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.

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.

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.

Austin, year three

I was reading back in this blog to remember my life as it was and saw a lot of flailing and spittle about Austin vs. Phoenix, and Austin in general.  I figured I'd weigh in, in year three, basically a native now, with some observations about the capital of Texas.

1. Locals are low-level obsessed with letting you know they were born here if they were.
Probably for good reason, they resent the extremely dramatic changes the city has incurred in the last 20 years.  The younger they are, the less they care, but the old ones are ready to go at any time or place with the comparisons.  This is the same everywhere, but not many cities have experienced the drastic changes that Austin has.  Now that I am an old-timey resident, I feel for them where I used to just roll my eyes.  It does suck, mon.  Unless you owned property before the deluge, and then it fucking RULE$$$ and you're hoodrich, where you were dustbowl poor before.  I kind of hate those people, because they think they are Richard Branson-style wealth geniuses, when in reality, they're just bumpkinasses who didn't leave the place they were born and eventually struck oil on their land, due to other people.  Yeah, I'm looking at you, former landord.

2. Hyperlocalization.
When I got here, I was sort of enraged by how hyperlocal people are, and by that I mean they won't travel outside of the 2 mile radius of where they live.  Coming from a city that's legit 500 square miles, I thought that was some kind of full bullshit self-absorbed need to never travel for anything.  Everyone I knew in Phoenix lived 50 miles away and we just dealt with it, finding central spaces to meet upon.  But, just this afternoon, I was reading the review of a new restaurant that opened about 5 miles away and said to myself, "Sounds cool but I'm not going that far."  Turns out there's a valid reason - traffic is truly satanic at all hours of the day, and traffic in that particular direction (central city to south Lamar) is basically totally fucked up at all times.  Unless you have to go (to Target or to a special movie showing) you ain't gonna bother.

3. No food to eat
So this isn't entirely true, but Austin's food selection is often just a lot of the same thing.  Like upscale versions of garbage comfort food?  You got it, dude.  Tex-Mex?  It's aplenty.  Want barbecue, preferably with low quality sides?  GET HERE WITH A QUICKNESS.  Chinese, Italian, Greek?  Forget about it.  Yeah, it's here, but it's either a chain, or not good, or real far.  I don't know, man.  We're no Houston.

4. History 50/50
The large quantity of sentimental boomers still in Austin (see #1) means that there's kinda? some appreciation of older architecture, but the vastly more powerful developers, who are dominating everywhere and everything are prevailing.  Austin has a big sense of self and a sense of its history, but it's a very localized, white thing.  The people of gentrified neighborhoods are trying to preserve what they can where they can, but it's a tough fight and they don't have the power or money to really get anywhere.  So, if you want one vein of history, again, get here, but be warned that it's only fancy white history.  You'll never learn about the legacies of black or latino peoples unless you dig real deep, and care a lot.

5. Parties and Events
Yes this city still loves a party.  I finally moved away from the Zilker area, home of SXSW, ACL and other massive-ass events I'll never take part in, and yet I can still hear and feel the deep thrumming of bass drifting over the river and trees to my bedroom.  Although I've moved miles from the center of destruction, and I'm now in a fully silk-stocking old timey beautiful rich neighborhood, it still touches us.  I'm not mad, because it mostly doesn't disrupt my drive or life, but it's there, and I can't go south during the Christmas season because of the completely underwhelming yet popular Trail of Lights.

and that brings us to

6. Local Pride
Yes, the locals be loving their city and state in a way that anyone outside of Texas, who was never a Texan, will never understand.  I appreciate the sense of place, but it's still foreign to me to be that defensive of a geographic area.  I personally think they should calm down, but they don't care what I think because I'm a dirty foreigner forever.  Even someone who moved here at 6 mos old is a foreigner by some estimations.  Many believe that you must have been born on the soil, whether it be the deserts of west or south, or in the bayous of the east, or in the distinctly Oklahomaish handle, to have absorbed the *magic* of Texasness.  Perhaps it's true.  Perhaps I could feel the same way about Arizona, if I was possessed by a supernatural sense of pride or MDMA.

