In Defense Of My President

So, it's less than a year into the Obama presidency, and where do we stand?

The ultra right-wing, the Republican base, the twenty percent (or so) of Americans who believe Sarah Palin is a viable politician (and decent human being) are cowering in their bunkers, hands on their rifles, waiting nervously for the Socialist Elite to come storming into town, steal all their stuff and perform pot-fueled abortions on illegal immigrant lesbians using taxpayer money. It is, they are certain, Armageddon.

The ultra left-wing, meanwhile, the twenty percent (or so) of Americans who secretly long to be in the feared Socialist Elite, but only so they can inflict their fuel-efficient cars and organic vegetables onto an unsuspecting public, are becoming more and more outraged by the fact that it's nearly 2010 and the president STILL hasn't hung Dick Cheney for his war crimes. They are becoming disappointed in the man they assumed would steer the right-leaning country into a glorious era of peace, shared prosperity and unparalleled human rights.

In between: everybody else. Mostly, I think, they're feeling a little better about the economy and a little freaked out that the national debt is threatening to suffocate the financial lives of their future grandchildren, great-grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren.

I think they are hopeful that some big, necessary changes are around the corner to increase their quality of life and their quantity of life, and I think they are scared that those changes will have repercussions that nobody is prepared for. America voted for change. And we're getting it. And change scares the living daylights out of us.

Most people know I stand firmly on the left... especially on social issues, less so on fiscal ones, but generally I align with the Democrats even if I wish they were less wishy-washy. I share in some of the frustration that other liberals feel... worried that we are squandering this time we have in power... worried that we are not changing at as rapid of a clip as we should. I cringe, sometimes, at the compromises being made and the diluting of the message that the president rode to victory.

But when I stand back for a moment and try to look objectively at what's going on, I feel somewhat bolstered and reassured. I find myself standing in staunch defense of the president and his actions. Not because I agree with the outcome, but because I agree with the reasoning.

One of the things that made me livid during the eight years of GWB that the nation endured was his assumption that his presidential win, no matter how slight, was some sort of mandate from the masses. It was not. It was a psuedo-victory at best... an acknowledgment that just a smidge over (or under, as was the case in 2000) half of us thought he was the best man for the job. Bush acted as if he were representing all of us, as if he were given the reigns of leadership with our full approval and thumbs up. And he became a dictator. He did not lead with the will of the people in mind. He led with nothing but his own ideas (and Cheney's) to guide him. And he further split the poles of us apart while cementing his place as a terrible leader and a poor representative of democracy. He steamrolled his way through the presidency, and I hated him for it.

Now times have changed, the pendulum has swung enough to give my side the narrow (although impressively larger!) margin of victory and a liberal population held under the thumb of oppressive conservatism for nearly a decade snarled back to life and demanded a massive shift in direction to counteract the spiraling decline of the Bush era. In essence, now that we have the power, we want to do exactly what Bush did, except we want to do it for the right reasons. (Well, what we consider to be the right reasons (they totally are, though).)

But, despite the Democrats' victory, public opinion is not consistently on their side. Despite the fact that most Americans really would be helped by extending a public option for health care they still stand, somewhat unsurely, against it. While homosexual rights are the logical extension of the equality promised in our Declaration of Independence, a big contingent of Americans are still opposed to gay marriage. There is definitely righteous indignation in the voices of the left and I believe in what my ideology stands for... but this is a democracy, and for better or worse, that means public opinion is still supposed to hold sway over our elected, representative leaders. I hated Bush for dismissing the public in his decisions... I admire Obama for taking them into account, even when their views clash with his.

What will be gained by pushing forth an agenda that Americans are not ready for? The results of dictation, here, are never good. When an idea is foisted upon the public before the public is ready for it, it fails... and usually spectacularly. There is usually a violent and unproductive swing back to square one and progressiveness loses out in favor of tradition. When leaders bully their way through the American public, their agendas end up going one step forward and two steps back. Conservatives are feeling that right now. They are seeing the momentum of the last two years of Clinton and the first two years of Bush Jr. dwindled to stagnation punctuated by the loudest and silliest of their membership. All of the work they did making inroads into the public consciousness were lost as Bush elevated his concerns above that of the nation he was leading. He wasn't afraid to make an unpopular decision, but he should have been at least cognizant of WHY those decisions were unpopular.

The fact is, progress is being made, and although it's probably slower than we Dems would like to see, it's, in its way, remarkable. We're talking, on a national scale, about public health care. Everyone in the country is engaged in the debate... some of us are terrified, some of us are thrilled, some of us just think that, by God, we've got to try SOMETHING new. But this is the most viable conversation we've had about health care in my lifetime! And, yes, it's divisive. There's no way it won't be. But we're not dragging most of the country kicking and screaming into some new system... we're dipping our feet in slowly, mostly, trying to warm up, hoping not to have our toes eaten by sharks. If it seems like a small victory, think about where we were on the topic a year ago today. This is a massive undertaking. People won't accept a wholesale change without freaking out. They just won't. Right or wrong, that's the way it is.

So the president is moving slowly. He is making the attempt to sell his ideas to the public! What a novel concept that is. And yes, it drives me batty to see loony tunes folks shrieking at their congresspeople, but most of the town hall meeting attendees are not frightening psychopaths. Most of them just want to know what the hell is going on and how it might impact them. And while seeing the thousand page bill and hearing twice that many interpretations of it might not be altogether reassuring, I think there's a definite feeling of at least feeling connected to the process of legislating that we haven't had in an awfully long time. Listening to people unfortunately means compromise... And it means a watering down of the original potent message. But it also means bridges are built and a nation starts to be reconstituted after years of dissolution.

