whatever happens, even if nothing

Last week, i hurt my back shoveling snow, and as i was on my knees, clutching the shovel and staring into the sun waiting till i could stand up again, i realized why i haven’t been able to satisfactorily revise an essay i’ve been clawing at for months about John Haines, the hill, and the internet, but might actually need to be more about time, and love: i haven’t given myself enough time or space to step away, put down the shovel, and sit still.

Those of you have been reading this for a while were probably thinking i was done blathering on and on about my tortured feelings about “my” little cabin on the hill, a la summer 2010, the summer of written and spoken meditations on the Zen of slop buckets vs. the understated joy of regular bathing, the sound of the river in summer vs. the ability to wake up in with warm toes on winter mornings, what is sacrificed for love, what is gained with electric outlets, and on and on. It might seem like, after a healthy period of commitment-phobic negotiations and in the tradition of modern, non-landowning people who enter into relationships, i just moved across the damn highway with all my crap, and shut up about it.

Which isn’t quite what happened. There were incredibly patient and understanding financial agreements, a lot of indecision and talk of escape plans, and only once, a passive aggressive threat to use one. I kept some things there: a thesaurus and 2 cookie sheets, a pair of nice shoes i’d completely forgotten about, some towels, a Virgin of Guadelupe candle, sentimental wine bottles, four Reese’s peanut butter cups c gave me almost 3 years ago as a consolation prize when i asked him to stay with me and he panicked and shoved chocolate at me instead and ran out the door (there were 5, but after they sat on the windowsill for the first year, Cassalyn announced, “those have been there far too long,” and ate one). Polka dotted rubber boots where squirrels have been stashing spruce cones. A broadside with one of L E-C’s poems printed on it. A jar of dried chilis. Duct tape. Enough to still feel like it’s mine, but not in a way that’s proven necessary–or even particularly convenient–to survive in a house already full when i moved in. When i could move again, i went inside and for the eightieth time started packing the remaining things into boxes, because this time i’m really gonna move out.

Except i haven’t yet. The driveway’s not plowed and i can’t pull in to load the boxes into the car. And if not for the distractions of fresh snow, a writing deadline, the Alaska Board of Game comment deadlines, baking pies, sleeping in, substitute teaching, researching wind power, and on and on, i might have been back there every day sculpting the path on the hill into the work of art it used to be when i was there more often.

I read three beautiful books recently in close succession: Eva Saulitis’ Leaving Resurrection, Mary Sojourner’s Solace: Rituals of Loss and Desire, and Alison Deming’s Writing the Sacred Into the Real. Each of these writers places great value on not knowing. I’d read Mary’s book before, two years ago to the date, and started a brief correspondence with her, about Flagstaff, development, and dry cabins. I told c about it on Valentine’s, and remembered that i stopped writing to Mary because i got distracted by something: him. In the next 2 months, i’d start leaving the cabin for days at a time, which eventually became weeks. The snow melted.

The boxes are still in the cabin. I brought the chocolates to what is now home, and put them on a windowsill in the bedroom. I haven’t tried to rework that essay yet, and i don’t think i will for a while, until there’s a clearer path out. Though right now, there are a lot of other things to do, and this was another distraction.

ian

My great-aunt Velma officially “died a virgin,” as if that’s something you announce to your family on your death bed.  This is, i’ve been told, Ian, the guy who wrote her mysterious dirty postcards from places more exotic than Ohio, where she spent her life establishing herself as the Watson family eccentric. Based on i don’t know what, i’ve heard several times that Velma and i would have gotten along, and it’s too bad we never met.

I’ve had these photos framed together for years (there’s a third in the series, but it’s blurred and in Arizona), and brought them to this house from the cabin on the hill a couple days ago. I’ve had Ian on various walls since college. Is it weird to have some kind of crush on my dead virgin great-aunt’s dead maybe-lover?

 

daily embracing its aching blue space

The more I puzzled over this place, the more fretful I became…Here I was surrounded by my beloved home wilds, yet here I felt unspecified dread. Dread, I supposed, can be part of the neighborhood, so I sketched it into the Map of the Known Universe.

-Ellen Meloy

almost home, thursday night

M told me in New Mexico that she doesn’t think anymore about Alaska when she’s not here, but she does think about New Mexico, what has gradually become her new home, when she’s away from it. This made sense to me, as a way to gauge the transition of a conscious home from one landscape to another. And it made me think about how i missed the desert last year, especially in the fall: a visceral aching for it that felt only partially relieved by being there, fantasizing about the weird little desert houses i wanted to buy: “Cozy, eccentric fixer-upper, $145,000, Patagonia, AZ.” Another place where people tend to develop fierce, tortured home attachments, and those aren’t easily transferable.

