Meditations on 9/11

When I was growing up, nothing could touch us.  My parents protected us, kept us safe, drove us places, and kept bad boys at bay (for the most part).  On a larger scale, we were in the throes of the Cold War, and a warm and fuzzy President Reagan wouldn’t let anything touch us as a country, either.  I was only a kid and didn’t understand the intricacies of it, but one thing was clear:  my father trusted Reagan, and that was important to me.   When something went wrong, and Ronnie’s welcoming face flickered across the screen, usually from behind his desk in the Oval Office, everything was okay.  We were safe.  We would not be speaking Russian and drinking Vodka for breakfast any time soon.

My family was not a military family.  Aside from a grandfather in the Navy and a distant uncle who made a career of it, the people in my family chose different paths.  The closest we came to a vested interest in world affairs was my father’s work.  As a defense contractor for General Dynamics, we directly benefited from the bulging defense program.  My father designed tank parts, and the more tanks we needed, the more work he had.  In the eighties and early nineties, our cup runneth over.  When Clinton entered the White House years later, my family’s financial situation changed dramatically.  My father’s job was cut, and our family was never the same, on many levels.

Still, my generation, myself included, came of age in a safe world.  A bubble of security.  Sure I grew up listening to stories about World War II from my grandmother.  Her father was forty and had three kids and a bum foot and was still taken away for the war effort.  My father missed going to Vietnam by a weekend.  And as a history buff, I knew full well how WWII bonded the country together, and how Vietnam tore it apart.  Still, we twenty-somethings were far away from globalized fear.  The panic during WWII, might as well have happened on another planet, a place you had to space shuttle away to, it was that surreal to us.

Then, one Tuesday morning in September, four days after I married my first husband, 9/11 happened.  I was on my honeymoon, and spent the entire day trying to get home.  In the days that followed, I like everyone else, became transfixed on that plume of smoke rising over NYC.  It was as if the terrorists drove a missile right through the safety net that my parents and President Reagan had worked so hard to construct around me.   I lost no one that day.  I was lucky.  But I did lose something.  We all did.

9/11 has affected each of us differently.  For some, it was reminiscent of a time when outside forces were still a looming threat to our safety.  For others, it was a call to duty, a call for action.   For the people of my generation, just out of college, starting families and careers, it was devastating in several ways.  It hurdled us into adulthood.  Suddenly, there was a real threat to our safety, to those we loved, to the world we had grown up calling safe.  It was the welcoming of our generation to the grown up table at Thanksgiving.  We were officially adults now.  We held within us a gnawing fear that terror and death could come for us from anywhere and anyone at any time.

But the real effects of 9/11 are much deeper and even more tragic.  We have to live in fear now, which most people do, whether they admit it or not.  Every time we see a suicide bomber or a rogue attack on an encampment of innocents, we think..we could be next.  But while the fear is everlasting and devastating enough, it’s not the real tragedy of that day.  The real tragedy of 9/11 on my generation is the loss of optimism.   I once heard a professor ruminate on the lack of “a proper dream of tomorrow” in this country.  Twenty years ago, people talked about the future as being full of flying cars and robot housekeepers.  He pointed out that those things don’t happen anymore.  What happened to that dream of tomorrow, he asked.   The sad reality is that we aren’t entirely sure there will be a tomorrow.  

The up and coming generations should be the future of a country.  The young people, the ones starting businesses and families… the people just embarking on the American dream.  But we are not that.  Not anymore.  Instead, we are a generation of fear.  We don’t trust each other.   We don’t trust that our government can keep us safe.  We go to work with fear in our hearts.  We feel a sense of living on borrowed time.  Many of us don’t want to have kids.  Those of us who do, live with a sense of panic tethered to us at all times., and dread the day we have to explain to them what all of this means, and how wonderful it was before.  We were born in the late seventies, sandwiched between the end of Vietnam and the building of  America’s defense empire.  We never knew real fear.  And that real fear has now snaked its way into the center of us.  This could all be gone tomorrow, so why bother?  We are apathy.  We are pessimists.  We are  a people living without a guaranteed future, because like my great-grandfather faced in WWII, we know there is a price on our heads at all times.  We are wanted.  Dead.  We are a post-9/11 people.

