I'm dead. This is why I've kept the same gmail account for the last 15 years despite the fact that every letter in the address rhymes and I have to repeat it 48 times any time I need to give it out. Searching for something mundane, I came across the 500,000 emails and gchats my BFF and I exchanged nearly a decade ago when that felt like a more acceptable thing to do.
I did not think that I had matured at any point since, ever, but I apparently have. Or, failing that, I'm just less committed to maintaining my edge. Now I'm just old and reasonable.* Also, reading back on the problems and experiences of a person in their 20s is bizarre and hilarious, and sort of alienating. Who is this person? Even reading about this life is a bit more than I can take, much less living it, and that's why the changes associated with age are so necessary. People may dream about being young and attractive and interested in everything forever, but isn't it just exhausting? Wouldn't you rather just die? (edge activated) So much time spent agonizing over the personal life. Do elderly people just not care about anything at all? The amount of concern and baggage that I have dropped in a decade would indicate that there will be nothing left to care about in another one.
me: god i hate when people know i like them.
Laura: I do too but only because as soon as I know someone likes me, I lose interest in them
Laura: and I assume that is universal to some extent.
Laura: I think it depends on the person. I think some people who aren't used to being crushed on are so dazzled by the idea
me: oh probably
me: but i don't want them getting dazzled on my fucking dime.
me: i have to keep up my distance and mystery here.
Laura: LOLOL
Laura: you can't always be that one though.
me: haha. ah, fuck every person.
I'm glad I didn't get "fuck every person" tattooed on myself back then, because it would have been appropriate.
I listened to an interview with one of the oldest women in the US years ago. She said her happiest years were in her 60s, and her worst were in her 20s. Why can't we just enjoy ourselves when we are in peak condition and have few responsibilities? I'm sure some people do. Old-me would say those people enjoy themselves because they're too stupid to realize what's wrong. Now-me is just like, I do not care if they're enjoying their lives or not. Time to complain about how many times I see baby yoda every day. No, he is not cute.
Improvement?
There are a lot of funny, shocking things in the emails that I had forgotten about. My new (too late) fixation with privacy on the internet prevents me from pasting anything here, and I should probably go back through this entire blog and delete every identifying thing so that...what? What's going to happen? I'm going to get outed for writing ten thousand crappy posts about myself? Someone's going to tell my dad I made fun of him on the internet? He knows! Or if he doesn't, he should. Do these data mining companies trawl for old information or just current? Bad things can happen, of course, but will they? The data I produced back then is largely useless, I think. You can't tell what I was buying or voting for for the most part. And what else is data for. What is a Youtube video of Sylvia Plath reciting "Black rook in rainy weather" paired with a picture of the moon going to tell the Russians about me, other than I was goth-basic and 26 years old.
*Not true, but truer.
Thursday, December 12, 2019
Sunday, October 20, 2019
Anna, Revisited
The things you find when you log into old accounts.
Setting aside my resentment of Ancestry, which is harder to quit than a gym membership, I logged into an old separate account that I had created to research one Miss Anna Ireland of Detroit, MI, 1936. I was shocked to see what had developed in the intervening years, data-wise. Photos upon photos of a woman whose trail had led to a brick wall for me years ago. I almost couldn't process it - was this really my gal?
I still have to parse through this to make sure it's all correct, but here's Anna, and the things I had wrong. Many questions still unanswered.
I could write an entire post about the '50s Mexican peasant dress, but I'm overwhelmed and I need to figure out if Colleen is still alive. We'll see what turns up.
Setting aside my resentment of Ancestry, which is harder to quit than a gym membership, I logged into an old separate account that I had created to research one Miss Anna Ireland of Detroit, MI, 1936. I was shocked to see what had developed in the intervening years, data-wise. Photos upon photos of a woman whose trail had led to a brick wall for me years ago. I almost couldn't process it - was this really my gal?
I still have to parse through this to make sure it's all correct, but here's Anna, and the things I had wrong. Many questions still unanswered.
- She married Jack at 27. In 1936, this was basically past the point of old maidery. No judgments, obviously, I'm just saying.
- Jack ended up dying in 1954, when their daughter was quite young. Reasons unknown, but Anna fretted about his ill health as early as 1937.
- She remarried a guy named Chick, but I haven't started looking at him. Chick is an out of fashion nickname for Charles that I enjoy.
 |
| Anna and the baby. 1947-48. Check those super-Forties rolls in her hair. |
 |
| Jack and Colleen, guess '48-49. I like this photo of he in his undershirt at home. |
 |
| Jack, Baby Colleen, Anna. Late 40s, tinsel tree. |
 |
| Anna and Colleen already with Stepdad Chick when Colleen was still quite small. |
 |
| Very much 1950s summer attire for mom and daughter. This would seem to be in Phoenix. |
I could write an entire post about the '50s Mexican peasant dress, but I'm overwhelmed and I need to figure out if Colleen is still alive. We'll see what turns up.
Wednesday, October 2, 2019
Ethnic Heritage
I did the Ancestry spit test a couple of years ago. I was fascinated to learn how the genetic past would differ from the oral history, or the documented past by census and passenger lists. I figured it might be quite a lot.
And it was. The data is (are? stop) dynamic because of the ever-growing sample size, so at first I was Lagertha: New Scandinavian. Yes, it said I was almost 1/3 from those upper parts, which was a complete and total shock - it wasn't in the oral or written history, not even a little. My dad was thrilled, not having done his test yet, because it confirmed all of his masculine bikerly dreams: I'm a fuckin' viking! I knew it! He sent me a silver Thor's hammer necklace for my birthday, a rare personal gift post-Trump.
From that, I assumed that our German ancestors were partly northerly people who had settled there at some murky point. A lot of those Germans and other northern Europeans have Scandinavian stock because, well, vikings. When they weren't conquering, they were at least vacationing around and mingling with the locals. We had always assumed from our surname(s), including the secret pre-Americanized one, that we were German AF. And maybe some are, but not me, because genetics are confusing AF.
The results changed a year later. Sadly for me, I changed from Lagertha to Colleen. I was, it turned out, just mostly Irish. Back when I was a northperson, I was fascinated to have to learn about a new culture that I had zero prior identity with. But the "knowledge" of my true genetics had bred no newfound familiarity or sense of remembrance of my people, probably because they weren't, or not exactly.
When I was a kid, my best friend was Mary Beth, a super Irish kid from Brooklyn. Her parents were very invested in being Irish: their doorbell played the first seven bars of "When Irish Eyes are Smiling" year-round, their pets were named things like "Irish Cream" and their home decor reflected their generalized hysteria about the island. They were American Irish, New York Irish, all the way down to the mounted police dad, who had moved his young family to Arizona upon an early retirement from the NYPD. They even brought the retired horse, ancient and gray-muzzled when I met him. It didn't help that these two freckled, pale brunettes had birthed an only daughter with the reddest natural hair I or anyone else has ever seen. This wasn't strawberry blond or even orange hair, it was red. Crayola crayon red. A red you can't get in the salon. That only emboldened them and, even in middle school, I was repelled by their posturing enthusiasm for ethnic identity as status.
I knew my family was Irishish too and identified that way, but I didn't. My Grammy (great-grandmother) and the people I was closer to were all Italians, and naturally I felt I was Italian too. CMAN! I'm Milano eyyy!!
Well, not by the numbers on my card. It's true that both of my Grammy's parents came from their Italian hometowns on boats like proper immigrants, but my DNA hardly recognizes that. Today I am 65% "England, Wales and Northwestern Europe," which includes France, Switzerland and parts of Germany but is most strongly centered on the UK. But I'm also 30% just Irish, and 5% "Germanic Europe". Additional communities for honorable mention are "Southwestern Quebec French Settlers," which I saw in the data when I uncovered the fact that my paternal grandma's people were in Quebec for almost 300 years before they emigrated to the US, making them among the first Euro settlers to Canada. That's 1. interesting and 2. so sad that they didn't stay. I could be Quebecois. Instead I'm from Phoenix.
But all this feels pretty removed. I feel very unromantic and pragmatic about ethnic origins today.
Partly because it's kind of hard to not politicize or re-litigate the past and count up all of the things they didn't know (care about) that we do, but mostly because I question the relevance of it overall.
My issue today is with time and how I can't square that with ethnicity and identity. I read one researcher say that, once an ancestor was far enough back in history, you weren't really related to them anymore. It's so far back, and so many other apparently less-interesting people have been involved since, that the connection is hardly there mathematically. Is this true? I better double check because I just remembered how they found some relatives of Richard III after they finally discovered his bod under that Tesco parking lot.