It's going to be slow and painful... moreso knowing we could just freaking do it because we've got the votes and even Al Franken for God's sake.

But that's a long term recipe for liberal disaster.

So I stand in defense of my president. I may not agree with his every move, but I think his motives are sound and his intelligence is immense. He's a strong enough leader to stand up for as many people as possible, even if that means, sometimes, disappointing his base in the short term. But I, for one, would rather put my trust in a man who doesn't cater to the far reaches of his side, but tries to tug the country, one battle at a time, in the right direction.

That's a foundation for long term success, not just for my party but for our country.

Change

As the darkness of night closed in on Marshall, he sat on his bed, his head in his hands, and a sort of monolithic sorrow crushing his chest. He was certain, now, of his own stupidity, his absolute lack of grace. He had ruined everything and he was sure it was never going to be good again.

The sun set, and dark rolled in, and soon, Marshall was illuminated only by an orange glow of parking lot lights streaming in through the half-open slats of his blinds. A desk fan oscillated and hummed. Dogs barked outside. Every now and then, he could hear a couple pass by on the sidewalk or a car drive past. He felt sick. Isolated. Alone. He replayed the day’s events in his head, over and over, and with each successive viewing, the error seemed more obvious. It seemed more egregious. A cool breeze blew in through the window and jostled the blinds. There was a mild din of plastic on drywall as the treatment slapped around. He didn’t know what to do now. He felt paralyzed. Abandoned.

Nothing good, he decided, came from expressing emotion. Nothing good came from telling someone how you really feel. All it does, he decided, is shatter finely built illusions. All it does is force reality to come charging through like rhino. When people ask you how you’re doing, they don’t really care. Nobody wants to hear about your fears or your worries or your hopes or your dreams. That’s what therapists are for. People want the artifice of intimacy without really knowing a thing about one another. That’s what she had wanted. And he wrecked that. He wrecked it and he didn’t know how, of even if, it could be rebuilt.

At some level, of course, Marshall knew she knew. She had to know. She wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t blind. She saw him fawn over her, gush over her, leap to her defense, beg for time. She saw all of that. She knew he was in love. But she was lucky enough to not really know. She could believe anything she wanted. She had nothing but circumstantial evidence… just an idea of it, no proof. Before he felt the need to upend his guts and tell her, breathlessly, just how in love he was, she could claim blissful and beautiful ignorance. Her reality was constructed in such a way that she and Marshall could be friends and nothing more, because Marshall never made the demand of anything else. She was fine pretending at closeness, and assumed that he was too. But inside, he was dying. Inside, he was clamoring to expel the truth.

As he sat on his bed in the dark, he wondered why he did it. He couldn’t adequately explain it. His stomach had been in knots around her. His brain hemispheres fused together in awe and lovestruck idiocy whenever the two of them were together. He cherished those moments, like rare stamps in some collection of time. Those moments stood out to him, and he wanted more. She was clear in her boundaries, but it didn’t stop his ridiculous heart or his ridiculous head from wanting, so badly, to cross into her borders. He kept it in check. He convinced himself, for a while, having her affection in any way was enough. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t close. It only whet his appetite. Every minute with her called out for duplication, for exponential growth. Every blush of something more only made the gulf between his hope and his reality that much more pronounced. He began to loathe the situation, the limits, the constraints and he hated himself for being cowed into action by his own asinine feelings.

He laid down then, on top of his blankets, in his clothes and tried to sleep, but he failed miserably in the attempt...

As night fell, Meredith was laying on her bed, struggling with a headache and pressing down on her eyes with her forearm draped across her face. She was sad and she was tired and she was angry that she wasn’t going to get to sleep tonight. She wished, somehow, she could go back and erase the last few hours, or that, at the very least, she could get a do-over. With her eyes shut so tightly, all she could see was the look of heartbreak on his face as he whispered “I love you,” and she responded with, “No you don’t.”

He did love her. She knew it. She didn’t want to know it and she certainly didn’t want to admit it, but it was doubtless. There was a polished sheen to the way he treated her… there was, in his words and his actions, a sort of barely contained admiration that both flattered and frustrated her. She knew. She could even pinpoint when his affection changed, when it grew it something unwieldy and larger than life. She saw the difference. He struggled with it, she could tell. And she wanted, badly, to somehow put him at ease. But she didn’t know what to say. The idea of it scared her to death. The idea that things could sour, that the status quo, a good status quo, might change made her sick to her stomach. So she ignored it and prayed that he would latch his attention on to somebody else. The idea of that made her queasy too. She liked things exactly how they were, but nothing stays the same for very long. Today she felt like she was watching a distant tornado, admiring it from her roof before realizing with dawning horror that it was headed straight for her. Now things had changed, and badly, and he was hurt and she was hurt and she didn’t know how to soothe any of it.

It wasn’t exactly that she wasn’t interested. She was. As much as she gagged at the idea of a soul mate, he was awfully close to that ideal, and she felt better with him than she did without. For Meredith, that was about as high of praise as any potential mate could get. But she squirmed, sometimes, at the idea of it as well. She would imagine the awkwardness of a first real date, a first real kiss… she would cringe at the thought of actual intimacy with someone she genuinely cared about because it just left so much room for things to go awry. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing him, so she kept up as many walls as possible and expunged any romantic notion of him from her head. Every now and then, her heart would twinge as she felt the flush of his kindness, of his compassion, of thoughtfulness she didn’t believe she’d ever be the recipient of. And she would crumble, a little, and try desperately not to let on.

