A Walk in the Park

In the last year I have noticed that it has become trendy to out oneself as an Introvert, as though it were an identity along the lines of one's ethnicity or sexuality, or at least one's political ideology. Such declarations are usually accompanied on social media by memes asserting that Introverts Are Like Such-and-Such.  The more neutral statements are about how Introverts "recharge" via time alone rather than time spent with friends, or some other essentially attributionless assertion; the less neutral statements charge the Introvert's apparent nemesis -- the Extrovert -- with being shallow and insensitive, while the Introvert's withdrawal from the world is evidence of deep contemplation and the spiritual superiority I suppose the West has always associated with hermits.  In any case, I find this mostly silly: like all online personality type assessments, it is based on scanty or no evidence.  But more to the point, it strikes me as a pre-fabricated categorization of the Self, and such can only be inadequate, especially as a way of announcing your essential nature to the world.  This latter urge I understand well: curating the documentation of one's life -- through social media or otherwise -- is a declaration that one's life is worthy of being recorded carefully.  I think this is an essentially positive inclination: all human lives are worthy of respect and attention (unless some Donald Trump-type character demonstrates decisively that they are an outlier worthy of no such things), and a healthy self-esteem regards oneself as a person whose life matters.  A life that matters requires examination and record-keeping, even if finding an audience for that project is not guaranteed.  But while broadly understood descriptors can be useful as short-hand -- "I am a socialist" -- they rarely suffice.

All of that being said, I don't much like spending time around other people.  I have a collection of loved ones whom I am happy to see from time to time, but otherwise I prefer to be alone, and even when it comes to those loved ones, I prefer to be alone the majority of the time, give or take the fact that I live with my husband.  This is a rather new phenomenon, increasing in intensity as I have aged, although I don't think it's an effect of aging per se.  Rather, I think that when I was younger I took being constantly surrounded by people as an indication that I was popular with others, and I took that as an indication that I was a Good and Worthy person.  My self-esteem was more fragile then, and this kind of external buttressing made sense; I don't regret it, and it was a useful formulation for me at the time.  But over time, my self-esteem has become less fragile, and so I no longer require so much validation from others.  This has allowed me to foreground all of the things that feel off-putting about other human beings -- which can mostly be summarized by saying that many of them are not very smart, but they are very loud.  And so random other people are no longer of much use to me, but they do feel like a small burden.  Thus I keep to myself more.  This makes sense, I think.

But how to keep to oneself?  There's always the living room.  But I have also found as I have gotten older that I am not only less enamored with humans, but I am also less enamored with their works.  This marks a decisive change in my attitudes.  I grew up in a benighted small town and longed to move to the city, which, I assumed correctly, would be a more diverse and cosmopolitan place.  I did this at 18, and was enthralled for many years by the urban environment.  The physical mass of human construction was a demonstration of command and will that was nowhere in evidence in Hometown; the scale of things bespoke a competency and artistry that I felt I had been deprived of in my environment growing up. The sheer quantity and variety of Things to Do was a beautiful remedy to the effects of many emotionally frustrated years of confinement in a very provincial place.  And I am still happy to live in the city because of all of the options and amenities it provides.  In the same week I can go to the symphony and a pizza festival along the same three-ish mile stretch of road; go to a banjo night or a punk show; see a classic Japanese film, attend a beer festival, visit a modern art museum, try Nepalese food, and take a hike in an enormous wooded park.  I'm not inclined to do some of these things, but I CAN.  These things are available to me, and this is very comforting to someone who grew up with no escape from a stultifying rural culture of anti-intellectualism, even after many years.

But those many years HAVE passed, and feeling secure now that I am not going to have these amenities and opportunities stripped from me, I am more inclined to see the urban environment more realistically.  It is dirty, it is crowded, and it is often crumbling.  It is noisy and frenetic.  In other words, it is STRESSFUL.  I'm already an anxious person by nature; miles of broken sidewalks and a never-ending, jackhammering sewer line infrastructure project doesn't help that.

This year and last I've been retreating to Frick Park as a remedy to the stress of the urban environment.  This is also a new inclination in me.  I have never been an outdoorsy person, I think for two reasons.  The first is that I spent the first half of my life having my physical capacity constantly denigrated, such that I thought I was a physically incompetent person.  The origins of this message were both systemic and individual.  Systemic because I was fat, and the world at large communicated constantly, starting at a very young age, that my body was WRONG, and BAD.  Media, popular culture, family members, doctors, teachers, peers -- all of them contributed to this message.  It is very difficult to be told repeatedly and in innumerable ways that your body is Wrong and Bad without concluding that it is those things, and not merely in terms of appearance, but also in terms of its functioning.  If my body functioned correctly, it wouldn't' be so Wrong and Bad, right?  If I wasn't so incompetent at having a body, it wouldn't be so Wrong and Bad, right?  (Never mind that I had been fat since I was an extremely young child.)  Clearly, I had a body that either didn't work right, or I couldn't operate correctly.  This was a message that was and still is widely abroad in American culture: fat people's bodies are Bad, fat people are incapable of having a body in the Right way, fat people do not deserve to have their bodies and use them freely.  

But I also received more individualized messages about my physical inadequacy.  In the first place, I did and do have poor health: my body has produced several major catastrophes starting in adolescence, such that I have come to think of myself as what they used to call "sickly."  As an endocrinologist put it recently, "You've got bad genes -- it's bad luck."  But I was also an only child raised by a single mother who was herself an extremely anxious person.  Every day of my young life, I heard about what wasn't safe to do.  Spoiler alert: basically everything wasn't safe.  The world wasn't safe.  And it was difficult to translate this into anything other than an indictment of my own competency, because many of the things my mother declared unsafe I knew were, in fact, objectively, much safer than she claimed. This was not adolescent hubris: my mother's anxiety skewed her ability to accurately estimate risk.  As a child, upon being told that I was not allowed to do X because X wasn't safe, but also knowing that in general X was safe, I was left to assume that I was the problem -- X was not safe for me, apparently because I was incompetent in some important way.  Since I was already routinely told that I was physically incompetent, I thought that this conclusion was confirmed.  To this day, my mother discourages me from doing regular and even actively healthful things because she deems them unsafe -- "You'll hurt yourself."  Maybe.  But the opposite side of the sickly coin is that I no longer expect not to hurt myself: Hurt is no longer particularly threatening. 

Having been convinced of my physical incompetency from a young age, it was difficult to imagine a place for myself in the outdoors, which I discerned was a more physically challenging place to be than indoors.  But there was a second reason for my antipathy to the natural world, and this still plagues me: my own anxiety involves a lot of hypochondria.  (The previous paragraph should shed some light on why that might be.)  And the natural world is full of unknown threats to one's health -- is that plant poisonous?  Can you get the Hanta virus from falling in the dirt?  Do these mosquitoes have Zika?  Is this water even clean enough to allow on my skin?  Could something with rabies bite me without me realizing it?  On and on.