Super 8, or Super 80′s?

Last night my husband and I saw Super 8. It was a decent flick, not what I expected, but good enough. Think Old School Spielberg, like an ET meets the Goonies kind of thing. The special effects were cool, the acting was pretty good, but what had my attention the entire time was the setting. No matter how many exploding trains they threw at me, my mind was constantly ratcheted backwards to the portrayal of calm neighborhoods, unlocked doors, and bicycles in the streets. You know how people talk about the 50′s like it was the safest decade on the  planet? However erroneous that characterization may be, it still sticks, right? Life was so much simpler then. Kids lived in neighborhoods, they rode their bikes to one another’s houses, they stayed out until the street lights kicked on. People were connected.

Flash forward sixty years and JJ Abrams and Steven Speilberg have characterized the late seventies, early eighties in the same way.  The West Virginia neighborhoods where Super 8 was filmed are transformed into a slice of nostalgia.  The kids in the movie, they all know one another.  They ride bikes to each other’s houses, sneak out and steal the car at midnight, (without fear of being decapitated by a crazy lunatic), eat dinner with each other’s families.  They make movies, paint model trains, and actually have interesting hobbies.  After watching five minutes of this film, something in the center of me began to ache.  It was like I was missing something I hadn’t even realized was gone.  But what was it?

Look! Kids actually hanging out together. In person.

I grew up in the 80′s and yes, life was simpler, but it wasn’t that Rockwell-esque.  We certainly locked our doors at night, my dad worked for the Defense Department helping Reagan build an arsenal of weaponry, and we all lived on this new fad called credit.  We were digging holes it would take us decades to climb out of, if ever.  Yet, here I was.  Thirty years after the fact, sitting in a movie theater, wishing I could go back in time and start over.  Then, some asshole in front of me answers his loudly vibrating cell phone, and I realize.  That’s it.  It’s goddamn technology.

When I was growing up, you didn’t sit at a table with your friends and surf the web or update your Facebook status.  You were in the moment.  You were present.  You talked to one another, you laughed together, you touched and felt one another.  You were real together.  Now, kids are hiding in their bedrooms living out their social lives through avatars.  Moms and Dads are half listening to their kids lives as they count up their Farmville neighbors.  We have become removed from one another and from our lives.  And I’m just as guilty as anyone.  I went to school online, I teach online, I work online.  I bank online.  I do everything in a world with no human touch.  Even the previews, before Super 8, at least three of them contained robots in some way, shape, or form.  I turned to my husband and said “Where’s the humanity?”  Then, as Super 8 began, I felt like I found it.

I don’t think the 80′s will ever compare to the 50′s in terms of nostalgia, but these two creative minds, Spielberg and Abrams, have come close to convincing us it did.  And while the characters on the screen wore heavy corduroy and drove around in gas-guzzling muscle cars, I couldn’t help but wish that for one day my kids could live in a world where bikes were as important as iPhones.  Where your best friend could be found right next door, not across the country on some Facebook profile.  Where kids made forts in the back yard, not cyber farms.  I think I am going to make an effort to curb my dependence on technology.   We can all do this.  Start with baby steps.  Leave your phone at home when you take your kid for a walk or a bike ride.  Yes, you heard me, leave the phone at home.  Shut the phone off when you’re at dinner with your husband or wife.  Check your Facebook only at night or in the morning, when the rest of the people you live with are asleep or at school.

If you're going to neglect your kids, at least make it for a good game. This one is LAME.

I’m not suggesting we give up the strides we have made with technological help.  We are on the path to curing diseases we never thought possible, we are more connected with extended family members and friends than ever before thanks to the inter-connectivity of the web.  We build better and cleaner everything, thanks to green technologies.  I’m just suggesting that we try to remember our human qualities as being something desirable as well.  Nothing can replace an hour of actually sitting down with your kids, holding them on your lap, and listening to their stories.  Nothing is better for your marriage or relationship, than having an uninterrupted dinner, where the only thing you “like” is each other.  I’m going to start making the effort.  It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it in the end.  It’s ironic that it took Steven Spielberg, a man who when I was growing up could take you anywhere your imagination could dream up (including out of this world), to bring me back down to earth.