It’s good to be home, easy in the way that home is easy, and difficult in the way that 45 below is difficult, and the difficulty breeds some sort of pride. Of course it’s beautiful; that’s an easy assessment. I worked in Healy yesterday, and the sun completed its brief daily arc between the mountains as i drove home, thinking how lucky i am to have this commute to an otherwise unremarkable substitute job and also angry at my stupid square-shaped tires and numb fingers and mysterious and apparently unnecessary car parts that shatter in the cold at a mere touch. There was nothing in between awe and loathing. I don’t know what that means, really.

The day before flying north, i was in Boulder, which i think we can all agree is a ridiculous town, and walked up the Red Rocks trail with a friend who lives there. She said that what she loves about the trail is how close it is to her house, how easy it is to get there. And because it was easy, it was crawling with people. Ease is relative, i suppose.

Ellen Meloy writes about the Canyon Country, “one of the continent’s extreme landscapes,” giving her “the sense that somehow I was less encumbered than those who lived in greener, easier, more temperate places.” I understand the sentiment, but the encumbrances can be different. If a place can inspire love, it can also inspire the opposite. I haven’t readjusted to the fact that going outside in sweatpants and slippers causes almost immediate pain, and i resent it. But i still stand there, enthralled by the quality of light, home, afraid, unable to move and wanting to run. In Boulder, i’d probably just run.

you could get here from anywhere but

South of Patagonia, AZ, 4 of us walked on a trail off a forest road on a mountain frequented by undocumented border crosses. Helpful yellow signs in the national forests here read “Smuggling and illegal immigration may be present,”the same signs that alert you to the possible presence of blowing dust or ice or other hazards. The one in our group who knew the trail best pointed out a well-worn but unnoticed path up the side of the mountain, and we followed it to a collection of prayer candles and the Virgin of Guadalupe tiled onto the rock, left for and by people traveling in the desert without an acceptable reason. A couple of us took pictures, because that’s what we do when looking at Something. c knelt before the eroded indentation in the rock, and before turning around and descending to the road i saw him cross himself. Later, he said he did it because we were all just being tourists, and he felt like we should acknowledge the shrine’s tradition instead of just staring at it. And his dad was Catholic. I made some half-assed argument about aesthetic appreciation, though we weren’t really arguing about it, and maybe tourism and aesthetics aren’t always mutually exclusive.

Went again to Christmas Eve service at my mom’s Methodist church. I remember that there was a baseball metaphor, and a blue screen. Someone farted, and the group of teenagers in front of us laughed. I dripped candle wax on my knee during Silent Night. I didn’t take any pictures. I wouldn’t have known what to photograph if i tried. Maybe i’d know what to take pictures of if i heard the same stories in the Middle East, sans baseball. I don’t know. Visiting architecturally dull contemporary North American churches is an easy kind of tourism to ignore.

There’s a beautiful shrine on a hill above Bisbee, white crosses visible from town and adorned with dreamcatchers, plastic flowers, baby shoes and a smaller Buddhist shrine strung with Mardi Gras beads and prayer flags just below the hill’s summit. I love it. I associate it with Gary Snyder revelations, warmth, and finding peace with my sexuality. That’s probably not why it was built, but it still feels undeniably spiritual to me. I took a bunch of pictures and wrote a little prayer to Jesus or Snyder or some weird kitschy desert god or the Buddha or a packrat and tucked it between the rocks. Tourists have certainly done worse, i think.

I remember feeling, with some horror, like i had found god in the Ganges River outside Rishikesh, after puking for 3 days and not eating anything but half a banana for another three. Fasting works. And i think that if people built and paint and cry and burn god into a place for enough centuries, that place absorbs it. Eventually, i went back to eating meals and left the Ganges. God faded.

A while ago, Lauren wrote this:

1. Matter cannot be destroyed. My skin cells were once birch bark was once a cat’s fur was once stardust. What made your body made my body. What was once your body could now be anything.
2. We are also made of stories.

And those stories have to sit somewhere, right?

Reading Richard Shelton’s Going Back to Bisbee in the back of a truck in the Chiracahuas felt a little like finding god sitting on a rock, too. Trying to recreate that feeling now, in a hipster bar in Denver, feels less so.