And so I am still slightly at cross purposes: the built environment is stressful, the natural environment is stressful.  But only the former is often ugly and full of strangers, and so over time I'm tipping more towards nature.

Frick Park is the first step out the door, so to speak, for a Pittsburgher.  At 644 acres, it was the city's largest park until only recently, when the Hays gift was announced.  Henry Clay Frick, who was a true capitalist ratfucker, gifted 151 acres adjacent to his East End mansion to the city, along with a trust to support its maintenance.  Henry, being a capitalist ratfucker, didn't provide this gift voluntarily -- his daughter Helen made him do it.  Over time, the city acquired more land and expanded the park, which now reaches into Squirrel Hill and through Regent Square to the Parkway East.

The topography of the park is characteristic of the western Pennsylvania woods generally.  The hills of this portion of Appalachia are not a mountain range but rather a plateau: an upland, 1200 - 1300 feet above sea level, that has been riven by water erosion from many many streams and rivers over time.  Thus it's less accurate to say that Pittsburgh has hills than it is to say that Pittsburgh has valleys.  And so Frick Park is shaped by the Nine Mile Run watershed; Nine Mile runs along the southern edge of the park, and streams that feed it flow down from Squirrel Hill and along the main flatland of the park, running south from Frick's mansion to the Run.  Nine Mile Run is filthy, as one might expect of an urban stream, particularly one in a city whose history is marked chiefly by coal mining and iron and steel manufacture -- and now fracking.  The Nine Mile Run Watershed Association, however, has made progress in its uphill battle; Nine Mile underwent the largest urban stream restoration in American history in 2006.  But sewage overflows, storm water runoff, and non-point source pollution generated by the third of the watershed that's covered in concrete (imagine the winter road "salt" alone) still leave its water unsafe to touch.

It looks nice, though.  There's nothing I find quite as nice as being around water.  The ultimate water one hopes to sit near and recreate in is the sea, of course.  Failing that, lakes, streams, cricks, and fountains serve the purpose, although not for recreation, because look, brain-eating amoebas are real.  I even enjoy sitting and staring at the swimming pool in the summer; I often listen to the soundtrack of Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou while I do so.  Needless to say, I also love to swim (in salt or chlorinated water, ahem).

But the West Anderson soundtrack for a walk in Frick Park is Moonrise Kingdom.  I'm not so drawn to the open areas of the park -- the field and wetlands surrounding Nine Mile are important to the Run's restoration, but leave me feeling exposed.  To the sun, which is its own consideration on a hot day, but also in a more existential sense -- imagine yourself on an open plain, vulnerable in high grass that masks predators but allows no place to hide.  My brain goes back to the stage of evolution when my ancestors were little things ducking dinosaurs.  Ironically, although dense urban spaces like Downtown leave me feeling claustrophobic, the woods closing in on me makes me feel safe.

My favorite part of the park is Falls Ravine.  In the spring and autumn a crick trickles down about a mile of little waterfalls, finding its way towards the Run.  The path is broad, a bit uphill, and the sides of the valley rise up on either side of you, populated with leafy, skinny trees reaching up and up, surrounded by open space that seems to give each tree trunk its own stage; more little rivulets run down between these into the ravine.  There is a constant trickle, if there are no other people to make noise and drown it out.  In the spring and summer, this little strip of the world is bright green and clothed in variegated light; the ascent isn't overwhelming, but it reminds you that life is work.  When I am there by myself, I feel like I am discovering something, despite the fact that the path has obviously been made by human hands.

This relationship between man and nature takes on different shades in the park than in the city itself.  Pittsburgh has recently, as part of its third Renaissance, been building this and that to be Green -- we have a number of Green Certified ("Certified"!) buildings.  I gather that Green, here, largely means "energy efficient," and this is not for nothing, since it's very clear that climate change is going to kill us all sooner rather than later without some action on our part.  But buildings are not Green in the true sense of the world -- they are not plants.  They do not grow.  They do not invite things to live in and use them, except insofar as some of the benighted creatures on this planet prefer a good hard, cold, enclosed space in which to operate, among them pigeons, cockroaches, raccoons, and human beings.  The chief experience of the urban environment is of domination -- Western humans do not seem to be able to interact with their environment other than by subduing it, and not in part, but rather in vicious totality.  We only feel comfortable with and think we understand a part of the natural world when we have completely conquered it.  At which point, out of necessity because of the negative consequences of this conquest, and a kind of spiritual malaise that we mostly refuse to name, let alone describe, we go back and begin to try to re-Green what it is we have paved over.  But this is not real greenness, it is a simulacrum.  Parks are the best simulacra of nature available to us now.

In a way, Pittsburgh's topography prevented the full and total conquest many other cities managed to procure over the nature they arose on.  I live in a dense neighborhood of mostly row houses, with very few street trees and very few yards of any proper size (my own being an exception).  And yet there is also a hillside adjacent to my lot that is too steep and unstable to build upon; it has never been built upon, and its trees and undergrowth shelter rabbits, groundhogs, raccoons, cats, turkeys, squirrels, deer, snakes, a plethora of insects, I am sure, and a variety of homely little birds.  Turned into an island by the concrete around it, of course, this hillside does not represent any kind of original, untrammeled wildness -- which has not existed in Pennsylvania for many thousands of years, as indigenous, pre-contact peoples managed their environments extensively, if somewhat less obviously, than we colonizers do.  And, anyway -- humans are a part of nature; our works are "natural" too, at least up to a point.  What that point is changes depending on whom you talk to, but I think industrial capitalism definitely falls after it.

This is the irony of the Pittsburgh landscape: on one hand, compared to many major American cities, the land here has resisted complete conquest by virtue of its physical difficulty: Pittsburgh does not sprawl, and there are many hillsides like the one adjacent to my house, too steep to build upon, too steep for a road or a sidewalk … many of these hillsides are surmounted by stairs, which are now too numerous and costly to maintain, such that many of them are being reclaimed by the hillsides they burrow into, and using them is more like a climb into the canopy than a walk up the street.  The city is very Green, in the real sense of the word, when seen from above or on Google Maps, compared to many others.

