About Seth Sexton

Seth is a Seattle based multimedia artist whose current work emphasizes large scale painting choreographies. Raised on a farm in Chimacum, Washington, he spent his childhood summers alternately mowing fields, stacking hay bails and studying ballet. He left dance to pursue an education in biochemistry at the University of Washington and later went on to receive a BFA in painting. He began a successful collaboration with metal artist Cathy McClure called SID INC. This collaboration focused on multi-media installations and led to subsequent collaborations with artists internationally. Seth moved to Panajachel, Guatemala and spent 3 years studying Tzu'tu'jil and the indigenous arts and rituals of the Mayan people of the Atitlan region. Having returned to Seattle and to Modern and Contemporary Dance practices, he continues to incorporate the labors, rituals and patterns of agrarian society with visual and performing arts. He has showcased his collaborative multimedia choreographies at Seattle based institutions such as Velocity Dance Center, On the Boards, Jack Straw New Media Gallery, Hedreen Gallery, Soil Gallery, Bumbershoot and others. He is currently represented by Sarah Hurt at Seattle Art Source. Inquire about his availability for commissions and collaborations.:

We sat by the saltwater in Sammish Bay. There we made a midden of oyster shells: Shigoku, Olympias, Kumomotos, Fat bastards, Sea cows and Virginicas. I marveled at their translucent winter lacquer and then the sameness of the clouds up in the sky. I brought her attention to the fleck of Dungeness crab shell in her hair by announcing she looked like the daughter of Philyra, a sea nymph. She smiled and pulled it gently from her nets. And we continued talking about how we would become the things we wanted to be. Both of us, for a moment, Sirens to our future selves. She said she wanted to work harder at prioritizing her health and later I said I wanted to empathize more with others' sense of time. For a moment I vanished inside the listening and connected Philyra to her son Chiron. 

Chiron, in mythological stories, was conceived through the trickery of his father masquerading as a horse. He was the wisest of the centaurs and honored by the constellation Centaurus after sacrificing his life for the hero Prometheus. Today a small dwarf planet in our solar system Called 2060 Chiron, named for this mythological creature, circles the sun through an elliptical path between Saturn and Uranus and between the asteroid and the Kuiper belts. These astronomical facts are droll but for some astrologers and for myself they are quite marked. Chiron has long been called “The Wounded Healer”. This reference stems from stories that he was a revered teacher of the arts, the lyre,  and medicine (a mentor to Asclepius). He could famously heal anything on earth but ironically could not heal himself from the piercings of the poison tipped (Hydras blood) arrows launched by Hercules. For this reason, The planetary body of Chiron, within the context of a natal chart, references where our soul has been deeply hurt before and brings light to the aspects of our being that hold healing powers as a result of these spiritual wounds.

I had my Natal Chart interpreted January 31st 2017- a month before going to Chicago for my interview for  Graduate School. I knew I had work to do in regards to historical and generational trauma at that time, even before meeting with my fey headed astrologer Erin. I could feel the change coming before it arrived.  But when it did, the whole country became consumed by the same reckoning of  inequities. When we finally met to discuss the chart I said I remembered this moment with her from a dream. It was no surprise that she emphasized the auspicious presence of Chiron in my chart. She said that, usually a minor aspect, Chiron figured so prominently in my chart, that it bore influence on all other major attributes encircled within my sigil. 

“Chiron conjunct Moon in Taurus in the 4th: Chiron aspecting the moon unites basic emotional security needs with wounding and healing. The lunar wound points to the early relationship with the Mother and the family system where safety and a sense of belonging may have been impaired. Mother herself may have been wounded, having inherited ancestral pain of feeling marginal or not fitting in. Therefore the child experiences the mother’s depressions as rejection. Postnatal depression or family difficulties may have meant the mother was disconnected from bonding with the child. Mother’s ambivalence towards her role as caretaker may have developed during her pregnancy, leaving the child feeling emotionally unsupported, even drawing the child into complicity with her feelings throughout life. The themes of dislocation and feeling foreign within the system can run through the family. Chiron sextile Venus in Cancer in the 6th: The wounding of the feminine in the family is highlighted. This would influence the attitudes toward female values, sexuality and roles. In the familiar past there may be a dishonoring of the feminine position in the family which shapes relationships as well as the relationships between sisters and other women in the family.”

I felt so many ways about this paragraph. First, feeling that it was true; that it was the truth. I hadn’t spoken to her yet, about Linda.  Only very sparingly growing up with others because I didn’t want to oversalt any of my interactions with new people, offering instead an occasional bland heel from my bread of shame. I presented my trauma as piecemeal and disconnected from the present, in such a way as to highlight my uniqueness and perhaps overemphasize my joy. Also, pleasing people and  appearing happy were how I sat at the table and consumed others and wanted them to consume me. People knew me as a good listener, full of good questions.  I learned withholding as not just a coping mechanism, but a course from which I could not diverge. Only my sisters could have known how accurate this portend from Erin was. 

You can see the dilemma of questioned credibility very quickly if you tell people that you are, and have been, in an abusive relationship hinging on sexual assault, psychological trauma, and physical abuse for decades, and that you are, and everything is, just fine. This is, in effect, what I have experienced with my sisters who have minimized their abuse, thus maintaining the hegemonic force of Linda’s mental conditions,  in order to rationalize the presence of their own joy; believing that one can only negate the existence of the other instead of recognizing their meta-cohabitability. So, and perhaps because of them, I have always had a seeming proof that the cognitive dissonance of listening to a smiling victim pins the responsibility of believability on the abused rather than the abuser. 

My second feeling was that the stars were scripted in the book of the night. Did I choose this life as a spiritual entity, and did I know the moment this transit of awakening would come before I was born and before this circular sign would call for my awakening, through a nearly perfect echo cast through the tympanic blackness of the Sitra Achra onto the stretched skin that is the light of my beating heart. 

This question of agency which we communally ask ourselves moves in a galactic swirl around its own impenetrable light. The light of reincarnation and reanimation. I found it not merely coincidental that in  Legacy of the “Uses of the Erotic” by Cara Page, she speaks of her ancestral lineage of literary mentors as cartographers and astrologers, She says of the many names “...And it felt like they were constellations. We were constellations….”  

“So all of my erotic self was wrapped in ““how do I associate with pleasure and desire without fear, without losing control, without being harmed?” I really had to walk out of a space that allowed for me to unravel and unpack those things as separate so I could define my sexuality and my erotic self in relationship to something that did not have to be violent, to understand that the desire to be loved and to love your family wasnt always mired with violent pasts but could begin again with new, healing destinies.” 

The following passages are a way of honoring the divine feminine in me. Celebrating emotional and psychic death as a transformational state, and by writing about it, participating in its life-affirming creations. I am very thankful for Linda. Linda has brought me joy, at times. This narrative counters our western sense of hubris and stoicism by affirming that grief can and should be a collective experience. 

And this was the very first thing they told me,

The Olympian Muses daughters of Zeus Aegisholder:

“Hillibillies and bellies, poor excuses for shepherds:

We know how to tell many believable lies,

But also, when we want to, how to speak the plain truth”

So spoke the daughters of great Zeus, mincing their words.

And they gave me a staff, a branch of good sappy laurel,

Plucking it off, spectacular. And they breathed into me

A voice divine, so I might celebrate, past and future.

And they told me to hymn the generation of the eternal gods.

|Dear Linda,

This will be a receipt of my remembrances. The things I have paid for.

You and dad met at college. He said you were beautiful and shy at first. In the student organization called Los AMIGOs you fell in love. You went to rural villages in Mexico when you were 19 and built cinder block rooms and dug wells. Later you joined the Peace Corp and you and dad went all over the world. He said one of the first “signs” that you were becoming ill was the collection of elementary school papers, drawings, pens, and memorabilia gathered together in boxes that you stored in Grandma’s garage. He didn’t recall that it was a “sign” because personal effects are so sentimental and everybody kept a few things from childhood even though he didn’t; and it wasn’t clear if grandma had saved them there or you had. His mother died, and his father was an alcoholic, so I understand why he didn’t have childhood ephemera, and later would recall yours as unusual. I think he too, likely came to understand the ways in which he was being erased by his father. This is the complication of attaching memories to objects, getting rid of the object equates to forgetting in some way.  Dad said In Mexico you were really affected by poverty, you hadn’t seen kids work so young or take care of their siblings at such a young age and look so capable of it and they appeared happy. You told me that people saved cords, and ropes, and rummaged through garbage piles looking for wires. You said single room houses were makeshift and made from mud bricks, and every scrap of wood and rusted nail was precious and “used until it couldn’t be used”. But the families were happy, you had said. They were growing corn and vegetables and keeping a few chickens and they smiled at you and you thought they were happy. I forget that you were a “city girl” raised by hard working middle class immigrants. You said people didn’t know the value of things and they didn’t know the value of hard work. I wonder what white colonial tourists looked like to indigenous people in the 60’s and for the few weeks in that summer, what other ideas you had appropriated there. Dad said that your father had resented him, blaming him for not maintaining the kind of life he had provided for you, a life in which you didn’t have to worry about the future. It complicates the story, and perhaps it’s because of the story, but I think not worrying about the future was a symptom of the illness of the Great Depression and the post-industrial age in which grandpa was formed. Grandpa said that after they got back from the Peace Corps that you really changed and it wasn’t the radical “Hippy” movement with women shouting independence and liberation that he was referring to, or even the radical responsibility for the environment. I think he saw the young 17 year old you, in Church standing up in the middle of a rote catholic sermon, all by yourself, all eyes on you, inspired by god, to do god’s work, and shout at everyone “the apocalypse was coming!”and he felt, and could see, his own shame. That he had taken you for granted, silenced you, forced you to believe, failed to see your fervent power, and creativity. I remember the dry sauna was filled with puka shells and tapa cloth from Western Samoa. It was some of the things you had marveled at while you were in the Peace Corps with dad. You really valued all the labor it took the women to make them and paint them. You wanted to share it with people, so you purchased a lot. You thought you’d make jewelry out of the shells, so you took bagfuls home off the beaches. You never shared it or made anything with them. You did intend to use stuff, in the future, make stuff, in the future, give stuff away, in the future. You said it was God that spoke to you in the church that day, told you to prepare for his coming. To gather everything together like Noah and the arc. You would see his return in your life and you would be ready. You loved art and God I guess. A mural sized wall stacked with quart containers of electric blue crisco, was your version of an Andy Warhol Sculpture; It sat outside until the labels turned light blue and taupe and the animals came. And there was a similar stack underneath the house, of kerr jars filled with a spectrum of dying fruits and vegetables. The preserves really shook dad. In his mind, he wanted to subsist through each season, let the food and animals and agriculture come and go. He wanted to make, and harvest, and use what we needed. Nothing more and nothing less. I’m not sure if dad lived more in the present or the past. So after the 2nd year and third year when the surplus grew, so did the fighting. He said it was hard, if not impossible, to fight against that kind of purpose. The forty buckets  were for sand, and dirt, and harvest. The sea of blue and green tarps, covered firewood, farm equipment, the extra clothes and metal.  The scrap wood, collected at the landfill, helped make the tree house. He couldn’t argue with that. How could he say that nothing was useful, that there wasn’t some beauty in it. That was the trap. He said, If just one thing was useful or could be recycled or repurposed, then everything could be. 