April

April makes me think about my friend, Shane, who died of complications from Leukemia when we were seventeen.    We had been very close as kids, and then, as the years went on the ebb and flow of adolescence bounced us in and out of each other’s lives periodically.  I forget about her some days, that she was ever here with us.   Then, I’ll catch a glimpse of the date, or overhear a remark about the snow in April, and I will remember that cold April morning when they buried her, snowflakes dotting the landscape like a Seurat.

Seurat's Ocean's Bridge

I remember her lying in a bed in Hospice, insisting that I listen to the Indigo Girls’ Rites of Passage, an album that would become the soundtrack for most of my early adult life.

It occurred to me this morning that she has been gone almost as long as she lived.  She has been gone for so long.  Her death, once the yardstick for tragedy, has faded, become a part of my past like exposition in a story of my life.  There are the big things, of course, that sadden us all when we lose a young person:  the fact that Shane would never grow up, go to college, have babies, publish her writing, fall in love.  But I tend to get caught up in the small things she missed, like Obama, the IPod, American Idol, Twitter…  all the things that have become so common place in our lives, Shane has never known.  She has missed so much.  When I Google her, nothing comes up.  Was it Shane, or Shayne?  I can’t remember now. It makes me wonder about the fleeting nature of all of this bullshit we consume in our daily lives.  When I’m gone, will anyone be able to find me on Google?  What if all that is left of me are my Tweets?

Indigo Girls' Rites of Passage

Maybe Shane is better for it.  Having slipped from life before the chaos began, taking with her the reality of what matters most: the human condition.  Shane touched so many of us, and she did it the old fashioned way, through the touch of her hand, through the sound of her voice.  She didn’t hide behind a computer and tell us what we ought to know.  She lived.  She lived what she knew.  And what she knew, was a good fucking album when she heard one.

I Dreamed You

Samantha and Penelope,

Once, a long time ago, before I held you both in my arms,
I dreamed you.
Two brown-haired girls
Two crescent moon smiles
Two voices tangling in my ears.
I had the wrong man, the wrong body, the wrong time,
But it was you, both of you,
All along.

Mommy

I’m Sorry You’re Miserable…(Sort of)

No matter where I am, the question is always the same.  You’re only in your thirties, what could you possibly have to write a memoir about?  You wrote a memoir?  What are you twelve? Don’t get me wrong, as a mother of four-year-old twins, I’ll take any youthful compliment how I can get it, but this one has always bothered me.  Up until recently, my stock smartass answer has always been, “You do realize that bad shit can happen to young people too, right?”  The implication of a torturous childhood, a malicious, abusive upbringing, is usually enough to quell the offender’s attack.  But lately, I’ve started to feel a tad….guilty.

The truth is, I had a great childhood.  My parents loved me, and (for a while, anyway) one another.  We had a home, two cats, a television in every room, and plenty of food to be consumed.  Yet, I insist on being attracted to the genre of memoir, the very fabric of which tends to elicit the darkest and most painful of human experiences.  No one writes a memoir about how great their life was, or how happy their childhood appeared.

The calm at the end of the memoir?

Some memoirs may end with that joyous realization, an epiphany of emotional calm spreading out across the book’s end like a still body of water expanding after a rain.  But there’s always a ripple. a storm, a downpour that led to that stillness.

And this is the trouble I find myself in at this point in time.  All ready to begin thinking of my second book, but afraid I’ve used up all of my material in the first.  I’ve had a few unfortunate events occur in my life, but they were small and usually of my own doing.  A bad marriage, a massive weight gain, a clumsy divorce.   I mined these jewels of misery to death in my first book.  Right now, everything is peaceful.  I’m living my happy ending.

I often joke that I am all style, no substance.  I can write memoir, I just have no subject.  Because of this, I sometimes find myself seething with jealousy at others’ misfortune.  A crazy aunt?  A homicidal father?  A neglectful, abusive mother? While I’m comforting and sympathetic on the outside, inside a cauldron of envy is boiling inside my belly.  It never shuts off, this tapeworm of tragedy inside of me.

I've always preferred one over the other.

Yes, I feel awful, and I really do, but somewhere in my brain I’m thinking:  Now that’s a memoir. And I can’t help but  imagine the fury with which my fingertips would write such a calamity.  Before you can judge me, let me add, I feel like a jerk.  Don’t worry, I have you covered.