Now, as the moon rose and she downed a cocktail of too many aspirin and too much Diet Coke, she was struck by just how off the rails it had all gone. She wished, then, that she could cry, because it seemed like other people in similar situations always felt better after a good cry. But she couldn’t do it. She didn’t even know what muscle to flex. She felt sad enough, certainly, but it just sat on her shoulders, heavy and damp, and she slumped back onto her bed and covered up her eyes again and pictured him, standing there, trembling with emotion and rejected wholesale by the girl he adored. If it had been anyone else she would have chastised their weakness, she would have mocked how much they cared. But she could feel it from it, waves of heat like the warmth of a campfire, and it was sincere and it was directed at her. She wanted, at that moment, to wrap her arms tightly around him and press her lips against his and tell him, madly, that she loved him too. She imagined it, and it seemed strained. It wasn’t her, and it wasn’t the response she could ever muster no matter how deeply she felt for him. It was too much, too theatrical… too showy. She did love him. If she was honest, she had to admit it, but she’d never love him in the same way he loved her. He’d never believe it because she’d never be able to show him. She convinced herself that, bad as this was, it was better in the long run.

But the long run seemed awfully far off on the horizon, and the here and now sucked. She hated knowing how badly he felt and she hated, even more, how badly she felt, herself. She tried, again, to picture the two of them, together, actually together, holding hands or sharing popcorn or driving late at night to faraway, star spackled beaches, content in a lovely silence and happy just to be with one another. And all of it fit. She didn’t retch, she didn’t recoil. The kissing, the sex, the gangly retro-teenage awkwardness of a burgeoning relationship was surmountable. It would, she was certain, be enjoyable at some point, even if it took some getting used to. So why did she balk at it? Why was her reaction so harsh and so cold and so damning? She knew why.

To let him in, to open that door and start something new would mean a drastic change. And Meredith saw all of the potential pitfalls... whatever he had to offer, she couldn't see the benefits being worth the trouble. She was angry at herself for admitting that, but she was, at her core, a brutally honest girl. She struggled with the loss and desperately searched reason to find a decent way out... but she couldn't think of anything to do or anything to say to assuage the situation.

She let out a soft painful moan and tried to sleep. She couldn't do it. Her brain wouldn't shut the hell up.

At around three in the morning, both Marshall and Meredith were bleary-eyed and wild with insomnia. Both of them thought fondly of the other, and then coldly, and then angrily and back to fondly again. Both of them felt bound by arbitrary rules, bound by some unwritten etiquette, bound by limitations and expectations they had set for themselves, and they were suffering because of it. Both of them felt hollow, out of sorts with the circumstances and lost in some sickening, confusing sea. Both of them wanted nothing more than to call the other, to hear the voice on the other end of the line and say, without hesitation or fear or anxiety that they loved one another. Both of them wanted that vocal embrace, that reassurance that despite a wretched day, things between them would be just fine.

Both of them stared at their telephones, paralyzed by the moment, and unable to act. They were certain things had changed forever.

Facade

What she had done, mostly, is try to hide behind a mountain of pretension, piling on layer after layer of subtle meaning and cryptic red herrings, hoping to dissuade anyone who bothers to look, hoping to misdirect the more tenacious amongst them. Like a roaring industrial anthem, she hides a melodic core under thunderous distraction and angry dissonance. She’s afraid that what’s beneath the noise isn’t good enough, isn’t interesting enough, isn’t real enough, and so she tried, desperately, to bury herself in a cacophony of meandering free verse and thoughtful, mysterious little scribblings. She worries that there is a hollowness to it all; she knows that there is such fragility to it that a simple gust of wind will send the entire house of cards crashing down. Even her name speaks to a certain inherent falsehood. Her parents named her, of all things, Lyric. And Lyric is tired of pretending to be more than she is.

Lyric pictures herself, when she pictures herself, as short, slim enough, with ratty black hair and too pale skin and grave gray eyes that seem a little too big for her face. Her lips seem strange, and she will become almost entranced by the way their slow pink fades almost imperceptibly into the white of her flesh. She will stare at them in the mirror, trying to determine where her face ends and her lips begin. Her teeth, she thinks, are too crooked, although they’re less crooked than most peoples’. And while her nose is perfectly acceptable, she is happy she can hide her ears, because one, she accurately perceives, is quite a bit larger than the other. She likes the way she dresses, even if other girls don’t, and she wishes she was more adept with mascara and eyeliner because she likes the way make-up looks on her when it’s applied correctly. All in all, she would say, she is a relatively plain girl, but on the right side of pretty. She is fairly objective in this regard, and feels head and shoulders above other girls her age who seem obsessed with weight and hair and tanning, and she’s never really felt bad about how she looks, which is nice. She’s never felt thrilled about it either, but she assumes indifference beats an eating disorder any day.

Lyric knows she is smarter than most people. This is not braggadocio, but instead, a very accurate hypothesis based on years of field research and reams of empirical evidence. It is also, she notes with sadness, not exactly a ringing endorsement of her intellect, as most people are pretty stupid. She sometimes wishes she wasn’t so smart. She wouldn’t give up what she knows or how she thinks or anything like that. She’d just rather that everybody else was elevated. It would make things easier on her, and maybe keep her from feeling obliged to let Tara Gimble always copy off of her math tests. But things are the way they are and Lyric is bright and most people aren’t and there’s nothing she can do about it one way or another. It’s still annoying, though.

