Find me on Mastodon!

One thing the Internet does not need is another Irish wake for Twitter. Suffice to say that if I had written a sentence of decent content for every tweet of at least 180 characters I wrote between 2009 and a week or so ago, I’d have written two more novels than I had. But then, who would I be? We are made of our choices and our relationships. See, that would make an excellent tweet, but goodbye to all that now. I’m not going to rent my eyeballs to Boy Wonder over there anymore. Let him live somehow without the fraction of a cent he earns from me.

After the initial “Now what?” of figuring out Mastodon, I am well and truly falling in love with the place, despite its flaws. I loved Facebook once, and Twitter until recently, but now, I’d prefer to love something non-profit and non-predatory. I’d like my brain back, and my attention span, and I’d like to throw the bread of the vain search for virality and the approval of strangers onto the waters of commercial social media.

More musings, perhaps, another time, as I emerge, dazed and blinking, into the light of complete sentences once more. Please find me on Mastodon here.

And then some history happened, and here we are.

Perfect Whole has been private for the past seven months because I was running for New York State Senate. Longtime readers of this blog (all four of them!) know that nothing on here could be construed as scandalous, nor do these essays contradict a word I said or wrote during the campaign. I am a WYSIWYG person, but I was warned that in politics, anything you’ve ever said will be used against you. I took precautions.

Since the day I lost the primary (September 13th, 2018), I’ve imagined that I would have a Niagara of wisdom to share with the world about the experience: what it’s like to go from living life as an anonymous citizen to hearing a crowd chanting your name (awesome, by the way), what it’s like to be a nuanced writer doing that least subtle of all human activities–campaigning, what it’s like to be an anxious person making speeches and TV appearances, what it’s like to realize that 48 years of cringing self-doubt might have been a shameful waste of time. I also learned a lot about politics, some of which you can only learn by running. Not to mention all the funny stories!

But I’ve said very little about the campaign, and none of it in public. I didn’t want to become That Person Who Had An Interesting Experience Once and Talks About It Endlessly For the Rest of Her Life, and I wasn’t sure I had anything to say that hadn’t been said before. (Maybe that’s the cringing self-doubt talking. If I were a man, I’d probably have written a book about it already.)

Maybe it’s all percolating in my unconscious, waiting for me to finish writing hundreds of thank-you notes to donors, to catch up on the River, River slushpile, and to complete the paperwork for shutting down the campaign. Maybe then, in the expectant stillness of winter, the space and time for pulling on the golden thread will open up in me again, and I’ll go back to being a writer. I’d started the last phase of the novel I’d been writing for several years when the campaign… (when it what? Happened to me? Like a natural disaster? A consensual one? Like falling in love? Like an attack? Like history demanding your commitment in a crucial moment? That’s what it felt like, but it sounds so pretentious) began, and I hope I can reconnect with the part of me that knows how to proceed (and find verbs). Maybe if I become a writer again, I’ll know what to do with the raw material of the most mind-blowing three-and-a-half months of my life.

If I do, I’ll tell you about it.

 

The Bulldozer

If someone drives a bulldozer through your house, getting rid of the bulldozer doesn’t rebuild your home.

You’d need a lot of work, time, money, expert help, patience, and determination. You might not have enough.

You would need to remember what it looked like before to have any hope of restoring it, but the bulldozer destroyed your photos and records. The details are hazy now.

Ideally, you’d like to make it better. Stronger. More bulldozer resistant. Better designed. You always knew the house wasn’t perfect. It needed work. It didn’t need a bulldozer.

But if you’ve forgotten what an intact house looks like, you have little chance of restoring it, let alone envisioning something better.

You may not be able to do it. The experts may have vanished. You may be broke. Your friends, family, and community may not want to help.

Worse, they may like the house better half knocked down. It’s fine, they tell you. You’ll get used to it. You’ll come to like it this way. You’ll see we’re right. Give it a few years.

Maybe you’ll walk away and live somewhere else, if you can.

Maybe the criminals who destroyed your home will come back to finish the job, cart away the wreckage, and build a prison there, or a palace for themselves.