But my question has always been, what point in history are we basing this on? Irish as of when. Certainly not eternity, surely that DNA has evolved around over time. What about whatever ancient people were there before? Is there a simple answer I'm missing? (because I went to ASU)
They say people with heavily English ancestry returns are super rare, because of how many people passed through there from way back and diversed it all up from early days. Well, my dad has that. Pretty high numbers for someone not even born there. Mr. Jack Daniels Jack Palance Dennis Hopper biker viking turns out to be an old limey Brit. At least for now.
And it was. The data is (are? stop) dynamic because of the ever-growing sample size, so at first I was Lagertha: New Scandinavian. Yes, it said I was almost 1/3 from those upper parts, which was a complete and total shock - it wasn't in the oral or written history, not even a little. My dad was thrilled, not having done his test yet, because it confirmed all of his masculine bikerly dreams: I'm a fuckin' viking! I knew it! He sent me a silver Thor's hammer necklace for my birthday, a rare personal gift post-Trump.
From that, I assumed that our German ancestors were partly northerly people who had settled there at some murky point. A lot of those Germans and other northern Europeans have Scandinavian stock because, well, vikings. When they weren't conquering, they were at least vacationing around and mingling with the locals. We had always assumed from our surname(s), including the secret pre-Americanized one, that we were German AF. And maybe some are, but not me, because genetics are confusing AF.
The results changed a year later. Sadly for me, I changed from Lagertha to Colleen. I was, it turned out, just mostly Irish. Back when I was a northperson, I was fascinated to have to learn about a new culture that I had zero prior identity with. But the "knowledge" of my true genetics had bred no newfound familiarity or sense of remembrance of my people, probably because they weren't, or not exactly.
When I was a kid, my best friend was Mary Beth, a super Irish kid from Brooklyn. Her parents were very invested in being Irish: their doorbell played the first seven bars of "When Irish Eyes are Smiling" year-round, their pets were named things like "Irish Cream" and their home decor reflected their generalized hysteria about the island. They were American Irish, New York Irish, all the way down to the mounted police dad, who had moved his young family to Arizona upon an early retirement from the NYPD. They even brought the retired horse, ancient and gray-muzzled when I met him. It didn't help that these two freckled, pale brunettes had birthed an only daughter with the reddest natural hair I or anyone else has ever seen. This wasn't strawberry blond or even orange hair, it was red. Crayola crayon red. A red you can't get in the salon. That only emboldened them and, even in middle school, I was repelled by their posturing enthusiasm for ethnic identity as status.
I knew my family was Irishish too and identified that way, but I didn't. My Grammy (great-grandmother) and the people I was closer to were all Italians, and naturally I felt I was Italian too. CMAN! I'm Milano eyyy!!
Well, not by the numbers on my card. It's true that both of my Grammy's parents came from their Italian hometowns on boats like proper immigrants, but my DNA hardly recognizes that. Today I am 65% "England, Wales and Northwestern Europe," which includes France, Switzerland and parts of Germany but is most strongly centered on the UK. But I'm also 30% just Irish, and 5% "Germanic Europe". Additional communities for honorable mention are "Southwestern Quebec French Settlers," which I saw in the data when I uncovered the fact that my paternal grandma's people were in Quebec for almost 300 years before they emigrated to the US, making them among the first Euro settlers to Canada. That's 1. interesting and 2. so sad that they didn't stay. I could be Quebecois. Instead I'm from Phoenix.
But all this feels pretty removed. I feel very unromantic and pragmatic about ethnic origins today.
Partly because it's kind of hard to not politicize or re-litigate the past and count up all of the things they didn't know (care about) that we do, but mostly because I question the relevance of it overall.
My issue today is with time and how I can't square that with ethnicity and identity. I read one researcher say that, once an ancestor was far enough back in history, you weren't really related to them anymore. It's so far back, and so many other apparently less-interesting people have been involved since, that the connection is hardly there mathematically. Is this true? I better double check because I just remembered how they found some relatives of Richard III after they finally discovered his bod under that Tesco parking lot.
But my question has always been, what point in history are we basing this on? Irish as of when. Certainly not eternity, surely that DNA has evolved around over time. What about whatever ancient people were there before? Is there a simple answer I'm missing? (because I went to ASU)
They say people with heavily English ancestry returns are super rare, because of how many people passed through there from way back and diversed it all up from early days. Well, my dad has that. Pretty high numbers for someone not even born there. Mr. Jack Daniels Jack Palance Dennis Hopper biker viking turns out to be an old limey Brit. At least for now.
Friday, September 27, 2019
Monday, July 22, 2019
Saturday, July 13, 2019
Black No. 1
Copied from antiquity, or 2014. I'm never writing anything again, I'm just reposting things I still think about. This one was reaching, but I'm sticking with it for now. All those special memories...
I want to comment on what I wrote seven years ago. I do so in bold. Don't @ me. I'm just a person, dealing with personhood.
---
5/30/14
I want to comment on what I wrote seven years ago. I do so in bold. Don't @ me. I'm just a person, dealing with personhood.
---
5/30/14
My dead gothic vampire boyfriend was a feminist.
Every year, sometimes more than once per year, I remember that Peter Steele is dead. This is still pretty hard for me to accept, and I generally mark these occasions by watching a million live shows and interviews on Youtube, and feeling very sad, then feeling ridiculous for feeling sad, while still feeling sad.
Every year, sometimes more than once per year, I remember that Peter Steele is dead. This is still pretty hard for me to accept, and I generally mark these occasions by watching a million live shows and interviews on Youtube, and feeling very sad, then feeling ridiculous for feeling sad, while still feeling sad.
This year, I was joined by my jewelry bff, with whom I spent all of this week's idle hours at work discussing the matter at length. I think we are probably friends because of Type O Negative.
Soon after meeting in a jewelry class, she showed me a keychain that she had made. "Looks like the Type O Negative logo," I said, instantly regretting my comment. My foreverlove for this band isn't something I bring up in mixed company, for obvious reasons.
.PNG) |
| Worn constantly in the 90s and never again. I keep it with the clothes I wear regularly, though. DGAF |
"It is the Type O Negative logo," she said. I raised one eyebrow. We were now GOOD. FRIENDS. It lasted til I left the state, some things are too good to keep alive.
So anyway, in trawling interviews this week, I noted how remarkably without prejudicial hangup Peter seemed to be. Believe it or not, a 6'8 white guy with a Brooklyn accent who fronts a doom metal band is fed a lot of baiting questions by music journalists, trying to lead him into representing the cliched mentality of many of the genre's fans. He batted each of these questions away with bored yet witty answers that would have made any one of today's contributors to feministing.com give a reply of, not bad.
Despite insisting that he hated everyone equally, Peter kind of sounds like a third wave feminist to me. Labels are offensive to everyone, and I wouldn't go around re-casting a dead person's values to better suit my own, but it's true and you should know it. Oh shit. I'm gonna get it... should anyone pay attention to this which thank god no one does.
In one early interview, he was asked about the recent national criminalization of marital rape (1993). Obviously, it was a leading question intended to elicit a controversial reply re: marital rape isn't real rape, that you somehow forfeit sexual sovereignty when you marry (if you're a woman), or whatever insane opinion stupid men were having at the time. He instantly rejected this position and instead talked at length about consent, the lack of which was completely unacceptable to him, because of his wild opinion that it's not hot to push people who don't want you into sex. I don't think I can over-emphasize how unusual his approaches to topics concerning women were for his lifestyle and surroundings at the time, not to mention the fact that there was no mainstream outlet for feminist thought at the time that could have influenced him (don't think he was reading Ms Magazine) - instead, he was (I guess!) simply influenced by his lifelong positive, supportive and familial relationships with women. He may not have described the issue in the way that I would have, but the message was the same. Certainly not what that two-bit music journalist was expecting to hear.
He was accused of misogyny, and rightly so, in response to the band's first album. The songs are frantically angry, all written about and immediately following a breakup, and the music sounds like 80s hardcore, and I guess it was. It was, I just never listened to any of their contemporaries. I know nothing of this genre. I bought the album as a young teen after I had already absorbed the Bloody Kisses album. I basically threw it out the window once I had listened to the first four songs. It was not the band I knew from the baroque and atmospheric Bloody Kisses album. Peter took a lot of heat for the lyrics on this album, again rightly so, but I believe his explanations when he says he was a very angry, very young and emotionally shattered person at the time of the writing. Additionally, the songs were not written for an album. They were demos that he had made for himself which were made into a record in a very questionable move by the record company.
