tuckova

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.

salt for such wounds

It is unlikely that anything will sting the way once, when you were so much younger, your friend sat down with you to confess that his feelings had shifted and what he had thought was a bit of fun while verbally sparring was actually an attraction and he had to acknowledge it, it wasn't worth pretending he didn't feel what he felt. He'd maybe never felt this way, so absolutely physically attracted to someone he felt intellectually matched with, and emotionally too. He needed to tell you about his feelings. And you in the blush of that moment realizing that you too had feelings, that the only reason you hadn't acknowledged them to anyone including yourself was that it seemed so certain they'd be not just unrequited but ridiculous, like falling in love with the moon. But what if the moon said he loved you, what if the moon said it first? Your heart rushing to the surface of your face. "Everyone will be so surprised," you said. "Even I'm surprised!" And he said, "So... She hasn't told you?" And you realized that ahhhhhhh this another story where the only part that is about you is how well you listen; what a good listener you are. You spent the rest of the night drinking and laughing about his newfound love.

That wasn't the first and not the last time that you have realized in the middle of a story that it wasn't about you. Nobody else's story is about you; everyone is the hero of his own story. Everyone is their own main character, this makes perfect sense. And sometimes you're not a character in their story at all. No reason for it to sting, though it almost always does, the sting of salt in the eyes and you blink it away.

And now you are more than halfway through life, the sunset years, rich with purple and gold and you want for nothing, happy to be a tertiary character in every story other than your own, swelling a progress or starting a scene or two, so to speak. It's fine. But the other day when you found yourself written entirely out of a scene while someone looked you full in the face in a chapter you'd built and told you how much other people had done as though you weren't even part of it, and the salt rose in your eyes and you felt every relegation fresh, and followed it with a shot of self loathing for ever having thought, for ever having even imagined that anyone would give you top billing or any billing at all. Of course of course of course. It's never going to stop. Keep your eyes firmly on your own work. Blink it away. 

 

 

 

Curiouser

I don't understand why we were told that curiosity killed a cat as if this were a reason not to be curious but a lot of people definitely aren't curious and it always seems weird to me. It's fun to know things. When I was younger, before the internet, I would call the library or go to the library to find things out. Flipping through card catalogs was fun. After the internet but before I could look things up on my phone I would write down questions that came up through the course of the evening and then send the answers in a next-morning email to whoever I'd been with when the questions arose. I thought it was a way of saying I'd been paying attention. I've been given to understand that not everyone finds this charming so I don't do it much anymore. But now that we all have libraries in our pockets, I'm regularly flummoxed by people who don't seem to actually care that there are answers to the questions they ask the air. And I'm even more perplexed when people lack curiosity not only about the world of facts but about the people they inhabit the world with. I am the sort of person who has forgotten things like birthdays since I started writing them down on paper, and I stand in awe of people who remember them (or most things like that) but more like baffled when people seem almost actively uninterested in a view of the world that is a different perspective. I have been in situations with people when I didn't want to hear their opinion because I thought it would change my view of them for the worse; this doesn't seem to be the case though. It doesn't seem like a fear of what truths are out there but an active lack of interest in any truth beyond the one they currently possess.

Maybe related: when people describe situations to me based on their understanding of those situations with no regard or interest as to what my view might be, even if those situations are ones I lived through and they did not.

To be curious about why people aren't curious is a Mobius strip that won't take me anywhere useful but at least I wrote it down, this moment of gazing, dumbfounded, at how little some people seem to want to know, even when it's right there. Even the cat got a good look. 

 

Kaninchen und Ente

 

This is a drawing of a rabbit. It's just a sketch and doesn't look very much like an actual rabbit; the ears are wrong and it lacks the endlessly curious bunny nose. I won't go on with rabbit details (soft fur, various endearing noises). I'm not stupid, it's not a real rabbit, it's a sketch of a rabbit, and just a rabbit head at that. What's making me personally unwell lately is that for some reason if I say "that's a rabbit" people feel a real burning need to tell me that it's not a rabbit, it's a sketch of a rabbit, or better yet that it's not a rabbit it's a duck. Yes, I see the duck, too. I'm well versed in optical illusions; wait til I tell you the story about that beautiful young woman in a fabulous hat who turned into a hag overnight. But right now for a minute I want to talk about the rabbit. I don't understand why before I get to talk about the rabbit I have to acknowledge all the different ways of seeing it. I know about those, too. I do! But there is something about the particular brand of my fear that is wrapped up with wanting to have the thing I see validated. Maybe it's not there, the creak of the house, the smell of gas, the cold draft from a crack somewhere, and I ask "Did you...?" because if you didn't then I am, finally, crazy. But I don't think I am. Yes, there's a duck there. But... Did you see a rabbit? It's all I want to know. Do you see the rabbit? Because I see it. 