Or maybe you’ll huddle in the rooms that remain standing, as fragments of the roof and walls fall, piece by piece, with every gust of wind, every rain and snowfall, every change in the weather.

Be A Happy Warrior

After an hour, I gave up trying to call Senator Chuck Schumer. His D.C. number played its monotonous busy signal to my wide-eyed young Android, who had never heard such quaint music, and the voicemail boxes at three of his regional offices were equally overwhelmed. So for the third time in twenty-four hours, I took a few minutes to write a Senator a postcard.

Vote No on the nomination of Jeff Sessions, I wrote him tonight. Yesterday, I asked him to vote No on Betsy DeVos. I have the subjects of twenty more postcards planned, and every day, the unrelenting horrors of the new Administration give me reason to add to the list. Don’t shut down the EPA. Don’t erase disabled people from the White House website in preparation for God only knows what other erasure. Don’t take my daughter’s health insurance away, and with it, the treatments she needs to stay alive and strong. Don’t take my LGBTQ friends’ marriages and families and human rights away. Don’t rob black and brown people of their right to vote. Don’t jail and deport our immigrant neighbors and friends. Don’t allow the President to use his office to enrich himself at the expense of the people. Don’t declare martial law in our cities.  Don’t  Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.

But the Sessions vote may arrive sooner than my postcard, so I wrote Senator Schumer an email, too. The former Congressional staffers who wrote the Indivisible Guide advise us to make emails personal for greater impact, so I got personal.

Be a happy warrior, Senator Schumer, I wrote. You may never again get the opportunity to fight this hard against people who deserve it more. Your constituents and your country are depending on you!

And as soon as I wrote it, I knew it was true. (Writing is funny that way–non-writers believe that you think a thought, then write it down. Writers know that writing is thought.) To survive this, we have to fight it, and we have to fight it with fire in our blood and joy in our eyes. We have to love fighting. This, not the ethics of nonviolence, is the subtext of this week’s Nazi-punching debate. People want to enjoy the pain in their fists. They need to know they’re still alive.

I’ve been as miserable as everyone else I love, plus ill. I couldn’t go to any of the Women’s Marches. Too sick to go to work yesterday, I mainlined the bad news all day long until I was exactly as terrified as Trump and Bannon want me to be.

The government as I understood it crumbled every hour, with each new Executive Order. Its foundation was not built of laws, but of norms, and it took only one would-be authoritarian a few days to show the world how fragile the structure had always been. 114 Congresses have come and gone, and not one thought to write laws preventing what is happening to us this week.  The rugged individualists would gather in the City on the Hill and select the leader God would have picked Himself, if we hadn’t invented democracy. If this Administration is the end of us, our faith in our own mythology is every bit as much to blame as Vladimir Putin’s hackers.

The more I saw, the less I could breathe.

But late in the afternoon, several friends asked for my list of postcard ideas. Rather than making the post public, I created a Facebook group called Postcard Riot, where people could share ideas for activism they could do from home. I invited a few dozen friends, posted my list, and watched the group grow to 340 members, most of whom I don’t know, posting information about postcard parties in their homes and places or worship, questions about how best to influence representatives, issues they wanted to get active about, and pictures of their postcards.

By the time I did that and wrote the first few postcards, I started to feel a little of that Nazi-punching energy pulsing through me.  I’m not in a position to punch anyone, and if my health doesn’t improve, I’m not going to be attending many marches, but I can write, network, research, and encourage. I can remind myself and others that we can do more than worry, complain, and grieve. We can, if we like, write a postcard.

I’m late to this work, and embarrassed by my lateness. Alec Mento, who writes the Thieves in the Temple blog, has been doing this work faithfully, Administration in, Administration out, for years now, crafting daily posts about peace, the environment, labor, education, and social justice issues, with simple, practical steps anyone can use to take action. I have always read and appreciated Thieves in the Temple, and admired Alec’s discipline and commitment, but seldom took any of the actions he recommended. If Democrats were in office, I figured they would take care of things, and if Republicans were, I figured there was no point. I hope never to make that mistake again, and I don’t think I ever will.

