"Safety Net"

The view from my bed on a clear day (aided by the zoom on my camera)

MAYDAY Magazine: "Safety Net"

I have been lucky. Frighteningly so.

Not health-wise, of course. But once my health deteriorated to the point that I had to access our medical system and social safety net, I managed to eventually land in the parts that still work. 

And welfare does work. Conservatives want to disappear it--we all get that. But reporting that only fixates on how welfare isn't working plays into conservative talking points that government can't help, that government is the problem. I'm a shut-in, but in a comfortable apartment because of Section 8. I have primary care that makes housecalls because of Medicaid. It also pays for the caregiver who picks up my prescriptions and does my laundry and helps me take a bath. I have enough heat in the winter and A/C in the summer because of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIEAP). I have a fridge full of healthy food because of food stamps (SNAP). I have phone service because of the Lifeline program. And I have Supplemental Security Income (SSI) to cover the expenses that these programs do not. I have little disposable income, but thanks to government programs, my needs are met. Being sick, in pain, and mostly bedridden is awful. But it would be so much more awful without welfare. 

The UNSCOM Commemorative Toilet

I stuffed my old U.N. Declaration of Human Rights poster behind some books 

when I didn't know where to put it upon moving in over 15 years ago.  

Came for the craft, stayed for the memories. Or rather, the memories flushed me down a vortex of emotions that have been all too familiar over these last three years of genocide: rage, frustration, desperate anguish, impotence. Between admiration and flashback, I stayed for all 10,000-plus words of Eliot Weinberger's classic essay, "What I Heard About Iraq." And then read it again, taking notes. 

The craft is breathtaking. The essay is a montage of "I heard" statements made by the lofty--politicians, generals--and the lowly--U.S. service members, Iraqi doctors, peddlers--which tells the story of the Iraq War up to January of 2005 when the piece was first published in the London Review of Books. His clever use of juxtaposition underscores the mendacity of Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush, the black humor of incompetence, but mostly the tactile horror of it all. There are two paragraphs that do not contain an "I heard" statement. One is a list of abuses from the U.S. Army 15-6 Report of Abuses of Prisoners in Iraq (the Taguba Report) currently echoing in Sde Teiman and Ofer Prisons: "Detainee 7 was ordered to bark like a dog while MPs spat and urinated on him; he was sodomized by a police stick while two female MPs watched." The second was "the military summary for an ordinary day, 22 July 2004, a day that produced no headlines." It is an extended paragraph of murdered dentists, headless bodies, at least 38 separate bombings and more than 15 gunmen attacking U.S. soldiers, contractors, and Iraqi police. By structuring the essay in such a way, Weinberger lets the actors and the acted upon in this war speak for themselves. It is the ultimate "show, don't tell" piece of writing. 

"Not Another Tragic Fattie"

Burningword Literary Journal: “Not Another Tragic Fattie”

In sixth grade, a boy tried to make fun of me for being fat. It did not go as he expected. Instead, he was the one who ended up being marginalized. I’ve always remembered it over the years as him being ostracized because he made fun of me. But I suspect I was mixing up correlation with causation. It’s likely he was also a dick to others. So the class decided collectively, if unconsciously, fuck that asshole.

I wanted to write about this memory to push back on the idea that being fat is always tragic, the fat kid always bullied and miserable. Most memoirs and novels I’ve read with fat characters focus on fatness as the result of trauma (overeating to create a larger, protected body) and/or the trigger of trauma (childhood bullying). But sometimes one is just fat. It’s not positive and beautiful. It’s not repulsive and wretched. It just is. Like being short. Or neurodivergent. Or having red hair. 

Midwinter Spring Is Its Own Season

Silly blueberry bush, it's January!    

It is not uncommon to have a break from the seemingly interminable Portland rain in mid to late January. After months of dim, gray-white skies, the sun feels almost aggressive, with a glare that is blindness in the afternoon even as we all luxuriate in its heart’s heat. Sometimes we even get temperatures in the upper 50s, teasing the bulbs with spring only for the most gullible daffodils—or blueberries (such as mine above)—to bloom and then die in a February cold snap. 

Between melting and freezing, my own soul’s sap is quivering with a tentative spring. Though at 53 years old I’m more in the autumnal time of life rather than winter. Still, a spring time out of time’s covenant. My pedometer may continue reading only 300-400 steps/day (especially since starting the Estradiol patch in August 2024), but I seem to be doing more with those steps. A bit more cooking in the kitchen. A bit more trimming and planting in the garden. An hour or two more out of bed here and there. 