 

Ballast

How long will you carry it, this weight? If the original idea was that it would hold you in place, it has done so, has pinned you not exactly on but so near the ground it's functionally the same. It is a form of stability that is closer to stagnation. What heights could you have reached? The birds you could have met, clouds you could have passed through, gossamer air, pale blue horizons within reach. For years I've watched you hover barely above the ground and waited to see when you'd cut yourself loose and where you might fly to. And the world has turned beneath you with you directly above it, fundamentally rooted to the spot. I thought you'd want to be free. Some days I blamed the ballast for holding you down, the dead weight, the burden you apparently believed had to be borne. Sometimes I blamed you for not releasing it. As long as you held it, your hands could touch nothing else, and I couldn't imagine why you didn't just let go. Your fear of the altitude you could reach, maybe. Was that it? Did the potential feel overwhelming? Or maybe, maybe, the fear that the weight isn't what holds you down at all. The fear that you were never meant for flight, could never soar, that your freed hands would remain empty and you'd have nothing to blame now. I believe you could have flown anywhere. Instead you held on, still hold on, your face sour as grapes beyond your reach, and the grass shrivels beneath your unmoving shadow.

murmuration

Last night, sitting on the balcony and watching the birds swoop across the sky in waves, like schools of fish, and trying to decide if that's a murmuration or just flocking without looking at my phone to see what the difference was. Our voices got quieter and hushed as the dusk shifted the sky to darker shades of purple or violet, a difference I also don't know without looking it up. You told me about a discussion or debate you'd recently had with a friend over whether theater can still serve any purpose in a world like this one. This one incorporating climate change and now a war that is not quite at our doorstep. You'd argued that of course it did, of course stories, always, as long as we've been here. Of course. But you came away wondering if you were right. It was my job to hear that fear and to tell you that of course you were right: of course stories, always. As usual with rehearsals I didn't do as well as I could have, so now I try again.

Of course theater, because of course stories. This, our humanity, how we pass our knowledge to each other most effectively and longest. Cave paintings. Ancient cultures. Acting it out. Stories are how we tell each other things, with and without words. What do we tell each other? Where the food is. Adventures we had. What to look out for. We tell each other stories to inform and to warn and to entertain. Stories to pass on to the future what we've learned so far, so we don't have to learn it again. We tell each other stories to hold back the dark, or to make the dark less frightening. Shh, go to sleep. I will tell you the story of tomorrow: how the sun will be hidden from us and then rise again.

I cannot imagine a world without stories, without words. And yet, as a wise woman has pointed out, we seem to be living at or near the end of the world. Well not the world altogether, just the world as we inhabit it, humans. I think so. So the stories we are telling are not stories for the future, but stories we tell ourselves. The sun will continue to rise and set with or without our observation; starlings will fill the sky and will not care if we know what they are called. Do the stories we tell continue to have value if they do not continue beyond us?

I didn't think I'd live past fifty. At this point every year is a combination of a revelation and curiosity to see how much further I'll go, and to be honest at this point whether I'll outlast the world. I try to love what I can while realizing each time could be the last time I see or hear or smell or taste something. There is no smell in the world more sweet and primal than a baby's head, but when my son say he'll never have children and I'll never be a grandmother I only feel profound relief. On some level I've already said goodbye to almost everything but that would be really very hard. 

Theater is not dead; theater will not die until we die. The issue of whether it serves a purpose now, while we are alive, is not the part that frightened your friend and that in turn frightened you. The real fear is the realization that this will not be for very long, and that the darkness is coming. We're only telling stories to ourselves now, I think. But the darkness is always where we told stories anyway. Stories in general and theater specifically: the shared experience of telling and listening is literally vital. Let's put on a play, let's do what we can, not because it makes a difference to our future, because I don't believe it does, but because it's how we connect with each other as long as we can. 

ways to be

being excellent but thinking you're perfect

being excellent and knowing it exactly

being excellent and thinking you're average

being excellent and thinking you're inferior

 

being average and thinking that you're excellent

being average and knowing it exactly

being average and thinking you're inferior

 

being inferior and thinking you're excellent

being inferior and thinking you're average

being inferior and knowing it exactly

being inferior and thinking you'll never get better

 

Nobody's perfect. Everyone can get better.

I'm just thinking about the distribution.

that unnoticed and that necessary

When I was little, I used to listen to my parents sleeping at night. They didn't snore, but they were deep and slow breathers. I used to have terrible headaches and found it difficult to fall asleep over the painful pounding in my own ears, but if I could listen to my parents' regular inhale and exhale rhythms, match mine to that, I could usually get myself to sleep. The trick was to focus on it completely and be sure that I was inhaling with them, exhaling with them. Sometimes my tiny heart would be pounding so, to get more oxygen in faster, but if I could focus, I could sleep.

When I had my first regular boyfriend, his breathing was different from my parents, faster. After years of learning to slow myself down, it felt like hyperventilating. But I managed to retrain myself, to make myself fall asleep by breathing with him, focusing. When we finally broke up, sleeping alone felt untethered, like I would never find my own breath.