Believe me, I almost never accept the inevitable excuses when a guy is accused of misogyny. Rarely do these characterizations result from misunderstandings - many men express themselves expecting the support and lauding that they've received all their lives, and when they get busted for crossing the current societal boundary line of acceptability, it's all a big misunderstanding, no one has a sense of humor, it's a witch hunt, they're being discriminated against, and all of the other tearful protestations regular white guys get up to every time they get into trouble. Pretty good, 7-year-past-self.
But I believe Peter. And not because I love him. I believe him because everything he said from the beginning of his career to the painful end was almost confrontationally authentic and consistent. At the height of his career, he discussed his fear and insecurity, his self-loathing, his suspicious feelings about praise, and all of the other issues that people of his emotional constitution or background feel on a daily basis. When asked about how he got into bodybuilding, he says flat out, it's vanity and insecurity. He thought he was unattractive and that his considerable height made him look ridiculous, and he did what many young men do in response: worked the hell out. People rarely admit that kind of shit, particularly not when someone is writing it down. When he became a sex symbol among female fans, many of whom rabidly pursued him in person, he said, "What's wrong with you? I'm just another asshole in a band." He openly discussed his drug addiction and subsequent destruction late in his career, and it is heartbreaking to watch. Aged beyond his years, these interviews show a frightened and gaunt-faced man discussing the bitter experiences he had in the penal and institutional asylum systems as a result of his addictions. His eyes were wild, his teeth were rotten, and he could have walked through a crowd of his own fans without being recognized. That is, if he hadn't still been the size of Andre the Giant, with hair down his back like the metal version of Marius the vampire. (Anne Rice, fool! It's goth night).
His bandmates and family say that he was finally clean and reasonably happy or hopeful when he died. His cause of death was aortic aneurysm, a breach resulting from the weakening of the walls of the aorta - an ironic, fairly common malady among recently rehabilitated long-term addicts. It's a fast death following a very long one, and it doesn't care if you're no longer using.
If I misrepresented him when talking about his openness about his discomfort with life, it's because I didn't mention that he normally expressed this with a black, rapier wit. He slipped dark jokes into his conversation constantly, sometimes absurd one-liners, and sometimes subtle, razor-thin remarks that only revealed themselves a moment later. He seemed to enjoy expressing his frustrations and troubles comedically, and he was very, very funny - but then, his brand of bleak wit is just the kind I like, just the kind I am attuned to look for, one that we all possess in some way but that few are able to hone. Find the evidence yourself.
Plus he was hot. Lame, but I'll allow it.
It's Cahnivore's video! Peter working on a car to his own band's music in shitty late 80s/early 90s Brooklyn. Honestly, could you love it more?
Still listen to this regularly.
Still love this, learned nothing, never will, feel ok about it.
Don't know what this was because it's been deleted.
Final thoughts:
I realize that it's a mistake to try to justify Peter for a now time, and a now audience. I don't know what I'm trying to do, other than continue to love this band in a way that is untenable to public wokeness, although I feel their offenses are pretty minor considering their contemporaries. I still think we can review and judge things from the time in which they were created, but were I a public figure, I probably couldn't say that safely without having to answer for everything he ever said or did in public or private, which I obviously cannot do and hence the don't @ me.
There are some problematic things about this band and about this person, but it's not nothing that he's been dead about ten years. I see little point in tearing him apart using a current perspective, particularly when he was already publicly irrelevant at the time of his death, and (knowing little about the current fandom) when I think that mostly no one is actually interested in him anymore.
There are some problematic things about this band and about this person, but it's not nothing that he's been dead about ten years. I see little point in tearing him apart using a current perspective, particularly when he was already publicly irrelevant at the time of his death, and (knowing little about the current fandom) when I think that mostly no one is actually interested in him anymore.
It's not my goal or job to make him acceptable in perpetuity. However, I think the interviews I refer to and unfortunately never linked (but do your own damn research, I don't get paid for this), do shed light on a complicated and embattled personality who was struggling with the world he was born into, and who clearly was aware of the fact that the intensely misogynistic world in which he came up and made his living was not the correct way of the world. And yes, as I mention in the original post, I am aware of the first album and I fucking hate it and always have, as apparently do all of the people responsible for it.
(I wish I was still in contact with my Type O jewelry BFF, the only other person with whom I have shared in detail my obsession with this band and person. Tell her to text me.)
Many of their early songs were disgusting, troubling, upsetting and unacceptable to women who listened. I think that's made obvious but I say it again here.
(I wish I was still in contact with my Type O jewelry BFF, the only other person with whom I have shared in detail my obsession with this band and person. Tell her to text me.)
Many of their early songs were disgusting, troubling, upsetting and unacceptable to women who listened. I think that's made obvious but I say it again here.
I believe that, were Peter alive today, he would have addressed his first album, the only release that was problematic, and either disowned it or explained his changed views. I think people who know him would say the same.
Friday, July 12, 2019
Rodents: Get over them
I wrote this years ago and just found it in my drafts. #mammaries #wrats
---
Some rats died in the ceiling at work.
As a teenhood fan of horror fiction, I've read many descriptions of the smell of rotting things, but nothing really prepares you. I guess I should be thankful that, unlike others, I could not until then automatically identify the smell of rotting death. When this problem occurred, I felt sure that something had gone wrong with the plumbing, but some sadder, more experienced souls insisted that what we were smelling was putrescence.
I passed our maintenance guy on his way in and he asked me how many bodies I thought there were. "Um, a hundred?"* The smell made my eyes weep and my sinuses cringe. I developed a migraine. But it was a Friday, and on the following Monday, we were hosting a new trustee who had been nice enough to give us five million dollars recently. It seemed important that we not make her breathe rat reek upon her visit - we had to find the source. It happened to be lying on the other side of a ceiling tile in someone's office.
Once the issue was resolved, our management company decided to place traps in the ceiling to evaluate the extent of the rat situation. This offended me. All rat traps are cruel, and the ones that aren't don't work. We live in a world overrun with critters and creatures that we can't control, and we're still doing pretty ok in spite of it here in the first world. Our building is 130 years old and shares walls with other centenarian structures that are now restaurants: if there are rats on this planet, they're gonna be AROUND. Get over it, you know? (as long as they don't die in the walls and burn your brain from the inside out with the green stench of their rotting bodies)
I didn't want them to put the traps in. If I hear one snap, I'll remember it for the rest of my life.
I kept various rodents as pets as a kid, but they never lived long. Hamsters always escaped and I grew tired of having to find them. My mother was not a big disciplinarian, but she didn't mess around on this issue - I was put on OT until the creature was found. And they were smartish - they'd find their bag of food in the night and nibble holes in it, then carry leftovers back to the rotating nests that they had carved into the carpeted corners of my closet. Hamsters hate people, btw. Every time I found them, they'd panic and run as though I had abused them, which I hadn't really. I went through a phase where I liked to gently toss them in the air and catch them...that wasn't nice, but I stopped when I realized that.
So I started buying cute feeder rats from the commercial pet store and keeping them as pets. They were only a few dollars and came in lots of unusual colors, soft beige and blue gray, or spotted like a cow. They usually died of respiratory infections within a couple of weeks, sick from living in a big plastic tray with a thousand other rats during shipping.
I bought my last pet rat from a quirky pet store in north Phoenix around '95. It's probably gone now. They had huge angelfish painted on the exterior walls, and carried all manner of snakes, pac man frogs, and screaming cockatoos. I asked for the rats and the owner shrugged and said they had some ugly feeder pups which they kept in a bin under a shelf of snake food. That's where I found Mordrid.
He was kind of cute as a baby, but plain brown, and in his adulthood he looked very much like a common sewer rat. A big one. He had oily brown fur, googly black eyes, and his tail was thick and flesh-colored, flecked with coarse, translucent hairs. Most people hated him at first, then warmed to his benign blandness.
The only thing Mordrid cared about in life was the chocolate orange from World Market. A close second was chewing the buttons off of tv remotes. He died quietly one weekend when I was out with my high school boyfriend, and it was then that I learned that my conservative, uptight mother had become attached to him after years of protest at my choice in pets. She had sat vigil by his cage and watched his little chest rattle its last, worried that she should be doing something.