If this moment is not the end of the Republic, then it’s only because we decided it’s not the end, and we can only make decisions like that about something that belongs wholly to us.

So if it belongs to you, take it up. Speak out for it. March for it. Knit for it. Draw for it. Chant for it. Pray for it.  Cook for it. Punch for it. Call and write your Representatives on its behalf. Donate money, if you can. Run for office, if you can. Never be silent. And whenever you  have sufficient strength and moxie, be a happy warrior.

The Perils of Prophecy

On Tuesday, November 4, 2008, I wrote some predictions about the Presidency of Barack Obama, folded them, stapled them shut, and put them in my desk drawer at work. On December 1, 2010, I didn’t open it, but added a scorecard.

Today, on the last full day of his Presidency, I opened it to see how I did, and graded myself on the scorecard.

For those who can’t read my handwriting (i.e., most people), I’ll transcribe both below.

1. Obama will disappoint progressives, early, often, and hard.

I gave myself a “Dead-on” for this one. I remember listening closely to Obama’s campaign speeches and noting that while his rhetoric was soaring and visionary, his policy proposals were moderate. But progressive Democrats were enchanted, and heard in his tone what they wanted to hear in his policies.  It’s not Obama’s fault that he did, in fact, disappoint progressives early, often, and hard. He had never promised what they thought they heard.

2. The Democratic Congress, even with a big majority, will continue to act as if their fate was to be decided by an omnipotent Newt Gingrich–wimpy, tentative, centrist to spite itself.

I chose “More right than wrong” for this. Democrats always seem to govern in terror, even when they have a majority. But they passed the ACA, so we have to give them some credit. 

3. We will get healthcare reform, but it will still be controlled by  insurance companies. Like Medicare D, it will help some people somewhat, but fall way short. Bipartisan compromise fans will love it.

Perhaps my “Dead-on” here is too enthusiastic, or maybe fans of bipartisan compromise were already a dying breed in 2008, and I didn’t know it yet.

4. We will make big progress on alternative energy and global warming.

This earned a “More wrong than right.” We made progress on global warming, but not nearly as much as needed, and the improvements in alternative energy have come more from technological advances and disruptions in the oil market than from President Obama’s White House. We may be grateful for this soon–the new President may overturn policies, but he can’t set the clock back eight years on technology. (Fifty years on women’s rights will be much easier).

5. The press will never give President Obama a moment’s peace. It will be Clinton’s first year all over again.

I gave myself a “Dead-on” because the punditocracy treated fabricated stories about Obama’s birthplace, influences, and secret motivations as if they had some sort of basis in reality. There was a time when Orly Taitz was nearly a household name, and some mouthy NYC real estate developer swore he had the goods to prove Obama was born in Kenya. Charges that the essentially conservative and business-friendly Affordable Care Act was modeled more on a plan of Fidel Castro’s than of Mitt Romney’s were discussed seriously on Sunday morning talk shows. Fox News and Breitbart went mainstream, and  even noted fantasist Alex Jones set the agenda for a lot of people and organizations who should have known better.
It’s a little difficult to remember now, because ever since that same punditocracy decided that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were equally appalling and despised figures, they also fell in love with the romantic poetry of the lame duck President, and since November 9, 2016, they can barely speak of him without a catch in their throats.

6. We won’t be out of Iraq by the end of his first term. Not completely, anyway. Not enough.

Was my ignorance of military matters showing here? You betcha. I didn’t know how an army leaves a place. Was I hedging due to my ignorance? Right again. I had no idea how to define “enough.” But I gave myself a “More wrong than right” for this, because most of the troops withdrew. For the record, in 2008, there were 164,250 troops in Iraq. Today, there are around 5,000.