 

the machine, the artifact, the devised, or the extraordinary

Science and some sorts of mysticism rightly propose that everything is natural. By these lights there is nothing unnatural about New York City, or toxic wastes, or atomic energy, and nothing–by definition–that we do or experience in life is “unnatural”…
So we can say that New York City and Tokyo are “natural” but not “wild.” They do not deviate from the laws of nature, but they are habitat so exclusive in the matter of who and what they give shelter to, and so intolerant of other creatures, as to be truly odd.”

-Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild

I really haven’t spent much time in real cities–i mean, big, sprawling ones with layers upon layers of history and several little worlds within their blurred boundaries (i’m stating these criteria primarily to disqualify Phoenix). During my six months in Buenos Aires in college, i mentally labeled features as “how things work in Latin America” rather than “how things work in cities” (and misunderstood which of these features were mutually exclusive (not many)). A year later, when i bumbled on to the subway in New York for the first time, it suddenly dawned on me that subways share certain logistical traits, and that the skills acquired in BsAs (um…how to read a colorcoded map) were somewhat transferable. I’ve had similar epiphanies about public transit, advertising, and use of outdoor residential space. The unbelievable variety of human activity occurring on almost any given city block.    

LEC and i–and a couple thousand others–attended the General Assembly at Occupy LA on the Sunday night when the city first threatened the occupiers with eviction from the lawn surrounding city hall. It was powerful. I cried. I got irritated at vague, undefinable things, and irritated at loud, arrogant men. The power, the futility, the irritation and anger are sentiments that brought me back to college activism, to the feeling of grappling with something so huge and monstrous with such grossly incompatible tools–clever zines against the bond underwriting industry?–and the feeling made me want to both run screaming and stick around until whatever was going to happen happened.

We left, after several redundant testimonies and incoherent phrases shouted through the human mic, rather than the electric mic, a choice i’m not sure always had the desired effect. Also, there was some beautiful singing, and it was the only place in LA where, when i said hi, strangers said hi back. It smelled like pot smoke, but most of LA seems to smell like pot smoke. The airport parking garage reeked of it. So i feel like that’s a moot point. The thing that was maybe going to happen that night didn’t, until several nights later, when the LAPD raided the camp and arrested a couple hundred people for standing on a particular piece of ground. What was the concrete demand there? Who knows. 

But what i can’t stop thinking about and expressing poorly is that as that was happening, so were a million other things. On Monday, after seeing a movie where two planets collide in a metaphorically messy way, we went to a Korean spa that was bigger than some towns and must contain a considerable portion of the Colorado River’s flow. LEC commented on how she loves that about LA, all these self-contained little planets in one huge jumble of streets. It reminded me again how strange the idea of “American” is.

And then on Wednesday, the wind came. The Santa Anas, i learned. It was exciting. LEC and i walked from her house to a bar on Sunset Blvd, where the doorway is covered by a red velvet curtain. The wind held the curtain horizontal, and each new person who entered, with their funny (ironic, i learned) pants and shiny hair, commented on it. I bought a book called The Ecology of Fear, which seemed like a good place to start my reading on LA, and scanned the indexed pages that referenced the Santa Anas. On page 100:

Born from high pressure areas over the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau, the Santa Anas become hot and dry as they descend avalanche-like, into Southern California. The San Fernando Valley acts as a giant bellows, sometimes fanning the Santa Anas to hurricane velocity as they roar seaward through the narrow canyons and rugged defiles of the Santa Monica Mountains.

It seems important that it was snowing on the Colorado Plateau, and that a large portion of LA is still without power. A large portion of LA is also probably at the spa.

here is water, wine, beer, enough books for a week

It seems quite likely that i’m going to meet Gary Snyder in July. My first hope is that i don’t embarrass myself. If i succeed at that, i hope to say something intelligent to him. At the rate i’m going, even something coherent would suffice.

I found out the day before my birthday last month. C and i were in line for coffee next door to Title Wave books in Anchorage, en route to Seward for my rainiest birthday to date, and as he looked at all the menu options and shiny boots surrounding us, c commented that he felt like a hick, and i agreed, thinking that if a coffee shop in a strip mall in Anchorage makes you feel like a hick, you probably are one. I got impatient with the line and tempted by the proximity of the bookstore, and abandoned the coffee project to run next door, looking down at my feet as the reality of being out alone in a public place set in and i became increasingly sure that i would trip and fall and probably break something that wasn’t mine. And then a voice said: “Erica! I granted your wish!” because even though there were trendy shoes and mocha lattes, it’s still a small state and a smaller population of bookish nerds who are up early on a Saturday morning in the nonfiction section. It was the director of my MFA program, and i stared blankly until he said “Gary Snyder accepted our invitation to come up next summer!”