Dear Linda

You had such a lovely contralto voice. It reminded me of the rattling diesel engine in the black 280 D Mercedes and it’s ripped up leather seats and loose stitching. You sang Cielito Lindo and dad would utter translations of Pablo Neruda, so somehow I knew Mexico had been important to you both. Auntie joanie, said she read the love letters dad sent you from Sri Lanka. And he gave you the Rubiat by Omar Kayak and you married them in your mind. That summer you came back from Nochistlan you drew, in black pen, a proficient copy of St Francis in Meditation by Francisco de Zurbaran. It hung in Grandma’s house in the stairwell. I didn't realize that you had drawn it until it returned to the house on Glendale Farm. I knew you loved that picture because it hung in the sewing room. You sent me a copy of that copy just 6 months ago, which I’ve ripped up and retaped now, 8 times while here at SAIC. The first time I cried. But everytime after, It got easier to let go of, to undo, to make it in my own image, and to make mine…. And some of the ghosts and some of the words vanished. 

Dear Linda

You said to me how important freedom was for all of us, how important your freedom was. When I was quite young you repeated this saying.  “I knew if you ever wandered off and got lost, or eaten by an animal, that It would be okay, that I could have another one”. Well, I did. I wandered off and got lost; eaten up by a terrible dragon called the sorrowing dark.  I orient myself towards the west, towards the setting sun. I have found another mother inside me, my own moon; reflecting whatever light you’ve left behind.

You have repeated yourself, and then said how much you hate repeating yourself.  On the other hand, you couldn't remember what you had said or what you had done, or what others had said and done. Or quite simply, you believed what they had said or done was a lie. A direct falsification of your truth.

Was that a joke the first time you said it? Was that your real self? Was it truth? Should it become more funny, more cavalier, more noxious, less meaningful, more appropriate, more honest, less real through time. I could fill this sentence like a closet in your house…

I’d like to start here with you, with that phrase- walk up to and part way through that door of the closet . But know that I’ll be putting things in every room, without order, and lose track of where I put them. It will be hard for me to distinguish what the most important thing to say is, and sometimes the least relevant thing will be the most important things for me. You, as always, will bury the words that I love under a pile of your own significance, deciding what is mine and what is yours and what is waste.

I’ll endeavor to use irrefutable science, and current developments in clinical psychology- and cite their resources. I’ll use first-hand anecdotes in both prose and poetry and other forms of pseudo-science; having some deference for the representations of truth but no regard for interpretation (in many ways we remain the same)- I will hold all of these articles, that I’ve set aside just for you, up, one-by-one, for you to deny. Perhaps and because I’ll have minor regard for punctuation and grammatical form it may be unclear in which way you should divide your attention. I understand life to be a shifting sense of proportion. 

I offer that rarely is life equal parts death, or fullness equal parts empty; but concede that whatever fraction of truth is contained here is proportional- multiplied either positively or negatively by our separate epistemes. I will be mostly concerned with what is between these two marks || . The absolute value of what has been said and what I am saying.

As you read this we are changing.

These are letters I would start writing to Linda. But there was always something I left out. Something I wanted to say that meant I understood, that I empathize with her. While making it clear that my feelings were facts also, my main intention was to give Linda the opportunity to accept accountability, as my father had. Without doing so meant that my sorrow for her would always outweigh the joy. I didn’t know how to move forward without adding something that I just learned, another piece of history I asked my family about, something my voice couldn’t say on its own yet. I looked for signs everywhere and found them.

“Until that moment she had always been there. No matter how much I appeared to change-how illustrious my education, how altered my appearance-I was still her. At best I was two people, a fractured mind. She was inside, and emerged whenever I crossed the threshold of my father’s house.”

The Dream I had several years ago was about a possible future. I want the reader to know that dreams are hyperobjects because they have an unfathomable scale. I mean the sometimes quantum immeasurability of coastlines around  islands of firing neurons; and always the conflation of time. Dreams for me are the closest I come in all ways to the idea of God.

“Other  divisions  must  also  be  told:  in  the  luminous  unity  of  appear­ance,  the  absolute  division  of  dreams,  which  man  cannot  prevent  himself from  questioning  in  search  of  his  own  truth  -  be  it  that  of  his  destiny  or that  of  his  heart  -  but  which  he  only  questions  beyond  an  essential refusal  that  constitutes  it  and  pushes  it  into  the  derision  of  the  oneiric.  It will  also  be  necessary  to  write  the  history  of  sexual  prohibitions,  and  not simply  in  terms  of  ethnology:  and  speak,  in  our  culture  itself,  of  the continuously  mobile  and  obstinate  forms  of  repression,  not  to  write  a chronicle  of  morality  or  tolerance,  but  to  reveal,  as  a  limit  of  our  Occi­dental  world  and  the  origin  of  its  morality,  the  tragic  division  of  the happy  world  of  desire.  Finally,  and  firstly,  we  must  speak  of  the  experi­ence of madness.”

The dream was about Linda, my biological mother, on her deathbed. In the dream, as in waking life, we hadn’t spoken in years. I received a call from a woman in a hospital who said that she was dying and if I wanted to say goodbye I would need to return quickly to the States. I was in a foreign land of angular cement and remnants of red brick roads- an Eastern Bloc country with cold constructivist architecture. In the dream I had been preparing for a show. I was walking through the streets with an interpreter, who was both my guide through the city and liaison for the exhibition, when the call had come.

I graduate this May in the class of 2021 with an emphasis in performance, painting, and drawing. This week I applied for a residency in Berlin through the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I submitted a work in progress called Lamentations. It’s about the perpetual liminality of death between Linda and I. It’s a cathartic ritual of exorcism and self-possession. I am reminded of this dream again. Lamentations began on an icy lake under the up-set table top of a grey marble sky-empty. In Saugatuck I began to spit out the memory of one. I would return to it as a ghost. Absorbing what I could into my formless vessel.

While writing this another possible future is unfolding.

I knew neither of my sister’s could be there. They too felt both alive and dead.  I returned by plane presumably, although a huge swath of time and space had been erased by the news of her imminent death. I arrived at the hospital and was detained by the nurse who explained the condition. She had a disease I’d never heard before but I knew instinctively what it was. I had no questions about it. 

We are all living now through the pandemic of Covid-19. The shift in society has felt for many as though we have awoken from a reverie. In which the illusions of political, social, and cultural equality have dissolved. We have begun to mark time by the passing of black bodies under police violence, mass shootings, and the sick.  This has created an overwhelming compression of time and space. And has refocused madness away from the individual towards the institutions of capitalism that have caused their duress. 

“In other words, those who are rooted in an understanding of race-ability and its relation to State violence do not see the incorporation of madness (as or in addition to mental illness) into communities of color or the inclusion of people of color within mad and antipsychiatry discourses as the goal. As Tam elaborates, what is needed is not an additive model regarding settler status, race, gender/sexuality, and disability but one that considers how discourses that  construct  each  of  these  subject  positions  are  related  to  each  other  and how the oppressions that result from such constructions build on each other. Mental illness or madness is not a trait of the mind but a relation to others and a result of relations of power.”

“Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus. Most people infected with the COVID-19 virus will experience mild to moderate respiratory illness and recover without requiring special treatment.  Older people, and those with underlying medical problems like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease, and cancer are more likely to develop serious illness. The best way to prevent and slow down transmission is to be well informed about the COVID-19 virus, the disease it causes and how it spreads…” 

Over the last year Lamentations has also become about how to situate oneself within a shifting theater of cultural loss and desire and, moreover, within the contrast of the collective grieving of our global communities. Anointing the hands and spitting were central actions in the work before the pandemic. But their meanings became nuanced with protection and violence as time as passed. The Pandemic has been a limen in which my understanding has passed through.  Each of the quotes you read are a stage in which a limen is presented. It's fitting that the following is in blue.