So the question becomes, do I move on and write something else?  The story of someone else?  Fiction?  Poetry?  And let my life slip by me, waiting for it to inevitably ripple?  And if so, how much time?  Three feet?  Seven years?  Those authors who have written more than one memoir, Abigail Thomas, Nick Flynn, Beverly Donofrio, Mary Karr, usually have a span of years between their subsequent stories, years in which something happens.  Do I sit back and wait for something to happen to me?   And this, my friends, is the trouble with memoir.  We must wait for our story to come to us.    In the meantime, I guess I’ll work on generating new and wittier responses to the question I get more often than not.  What on earth could you have to write a memoir about?

On Being a Writing Mom

Having been a professional in the workplace for the majority of my adult life, it was with great pleasure that I walked into a bright 10×10 room and signed my not-yet-born twin daughters up for full time daycare.  It hadn’t been a decision I wrestled with, much to the dismay of my mother and grandmother. I believed in my heart that the bond I would have with my girls would be strong and malleable, able to withstand the pressure of eight to nine hours apart from one another, everyday.

Then, on a blustery winter Tuesday, my girls were plucked from my belly and placed into my arms.  Meeting them changed everything.

My girls..Penelope (left) and Samantha (right)

I stayed home for six weeks before returning to my full time job, and during those six weeks something happened.  I began to soften, to question my once rigorous stance on the ability of a woman to have a successful career and a close relationship with her babies.  Still, despite my quivering bottom lip, I drove to the daycare, placed my six-pound infant daughters into the hands of a virtual stranger, and left.

It wasn’t long before the crying began.  At my desk, in the ladies room, at lunch time, there was no predictor of when the gut-wrenching guilt would strike.  It was a parasite chewing its way out of me.  It was a constant stream of toxic thought running through my gut.  I had to accept that I had changed, that my babies had changed me.  I wanted to be, gulp, a mommy.  A week after I returned to work, I quit my job of seven years, and decided to be a stay at home mom.  Bring on the blissful cookie-baking, craft-assembling, picturesque home life….right?

Not quite.   Being home with my girls was great for them, but not so great for me.  I am a social creature, feeding off my interactions with other adults, relishing in office banter and workplace pranks.  I’m a Libra for Christ’s sake.  Being a full time stay at home mother made me feel like a trapped animal.  While my beautiful girls were wrapped tight in their puffy, pink blankets, nestled in their cribs and taking two naps a day, I was climbing the walls in less than six months.  So, I decided to go back to school, to pursue the one thing I always wanted to be: a writer.  I joined a low-residency MFA program, which allowed me to complete my school work from home for the majority of the year, while providing me with the social interaction and professional network I required to stay sane.

That decision changed my life.  I began to think of myself as a professional writer, a carrot only dangled very far in front of me previously.  It was as if my life up to that point, that of an office worker, had become an egg around me.  Now, someone had cracked that shell, revealing a tender, vulnerable yolk, just pregnant with possibilities.   I started writing a book, a memoir, and found that I have a funny way of telling stories, and I enjoyed writing to make others giggle.  I honed my poetry skills, started working on a second chapbook, launched a website, and made new friends.  I was becoming the one thing I never thought possible.  I was a writer.

In the midst of my bliss, however, I never stopped to think what this lifestyle would do to my children, to me, to us.  See, instead of straining my attention between two infants and a full time office job, I now have to split my mind between two toddlers and being a writer, which is an ever-encompassing calling.  Writing consumes me.  When I’m not sitting at a keyboard, I feel that I should be.  And when I’m not writing, I’m plotting my book in my head, building characters while listening to Barney, and untangling storylines and points of view while serving dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets and apple slices.   My girls never have my full attention, and that makes me sad and presses on my already guilty conscience.

You have the right to remain preoccupied...

Then, two nights ago, a ripple of relief made its way to the surface in the pool of shame I carry with me in my belly.  I had just finished writing in a journal I have been keeping for my girls since they were born.  It’s almost full, and I’m getting ready to start a second.  I clicked off my bedside lamp, snuggled up to my sleeping husband, and closed my eyes, ready to imagine the next piece of my unfinished book falling into place, when that ripple suddenly turned into a wave and jerked me from my near-sleeping state.