As much as I may not agree with certain people, I have to respect those who love animals and vulnerable creatures. It doesn't mean you're a good person (Joe Arpaio), but it's usually a decent indicator. My mother and I have fought all my life, but the way she cared for stray animals during my childhood made an indelible impression on me. She always stopped for a loose dog running the streets, and I remember several occasions of her loading random dogs into our car with us on her morning commutes to work or my school. Granted, we kept one who ended up attacking the neighbor kid, but that's another story. Bad boy, Rufus.
I had a mouse in my house once. On a nice night in Phoenix, I had left the screen locked and door open and then gone to bed without remembering to shut the inner door. A few days later, I kept starting up in bed hearing a distinctive rustle rustle in the kitchen. Every time I rushed out, nothing was there. I deduced, in some way I can't remember, that it was a field mouse living under the refrigerator. I bought several kinds of no-kill traps, which the mouse obviously never bothered to go near to matter how may Trader Joe's peanut butter pretzels I put in there (I read they are irresistible to mice). Eventually, Fatima killed it. I woke up to the tussle, separated them, and then being ridiculous, "saved" the mouse in a container, thinking it could just like...live with us in an aquarium? Because that's what it would want. It looked ok, but died hours later from internal injuries. I felt terrible, and gained a new, surprised respect for her catness.
Rats and mice are just borrowers trying to make their way in our stupid massive footprints. They're a bit of a scourge, but before they started to die in our ceiling, we never knew about them at work. I think I may make it a point to stick a pencil in all of the rat traps, if I can find them.
--
*There was one.
---
Some rats died in the ceiling at work.
As a teenhood fan of horror fiction, I've read many descriptions of the smell of rotting things, but nothing really prepares you. I guess I should be thankful that, unlike others, I could not until then automatically identify the smell of rotting death. When this problem occurred, I felt sure that something had gone wrong with the plumbing, but some sadder, more experienced souls insisted that what we were smelling was putrescence.
I passed our maintenance guy on his way in and he asked me how many bodies I thought there were. "Um, a hundred?"* The smell made my eyes weep and my sinuses cringe. I developed a migraine. But it was a Friday, and on the following Monday, we were hosting a new trustee who had been nice enough to give us five million dollars recently. It seemed important that we not make her breathe rat reek upon her visit - we had to find the source. It happened to be lying on the other side of a ceiling tile in someone's office.
Once the issue was resolved, our management company decided to place traps in the ceiling to evaluate the extent of the rat situation. This offended me. All rat traps are cruel, and the ones that aren't don't work. We live in a world overrun with critters and creatures that we can't control, and we're still doing pretty ok in spite of it here in the first world. Our building is 130 years old and shares walls with other centenarian structures that are now restaurants: if there are rats on this planet, they're gonna be AROUND. Get over it, you know? (as long as they don't die in the walls and burn your brain from the inside out with the green stench of their rotting bodies)
I didn't want them to put the traps in. If I hear one snap, I'll remember it for the rest of my life.
I kept various rodents as pets as a kid, but they never lived long. Hamsters always escaped and I grew tired of having to find them. My mother was not a big disciplinarian, but she didn't mess around on this issue - I was put on OT until the creature was found. And they were smartish - they'd find their bag of food in the night and nibble holes in it, then carry leftovers back to the rotating nests that they had carved into the carpeted corners of my closet. Hamsters hate people, btw. Every time I found them, they'd panic and run as though I had abused them, which I hadn't really. I went through a phase where I liked to gently toss them in the air and catch them...that wasn't nice, but I stopped when I realized that.
So I started buying cute feeder rats from the commercial pet store and keeping them as pets. They were only a few dollars and came in lots of unusual colors, soft beige and blue gray, or spotted like a cow. They usually died of respiratory infections within a couple of weeks, sick from living in a big plastic tray with a thousand other rats during shipping.
I bought my last pet rat from a quirky pet store in north Phoenix around '95. It's probably gone now. They had huge angelfish painted on the exterior walls, and carried all manner of snakes, pac man frogs, and screaming cockatoos. I asked for the rats and the owner shrugged and said they had some ugly feeder pups which they kept in a bin under a shelf of snake food. That's where I found Mordrid.
He was kind of cute as a baby, but plain brown, and in his adulthood he looked very much like a common sewer rat. A big one. He had oily brown fur, googly black eyes, and his tail was thick and flesh-colored, flecked with coarse, translucent hairs. Most people hated him at first, then warmed to his benign blandness.
The only thing Mordrid cared about in life was the chocolate orange from World Market. A close second was chewing the buttons off of tv remotes. He died quietly one weekend when I was out with my high school boyfriend, and it was then that I learned that my conservative, uptight mother had become attached to him after years of protest at my choice in pets. She had sat vigil by his cage and watched his little chest rattle its last, worried that she should be doing something.
As much as I may not agree with certain people, I have to respect those who love animals and vulnerable creatures. It doesn't mean you're a good person (Joe Arpaio), but it's usually a decent indicator. My mother and I have fought all my life, but the way she cared for stray animals during my childhood made an indelible impression on me. She always stopped for a loose dog running the streets, and I remember several occasions of her loading random dogs into our car with us on her morning commutes to work or my school. Granted, we kept one who ended up attacking the neighbor kid, but that's another story. Bad boy, Rufus.
I had a mouse in my house once. On a nice night in Phoenix, I had left the screen locked and door open and then gone to bed without remembering to shut the inner door. A few days later, I kept starting up in bed hearing a distinctive rustle rustle in the kitchen. Every time I rushed out, nothing was there. I deduced, in some way I can't remember, that it was a field mouse living under the refrigerator. I bought several kinds of no-kill traps, which the mouse obviously never bothered to go near to matter how may Trader Joe's peanut butter pretzels I put in there (I read they are irresistible to mice). Eventually, Fatima killed it. I woke up to the tussle, separated them, and then being ridiculous, "saved" the mouse in a container, thinking it could just like...live with us in an aquarium? Because that's what it would want. It looked ok, but died hours later from internal injuries. I felt terrible, and gained a new, surprised respect for her catness.
Rats and mice are just borrowers trying to make their way in our stupid massive footprints. They're a bit of a scourge, but before they started to die in our ceiling, we never knew about them at work. I think I may make it a point to stick a pencil in all of the rat traps, if I can find them.
--
*There was one.
Friday, May 24, 2019
Heidi
Heidi is so American. Blonde, blue-eyed, loves tennis, married into a little bit of oil money, loves cars and dogs and margaritas ("margs") and pedicures. As a girl, she went away to a fancy boarding school, but decided to move to Phoenix and chase wild guys around when it came time to go to college. She thought about college, but she met someone instead and set about to fixing him up and making a husband out of him. She made him stop recreational drugs, moved him into a two bedroom apartment to play house in, and hid the relationship from her dad.
Her mom was gone by then, and her dad had remarried to a classic wicked stepmother, who pulled him away from his children and wore his dead wife's furs around their Long Island mansion. He sent money to Heidi sometimes, enough to keep up a lifestyle, but otherwise cooled to her. Meanwhile, Heidi and her new boyfriend got married, moved to the beach, raised dogs, quit smoking, got political, and grew older.
They traveled to Mexico for a niece's wedding and chanced to meet an Austrian man named Herbert. They were with the bride's family, Herbert was with the groom's. They got to talking and learned Herbert was from Salzburg. This piqued Heidi's interest, because she's not really American, or not by birth. Heidi was purchased in adoption from Salzburg in 1955 by the rich American couple who became her parents, a beautiful woman who looked like a movie star, and a handsome man who was the king of the huge, animated advertising signs of midcentury Manhattan. The giant man exhaling real smoke in the Camel sign? That was him. The massive cup of Eight O'Clock Coffee that emitted steam into Times Square? Him too. He's famous in the annals of Mad Men-era advertising.
Unable to adopt in America due to their advanced ages (36 and 40ish), they turned to Europe. Who knows how many orphanages they visited before they saw that pink and blonde baby, with blue eyes the size of silver dollars, fat fists curled around the bars of her crib as she stood and bounced and gurgled. Once you know this, the name they gave her, Heidi, sounds rather on the nose, but it was appropriately exotic for her future life in New York. They signed the papers and swooped the baby away to a life of big lawns, flouncy dresses, Kodachrome family photos and visits from Santa.