7. We will renew relations with old allies and cultivate new ones. That will improve a lot.

I might have graded this differently four years into Obama’s Presidency, when he had won the Nobel Peace Prize and Made America Cool Again. Perhaps this deserves higher than “More wrong than right.” But Obama  could not have predicted the anti-immigrant, anti-liberal democracy backlash in Europe and here. Obama made great efforts to repair the damage done by the international arrogance of the Bush administration, and promoted a more cautious role for the U.S. World leaders other than Vladimir Putin and Bibi Netanyahu seemed to like him personally. But the drone program did him no favors with the people of the Middle East and human rights advocates everywhere. Given the new President, though, we may look back on today as a zenith of American popularity for many years to come.

I’m keeping my day job and staying out of the dangerous business of prophecy in 2017.

Anyone who tells you they know what lies ahead of us now is a liar or a fool.

Even at the privacy of my desk, on a scrap of paper hidden in my drawer, I don’t dare to guess.

If you do, please leave a comment with your inaugural predictions.

 

 

 

 

Vindication

​In the Afterlife is a palace for artists, scientists, and visionaries who died penniless, unrecognized, or forgotten, but whose genius has been vindicated by history. Van Gogh, Dickinson, Melville, Tesla, Lovelace, Poe, and many others toast each other for all eternity.  There’s a lot of “Tolja so!”, but it’s allowed, and no one ever gets annoyed. A heavenly bell rings every time their names are spoken or written, and it’s like windchimes in a hurricane.

The palace for those who are still unknown, whom we may never know, is even lovelier.

“The Question Is”

Here’s another short story that takes place in the A&P two Tuesdays before Thanksgiving a little before 6pm. Jennifer Lerner, PhD., asks herself 66 questions about competition, marriage, academia, children, sex, careers, the soul, and cake mix.

Here’s an excerpt:

 

Better still: who is crying? Or is that two people crying? Who cries in the A&P? Then again, isn’t the riotous excess of options, the tens of thousands of micro-decisions that constitute every expedition through this temple to consumer choice and evolutionary irrelevance enough to make anyone with even a fraction of her soul intact sob with gratitude, guilt, and despair?

Does one still believe in the soul?

That can hardly be the question right now, can it?

Does academia ruin a person for normal life might be a valid question. Another: is it better to keep reading the text of the baking aisle, or just to get on with Tuesday evening?

Still another: why won’t that child stop howling? Furthermore, if one began crying in the A&P, how would one ever stop?

Read the rest here, and let me know what you think.

(Can’t get enough stories about the A&P? Here’s another, published last year in River, River. More coming!)

Survivalism

Survivalism is a collection of absurd delusions.

You have your own solar panels, your own water supply, and your own food growing and preserved on your own property?

Someone bigger, stronger, or better armed can steal them, enslave you, or kill you and your family.

Arm yourself? Sooner or later, your weapons break, you run out of ammo, or someone with better guns overwhelms you.

This species did not evolve in isolated families, but in clans and tribes. Practically speaking, there is no such thing as individual survival.

We survive together, or not at all.

“The Schools”

Lately, I’ve been writing essays in my head instead of on paper, which has made Perfect Whole far too quiet, and my head far too noisy.

But I’m popping in to share some news.

The inaugural issue of River, River, a biannual journal of poetry, short prose, and photography, makes its debut today.  I am pleased to announce that my story, “The Schools,” adapted from my current work-in-progress, appears in its pages. This is my first publication in a literary journal, and I’m thoroughly delighted, possibly all out of proportion.

Please visit River, River and let me know what you think. The submission period for their next issue is open now, if you have work you’d like them to consider.

“How Kind of You to Come”

In what may be the first and last sort-of ghost story of my career, I present “How Kind of You to Come,” a short story I wrote for Neil Fein’s Magnificent Nose, a tale of Halloween, art, grief, obsessive love, and selfies. Here are the first two paragraphs:

I’m ashamed to admit it, but I’ve forgotten her face. It’s become a disordered collage: the slope of a nose, the curve of a lip, a glow of brown eyes. Memory no longer assembles them into a face.

So I paint everything else. Her front door. The in-between coat she wore in autumn. Her beagle. The mums that grew in her yard. The grackles that flocked around her at the bus stop. Her clarinet case. Her long, sequined prom gown. Her boyfriend’s motorcycle. The instruments of her destruction.

Read the rest here.