tuckova

Postcards

Beginning at about age thirteen I was a consistent writer of lengthy letters to people I missed. Part diary, part longing. If they wrote back (maybe half as often, if I was lucky) I would spread their letter out beside the next one I wrote, to make sure I addressed everything. I think of this writing now and I love how much I wanted to understand and be understood and I also think it must have been a little suffocating.

In my twenties, I kept a diary which cut down on the letter writing a little but not much. A fair bit of my diary from that time is about letters I've written for which I am awaiting responses, eagerly and sometimes angrily. Can you believe that I waited a minimum of a month for an answer, and can you imagine what that did to me if the month stretched to two months or more?

 

Conversely, the invention of email and the ability to immediately communicate to someone what was going on in my thoughts and my life cut back the diary quite a lot. Who was I writing that diary for? vs a letter and the potential interested audience, the possible provocation to interaction. Plus I had automatic copies of everything, so it was still a diary. But it made me a worse kind of crazy to write and wait for a response when it still took a month or months and whyyyyyy.

 

In my forties, I started blogging, and what I learned to do with this was disentangle myself from a response. Maybe someone who knew me would read it, or maybe not; maybe they'd write a response or maybe not. It was the purest writing I did, because it was not about feedback or publishing or a desk drawer. It was releasing a thought into the wild. 

 

Then social media arrived, and writing became about the response in a way that was worse for a lot of people than letter writing had been for me. Having survived the anguish of an unanswered letter, I think I enjoyed social media without letting it get too close to my heart. It still sucks what it's turned into and I mourn the updates from a range of friends.

 

HOWEVER in December at the unmitigated prompting of one textual apothecarian, I finally started writing postcards and: wow. Here's what a postcard is: it is a brief format writing (like a social media post or a short letter) without the expectation of response. You get a stack of stamps and you stick them on a stack of cards and then when you're waiting somewhere for something, you write a postcard instead of looking at reels or whatever, and then you send it and forget it. You can do that with diary entries, too. But as opposed to a diary, the primary message of a postcard is: thinking of you. A response to a postcard is not required or even expected; the format plus slow mailing times means your message is necessarily brief and complete in itself. 

 

I'm pretty good at seeing folks when I'm in their towns, but the world I have chosen is large and I'm always missing someone. This seems like a very mentally healthy way to address (literally) my longing, rather than amplifying it. Also a tiny act of rebellion against the powers that control other ways we connect.

 

I bought 100 postcards. Send me your address if you want one. 

to be of use

I usually wake up first, the first human in any case, and pour the coffee and feed the birds who never talk to me despite my hopeful chirping. I think they are on strike for people they love more than they love me, but I love the same people more than I love the birds. Check the cats, clean the boxes. If I can make myself remember that it's not that cold, I will go outside and walk past homes breathing various forms of suburban life support, ranging from trees-grass, trees-grass to someone who's really pushed the concept and included a little library and multiple water elements. Some people have miniature creeks. Many have porches with pairs of chairs but almost nobody sits on them, much as Czechs rarely seem to be on their balconies, which I also do not understand. There are neighborhood watch signs co-existing with (and low-key contradicting) the "in this house" signs, which I normally associate with what might be called gentrification but probably not in the suburbs. There are turkeys roaming the streets (not streets, but ways and drives and courts), modern dinosaurs, hopelessly misplaced, their horrible necks a shade of blue I'd say was not found in nature and I'd be wrong. They are very ugly and very beautiful and I am aware of being brave when I pass them which means that in addition to being absurd they are a little scary. I similarly pass people and don't know what to do because it is neighborly to say hello but I am not really a neighbor. I nod and make a hello noise. I grew up here, walked down a nearby road to the bus stop for school, down another to the Goodwill where we sorted through trash and treasure with the bored sophistication of the universal teen. I was, in retrospect, a largely useless human then; my memories of myself are of cleaning and childcare but I think I did much less than I could have done for anyone, including myself. I guess it was four or five years, a span of time, and there were several versions of me, based on the photos I've unearthed. Watching my face emerge from a thirteen-year-old's curtain of hair and pink-and-beige make-up to what I thought was ferocity but to my eyes now still seems soft, almost fuzzy. Was I ever of use. I joked with one friend that we provided free therapy so I guess I listened to people, maybe that was good. In the evening we watch movies that remind us as little as possible of the world beyond the sidewalk, which is frankly much more terrifying than a whole rafter of turkeys. Today I worked and tomorrow I will work again, at the job I'm paid for, and this is how it goes. Sometimes I think about home and wonder what I'd be doing there (colder, grumpier) but home is wherever I am which is, for the moment, here. "But the thing worth doing well done/ has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident." I am, truly, for the most part, happy.