You can tell a local by their accent, which is an admittedly pleasant mix of twang and drawl, and which is utterly rare, leading me to believe that they were raised by real Southerners, or that they are exaggerating.  Nevertheless, I enjoy it.  You can also tell a local by their familiarity and/or love of Ann Richards, which pervades even the conservative-est of local Republicans.

Heritage Church

While walking around in my new hood of Zilker, I came across a stark block building in the middle of a huge lot.  It's an odd sight in a part of town where every square inch of land is at a premium and new mcmansions occupy entire footprints of land, interspersed among the modest 1940s bungalows that came before. 

This desirable and expensive zipcode (04) was once "nothing," according to a middle aged native Austinite I flew home from Phoenix next to recently.  "We liked it, but it was a poor area."

It's beautiful, though.  The neighborhood abuts Zilker Park, the Central Park of Austin, and is filled with old, old oak trees and big shading magnolias.  Vines and weeds and flowering plants tangle all over each other here, in the Austinian style.  All of the old, gracious parts of the city are full of overgrowth - plants spill onto the sidewalks and streets and grow big and wild.  Pastel paint peels from old houses and fences lean on properties that, as values have skyrocketed, you'd never imagine are worth high six figures.  You cannot tell a home value by its appearance around here.  This is nothing like Phoenix, where properties are pathologically groomed and clipped and repainted and edged, and leafblowers rage at all hours of the day.

But the church.  This is what the sign said:

I have some comments about the sign.  1. Is it that noteworthy that some of the people buried here beginning in 1866 were born before 1840?  26 was that notable an age?  Or is 1840 a reference to Austin's early days that I didn't catch?  Does it simply mean to point out that they were born in the antebellum slavery period?  2. "In the 1940s, the wooden church burned."  Because this was Dixie once, I feel suspicious at the assumedly intentional ambiguity.  Why did it burn?  It's wet here.

Sealed tightly forever.  Why?  Why not a museum to early black culture and churches of this era?  Why not a space to share this completely ignored aspect of early Austin?  This city's interpretation of its own history is so whitewashed.  This building is not only significant because it's still here and the land is still safe, but it's a touchstone for a huge group of people who don't get their story told here almost ever.

Big, beautiful treeish lot.

But as the sign says, it's a church and cemetery.  Underneath the weeds in the green lot are headstones.  Incomplete headstones.  Stumps and chunks, leaning shards, mounds of local lime melding, very slowly, into the grass and networks of vines.

Someone mows it sometimes.  It's rained so much lately that it's impossible to keep the greenery down, and it shoots up in uneven patches.  I stepped gingerly in the grass, deep into the shady back area to look at the stones, praying against snakes and cursing that the foliage was so dense and moist that the big black Texas mosquitos, who normally pass on me, lighted on my bare skin with glee.  I don't know how to hike or walk in backcountry, and although this is in the middle of a dense city, it feels distinctly lonely and untrodden.  I watched the ground for those snakes.

Age 87.

Worn down stone looking like a natural occurrence and not a grave marker.

There were a lot of spots, much bigger than this, where the grass wouldn't grow.  Some of the spots were...grave-sized?  Multiple feet by multiple feet.  Why?  Why would this enthusiastic foliage not grow in certain patches?

Condos to the left, apartments to the right, encroaching right up to the edge of the protected space.  No doubt tens of developers have cruised the big empty space, populated only by that lonely box just one step above a shed, and cursed the city for setting it aside.  A lot like that?  DREAM CONDOS! With a stupid fucking name, like Zilker Commons, or Greenview, or Barton Heights.