Celebrity is a funny thing. I consider my Snyder obsession to be fairly intellectual, but my reaction to this news was comparable to (what NPR tells me about) teenage girls at a Twilight showing. I must have said “Oh my god” at least five times, thanked him profusely, and maybe, though i hope not, added something about how i wouldn’t behave anything like how i was behaving right then in Snyder’s presence. I’d done this before at my first residency last July, when the director mentioned that Snyder is a friend of his, and i launched into a similar gushing, hyperventilating plea for him to bring him to Anchorage next summer. It went something like this: “Oh my god that would be so amazing that would be like beyond anything i would have hoped for in life or ever and oh just to see him read i’ve read all his books and oh if you could do that i would be so so so grateful and i mean that in a literary way, really,” but jesus christ, erica, could you sound any more desperate? And desperate for what, exactly? When c and i were back in the car, he said i was too giddy to converse with for at least 30 minutes.

The lines between respecting someone’s imagery and having a crush are big and blurred and largely irrelevant, until you end up at dinner with that person, and they’re 86 and human and knowing how many times you, if you are an obscure, obsessive stranger with too much time on her hands, have blogged about them might be a little bit…creepy. Or flattering? I’d love to be able to have a real conversation with him, but i don’t even know where to start. “Hi, i just wanted to let you know that your books changed my life. How? Um…”

These are some memories:

Summer 2004, Eielson Visitor Center, reading No Nature at work at the ANHA bookstore, and having some cliché epiphany like “holy shit, everything in the world is connected to everything else!” over and over and over again. Ignoring the tourists, the cash register, and the time of day and reveling in the fact that it was possible to write poems about logging that invoked both Coyote and Bashô. I didn’t do it, but it was possible. I learned to feel rain differently. I wrote one poem that had nothing, or very little, to do with any of that.

Spring 2005, Bisbee, AZ, spring break from UA in Tucson, visiting a crazy friend who has since disappeared, and i’m glad people can still do that, despite everything. Reading Practice of the Wild, again, and we didn’t have enough money to make real meals but we spent most nights at the bar, somehow. I remember sharing an avocado, and listening to Lucinda Williiams. One night, she told me to go home with a friend of hers, and i did, and the next week, back in school, i wrote a poem about the strangeness of one night stands, and god, how many undergrads have written about one night stands, and will they ever stop? There’s a white cross on the hill overlooking town. I remember writing this in the Bisbee Library. Everything seemed so clear that week.

Fall 2006, AHD’s nonfiction workshop, Tucson. I told Susan, one of the only non-traditional (i mean, old) students i met at UA, that i wanted to marry Gary Snyder. She shrieked and reached her hands across the plastic folding table and said “Oh my god, me too!” Several 21 year olds stared at us in confusion.

Summer 2008, the Snyder book list on a paper napkin. River and i spent a lot of time drinking together that summer, and he had a crush on a girl who looked vaguely familiar to me, and asked me to be his wingman. She and i started talking. It turned out she’d been our bartender in Bisbee, a friend of the disappeared crazy girl. We both agreed she was crazy and a little bit selfish, and that we missed her. “Meditation is the problematic art of deliberately staying open as the myriad things experience themselves.”

Fall 2009, the cabin on the hill. I wasn’t sleeping much, and wasn’t particularly at peace with the darkness, or much else. At some point around 2 am, i decided to try to make a list of Gary Snyder’s sex poems, resulting in a great sense of accomplishment, after which i think i slept for 2 days. Nan told me that at least i was good at thinking of ways to entertain myself. I blogged about it, and asked Gary to write to me. This just keeps getting more awkward.

I have about seven months to come up with something to say, or at least a list of things to not say.