And yet very few American cities have seen such complete environmental annihilation as Pittsburgh.  Between the 1780s -- when settlers had mostly killed or relocated the area's native population -- and the 1830s, Pittsburgh was chiefly a gathering of scattered settlers working small farms wherever enough moderately sloped land could be found for the purpose.  Their first cash crops were wheat and rye for whiskey.  Over time the Monongahela Wharf became a busy spot for river transport, and a frontier city began to grow up.  But even in the early years of the 19th century, Pittsburgh was choked by smoke.  By 1850 there were 80,000 people in the area -- first digging out clay (for bricks), sand (for glass), and iron, but then digging out coal.  Tons and tons of coal, which was put to the tons and tons of iron to turn it into pig iron.  The "unmatched urban-industrial landscape" of the city created an aesthetic unique to industrial capitalism: enormous complexes of mills, eventually for making steel, and the railroads that attended them, sprawled over hundreds of acres lining all three rivers.  They dominated the landscape and were integrated directly into the city's main population centers.  People at the time chiefly responded positively to these structures, in a manner not unlike the way I received the city at 18: as a monument to human enterprise, power, and invention.  Pittsburgh proudly trumpeted its built environment throughout its industrial age.*  

The rivers were practically obliterated, visually and otherwise, by mills, railroads, wires, and barges.  The city's impressive waterways were completely subsumed into the built, industrial environment.  The many flowing streams that had characterized the landscape the city came to subsume were culverted into the sewage system. Water, water everywhere, and somehow none to stare at.  It is still startlingly difficult to access Pittsburgh's waterways throughout most of the city.*

Tastes change over time, of course.  For example, living in a hideous industrial landscape of filth and pollution eventually seems less like a tribute to human ingenuity and more like a way to contract disease.  The public-private partnership of the Pittsburgh Renaissance after World War II created parks but also highways ("parkways"), skyscrapers, and a new stadium. 1960's-style "urban renewal" destroyed several city neighborhoods, but air and water quality was also targeted for improvement, relatively successfully.  The second Renaissance preserved historic structures and, as Pittsburgh deindustrialized, cleared brownfields and more or less entirely dismantled the industrial structures left vacant by the shifting economy.  Pittsburgh continues to "green" through its third renaissance -- in spite of its river fronts being largely blocked by railroad tracks, its air being continually polluted by the region's coal power plants, and its waterways now being used as sewers for mostly unregulated fracking waste.  The Green simulacrum is difficult to maintain, but better than the alternative.*

Living in conflict with nature also means striving for accommodation with it; but it's easy to lose sight, in a city, of the ways we're constantly shaping and being shaped by the natural world.  The park looks like a mostly "wild" space, set aside from the city -- but it is very much a human-made space, and we make choices in developing it.  Frick Park has very little access for disabled people -- many of the flat trails are inaccessible without first descending stairs or very steep inclines.  There are very few bathrooms within the park.  And so we choose to make it difficult for disabled folk to access the "wild" -- we make it easier for men than for women to spend time in "nature."  Meanwhile, the city itself looks like a space of conquest over nature -- but floods and overgrowth threaten every spring and summer, and every winter we grind to a halt because of the difficulty removing snow and ice from all of our ravines covered over in cracking asphalt.  The deer come out of the cemeteries and parks to eat our tulips.  We pump hexavalent chromium into the water supply in fracking waste.  We do a much better job of spiting us than the deer do.

But even knowing it's not the real wild, I retreat to the park, to the "woods" to "hike." (What is the difference between a hike and a walk but setting?)  And I pretend the wild world still exists for me to encounter -- which is also pretending I am something apart from and different from the wild world. The division between the Human -- which frustrates and exhausts me -- and Nature -- which is now only a museum display -- strikes me chiefly as a question of dharma: people violate the cosmic order, the right-way-of-living, routinely; nothing else does.  And yet our museum-piece, dramatically moderated and altered Nature is itself perhaps a violation of dharma -- or more accurately, a simulacrum of it.  And our own cruel and dominating natures are apparently just that -- nature, built-in, universal to our species, evolved in this cosmos right out of the same dust as everything else.  All of our radical difference and radical similarity to that which we destroy and then struggle to resurrect and preserve is flattened into a map like Borges's -- it covers the territory completely, then, as Baudrillard says, replaces it.

So I visit the place on the map where the fewest people are in evidence, and pretend briefly to have escaped into the woods. X marks the spot of my imaginary world. Terebithia ended tragically, but I suspect I'll just float on mundanely through the simulated woods, unless and until someday I retire to the sea, with my incompetent and sickly body that will seem very moot in the comparison.

*Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental History of Pittsburgh and Its Region, by Joel A. Tarr

Dreams and Alcohol Aversion Therapy

My blogging is falling off.  I know, I know.  But I'm getting stressed out about this fall's new class, and that's been where my energy has been going.  So what's new with me?

Well, this weekend I had some alcohol aversion therapy practiced on me.  On Friday, Ted took the day off, and so we went to Tamari for happy hour dinner and cocktails.  There, we ran into Katie and Randy, who thought that the idea that Nick texted us -- Sidelines for $1 Shot Night -- was an excellent idea, as did Davin when he found out about it.  When we got there, Friend Dave and his lady Shannon were also there!  Such good times!  $1 shots!

I was hungover on Saturday.  I don't know what happens to you when you get old, but your body just can't party like it used to.  But on Saturday, we had plans to meet Sarah and Roger for dinner at Mad Mex in Monroeville, and then attend the monthly Arthur Murray Saturday Night Dance Party.  Sarah and Roger are professional dance instructors, and once a month their studio holds a a BYOB/F dance party.  Now, Ted and I don't dance.  We're physically awkward and uncoordinated people, and it's no surprise that we can't waltz.  But Sarah, God love her, is a proselytizer for her field.  So she showed me the basic steps for a Hustle and Rhumba (the box step), and then told her students that I could participate in either.  Sarah's students are nice people, and so whenever we attend these dances, I usually have one or two guys who come over and ask me to dance.

Except instead of one or two dances on Saturday night, I got asked to participate in like, a dozen.  Imagine this: you are hungover.  Someone comes up to you, makes you stand, spins you in a circle for two minutes, and sits you back down.  Repeat.  When you're not spinning, Sarah is trying to force you to drink sangria.

Oooooog.

Ted and I spent Sunday cleaning the house.  Both the fridge and the stove top got cleaned, hooray!  And SO MUCH CAT HAIR.

This week, my mother's come down twice to paint my kitchen cabinets, and that's not going well.  I like the look -- we're moving from an ugly fake oak laminate to white -- but so far, after two coats ... we need a third coat.  And yes, we scuffed and cleaned before we painted.  On both of those days I got no work done on the class, and this is stressing me out additionally.  Plus: making dinner with all of the cabinet doors and drawers hanging half open is no picnic.  But today is back to reading about the Gulag.

Oh, and we're totally broke and there's still like, a week until the end of the month.  While we were able to be really frugal in June, that seems to have fallen apart in July.  I don't know, people.  I don't have the heart to be parsimonious.

***

Another thing I'd like to bring up is a dream I had last night.  I know, there's not much that's less interesting than other people's dreams, so I'll try to keep this brief.  It had many of the nonsensicalities that one finds in a dream, typically: inexplicable jumps from place to place, one person turning into another part way through, absurd situations, etc.  Still.  Suffice it to say, Ted and I had started a business together in an exotic locale, and I was very happy with it.  But then we abandoned the endeavor at Ted's request.  We became wealthy (I don't know how) thereafter, but I was still unhappy without the business.  Plus, Ted started cheating on me*, and I had to throw his new lover out of our house.

*NB: Poor Ted!  In my dreams, he is CONSTANTLY cheating on me, even though in real life he has never, in all six years we've been together, demonstrated anything but commitment and fidelity.  I'm well aware that Actual Ted would no more cheat on me than he'd pluck out his own eyes, but Dream Ted is a dick, and always running around on me unremorsefully.