I searched for clues about the church and cemetery and came up with little more than what's contained on that historical marker sign.  There's an inventory of the remaining stones, or what remained of them ten years ago.  I couldn't find as many as the website had.  It takes a jaded, weird fucking person, weird beyond any measure I can imagine, to steal a fucking headstone.  When I was a kid, I thought to linger too long by any old grave would tempt the spirit belonging to it to follow me home, and I worried in the car that an illicit tour of the Pioneer's Cemetery in Prescott, Arizona (it was pre-renovation and closed to the public in the 90s) might have caused some old ghost to follow us home and scare me in my bed at night.  Needless to say, even this morbid ass would not remove a memento like that from a cemetery, not to mention the fact that it's vandalism and ruins historic spaces for the rest of us.  I did take ball moss home from the Texas National Cemetery once (yep, Texas still thinks it's a country), but it died.

I mean, seriously.  Where the fuck do headstone thieves put their prizes?  In their herb gardens?  WTAF

I'll continue my researches, but this might require IRL reading in an archive.  I must say it was easier to find the dirt I wanted in Phoenix, even about the most obscure of historic properties.

I will say that Austin in this early steamy summer is pretty and charming south of the river.  The big tangle of green paired with two years of inordinate rainfall has the lightning bugs out in force, and they're at their densest in unmanaged green spaces.  Apparently the eggs lay in the earth for about a year before hatching upon us, and in heavy rainfall, they germinate wildly.  They float and twinkle in the dusk all over this area, they flow into my house when I open the door sometimes, they're so thick.  Ugly bugs in the light, but neverendingly charming outside.

Goth Chronicles part 5 of 500

I always thought it was kind of funny that my grandmother still listened to the music of her youth while she hung out at home in her 70s.  It can't have been that good, I thought.  Not tired of it yet?

One, it was that good, as I later found.  I love Glenn Miller just as much as she did.
And two, you never do get tired of it.

I found an old Sisters of Mercy cd in my car, scratched and beaten and practically trash.  Within moments I was playing Marian at a dangerous volume in afternoon traffic and wondering what Andrew Eldritch was doing right now. 



I guess the Sisters of Mercy are the greatest goth band of all time.  Other greats are, as Eldritch often incorrectly claimed about himself, not truly goth.  The Cure, Siouxsie, only peripherally goth.  Siouxsie's baroque theatricality was much too big for such a label, and Cure are their own genre.

I love to get super deep about this shit because I know absolutely no one cares anymore.  Except for Anita, but we have to be careful because we'll fight if we tread onto a topic where we disagree, such as Are persimmons good? or What is the greatest goth band of all time?  She'd say Christian Death.  And, as with many ancient friends who, in their ancientness, take on a sibling-like status, I can't back down.  Like two dogs seized on the same toy, we will shake and pull for hours, and it's best to just avoid it.

My goth playlists are my most popular playlists on 8tracks.com.  I feel the reason for this is because, unlike the old dance club djs from "BITD" (as Cher says), I know that people just want to hear the hits.  Don't throw in some experimental crap or a bad b-side just to show how advanced your taste is.  No one wants it!  They want an 80s drum machine, an angry Welsh man singing, deep bass, some synth, and that's it.







https://youtu.be/DJNUk-O2RlY
This. This is the song.

When I was trying to write about Bowie's death, I ended up writing about the Nile.  It got too tangential, so I deleted it, but it was fun to remember.

I might have been 15 the first time I went to the Nile.  Seems so crazy young, but I had already put in lots of time on usenet's alt.gothic, and after reading so much about goth clubs all over the world (mostly in the sentimental memoirs of 80s goths), I had to go to my own. 

I went on New Year's Eve and arrived to a big empty room, as most people had chosen parties instead.  It was a cavernous black space, occasionally cut through by revolving blue and white lights, and Bauhaus' She's in Parties played ghostly and tall in the dark.  This, I thought.  It was everything.

The walls, floors and ceiling were painted flat black, and the space outside the dance floor was pitch black.  Flickering prayer candles occasionally disrupted the darkness along the walls.  It was a venue for bands on other nights of the week, mostly punk and metal, and sometimes denizens of those scenes intermixed, bemusedly, with the goths, mocking and looking for girls.