“The earliest discourses of which I’m aware about the role of theater has to do with collective catharsis, and the assumption that the story performed dares to present emotional material that ventures beyond what might fit tidily within social convention. Today I’m struck by the gradual isolation that has been imposed around much of the healing many of us pursue in our lives, so much that podcasts I listen to regularly advertise working with a therapist via text message. Alongside Greek tragedy and the strata of group therapy, couples therapy, individual treatment, and cyber-chat with a therapy bot, I might add to this initial constellation professional mourners, notions of shamanism in which ritual is enacted on behalf of a broader social order, and various scenes within the society of spectacle to which we’ve become accustomed, such as televised interviews between politicians and news anchors in which both conversants are alone in a room with a camera, and not in fact in physical dialogue. Even further, I’m thinking of the Hollywood-Squares-pageantry of Zoom and all of the ways our isolation has been annotated across the last year of quarantines and lockdown. I’m listing all of this to serve as a setting for which I can try to understand my relationship with; your performance, Its being videoed, Its being videoed and further augmented with textual overlays, the constitutive features of the piece being staged: lighting, soundtrack, space, body, movement, utterance, drawing, tools/prosthetics.“

This script is a concatenation of people and experiences that reveal transgenerational traumas. Here I find myself  both revealing, repairing, and cleansing those traumas. Part of this process proceeds by understanding madness through genetic, pathophysiological, and neuropsychological lens. But most importantly understanding madness as defined by a shifting sense of power relations, and a necessary counter philosophy to notions of sanity, if indeed there are.

“..Protect yourself and others from infection by washing your hands or using an alcohol based rub frequently and not touching your face. The COVID-19 virus spreads primarily through droplets of saliva or discharge from the nose when an infected person coughs or sneezes, so it’s important that you also practice respiratory etiquette”. Like wearing a mask, refraining from spitting, or coughing into your flexed elbow.

Before I entered into a well-lit room awash with sunlight on a storied ward. Her bed was in the center of the room. A boney frame, a sallow face, and bristled white-white hair.  She was propped on sweaty wet pillows and her giant scarred  knees were bent and knocked together. I noticed she was untethered to tubes or monitors- she herself and island in this world.  I held her gaze for a moment before I started crying and woke myself out of the dream. Her eyes were so red they appeared to mist with blood instead of tears. Something echoed inward.

But, There were no words between us.

When I woke I couldn’t stop crying, in reality as well, for a brief time. It surprised me though- how long it took to shake the feeling of seeing her that way in the dream. I have often wanted Linda to be dead. I prayed for it. As a child it was often vindictive,  a retributional consideration. As an adult it’s a strange compassion, I think of her death to be the cessation of loneliness and suffering. It’s not a persistent desire.  I’ve never said that to her in the explicit ways that she has said it to me; to “rot on a grave” or “you are dead to me” or “go to hell.”

I’m not ready to tell you about that.

But I am working towards ending the relationship, meaning I am working towards making my emotions as thin as possible, to loosen the cords of attachments, to unravel a yarn of madness. To experience the lamentation of loss and the interment of feelings to a ceaseless rest, a rest I call an iron sleep. I have always felt it would be so much easier this way and so, to feel the most liberated,  I dream that she is almost dead..

Sleeping is my Superpower. I can fall asleep in cars, on busses, in planes, on new beds, with new people, on hard floors, on soft grasses and dirt, in meetings, at parties, in the middle of the day, in absolute silence, within minutes after exercise, after a fight or a kiss, a good cry, a bad cry. With my eyes closed or open.

Linda was a dirty home, a cloudy iron-backed mirror. When people die their ephemera remains. Their objects reinvoke the memory of places and activities that happened there amongst the living. All objects and their ideas are flat mirrors. Everything is a home to something and like these words a hovel. 

This work is an experimental writing at the intersection of auto ethnography, poetry, and critical analysis. To assist the reader, I will elaborate on the structure and coloring within the writing. The main story is in black text. Subsequent deviations from the primary story are indented and colored in traditional prismatic order. Each indentation is an associative subtext which refers to the previous indentation. Often, they are direct quotes. Many come from the echochamber of the internet.  Each color can be read independently, meaning they follow a coherent sequence in the absence of any passages of intervening colors. Prismatic sections can be read in this way starting and bookended by black texts. This experimental writing attempts to suggest an alternative to accepted reading structures and challenges the ambiguity of truth and voice.

The role of neural plasticity within mental illness allows us to think about a counter narrative away from the traditional power structure of logic and reason.

The objects reify the edges of character and personality, once perceived, and endeavor to construct a version of their creator on the surfaces of their absence. We acquire things to reflect us, to trap our light with clearer resolution and finer definition. The living cling to the object because the object invigorates the memory inside them.  If you eliminate all the things that press upon the absence then the absence is further reified by its loss of definition. 

“.. the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised them the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life. And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we have no inkling of. And it depends on chance, whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.”

I was born in a cemetery; at home. Amongst tombstones and buried bones. Things that had lost their flesh and softness, but not their meaning. They were short-lived lives that had been celebrated around kitchen tables and adored in the parlours of their other’s keepers. These objects were heroes and vagabonds given into the right moment.  They were written with names of people I did not know and in languages I did not speak. Linda was a hoarder; an undertaker; a curator of the dead, a death doula, a shroud maker

Her cavern was vast, it’s walls both unseen and impenetrable. Its floor is littered with the peels, shells, and husks of the Sitra Achra. From a womb of blackness I emerged. She possessed me.

“It is because we are the ligature between the dead and the unborn- and not because we are vulnerable to the elements and predators-that we humans require housing….A house is a place of insideness in the openness of nature where the dead, through the care of the living, perpetuate their afterlives and promote the interests of the unborn.”

Thanatos is the harbinger of a peaceful death.. An eternal god with the gift of eternal sleep who was perhaps  overshadowed by Hades as the God of the Underworld. Ken Wilber claims an inextricable link of Thanatos to phobos and agape and eros de facto in his theories on transpersonal psychology (1995). I refer to his writings in relation to the ‘spectrum of consciousness’ and my own notions of queer thanatology.

Many people write of text as textile. In some ways that language is delicately woven together through ritual actions and that meaning is housed in this way eliciting palatial landscapes and diaphanous drapes when calling out, mewling in the night, towards the vital breast and performing acts of hunger and desire.  I suppose this script is a shroud resting in the crypt, put in its proper place on the page. You and I are entering into a ceremony.

“In computer programming, a script is a program or sequence of instructions that is interpreted or carried out by another program rather than by the computer processor (as a compiled program is). Multimedia development programs use "script" to mean the sequence of instructions that you enter to indicate how a multimedia sequence of files will be presented (the sequence of images and sounds, their timing, and the possible results of user interaction).”

“Transcription is the process of copying a segment of DNA into RNA. The segments of DNA transcribed into RNA molecules that can encode proteins are said to produce messenger RNA (mRNA).Both DNA and RNA are nucleic acids, which use base pairs of nucleotides as a complementary language. During transcription, a DNA sequence is read by an RNA polymerase, which produces a complementary, antiparallel RNA strand called a primary transcript.”

Linda Liked black things, beads, and sequins. She always wore black onyx and silver around her neck and in the rings on her fingers. I associate the black-and-white layered variety of chalcedony with Linda and with mourning.

“In 1861, Prince Albert of the United Kingdom passed away, and the American Civil War started. Both incidents brought an abrupt halt to the whimsical romance of the Early Victorian Period. So began the Grand Period (1861-1885) of the Victorian Era.Queen Victoria mourned her husband until her death in 1901. This set the tone for Grand Period jewelry manufacturing. However, her subjects buckled under the heavy gloom and death and war perpetuated the Victorian desire for remembrance jewelry. Onyx symbolism is replete with connections to bad luck. In Arabic, black onyx is known as el jaza, which means “sadness.”

I have a huge chunk of black obsidian. It’s a kind of volcanic glass shaped very nearly pyramidal. I use it in my performances when doing memory work about Linda, to help Pprotect me from negative psychic energy and ghosts. It’s supposed to bring clarity to the mind and relieve confusion. 

The Mayan prophets used polished Obsidian as “mirrors” for scrying purposes; their way of prophesying the future 

”A very popular method of scrying involves the use of water. While this can be a large body of water, such as a pond or lake, many people simply use a bowl. Nostradamus used a large bowl of water as a scrying tool, and put himself into a trance to interpret the visions he saw. Many people also incorporate the reflections of the moon into their scrying.”

“There is a peace and soothing isolation these relics came to find submerged in the icy shores and waters of a remote lakeside. To see the primal abstract markings on a white void against the landscape, foil their connected but separate material lives. The wilderness invites this paper back into its origins. To float away to its final destination like a dead Viking.”

“A manuscript from 1875 notes that in China, slaves and menial servants mined onyx. Nobody would willingly touch or own this gem for fear of bad dreams, misfortune, and loss of energy” 

She’d wear all sorts of rings, really. She’d wear them on all digits including the thumbs and at different sections of the phalanges. Size didn’t matter usually to her; her hands would swell and dessicate at different times. If one day her waters ebbed and a ring was able to pass by her enormous knuckles, but then the tide would rise again and turn a finger red and purple, she’d have to remove them with bolt cutters and soap. This happened several times. Her hands were dirty and calloused from the firewood business, the weed pulling, the constant sorting of this, that, and the other.

This, That, and The Other, was also the name of a thrift store that Linda owned and operated at the storehouse on the corner. It was sometimes referred to as the “Red House”.

It’s there that the EPA first started their legal battle with Linda because of a rat infestation that was affecting the neighbors. Linda spent a decade representing herself in court for illegally operating as a Solid Waste Disposal Facility. Although many fines for improper disposal of hazardous materials amassed and were settled,  many of the larger indictments remain pending, The Federal government has yet to concretize a definition of “waste”. Current definitions are both circuitous, contradictory and vague.