Anyway, none of that's really the point.  The point is that throughout the dream, my Uncle Bill, who passed away last year, was following me around, comforting me and consoling me in my losses.  At the end of the dream, he gave me a big hug, and the money to go back and reopen the business I so missed.  His face and body and voice -- his entire physical presence -- were particularly clear to me throughout the dream; when I hugged him, I had the sense that he was acting not just on his own behalf, but on his brother's, my grandfather's, as well.  (My grandfather George is long dead.)

I awoke from the dream in the middle of the night, in the middle of a lightening storm, and had a particular sense that Uncle Bill had in some way been there in my dream, not just as a memory or a construction of my own psyche, but really, actually present with me.  This is strange.

I'm a practicing Catholic, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I have any particular deep faith in the unseen world.  I practice religion because I think that having a spiritual practice is good (for me), and because it helps me to be a moral person.  As far as whether or not God exists, or there is an afterlife where my deceased loved ones are awaiting me ... eh?  I don't know, it seems unlikely?  The older I get, the more unlikely it seems.  (Poor Ted.  When we were discussing this one day, he goes, "Wait.  You've been dragging me to church for years, and I believe in God more than you do??")  I don't know.  I'm not saying that God and the afterlife don't exist -- I tend to believe these are questions the answers to which I cannot know -- I'm just saying that in 30 years I've got no evidence to offer you that they do.  I can only factually assert that religiosity helps me to be a more moral and centered person.

Despite this agnosticism, though, the sense as I lay in bed last night that my deceased uncle had visited with me in a concrete way, and as a representative not just of himself but of his dead brother, was intense.  I don't have anything else to add, other than to recount the event.  I said a little prayer that went, "God, I don't know if You're there, or if my uncle and grandfather are, but if so, thank You, and thank them for me," and watched the lightening until I fell back to sleep.

Living in the world is a strange thing to do.

Fat Acceptance (Wherein I Fail at "Fatshion")

Whew.  OK, I think I'm back on track.  Postings have been slim around here, and I'm going to blame Will.  He came to visit and it was like I was on vacation myself.  And while I did put him on his plane on Thursday ... well, the point is, here it is Monday, a fresh start.  Actually, I woke up today feeling a little like crying because I have to really buckle down from here on out doing prep work for the new course I have to teach this fall.  On one hand, teaching new courses is cool because you get to learn about different things that you might never have even considered before.  On the other hand, teaching new courses sucks because you have to learn about different things that you might never have even considered before.

So later today I have to go pick up umpteen library books and stop into my office in Oakland (I hate Oakland).  I also have to get dinner on and pay bills today.  But I thought it best to start with some tea and a blog.

I've got a blog topic I've been mulling over for literally months, and I figure today is as good a time as any to tackle it.  Here goes.

***

As I'm sure I've mentioned here and certainly have in other places, I am fat.  I prefer the word "fat" to "overweight" because ... over what weight?  The weight I'm supposed to be?  According to my experience, having been fat for almost my entire life, this is the weight I'm supposed to be.  Over the weight other people would like me to be?  Fuck them, my weight is none of their business.  I also prefer "fat" to "obese" because that is a very medical-sounding, pathologizing term.  My body is not pathological.  It is just my body.

This is an "outfit of the day" picture I took during "Fatshion February", which is a thing on Twitter where fashionable fat folks post OOTD pics of themselves. I was making a point about how we're not all fashionable, or want to be.

If you're curious, I don't diet, and plan never to again, though I have in the past, intensely.  I try to eat pretty healthily, or at least wholesomely: lots of fresh vegetables and fruits, lots of food made from scratch, easy on the meat and sugar.  I don't really exercise, which I know I should, but my relationship with exercise is its own ball of wax, and perhaps one I'll get to on another day.  This can be a two-part series: Being Fat in the World: Sabrina Edition.  Anyway, I don't diet because I practice Body Acceptance.  I won't tell you what to with yourself, because it's none of my business, but if you were to ask me, I would recommend that you practice Body Acceptance, too.  Letting go of the shame and anxiety of trying to look the way other people think is acceptable (and who the fuck are they to say?) was, quite literally, the best decision I have ever made -- I am happier and more confident than I ever was before I chose this path, and, amazingly, even though it's fatter now after years of metabolism-destroying yo-yo dieting, I am more comfortable in my body now than I was when I was starving my body thin.  Also, accepting your body in the size and shape it is in does not mean that you cannot practice healthy habits and try to improve your health -- the practice of engaging in healthy eating and exercise behaviors without a focus on weight loss is called Health At Every Size, and it is endorsed by the United States government among others as effective.  One can be fit, strong, and flexible, and enjoy positive health indicators like good cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood sugar numbers while fat.  Trust me: you really can!  (Example: my last blood pressure reading was 110/69, and I am DeathFat, yinz.)

I was not always so accepting of being fat.  I'm sure almost no one in this country is comfortable being fat when they are young, because they are subject to a tremendous amount of bullying, from peers, family, and society at large (I'm looking at you, Michelle Obama).  Literally every day I was in school between the ages of five and eighteen, I was bullied for being fat, some days relentlessly, mercilessly, until I was shaking and crying.  At home, my grandmother reminded me constantly that I was too fat, that I should diet, and that boys would never want to date me as long as I was too fat.  My mother, who I know was well-intentioned, sometimes encouraged me to diet too, probably thinking that my life would be easier if I were thin.  She was probably right -- this is called Thin Privilege, and I assure you, it is real.  But not all bodies are thin, or can be thin.  In any case, I buckled down and endured.

Are you noticing a pattern? This is how I dress for work basically every day I have to dress for work.

The irony is, I cannot recall hating my body on my own at any time in my life -- I hated my body because other people hated it.  Does that make sense?  My disgust and shame were not only learned behaviors, I was acutely aware of them as learned behaviors -- hating my own body for how it looked felt unnatural and silly to me, even at a young age.  But when every peer, family member, doctor, nurse, and media figure assures you your body is not just wrong but disgusting, what are you to do?

As a young adult, I did try to diet.  My most "successful" diet coincided with my time living in Michigan for graduate school.  Moderate dieting had never helped me to become thin -- I had tried the kinds of supposedly gentle, "healthy" methods one might encounter in a Weight Watchers meeting or in a women's health magazine, and they had made not the tiniest dent in my fat.  So, living alone for the first time and homesick, in Michigan I really went for it.  I counted every calorie except those contained in whiskey, and tried to eat no more than 800 calories a day.  (I am six feet tall and very sturdily built -- now that I consider it, I bet I burn 800 calories a day by just existing, let alone other exercises.)  I exercised four or five times a week, for an hour or two at a time, despite my great loathing of the gym.  I mostly smoked and drank, liquor and black coffee.  I lost a lot of weight -- I lost about 100 pounds.  My hair fell out and I was often awake with insomnia for literally days at a time, but everyone I knew told me I looked great and to keep it up.