And on the subject on having nothing to say, from The Back Country (“Kali”):

To Hell With Your Fertility Cult

To hell with your Fertility Cult, I
never did want to be fertile,
you think this world is just
a goddamn oversized cunt, don’t you? Everything
crowding in and out of it like a railway
terminal and isn’t that nice?
all those people going on trips.
well this is what it feels like, she said,
–and knocked the hen off the nest, grabbed
an egg and threw it at him, right in the face,
the half-formed chick half clung, half slid,
half-alive, down over his cheekbone, around
the corner of his mouth, part of it thick
yellow and faintly visible bones and it drippt
down his cheek and chin
–he had nothing to say.

————————————————————–

I started out hoping to work this in gracefully, but i’m too entrenched in myself to manage to do that, it seems. It’s related, in that it’s about obsession, celebrity, the internet, and trying to make sense of all that in real life. And it taught me what a merkin is. Which isn’t related at all. My friend Anna on sort of meeting Amanda Palmer: I’m from Twitter. Here’s a merkin.

went on too long, what should have been

My friend Henry the painter was painting nothing but gas stations that year. Esso gas stations.

-Ed Abbey

When I first got my driver’s license and around the same time first did some research on alternative fuels, it seemed likely that within my first decade as a driving American, the aesthetic of rural gas stations would be a thing of the past. I remember writing something in my journal about these two conflicting ethics: sustainability and the potential for life to become Thelma & Louise at any waking moment, which seemed less likely if fueled by corn oil or hydrogen. The fantasy scenes had to smell a certain way. Of course, even then, I was always confusing one tradition with another, and wrote a poem about trying to play out some kind of Bronte-esque scene at the Chevron station on Butler Ave in Flagstaff. I remember that it was hard to be 16 and desperately hoping someone would launch into a Byronic monologue when all they thought they were doing was getting gas. But i imagined myself on all these long desert road trips where getting gas somewhere other than the Chevron on Butler would be enough, or something.

And anyway, i was reading Ed Abbey today, and in “Manhattan Twilight, Hoboken Nights,” he says that thing about his friend Henry, and going to all these parties in different apartments “with the same paintings of Esso gas stations on the walls,” and it reminded me of this woman whose house i went toin Tucson a few years ago, and i wrote this then:

susan’s house is filled with paintings by the last man she loved, who died in prison 2 months before the end of his 10 year sentence. she later learned from his mother that everything she’d known about him was a lie, and at 54 she said she’s done with men for good. my favorite painting was of a pay phone on a brick wall outside a diner advertising beer and burgers, and cloudless blue sky.

I know there was another of a gas station, probably not an Esso, and the same blue sky. The thread here is that i’ve been a licensed driver for more than 12 years and the conversation about eliminating gas stations and their infinite romantic potential doesn’t seem to have evolved much, and i still miss the desert sometimes.

for the record

This is my personal comment on the Denali National Park Draft Vehicle Management Plan and EIS. If you have not been dorking out on this document for the past several months, this will probably be hugely incomprehensible and irrelevant to you. Otherwise, read on, and comment if you please. Deadline tomorrow!

Dear Superintendent Anderson,

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the Vehicle Management Plan and EIS, and additional thanks for responding to the many requests for an extension of the comment period until October 30. In responding to a document as complex as this one, the extra month was greatly appreciated.

However, after the days of studying the plan and attending multiple meetings and discussion groups, I’m not sure any amount of time would have allowed for true understanding of all the subtleties of these proposed changes. My suspicions have been confirmed by private and public correspondence with NPS officials who have, I do not doubt, a solid and complete grasp of the science and policy details, but whose explanations often boil down to “it’s too complicated to explain; just trust us.” I trust that intelligent, thoughtful people put genuine and well-meaning effort into developing the alternatives. I do not trust the attempt to communicate those ideas, and because of these many unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable questions, I can only voice my support for Alternative A, no action.

I support the effort to replace the 10,512 limit with scientifically defensible standards, and feel the work done to create standards by which this limit will be defined is important and valuable. I am dubious, though, of the nebulous explanation of “managing to a standard, not a number.” There will always be a number, whether it is labeled or not, and given the pressures put upon NPS by the tourism industry and other entities, I strongly believe that a limit must be defined and enforced. This is not simply a distrust of the methodology of adaptive management; I appreciate NPS’s interest in applying a scientific standard to road management, and in allowing for some degree of flexibility in the numbers and types of vehicles allowed on the road as we continue to learn more. But as outlined in this plan, if negative impacts warrant a reduction in vehicles, the infrastructure is not in place to respond to those impacts. I don’t feel that it is a safe option to assume that visitor numbers will remain low and vehicle numbers will remain well below 10, 512 for the first several years of implementation of any proposed change. I fear for further damages to the already tenuous grasp on the “Murie Vision” of the Denali Park road. Alternative A is the only option in this plan in which a concrete limit is retained.