 

Southern half

I'm working on maintaining a constant vague smile in the hopes that my face will freeze that way and save me a bundle on plastic surgery but sometimes I forget. Walking along the sidewalks, when there are sidewalks, all in various states of cracked and crumbled so it's more like stomping along the history of sidewalks with my vague smile and in the course of a block I decide I am a minor film star, on holiday and hoping to be incognito but if recognized and photographed would prefer not to be looking grumpy or sweaty or heaven forbid tripping, and so I hold my chin up, hold my smile up, lift my feet up, and this carries me most of the way home. Well a little sweaty is true. 

On one block along the way a Buddhist monk wrapped in orange stops me, smiling, and I also smile, and he blesses me, touching my wrist and his forehead, and some part of me really wants to believe; would I be saved and happy if I just tried harder? He's touching my life line, head line, heart line, maybe saying something I can't hear over the sound of the scooters zooming around us because traffic never stops even if you might be having an eat-pray-love moment, and he ties a red thread around my wrist so that everyone will know I'm a sucker as I walk down the street for the rest of my stay. He charged me about $8 for the experience and I'm not complaining because I have a story and that's cheap for a story but also I can't get the thread off since scissors are a dangerous weapon I don't carry. I guess as long as people think it's a Buddhist thing I'll count my blessings. Get it?

Negotiating or bargaining is hard because people seem simultaneously very good and very bad at it. A taxi from one place to another costs between 2 and 20 dollars. I'm generally inclined to pay what I'm quoted because I'm not poor and haggling bores me but even a hag has her limits. I walked away from a lot of things I would have bought (and I also unfortunately overpaid for some things that I thought were reasonably priced and would have been, had they been what the sellers said they were). I spend time pondering the meanings of fine as in art as in acceptable as in penalty.

This trip has given me a tremendous perspective on history and politics and people and of course also myself. The micro and macro perspectives that any distance gives us: I am so mortal, we are so different, borders are largely imaginary, home is so tiny and far, home is everywhere. I regret nothing, not even the food poisoning. I'm ready for the next place. 

North half

The buildings are narrow, taller for being so narrow, each one its own slender pagoda except each floor is different, where one is a shop decorated with my idea of authentic, some curly gold-scaled dragon, mouth stuffed with shimmering pearls, then a floor mostly plain but with window shutters that remind me of New Orleans more than France exactly but is French colonial in the most absolute sense and then the third floor is corrugated tin and lines of laundry. The buildings line up like jagged teeth, the front six of which, we are told, are filed down to indicate maturity. At night I grind my teeth and wonder. In the city everything is crowded, four people on a scooter, four zeroes to buy coffee on the sidewalk (though no sidewalk), and I remember how to cross the street like I could kill a car or die trying, a fierceness in myself generally untapped and when no car takes the challenge I am both triumphant and weary. Young women in silk and fur pose at every storefront and their pockmarked photographers dutifully document it and then they both gaze into the reflective surface to evaluate the results. Outside the city we travel by bus past whole towns of row upon row of identical houses, a contrast to the city in how empty they are, and how pristine, ghost towns, no cars or influence in sight. We take a boat into a bay full of limestone mountaintops, now worn at the base, and the guide smiles and we smile back; and his tobacco-stained teeth echo the islets. There are dozens of boats, giant and gleaming white, and dotted amongst them are small entire villages of primary colors selling fruit and fish that later appear on our plates in beautiful bite-sized pieces. Many things are tiny and precise, carved and chopped to fit in the palms of a thousand hands. We learn how lacquer is made, I've dismissed it as kitsch but now I want it the way I want anything shiny and possibly poison. At a rest stop where an uncomfortable level of aggression is used to encourage us to buy a coffee, use the toilet, or spend money generally, there is a woman cracking eggshells with a mallet into smaller and smaller particles of white which will become conical hats in a grouped image or maybe a moon rising over a rice field, equally authentic and unreal.