I am not a good mother in spite of being a writer, I am a good mother because I’m a writer.  Imagine, as a grown woman, having journals, manuscripts, sheaths of poetry, all detailing your mother’s inner thoughts and reactions to the world around her.  A detailed account, many detailed accounts of your birth, of your impact on her life.  An inside look at how she felt about you, your father, your grandmother, the state of her country, the conditions of her childhood.  It’s as if my memories have been mined, scraped from my brain like plaque from my gums, and placed into neatly-typed tangible commodities.

My daughters will never wonder what makes me tick, will never spend their lives wondering how I feel about them.  They will never question my ethics, wonder about my political stance, or miss me when some day, inevitably, I am gone, and they will have to soldier on through this life without me.  They will show their children, and they will show theirs, and so on.  As I sat upright in bed that night, with tears streaming down my cheeks, I understood why my job as a writer is so important.  I am creating my family’s legacy.  And what better thing can I do for my children?

Quick, Put Bon Jovi on the Jukebox!

My book is finished.  Is it perfect yet?  Nope.  It is near perfect?  Nope.  But it’s as good as I am going to make it, for a while at least.  So after I mailed it to where it was going this morning, I sat down, and for the first time in years, I thought, okay…now what?
Writing a book was so much more than writing a book.  It became a vacuum that constantly sucked away at my free time.  When I wasn’t sitting at the computer in front of the book, I was thinking about it.  When I wasn’t thinking about it, I was feeling guilty for not writing it.  It became the “thing I never had enough time for”.  I was constantly stressed as I wondered how I was going to find time in my schedule to finish.
But, like an unappreciated boyfriend, now that it’s gone I wonder…How will I live without it?  Where as before my free time felt small and fleeting, now it feels wide and expanding, like a still body of water in which I am trapped.

I miss you, book.  I miss the early mornings before the girls woke up, when the dogs still snored in their cages behind me, and the coffee was too hot to touch to my lips.  I miss the late nights, my eyes barely staying open as I write the one or two pages that had me popping from my warm bed only moments earlier.  I miss the time we shared in my brain, when you walled yourself up in my frontal lobe and refused to come out until I listened to you.

I have plenty of other projects on the back burner, just waiting to be reunited with my thought process, after such a long hiatus.  Projects that will keep me busy, I’m sure.  But my first love, my memoir, is gone, and I would be lying if I didn’t say I miss the hell out of that thing.

Next up…a poetry project.

Three Easy Ways to Derail Your Writing Career Before it Leaves the Station

I may not be in Public Relations, and yes, I was only in Marketing for seven years, hardly comparable to the veteran marketers out there.  But, one thing I am, is a Libra.  (same birthday as Barbara Walters, thank you very much)   This past week as I was surrounded by very talented and some very successful writers at the Wilkes University’s MFA residency, I was surprised as to the disparity between the number of writers who can market themselves and those who really need to work harder at this vital skill.  Marketing yourself is everything.  I would love to live in a world where the writing is all that counts, and in some cases that is enough, but the harsh reality is that we are a society that is plugged in.  And if you’re not on that network, you’ll be left behind.  Here are three major mistakes I see writers making that can lead you straight to the slush pile.

1. Be invisible on Google. Do this right now:  Go to a computer that is not yours.  Bring up Google and type in your first name.  Now hit the space bar and type in the first one or two letters of your last name.  If you don’t come up as a suggestion, you’re not doing your job.  How do you turn your name into a Google suggestion?  Google yourself often.  Get your content out there.  A simple way you can do this is to get published in online literary mags.  Often these magazines will do all of your promotion for you, just sit back and watch the searches begin!  Google Amye Archer… over six of my results on the first page are online literary journals in which I have been published.  The first result should be your own website, of course.  If you don’t have that…see step two.