As described in the plan, transit is given priority in all alternatives. The logistical gray areas of what this prioritization might look like are enough for me to oppose outright the proposals in Alternative B, which combines tour and transit users on one bus. The loss of the designated camper bus would, I believe, mark a final step away from what once made the Denali backcountry experience so unique. The many details that are yet to be worked out in order to implement the changes proposed in Alternatives B and C leave me with a sense of deep confusion as to why these changes are proposed at all. Though it is by no means perfect, the current transit system provides efficient access to backcountry users, and Alternative A is the only proposal where that access is coherently preserved.

I recognize that the transportation system at Denali is quite different from that of any other National Park, and commend NPS for their creative responses to the challenges this inevitably presents. However, I don’t believe that these challenges are a sufficient reason to avoid defining “affordability” of transportation costs, and relying instead on the unstable measure of “perceived value” in order to determine whether the affordability standard has been attained. National Parks are and always have been a refuge primarily of the more comfortable classes; however, a plan that truly guarantees affordability would take into consideration the local and regional population, many of whom live at very low income levels, for whom cost of a trip into the park is very definitely prohibitive. The federal government manages to define poverty levels and low and middle incomes; surely there must be a mechanism to calculate affordability that addresses people other than out of state travelers who can afford to spend large sums of money on travel.

I understand that there is a common knee-jerk opposition to change, and that much of the opposition to this plan undoubtedly stems from that opposition. But for many of us who are deeply invested in this place, our wariness is rooted in our sense that without constant vigilance, the assurances made in proposals like this go by the wayside in the face of budgeting realities, political pressures, and diminishing interest. When I first came to Denali in the summer of 2004, I was impressed with the park’s relatively minimalist facility development within its boundaries. As is the case with anyone’s personal status quo, those conditions soon changed, and I was disappointed to see the erection of the giant eyesore at Toklat. I was comforted, though, with the assurance that it was temporary; and yet, more than six years later, the tent remains. This is only one example. I hope that NPS will be fully accountable for whatever changes might be implemented, rather than rely on the failure of the public’s short term memory. But because I am unconvinced by the necessity, clarity, and feasibility of the proposed changes at this time, I support No Action.

As a board member of Denali Citizens Council, I support the comments made on behalf of the organization as well.

Thank you for your time and efforts,

Erica Watson

your thoughtless words are breaking my heart

Most of what Google comes up with when you search for “age difference in relationships” is horribly punctuated. For a while, this concerned me greatly: what is it about women who tend to favor significantly older men (and this is the demographic who did most of the online writing i found on the subject, with the exception of one young gay man who was actually quite funny but i had to give up on after the third then/than error) that leads to horrendous misuse or lack of use of the comma? Were these awfully written message board posts some horrible foreshadowing of my future? That idea haunted me more than the usual gold-digger/father-figure/sugar daddy cliches, and became more disturbing to me than anything i might have been wondering about the potential psychological implications of my relationship choices, and eventually i stopped that particular Google habit. It was too depressing, grammatically.

Recently, at an all-female wine-oriented gathering, a woman i know just well enough to call a friend, whose husband is several years older than her, offered to get together sometime and share some of what she’s learned about age difference. My resistance to making plans with her had nothing to do with punctuation: she expresses herself very well in writing and in speech. I don’t doubt that she’s learned many valuable lessons about age and love and life, although i have found myself applying hierarchical labels to what people consider “difference,” and am slightly skeptical of anyone who places significance on a mere twelve or fourteen years (“Ha! My age gap could kick your age gap’s ass!” (which might be my irrepressible youth talking)). But i think my lack of interest is mostly because i don’t have any questions that can’t be answered or at least addressed by talking to c about them, getting it out in the open, and generally, moving on. There are of course discrepancies in attitudes about money, public drunkenness, Facebook, and the societal value of Youtube videos of laughing babies, but i’m not convinced that has any more to do with age than upbringing, income, gender, attention span, or any other variable. We’re lucky to live in a community where social stigma is pretty difficult to maintain, as long as your transgressions stop short of violent outbursts, destruction of property, and jail time, and even that will eventually be absorbed into the mythology of “things that happen in winter.” It isn’t completely necessary for our romantic health that the same songs send us down a spiral of adolescent nostalgia, so the fact that we tend to experience Jewel songs in completely incompatible ways hasn’t created any insurmountable challenges.