mine

An explosion of color and words about love

The microscopic image of a tear 

Clay formed by a child's hands both clumsy and sweet

Icarus falling into the water, the black sun watching him with neither anger nor mercy

An old man's gnarled fingers gripping his cigarette as he stares into the distance 

A boy releases an arrow into the sky from a homemade bow

The rusting sign at the entrance to an abandoned cavern declaring itself:

mine, mine, mine.

RIP, BLK

The first time I remember seeing you was when I was in 7th or 8th grade. I was 13 years old and full of the anguish that comes with that age plus the added sadness from still feeling not quite at home where I lived, the idealized longing for what I'd lost. There was a "poets in the schools" thing, and you came with Arthur Butler to my school and both of you were so much cooler than I'd ever imagined poetry to be. I loved poetry but thought it was like, mostly spinsters and sadness or long rhymes or both. Together we all wrote poems about what our names sounded like, smelled like, and you didn't choose mine to read which hurt but less than I was usually hurt by these kinds of things. I was enchanted. It did not feel like children writing forced rhymes and acrostics, it felt very adult and exciting.

The next time in university. My best friend and I would adopt people and follow them around campus and report our findings; this may have only happened once but it became a way of thinking for me so it feels like many times. I adopted a woman with a fascinating haircut and a face lit with an inner processing that I guess I'd call Slavic now, that kind of watchful calculation that is simultaneously present and a million miles away. My friend picked you; her report was more interesting. Sometime later, you came to Kathryn Hohlwein's class and read "Howl" with spit flying from your mouth, you were howling. And then you both talked about how Ginsberg performed it, what choices you were making when you did it differently. I was 18, maybe 19, writing furiously by then, and thinking about writing all the time, but I hadn't thought about performance and poetry together, and a door opened.

I know you were friends with my friend, but I don't know when you and I became friends, I don't know if it was friendship, it was mostly you talking with overwhelming passion and volume about something and me listening. Which is fine; you knew more than I did. In my recent move I found about a dozen drawings you'd done when you lived in my apartment, which I had forgotten about. A month? Two? The thing about forgetting is that half the time you don't even realize you've forgotten; it's just gone. I remember going to an event you organized, a tribute to Jack Kerouac, and I had a necklace I wore all the time and Victor Wong bent to look at it, touched me briefly, and I told everyone for years that Victor Wong touched my chest and that was my nearest brush with celebrity. But I remember feeling like part of something, to the extent that I ever feel like I belong; in my mind I am on the periphery of wherever I am, but just feeling like I belonged in the room at all was incredible. 

You organized so many poetry readings that they blur together, but I remember one that I was in with Arthur Butler and Scott Soriano. You introduced me to the concept of how mismatched performance was messy and potentially the most beautiful. Arthur, all rhythm and images (and the 13-year-old in me crowing with delight), Scott put a steak on his face and sang "Au Jus", and me with sad girl poetry. My family came, Arthur Butler talking to my sister. I remember Ann Menebroker came to one reading and stayed after to tell me she liked my writing which is just, the honor is so much. It meant the world to me to be treated like I mattered, doing what I wanted to do. 

Looking back it is stunning to me that you never tried to make anything sexual about our relationship, back when I was young and impressionable and probably would have done anything for your attention, which you just gave freely. I remember two women that you were with, in the time I knew you, and that you spoke of them in glowing terms, as artists in their own right, not as muses. I find this remarkable now.

You could be very loud, you could be very rude, you rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. You were self absorbed like I guess many artists are. When I was in my 30s we were back in touch for a bit, and we'd sit on the floor of your apartment listening to music and talking about poetry and talking a lot about people who didn't understand you and your genius, but we also talked about my life. I paid for dinner and you paid me back in paintings, which I cherish. Your health was never good, and we fell out of touch; the next time I tried to find the number didn't work, and you never figured out social media, and I thought: well, not everybody needs to stay in contact. It seemed to me that you might have been dead, and I have lost enough people before they die that I know their death isn't the end of anything for me, other than the end of a possibility. 