A decade and a half later, Heidi's movie star mother died after years of suffering from early advanced rheumatoid arthritis in much of her body. Whether it was an accident or not, it was barbituates that finally did it, maybe a couple of years too late. Heidi was already away at boarding school in Florida, only allowed to see her mother for a few moments at a time when she came home, where she was placed for viewing on a long glamorous couch with her nails done and head in a turban, puffed and pressed into an appearance not too ghastly for the child to see.
Then came the stepwitch, who pulled Heidi's dad away and kept him for about thirty years. Then was Heidi's married life, fun but unremarkable, full of play and stepkids, adversity but always privilege too.
For me, it gets really interesting when Herbert appears. Delighted by the coincidence of meeting someone from her "hometown," Heidi exchanged contact information with Herbert and sent him some of the adoption papers she miraculously retained after the stepwitch hauled every vestige of her husband's previous life to the curb after he finally died. Herbert scanned the German words, and said, wouldn't it be funny if we looked your mom up? What if she's alive? She can't be, Heidi said. We don't even know what the circumstances of the adoption were. What if she died back then? But go ahead and look.
Herbert's retired, his kids don't live in Austria anymore, and he's got the time, so he went down to the archives and checked it out.
And there she was. Paula.
Paula was still alive. Still there in von Trapp town, living in a retiree apartment alone. Herbert called Heidi for permission, who held her breath and then said, "What the fuck, call her," and it began.
Paula's tough. She's cold. She is beyond reticent. She is suspicious. She and Herbert talked several times in an exchange both outraging and comedic as she cursed him and hung up, then called him back, then hung up again. Herbert is a giver, though. He couldn't let this go once he understood the mother was actually alive, and he was careful in his pursuit of her. They become a sort of friends over the phone, and built a rapport outside of this American reality show plotline. Herbert and his wife started to visit Paula, they took her to the doctor and did her grocery shopping and had her house cleaned. She's old, and after a lifetime of menial jobs, she needs help. She fixed meals for them and they drank together in the local biergarten. They became real friends.
All the while, Herbert would periodically report back to Heidi on Facebook or the phone.
"She says she can't remember anything." "She says you must learn to speak German." "She can't remember your father." "She loved your father." "She won't talk about anything back then."
Paula couldn't make up her mind about how to handle this. As Heidi and her husband became closer friends with Herbert and his wife, they decided to go to Austria. They'd meet crazy Paula, and if that didn't work out, they could hang out with Herbert and see the sights and still have a nice trip one way or another. It doesn't matter how early Heidi came to America, how much she loved Davey Jones or how much Coca Cola she drank, she's a lot like Paula. Guarded, irreverent, unemotional: she could handle this.
They went. They saw her. She was a tiny, shriveled lookalike to Heidi in a blonde bouffant, still pretty, with squinty laughing eyes. She hugged and kissed and was warm as you would be to a second cousin from out of state, polite and gracious but that's it. She wouldn't talk about the past because she didn't want to tell Herbert, didn't want him to serve as a translator, she wanted to tell Heidi herself, but Heidi can't understand German. So they laughed and smoked a cigarette together and drank a beer in the pretty sun dappled place, all edelweiss, and smiled and gestured and made the best of it. When Heidi got up from the table, Paula pointed and choked, laughing, mumbled a little something in German. Heidi wheeled on Herbert, "Ok, this time you better tell me what the fuck she said," and Herbert said, embarrassed, "She says you have her ass."
And this goes on! Heidi goes home, she comes back, she talks to Herbert who talks to Paula, then Herbert's wife tries talking to Paula, and slowly, carefully, like pulling a fragile, brittle thread out of an ancient tapestry, they get a narrative out of her.
Paula had other kids, and least two others. The other girl is older and was put up for adoption too. She lives in Russia now, but Paula can't remember where, and a jealous ex-boyfriend burned all their letters so she can't find her contact information. The boy was born with dwarfism, and though she didn't want to keep him either, she did. She was afraid he'd be abused in the orphanage and in his life. He lived to adulthood, but died early, and she took care of him.
She said she was in love with Heidi's dad, a boy from a nearby village. She said he never knew they had a baby. She wanted to tell him but she couldn't. He lived on a farm with his family and she couldn't figure out how to do it or be with him. She told Herbert she really did love him, and he was beautiful.
Although she put Heidi in the orphanage when she was born, Paula would make the long walk back there every day or every couple of days to nurse her. She said she didn't mean to officially put her up for adoption, but she just couldn't keep her then. She said she made the walk to the orphanage one day and the baby was gone.
After that, she became silent. She wouldn't talk about her family, her youth, or even her later life anymore other than she had cleaned a school for a living, and she got by. She wouldn't talk about her parents or her own family or about living through the war. She became angry when questioned and she cursed Herbert, for real this time, not in jest. She insulted him.
By this time, Herbert's wife had had it with Paula. They wanted to move to Spain to be with their son. They were done with this episode of caretaking an old woman who wasn't even their family, who spat and insulted them when they were just trying to be helpful to people halfway across the world, who made rude demands. And there it sat, seemingly over, just a surprising story of coincidence and unlikely meetings.
And it's all true. Heidi is my mom's best friend. She's my godmother. I've known her all my life, ever since my mom placed my 6 week old glow worm shaped swaddle in Heidi's lap, and Heidi fumbled me and screamed, SHIT!! when the family dog simultaneously jumped into her lap, unconscious of the baby there.
My mom says (resentfully) that somehow I am actually Heidi's daughter, not hers. She and I are the same in the ways that I am least like my mother, in the ways that my mother likes least. Heidi and I cursing and making fun in the kitchen, hexing and insulting, talking politics (verboten to Kari).
In fact, this all started for me when my mom and I were having a fight in Heidi's kitchen. A casual disagreement had turned into a real argument, one of those visceral mother-daughter things when everything she says makes me want to flip a table, and when she takes the imagined privilege of not backing off, no matter how visibly angry I've become. In this familial environment, Heidi's space, it went on longer than it ever would in other company. The topic? Where are the grandchildren. As I became increasingly defensive, telling my mom she was crossing the line for real, Heidi suddenly burst into tears. Loud tears, maybe even a small wail. We turned, both shocked, especially me because I thought Heidi had been on my side, and she said, through sobs, "AT LEAST YOU HAVE A MOTHER."
I fell back in my chair, completely dead, and she laughed through tears, "I know. Beat that, bitch!" Heidi doesn't cry. Or not for long.
That's when I learned about Paula. I learned about Heidi's adoptive mother, and how she had committed suicide but how it was somehow ok, because of the pain she was in. I became entranced by this story and I recorded her telling me everything she could possibly remember about both of her mothers, her father, hours of conversation while we staved her husband off with a closed door. Heidi's husband is so extroverted that most people don't know how complicated and interesting her life is, because she is happy to never be a focal point while he can't be anything else.
The one thing I couldn't accept was how reticent Paula was. How dare she? What absurd vanity was she trying to protect after 60 years? How dare she not share the father's name, and the story? Does she not understand what this means to Heidi? She was about to die, for god's sake! All of the things she had done in her life, the kids she abandoned, and she still had to keep that story to herself? She seemed so selfish, so foreign, so unnecessarily difficult. I was pissed. Heidi was pissed. Herbert was pissed. What the fuck, Paula?
I tried to research her on the internet, but it was fruitless. I didn't know her family's names, I didn't know her exact birth date, I don't think she was even born in Salzburg. I didn't know where to look and finding records from back then on the internet in another country is hard. Herbert couldn't even find her without going to a library in Austria. So I started looking into the area and the other towns, I thought Heidi said she was from nearby somewhere. I started trying to find a context for her life. Heidi shared all of her documents with me and I scanned them, translating and saving for my reference. When she was born, Heidi's name was Sieglinde. A beautiful name I have never heard of.
Paula was about 20 when WWII began in Europe. She lived in a place that sympathized with the Nazis. As I learned more about the details of life in this part of the world during and immediately following the war, I started to think. If you're an American with a functional but one-sided understanding of WWII, even if you watch the History channel religiously, you don't know how it was for the Europeans. You don't know what the war was like for Germans and Austrians and others, starving and no work and everything taken away, the bad times that happened before and then what it was like afterwards. I watched an old documentary made in the 80s, when more US vets were still alive, and the same observations rang over and over: the Russian soldiers were so cruel, unspeakably violent, and the American GIs, who hated the Nazis and their supporters as much as anyone, were repelled and repulsed by the way the Russians treated the people in the towns they occupied. To say that they raped and stole and burned is an understatement. And they were everywhere.