Her hobbies are myriad and too many and the extreme variety in her pastimes precludes excellence in any of them. She doesn’t like this about herself. She doesn’t like flitting from one passion to the next.

She loves music, older music especially, and she has a closet full of grunge t-shirts that her Aunt Sara gave her. She likes that nobody she knows has a Smashing Pumpkins tour shirt, or a Screaming Trees tee or a homemade Nirvana hoodie. Sometimes people think it’s cool that she’s a decade behind, other kids can’t understand it. Adults love it, Lyric noticed, when a teenager likes something that they, the adults, liked when they were teenagers. Her Uncle Steve loves to talk about Soundgarden with Lyric. His wife, Gretchen, was a fan of Hole and L7 and the whole riot grrrl thing. She has an older cousin, Doug, who saw the Meat Puppets play when both of the Kirkwood brothers were alive and well. Lyric makes them feel less old and less lame by sharing their passion with them. She feels this is a valuable service to men and women on the verge of losing their youth forever. Her tastes run similar with books and movies. She feels slightly out of time, and that’s ok with her.

In addition, Lyric is a writer. She is an artist. She wants, desperately, to make something of value and wants her time to be spent just making things, producing things, because she is very afraid of not leaving a mark when she’s gone. She isn’t particularly good at any of the things she does, although she’s not laughably bad at them either. She puts forth a good effort, usually lagging at the end as she becomes bored and longing for something new to do. She has half-written snippets of songs in her head, a shoebox full of photographs she took of old factories and churches, a sketchbook with the skeleton of a teen drama graphic novel, a list of titles for the books she might someday write, and a notepad scrawled over with the seeds of a thousand unrealized projects. In this way, she has constructed a wall of creativity to hide behind. She has, in essence, built a faux persona, an exoskeleton that she crawl into to make herself appear, perhaps, deeper than she is. She can stand behind this pile of potential product and say, with regality, “look what I will make (someday)!” And in doing so she affords herself the role of poet, of painter, of stalwart chronicler of human existence and she allows herself to rest on it, to believe in it, and hope upon hope that she can follow through on something, anything, to substantiate her claims. In reality, she feels she has very little to say, very little to offer and she struggles with what’s behind the superficial charm of witty chapter headings and intricate magazine logos. So the superficiality descends into esoteric puffery, and the false starts and copious notes become increasingly stranger and harder to decipher. This has the added benefit of reducing scrutiny. It’s hard, she discovered, for anyone to objectively judge something they don’t understand. Better still, confusing things had an unintentionally hilarious side effect of forcing people into finding meaning. She found that teachers hated admitting they didn’t understand her papers or her journal entries. As much as they preached the value of substance over style, they were loathe to admit they didn’t actually know the difference. So Lyric’s persona of eclecticism and inscrutability continued to grow, unabated, and before long she began to feel suffocated by the gripping hands of a monster of her own design.

What she wants is for someone to see through her bullshit. She wants to be called to task for the overblown, overstuffed, shambling importance now ascribed to anything she does. But nobody seems to do it.

Lyric writes a column in her school newspaper. She feels like she has nothing of value to say, so she gussies up self-help aphorisms and sub-Ann Landers advice with artistic flourishes and strange linguistic trickery. She adds snippets of foreign phrasings and spellings cribbed from old “Krazy Kat” comic strips. She bends meaning to the point that it snaps and then reassembles it in a completely novel and useless configuration. Then she adds a quick pen sketch that is apropos of nothing to really sell the package. And people love it. It drives her crazy.

Lyric has talented friends who started an online e-zine. Her friend Mitchell writes short stories with plots and believable characters and genuine insights into being a young adult. Her friend Coriander takes beautiful photographs to illustrate Mitchell’s fiction. Her friend Leticia has well thought and intricately reasoned political views. She expresses them with grace and force. Her friend Carmon draws a hilarious comic strip called “Pack-N-Play” about a pregnant teen and her overbearing single mother. And Lyric provides nonsense, day after day. She never knows what to say, so she rattles off stream of conscious beat poetry and simplistic, rambling narratives or bumbling reconstitutions of her dreams into something like a letter, something like a play. It’s all miles beyond comprehension, not because of brilliance or genius, but because if it were reduced to something understandable, it would be absolutely laughable. But when obscured behind barbed wire non sequiters and middling art pretending the lack of inspiration is intentional, nobody seems to notice. Lyric is able, every day, to cram another load of nothing down the throats of her online fans. There are plenty of them. They don’t seem to care that she is, in essence, a sham artist.

Lyric won a scholarship when her art teacher, Mister Monroe, submitted a terrible painting of sparrow that Lyric had made and then hidden behind thick walls of goopy paint and spattered ink that added a dimension of (in the teacher’s words) “sorrow to the malformed shape of a poorly loved songbird.” Lyric felt guilty, especially knowing that her fellow student, Rickie Garamond, had spent weeks on his beautifully crafted rendering of Westminster Abbey only to lose his scholarship to a girl who was so ashamed of her terrible work that she blurred it as much as possible to avoid anyone seeing just how mediocre she really was. Even Rickie believed in her, though. He seemed thrilled to have lost to her. He even mentioned that he wished he could make art on a deeper level than just copying lines in a technically perfect manner. When she received the notification, she wanted to throw up.