I don't know why I took the news of your death in October so hard. I hadn't seen you in two decades, I think. And I don't necessarily wish we'd stayed in touch; I don't think I had anything to teach you and you had already taught me so much. By example: Be chaotic. Do what you love. Plunge into things and let the world catch up. By warning: Don't care so much when people don't like what you do. I'm working on it. 

There's a parallel world where I am still there, writing. 

There's a parallel world where I am still there, not writing.

In both of those worlds and in this one, you changed my life. I'm so grateful. 

getting OK

You guys I'm still so tired. Moving really takes it out of me, it turns out, and having stayed in one place for such a long time makes it harder. It's not like money where you save it up; it's like a muscle I haven't flexed. I measured and measured and measured and moved a bunch of stuff from the old place to the new one only to semi-sheepishly return it a couple weeks later when it turns out that centimeters aren't the only thing that makes stuff fit. On the plus side, the young man I hired to help move the furniture over turned out to be quite nice and I hired him for other projects as well. In Czech, they call a handyman an "hourly husband" and I hired an hourly husband who came out to install some lights and didn't bring the right tools and broke one of the things he was supposed to install and and bitched about my taste and also stunk up the place, so he was kind of like a traditional husband except at the end I had to give him money instead of whatever a traditional wife does with someone like that. I was pretty bummed about the whole situation but then I called the mover to ask if he also assembled furniture and he did so I dubbed him my "hourly son" and I have adopted him as my own, in an hourly way. He does not stink.

The things we do and do not pay people to do and the things we do and do not get robots to do and which things we take pride in and would never delegate and which things we delegate as soon as our income bracket can afford it are very interesting to me.

Despite a pretty significant paring down of things I still have too many things. My sister, who is a much nicer sister than I deserve, came to visit and helped me put up my art in ways that make me feel surrounded by beauty and she tried to help me weed out the books but books make me feel safe the same way a stack of sweaters or a drawer of neatly rolled scarves does, so I need to look at other areas. Some years ago I saw a photo of Georgia O'Keeffe's home with just a few dresses (hung on nails on the wall, I think?) and I thought how much I would like to be like that. Not minimalist in all things, I think that ship has sailed, but at least in clothes. A few really structurally interesting pieces that I wear all the time. The problem is that I think I'd have to be structurally interesting in the same way O'Keeffe was, and as I realized when I recently saw a photo of myself, what I usually look like is a pile of laundry. Clean laundry, but still. But I don't think clothes is what I'm going to pare down either. 

A lot of things delight me lately --  I like my new home. I've dealt with some quite lovely people in the last couple of months. Work has been improving after what felt like a multi-month slump that had me really doubting myself. I auditioned for a play that I was not in charge of and got cast and enjoyed knowing that I can still learn lines (not a lot of lines, but if I can still memorize at all it means a great deal to me), and that I can still slip into a character in a way that pleases me, to stop being Anne for a minute and take on the heart of someone different enough that it's interesting but familiar enough that I can still say what I need to say. I've read things for pleasure and been pleased. I've watched some pretty good plays (Vanya was amazing; People Places and Things more disturbing but such a creative set). I've been irritated by people too, and annoyed by work, and frustrated with projects not going the way I want, and with my own limitations, and with the amount of crap that has to be waded through before you can swim at all. And I don't even want to talk about the amount of time I've wasted thinking about politics without feeling like I'm learning or growing in any kind of meaningful way. But in general, mostly good. And I'm optimistic that now that I (finally) have internet again and mostly know where things are even in the dark, I'll be back to a rhythm in which I sleep and live and get things done in no time. 

