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This is a scan of a drawing I put on here a couple of years ago. My daughter's rendition of Jack Skellington as Michael Jackson.
I'd like to talk about something today: courage and cowardice.
The news of MJ's death set this household reeling yesterday. How unexpected really, but deep in the back of my mind I think I always knew he'd meet some tragically sad end. As some have said, who would have thought of him as a 90-year-old anyway? He was always so fragile and childlike as an adult. He seemed so much more solid and healthy as a child, though we all know about what stresses and rigours his child's mind had to contend with, and I do believe that altered him in adulthood in ways most people can't truly understand. Self-preservation, for him, manifested in some very weird ways. Changing his face, building and living in a fantasy world, an inability (or refusal) to understand social mores to the extent that you click in to what is appropriate and what isn't as far as sharing the contents of your mind. Even if he never did the things he was accused of doing, to not realize how much risk you are putting yourself at by allowing certain situations to perpetuate under your roof showed a distinct lack of, well, the Getting of Reality. Was living this way courageous or cowardly? I'd say a little of both.
What struck me last night in watching the onslaught of coverage while I sat amidst ground zero in my house, pricing items for tomorrow's yard sale, was how many celebrities waxed loquacious about Michael Jackson. About his talent, his persona, his gifts, his sweetness and generosity. Where the hell were they when he was on trial? Now it is safe to voice support and admiration, because he's dead, yo. Celebrity self-preservation dictates you don't say anything about a peer up on charges of kiddy diddling because of what it could do to your own reputation and career. But once rigor mortis sets in, you can convey sympathy and empathy and natter about his genius and legendary status, because now, you're safe. It's the same with the general public. Throngs gathering en masse around the country at various touchstone places to mourn. Where were they when it was uncool to like MJ? Uncool to say so? Death undoes the stigma.
This is one of the reasons that I think my daughter is courageous.
When most kids her age were into everybody from Hilary Duff to Linkin Park, she veered voraciously into the world of popping, locking, moonwalking and crotch grabbing. Her adoration of Michael Jackson was anachronistic. It came about after a barn dance at camp the summer she was 13 (she is not yet 15 now). The campers and counselors did the Thriller dance together and it so captured her imagination and fired her excitement that when she got home from camp, she delved into YouTube for the real music video. The rest is history.
It went from viewing all the videos to viewing all the interviews done with him, from Bashir to Sawyer. It was downloading songs from iTunes and purchasing CDs. It was sock dancing on the kitchen floor and bugging us to join in with her dance parties. It was poking through musty piles at used record shops for music and VHS video tapes of his videos and performances. It was begging me for a fedora like the one he wore in Smooth Criminal. It was me finding a black one, and her wearing it to school for more than a month straight. It was writing fan fiction in MJ fan forums; fanciful stories with Michael as the head of a pack of wolves, and her building a loyal readership. It was inserting him into her art.
And of course, she endured all kinds of flak from friends and family who would shake and poke at the foundations of her love for him. Who were openly disdainful of him, not giving a hoot how this felt to a young girl. I even experienced a similar thing myself. I found her fascination fascinating and unique and got a kick out of the fact that she could be so different from her peers in so many respects. Yet if I shared this quirk of hers with friends or family, I, too, often received this backlash of ridicule and contempt. Of course, I knew why. Still, I wished people would embrace the cool aspect to it. It was a weird, but brave, kind of thing, I thought. Weird and brave are qualities I can get onside of.
Certainly I saw that she had drunk the Kool-Aid when she began to spout lines she must have heard from other fans and read online. About lies and news being made up and him being framed and evidence being faked and all that. Since I am a journalist, I had to carefully explain to her what could and couldn't be printed, and what evidence there had been, in an attempt to let her know that as much as many fans wished there not to be any controversy, there was. His acquittal was, to her, proof of his innocence. And that very well may be. Perhaps time will tell.
Anyway, I think it is courageous to march to your own drummer despite what everybody else is doing. Jackson did that. My daughter does that. As a kid, I did that, too, and I secretly relished my own oddities, which included for varying periods of time, carrying a large purple muppet-like puppet named Levon around; wearing a straw cowboy hat to and from school for the entire Grade 8 year; donning a green satin clown suit with black polka dots and red yarn pompoms down the front and wearing it to class in high school on random days, acting like it was entirely unremarkable; and becoming anachronistically obsessed with musicians and actors, like The Band and Jimmy Stewart. I did these things for reasons I probably could not have explained to you at the time. Looking back, it's perhaps in small part because I didn't want to be like everybody else, but just as much that I merely let myself blow where the winds of my mind wanted to take me. Explored those impulses rather than quash them. As an adult, I lost that willingness to adventure somewhere along the way. I am in the process of re-learning it. And my kids are good role models for me in this respect. Come to think of it, so is my own "Michael Jackson" -- Rick Springfield (I'll spare you the details as to why I believe this). And of course, so was Michael Jackson. Exploring his impulses — sometimes, of course, to his downfall and detriment.