And Paula, a young girl, working alone in another town away from her family. There, in the middle of all of that war and inhuman chaos. It's trauma that makes her inconvenient now, doubtlessly trauma that is big enough to occupy sixty years of time. How could it not be? In what scenario was she there in that melee not being victimized and abused? Fuck, to think of it.
I tried to say this a little bit to Heidi. Heidi doesn't read history, doesn't know any more about that part of the world back then than anyone else here. This is the same Heidi who was like, "Fuck it, I'm too old," when I asked if we could get her on Rosetta Stone to learn enough German to talk on the phone to Paula. I didn't want to say, yo I think your mom might have been psychologically destroyed by a war machine and the worst of humanity, but tried to impart it in ways that wouldn't keep her up at night, or hurt her now after she's been hurt in so many other ways. At the same time, I wanted to talk about how, hey, maybe this is really complicated. Maybe there's stuff there that no one is allowed to know. Maybe it's not about you, that baby, the accident who happened when your mother was just trying to get ahead, when things were just starting to turn up in that part of the world. I know Heidi knows that, somehow. It's why she's ok to leave it alone, and leave Paula alone for now.
They're thinking about visiting one more time, before Paula dies, maybe next summer.
Until I hone and perfect this, make it better, do more research, editorialize less and learn more, I can't comment any more than this.
Her mom was gone by then, and her dad had remarried to a classic wicked stepmother, who pulled him away from his children and wore his dead wife's furs around their Long Island mansion. He sent money to Heidi sometimes, enough to keep up a lifestyle, but otherwise cooled to her. Meanwhile, Heidi and her new boyfriend got married, moved to the beach, raised dogs, quit smoking, got political, and grew older.
They traveled to Mexico for a niece's wedding and chanced to meet an Austrian man named Herbert. They were with the bride's family, Herbert was with the groom's. They got to talking and learned Herbert was from Salzburg. This piqued Heidi's interest, because she's not really American, or not by birth. Heidi was purchased in adoption from Salzburg in 1955 by the rich American couple who became her parents, a beautiful woman who looked like a movie star, and a handsome man who was the king of the huge, animated advertising signs of midcentury Manhattan. The giant man exhaling real smoke in the Camel sign? That was him. The massive cup of Eight O'Clock Coffee that emitted steam into Times Square? Him too. He's famous in the annals of Mad Men-era advertising.
Unable to adopt in America due to their advanced ages (36 and 40ish), they turned to Europe. Who knows how many orphanages they visited before they saw that pink and blonde baby, with blue eyes the size of silver dollars, fat fists curled around the bars of her crib as she stood and bounced and gurgled. Once you know this, the name they gave her, Heidi, sounds rather on the nose, but it was appropriately exotic for her future life in New York. They signed the papers and swooped the baby away to a life of big lawns, flouncy dresses, Kodachrome family photos and visits from Santa.
A decade and a half later, Heidi's movie star mother died after years of suffering from early advanced rheumatoid arthritis in much of her body. Whether it was an accident or not, it was barbituates that finally did it, maybe a couple of years too late. Heidi was already away at boarding school in Florida, only allowed to see her mother for a few moments at a time when she came home, where she was placed for viewing on a long glamorous couch with her nails done and head in a turban, puffed and pressed into an appearance not too ghastly for the child to see.
Then came the stepwitch, who pulled Heidi's dad away and kept him for about thirty years. Then was Heidi's married life, fun but unremarkable, full of play and stepkids, adversity but always privilege too.
For me, it gets really interesting when Herbert appears. Delighted by the coincidence of meeting someone from her "hometown," Heidi exchanged contact information with Herbert and sent him some of the adoption papers she miraculously retained after the stepwitch hauled every vestige of her husband's previous life to the curb after he finally died. Herbert scanned the German words, and said, wouldn't it be funny if we looked your mom up? What if she's alive? She can't be, Heidi said. We don't even know what the circumstances of the adoption were. What if she died back then? But go ahead and look.
Herbert's retired, his kids don't live in Austria anymore, and he's got the time, so he went down to the archives and checked it out.
And there she was. Paula.
Paula was still alive. Still there in von Trapp town, living in a retiree apartment alone. Herbert called Heidi for permission, who held her breath and then said, "What the fuck, call her," and it began.
Paula's tough. She's cold. She is beyond reticent. She is suspicious. She and Herbert talked several times in an exchange both outraging and comedic as she cursed him and hung up, then called him back, then hung up again. Herbert is a giver, though. He couldn't let this go once he understood the mother was actually alive, and he was careful in his pursuit of her. They become a sort of friends over the phone, and built a rapport outside of this American reality show plotline. Herbert and his wife started to visit Paula, they took her to the doctor and did her grocery shopping and had her house cleaned. She's old, and after a lifetime of menial jobs, she needs help. She fixed meals for them and they drank together in the local biergarten. They became real friends.
All the while, Herbert would periodically report back to Heidi on Facebook or the phone.
"She says she can't remember anything." "She says you must learn to speak German." "She can't remember your father." "She loved your father." "She won't talk about anything back then."
Paula couldn't make up her mind about how to handle this. As Heidi and her husband became closer friends with Herbert and his wife, they decided to go to Austria. They'd meet crazy Paula, and if that didn't work out, they could hang out with Herbert and see the sights and still have a nice trip one way or another. It doesn't matter how early Heidi came to America, how much she loved Davey Jones or how much Coca Cola she drank, she's a lot like Paula. Guarded, irreverent, unemotional: she could handle this.
They went. They saw her. She was a tiny, shriveled lookalike to Heidi in a blonde bouffant, still pretty, with squinty laughing eyes. She hugged and kissed and was warm as you would be to a second cousin from out of state, polite and gracious but that's it. She wouldn't talk about the past because she didn't want to tell Herbert, didn't want him to serve as a translator, she wanted to tell Heidi herself, but Heidi can't understand German. So they laughed and smoked a cigarette together and drank a beer in the pretty sun dappled place, all edelweiss, and smiled and gestured and made the best of it. When Heidi got up from the table, Paula pointed and choked, laughing, mumbled a little something in German. Heidi wheeled on Herbert, "Ok, this time you better tell me what the fuck she said," and Herbert said, embarrassed, "She says you have her ass."
And this goes on! Heidi goes home, she comes back, she talks to Herbert who talks to Paula, then Herbert's wife tries talking to Paula, and slowly, carefully, like pulling a fragile, brittle thread out of an ancient tapestry, they get a narrative out of her.
Paula had other kids, and least two others. The other girl is older and was put up for adoption too. She lives in Russia now, but Paula can't remember where, and a jealous ex-boyfriend burned all their letters so she can't find her contact information. The boy was born with dwarfism, and though she didn't want to keep him either, she did. She was afraid he'd be abused in the orphanage and in his life. He lived to adulthood, but died early, and she took care of him.
She said she was in love with Heidi's dad, a boy from a nearby village. She said he never knew they had a baby. She wanted to tell him but she couldn't. He lived on a farm with his family and she couldn't figure out how to do it or be with him. She told Herbert she really did love him, and he was beautiful.
Although she put Heidi in the orphanage when she was born, Paula would make the long walk back there every day or every couple of days to nurse her. She said she didn't mean to officially put her up for adoption, but she just couldn't keep her then. She said she made the walk to the orphanage one day and the baby was gone.
After that, she became silent. She wouldn't talk about her family, her youth, or even her later life anymore other than she had cleaned a school for a living, and she got by. She wouldn't talk about her parents or her own family or about living through the war. She became angry when questioned and she cursed Herbert, for real this time, not in jest. She insulted him.
By this time, Herbert's wife had had it with Paula. They wanted to move to Spain to be with their son. They were done with this episode of caretaking an old woman who wasn't even their family, who spat and insulted them when they were just trying to be helpful to people halfway across the world, who made rude demands. And there it sat, seemingly over, just a surprising story of coincidence and unlikely meetings.
And it's all true. Heidi is my mom's best friend. She's my godmother. I've known her all my life, ever since my mom placed my 6 week old glow worm shaped swaddle in Heidi's lap, and Heidi fumbled me and screamed, SHIT!! when the family dog simultaneously jumped into her lap, unconscious of the baby there.
My mom says (resentfully) that somehow I am actually Heidi's daughter, not hers. She and I are the same in the ways that I am least like my mother, in the ways that my mother likes least. Heidi and I cursing and making fun in the kitchen, hexing and insulting, talking politics (verboten to Kari).