She doesn’t watch much television, because she feels it distracts her, although she’s not even sure, now, what she’s being distracted from. She used to like jigsaw puzzles because completing them felt like an accomplishment… now, it’s hard to feel any level of satisfaction from completing someone else’s work. She used to love going to Denny’s at midnight with her friends. Now, her friends and their genuine and increasingly sophisticated discussions of art and literature and cinema only cement her feelings of cultural inadequacy. She hates speaking to them. She’s certain they will see through her façade and realize that she is a fraud, that her whole oeuvre is nothing but a pile of half-realized ideas and warmed over bits stolen from people that are way better at everything than she is. But as yet, they seem to believe in her sketchy, foggy talents and the value of the fluff that she pumps out.

Lyric sits, sometimes, in the dark, racking her brain trying to think of something sincere to say. She tries, desperately, to think of her passions, of music, of movies, of books and replicate that feeling in some way. But everything she does belies a sort of Xerox mentality. She feels incapable of real creativity. And when she does, in those dark moments, think of something genuine, she immolates herself in self-consciousness and burns the idea to the ground with her. If she does it, if she displays herself in a way that isn’t warped by frosted glass or spun through a kaleidoscope, she is certain there will be no doubt as just how mediocre she really is. And that scares the hell out of her. So she keeps up her charade, wondering if anybody will ever point out that she’s an empress and she’s not really wearing any clothes at all.

Lyric wants out, but she’s not sure how. She picks up the phone and calls her cousin Doug and hopes maybe they can go see a show. And she hates the fact that Doug thinks she’s just so cool.

Ghost Town

Sirat, somehow, found herself lazily wandering through the dusty alleys of an old west ghost town. She didn’t remember what had brought her there, nor, she realized with a sort of panicky horror, anything prior to that. She felt blank, a simulation of someone else named Sirat, a pale imitation with just broad strokes to fill in the huge white expanse of identity. And she didn’t like that. Around her, a crop of empty husk, hastily constructed buildings stood sad and rotting as a dim-bulb yellow sun hung low in the sky, hovering over the horizon and flooding the blasted desert landscape with a chalky glow. She felt ill at ease, isolated and strange. Nothing seemed quite right, and while she was tempted to blame her hole-riddled memory, there was a nauseating impermanence to her surroundings and herself. She saw vultures overhead that seemed to blink in and out existence. Things seemed fuzzy on the periphery of the desert, as if the world just came to a stop. She looked at her hands and didn’t feel like they fit with the rest of her personage. They looked different, somehow. It was only a moment, however, before they seemed to change and conform to her specifications. She felt, maybe, like she and the world were being pieced together at the same time.

With little else to do, she began to silently explore her environs. There was a smell to the place, a kind of stench of antiquity, and it stung her nose and made her eyes water. Each whiff carried with it a collection of memories that raced through Sirat’s head in a way that made them feel important and frustratingly intangible. It didn’t take long to acclimate to it, to put it aside and ignore it, but every now and then, a whisper of it would find its way to her brain and restart the memory show. It was disconcerting, but at least it was interesting. At least she felt something other than abandonment and disorientation. The town was small and trite, more like a movie set version of the American west than anything real. There were typical buildings: a jailhouse, a brothel, a post office and a saloon. Hitching posts and water troughs lined the dirt main street. Sirat could picture men in ten gallon hats with holstered guns prowling the alleys, and ladies in their corsets and finery trying to woo them to bed. It seemed so silly in that context, the way real people and real events were distilled to some basic essence of their existence and then launched forward, forever, as a default representation, a perpetual archetype. It struck her then that she, here, was no different. She was an essential part of someone real, someone else who was, no doubt, slumbering peacefully in a bed far away while Sirat wandered through the ghost town. Sirat was suddenly aware that she was a dream, a bit of fluff given form and the semblance of someone else’s life and forced to interact with an imaginary world… she felt inconsequential, then, ashamed of her own lack of solidity. She was angry at having been called into being at all, and saddened that her existence would surely end the moment the real she woke up.

But the dream Sirat, solely through that realization had woken herself up and removed herself from the control of another Sirat’s dreaming mind. She was no longer tethered to the brain that had invented her. Her existence was her own. This was not a concept she readily understood. If there was a difference in her before her self-realization, it was too subtle to notice. So the dream Sirat still felt very limited even as she stepped out from her real self’s shadow to become something greater that the woman that had birthed her.

Sirat, strangely self-aware and anxious about her fate, struggled with meaning. She felt faced with an existential crisis, saddled with a condensed life that she felt needed some purpose, some goal, some form of achievement in order to validate its having happened at all. Lost amidst the ruins of a never-was town, however, she wasn’t sure what to do. She rushed from building to building, hoping that beyond each door there would be some sort of sign or direction. She flung open old doors to musty pantries, to outhouses, to bedrooms and to jail cells and found nothing but dust and dirt and ghostly white cobwebs strung between chipped paint and molding wood. With each failed door, she grew wearier, more frightened and more distraught. Her eyes began to feel heavy, her legs, leaden. She moved with slack muscles and pained joints and felt like collapsing. In the corner of the old saloon’s dining room, beyond a busted player piano, Sirat found a dirty blue mattress, stained with blood and bile and coated in a fine layer of deep gray dust. Depression and fear overtook her. There was no point to this brief exercise in existence, she told herself. There was no end goal, nothing to do, nothing to accomplish. Tears rolled down her cheeks and her whole body shook with heaving, anguished sobs. She was convinced her time was near an end and she had nothing to show for it. There had been nothing, here, in this dirty ghost town… nothing but empty rooms and debris.