teeny tiny charcuterie boards laden with cheese

One day there was a woman reading on one of the back balconies, the one with the most plants, a cat in her lap. We nodded hello but that was it. I imagined myself similarly positioned. Could I grow that many plants? Do I want a cat? Some months later, there was a woman, I think the same woman, in front of the same building with a suitcase and a cat carrier. Maybe going on holiday? She was waiting for a taxi and seemed perhaps a little impatient but waiting for taxis often looks like this. A day or two later, the front windows of the apartment that align with that back balcony, assuming their apartment layout is the same as mine, were open, and music blasting out. Maybe she doesn't like this music, and the chance to blast it is in her absence. Maybe the cat doesn't like it, and now that the cat's away, the mice can listen to yacht rock with impunity. There's a mouse party, tiny mouse cocktails. I don't even make this happen, my brain does this for me. More likely there are two humans living in the apartment and one has gone out and the other is listening to music and that's all, though I'm sad to let my tiny mouse swizzle sticks go. Later I'm taking the stairs and I hear a door slam and think: fight. no, wind. or possibly excitement. There was a woman outside ringing a doorbell when I got there and she entered the stairwell behind me and now she's not there, so she's gone into some apartment below mine, which could be the one with the most plants and the yacht rock. I'm stringing together whole narratives. I haven't seen the cat lady on the balcony lately. Has she moved out? The plants, which I had presumed were hers, are still there. But some people walk away from plants when they're walking away from other things that are harder to leave, so that's no evidence of a planned return. Could be anything. Maybe you are thinking the same story I am. Jimmy Stewart, confined to a wheelchair, has nothing on me and my imagination, though I haven't started thinking about murder yet. I caught myself standing under the window to see what music, if any, would drift out. It's the same but not as loud which could mean less emotion or could mean nothing. I like yacht rock for cleaning, myself, though I have been trying to set spotify to the top hits of the week so I know what the kids these days are listening to; someone walking under the window could think I was enjoying brat summer but in fact I am, like with most of my life, sitting beside the action and watching it with curiosity and a gift for amusing myself by making up stories that are probably certainly not true or they might be. 

sky walking away

It is unfair how much of the work that we have to do in order to be fully human is necessarily devoted to overcoming false narratives. This sentence came to me fully formed while standing in a very long line and then I had to hope I'd remember what I was thinking about and how clearly I was thinking it if and when I was able to write it down. I am so easily distracted. It was probably better before. And I'm pretty sure now it's not an original thought. Letting go of the idea of The One after having been told it's true for years is an example of this, though that wasn't such a struggle for me. But I am of the age that was taught by books and films and television that almost every villain could be redeemed if you just practiced sufficient patience with them (and maybe sent them a ghost or two but mainly that you personally had to be patient and forgiving). This patience and forgiveness was not to be extended when they were sorry because they didn't have to be sorry and it wasn't based on them trying to do better and then you forgiving them because often your forgiveness had to come first, the first step in their redemption was yours. We set up generations of people to believe that "sensing the good in them" was enough. I was talking to a friend who said that she views people on the basis of what they do and she is thus less likely to be surprised when they act how they are. In that conversation, I said I view people on the basis of what they say they are, but even that's not quite true. In honesty, I think I often view people on the basis of the good I think ("sense") they're capable of, and then I'm always knocked flat when they don't do what I expect. But that's the mythology I grew up with. It's not a new thought even to me but apparently it's time for this seat on the ferris wheel of my recurring thoughts to have its moment of a clear view: today's a reminder that redemption arcs are considerably thinner on the ground in real life than they are in Hugo, Dickens, Lucas, etc. It's unfair that I've gone about forming my current view of myself as a "good person" in part because I make myself see the good in people even while their knife is hilt deep in me. I have found myself fighting back the urge (sometimes unsuccessfully) to justify for them how much they hurt me, as if I could somehow empathize them into good behavior. It's unfair because I don't actually think it's "good" of me and certainly hasn't been "good" for me, and yet part of my recent life has had to be devoted to tearing myself away from a dream narrative I was fed and consumed dutifully. I swallowed it whole. I'll see the good in them and then they'll be that good. Delicious! I do still want to be good and kind and empathize. I just don't feel like I can or should give people the unearned benefit of that anymore. It's so hard. You who already know this truth don't get why I'm struggling but take my word for it, it's a bitter pill. But if I'm going to live another five years, and those five years wouldn't involve this pain, feeling betrayed by my faith in people who usually never asked for it, it would be sweeter. Ten years twice as sweet. Maybe that sweetness would be worth more to me than pretending to myself that I'm good. Probably worth a try.