“(7) A material is “recycled” if it is used, reused, or reclaimed.

(8) A material is “accumulated speculatively” if it is accumulated before being recycled. A material is not accumulated speculatively, however, if the person accumulating it can show that the material is potentially recyclable and has a feasible means of being recycled; and that—during the calendar year (commencing on January 1)—the amount of material that is recycled, or transferred to a different site for recycling, equals at least 75 percent by weight or volume of the amount of that material accumulated at the beginning of the period...”

It filled up eventually, but after the warehouse was built she excavated the insides and turned it into a kind of halfway house for her helpers and people that needed to rent a room for the short term. The police were regularly involved with evictions and the EPA with citations.

Sometimes she’d apply acrylic nails but they would chip and break off within a day or two because of all the wood chopping and free haul away.  It was funny at times because even if half of them were gone she’d keep the rest, and those 5 or 6 would grow out over the course of a week or two.

After she had gotten busted for growing marijuana, and received her felony for possession, they revoked her teaching license in the school district. 

In 1971, President Nixon declared a “war on drugs”. He dramatically increased the size and presence of federal drug control agencies, and pushed through measures such as mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants. Between 1973 and 1977, eleven states decriminalized marijuana possession. I was born at 11:47 PM AT home in 1978 in Chimacum, Washington; At the tail end of the initial push towards decriminalization of marijuana but moving towards a climax of criminalization and incarceration of marginalized communities. Those states beginning the push in chronological order were: Oregon, Alaska, Maine, Colorado, California, Ohio, Minnesota, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Nebraska. In January 1977, President Jimmy Carter was inaugurated on a campaign platform that included marijuana decriminalization. In October 1977, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to decriminalize possession of up to an ounce of marijuana for personal use, 

In 2012 Colorado and Washington become the first two states to legalize the recreational use of cannabis following the passage of Amendment 64 and Initiative 502.[43] 

Marijuana wasn’t legal then or there- in Chimacum.  Linda said she smoked a lot of “homegrown” with my dad and it helped during her pregnancy and even during childbirth. My dad doesn’t remember growing it when I was born. There had been a lot of yelling and breaking things and holes in walls about marijuana. When my dad was building the second house, before it was fully constructed, they rented it out to a guy with cancer. He was a friend of Kirk’s ex-wife. Kirk was now fucking Linda, I saw more of it than my dad did. They’d fuck in the bed next to me, and I was so paralyzed by the noises I’d just pretend to be asleep. The guy was growing 50 plants inside the house, the guy also ended up trying to make his living off of it. My dad wanted nothing to do with it and, of course, he was furious about Kirk. After my dad confronted him about the affair, and Kirk shot at him with a 22 gauge shotgun rifle, their friendship was over and my dad  “kidnapped” my sisters and I and took us out of state to Aptos, California. Linda recalled being traumatized by the event, she didn’t know where we were for the first several weeks and the cops were looking for my dad in Washington. 

My first earthquake, the Coalinga event, was May 2nd 1983. It was magnitude 6.8 and we felt it 134 miles away in Aptos. I wasn’t afraid of plates smashing, I’d seen my father quaking with anger before we left. But, there, I felt a tectonic shift in my childhood; realizing a final cleft between my biological parents.

The cerebrum is a term often used to describe the entire brain. A fissure that separates the two hemispheres is called the Great Longitudinal Fissure

 The first few months in Aptos we stayed with a lady that had a son who was intellectually and developmentally disabled. It was the first time I thought about how humans could be “Imperfect”. I trace my biases and ableism to these moments. Later this would translate into thinking that Linda’s brain was “imperfect”, people were always saying her wires were getting crossed, and I thought maybe that had something to do with the space in the middle.

A few months later my dad was sleeping with another lady in Capitola we moved in with her and I killed her goldfish, by accident. And after I got spanked my dad said he thought “I might be retarded”.

When we came back, I started Kindergarten. I married one of my best friends at the time, after I realized she was interested in becoming a doctor too. My parents started finalizing their divorce around the same time. My dad moved into the lower house and Linda moved the marijuana plants into a room under the porch in the upper house. It had a padlock on it most of the time and we were admonished for going in there if ever it was left open. I went there frequently, but my oldest sister claims she never went in there. She also claims to have forgotten about the arrest and  the suspension of the license. The arrest for me has represented an incredibly important shift in lifestyle, means and reputation in our lives. It had a vast rippling effect, so it’s hard for me to understand this erasure even now. But Jeroma and I do. I’m not sure who turned her in. Jeroma thinks it may have been the man with cancer. My Dad doesn’t remember it happening either. So I’m sure it wasn’t him.

Kirk and Lindas dream was to eventually convert the 180 acre certified organic beef farm into a hemp and medical marijuana operation. But Kirk died 2 years before that could legally happen, because of mad cow disease. There was no drug that could save him from that.

declaring that "Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself." 

When President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he vowed to crack down on substance abuse and reprioritize the War on Drugs, which was originally initiated by President Richard Nixon. DARE (Drug and Alcohol Resistance Education) was founded in 1983 as a partnership between the Los Angeles Police Department and the L.A. public schools. Eventually, the program was in place in up to 75 percent of the nation’s school districts (including Chimacum), by DARE’s own count.

“The effectiveness of DARE in altering students’ drug use behavior has yet to be established," concluded a University of Illinois at Chicago study in 1991.

The DARE program did effectively change my behavior from grades 3 to grade 6. With a polished program of fear, intimidation,and incrimination, I became distinctly aware that my parents were criminals and I began to villainize them. Although asked to, I never betrayed them. I had learned how to roll joints and cigarettes, would find lighters and matches, and light them whenever I could, by the age of 7. It was those rare times that I would get a heartfelt thank you. I felt myself a willing accomplice, so I mastered the deceptive vices of secrecy, silence, denial, resentment and self-loathing, whenever DARE came to class. 

A decade or so later they put her back on a substitute teacher list and so occasionally she’d fill in at school. On a day that wasn’t Halloween, in 7th grade, she was the substitute teacher in my humanities class. She came in super high on dope, with her nails like this, randomly applied, but painted in black nail polish. She was dressed all in black. She wore a black frizzy-perm wig, it was mullet cut and went mid back; Motely Cruesque. She wore this, and a shiny black scrunchy dress. By dress I mean a two-piece scrunchy crop top and a matching barely there scrunchy mini-skirt. 

She wore the same two-piece as an extra in a bar scene in the movie American Heart starring Jeff Bridges.

This was complemented with silver-tipped slouchy leather biker books, no socks or panty-hose, dirty bruised knees and legs and an oversized leather biker jacket, which she took off in class. And finally, massive black onyx rings, one lacquer ring, a slinky of silver bangles, and  Tammy Faye style mascara-post cry with a hint of rouge the same color as her lips- So red. 

 “A dark, sometimes morbid fashion and style of dress, typical gothic fashion includes colored black hair and black period-styled clothing. Both male and female goths can wear dark eyeliner and dark fingernail polish, most especially black. Styles are often borrowed from punk fashion and—more currently—from the Victorian and Elizabethan periods. It also frequently expresses pagan, occult or other religious imagery. Gothic fashion and styling may also feature silver jewelry and piercings.”

During lunch break she went on a mission to the cafeteria, which was also the highschool commons and a lutheran congregation on Sunday’s, to go give my sisters some PDA. I’m not sure how Soma, a senior at the time, felt about that experience. My middle sister, in 9th grade, left running and screaming into the parking lot. Linda literally ran after her and wouldn’t stop until she got a hug and open mouth kiss. I imagine she was challenging the notions of authority, dress code, beauty and judgment. Theatrical displays were generally followed by this didactic need for expression and acceptance. She thought of herself as an actress. She was performing the role of prostitute. 

“For a long time, the story goes, we supported a Victorian regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today. Thus the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality. At the beginning of the seventeenth century a certain frankness was still common, it would seem. Sexual practices had little need of secrecy; words were said without undue reticence, and things were done without too much concealment; one had a tolerant familiarity with the illicit. Codes regulating the coarse, the obscene, and the indecent were quite lax compared to those of the nineteenth century. It was a time of direct gestures, shameless discourse, and open transgressions, when anatomies were shown and intermingled at will, and knowing children hung about amid the laughter of adults: it was a period when bodies "made a display of themselves."

”The  impoverished  and  prostituted  women  must  have  been  the  victims of  extraordinary  chronic  violence  both  sexually  and  physically.  Their eventual  breakdowns  were  not  understood  as  normal  human  responses  to persecution  and  trauma.  In  fact,  many  of  the  hysterics  whom  Dr.  Breuer hypnotized were prostitutes who had led endangered lives. By  the  end  of  the  nineteenth  and  throughout  the  twentieth  centuries, the  portraits  of  madness  executed  by  both  psychiatrists  and  novelists  were primarily of women.Today,  more  women  are  seeking  psychiatric  help  that  at  any  other time  in  history.  We  must  not  forget:  (1)  that  more  men  are  too;  (2)  that both  the  number  of  clinicians  and  therapeutic  promises  have  also increased.”

“Existing theory and research suggest that people’s negative attitudes toward disadvantaged or stigmatized groups—including men’s greater likelihood of blaming women for being sexually harassed—can be explained by their lack of empathy for the victim or the victim group due to a failure to consider their perspective (for a review, see Batson & Ahmad, 2009). Empathy is defined in different ways (Batson & Ahmad, 2009), but here we follow Batson, Early, and Salvarani (1997) to define empathy as an other-oriented emotion that relates to the welfare of a person or group in need, including feelings such as sympathy, compassion, and concern. This form of empathy, also referred to as empathic concern, is an emotional response that can be distinguished from perspective-taking. Perspective-taking involves considering a situation from another’s perspective, which can promote feelings of empathy toward that person but does not always do so (Batson, Eklund, Chermok, Hoyt, & Ortiz, 2007; also see Tarrant, Calitri, & Weston, 2012).