Sirat took a deep breath and slumped herself, morose and worthless, into a heap on the mattress and fell into the dreamless sleep of a dream.

As Sirat slumbered, her mind set on pause, time, in its weird dreamy way, still flowed about her. Though she was no longer engaged, the world of dreams was still in motion, and a shadowy little creature, a shadowy little imp, had made her way into Sirat’s ghost town. Once, she had been the consort of a fellow imp, a dastardly little creep that demanded to be called “Thimble,” even though it wasn’t his name. Her name, however, was no secret. She was called Shair.

Shair, like Thimble, had been crafted by dreaming magicians, by men and women who dedicated themselves so wholly to the arcane arts that they practiced those arts even whilst asleep. Imps were the dream-toys of these magicians, built for purpose, to fetch and to test and to serve. Some imps fled their dreaming masters, some were emancipated upon their owners’ deaths. Others, like Thimble and Shair, had slain their magicians to gain freedom. Once, the two imps travelled the land of dreams together, side by side. Thimble, though, grew weary of their partnership and sought out the company of a newly wakened dream, a woman named Kara Frost. He abandoned her in a swirl of formless fog, and she hadn’t seen him since. Travelling alone, Shair would sometimes hear stories amongst Woken dreams, she would hear of how Kara Frost and Thimble had saved so many from the death of oblation. And so Shair, jealous Shair, dedicated herself to the opposite. She had slain her master with no remorse. Surely the destruction of those her former lover and his new escort had rescued would ease her suffering. She was pitiless in her hunt, tracking down those who bore the salvation offered by Kara and Thimble, obliterating their minds and their memories and taking their heads as trophies. In a black bag slung over her bruise blue shoulder, Shair carried the heads of a hundred dreams touched by the waking hand of Kara Frost. Even with so much death on her hands, however, she still felt the sorrow of abandonment.

Eventually, Shair began to wander, lost in confusion and sadness, and in those wanderings she stumble across the ghost town built by the dream of Sirat. Shair loved these places, these miniature hollows of human dreams. She loved exploring the streets and alleys, loved how they ranged from so simple to so convoluted. This one, however, seemed drearier and emptier than most. She was shocked that no one wandered the streets. She was amazed that the place was so lifeless. Like Sirat had, Shair walked amongst the buildings, opening doors and looking for a reason to be there. Eventually, she came across the slumbering form of Sirat on the mattress.

And Shair, then, saw a similar confusion and a similar sadness on the face of the woman lost in her dreamless sleep. She felt an inexplicable kinship with Sirat, a tether she hadn’t felt since walking with Thimble. She smiled for the first time in a long while, and she bent next to Sirat and kissed her softly on the cheek. Shair felt a shock go through her, a wave of cold as she appropriated the sadness of the woman. Shair ran her clawed hand through Sirat’s black tangle of hair. She drew in the dread and the gloom that had afflicted Sirat, and expelled it into the dreamscape as black crepe exploding from her talons. Sirat stirred, her weariness abated, her sadness expunged. The act, for Shair, was redeeming, powerful in its kindness, and Shair suddenly felt a profound hollowness that had come from slaying the dreams saved by Thimble. A heavy remorse set in, a sickness of consequence, and Shair was overtaken by the memories of those whose heads she carried in her bag. As Sirat woke, newly and confusingly content, Shair cowered back into another corner of the musty saloon. A floodgate of guilt had opened upon the poor imp.

Sirat, aware now that Shair had stolen her anguish, saw the imp cowering and felt a wave of sympathy. She could see the hurt in the poor creature’s black eyes, and she wanted, now, to help in any way she could. So she offered herself up to Shair, she offered her assistance as payment for the kindness Shair had extended to her. And Shair, then, knew how she could atone for her sins.

She asked Sirat to lay, again, on the mattress. Sirat complied, nervously, while Shair retrieved her bag of trophy heads. Shair asked Sirat not to move and Sirat didn’t, even as, one by one, Shair removed the heads of the slain dreams from her bag and cracked them, like fresh eggs, over Sirat’s body. She emptied the contents of each cracked head onto Sirat. From one, microscopic cities of glass fell like twinkling dust and dug into Sirat’s skin and eyes. Another produced liquid volumes of chromatic essence, which stained Sirat like a painter’s rag. Others released models of staircases, dollhouse furniture or tiny soldiers determined to die in some far off conflict. One merely produced the smell of French bread and cobblestones from a faux Parisian alley. All of these, the contents of all one hundred heads, were absorbed by Sirat and became part of her.

And Shair explained:

She had obliterated these dreams, destroyed their minds and befuddled their memories. But the essence of them, of who they had been and what they had created, still existed inside of their heads. By releasing them, Shair had given them to Sirat, breathed new life into them as a new life took them over. Sirat was a library, now, of these dead dreams, and Shair was convinced that they could remake them all, if only Sirat would accompany her to the places she had taken them from.

And Sirat smiled, broadly. She was suddenly full of purpose, full of meaning, and full of direction. With no reason to remain in the ghost town, Sirat and Shair set off to old parts of the dreamworld, intent on restoring what Shair had, in madness and in sorrow, so cruelly destroyed.

The ghost town crumbled behind them as they left.