Odd to think of being a teenager in this environment, out all night with this motley cast of characters, and odder still that I feel I was entirely undamaged by it.  There were addicts and runaways, creepy older men who I disgustedly avoided.  Basic guys who thought they'd blend in by putting on their only black Hanes t-shirt.  You didn't venture into side rooms lest you saw something you didn't want to, like kids shooting heroin, or people having sex while their spurned lovers cried in the corners.  That this happened an area overrun by Mormons was funny.  Everything was funny, because I was a kid, and unbothered by everything.



I didn't recognize the danger that was probably around, and I was unfazed by the people.  Many things converge in a goth scene, and pieces of other subcultural groups accumulate, having nowhere else to go.  Sexual fluidity, trans kids, nudity on the dancefloor, bdsm, genital piercings, occultism on behalf of people who actually believe in shit like enochian magic, these things were everyday.  Being gay certainly wasn't the source of tension that it could be elsewhere in life and otherwise straight people occasionally dated or experimented amongst their sex without notice from anyone else.

And nothing bad ever happened to me.  My friends were nice people, the people I dated were nice people, and I never fell into the traps that I realize now were opening and shutting around me at all times like venus flytraps.  I don't think I was as vulnerable as I seemed based on age, in part because of my total naivete to what people were actually doing, and to my disinterest.  I just wanted to be cool and dance.



It feels a little silly to even point this out as a thing because it just was, but all of this happened easily 20 years (and many more before me) before the rest of America began its slow tread to acceptance.  That was the best part about the scene.  Everyone just belonged, without comment, as long as they were there for the music or the aesthetic or, at least, were affiliated with someone who was.  It wasn't very complicated.  I saw a lot of lifestyles that aren't for me, but no more than I would see on the average trip to a mall.

It's also why I'm so disgusted by people who insist on being shocked by regular-ass deviance from social mores.  The dichotomy of being an adult, yet operating with the mind of a flappable, naive child is sort of repulsive to see in action.  I can't stand people who shrink from or are shocked by a past or a garden variety weirdness.

Thanks, Gram(s).

I recently read that the reverberations of life experiences can be passed from generation to generation.  That the effects of traumas suffered by recent ancestors can rear up in your own life, can explain subtle lingering tendencies, anxieties, fears and problems.  The abuse or sufferings of the great-grandparent can apparently manifest in the 21st century descendant, but how?  In what ways.

It seems so fascinating, shocking, yet obvious.  It's a scientific confirmation of something we've always sensed - that nothing is ever really forgotten, as much as we wish it to be, and that each experience lives on in a new form.

I hate that.  A deeply self-conscious person for most of my life, the only comfort that I could ever accept was that no one would remember the interactions or experiences I regretted.  And maybe they won't.  But those childhood pangs and young adult anguish could live in the strands of my being for the rest of my life, and in the psyche of a child.

But that's a terrible example.  Consider the shadow that may live on behind the eyes of the grandchildren of holocaust survivors, of any victim of a cruel and unimaginable violation or torture. Imagine the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of slaves.  How are their lives affected by the pain and struggles of the people who came before them? How are their experiences unintuitively informed by the experiences of their greats and their great-greats?

I scanned back through the last few sets of my ancestors and could think of nothing so extreme.  Most of my great-great grandparents dealt with the stress and upheaval of a transatlantic voyage, of leaving their homeland and their native language for a land of commercial brutality.  But everything worked out in the end and they all experienced some prosperity and safety within their lifetimes as a reward for their courage.  Bad marriages, dead children, economic strife, it could all be in there in the cords of my DNA, but how does that compare to what they carried themselves, from their own ancestors?  Starvation and true poverty, uncountable generations spent in subsistence in the mud of some crevice of Europe, now known by another name.  Poor Irish, Italian peasants, German laborers.  Uneducated people linked by twining strands of bad experiences bound together through generation after generation like held hands.

If the experiences do carry through, how long do they last?  Long enough for you to create one for your own descendants?  Do the stains of the far flung past fade or remain, diluted but carrying potential, waiting for their activation?