Here is perhaps a recognizable confrontation between a formative paradigm and the one in which I exist now.  As a child I saw Linda as sexually deviant. Because I observed her in that way and was complicit both with fear and desire, I understood myself to be deviant also. I was then responsible for sexual acts and curiosities, and especially insults and aggressions, somehow because of the way that I dressed and acted and complied. Today, I understand that the information I received manipulated and convinced me of my onus. You, the reader, are responsible for your feelings and the way you imagine these stories to be read. I am aware of this challenging provocation.

I’m just not sure for whom. I’d seen a private performance like this several years earlier. And remember maybe that she had a complete set of nails at the time.

Sometimes a few would make it to the next time she added them on, and those next-times coincided mostly when she acquired them from garage sale pick-ups, but they would never be filled-in, just super-glued on, so you questioned what she thought was so beautiful about them in the first place. 

Or then again, maybe she did know. Maybe she considered the individual nail, and not it’s relational gestalt, as beautiful. Each nail its own quotation of beauty; It’s own microsystem of power relations.

She wore them for Kirk and sometimes when she had an audition in the city. He’d offer to get her nails done every once in a while. I think she questioned his motives, but occasionally would accept.

Linda told me that Kirk lived by the 3 C’s in life “Cows, Cunts, and Cars”. I’d overhear her say it on the phone to other people. 

Linda, my sister and I were represented by “Terry Terry Talent Management” in the late 80’s and early 90’s. So we would get faxed scripts to read and rehearse before we drove into the city. Linda, didn’t get as many scripts as my sister and I, she did mostly community theater. But on one occasion she received a script to read for a part in a movie. It was called Mafia Kingpin: the true story of Sonny Gibson. Sonny was going to make a movie out of the book he wrote while he was in prison. He told her he was going to play himself and be the Executive Director.

Examining the peculiarity and validity of this memory, I found the following article on Sonny Gibson in the LA Times from 1987. I would be age 9 at that time.

“The book supposedly was the true story of Gibson’s egregious life as a Mafia killer-dope dealer--prior to finding Jesus during his prison sentence. At the time, Gibson was hitting the talk-show circuit and giving impassioned speeches to Christian youth groups, citing his experience as an example that, with the Lord’s help, “anyone can change.” Problem was, law enforcement officials branded Gibson’s book a phony--and claimed he never was a member of the Mafia, much less a kingpin. Nor, they said, was he a killer or a dope dealer--just a small-time hood, con artist and liar.”

Linda was asked to read a part for one of the abused girlfriends of Sonny. Sonny had received her headshot from the casting director and wanted to do some of the readings over the phone. He told her it was between her and another woman and she practically had the part. Except he needed to establish a rapport with her before an in-person “audition” in Los Angeles.  They ended up reading over the sex scenes many times. And over the course of several months ended up having a lot of actual phone sex. It would be in the middle of the day or in the evening. My sister and I would walk in while she was doing these “scenes” with him at her desk, and carry on like we weren’t there; eventually, after she started finger-fucking herself IRL, it moved to behind semi-closed doors when kirk was out, but the wailing and moaning and the odd hours were obvious, we knew when Sonny wanted to “go over the script”. Eventually he flew her down to LA and they fucked for a couple days. She didn’t get the part and he never made the movie. But she let us know that he had a 22 inch penis, as girthy as a coke can, AND a 7 inch penis right next to it,  and extra testicles. It was an excruciating experience. She never got paid. She gave us all the details about where and how they did it. Like she was reading from the screenplay.

“What is a screenplay? Is the screenplay art—more specifically, literature? What kind of a thing is a screenplay? Nannicelli argues that the screenplay is a kind of artefact; as such, its boundaries are determined collectively by screenwriters, and its ontological nature is determined collectively by both writers and readers of screenplays. Any plausible philosophical account of the screenplay must be strictly constrained by our collective creative and appreciative practices, and must recognize that those practices indicate that at least some screenplays are artworks.”

I think it was part performative, keying up the emotional drama just for us, but she would say it to me after a yelling match as a final point- not to him, but to me.  She spent a lot of time trying to convince us that Kirk was not a father and so the three C’s were meant to remind us always what his priorities were. That we could only trust her. Kirk had many affairs over the 25 years that they were together, that’s true. Some of them were ongoing. But so did she.

I’ve grown to interpret this phrase in this way;  “Cunt” meant Kirk needed the solace of a woman without “mental illness”. To be touched with “clean” hands. And she knew this. She knew he wanted to be seen as sane in the rural social milieu. Male sexual conquest outside of relationships has always been an oblique indicator of normalcy in Western Culture. So, of course he was always looking elsewhere;  In some ways it would be “crazy” not to.

He didn’t like to see all the chainsaw grease and cuts from the blackberry bushes, and the dried blood and scars and scabs. She never washed her hands, after the bathroom or before eating, or after work, or before some sex acts. I think he was sad that she worked so hard. It reminded him that he wasn’t able to take care of her, to heal her maladies, or have power over her femininity.  I know for me it was hard to be touched by those hands. I knew how dirty they were too, when she would come and scratch my back in the morning,

 I loved

stroke my ass,

  I hated. 

run them through my hair,

I loved.

Slap my face,

I hated.

Sew the holes up in my clothes

I loved

Insert metallic dildos into her vagina,

I hated

Or offer me torn-apart pastries from her palm.

Mixed feelings

Research on psychological functioning has found that men who self-define as sexually abused generally have poorer adult adjustment than individuals who do not perceive the experience as abusive (Fondacaro et al., 1999; Stanley, Bartholomew, & Oram, 2004; Steever, Follette, & Naugle, 2001). The few studies that have investigated the association between childhood sexual abuse perceptions and adult sexual risk behavior reported mixed findings

“Findings, in sewing, are all components besides the actual fashion fabric, trims, labels, threads, elastics, underlying fabrics, zippers, buttons, closures; these can also be referred to as notions”

With her iron hands she’d bring in soggy boxes or black garbage bags from outside or from a mildewed travel trailer or wherever they had weathered. She’d bleach clothes in buckets and that, and the oils, greases, and gasses would dry out her hands and make fissures along the knuckles. 

“Any fissure within Devotion is a fault: that is the rule of Cortezia.  This fault occurs whenever I make any gesture of independence with regard to the loved object; each time I attempt, in order to break my servitude, to “think for myself” (the world’s unanimous advice), I feel guilty.  What am I guilty of, then, is paradoxically lightening the burden, reducing the exorbitant load of my devotion—in short, “managing” (according to the world); in fact, it is being strong which frightens me, it is control (or its gesticulation) which makes me guilty”.

And then she’d dye clothes, usually black, without gloves, so all the fissures and cracks, and every beautiful microscopic triangle of skin, would be visible for weeks. I don’t need to say this, but she had strong hands. They were the same hands my grandmother had and they are the shape of my hands now. Like the tongue, they communicate love and deceit, intimacy and violence,  They construct and deconstruct simultaneously. 

What I am endeavoring to do here is contrast a portrait of Linda, based upon my inchoate understanding of power structures within society as a traumatized child, with the portrait that has evolved as I have reevaluated the effects of those power structures on the formation of my adult identity. To reiterate Ben-Moshe “Mental illness or madness is not a trait of the mind but a relation to others and a result of relations of power”. Sex and sexuality are exmples of relational power and conflated in this story through desire-desires that are based on narcisism, misogyny, objectification, incest and transgenerational trauma. 

“To write the history of madness will therefore mean making a structural study of the historical ensemble-notions, institutions, judicial and police measures, scientific concepts-which hold captive a madness whose wild state can never be reconstituted, but in the absence of that inaccessible primitive purity, the structural study must go back to that decision that both bound and separated reason and madness”

As an adult I do not want to criticize or condemn the prostitute as an important cultural labor in contemporary society. Nor do I want to echo the deleterious adage that “she was asking for it” that somehow her appearances made people attack her mental stability. 

It is important to note that sexual freedom is not afforded to both sexes and that hypersexualization and  prostitution for women is a form of feminine oppresion and is foundational to the pathologization of mental health conditions in women.  I offer the complication of sexualized aesthetics and provide a link between and through the Victorian eras lasting effects of depression and the sexual oppression of the female body. Current discourse affirms that the aesthetics of “prostitution” are defined, and the resulting violences imposed upon, by white male patriarchy. Accountability and  self-awareness become essential in recognizing familial and societal impositions.

In the following story I am building an understanding of self-worth, value, loss of value in relationship to others, and cloying feelings of disposability. This may be a meta-narrative about my incarceration within the home and about the carceral system in general. As these individual findings and notions forefront the same intersections of labor,  marginalized populations and capitalism in the fabric of society. 

Kirk and Linda had left the house together for the weekend. It was rare that they left together. Kirk had a solo 1 race at the Portland International Speedway. Linda painted her nails, put on something with sequins, and brought alongs some sewing work.

It was sometime after Silas Brainard had died in the house (that’s who we inherited the farm from), and Grandpa Rolf who died of brain cancer and before Kirk died and his brother Max died and his parents Nick and Kay died and before Grandma Jeroma got Dementia. Nick died first. Kirk’s brother Max and father both had Parkinsons. The house had called to each of them. They seemed to return to the earth on command. All of their minds scattered across the landscape.