In fact, this all started for me when my mom and I were having a fight in Heidi's kitchen. A casual disagreement had turned into a real argument, one of those visceral mother-daughter things when everything she says makes me want to flip a table, and when she takes the imagined privilege of not backing off, no matter how visibly angry I've become. In this familial environment, Heidi's space, it went on longer than it ever would in other company. The topic? Where are the grandchildren. As I became increasingly defensive, telling my mom she was crossing the line for real, Heidi suddenly burst into tears. Loud tears, maybe even a small wail. We turned, both shocked, especially me because I thought Heidi had been on my side, and she said, through sobs, "AT LEAST YOU HAVE A MOTHER."
I fell back in my chair, completely dead, and she laughed through tears, "I know. Beat that, bitch!" Heidi doesn't cry. Or not for long.
That's when I learned about Paula. I learned about Heidi's adoptive mother, and how she had committed suicide but how it was somehow ok, because of the pain she was in. I became entranced by this story and I recorded her telling me everything she could possibly remember about both of her mothers, her father, hours of conversation while we staved her husband off with a closed door. Heidi's husband is so extroverted that most people don't know how complicated and interesting her life is, because she is happy to never be a focal point while he can't be anything else.
The one thing I couldn't accept was how reticent Paula was. How dare she? What absurd vanity was she trying to protect after 60 years? How dare she not share the father's name, and the story? Does she not understand what this means to Heidi? She was about to die, for god's sake! All of the things she had done in her life, the kids she abandoned, and she still had to keep that story to herself? She seemed so selfish, so foreign, so unnecessarily difficult. I was pissed. Heidi was pissed. Herbert was pissed. What the fuck, Paula?
I tried to research her on the internet, but it was fruitless. I didn't know her family's names, I didn't know her exact birth date, I don't think she was even born in Salzburg. I didn't know where to look and finding records from back then on the internet in another country is hard. Herbert couldn't even find her without going to a library in Austria. So I started looking into the area and the other towns, I thought Heidi said she was from nearby somewhere. I started trying to find a context for her life. Heidi shared all of her documents with me and I scanned them, translating and saving for my reference. When she was born, Heidi's name was Sieglinde. A beautiful name I have never heard of.
Paula was about 20 when WWII began in Europe. She lived in a place that sympathized with the Nazis. As I learned more about the details of life in this part of the world during and immediately following the war, I started to think. If you're an American with a functional but one-sided understanding of WWII, even if you watch the History channel religiously, you don't know how it was for the Europeans. You don't know what the war was like for Germans and Austrians and others, starving and no work and everything taken away, the bad times that happened before and then what it was like afterwards. I watched an old documentary made in the 80s, when more US vets were still alive, and the same observations rang over and over: the Russian soldiers were so cruel, unspeakably violent, and the American GIs, who hated the Nazis and their supporters as much as anyone, were repelled and repulsed by the way the Russians treated the people in the towns they occupied. To say that they raped and stole and burned is an understatement. And they were everywhere.
And Paula, a young girl, working alone in another town away from her family. There, in the middle of all of that war and inhuman chaos. It's trauma that makes her inconvenient now, doubtlessly trauma that is big enough to occupy sixty years of time. How could it not be? In what scenario was she there in that melee not being victimized and abused? Fuck, to think of it.
I tried to say this a little bit to Heidi. Heidi doesn't read history, doesn't know any more about that part of the world back then than anyone else here. This is the same Heidi who was like, "Fuck it, I'm too old," when I asked if we could get her on Rosetta Stone to learn enough German to talk on the phone to Paula. I didn't want to say, yo I think your mom might have been psychologically destroyed by a war machine and the worst of humanity, but tried to impart it in ways that wouldn't keep her up at night, or hurt her now after she's been hurt in so many other ways. At the same time, I wanted to talk about how, hey, maybe this is really complicated. Maybe there's stuff there that no one is allowed to know. Maybe it's not about you, that baby, the accident who happened when your mother was just trying to get ahead, when things were just starting to turn up in that part of the world. I know Heidi knows that, somehow. It's why she's ok to leave it alone, and leave Paula alone for now.
They're thinking about visiting one more time, before Paula dies, maybe next summer.
Until I hone and perfect this, make it better, do more research, editorialize less and learn more, I can't comment any more than this.
Friday, May 17, 2019
In Defense of Dan
I'm a weekly listener to the Blabbermouth podcast, which is produced by Seattle's Stranger news staff.
I started listening because my best guy Dan Savage is a regular contributor, but over time, I have very slowly grown to semi-like a few of the regulars on the show. Eli is a great writer and good moderator in spite of his slow, choppy speaking pattern. I'm torn because the way he speaks annoys the actual living fuck out of me, but I still like him in spite of myself. I originally thought Rich was the sort of untenable wildly leftist young millennial type who wants to cancel everyone, but he's not so bad, and I've even found myself agreeing with him most of the time when he's being challenged by everyone else. I also enjoy his dour personality and the constant references to his failed relationships, and the references to his resemblance to Robert Mueller. I like someone who leans hard into their dreariness despite being young and smart and attractive. Katie Herzog is the most hated character, but she's just sort of what I expect from someone who is probably 26 years old but thinks she's 100. You might could* say I've been there.
This week, they took Dan's absence as an opportunity to pile onto him about his being a boomer and generally dominating all of them at work and on Blabbermouth. Apparently he's an overwhelming presence in the Stranger offices, but instead of enjoying it, they just grumble and roll their eyes. HE IS DELIGHTFUL YOU INGRATES. Anyway, they seem to take his constant owning of them as an example of boomerism because, by some bizarre stretch of generational classification, he is apparently technically a boomer despite being only 50ish and otherwise very Gen-Xey in general.
They accuse him of centrism because he says we should all vote for the Democratic nominee, no matter who it is, in order to destroy Trump. Because he thinks Biden's gaffes are regrettable but not bad enough to vote for anyone else if he's the nominee, or to not vote. But he thinks that about every potential candidate, from Warren to Buttigieg. (I just want to note that I spelled that correctly on the first try, my first time actually typing his last name. Not bragging, just surprised) I think this characterization of Dan as an old yelling guy is just reductive laziness. I almost always agree with him, but I also almost always agree with Bill Maher too, so that probably makes me a cancellable old jackass as well. It's also not nothing that Blabbermouth would be adrift like a broken sailboat if not for Dan. When he was away in Europe for weeks earlier in the year, the Blabbermouth Facebook page just became a spam zone of "WHERE'S DAN" posts.
My corner of the internet is filled with these types of crazy politically fringey kids, people who aren't even that young but who want to burn and bury anyone who isn't 1000% in lockstep with their own views as they are today despite the fact that they (the accusers) have been evolving by the minute, and forget their own recent pasts in which they have been, as the kids say, hell of problematic. Some of the people I am thinking of had extremely, objectively questionable views 5 and certainly 10 years ago, when they were younger, dumber, and less aware of the lived experience of anyone not just like them. No sense of irony in these people.
If Dan is to boomer as I am to millennial, then, fine whatever. I'm considered an "old millennial" (thank you) based on my birth date and the fact that much of my life has included the internet, but I fully remember days before home computers were normal, when people recorded their answering machine messages on cassette tapes and answered the phone without caller id or hesitation. When having a pager caused your uncle to jokingly ask if you were a drug dealer. When pagers were even a thing. Those memories are getting dimmer and dimmer, but I remember what it was like to, as some New Yorker or Vanity Fair article said, stare into space for long periods of time in the absence of the constant demands and lures of social media, and I got through my adolescence that way, which I think was probably valuable.
"Republicans are always carving new orifices in our body politic and finding new ways to fuck us."
Dan Savage, 2018
My fondness for Dan is only somewhat an endorsement of his podcast, The Savage Lovecast. Go for the rants at the beginning, but based on your lifestyle, you might skip the rest. I've been listening for years, and I am dead tired of most of the questions that people ask. They always want to know if they should leave their abusive partner, or how to have anal sex. Always the same old things. Do y'all not use the internet, or do you just want to hear it in Dan's voice?
--
*"Might could" just means something like "maybe" in Texas. It's my favorite old timey localism.