Conversely, the positives do carry forward as well.  Perhaps these are easier to see.  The tender upbringing, the positive home environment, the lack of desperation can all make for more stable grandchildren.  In my family, going back to a time when it wasn't so easily attained, there was an inclination to formal or autodidactic education.  When my great-aunt led me on a tour of the farmhouse my grandma was born in, she took us down the stairs to a dank basement and clapped her hand on an old chalkboard.  She said my great-grandfather brought this home when the local schoolhouse upgraded to a bigger one.  On it, he taught his children, boys and girls, basic arithmetic to reinforce what they learned in the classic one room schoolhouse of Percival.  It was long enough ago that it was uncommon to educate daughters, because there was no point - she didn't need to know the rivers of the world to raise a baby adequately.

I know those things matter.  And I know they carry forward from generation to generation.  I'll spare the tender examples, but my grandmother spent her entire life in the casual pursuit of knowledge and so has my dad.  And their examples and teachings have led me to do the same.  I think much of this is an innate desire, but is it really?  If an example isn't made, do you know the option is there?  I've known many naturally sharp people who lack completely the intellectual spirit of the pursuit of knowledge for pleasure.  They have the raw material, but it's never quite realized into something coherent or refined enough to do much with.  Is that a shitty qualification of the various types of intelligence?  Probably.  Call the police.

Although the beginning of this thought seems fucking depressing - that we are possibly saddled with the residue of our ancestors' experiences, isn't that somewhat of a comfort?  It either explains heretofore inexplicable tendencies, or it lends some gravity to the things prior generations experienced.  Because isn't it kind of disgusting that generations of your predecessors had to spend their lives fumbling in the dirt so that you could drop pizza on yourself on the couch while proclaiming that today is the worst day in history because the Seahawks lost?

You know?  (I tried to use an example outside of myself for fun. Did it work? My example would be "because Matthew died on Downton Abbey" or something. SPOILER, but as I always say: if you found out after me, you're on your own)

Isn't it terrifying that we don't really know what even happened 50 years ago, not to mention 350 years ago?  The hardscrabble lives and lack of choices?  If we can't remember cognizantly, then we can remember subconsciously, celluarly.  Because I think it's diminishing and unfair to forget that lifestyles that we would consider worse than death were entirely normal once, and that you are made of the victory against nature that was survival, once.

So anyway, everyone's fucked because everyone suffered a while back.  Kind of takes the pressure off, though, does it?

Hexmas

I made a satanic tree skirt.  Actually, I made two, but the first one turned out kind of gentle, far more pagan than satanic.

The first one was for me.  White fur with a glittery pentacle, fringed in red pom poms.  I stand behind it.  All of my new friends in Austin are pretty establishment, so when they see my house or the way I dress on my own time, and certainly the crafts I engage in, I feel distinctly reminded of my mother's gentle disapproval.  I still love you, but I don't like this.

So they didn't really get the tree skirt.



But I love it.  I smile every time I see it.  Although my taste is that of a spinster aunt in 1967, I feel very happy to know what I like.  I will never struggle to decorate a house.  I will never be unsure what image I wish to project.  I will never be unsure of what I want to surround myself with for the rest of my life.

The only thing that inhibits me is lack of space, and my student loans.

I've struggled with Christmas in my adult life.  It's hard to preserve the childhood magic of a holiday when you scorn the way other people celebrate it, and when you hate religion.  But winter has always been a welcome, happy time for me, and I like to observe the way the year turns.  I like to see different things in the house, and in my familiar landscape.  I like a sense of occasion and ritual.  I love to buy presents for other people, and I'm very good at it.  So what to do?

Just do it.  I was too cool and noncompliant to celebrate anything from holidays to birthdays in my mid 20s, I was like an atheist Jehovah's Witness, but now I just don't give a fuck.  I go there.  I have a pink tree decorated with antique German glass ornaments.  Don't you know holidays are just another way to amass interesting shit?