“Many neurological disorders involve cell death. During development of the nervous system, cell death is a normal feature. ... Such cell death, occurring by “programmed” pathways, is termed apoptosis….Chronic disorders, with relatively slow central nervous system degeneration, may occur over years or decades, but may involve cell losses. Such disorders include ...cerebral dementing disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia, and a variety of degenerative movement disorders including Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, and the inherited ataxias. There is evidence that the mechanism of neuronal cell death in these disorders may involve apoptosis.”

“Apophis (also known as Apep) is the Great Serpent, enemy of the sun god Ra, in ancient Egyptian religion. The sun was Ra's great Barque which sailed through the sky from dawn to dusk and then descended into the underworld. As it navigated through the darkness of night, it was attacked by Apophis who sought to kill Ra and prevent sunrise.Apophis, then, represented everything the Egyptians feared: darkness, oblivion, and the loss of one's identity. Set (Seth, Setekh, Sut, Sutekh, Suty) was one of ancient Egypt's earliest gods, a god of chaos, confusion, storms, wind, the desert and foreign lands. It was he who defended the Solar Barque each night as it traveled through the underworld, the only Egyptian deity who could kill the serpent Apep - Ra's most dangerous enemy - each night as it threatened to swallow the Barque.

“In this context, mention should be made of the studies that tend to characterize mood disorders as neurodegenerative diseases underlain to a significant extent by glial cell destruction. The studies that describe apoptotic destruction of glial cells and other CNS cells have provided strong evidence for the mechanism of apoptosis to be crucial in the etiology of mood disorder at the molecular level.”

”Certain impairments also have different interpersonal consequences...To put this more bluntly, the struggles of a distressed individual who can nevertheless communicate with others, can and must be distinguished from an individual with thought disorder so severe that he or she can no longer be understood, even in the most basic of ways. Similarly for some individuals, madness engenders changes in personality and belief capable of driving even the most pacifistic person to acts of symbolic, interpersonal or physical violence (Jones and Shattell, 2014). For others, insight into the consequences of their actions never appears to be compromised.”

Nick was a child in a haunted house. He ground his ivory teeth to nubs all day long. He made the sounds of chalk boards and creaking doors. He would wander off on some cursive trail, and the police would bring him back. It happened a handful of times in the late fall. The last time he wandered off down Center Rd., he got sick with pneumonia. Soon after he died in the hospital.  Kirk couldn’t run the farm and watch his dad all the time.

Linda, spent most of her days hauling, sorting and sifting waste. She had a short quip (under 25 words) in the classifieds in the back of the local newspaper, the Port Townsend Leader. It ran for over a decade. It proclaimed “Free Haul away, will pick-up yard waste, garage sales, moving, leftovers, 24/.7” 

This makes me think about my sexual proclivities; and the ways in which I gather sexual experiences, insert myself into a sexual community, and disclose identity. The following is my Grindr profile ”I prefer chats and dates. Love to host. Vaccinated. 42,  5’10”, 175, Toned, Vers Top, 6” Uncut, Neg. on Prep”

“Often, oversharing is an unconscious act — "many times," says Cole, people "don’t realize it until after the fact” that they've just spilled major details about their personal lives. Yet sometimes, oversharers become aware of their behavior midway through the conversation, and suddenly find themselves feeling vulnerable for revealing too much info — or, in some cases, they are aware the entire time that they're oversharing, but don’t see it as problematic. If someone comes from a family of “talkers” where oversharing is the norm, they may echo this behavior in their day-to-day life, Dr. Brown adds. “Or," he continues, "a person may do it out of feeling generally inadequate or if they’re a narcissist — they need to share everything that comes to mind to make sure they’re heard.”

Between that, and chopping firewood with a few hired farm hands, those fervent yet unruly helpers, the slummed out trailers and houses she rented, and all the seamstress work, she made a living. 

The farm hands, Linda's friends that she loved and  made-love to, that she let live in the “livable trailers”, came to work for her from all walks. They would work-trade mostly. Meaning they would sort through waste, haul firewood, or try and fix broken things in exchange for rent.  They need only keep track of their hours. The most memorable of the dozen ( each came and went over the twenty plus years) that I can remember: Richard, from the Western State Mental hospital who committed suicide. Jack came to the farm from the Washington State Corrections center in Shelton. Linda picked him up hitchhiking. He was on antipsychotics, He lifted weights and I think he had been incarcerated for beating up a guy, but he was “mentally unfit” so he didn’t do all his time there. He kept a stone under his tongue to remind himself to be careful about what he said. He said a wise Native American man had told him to do that. 

Jack would show me how strong he was, flex his muscles and do push-ups and sit-ups for me, always have his shirt off, and smile with a lazy eye. He also said that “Native Americans used every part of the buffalo, they didn’t waste a thing”. I was afraid of him physically but I also wanted him to molest me. I tried putting a pebble under my tongue all day and failed.

Fox, a middle aged man,  was an illegal immigrant from Zacatecas. He’s the one that professed his love for my middle sister, 15 at the time, and tried to break down the door of the guest house where she was living to get to her. Sean stayed for a decade, after Kirk died. Their bond got stronger I think until he died of cancer too. He had been homeless and incarcerated for meth and drug use. Sometimes he’d relapse and she’d have to pick him up from jail. She’d say to him “Not every teat would give milk, Sean”. 

She didn’t pay attention to Kirk’s relatives, or much of anyone else.

She didn’t have time to watch all of the people dying from the inside out. 

I tried to help Kirk with his parents. Making food for them when I could, Watching T.V. with Nick or changing the dressing on Kay’s rotting leg. 

I think that took a level of care that her resiliency wouldn’t have been able to negotiate. And besides, Kirk didn’t fully trust her definition of care. So, He didn’t get much help.

Kay died 8 months later in the bedroom from the cancer eating away at the flesh of her leg

On one of her visits the home nurse had found maggots in the wound. Linda wasn’t embarrassed but I was. She had said, people used to use maggots and leeches for sanitizing  wounds, it was only in the last century that they stopped doing it mainstream. 

“Maggot debridement therapy is the intentional application of live, “medical-grade” fly larvae to wounds in order to effect debridement, disinfection, and ultimately wound healing. Controlled studies demonstrate the efficacy and safety of maggot therapy. Advances in medicine, materials manufacturing, and transportation now make maggot therapy readily available and relatively simple to use. As a consequence, many therapists now consider MDT as a practical solution for many non healing wounds..”

but she had dementia so she would forget she was dying.  Max wandered off into the high desert just like his old man used to do, they found his body a week after he was reported missing. Of course we were all really upset about him going back to Arizona after the tragedy of him coming to live with us in the first place. Max, was a mean whyte man, who had raced Indy cars and made Native American tomahawks on ZUNI land as a hobby. 

“Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else's culture without permission. This can include unauthorized use of another culture's dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc. It's most likely to be harmful when the source community is a ​minority group that has been oppressed or exploited in other ways or when the object of appropriation is particularly sensitive, e.g. sacred objects."

“Being assimilated into white culture, being part indigenous, being artists yet having to survive in the “real” world puts us in a precarious position, with our feet in different worlds. Though Chicanas are aware that we aren’t “Indian” and don’t live in a Native American culture, and though our roots are indigenous, we often do misappropriate and collude with the Anglos’ forms of misappropriation”

“The European materialist tradition of de-spiritualizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person. And who seems most expert at de-humanizing other people? And why? Soldiers who have seen a lot of combat learn to do this to the enemy before going back into combat. Murderers do it before going out to commit murder. Nazi SS guards did it to concentration camp inmates. Cops do it. Corporation leaders do it to the workers they send into uranium mines and steel mills. Politicians do it to everyone in sight. And what the process has in common for each group doing the dehumanizing is that it makes it all right to kill and otherwise destroy other people. One of the Christian commandments says, “Thou shalt not kill,” at least not humans, so the trick is to mentally convert the victims into nonhumans. Then you can proclaim violation of your own commandment as a virtue.”

He rented a small mobile home outside of Flagstaff and the landlord had called one night to say Max was “going downhill fast”.  His daughter was in a congregate care facility and heavily medicated for depression and schizophrenia, and Bobby, his son, had been estranged since Bobby was a teenager. Kirk didn’t have a choice, really. On his way up from Arizona, the nurse responsible for driving him to the house fell asleep at the wheel and she died in the crash. Max had some minor contusions, but he couldn’t remember the drive up-or anything else in the last two years we found out. 

In the house all the rooms looked the same, it was a sea filled with boxes, and clothes, and forgetting. Kitchen things tended to be in the kitchen, but you could find silverware, dishes, baskets, or whatever, in the bathroom or a closet. And the same was true for a bedroom or what would become Kay’s bedroom, or Max’s bedroom after she died.  There were just as many blankets, and lamps, and books in there as there were in the living room or the mud room. 

I would lose focus on details, my keys, a cup, or a picture, or where my shoes were, and not find it again for days. things would drift ashore out of the chaotic waves of nothingness. There was no proper place. My sisters said I had a terrible memory, because I would always leave stuff in places and not remember where I put it. My memories began before I could talk and walk. I think I was beginning to hone active erasure. I’d leave stuff at peoples houses. Somebody told me once that if you leave something somewhere, like at a friends house, it meant you secretly wanted to go back there.

Winograd and Soloway found that people put things in unusual places thinking the places will be memorable. Unfortunately, while the places may be memorable, those spots do not become memorable locations. Instead, it is easier to remember where things are when they are in obvious rather than unusual locations. When we put things in special places, we actually hide those things from our future selves.

I loved being away from Lindas’s house, to see how other people lived in theirs. I also used to read a lot. My siblings and I avoided having anyone over for fear of the same. I’m afraid of writing.

