44. The Week in Me
TW: Depression, suicidality. (I'm okay!! I'm good!)
I, like a lady who lunches1, hustled my unemployed ass over to my local library Wednesday for a lecture and art workshop centered around the Apsáalooke (Crow) painter, photographer, and mixed-media artist Wendy Red Star. Red Star’s work examines and satirizes stereotypes of indigenous people whether a non-Native audience holds them with benevolent intention or not: indigenous peoples’ communion with nature and their depictions, always in warbonnets, always in dreamcatchers, always antiquated in John Wayne movies and outdated fourth-grade history books read in towns with Native names but no Native people.
Here’s an interview with Wendy.
After the lecture, our instructor Liz invited us to grab the Blick store’s worth of materials from the back and get to crafting. We could print our own photos to incorporate into collage or painting, create a commentary on nature (which…all I need in this life of sin is me and my Claritin, so no), or practice figure drawing with a projected image of Bull Chief.
Cultural appropriation is one arena in which I prefer to deploy an unchecked avoidant attachment style, so I opened up a handful of magazines and cut out glossy pieces of my life. The letters of my name in Big Lebowski ransom font2. A tiny, inexplicable appearance of my birthday twin David Spade in Joe Dirt. A music-video vixen in a leopard thong bathing suit. Then I hit an article about the rapper Too Short, with his name in black on a bed of seafoam green, and smirked. I was bullied as a kid for being too short. I went on Lupron to medically postpone my puberty so I could go on a ration of Sylvester Stallone’s hoarded human growth hormone supply. I would have been 4’6” as an adult. “My ass,” I thought. The next page featured a giant Roddy Rich diamond pendant of a dinner set, a feast of a reminder of my seated gluttony in food and shopping and full shelves and urges. The gout of me.
And then I, like Chrishell on this season of Selling Sunset, was activatèd.
A Flavor Flav clock medallion.
The metronome of “I started too late”s I speak to myself and everyone around me, about writing, about music, and the time I waste barking those words from my mouth instead of doing.3
The eyes of Hiam Abbass (Marcia from Succession).
What I first thought I was clipping out as brown eyes, eyes of my hue, I realized was the scornful glance of a dissatisfied mother. My mom has been nice this week, calling me “chickie,” remarking how proud she is that I took a trampoline workout course, calling the folks that didn’t hire me because I’d be “bored” there “fuckers.” But that is a fossicking of machinated forgiveness for my tears last week, tears I haven’t let her see in a long time, after one of the cruelest things someone has ever said to my face, let alone a mother. My mother. I will never be good enough. My mother’s eyes are blue, yes, like Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, but I recognized the same mathematical ice in the eyes I cut.
A creepy-ass doll that gives “Samantha the American Girl doll if she didn’t slay.”
I once told my therapist I hated my inner child. I resented her for not learning the right lessons, not picking up a guitar, for saying no, for saying yes. I have much to heal. I have much to learn. I have much to muster the courage to face. The image of a false child, a hauntèd, cursèd muñeca, felt numinously right…why? I am, for now, choosing not to know.
A vinyl record.
I affixed the record to the middle of the bejeweled knife, a commentary on how my short-lived music “career” was a ministry of self-laceration, to quote a guy with pink hair that I used to hook up with. (He was right, remains a good dude.) I hated my voice. I hated that I could not womansplain myself to mansplaining producers other than wanting things “brighter” in the mix or the guitar to sound “more guttural” or like that one Shannen Moser track I brought with me to every session. I once overheard my producer tell my mixing engineer (Kyle, you a real one!! We love Kyle in this house!) that my voice was sibilant, the same thing my abusive ex-boyfriend told me early in the grooming process, the shampoo before the leave-in conditioner, if you will. I still hear my then yet-to-be-excavated nasal polyps when I don’t skip past my Jolene sequel “Abbey, I’m Sorry I Stole Your Man” fast enough. And I skip, with alacrity, with aching need. My singing voice, all three octaves and two semitones of it, made me suicidal. I learned what it meant to hate myself, to want myself terminated with extreme prejudice. Not the depressal missive that caught my eye at 13 and held it all these years, that told me suicide was painless, a loving protection for myself against a world that reaved and reaped me one time too many, but to feel that I merited zamochit of my existence. Despite this…part of me still wants to release the 40 painful, funny, true, incisive songs in a Google Doc, tucked safely away from those producers, tucked safely away from bastardization in meaning by listeners, tucked away from myself and what making them would do to me. The knife, too, was regret that I ever stopped, didn’t try to - to quote Churchill like a real piece of shit - take one with me.
Well-fed arms.
I guarantee you no one gives a shit that my arms look flabby when I take photos from the side. EXCEPT ME!!!
The hanging rope.
See the vinyl record.
A hieroglyph of a sun, made from light peeking through yellow curtains.