The news of his death yesterday was one of those head-snapping double-take moments. Whaaaaaat? In an instant, I knew I had to break it to my daughter, who was upstairs drawing in her room. I called her down and told her. This blank mask took over her face. She was nonplussed. She went up to her room, called her best friend, and then settled in up there, avoiding all the rambling TV coverage after she came down to catch the official news on NBC. She doesn't like to cry, that one. She was rattled and teary, and then went back up to her hovel. I think she's between shock and denial right now. She doesn't want to talk about it. For her, it's not the same as it is for a lot of people. It's deeper.
I remember hearing when Elvis Presley died. I was 10 years old and pulling my red wagon loaded with books to the local library. People were telling strangers on the street as the news leaped from open car windows through the radio. I remember being deeply (yet deliciously) shocked. My parents had his records. I thought he was cool. But when you've really embraced that person as a fan — it's devastating. I remember the morning my dad walked into my room in his underwear and undershirt, hair mussed and sleep-crinkled, his voice choked up as he told me John Lennon had been shot and killed. He was utterly distraught and in need of comfort, reaching out for it in me — and I was 13 years old and in the midst of my latest anachronistic fetish: the Beatles. The news resounded in our household for days. And that is what I am expecting around here, with my kid. It is no way to start summer vacation. Even if you are courageous.
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| I see you and you see me, and we do this dance.
Dancing is what I do these days. Not like the old days but new. Experienced and wary, practiced and wily.
I am open to a lot of things these days. A door ajar on a weather-worn barn.
On less serious fronts, WTF. Is with. The fashion industry. Even now, bootcamped down, I face nothing but 10% "fits-good" in the stores.
Good enough isn't good enough.
My new life motto.
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| Deep breath
Well. The world just keeps on spinning, doesn't it?
So much is going on, but I have a definite disconnect between my mind and my fingers and the wanting to tell of it, to you, the demi-anonymous readership. Obviously the love affair between me and blogging done be kaputski. Though I do still enjoy my voyeuristic peeks into your own worlds.
And what is up with me? Well, bootcamp has been taking up a few of my evenings and I am masochistically loving the grueling workouts outdoors. For somebody that sits working in front of a computer most of the day, sweating it out amidst the unfurling spring leaves and soaring peregrine falcons has a certain dichotomous appeal. Or am I full of shit? No, I think not. I love the brutal exertion my body is able to take and the days of leftover soreness from the effort. I love doing more than I thought I could, right beside people going through the same motions. And I love doing it, snow, sun, rain, wind — outside where the air sharpens my mind and the sound of the natural world feeds the soul of a desker whose days are so much filled with the clacking of her own keyboard and the hum of the refrigerator in the room beside her office.
So this has been good, and I am thinking of other things I want to do. Take stained glass class. Enrol in a silkscreening course at the local art college. Write an article for Psychology Today. Finish the 3/4 completed novel languishing in the word file in the folder called Creative Writing.
The past few months have seen a definite shift for me, if only by little degrees. I took up skiing again and relished the thrill of flying recklessly — OK, I'm a bit more cautious now — down the slopes of the Rockies. Finding the almost deafeningly quiet spots at ridiculous elevation, white before you, blue above you, only the sounds of your breath and your skis, and I actually started singing out loud as I shusshed on down. Nobody was very close, and the sound was so damped up there, who'd hear?
Of late, I finally see myself as truly having a bit of an athletic heart. It's under here someplace, which surprises and delights me. But when I think on it - maybe it shouldn 't. I have always encouraged my children in athletic pursuits — equestrian, soccer, biking, hiking, swimming, skiing. And much of the time I have participated in some way. Why didn't I see these qualities in myself? Weird.
But then again what is weird is that my self-analysis these days is getting to the core of what's what, and why. Maybe it's midlife crisis but I'm seeing myself through an interesting new lens. And it's not exactly easy, but it sure is interesting. At least to me.
For one thing, I have come to the conclusion that I have an enormous amount of difficulty receiving love. This was a strange epiphany for me, because I always saw myself as such a loving person, but it makes total sense.
When I was 11, my parents split, nobody asked who we wanted to live with, my dad played mind games with my mom — who has not got the strongest constitution — my dad got custody of us, my mom's boyfriend later messed with me, for a couple of years, and both of my parents more or less proceeded to ignore us for at extended period of time, with sporadic attempts at assuaging their own guilty consciences by showing us affection through things like trips, talks, and gifts. Basically they were emotionally absent, each grappling with their own internal issues and external lives, and having the damnedest time figuring out where to fit the kids, or to even imagine what we were experiencing. Self-centered. It was the late '70s, so what else?