It was all connected by a pathway, the central trunk of a tree, or a great meandering bramble. I mention this because Max would wander into my bedroom sometimes, and I felt sorry for him. The dementia was already disorienting. I imagine being with us just hastened his demise because there was no knowing place to anchor memories. 

Kirk died from mad cow disease. 

“It is important to clarify the differences between variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of mad cow disease, and another form of the disease, referred to as classic or sporadic CJD. Classic CJD has no known cause and occurs each year at a rate of one to two cases per 1 million people throughout the world, including in the U.S. and countries where mad cow disease has never occurred. It is not linked to eating nerve tissue from mad cow disease-affected cattle -- both vegetarians and meat eaters have died from classic CJD.”

The first month he knew he was dying and then, after that, he could neither forget nor remember. The last month we just cleaned up the shit and piss and rolled the body from side to side. A body scattered across the landscape. Those were all certain kinds of smells and images I couldn’t forget. I could smell Katy, Max, Silas, and Kirk everywhere in the house, long after they were gone. People say that the memory of smell is attached to taste, to the tongue and the mouth. I think it’s profoundly deeper in the body. More heavy than that. Just beyond the gut, beneath the bones, where joy and sorrow collide, is the smell of Ghosts.

One of our neighbors, Denver, had borrowed the tractor because it had a two-prong forklift attachment and a large front loading bucket usually meant for spearing round bales and moving dirt around. He needed it to lift a one tonne buffalo that had gotten sick,  died a few days before a couple miles away, and bring it over on the highway to our place so he could cut off its head. Because those were worth a lot of money on the internet (none of us knew much about the internet) He was intending to bury it up near the gravel pit on the hill, off Center Rd. But for some reason, after he cut off the head, the body bloated, unburied and writhing with maggots, it stayed in the alfalfa and sweet clover field on the front 40 acres. I’d keel over dry heaving if I got within 20 yards of the thing that was left. I vomited one time from the sight and not the smell of a dead thing.

I also remember the smell of certain pets, of their hides, of horses, and cows, and birds. I remember the ones I loved the most, dying. I’ve seen slaughter, smelled the difference between offal and fresh fat, and the skin, and the flesh. I’ve dared my sister to poke the stomach, and laugh at the shit on my hands, or feigned my own wound with their blood. As an adult I would never mock the sacrifice. There are many different deaths and I got used to all of them. Except the following

A cow had gotten “Hip-lock”, meaning when it was trying to give birth, the calf was too big and couldn’t pass by the hips. Often the calf would die in the canal. If you didn’t see the cow go into birth and the calf died, the strain could kill the mother, or she could be predated by coyotes. The mother is worth more than the calf so you do anything you can to save her. In this instance the calf died. It was winter and the mother was in the mud near a water culvert, exhausted and lying down with the calf’s snout protruding. We had to tie a chain around its head from within the cervix and attach the other end to the hitch on the truck. The calf wouldn’t come and the mother was too exhausted to stand. After an hour, we called the vet to come out and we had to cut and quarter the calf from the inside, through the birth canal,  with a cutter that looked like a long serrated cheese wire. 

In the Interrogatoire de Serge Lutens dans le Noir, the great perfume maker says “I do not believe in victims, I only believe in things happening and how we deal with the things that happen to us. Victims do exist, of course, I’m not denying they do, but it shouldn’t be through self-indulgence.”

“Caesura; In modern prosody: usually a rhetorical break in the flow of sound in the middle of a line of verse, any interruption or break.”

So it was just Soma and I. 

“Soma (anatomy) The whole axial portion of an animal, including the head, neck, trunk, and tail.

The corporeal body, as distinguished from the psyche or soul and the pneuma or spirit.

(hinduism) A ritual drink in ancient Vedic and continuing Hindu culture, obtained by pressing the Soma plant. (by extension) Any kind of intoxicating drug.

(cytology) The bulbous part of a neuron, containing the cell nucleus”.

“Seth is a boy's name of Hebrew origin meaning "appointed, placed".

Adam and Eve's third son after Cain and Abel,”

She was 16 and I was 10. She didn’t usually pay much attention to me, so I was happy to be used by her. Our parents separated when we were young and we oftentimes didn’t have custody in the same location at the same time. She was kind, if not intentionally oblivious. Her and my middle sister Jeroma, argued violently.  Linda didn’t like us to clean the kitchen because she believed mold was an antibiotic so everything was potentially a medicine; But also because sometimes we used it as an act of rebellion; this was one of those times. Linda needed to prove that everything had a purpose.

“Many ancient cultures, including those in Egypt, Greece and India, independently discovered the useful properties of fungi and plants in treating infection.[9] These treatments often worked because many organisms, including many species of mould, naturally produce antibiotic substances. However, ancient practitioners could not precisely identify or isolate the active components in these organisms. In 17th-century Poland, wet bread was mixed with spider webs (which often contained fungal spores) to treat wounds.”

Spiderwebs as a cure

Spiderwebs as a curse, as confusion, as derangement, as lies.

The children, those little flies, had yeast infections, warts, and fungus.

I had a mole on my nose, I thought I was becoming a witch.

“The technique was mentioned by Henryk Sienkiewicz in his 1884 book'' With Fire and Sword”. In England in 1640, the idea of using mould as a form of medical treatment was recorded by apothecaries such as John Parkinson, King's Herbarian, who advocated the use of mould in his book on pharmacology.”

That it was good for us. The use of objects whether food or  other broken things was ambiguous-counter-intuitive. So things were left on counters and in the refrigerators to ferment and mould. She would go to the food bank every other week or so, and instead of pulling from the already aging produce, she would ask to take their refuse box. She would ask for the food that the food bank wouldn’t give as a didactic lesson on the piety of waste. This is what would be on the counter or stay in the box on the floor; her religious residue. Walking into the kitchen was hard. It reminded me of those dead animals. By the end of a week in the summer it would writhe like a carcass and waft through the house

The vicissitude. The black spit of flies. The Child. The maggot. The ebbing murky water below. The waft. The winged messenger. The viscid. The empty womb.The visceral

She had said that if you couldn’t find a use for it, it was because you lacked creativity. 

That’s probably why I’m saving some of these sentences now. 

“For decades, scientists were puzzled by this phenomenon. With no obvious function, the noncoding portion of a genome was declared useless or sometimes called "selfish DNA," existing only for itself without contributing to an organism's fitness. In 1972 the late geneticist Susumu Ohno coined the term "junk DNA" to describe all noncoding sections of a genome, most of which consist of repeated segments scattered randomly throughout the genome. Typically these sections of junk DNA come about through transposition, or movement of sections of DNA to different positions in the genome. As a result, most of these regions contain multiple copies of transposons, which are sequences that literally copy or cut themselves out of one part of the genome and reinsert themselves somewhere else.”

We had an endless burnpile, for brambles, and an old cement slop trough we’d fill and douse with diesel on occasion.

On nights we had bonfires the smoke would give me reason to cry. 

I want to be cremated. I want an irrefutable end. But wait! put my ashes in the green garden. The beginning of my next life will be very mysterious.

I continue to bury parts of me in a ceremonial way. They return unexpectedly.

Sometimes I’m afraid to throw things out. And this is one of the reasons: Soma commanded me to help her clean the kitchen. I wanted to, but I knew the consequence would be dire. We were going to remove everything off the counters and in the refrigerator, except what Soma thought we could use. I reached in with my wiry arms to remove the dead. Everything was dumped into two 5-gallon buckets. Soma would clean and sanitize the interior of the casket, and I would carry the buckets far into the field, dig a hole on dry land, and inter the contents.  I want to tell you about the inside of the refrigerator. I want to describe it with the clarity of a landscape. I want to give you the ombra, the sweep, the texture, the smell. All I can say now is the contents were heavy. 

These are synonyms of heavy; Fleshy, overweight, clayey, cloggy, lowering, sullen, threatening, dense, impenetrable, big, sonorous, hard, intemperate, grave, grievous, copious, colossal, concentrated, profuse,whopping, whacking, covered, filled, groaning, bursting, teeming, dense, thick, opaque, soupy, murky, coarse, rough, rough-hewn, ungraceful, unrefined, inelegant, rugged, craggy, substantial, filing, hearty, large, ample, sizeable, muddy, sticky, gluey, viscous, wet, forceful, powerful, vigorous, mighty, hefty, relentless, torrential, severe, arduous, murderous, grueling, hellish, difficult, exigent, exhausting, toilsome

They were more than heavy. I dug a whole and buried them there. I carried one at a time with all of their contents 500 yards from the house. I came back to help make room on the counters and vacuum all the rugs in the kitchen. I cleared off the old chrome and laminate breakfast table for the last time; the table that Silas Brainard sat at every single day with his same routine when he was alive. 

Kirk would prepare and serve him his soft boiled egg in an egg cup and a half-grapefruit with a silver serrated grapefruit spoon, a fresh glass of milk pulled from a clean fridge, and he’d read the paper version of Wall Street Journal and get his finger pricked to check his insulin levels. Every finger had a bandaid, because not every finger gave blood.

Kirk and Linda returned the next day. I cried most of the night; after she took me out by the nape of my neck and hair, kicking me when I had fallen and picking me up by my throat to rise again, to the place I buried the heavy. With a shovel and bare hands I had to dig it up and put it back in the bucket and return it all to the kitchen. She kicked Soma out of the house and spent the next several days putting the heavy back into the fridge, giving some to the dogs and cats, and offering it to me to eat continuously- out of what I felt was spite.