2.  Be afraid of technology. Get a website.  Even if you have a blog hosted somewhere else, a personal website will drive more traffic to your blog.  Your website does not need to be fancy, but should let people know who you are and what you are about.  Also…buy your own domain name.  Nothing says rookie like telling someone your website is www.amyearcher.yahoo.geocites.122213.com.  WRONG.  Your website needs to be www.yourname.com.  If that’s not available than it needs to be short and sweet and memorable.  Once you have a website, get a Facebook account.  Facebook is an immediate network of thousands of writers and readers at your disposal.    Once that happens, get a Twitter handle.  If you don’t know what twitter is, watch instructional videos on Youtube, ask your kids, your grandkids, or the teenager next door to come to your house and show you.  It’s like riding a bike– once you understand all of the nuances of social media, you will never forget them.

3.  Be self-centered. Read other writer’s work, and talk to everyone you meet.  I know, I know, your mother drilled it into your head not to talk to strangers.  But you need to forget that bad advice.  Introduce yourself to anyone and everyone you can.  Especially other writers.  Shake hands, and ALWAYS use your full name.  ”Hi, my name is Amye Archer, I really enjoyed your reading…”  is more memorable than, “Hi, that was a great reading.”  Separate yourself from the fans.  When you go to hear a writer present his/her work, remember, you are a writer also, not just a fan.  If you see someone on the subway reading a book you love, tell them.  Don’t be annoying…but be friendly.

My brother-in-law, a wonderful comic book artist, was in a Brooklyn bar one night when he struck up a conversation with a gentleman sitting nearby. Guess what?  The guy is a television producer.  Now my brother-in-law has a fantastic connection with someone who has adapted comic books for the small screen (Think: Walking Dead). All because he said hello.

In a world of 24/7 instant gratification, it’s easy to be forgotten.  But those who know how to market themselves well will have a better chance of staying above the static.  I heard a radio interview just this morning with a reporter who was referencing Ronald Reagan.   One thing the reporter reiterated over and over again, was that Reagan was a nice guy.  ”He always remembered names, and always shook your hand,” the reporter remembered.  What will people remember about you?

A Little Ditty I Like to Call…Eurotrash.

It’s a Saturday night, and I’m drunk in Brooklyn.  Six beers, maybe seven, have turned me into a slobbering fool.  It has been fourteen months since I had a drink, not that I’m counting, not that I’m on a wagon of any sort.    Six months ago I gave birth to twin daughters, who are now resting quietly in their grandparent’s care, almost three-hundred miles away.

“Come on, don’t be an asshole,”  my sister said over the phone last week.

“I’m not, Jennie, it’s just… I don’t know, my life is so different now, I can’t do what I used to do.”

My words fell on deaf, childless, ears.

“Whatever, you can’t stay holed up in the house forever, Aim.  There are millions of people who have kids and lead perfectly normal lives.  You can’t forget about you.  You need to still have fun.”

“If I do come, I can only stay one night…”

My sister’s move to New York City from our hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania three years ago broke my heart.  My only sibling, we were very close, and she helped me tremendously through my divorce.  I hate to admit it, but she literally pulled me up off the floor and pried a wine bottle from my grip, once… okay, maybe twice.  When I met my new husband and appeared stabilized, she wasted no time in packing herself up to follow her dream of becoming an artist in New York City.

Now, with the summer heat on our backs, we walk for what seems like hours, from Greenpoint to Williamsburg, which according to my sister is a few blocks, and according to Google Maps is about two miles, which is a long way to walk when you’ve recently been stitched up from a Cesarean , and have had a little too much to drink.

My husband takes my small sweaty hand in his and we finally arrive at our new destination, The Trash Bar.  My sister has been talking this place up for months.  Apparently it’s one of the cheapest places to drink in Brooklyn, and I soon realize why.  I’m sober enough to know from first glance that someone has caught a disease here, at least once.  The black pleather door swings open to reveal a hundred square feet packed with more leather and chains than I have ever seen before.  Despite the dim lights, I can see a worn down red velvet material streaked with dark goo climbing the walls around us.

There are no chairs in The Trash Bar, only car seats.  Not the kind I buckle my beautiful daughters into every Tuesday on our way to the market, the kind I had sex on when I was sixteen..  The kind of car seats that look like they just jumped out of Joe Prafkey’s 1989 Chevy Cavalier that we all thought was such hot shit.  The car seats line the walls, wrapping around a pool table and a crescent moon bar.  The bar is packed, six and seven people deep.  A very pale woman with jet black hair and a thorn sticking out of the middle of her chin smiles and takes our drink order.