But here's the thing: 95% of diets fail.  It's been demonstrated over and over again in scientific studies.  Scientists know that for a variety of reasons, it's virtually impossible to keep (not make) a fat adult thin.  Statistics didn't spare me - my weight came back within two years and brought friends.  I tried again to diet.  I lost weight again, but then it also came back, also with more pounds.

And finally, at the age of 26, I decided that this was a very stupid way to live my life, and I stopped.

I didn't stop alone.  I had resources.  Great websites like Shapely Prose, Two Whole Cakes, The Rotund, Dances with Fat ... these women bloggers shared their stories of giving up on trying to make their fat bodies thin and accepting themselves, and provided an example for me.  They tied their individual experiences to cultural criticism and an expansive feminism that helped me to understand how truly fucked up it was that American cultural attitudes about fat had driven me to literally try to eliminate myself, and how those attitudes are part of a kyriarchical system of oppression.  These ladies don't know me, but I owe them thanks.

But while I have since then become comfortable as a fat lady, a few anxieties remain.  One of the things that still traumatizes me is shopping for clothes.  I hate shopping for clothes.  Hate it.  I have always hated it.  Very tall, very fat, as a child, there was little in the kids' section of the department store that fit me.  My mother and grandmother would dress me in clothes for petite adult women; I remember my grandmother picking out clothes for me by Alfred Dunner, a brand of clothing old women wear -- off I went to elementary school dressed like a little fat old lady. Later in life, I would go off to the mall with my friends in junior high and high school, and while they had a jolly time in teen stores, I stood off to the side, mortified, lingering at the jewelry racks because nothing in the trendy teen stores fit me.  In college, Lane Bryant was the only brick-and-mortar store around that had clothing that fit me -- I hung around campus dressed like a 30-year-old on her way to the office.

I have drawers full of knit shirts and thin cardigans. You can't see all the knit skirts, but they're there: plain knit skirts in uninteresting colors.

Now that I am a 30-year-old, things aren't much better.  Once or twice a year I brave an Old Navy, buy a lot of cheap knit tops and skirts, and despise the entire experience.  I get nervous; I sweat.  I remind myself that I don't have these feelings of inadequacy and ugliness anymore, but something about clothing is ... triggering.  I'm not in control of my feelings when I'm in the dressing room (or even ordering clothes online); self-acceptance, in those spaces, is not an option.

But here is the problem.  One of the key ways that fat ladies on the internet, including some of the bloggers that I most love, have formulated resistance to the cultural narrative that degrades fat people is through "fatshion".  Let me say, I take their point entirely.  Fat women are told over and over again by many sources that because they are fat, they cannot be desirable, or feminine, or attractive.  It is even suggested that by providing nice clothing for fat people, one is "encouraging obesity", and we can't have that, can we?  So by being fashionable, by cultivating a means of expressing themselves through clothing that society would like to deny them, I completely understand, academically, how these women's fashion statements are actually feminist statements and Fat Acceptance statements, and why they are concerned with fashion.  Plus, it is the case, I suppose, that some people, fat and thin, just really like clothes -- and please, you do you.

But here's my problem (and I would be interested to hear from other people who might have brushed up against the Fat Acceptance movement's Fatshion component what their take on the subject is): I still hate clothing.  I still hate shopping for clothes and getting dressed in the morning.  And I sometimes feel, because of the emphasis on fatshion in the FA community, that I'm ... doing FA wrong because I'd prefer to just bury myself in some cheap knits and get the day over with.  It's not that any of the bloggers I'm familiar with suggest that unfashionable fatties are setting the movement back or anything like that; it's just that the focus on cultivating a femme, fashionable appearance in many of these spaces creates in me a burden and a sense of "ur doin it wrong".  I fully concede that this could be entirely my own problem -- in my head, and reflective on FA bloggers not one whit.  But I often wonder if there are other people out there who aren't fashionable, who aren't femme -- for whatever reason, be it past experiences that can't be overcome, predilection, gender expression, or anything else -- who want to come to Fat Acceptance, but who feel like because they're not into dresses and nail polish and suchnot that there's not a space for them, or that the space is ill-fitting (oh, the irony!)  Or maybe there is some corner of the FA universe that's like "fuck fatshion" and I just haven't found it?  I don't know.  If you do, please point me there.

I was happy in this one because my t-shirt was awesome (and I was not going to work). The look is basically the same though. BTW, the t-shirt is from www.exocomics.com, which is an awesome web comic.

In conclusion, I love that I've made my peace with my fat, I just wish I didn't feel a vague pressure from the community -- that I owe so much to and am so grateful to in general -- to go out there and express myself through clothing.  Because it ain't gonna happen.  I'm happiest in jeans in a t-shirt.  I just wish I could find a fucking pair of jeans that fit.

[And something that I failed to address above, but that is also worth considering, is the way that a focus of fashion marginalizes poor fatties who, even if they dearly would love to be femme and fashionable, cannot afford to be.  And don't give me some crap about "thrifting" or learning to sew -- sewing is very time consuming and difficult (especially given the dearth of nice patterns in large sizes, and the extra difficulty in trying to draft patterns up in size), and thrifting as a fat woman is practically motherfucking impossible; if you think there aren't many options for large sizes in the whole world, try the thrift shop.  Fat folks, because decent fat clothing is so hard to find, will hold on to clothing until it is literally falling off their fat fucking bodies -- I personally have shirts and sweaters that are more than a decade old.  So.  Also that.]

I Have Eaten and Drank All the Things

Well!  So, Friend Will is in town from the west coast, and so, after two months of thrift and boredom, we have been OUT and ABOUT.  Will flew into town on Thursday, and Ted and I picked him up at the airport.  Our first order of business was to drive straight to Piper's Pub, for breakfast and beer.  Because breakfast and beer is the best possible solution for overnight airplane rides.

Ted ordered Toad in the Hole at Piper's: bangers in Yorkshire pudding with onion gravy, which turned out to be motherfucking awesome breakfast.

After that it was naps, and then we went out in the evening to the Brillobox, where delicious beers were again enjoyed, and I ate a plate of nachos for dinner.  Because I could.  Friends Carley and Lindsey and Acquaintances Tom and Amber were also there.

Ale aged in tequila barrels.  It was a hell of a beer.  I kind of want more of it.

Then Friday I got up and actually cooked a meal -- biscuits and sausage gravy and eggs and tea and orange juice -- cause it seemed like the hospitable thing to do.  But later it was out to Kelly's for happy hour.  There the three of us were joined by Will's friend Michelle, whom I'd met before, but upon being reacquainted with, I like a lot.  Many $4 cocktails of the day were had, along with Pittsburgh Bites and mac 'n' cheese.

On Saturday, Will made four loaves of zucchini bread shirtless in my kitchen.  Woo?  Then Ted and I ended up going out to Eleven to meet Friends Carrie and Roger.  More cocktails.  Plus a stop at the pop-up beer garden in Larryville for veggie dogs from the Franktuary truck.

Tomato juice is a vegetable ...