After I made my tacky pagan tree skirt, I received a request for the gag gift of an unapologetically satanic tree skirt.  Christmas is hard for atheists, I think they feel guilty celebrating something so heavily knitted together with Christianity.  But when you throw in a tree skirt emblazoned with a baphomet, it feels a little bit easier.

I don't want to show it completely yet because I'm not finished, but I'm very happy with it.



A baphomet made of sequins.  There will be pom poms.  It may be the greatest thing I've ever created.

I hesitated when the girl at the fabric store eyed my armload of black felt and blood red pom poms.  "Whatcha...makin?" she asked.  Oh, nothing...

I think this theme combines well with my interest in the overblown tackiness of Hollywood Regency and late 60s ultra lush absurdity.  Although Anton LaVey was a silly fool, he cultivated a finely articulated aesthetic that still appeals today.  A mix of the medieval and the swinging 60s, with lush velvets, skulls, knives, altars, black candles, topless "witches" with big hair, fake blood, ancient books, bejeweled goblets, I could go on.

I never really bought into his philosophy, because it's for men - ridiculous men.  It's all plagiarized from Ragnar Redbeard's 1890 publication "Might is Right," which basically espouses a hedonistic "fuck all y'all" attitude, but which does ring true on some topics, such as how it's ok to reject the contemporary flow of society when you know it to be wrong, even when it means ostracization, because you must be strong enough to withstand the slings of smaller people and smart enough to know they will come, etc., etc.  Subtler souls prefer Nietzsche.

LaVey does make unique recommendations for women, which you can read in his book, "The Satanic Witch," and which are pathetic and condescending and all about fashioning sexual snares.  His ideas about female beauty really show his age and plebian tastes, too.  He may have made his bones in the late 60s, but he was already a bit old then, and his tastes seem so stodgy.  He's all about garters and brown pantyhose, bad blonde dye jobs and blue eyeshadow.  The ideal woman he described seemed to belong in a bingo hall to me.  Truly, only idiots idolize LaVey, but he is a fun character, and I do like that he organized all of these ideas into a formal "religion", recognized as tax exempt by the US government.  It's all a fun joke that may bring the attention of young people to ideas they should think about.

And therefore, satanic Christmas tree skirt.

I told you no

And you did it anyway.

Sometimes I feel self-conscious talking about my cat in the same way people at work talk about their small children, but now I DGAF.

Strange Magic

I've been in a Virgin Suicides kind of mood lately.  A sort of ELO, Carpenters, gold microphone, bad hair mood.  A dreamy middle child in a 1970s suburban development mood.

This is basically the last of the walls to fall when it comes to my ideas about things I will and will not do.  Not sure if I can adequately convey how much I HATED this class of dorky 70s music when I was younger.  In the 90s, I thought everything about the 70s was full disgusting.  But I like it now.  I don't care!  About anything!




A few years ago, a friend and I decided to start a band.  I told her we should start a Chad & Jeremy and/or Peter & Gordon cover band called Brittany & Anita.  She was game - she had a maraca - and we eagerly planned to really annoyingly explore this development during a long winter weekend at her place in New Mexico.

So on a beautifully cold November weekend at the feet of the Sandias, I queued a playlist and told her, Here's the shit you gotta learn to play, bro.

I played "I Go to Pieces" or something, and she froze.  Then screamed, "Oldies? I HATE OLDIES!"

WHAT, I screamed back, hands flying around my face in horror.  "That's what Chad & Jeremy is!"  "I didn't know!" she screamed.  We just stared at each other in silent remonstrance, both disappointed.

And as amused as I am by her wild hatred of "oldies" and all sentimental music, I dissolved the band.

So I'm not going to send this playlist to her, because somehow I feel this is so much worse in her book than the Everlys or Peter & Gordon could ever be.







This Todd Rundgren song is one of my mom's favorite songs of all time, and ELO is probably her actual favorite band of all time.

A nice young woman who never asked for a jerk child

I finally kind of get it.