Same Old Novelty

I'm still in Baltimore, but I'm going to make it home. I tell myself that, in and from the throes of a barrage of contrary obstacles. It's humiliating, but the net effect is somehow even more destabilizing. I have done everything "right," and everything has responded by malfunctioning grandly.

And I miss my family A GREAT DEAL.

What is the synthesis that is lacking from all of this blasted life-and-living thing? At the risk of drowning in a stale puddle of metaphorical fluid, I will say through my resigned grimace that it's like an arch minus the keystone. So much will seem during these times to be going so well, and as my stride grows more assured and comfortable with that awareness, I encounter a snare that is (or at least appears to have been) designed for people that dare to be that way. Then commences the horrid cascade of thorny consequences, with trite-but-ever-truer results.

(Like, dig this: since we live in a world of cellphones, it is expected that the owner will be available at ALL TIMES. They take umbrage at your lack of complete, drop-everything accessibility. Why? When things happen faster, people become even more impatient? Fools.

And, as if there were somehow an insufficient basis in the miasma du jour for keeping poor people in perpetual states and senses of lack, there's always a line of profiteers that are interested in exploiting any mistakes that could possibly made. No "trust" or any similar liability--merely unmitigated greed. And suspicion! For instance, combatting "abuse of the system" is a central aspect of political lip service [in this country, at least], and finding help in general is a dehumanizing procedure in which the person seeking assistance is subjected to constant monitoring, viewed as being somehow less than an actual adult. Yet, as this happens and happens, there is no accountability for iniquities that bring people to where today finds or has found them.

And for all of the heartless, stratified hogwash about an "ownership" society being bandied about in these last years, I've seen nary a shred of detectable ownership regarding privilege. It's anybody's privilege not to recognize his or her own privilege, but it's a prison that separates a person from people. And does so ever more with the passage of time; as the true consequences of an impropriety reverberate through decades, that betrayal is ever more likely to be dismissed as something from the past [blame for the victim's struggle with residue of the past], and is less likely to be examined authentically [disenfranchisement]. THIS IS A FLAWED SYSTEM. It's dripping with the very privilege that survives in the absence of its acknowledgment, and nobody at all actually benefits.)

That was indeed a lengthy digression.

Anyway, I'm happy with my negative bottom line, but just because that's the way that things have gone lately, and I owe it to every person that cares about me to have a happy life. So, I dedicate my only self to that premise. It won't deter me from looking, but it might enhance the quality of my family's life in this awfully meantime.
I hope that everybody's doing great today.

Love, Benb xoxoxoxoxo

Adjective Heavens!

It is April. Welcome to that, for all that it may be (but, in my experience, typically isn't) worth. It seems nice enough outdoors, and it is, here in Baltimore. Not that I'd really know, having sat in uncomfortable proximity to my feelings over the weekend.

Sunday was Glenn's memorial service, and I attended. It was jocundity in the face of tragedy, with tenderness and laughter and uncharacteristically articulate accounts of Glenn when he was among us. New friendships were forged, by way of connectedness unearthed by the common vulnerability of our grief, that will doubtless span and endure decades. And, from everything that I could tell, none of it softened the precipitous sense of loss that we felt. But we all seemed to realize that there was little, if anything, that we could do to address that pain, so we tacitly agreed to transcend it with our unique respective love for our dear friend.

And here we sit, among the setting and trappings of April. Life is not moving as deliberately, nor with as much alacrity, as I would choose (if ever I were faced with a choice). I wonder if there's an April equivalent to the axiom that's wielded in concert with the idea of March. You've heard it a nauseating number of times, I'm sure: "in like a lion, out like a lamb." That's a very beautiful concept, and I do love beauty so, but what if the lamb gets eaten by the lion that will no doubt say, in arrogant Lionese, "April Fool!"?

I'll tell you what if. Everyone would be revealed as an outright sucker in that equation--including lions, dwellers of the jungle, having been left to suffer the failed fruits of their hunger with cold weather.

Having just said all of that, I am completely unaware of the current temperature or climate or whathaveyou. I long to see Molly, Desmond, and Ivor, I ponder just how I'll return home (awaiting a delinquent paycheck), and I'm reminded with maximal poignancy about all that I've learned to accept NOT having in life. This neither implies nor infers anything about what I DO have, as all of that is totally amazing. But it seems labor-intensive in a way that it shouldn't be. So, armed with some-or-other strength, I would like very much to declare the following for myself, I hope that you're ready. I am not ready.

1. I am not disabled. Yes, I have a disease and all of its accordant issues, but I remain aware of the world around me, am desperate to contribute to it,  and won't (although I'd love to) mail satchels of barf to all of the purveyors of abuse and hapless judgment that I have encountered regarding my health. To them, I have only to say: YOU ARE MAKING THIS INCALCULABLY WORSE.

2. I need a reliable job. This is more serious than it's possible to imagine. While it may seem reductive to say that this is all that I need, it is the agonizing truth. The stress that my family and I feel from the relentless drip-drab of freelancing and unpredictable pay cycles is positively lethal. I am able to work. I want badly to work. This New-Age bullshit of visualizing a bountiful future is all well and good, but I have applied to 1,400 jobs. It has been said (by Albert Einstein or Benjamin Franklin [or another person of far-greater financial means than meager old me, no doubt]) that "insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." Well, does that mean that I should refrain from applying for jobs?

3. I am committed to parenting. This supersedes everything else in my life, and the level of resentment that I feel toward those that have ignorantly drawn conclusions to the contrary cannot be exaggerated. I do not wish to inundate my children with television or plastic or sex-role stereotypes that will instill them with the same hinges and buttons, the same onus of irrelevant privilege, that I have worked tirelessly to surmount. My goal with my children is to help them be, without shame or fear, exactly themselves. And, despite, or even because of, my health, I am a capable and conscientious parent.

I have become so incensed with the well-meaning attempts to corral me that are actually deleterious that I am quite sure that I need to end here and possibly sleep.