I started listening because my best guy Dan Savage is a regular contributor, but over time, I have very slowly grown to semi-like a few of the regulars on the show. Eli is a great writer and good moderator in spite of his slow, choppy speaking pattern. I'm torn because the way he speaks annoys the actual living fuck out of me, but I still like him in spite of myself. I originally thought Rich was the sort of untenable wildly leftist young millennial type who wants to cancel everyone, but he's not so bad, and I've even found myself agreeing with him most of the time when he's being challenged by everyone else. I also enjoy his dour personality and the constant references to his failed relationships, and the references to his resemblance to Robert Mueller. I like someone who leans hard into their dreariness despite being young and smart and attractive. Katie Herzog is the most hated character, but she's just sort of what I expect from someone who is probably 26 years old but thinks she's 100. You might could* say I've been there.
This week, they took Dan's absence as an opportunity to pile onto him about his being a boomer and generally dominating all of them at work and on Blabbermouth. Apparently he's an overwhelming presence in the Stranger offices, but instead of enjoying it, they just grumble and roll their eyes. HE IS DELIGHTFUL YOU INGRATES. Anyway, they seem to take his constant owning of them as an example of boomerism because, by some bizarre stretch of generational classification, he is apparently technically a boomer despite being only 50ish and otherwise very Gen-Xey in general.
They accuse him of centrism because he says we should all vote for the Democratic nominee, no matter who it is, in order to destroy Trump. Because he thinks Biden's gaffes are regrettable but not bad enough to vote for anyone else if he's the nominee, or to not vote. But he thinks that about every potential candidate, from Warren to Buttigieg. (I just want to note that I spelled that correctly on the first try, my first time actually typing his last name. Not bragging, just surprised) I think this characterization of Dan as an old yelling guy is just reductive laziness. I almost always agree with him, but I also almost always agree with Bill Maher too, so that probably makes me a cancellable old jackass as well. It's also not nothing that Blabbermouth would be adrift like a broken sailboat if not for Dan. When he was away in Europe for weeks earlier in the year, the Blabbermouth Facebook page just became a spam zone of "WHERE'S DAN" posts.
My corner of the internet is filled with these types of crazy politically fringey kids, people who aren't even that young but who want to burn and bury anyone who isn't 1000% in lockstep with their own views as they are today despite the fact that they (the accusers) have been evolving by the minute, and forget their own recent pasts in which they have been, as the kids say, hell of problematic. Some of the people I am thinking of had extremely, objectively questionable views 5 and certainly 10 years ago, when they were younger, dumber, and less aware of the lived experience of anyone not just like them. No sense of irony in these people.
If Dan is to boomer as I am to millennial, then, fine whatever. I'm considered an "old millennial" (thank you) based on my birth date and the fact that much of my life has included the internet, but I fully remember days before home computers were normal, when people recorded their answering machine messages on cassette tapes and answered the phone without caller id or hesitation. When having a pager caused your uncle to jokingly ask if you were a drug dealer. When pagers were even a thing. Those memories are getting dimmer and dimmer, but I remember what it was like to, as some New Yorker or Vanity Fair article said, stare into space for long periods of time in the absence of the constant demands and lures of social media, and I got through my adolescence that way, which I think was probably valuable.
"Republicans are always carving new orifices in our body politic and finding new ways to fuck us."
Dan Savage, 2018
My fondness for Dan is only somewhat an endorsement of his podcast, The Savage Lovecast. Go for the rants at the beginning, but based on your lifestyle, you might skip the rest. I've been listening for years, and I am dead tired of most of the questions that people ask. They always want to know if they should leave their abusive partner, or how to have anal sex. Always the same old things. Do y'all not use the internet, or do you just want to hear it in Dan's voice?
--
*"Might could" just means something like "maybe" in Texas. It's my favorite old timey localism.
Wednesday, May 8, 2019
Reflections of! A life that used to be.
When I thought about it, I was sort of sad that blogs died. Wasn't that fun? Writing and sharing interesting things, before half the shit you saw on the internet was just shares from your stupid uncle, something about mooslims?
And it is kind of sad. The blogs I read are all either gone or frozen in 2013. And before that, the Livejournals I read, all frozen in 2004. Livejournal was what Facebook should have become: part expression and part commentary. But then I realized that it might actually be perfect that the world has moved on from the traditional blog, the one with no ads and no real names. I think that means that I can skitter back in like a mouse to live richly in the ruins. I can get back to trying to write for fun without the bother of colleagues and family. Or without worrying that what I'm posting is crap, because no one is looking.
I've been diving into old stuff a lot lately. Every five years or so I have some kind of mini crisis as I remember another part of my life and try to decide if it was better. When I was younger, I always thought the past was better, but as I've aged, I find I've become almost savagely pragmatic. Things were fucking dumb back then and if I remember it fondly, I'm probably just wrong.
Then I broke into an old laptop that I had forgotten the password to. I began to browse, increasingly shocked as I opened folder after folder of old pics, some of friends and family (appalling young, all of us), some of things I had saved as inspiration (dumb or trite mostly), and then my iTunes folders. So much old music, a strange and senseless mix of saccharine 1950s radio tunes, cheesy European synthpop, 90s hip hop, 80s goth, and Type O Negative. So much Type O Negative.
I listened to the Jarvis album, Jarvis, from 2006 and remembered copying the cd for my friends. I loved to make little presents then, so I bought cds that looked like records, and printed out the album cover and reverse and stuck them in the jewel boxes to give to friends. Basically pirating shit they should have bought for Jarvis' sake, but I always gave music away then. I made three volumes of mix cds over a couple of years, all of which Michael gloriously still has, and bless him, still listens to in his little Dodge Charger, the most unexpected car in Portland. All self important cool kid music that is still so indulgently good, The Crystals and Serge Gainsbourg and Pulp and Liberace, Harry Nilsson and Goldfrapp and Joan Baez. Music to be young to.
Now, as I balance on my gnarled cane of agedness, I see that my more recent, highly unromantic take on the past is probably wrongheaded. I've always had a weird thing about the past, either hating it (my own, bad friends, problematic boyfriends) or obsessing about how much better it was, which was what I did for my whole life about the generations before mine. No middle ground here, either it SUCKED or was better than anything can ever be going forward.
All I want to know is, now that Michael Jackson is cancelled, can I still love the Jackson 5? Because this is my favorite song.
And it is kind of sad. The blogs I read are all either gone or frozen in 2013. And before that, the Livejournals I read, all frozen in 2004. Livejournal was what Facebook should have become: part expression and part commentary. But then I realized that it might actually be perfect that the world has moved on from the traditional blog, the one with no ads and no real names. I think that means that I can skitter back in like a mouse to live richly in the ruins. I can get back to trying to write for fun without the bother of colleagues and family. Or without worrying that what I'm posting is crap, because no one is looking.
I've been diving into old stuff a lot lately. Every five years or so I have some kind of mini crisis as I remember another part of my life and try to decide if it was better. When I was younger, I always thought the past was better, but as I've aged, I find I've become almost savagely pragmatic. Things were fucking dumb back then and if I remember it fondly, I'm probably just wrong.
Then I broke into an old laptop that I had forgotten the password to. I began to browse, increasingly shocked as I opened folder after folder of old pics, some of friends and family (appalling young, all of us), some of things I had saved as inspiration (dumb or trite mostly), and then my iTunes folders. So much old music, a strange and senseless mix of saccharine 1950s radio tunes, cheesy European synthpop, 90s hip hop, 80s goth, and Type O Negative. So much Type O Negative.
I listened to the Jarvis album, Jarvis, from 2006 and remembered copying the cd for my friends. I loved to make little presents then, so I bought cds that looked like records, and printed out the album cover and reverse and stuck them in the jewel boxes to give to friends. Basically pirating shit they should have bought for Jarvis' sake, but I always gave music away then. I made three volumes of mix cds over a couple of years, all of which Michael gloriously still has, and bless him, still listens to in his little Dodge Charger, the most unexpected car in Portland. All self important cool kid music that is still so indulgently good, The Crystals and Serge Gainsbourg and Pulp and Liberace, Harry Nilsson and Goldfrapp and Joan Baez. Music to be young to.
Now, as I balance on my gnarled cane of agedness, I see that my more recent, highly unromantic take on the past is probably wrongheaded. I've always had a weird thing about the past, either hating it (my own, bad friends, problematic boyfriends) or obsessing about how much better it was, which was what I did for my whole life about the generations before mine. No middle ground here, either it SUCKED or was better than anything can ever be going forward.
All I want to know is, now that Michael Jackson is cancelled, can I still love the Jackson 5? Because this is my favorite song.
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