Then Sunday was BRUNCH, which is my favorite meal in the world, and I always LOVED having with Will be fore he inconsiderately moved away, and which I haven't had in AGES, cause blah blah broke.  We were at Casbah, and the prix fixe there is amazing, and so much food.  There're little muffins and scones and biscuits, and then my appetizer was a smoked salmon plate with truffled potato cake, capers, red onion, and aioli.  Then the main course was eggs benedict with prosciutto, served with roasted potatoes and fruit.  Plus a bloody mary and a mimosa.  Holy breakfast, Batman.

This is The Most Smoked Salmon.

Now this evening we're going to PD's Pub in Squirrel Hill for wings, and apparently tomorrow is happy hour at Tamari.  Then on Wednesday Will is going home.  I don't even know.  We have charged a shit load of food and booze, and eaten practically no vegetables.  I feel ... conflicted.  Mostly about the vegetables.  Still, it's been quite a staycation.  I'm sort of not looking forward to going back into spend-nothing, research-for-free mode.  I am looking forward to eating more vegetables.

If there is any more perfect thing than hollandaise sauce and runny egg yolk dripping over a toasted starch and a salty meat, I do not know what that could possibly be.

Equal Work, Equal Pay, Equal Hot Dogs

Today I wrote on my other blog about a matter near and dear to my heart, and appropriate to the holiday: Cookout Feminism.  More specifically, I wrote about how Major League Eating's decision to gender segregate the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest is bullshit.  Sonya "Black Widow" Thomas is an elite competitive eater, who deserves the right to go up against the likes of Joey Chestnut; I demand she -- and other women eaters -- be released from the hot dog ghetto!

Check out my equal rights hot dog blog!

"The Virgin of South Oakland" (Iteration #?)

Well, this weekend.  Let's see. Ted and I watched all of Season Three of True Blood, which is an absurd spectacle, and I love it -- it's like the vampire equivalent of Roland Emmerich disaster movies.  We visited an old friend in the hospital, which was ... strange, and left me a bit  ... I don't know how to describe it.  Quiet inside.  On Friday we went to happy hour at Tamari (SO GOOD) with Friends Katie and Randy, and then to Sidelines where we also met Friend Nick, and met a nice acquaintance of his named Megan.  I made eggs and sausages, and green curry, and roasted chicken, and on Sunday we went to Burger King for $1.04 chicken sandwiches at Ted's request, and of course that was sort of a disappointment.  Oh, and Ted and I saw a matinee of Moonrise Kingdom: $6 was well worth it to look at the Wes Andersonness of it all.

I'm not sure that I have a lot to say about life at the moment: things proceed apace.  Payday comes and we go out, and then we're broke for a while, but so far we've been good about sticking to our budget, and the credit card has only come out for unexpected expenses like pills for kitty cats and car repair and one unexpected night of burritos after some traumatic news.  So far so good.  Ted's off after Tuesday, so maybe I'll have an adventure to report on later in the week.

So to provide some blogness today, I decided that I would put up a short story I wrote a couple years ago.  The general advice is to never self-publish anything, because once a thing is published for free it can never then be sold for money, but I think it's pretty clear by now that I'm never going to be a professional author, so.  This story went through exactly one draft, but it's a version of a story I've been rewriting for years -- or at least, part of it is.  See, years ago, as a challenge to myself, I set myself the task of writing a story that includes a vision of the Virgin Mary that seems believable, or at least not hokey.  I have yet to actually accomplish this, but I've gone through probably a dozen iterations, one of which provided the title for my MFA thesis, "The Virgin of South Oakland".  This is the most recent iteration, which I wrote for a law school elective that was, amazingly, a creative writing class.  It doesn't have a title: or rather, actually, they're all titled "The Virgin of South Oakland", though they sometimes vary from one another considerably.

Anyway, here's a short story draft of mine.  In case you were interested.

***

Brian was staring at a photo album; not the photos, the actual book, which was navy blue and covered in fake leather and embossed with fake gold.  Inside, tucked between the cellophane and the tacky paperboard four to a page, were 89 pictures of Brian and his little brother Ethan standing in front of dinosaurs.  Three years before the Post-Gazette had published a map in the paper showing the location of 89 out of 100 dinosaur statues that had been designed and placed around the area, mostly in the city, for DinoMite Days, a promotion conducted by the Carnegie Natural History Museum, which was Ethan’s favorite place on Earth, probably.  That summer Brian had just gotten his driver’s license, and he had driven his six-year-old brother around town and out into the suburbs and sticks to see all the dinosaurs except for the 11 that, according to the paper, “had not yet been placed.”  They took a picture in front of every dinosaur.  Then his mother bought this photo album for the pictures and showed it to practically every single person at St. Rosalia’s to brag about how proud she was that her elder son was such a good brother to her younger.

            After they’d seen all 89 dinosaurs, and the map cut out of the paper was so abused that you couldn’t even unfold it without tearing it some more, Brian had promised Ethan that they would go see the remaining 11 statues as soon as they were placed.  But that never happened.  Brian just never got around to it, and then he moved out to go to school, and now he regretted it, and it was because of the empty three pages at the back of the album that he didn’t open it up and look at the pictures.

            He was sitting on the ugly orange couch in his living room, and his roommate Lynn was staring at him from the worn green armchair; she was curling her toes through the shag of the stained carpet.  The TV wasn’t on, and neither was the stereo.

            “You wanna borrow my car?” she asked him.

            Two days ago, Brian’s mother had called him sobbing and gasping and praying Jesus.  She’d gotten a call from the school that the police were there and she had to come immediately.

            Ethan, who had never in his entire nine years hurt a fly … Like, literally, Brian thought, he yelled at you if you tried to kill bugs in the house, you’d have to get a damn cup and stray piece of mail to catch the things and set them free …  Ethan had brought a baseball bat to school and beaten another boy so badly that the kid was still in the hospital.  Other students who had seen the beating happen said that Ethan had walked up behind the kid while he was getting into his locker and swung the bat as hard as he could at the kid’s head.  There had been blood everywhere.  The other students also said that the kid had been bullying Ethan for months, since the year before.  On the phone, Brian’s mother had choked out, “I didn’t know, how didn’t I know?”

            Now Ethan was in his house, being watched over by their mother, not allowed to go to school, only to church, which he didn’t want to do, and so their mother, afraid to leave Ethan alone or with anyone else (and also, Brian thought from the tone in her voice, afraid to be with him a little), hadn’t gone to church either, or to work – she was using some of the zillion sick days she saved every year at her job with the County – or left the house at all.

            Brian looked up at Lynn, who was still watching him from the worn green chair.  She was chewing on the end of her ponytail.  Lynn hated riding the bus more than anyone Brian had ever met, and so she was always offering to let him borrow her car so he wouldn’t have to.

            “Yeah, I’ll take it.”

            She handed him the keys she’d been holding while they’d been sitting in silence and Brian took them, flung the photo album down onto the ugly orange couch, and went out into the cold air.