For a child who felt so loved, especially by her mother, up till then anyway, I think maybe the shock of it all created a hastily-built but incredibly sturdy wall. Till then, I was a girl whose mother lovingly fussed over crocheting another couple of rows on her pink-and-white party dress because she'd grown a few inches since she last wore it. Who made a tugboat cake with white and blue frosting and peppermint-lifesaver rescue flotations for her brother. That tended the vegetables and flowers in the gardens and went to quilting bees at the local church where she made a Holly Hobbie quilt for me. Who knew (and was loved by) many of the neighbours on the block, from ancient Mrs. Mah to the pothead hippie photographer and his wife, who let their kids run around naked. Who was in art college and painted in her upstairs studio and administered Dettol and bandaids when required, and pushed back your sweat-slicked hair when you were sick.
Moved out.
And then the house seemed entirely empty. And in my own mind, I became entirely unlovable.
Later on, boy but could I love. Men. I could give love. I just couldn't receive it. I loved — and loved hard. A lot.
But I think I still have a hard time with it. I love immensely. I love intensely. But won't let it flow the other way. Toward me. Into me.
Yep. Lots of thinking going on.
Lots of hoping to un-tilt the world that got so skewed.
Midlife. Ain't it grand?
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| Sadness always pops the lid
apparent
I am not interested in
I’m sorry
It’s always too late
after I have hung hooked and twisting
on the questions and the wondering
just what the fuck
is going through your head
conjuring and rejecting theories
grinding myself into hamburger
while you selfishly self-preserve
ensconced in your tower where
the air is too thin for empathy
Do you think of me at all
as the acid of your pointed neglect
your withdrawal of self
eats me alive
soaking holes through the dreamscape
picture of the future I had so many
years ago?
It is burned and melted
like film stuck in the projector gate
I think you don’t think of me
I prefer to think you don’t
Because if you did
it would be worse
it would be perpetration
But I think you don’t because
I have hung without your explanations
your answers, your truths
for hours, for days, for weeks, for months
do you remember the months
of lies I endured
as I twisted on the moorings
as I was being lied to?
Would you really do that to me intentionally
if you had any idea of how it felt?
Do you think of the years you’ve let go by
as the lion’s share of the same lie
the part you wouldn’t own up to
flew twittering, rabid and batlike in my face
when the revelations from others
unhinged it all
and truths were so transparent
even as your denial tried to shutter them
and with that one I just got used to the hook
and gave up the fight
as it drowned me
as I drowned myself
Shall we speak of the truth?
Your line is over yonder away from mine
It is blurry and ill defined, sham and treachery
that you believe with all your mind
if you just speak it with enough conviction
I have my secrets too but they (almost)
always find a way out and I confess
and I admit and I refute and I apologize
and I improve and I try harder
work and aspire and never am I
good enough
(not for anybody)
I give you over most of everything I am
even when it’s ugly or wrong or damaging
But I think now, I will not spill myself
and maybe I will make some (more) secrets just for me
so that I have something left
when you leave me on hold
and hang me out to dry
something left to do but fall apart
and cry for the things that I was sold
cry for the dearth of them
This life has pulled me out of shape
the reveries of the past now gone Dali
I am not interested in your pretend penitence
I will not sail on again, deking around the jaggedness of circumstance
as though it did not tear open my hull and make me founder
Go ahead blithely, dismissive
you’ve heard it before
I cannot take this
any
more
kd.
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| Ennui
You know when you do something like, really-really big, and then your brain turns into asphalt ice cream? Licorice nibs and marshmallow fluff?
It's like that.
Plus, it's like I've got a fishhook in my left asscheek reeling me back, every night, so that I live in that moment, in those eyes, and in the crosshatch creases whispering across his cheekbones. The timbre of his voice resonates against my throat, vibrates in my ears. The whole person I imagined in so many ways in conjured moments from plebeian to passionate, palpable beside me. Weird, weird. And weird. And staggering.
Did I really do that? Was I really there beside him? Did those green eyes really fixate on the limpid aqua of my own, in all manner of ocular sexxin'? (What. Yeah whatever, I'm overboard here.)
And then in the morning I am pulled forward by the scruff of my neck into all the shit that doesn't matter to me right now, but I do it. I write every damn lead, body, 30-and-file-it. I fold the laundry in a haze and I boil the kettle until it's vapours. I pitch forward into what has to be done.
And then later in the quiet and alone, I am hooked and reeled and my skin grows numb and alive, numb and alive, to the repeated playing back and forth of images of that big-big moment.
And soon, I will have to grab the reel detach the fishhook and let the line play out so that I can unravel it and roll it back all snag-free and sensical.
I will do that.
Soon.
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