From what i’ve been told, relationships are hard, whether they’re with someone your age or not, monogamous or not, long-distance or not. So i’m not saying mine is perfect, or wholeheartedly recommending that all women in their 20s go find a single gray-haired dork to move in with. I’m actually only writing this because in my attempt to start submitting to and getting rejected by legitimate publications, the writing of a “query letter” has proven to be a major brick wall and this seemed like a better procrastination tool than watching videos of laughing babies (c is sitting at his computer, grumbling about photography contracts that need his attention and downloading The Band songs instead, having his own adolescent reminiscences. These are the moments that matter). If you found this blog by Googling “age difference in relationships,” i hope to god you’re impressed by my punctuation, because i know what you’ve been through. And i’d love to get together and talk about it sometime.

sounds like a whisper

According to the internet, the American Revolution is starting, and i’m addicted. It’s worse even than streaming The Office from Netflix, and less damaging to our monthly bandwidth allowance, and while i can imagine few things i’d want to do less than camp out with a bunch of men in their twenties in the middle of a city, i’ve started to feel distinctly left out of…something. I’ve thought about making a sign and driving to Anchorage to participate in the burgeoning “occupation” there, but there is a limit to how much money should be spent on gas in the name of economic justice.  The internet tells me that Facebook is only a communication tool, that real change happens with face to face conversation, when we talk to our friends about it. Last night, i tried, sort of, but i ended up talking more about Facebook because the truth is, that’s what i know. Three out of the eight people present hadn’t heard of “Occupy Wall Street,” and the one who knew the most, second to me, only knew it because he lives with me and i insist on reading every mildly amusing or unusual status update or article out loud to him while he does dishes. Two of us are at least somewhat unemployed, three work for non-profits, and three for the government, and our ages span about 30 years. I attempted an inspiring speech, based on various blog entries i’ve read, about the importance of this movement. I held the interest of one person for about 30 seconds, and then conversation enthusiastically moved on to “things we were afraid would come out of the toilet when we were kids.” Oh well.

I’ve written here before about the strange way electronic media has of convincing you that you are or could be a part of something when really, you’re just consuming information, rabidly following one link to another, and the end result is a feeling similar to having just “accidentally” eaten an entire bag of potato chips in 30 minutes: headachy and overwhelmed and mildly ashamed. You go outside. You think about talking to the neighbors about the revolution, but that would probably be like the conversation about yarnbombing: exciting, in theory, for a day or two, but then someone accidentally gets a job and someone else has a baby and after a while, it starts to seem like a waste of good time and scrap yarn. Or like the initial outrage against a new street sign: promises that it WOULD NOT STAND for even a week, but, well, you get used to it.  There are so many other things to do, like make food, go to work, or don’t go to work, chop wood, write about what you would do if you were going to do anything to the street sign. last year i wrote about those Obama emails telling me to “organize a rally in Denali National Park,” and a woman i rarely see and didn’t know read this blog told me a couple weeks later that next time we get one of those emails, she and i should just get together and drink some wine and talk about change. We haven’t even managed to do that, and Obama’s been pleading for a whole hell of a lot lately.

And so what am i getting at…i don’t know. Perhaps i’m just telling a pointless story about a group of lazy isolated white people who either have enough money or don’t but aren’t generally too concerned, which of course means something. I admit that i miss, at least occasionally, being part of a group of people who share the belief that revolution is necessary and the discussion is about tactics rather than legitimacy of belief. I also admit that, prior to two weeks ago, if you’d asked me where Wall Street is and i didn’t happen to have that one Sex and the City episode in mind where Carrie rings the bell to open the day’s trading of little floating numbers, which i usually don’t, i probably would have said Washington DC. My tendency to live in a financial fantasy world hasn’t changed one bit with the financial crisis; if anything, the disconnect between income and lifestyle has grown. So i guess all i’m really saying is that experiencing the revolution via Facebook is a little bit lonely, and a little bit delusional, and a little bit irrelevant, but most important experiments at least start out that way. Maybe i’ve romanticized my memories of public protesting the same way i romanticize other city things like sitting in coffee shops, and when i do that i end up wishing for my own mugs, my own music, my own solitude. Then i worry that i’m becoming too much of a curmudgeon for the revolution, and search for an article addressing that particular problem.

And then eventually, i make food or go outside, and do something else.