Brian parked Lynn’s car at the end of his mother’s block, but didn’t turn the motor off.  He sat and watched the glow-in-the-dark plastic rosary swing from the rearview mirror, feeling a lump rise in his throat, like something trying to choke him from below and inside himself.  The rosary wasn’t ironic, even though Lynn was 19 and got drunk at house parties and smoked cigarettes and skipped classes and all of that.  She went to mass every Sunday in Oakland, walking up from their apartment to St. Paul.  She reminded Brian of his mother in that way, except since his dad had died about eight years ago, his mother went to church like, every fucking day.

            Brian had gone to mass on Christmas, and before that on Easter, and before going to college at Pitt, just a few neighborhoods away, every Sunday at least because that was just how it was.  But then he’d gone to school, and taken a dorm room his freshman year even though his mother had wanted him to stay home and commute.  Brian moved to Oakland, got drunk at parties, smoked cigarettes, found a beautiful girl and lost his virginity to her.  Her name was Heather, and they had started dating, and he had told her that they were going to get married some day, and she had laughed at him for saying this, but at the time he found that charming. 

            Brian watched the plastic crucifix swing in front of Lynn’s dashboard.  “This is my fault, probably,” he said out loud to the empty old car.

            He had met Lynn very shortly before beautiful Heather had left him.  It had been an unusually hot day at the beginning of May, and he and Heather were walking through South Oakland with a couple of other people, laughing and trying to plan how to get some alcohol and also on a quest to find the Virgin of South Oakland.  Brian had been the one to suggest the afternoon diversion, having heard of the Virgin from his mother.  It was a shrine set up in someone’s backyard where supposedly some steelworker or someone had seen a vision of the Virgin Mary and then a magical spring had come out of the ground to water the flowers some little old Catholic ladies in the neighborhood planted or something and now it was some kind of neighborhood to-do.

            They found it at the end of a dead-end street where rows of rundown houses hung onto the edge of the small cliff that overlooked the Parkway.  Sweaty and squinting in the sun, the group trotted down an alley so steep that the bricks that made it stuck out of the ground like upside down steps.  There was a small sign at the top of the alley, rusted, that directed you to the shrine.  To reach it, they had to go through someone’s backyard.

            They followed a narrow and sloping path through a corridor of tea rose bushes that were the warm-up for rows of wooden crosses about seven feet tall, each a Station of the Cross.  As the garden wound deeper down the cliff – not a backyard anymore so much as a sort of clearing around a rock face – there was a brick shrine with a statue of the Virgin Mary and a glassed-in newspaper article explaining the origin and maintenance of the site.  Then further along there was a second shrine, with a kneeler, and more statues of the Virgin, the clamshell kind Brian’s mother had in her yard, and an explosion of cloth flowers in all the brighter-than-nature colors cloth flowers come in.  Candles in red vases flickered faintly in the midday sun.  Tucked into the rock face were statues of other saints, showing various wear, either gleaming plastic or worn plaster, including several pieces of an ancient nativity set, small sheep tucked into niches in the exposed shale.

            At the bottom of the clearing was the grand finale, a shallow spring that trickled out of the shale and pooled in a cool shadow.  Someone had placed a few bricks around it to allow people more stable footing. 

            Heather had begun to make fun of how tacky everything looked to her, and another one of Brian’s friends lit a cigarette.  But then everyone noticed that there was someone else there, a plain looking young woman in a Pitt t-shirt, who gave them all the side eye and said nothing.  Brian’s face burned with embarrassment.

            “Do you live here?” he’d asked her.

            “No.”

            Heather turned to someone else and snickered, but the other young woman didn’t look at her.  She looked at Brian.

            “Do you need healed?”  She asked flatly and gestured at the little black pool.

            “No.  I’m sorry.” He turned to everyone else.  “Let’s go.”

            The next week, following a final exam, he had seen the plain girl from the grotto smoking a cigarette in front of the student union.  He went up to her and apologized and they talked.  She was staying in Oakland over the summer, and so was he, rather than moving home when the dorms closed.  He had bargained to crash on a friend’s couch, but then he ended up kind of hating that guy, and everyone else he had hung out with while dating Heather, before she cut off their relationship as soon as her finals were over.  So at the beginning of the fall he moved in with Lynn, who was his friend now.

            Brian turned off the car.  The cold February air seeped in immediately without the heater on.  He wondered if Lynn had a secret crush on him; he didn’t think so.  Was he a dick to not want to date her because she was plain and sort of strange? 

            Probably.  I’m probably a dick, he thought.

            Up the street, his mother’s house was just like always, with the green awning over the porch and the aluminum siding and the Virgin on the half shell in the front yard.  He used his own key and just went in.

            “Brian!”

            His mother jumped up out of her seat and hugged him and immediately started crying.  When she pulled away from him she crossed herself and said, “You don’t come home enough.”

            “You’re a cliché, Mom,” he said to her, the lump in his throat making the words come out thin and strained.  She pursed her lips and shook her head. 

            “Ethan’s in the kitchen, he’s finishing lunch.”

            Brian went through the little living room, with its wooden-footed couch and chair set and the big TV turned to the Food Network and the cross-stitched pillows his mom made herself.  He edged around the big table they almost never used in the dining room and found his brother at the little three-seat table in the kitchen, his skin sort of sallow-looking against the yellow wallpaper in the overhead light.

            Ethan was thin and small for his age; he needed a haircut.  There were circles under his eyes.  Brian saw that he had basically finished his grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich and glass of milk.  He remembered eating infinity of those at this table, Isaly’s chipped ham with a slice of muenster cheese on “D’Italiano” white bread, toasted in a skillet with butter.

            Ethan looked up at him.  “Hey.”  When was the last time he’d seen him?  Christmas?  Christ, you live like, ten feet away, Brian chastised himself.

            Brian sat down across from him.  “What happened?”

            Ethan turned his head away and studied the little yellow flowers in the wallpaper.

            “He made fun of me.”  Brian felt like this boy in front of him wasn’t his brother at all.  His brother was a smart kid, and cheerful, and fun, someone Brian was proud of.  This kid was someone else who just looked like him, like in a movie, an uncanny replacement.

            “Did he hit you?”  Brian twisted his fingers together under the table, stared at his brother’s abandoned sandwich crusts.

            “No.  He pushed me sometimes.  Not really.”

            The lump was growing.  Brian felt like he couldn’t breathe.  Silence hung around them, and then he asked, “What did he call you?”

            Ethan continued to stare at the wall.  “He said I was like a girl, that I was weak, and a nerd.  He called me a faggot all the time.”  This last he choked out softly.

            Brian flinched.  He thought back to his own high school years at St. Rosalia’s, how he and his friends would call things “gay” when they meant that they were “lame,” and how now that he’d been to school and learned about equal rights and stuff he knew that was wrong to do.            “There’s nothing wrong with being gay,” Brian said reflexively to Ethan.

            “I’m not gay!” Ethan screeched, slamming his little fist onto the wood veneer tabletop, rattling his empty milk glass and finally looking at his older brother.

            Brian flinched again and caught his breath, embarrassed by Ethan’s wail.  He waited, and looked into his own lap and said, “Alright, I’m just saying.”