The cloud I cast over myself, holding it aloft, couraging against the direction of the wind, an umbrella. The antidepressants I have grown lazy about taking, the unsurety of their use when I do. Stupid, stabbing perspectives. My something borrowed, something blue betrothal to the sublunary. My hummingbird quickness to cast myself as bad and wrong and an abberation, an unwelcome siphoning of precious air and my friends’ patience and Exxon gas and boxes of Annie’s white cheddar mac and cheese. Ribbons of blue from its center, tendrils of my perennial truancy in looking up, looking out beyond the land I rent with my little feet, looking to live what is natural and true: not rehearsed, not cast like pinched clay, not storyboarded.
A basket-weave of a painter in a field.
This is where I let the indigenous theme of our presentation come through, in using a craft textile. When I saw this in the New Yorker I was flipping through, I thought “How I should be creating: phone away, commenting on something grander than my stupid brain, using an expanse of color(ful words), absorbing the outside world (movies I watch, music I enjoy) and producing something meaningful to say about it.” I have taken to beating myself up, just a little thankfully, that I do not feel I am yet someone with any skill as a critic, like
A triangle of leaves, branches strangling a blue sky.
A verdant reminder to touch grass. Too on the nose? Yes, but it goes without collaging that I am as subtle as a Ford Fusion in a superbowl sitcom special.
Why is it that a craft workshop on Native American art surrounded by 10 immigrant women in their 70’s, something nice, something banal, a pleasant activity, led me to deforest myself with the magazines you read while you’re pooping at your mother-in-law’s house? Why do I fucking do this to myself? Can I create without punting myself in the face with my own chewed-off leg? Can I love myself if I create? Can I love myself if I don’t? Can I write about a nice rose bush, or reproductive justice, or ravage a movie with irresponsible messages without inserting myself, my trauma, my dumb white life into the work?
Does anyone, really? Why that rose bush? Why that biography of Frida Kahlo? Why that story of a factory worker in Duluth? Absent of an editor’s mandate and a watermarked check, why? And even with a hefty advance lobbied at an artist, can they write about roses and leave their grandmother’s roseate talc scent out of the words they choose, the lilt of the piece? Can they conjure a fictional radical activist without that person marching through their own vena cava, or that person flouting their every held belief?
I am new to this, writing, sharing. Maybe I don’t know how to cloak myself from unforgiving natural light, writing as characters, writing in the spectacles and stained sweater of a Serious Journalist, so I stick to the rivers and the lakes that I’m used to. Maybe that will change by blog 100. Maybe I never will understand how to shield myself, my innards, from the sun.
That’s another thing I’m bad at - wearing sunscreen.
And now, some recs…
To listen:
My friend Itarya’s band Rid of Me released their new album, Access to the Lonely. Because I am well-connected and cute, I got to stream this earlier than all of y’all.
I have sent this album to about 12 people already, people who I know can handle the level of whoopass it has to offer. Rid of Me’s cover of Sheryl Crow’s “If It Makes You Happy” is an all-timer too, and one of the songs I scream most often in the shower:
To watch:
I saw Merrily We Roll Along on Broadway. I’d go see it again, if any of y’all want to join me. Daniel Radcliffe to the surprise of many EXCEPT ME, the girl who would write his initials in her 12-year-old diary, did a patter song that basically amounted to a rap. I’m sure people were in awe of his talent, etc, etc. But he is true to this, not new to this!!
Whitney and I had the pleasure of seeing understudy Leana Rae Concepcion in the role of Beth, and her performance was sweet and fragrant and lovely. A lily in the madness.
To read:
This Newsweek piece by Chris Nolan on Heath Ledger. I can’t imagine anyone who didn’t want to be, kiss, or be serenaded by that man. May he rest.
Zeba wrote about attending the march in Washington, D.C. and asks some singing questions we could all do to meditate upon:
As a proud Jew with relatives reporting from Israel in my WhatsApp inbox: ceasefire now.
I offer a resource in balance, taken from a recent
email:“STANDING TOGETHER is a grassroots movement mobilizing Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel in pursuit of peace, equality, and social and climate justice. While the minority who benefit from the status quo of occupation and economic inequality seek to keep us divided, we know that we — the majority — have far more in common than that which sets us apart. When we stand together, we are strong enough to fundamentally alter the existing socio-political reality. The future that we want — peace and independence for Israelis and Palestinians, full equality for all citizens, and true social, economic, and environmental justice — is possible. Because where there is struggle, there is hope. Donate here”
This is literally just Simone:
This is literally just Lugosi:
Actually my babies:
Various and sundry:
THE STRIKE IS OVER!!!!
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This is that boobalicious, fly to the point of life-ruination, simps wafting behind me like cartoon characters towards a pie sitting on the windowsill shit I want to be on:
From Marianna:
A very happy birthday to the person I skipped prom to go see the 2009 Star Trek with, Nick Messina, who has despite our stubborn Italo natures, remained in my life and will for many years still if I have a thing to say about it. This is for him:
AND! I leave you, just because, with this:
Love you bitches,
TG
And like Elaine Stritch, I am often sans pants:
this was such a wild and fascinating piece and I loved the collage as a structuring concern! Thank you for the mention too 💖
This is so beautiful, I relate to so much of what you wrote. ❤️