Over years, sleeping in different rooms with other people, listening to the various ways that people sleep and breathe. Trying to keep up or slow down. Trying to connect myself to the thread of their breath and let that carry me to sleep. Sometimes lying in a dark room alone and imagining the room itself breathing, not sleeping, waiting for the next morning. 

I was married for years and I remember at one point when I had internalized his breathing patterns, I thought: This is the last one I'll learn. I will never again shift the rhythm of my breath to match someone else's; this is the pattern I'll follow now. Which turned out not to be true: I have slept in more rooms, tents, hotels, with more people, each with their fingerprint breath, whorls of air, and I've followed the individual patterns each time. Sometimes I can feel myself falling asleep even before they've settled into their own dream rhythms. Sometimes I don't sleep, unable to follow their jagged breath. Sometimes I wear earplugs and try counting myself to sleep instead, make my own metronome. Sometimes I remember my parents' breathing at the end of the hall, the pounding headaches, the childhood fear of being the only one awake and the comfort of sliding under someone else's pattern, warm and steady. 

memory souls

The heat came on yesterday. It's August. I have some opinions about that. One of which is: WTF. 

 

Sometimes I feel like I'm wasting my life, or specifically that I'm wasting my summers, working and reading shit online, but then I think: What was I planning to do? Is it a shame that I didn't spend time reading a book under a tree? It is. But then how much of a shame? Not enough to make me prioritize that, clearly. I like my job most of the time. And I like being a person who does what she says she will. And thus I sometimes spend summertime indoors doing projects I should not have agreed to do, and the clouds shift and the cool air rolls in and the shadows lengthen under the tree. Shiver. Existential dread of winter in August. It's not my best look. 

 

But I didn't stay inside the whole summer! I spent six weeks in the US soaking in all the things I love: art, friendship, oysters, cocktails, hard laughter, road trips, the very specific pleasure of knowing someone for a long time. I cried (because I persist in being myself, including one day that I literally flung myself across a bed and howled into a pillow), but MOSTLY I was happy. 

 

And I went to Prague twice to perform, and once went well and once did not. Performance is interesting because you're often saying very personal things to a room full of people who then think they know you, that you've shared something with them individually, and it's intense. Well at my level of fame ("fame") it's totally fine, because there can be connections; I'm still just a person. But I see more famous people trying to continue with that "we are equals" narrative long after they have ceased to be equals with their audience, and it's just... it doesn't work. Back when there were blogs, some blogs got popular and then those writers were only reading other writers of a similar level of popularity, and yet they wanted the people they didn't read to keep reading them. It stopped being sharing and started being performing, competing. They wanted to be adored as equals (ah, we're all just friends!) but they also wanted the power ("power") that came with being popular. [This is also, I believe, the root of a lot of sexual harassment cases: One person wants the pretense of being equals; the other person is keenly aware that they're not really equals. So when the first one takes something or even asks for something from the second one, that's messy].

 

Having never been particularly "in group" OR "out group", please forgive me while I work through observations that possibly were old news to you in high school. 

 

I wouldn't want to be a mean girl. It seems like there's a lot of insecurity involved. It IS true that I didn't get invited to something recently that I felt that I absolutely should have been invited to and I 100% stomped around my living room for almost a week over it. I didn't write a burn book or anything though. I just did some stomping. 

 

I have also been thinking, regarding performance, that I have the very softest space in my heart for things that are amateur, clunky, brave, vulnerable. And I also have a huge amount of available affection for things that are professional, thoroughly considered, perfectly executed. In between, it's a lot about what I ascribe your intent to be and I have found that I have much less patience for things that present as being professional and then fuck it up. And yet is it not at some point cloying to pretend to be less good at something, to play "whoops this guitar just fell into my hands here and I just did a little van Halen thing on it." And even if you're not that good, public self-deprecation requires too much assurance from the audience as a form of participation. Still, I prefer people to err on the side of underestimating themselves, just a bit. 

 

My mind wants to go into a little digression about differences between men and women but I'm pulling it back by the scruff of the neck.

 

Another thing I am thinking about, which probably ties back into performance but was actually related to art, was the difference between invitation to narrative and invitation to dialogue. Like, some art just raises so much thinking in me. Where does that path lead? Why is she sad? Some artists seem to invite you to think about it on your own, but some artists, for some people, it feels like an invitation to dialogue. And I wonder why that is. Like why people felt the need to hunt down J.D. Salinger but maybe not Harper Lee. I would say that both invite narrative (the reader wants to write or paint or think new thoughts after reading) but Salinger (despite, I think, his intentions) invites dialogue: people wanted to talk with him afterwards. Whereas I think people wrote to Harper Lee but not with the same need to be seen? I'm thinking on it. 

 

I ordered a new pair of shoes online, always so tricky to figure out how they'll look from a photo. They just came in the mail today. They have memory soles. Maybe fall won't be so bad.