Bibliophilia

All the talk about books in the comments section of the post below has me thinking a bit more about my library. Tubbs quite rightly chided me about even thinking about getting rid of books. So, thought I'd write this post as penance.

Poeisia commented that books are like friends and I have to say that's very true. When I first left home to go to college and was feeling homesick, an afternoon in the library made me feel a lot better. And now that I spend a lot of time in bed, looking up at the long shelves snaking their way around the ceiling and down the walls makes me feel less lonely because those familiar novels, plays, historical monographs, and theological treatises are here along with me.

A lot of the books I have I don't remember exactly where I got them. Others, of course, I do. An old bookstore in West Salem. Gifts from friends. Thrift stores. Open houses at the Middle East Studies Center.

Many, many of them are from Powells Books, either at their store or during their annual Square Deal Sale when they fill up Pioneer Courthouse Square with overstocks and books they otherwise can't seem to get rid of. It takes hours to go through the tables winding their way along the etched red bricks. The store, of course, takes even longer. Indeed, though I've lived between 5 and 20 minutes away depending on whether you take the streetcar or walk for most of my adult life, I don't think I've actually ever been through every aisle of the store, though I believe I have been in every room. It's really that vast. But I've certainly spent hundreds of hours there. Sitting on the floor or standing with my head crooked to one side as I skim the names. My godfather, a cynical guy from the East Coast now stuck on the wrong coast in Seattle for grad school, thought I was totally overhyping Powells. Until he stepped inside. After a few hours he admitted he was overwhelmed. Our favorite thing to do when he comes to town is to head to the Middle East section at Powells and sneer or salivate at what they've got.

And now with the Internet, I've reached new heights in book collecting. Books that I've had to constantly request through Inter-library loan and finally spend money and hours at a copy machine because they've been out of print so long I'm now finding through the far reaches of the Web. It's made me smugger than ever of my library. Especially I when wrote a book review of John Joseph's, Muslim-Christian Relations and Inter-Christian Rivalries in the Middle East: The Case of the Jacobites in an Age of Transition (Albany: SUNY, 1983) for a professor, who upon reading it said, "we should get this book for our library" to which I responded cheekily, "I own it."

To those who say that the public library is a lot cheaper, I say that they've never seen my overdue fines. I've probably built a wing of our university library with my tardiness and as the Internet makes book buying so easy and cheap, I've decided that it's far more economical to just buy the books I need or will want to read eventually rather than pay for my forgetfulness. I mean, then I get to actually keep them.

As fate would have it, the movie that I popped in the DVD player tonight from Netflix was a book about bibliophiles, 84 Charing Cross Road. The main character is a New York screenwriter, Helene Hanff, who also has a particular taste for hardbound English literature. But, being a writer, she's not particularly wealthy and has a hard time finding affordable editions. Upon finding an ad for a British bookstore, Marks & Co., she writes hoping that they might have what she's looking for at reasonable prices. The manager of the store, Frank Doel, responds with a polite letter, a few of the books she requested, and an invoice. Thus begins a 20 year correspondence among Hanff, Doel and the staff at Marks & Co. in which Hanff is the witty, outspoken New Yorker and Doel the reserved, but polite Englishman. It's a great movie regardless of whether you like books or not. Subtle and sweet but not at all sappy. However, if you're a book lover, this movie has you thinking about that wonderful smell of books. That soft touch of leather bound. The slight sparkle of gilded edges. It totally made me think of you, Sylvia.

It also made me miss England. Reminded me of that little bookshop near the British Museum that specialized (or should I write specialised?) in books on the Middle East (or the Orient as their sign said). A. practically had to drag me out of there by my ear if we were ever going to leave. And speaking of my British boyfriend, my favorite line in the movie is where Hanff is chatting with her friend and her friend's British boyfriend. He says something about raspberries, but being a good Brit pronounces it rahspberry. "Raaahhhhspberry," Hanff says. "Can you believe a whole country of people pronounce it like that?" LOL Lord knows A. and I giggle at the way each other pronounces things. Like herbs vs. herbs-with-an-h. Or fillet vs. FILit. Or drawing vs. drawring. Then there are their weird-ass names for things. Instead of Graham crackers, they have "digestive biscuits." Does that not just sound like a cookie made of Maalox?

So, at any rate, I gave my dad another twenty bucks tonight to get some more packing tape, as well as some Fix-all to fix the walls as the brackets for the shelves stuck to the walls when they were screwed in and after being extracted, took hunks of plaster with them. And this time next week we'll be figuring out how to fit shelving for some 1100 books or so into an even smaller studio. Cause, ya know, while I've seen lots of friends come and go over the years, these ones are still hanging around.