The French Alley Sabine

Sabine awoke, but not really, in a different place than she expected. While her eyes had opened, she was still in bed, dreaming of waking up and turning restlessly in her sleep. She was unaccustomed to the feeling of being in two places at once, as newly dreamt dreams often are. It was all so new and stunning that it took her a moment to get her bearings, to identify herself amongst the swirling morass of fluff and detritus that would become, as she inhabited it, a carnival barker’s yelped version of a dusky French alley. She took note of herself, barely dressed for being in public and far more attired for sleep. As she moved into the coagulating street, naked footfalls became encased in socks and then leather boots. Her thin camisole blossomed into a white t-shirt and black jacket. Denim spiraled around her bare legs like ivy to become a pair of jeans. She felt better, then, less vulnerable and more engaged with her newborn surroundings.

From the periphery of her eyes, misty blue and white nothingness began to congeal into blackish red brick towers, rising up along moistened cobblestone sidewalks reflecting lamplights that grew like time lapse cornstalks from the void. The skyline they formed was ragged and fake… roofs jutted in exaggerated angles and cut against an evening sky that looked like dyed cotton pulled over dark pigment soaked watercolor paper. The buildings looked cartoonish and queer, even if the feel of their mortar lines and pitted bricks seemed genuine. The lampposts developed snaky curlicues of wrought iron that bloomed from the base and bulb like weedy tendrils, cutting into the color of the false sky with their own malicious silhouettes. Oddly positioned windows flickered up with worm yellow light that spilled into the darkening world and made for stages of delicious little shadow puppet theaters. It was all very unreal and lovely in its unreality. Sabine’s dream was pleased with it, and didn’t think it odd, at all, that drifting in with an accordion cadence and mournful violin cry came another young woman with a creeping little imp on her shoulder.

Sabine knew, the way dreams do, that the woman was named Kara Frost and that the imp was called “Thimble,” even though that wasn’t his name. She knew them from a fabricated personal history, and accepted it easily, even though this dreamt Sabine had never existed prior to tonight’s slumber and certainly had no past dealings with anyone, imp or otherwise.

Kara Frost walked with a deft arrogance, almost regally, though her imp seemed far less noble. She had about her the air of knowledge, the confidence one gets from knowing a secret, or, in Kara’s case, a whole host of secrets. Kara was, in her own terminology, Awake and she planned on Waking Sabine as well. She knew the landscape of the dreaming world, and traveled it with ease. She had spent the time since her own self-realization convincing other bits of dream that they could, in fact, exist without the need of their sleeping creators. It was that awareness that allowed her to remain hale and hearty while so many of her doppelganger sisters had perished upon the “real” Kara being roused by the alarm clock. Thimble had shown Kara the graves of her previous selves, all laid out in depressing cemetery rows in the endless fields of a firehouse from the real Kara’s youthful memory. She felt a certain obligation, then, in meeting with other dreams and showing them how to step out from the destructive shadow that their real world counterparts cast. Kara showed other dreams how to Wake Up.

All of this, the way back story is inexplicably related in dreams, was known to Sabine as she watched the slow march of Kara and Thimble into her cartoon alley. Just seeing the glimmer of reality in Kara’s eyes was impetus enough to the newborn dream to conjure up, without thinking, a café front complete with serpent coiled iron chairs and table, red and white striped parasol and a vaporous, faceless garcon to take their order. Without a motion, Sabine, Kara and Thimble were all seated under the umbrella and the phantom waiter was pouring pale blue champagne into crystal flutes for the trio. Some dreams had difficulty comprehending what Kara Frost offered them, but Sabine saw, immediately, the promise of life, nay, immortality, in Kara’s Waking. There were no words exchanged amongst them, not in any traditional way, but newsprint pigeons, torn from old paper, frayed of edge and stained sepia with age, fell into the twilight alley and acted out the conversation in telex typed English and hand scrawled French. Sabine smiled as her representative bird wrote out everything she wanted to ask of her free-dream savior. Kara smiled as her own avian surrogate spelled its way through her timeworn pitch. When their conversation ended, Kara held out her hand and the paper birds crawled into the skin of her wrist like some blood borne parasite. When she had fully ingested them, their heads poked through the black of pupils and whispered, in a tiny fortune cookie string, a goodbye to the newest recipient of Kara Frost’s assistance. Even sour faced Thimble offered up his little claw to be shaken in gratitude by the beaming Sabine.

With a rise of her dark eyebrows, Sabine offered a place to Kara, a fixture amongst the morphing alleyway of this dreamland caricature of Paris. One of the brick buildings, frillier than the others, bent itself down, like a wind wrestled tree trunk and opened a submarine hatch on its roof to Sabine’s benefactor. Sabine, like many of the dreams aided by Miss Frost, wanted desperately for Kara to stay on and expose the world of dreams, unfurl the secrets of its manipulation and the key to finding some meaning in this new and possibly infinite life. But Kara never relented, despite desiring a bit of respite from her mission. In the real world, Kara’s other was fond of telling the story about a little girl saving starfish on the beach. A curmudgeonly man, of course, tells the girl that what’s she’s doing is hopeless… there are too many starfish to save and the little girl’s actions are meaningless… that they don’t matter at all. The little girl, of course, responds as she tosses another starfish into the life-giving sea, “It matters to this one.” Kara Frost, unshackled and eternal since her Awakening, felt the same way. While her mission could be difficult, sometimes dreary and possibly ceaseless, she still needed to do what she could. Sabine was a starfish easily cast in the ocean and given a new life by Kara’s actions. There were countless more dreams to save.