            Brian didn’t have much more to say to the uncanny little boy sitting across from him, who didn’t seem at all like his brother Ethan.

            Out in the living room, Brian sat on the edge of a chair to talk to his mom, who had put the TV on mute.  Silently next to him, a fat woman was cheerfully forming dough into lumps and putting them on a cookie sheet.

            “So what’s gonna happen to him?”

            His mother teared up again and fumbled with her gold chains.  “I don’t know.  The lawyer says that it’s not self-defense because the boy wasn’t doing anything to him when he … when he hit him.  But the kids all said the boy was awful to him, just awful, all the time!  Why didn’t the teachers do something?” she demanded, raising her voice.  “Why didn’t he tell me what was going on?”

            Brian didn’t answer and in the silence heard Ethan’s chair scrape the floor in the kitchen.  The boy, staring at his feet, hurried through the dining room and the living room and ran up the stairs; a door slammed.

            “It’s not his fault,” Brian’s mother said, lowering her voice again.  “The poor boy didn’t know what else to do, being tortured like that every day.”  She didn’t look at Brian when she said this.  She’s trying to convince herself, not me, he thought.

            “But didn’t he hurt that kid really bad?”

            Silence.  To his right, the cheerful fat woman on the TV mutely whipped up icing for her dough balls.

            “He’s still in the hospital,” his mother said.  “I don’t know, I guess he did.  I’m sure he didn’t mean to.  You know Ethan – he’s a good boy.”

            He always had been, better than Brian, who had been a reluctant student and “defiant,” as his teachers had always put it.  Ethan had never known their father, who died in a car accident when Ethan was just a baby.  He just grew up happy with his mom and his older brother and didn’t know there was anything to miss.

            “I don’t know why he didn’t tell me,” Brian’s mother said again, staring out the front window.  “You should come around more, Brian, he needs a boy to talk to.  You’re supposed to be the man of this house.”

            Brian said nothing, just stared at the woman on TV with her pastries.  After an excruciating minute he stood up and said, “I love you, Mom.  I’ll come back later this week.”

Instead of going back to the apartment, Brian drove around the city, because he was ashamed for Lynn to know how little time he’d spent with his mom and his brother.  He drove all over, crossed all three rivers, got lost, got stuck in rush hour traffic, drained Lynn’s tank of gas and refilled it.  He got back to Oakland around 8 o’clock at night.

            Instead of going back to his apartment, though, he drove to the end of the neighborhood and parked Lynn’s car at the top of the steep alley that led to the grotto where he had first met her.  The plastic Jesus had been swinging in front of him all afternoon at the end of her rosary, and Brian thought that maybe it was a sign or something.

            He walked down the dark alley carefully. In front of him a big tomcat came out from under a car and watched him with an unconcerned gaze, and Brian moved into the middle of the brick lane rather than get in his way.

            “Sorry to bother you,” he said, holding up a hand to the big orange cat, who’s eyes followed him sanguinely as he passed. 

            The metal gate’s lock was cold in his hand and there wasn’t a lot of light in the garden – just a very bright porch light left on by the last house’s owners.  The rose bushes were bare; the crosses were still there, lined up like skinny soldiers.  Brian saw two candles guttering in their red vases as he made his way over the frozen ground.  Who lit them?  Who came here everyday to light these things?  Who were they lit for?

            Brian looked up at the saints in their nooks; they looked cold, and strangely embarrassed.

            “It’s my fault,” Brian told them, meaning that: he was a dick for not wanting to date Lynn, and for being relieved that he didn’t live with his mother anymore, and relieved that he’d didn’t go to church anymore; he had abandoned his brother, who had turned into some kind of crazed murderer or something, after being such a happy little boy; he had disappointed his father, who was dead and couldn’t even realize it; he had just generally been an average and unremarkable little shit, like you might have expected if you’d known him all his life. 

            Brian looked down towards the spring, almost invisible in the darkness.  His mom believed in all of this and so did Lynn – did it work?  Was it just a few drops of water and you were fixed?  His breathing was heavy and his chest hurt – maybe he was having a heart attack.  Maybe he would die young, like his dad, in some stranger’s backyard.

            He started down towards the little pool of water, but then slipped on the bricks surrounding it, icy in the cold.  He fell and slid the rest of the way, splashing into the pool and cutting his hand on the sharp shale rocks behind it when he tried to stop his fall.  His chest felt as though it were being bound in rubber under his soaking t-shirt, exposed beneath his unzipped jacket.  He hauled himself out of the little indenture in the rock, sitting hard on the ground and putting his back against the uneven slate hill.  “Shit.  Shit, shit, shit!”  He was crying now.  He closed his eyes.

            Brian’s mind drifted along on the sound of the traffic passing on the Parkway.  His inner eye pictured their headlights, and then all of a sudden the face of his six-year-old brother, waving in front of the Mr. Rogers T-rex, which had been his favorite because it had a zip-up sweater and the puppets on its stubby little arms from the show he loved; Brian breathed raggedly and watched this vision, rapt and suddenly exhausted.

            He ceased to hear the traffic and more and more heard the sounds of the shrine, the trickle of the spring, the rattle of branches, a soft creaking he didn’t know the source of.  Behind his eyelids were completely new forms that had no corollary in his real life.

            His inner sight intensified and he began to see a figure.  It was a woman, average in height and build.  His mother?  Lynn?  No.  She wore a long blue coat, or a cape, or a robe.  She had black hair, was dark and beautiful, much more beautiful than Heather or any other women he’d ever seen in person.  The sight of her filled the whole of Brian’s imagination.  A light like the far off headlights surrounded her but never touched her.  Brian felt the lump in his throat and the panic in his heart disappear.  He breathed easily.

            And then a desperate fear climbed out of his gut and ran like spiders over the inside of his chest, onto the skin of his arms and neck and face; adrenaline tasted like metal in his mouth.  Brian had the sudden thought that looking longer at what he saw would ruin him in some way forever.  He opened his eyes and the vision passed.  For a moment he felt ashamed and cowardly.

            Brian got to his feet and climbed up the alley, so steep its bricks jutted out like upside-down stairs.  The fear had passed and he felt calmer now.  And then he felt the sudden urge to run all the way to his apartment to tell Lynn what he had seen.  His exhaustion had evaporated, turned to exhilaration – he felt like he could run forever in the cold night air.

            Brian stopped in a pool of lamplight when he realized he could no longer see the woman’s face in his mind’s eye.  He could see her figure and the light around it.  He could even see more, things he had not seen, everything, the cars on the Parkway, with their streaking headlights; his little brother at home in his room and his brother’s victim tucked into bed in the hospital; Pitt students, fresh and soft in their coats and their youth; the close, warm basements with their Christmas lights and Solo cups, comforting like old newsprint and filled with his friends; his father, throwing a baseball towards him in the park; the rivers, vast like seas, and the bridges that stretched over them; the dinosaurs, multicolored, guarding their homes on corners and suddenly alive … except for her face, Brian could see everything.