull toward it like iron beads to a magnet hovering above them a little too high for them to fly into the air but not high enough to keep them from vibrating against each other. I don’t mean any sadness. I mean this sadness. I mean how this dying connects with all the dying I’ve experienced.

I see the honey locust against a darkening sky. I see the laccolith darkening before everything else I see. I see the edge of the pasture where Curley, Friday, and Jet live. I see a hummingbird zipping up and over the house.

I hear the dishwasher busying itself in the kitchen. I hear the bulb in my desk lamp buzzing. I hear the cars on Highway 17. No, not the cars: the tires. I hear my tinnitus, especially in my right ear.

I smell mildew from the dish towel I just wiped my hands on. I smell my berry-flavored Eos lip balm. I smell my hairspray even though I didn’t use it today. I smell cloves from my aromatherapy kit.

I taste the olives I just made myself eat. I taste salt because I’m part salt. I taste whatever taste arsenic-laden Toquerville water is. I taste the skin on the inside of my mouth.

Correction: I feel the skin on the inside of my mouth. I feel my wet hair tightening into curls against my face. I feel the balls of my feet pressed against the windowsill. I feel the raised lettering on my keyboard.

I’m forgetting how to spell words like waist (waste?) and buzzing (bussing?) and sarong (which I didn’t even use in this post) and, in a minute here, tranquilizer (tranquelizer?). I’m forgetting words entirely, like laccolith (la- something) and desk lamp (light on table surface) and aromatherapy (smell healing).

This sadness feels like being shot with a horse tranquilizer. At least, that’s how I imagine it feels. I’ve never been shot with a horse tranquilizer, but I’ve been sedated for surgery, which quickly turned into sugary, just as the doctor who performed my surgery, Ryan Cooley, quickly became Dr. Floovr and remains Dr. Floovr to this day.

Language is leaving me. Dyslexia and working memory impediments are taking control of me in ways that aren’t fun or creative or surprising. I want to tell you about the sky now, how it’s the perfect ombre, about the bats fluttering above my street, about the honey locust and how it’s so dark that it looks like it’s gone beyond black. It’s the darkest maroon you’ll ever see. Something like that. I want to tell you something like that.

Not the Porcupine

It was not the porcupine’s skeleton. The ribs were much too large, and from one angle, I was able to see that it was a deer who was almost entirely stripped clean save for the head.

I ended up turning around in the cemetery, where I met three cows: Curly, Friday, and Jet. I stopped to say hi. They all came over to say hi back. Jet is the only one who urinated while walking toward me. It was surprising how much Jet could urinate. Jet and Friday appear to be very close. They nuzzle their heads and lie side by side in their grassy pasture. They live with a chicken. The chicken wasn’t interested in interacting with me. I don’t even know their name.

I don’t think this is the real cemetery for Toquerville. There must be another one for the pioneers, like the one over in Silver Reef. This is a more modern cemetery. The dead in it are barely dead.

Last year, a neighbor was upset that land near the cemetery is being developed. I don’t want people in their houses looking at me when I’m dead, she said. She went door to door asking folks to sign a petition to stop the development. Now, the bypass road will be back that way, too, not just houses. Things like that are going to happen, either now or after we’re dead.

If I planned on being buried, I wouldn’t really care who was looking at me from their homes or cars. I suspect something else was going on for that neighbor: something about safety, the fear of being watched without consent, something about trauma.

My husband was great this morning when I told him I needed to drive over and see if the skeleton belonged to the porcupine. He told me to watch for cars and be safe. If it’s the porcupine’s, we’ll have to go back and retrieve it after you get off work so we can relocate it, I said. I know, he said. I’ll clean out the car.

I’m glad he understands me and wildlife and the dead and bones and burials and honor and how it all somehow relates to healing.

Living Through Destruction

I just woke up from a dream that I was driving through Canyonlands while Harold Budd and Brian Eno’s “Not Yet Remembered” played in the background.

The wind has stopped. It’s raining. It’s dark. I’m here in the dark-sky Toquerville blackness, in the no-wind dribbling rain, crying about yet another place I love.

May we all remember a place we love today, even if it’s gone, even if it’s been destroyed, even if we’re living through its destruction. May we all survive and help our places survive, too.

Neighborly

Morning Prayer October 16, 2024

I’m listening to the chickens on the other side of La Verkin Creek over in the Cholla neighborhood where people have lawns and shade trees and gardens and orchards and side-by-sides and motorcycles and religion-themed Little Free Libraries and trampolines and waterfall-edge pools and corrupt former city council members and huge parties with DJs where all the dirty words in songs are replaced with nice words and big flags and banks of photovoltaic panels and gazebos and bermed landscapes and guns that they wear all the time and men who come out of their homes and surround you and ask what are you doin’ and accuse you of looking in their windows when you’re just out birding and saying you better not be a liberal and asking you what state you’re from ’cause if it’s California, you got no place here and telling you that you can’t be on city property and pointing to the No Trespassing sign they’ve posted on the city-owned bridge that connects your neighborhood to theirs and they pretty much do whatever else they darn well please, like having chickens.

I’m clearly not a fan of Cholla, but I do love those chickens. Listen to the way they greet the day. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW. They don’t care about Cholla. Bu-CAW. They just want to chicken. Bu-CAW. So they chicken. They chicken hard, and I get to listen to it from the relative safety of my home because their vocalizations don’t stay in Cholla. They go where they want and are received by those who need to be reminded how to live above repression, above cultural toxicity, and on their own terms.

Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW.

Anyhoo. For the record, I’m not from California. I’m from Oklahoma. And I’m not a liberal. I’m an outsider American Leftist who’s not a tankie. And I really was surrounded by three of Cholla’s HOA members a week after we moved here when I decided to go out birding. The city almost took the bridge away when it found out what the Cholla folks were doing to intimidate folks in our neighborhood. I wrote a letter to the city saying it was all good. I made those men chocolate-chip cookies, and they brought me a passel of pomegranates, and we smoothed everything out on our own. So the bridge remains. You’re welcome, Cholla. (You can look all this up in the Toquerville City Council Meeting Minutes from 2020, which are online. I am not even exaggerating about the city threatening to take away the bridge if residents couldn’t play nice. The whole thing was ridiculous but not inconsistent with the rest of my experience in Southern Utah.)

I got distracted. Here’s the prayer part: May we all Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW today. Let’s chicken. Chicken like there’s no tomorrow. Chicken for those who need to hear you chicken—maybe across a creek, maybe on the other side of the world. Chicken because chickens rock and you rock, so you really should chicken.