As Sabine’s French alleyway began to sprawl from its original set, Kara felt sure that her newest rescue would do just fine for herself. Sabine was already raising a cast of thousands from the ground up to ease what could easily become the maddening isolation of being Awakened. It was smart, Kara thought, and as a menagerie of beautiful people were giving a sense of life in Sabine’s new world, Kara and Thimble snuck out a back door Thimble drew onto the sky with one of his many charcoal pencils. This one, Kara marveled, had been so easy.

Somewhere else entirely, a real Sabine opened her real eyes as two cats screeched angrily at one another outside of her bedroom window. The dream of Kara and Thimble and the newsprint birds and cartoon buildings stayed put in her brain for only a minute before dissolving into forgotten steam and soup. It would have been the death of the French alley’s Sabine under normal circumstances… but that Sabine was spared by the kindness of a dreamt Kara Frost.

Monday's Playlist: Black

So, last week I dug into my depresso music and pulled out one of my mix-CD's that really made me feel like shite. Things continue to look bleak on my horizon, so I've gone even further back, digging into my old cassettes to find this miserable masterpiece from 1999. It's another tour de force of sadness, this time clinging to some grunge stalwarts and other alt-rockers. I literally listened to this tape until it snapped. And when that happened, I remade it and nearly wore it out again. Enjoy!

1. Mess - Ben Folds Five (from "The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner")
2. Still Remains - Stone Temple Pilots (from "Purple")
3. Head - Meat Puppets (from "No Joke")
4. Sober - Tool (from "Undertow")
5. Ugly - The Smashing Pumpkins (from "1979")
6. Three Speed - Eels (from "Electro-Shock Blues")
7. Doughnut Song - Tori Amos (from "Boys For Pele")
8. Softer, Softest - Hole (from "Live Through This")
9. Medication - Garbage (from "Version 2.0")
10. Pillar of Davidson - Live (from "Throwing Copper")
11. Something In The Way - Nirvana (from "Nevermind")
12. Immortality - Pearl Jam (from "Vitalogy")
13. Zero Chance - Soundgarden (from "Down On The Upside")
14. Nutshell - Alice In Chains (from "Jar of Flies")
15. Miller's Angels - Counting Crows (from "Recovering The Satellites")
16. Breaking The Girl - Red Hot Chili Peppers (from "Bloodsugarsexmagik")
17. Roseblood - Mazzy Star (from "Among My Swan")
18. Falls To Climb - R.E.M. (from "Up")
19. Bullet Proof.. I Wish I Was - Radiohead (from "The Bends")
20. Bizarre Love Triangle - Frente (from "Marvin The Album")

Palinic Rage

So, I seriously get a little blinded by rage whenever I think of Sarah Palin's idiot comments regarding her son, old people and the wholly fabricated Obama "death panel." It makes me furious that this whackadoo a-hole, who supposedly serves (well, served, since she just up and quit her post) the public, is in the same business of whipping up the already frightened and befuddled masses of America into a terrified hysteria as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. At least those three ne'r-do-wells are pundits, obvious extremists whose purpose is more to entertain than to inform. But Sarah Palin is NOT a pundit. She's sort of a real politician and, as such, her words end up carrying more weight than a series of talking heads' do. She has a cult, a large one, of fervently devoted Palinites hanging off her words, because they mistakenly believe she is a.) an independent thinker, b.) looking out for their best interests and c.) not a steaming pile of nutjobbery. And this is dangerous. I can forgive cable news freakos. With their incessant stream of misinformation, lies and exaggerations, they're just doing what they get paid to do. But Palin seems to be on a different track entirely... one in which she is setting herself up as a moral authority and a figure of importance, cementing her reputation as a right-wing queen and giving her crazy army their marching orders. She's doing this by spewing outright lies in a performance that makes her fearmongering vice presidential campaign look tame and professional by comparison. She should be taken to task for this. She should be publicly humiliated for being a modern-day Joe McCarthy, the worst sort of personality our political system can puke out. She should be ashamed of herself, not only for actively working to keep this country in the dark ages, but by doing so in such an underhanded and wholly vicious way.

It bothers me because she is fanning fires where tremendous combustion may be imminent. She is doing a grave disservice, not just to us lefties looking for real progressiveism, but also to her own side's ideaology. Personally, I welcome debate on this topic, and I honest-to-God wish that the Republican party would chuck these politics of fear, the same tatics that bludgeoned our country into sad submission throughout the Bush administration, and offer up some legitimate concerns and counterproposals to the health care reform package. But instead of providing thoughtful, rational disagreement, they stoke their already loony and absolutely mortified base into mob mentality loudness and nebulous agression... who does this help? What good does this do for the country, when your opposition is based only in knee-jerk reactions free from the constraints of logic, understanding or reason? It's another sign of the right-wing meltdown... and that meltdown has grave implications for everyone, leftists included. As the Republican party continues it's ever-quickening descent into old-school Puritanism, Salem-style, there is a void of genuine fiscal conservatism left in the wake. Reasonable people are fleeing the right just as rapidly as the right is fleeing from them. And my side, of course, will view this flight as a mandate, and begin to get too big for its britches, like groups in power always do. And the pendulum will swing too far and people will be put off and a new, more powerful right wing will grow up as moderates on both sides of the aisle feel abandoned once again. We NEED the balance of reasonable, intelligent conservatives... but the current right wing seems hellbent on ignoring those folks and raising up cuckoos like Palin to raise the banner against imaginary boogeymen.

She's the closest thing we have right now to a honest-to-goodness supervillain.