The crowd is a mix of girls with fishnet stockings and guys wearing black eyeliner.  Tattoos are all over the place, on arms, on faces, up the backs of necks,  anywhere there is skin exposed there is ink to cover it.    A few misplaced yuppies stand along the outer walls clutching their purses with two hands, perhaps they came here by mistake, fooled by the anonymous brownstone veneer, or perhaps they came to people watch, I can’t say I blame them.  I’m so caught up in watching a guy with a barbell through his bottom lip and a tattoo of a lizard crawling from his neck onto his face, that I almost don’t notice my sister signaling to us from across the bar.

At her beckon, my husband and I, drinks in hand, huddle close together for safety in the middle of the pierced crowd.  We reach my sister and her lips move intensely, but over the death metal blasting in our eardrums, we can’t hear a word she is saying.  She points to a small narrow staircase, and I realize, there are more layers to this thumping, sticky, bar.  My husband grabs a hold of my hand and squeezes it tightly.

We descend down a narrow staircase which makes it difficult for me to not touch the railing or the walls, thankfully I’m drunk, so my germ phobia has taken a backseat to the need to lean and stagger.  The basement of the Trash Bar is even scarier than the main floor.  The red velvet on the walls is completely brown, and I can’t determine if it’s intentional or not.  The car seats are replaced by old sofas that look like the one my grandmother is still dragging around with her from 1972.

The ceiling is low and one fluorescent light hangs in the middle of the small room.   I can’t help but feel like I’m in my ex-boyfriend’s basement, the same ex-boyfriend who sprang to mind when I saw the car seats upstairs.  I’m sixteen again, and not in a good way.  A couple next to me is talking about Obama, and in my intoxicated state I cannot hold back my opinions.  Suddenly I notice the guy is English and interjects “fuck” into everything he says.

“She’s ree-fucking-diculous!”  he yells when I ask how much he hates Sarah Palin.  The music and the leather boots are pounding the ceiling above our heads, and every once in a while I can feel a drop of liquid fall on my head.  I’m too afraid to investigate.

Four beers later, I’m sprawled out on a dirty couch, making eyes at my husband and telling the English guy how much he sounds like Jamie Oliver, when I hear people yelling and cursing.  I soon realize some guy is so drunk that he’s pissing all over the wall next to the staircase.   Right out in the open, pants down to his ankles, a tattoo of a saber running up the back of his left thigh.    In my mind, it’s funny, in the bouncer’s mind it’s not, and although we are innocent of any association with the public pisser, the entire basement is thrown out, all at once.  Five of us stand on the street looking with bewilderment at each other.  No one really knows what happened, but it’s late and we are all ready to move on.

“Want to go to BarCade?”  my sister slurs.

“Abso-fucking-loutely,”  I sneer back.

I’m Going All Tony Robbins On Your Ass

Gram says:  ”When you’ve had enough you’ll know it.”

My seventy-five year old grandmother dispenses these pearls of wisdom as though she listened to and lived by every single one of them.  The truth?  She was married to an alcoholic who was completely controlled by his disease and drank himself to death by the age of 49.  She has never touched a drink.  In fact, she went to a bar once in her entire life and remembers vividly becoming drunk off just the smell of the bar.  (When pressed, she thinks it was the smell of the beer, not the cigarette smoke.  Since she herself smoked for 51 years).

So why is it then, that we can see each other’s solutions so easily?  Yet we are blind to our own?  I was never blind to my circumstances.  I knew that I had to leave my first husband or I was going to get sucked into the void of his disease.  But I did nothing about it, for ten years!  I can blame my surroundings, money, my weight problems, and a whole host of other things, but the truth is…I was comfortable.  I was comfortable in a miserable life, and instead of doing the hard thing- which would have been to leave that life and start over- I chose comfort.

We are way too comfortable with the status quo in this country.  If you are unhappy, get off your ass and change things.  If you have weight to lose, lose it!  If you hate your job, quit! Don’t be controlled by obligations of the mind.  You own your life, no one else does.  Change what you need to change!

Oh and, listen to Gram.  She’s pretty damn smart.