“We are living in strange times, with much of the world under quarantine for the novel coronavirus—and that’s precisely the kind of stress that may impact future offspring according to some scientists. A growing body of research suggests that trauma (like from extreme stress or starvation among many other things) can be passed from one generation to the next. Here’s how: Trauma can leave a chemical mark on a person’s genes, which can then be passed down to future generations. This mark doesn’t cause a genetic mutation, but it does alter the mechanism by which the gene is expressed. This alteration is not genetic, but epigenetic.”

“There is mounting evidence that OCD is a heritable disorder since an individual is twice as likely to develop OCD if he/she has a first-degree relative who has it. This heritability is increased ten-fold if an individual has a first-degree relative who developed the dis-order in adolescence or childhood. Gene research suggests that a region on chromosome fourteen may be linked with compulsive hoarding in families with OCD..” 

“A study of adolescents’ personality and intentional happiness-increasing strategies as a function of temperament and character, as phenotypes [12], showed that the harm-avoidance and self-directedness dimensions predicted subjective well-being. A mediating factor was a strategy endorsing ambivalent effort to both avoidance and mobilization of negative thoughts and feelings. The dynamic nature of epigenetic mechanisms holds implications not only for psychological health and well-being but also eventual therapeutic interventions focused upon mood disorders [13,14].”

”..More and more biologists now regard repetitive elements as genomic treasures. It appears that these transposable elements are not useless DNA. Instead, they interact with the surrounding genomic environment and increase the ability of the organism to evolve by serving as hot spots for genetic recombination and by providing new and important signals for regulating gene expression”

“At both Ox-Bow and in conversations this semester, I have come to associate a large part of your research with what I might refer to as ‘clutter’—hoarding, refuse, amassed material in various stages of being processed. These variations of this Lamentations work presents another axis along which I see you exploring: filth. Together clutter and filth could be descriptive of conditions around wellness or lack thereof. I also think about the burgeoning use of filth as terminology in some areas of drag and cabaret performance, where qualities of attraction/repulsion are heightened.” 

“Artists like Zhang Huan (in his piece Family Tree), and Glenn Ligon have been invested in the cultural and psychological implications of darkening, staining, and gradually rendering illegible a kind of language related to embodiment. There is a way that your use of drawing materials could be read as a more structural rather than psychological exercise, but in the spirit of risking making claims in critique, I want to see where invoking filth as a dimension of the dirtying, making, layering that happens between your body, space, and drawings takes us.”

I made a poem about it a couple years ago after Soma and I shared this memory of cleaning the fridge. 

“So Sad Things Die”

I was suckling on your teat

Well after I knew it wasn’t needed

Winter kissed me deeply and my lips parted

My mothers Prithu, Io, Hessat,

Rows of Narcissus, peat bogs, and charcoal.

Shifted onto the hip of seasons

The world stood contra-post over the Valley.

A vanitas hung on the mantle.

Fecund, naked on the farm,

Sexed like a chick in the hutch

You laughed wandering off into the woods

…….. so sad things die

Your hippy mind is hard to follow

Sent to the fen with a bucket and a shovel

A soft sickled harvest to bury

Devour dirt, fill up the refrigerator!

Sweet sweetbreads and delicate livers,

Tender eviscerated bodies

Interred by the malady of mothers milk

Into graves unmarked by stones and bouquets

Its cold, pull back the covers.

you are my son, come rest on my skin

Ixchel I shed tears

howling under your moon

Bellicose autumn crocus emerge

with violet rage

Against the lacy sheets of snow

Child in a quagmire

Back-to-the-land in Chimacum

Thick coat coyote out near the culvert

Kirk!, grab your gun in case we need to shoot her

Placenta on the ground, in the sky a vulture.

The ditch was brown and hard to swallow.

The hairs stood up, my skin would prickle

A sick spirit lingered over the 

still-born calf, cut and quartered

The Mother lowing in the barn in the end.

I point out that Linda helped individuals that were often at the intersection of criminal and racial pathologization. Even though it created an environment of constant psychological anxiety, I recognize that Linda’s vision for a community of misfits may fall under the umbrella of Mad activism and potentially position itself tangentially to an international  antipsychiatry movement. Had children not been involved, this unique vision of commune centered around labor and “recycling” may yet provide an interesting counterpoint for institutionalization.  Liat Ben-Moshe discusses this complex issue in the phenomenological study of congregate facilities in her book “Abolition in Deinstitutionalization: Normalization and the Myth of Mental Illness.”Decarcerating Disability”. I use a passage from this specific essay to stress that behavioral patterns are constructed within an insular environment, the family structure, and become counter orders when evaluated by contrast to the broader social construct. In a similar manner I use a multitude of passages from various authors eclectically, this elicits the same obsessive collective behaviors demonstrated by Linda, but contrasts a traditional logic of accumulation in writing structures. One in which the repurposing of data and content become self-evident.

This story in black is about the irony of food insecurity on a farm. It’s also about death, animalistic vitality, and primal endurance. It provides a  connection to the inner workings of the farm; Linda's hegemonic order of  “rot-as-medicine” is rebelled against by her children. It’s also about how the death drive begins to develop as a sublimation of sacrifice.  As we continue, I theorize that the statements from my opening letter to Linda are really indicative of the notions of  “natural selection”. This became a deeply rooted philosophy for Linda. I think,  because of early interactions with agrarian cultures outside of the United States, and then its re-emergence as a counter against Western Hegemony. More personally, I think she utilized this way of thinking as a means of desensitization and a tool for emotional distance once she established herself with Kirk. I use Lamentations and these writings in the opposite way; I want to create emotional closeness and sensitization of and with the psychic self.  I want to change my energetic pathways at the very root of me, I want to affect the organization beneath the flesh and bone to the level of DNA. “Programmed cell death”is not fully understood but there are curious pathways between trauma, memory aversion, mood disorders, psychological pathologies, and physiological responses at the cellular and proto cellular level. I have, over the course of my reclamation,  been offered the advice to let go of my trauma, to focus on the accumulation of joy, and to stay intently focused on the present self. But I have come to believe that remembering trauma, harnessing its power, has changed me for the better, potentially at the level of DNA on the level of spirit and “ghost”

 In the above passage, each indentation shifts more closely to monologue towards the present self, it expresses different psychological associations and makes time and space both spectral and queer. The caesura emphasizes both associative and dissociative punctum. It gives a sense of the formative physical and cognitive environment that Linda created for me as a child. Things appear to build in significance, but doubt and consternation of meaning are emphasized in the immediate line of reading and the insertion of  literary objects. The reader clamors for categorization, a means for measure. Does the shift from personal to pedagogical diminish rather than amplify the value of both.

I was confused about my value as an “object” of  Linda’s desire. 

How did I figure into her larger narrative? Was I a validating fact? 

The story continues to unfold the complicated dialectic of equifinality. I present my trauma as evidence for psychiatric evaluations of “mental disorders'' and finally juxtapose that with deeply biological explanations to arrive closer to an understanding of the indomitable spirit. The compiling, the programming, and the transcripting author, through self-disclosure, highlights the inconsistencies in the overarching social architecture of both reason and madness in psychiatric and biological etiologies. 

I  surreptitiously address the act of appropriation and its function. What and who is giving value to my story? Shamanism and Western Noetic practices have efficacy and should be navigated with honor and respect. Museums, cultural institutions, and individuals alike, might evaluate the possessions of sacred objects in context to not only their culture but their intended use. Many sacred things are made to be “passed on” literally and figuratively. Where preservation of the “sacred” is a distinctly capitalist and Western concern. In literature the arbitration of appropriation  depends primarily on attribution and acknowledgment but is, nonetheless, disrupted by capitalism and distribution. I often think about how I may have inadvertently appropriated  “mental illness” constructs to distance myself from Linda, and have found now that those distancing tools no longer serve me. In a similar way I have noticed in the composition of internet references for this work, that many texts are like used car lots,  sentences are touched up here and there, but generally the same jalopy transports an idea from one platform to the next. I would like the reader to be extremely critical of my involvement in that market, and the allusion to hybridization.

Linda liked used cars and trucks and she had what I called an iron foot. She ran them junkers hard and didn’t do any upkeep. She would constantly yell at Kirk for not supporting her in the “only” way he could, by fixing them.

Kirk had a Mercedes repair shop in the back part of the red barn. He loved working on cars. On their edges, on the edge of love. Like a lot of men in middle America he fetishized the car; a mechanophile with his auto erotica.

“Mechanophilia has been used to describe important works of the early Modernists such as the 1922 FEKS 'Eccentric Manifesto' of Leonid Trauberg, Sergei Yutkevich, Grigori Kozintsev and others, a modernist avant garde movement that spanned Russian futurism and constructivism. The term has entered into the realms of science fiction and popular fiction. Scientifically, in Biophilia, The Human Bond with Other Species, Edward O. Wilson is quoted describing mechanophilia, the love of machines, as 'a special case of biophilia,' whereas psychologists such as Erich Fromm would see it as a form of necrophilia.”

“What is so deceptive about the state of mind of the members of a society is the “consensual validation” of their concepts. It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing is further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing whatsoever on reason or mental health… The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”

Designers such as Francis Picabia and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti have been said to have exploited the sexual attraction of automobiles.”,

All of Kirk's cars had female pronouns and the tractors had male pronouns.

Kirk taught me how to drive a stick on the green John Deere tractor, age 7, around the same time I could roll a cigarette or a joint. Around the same time I remembered what Linda had shown me, and I taught myself to masturbate.

In hiding

It was his escape. He did Solo I (autocross) racing through the SCCA at the Seattle International Raceways, and had a lead foot too. He got awards for it. He had miniature Hot Wheels versions of the Mercedes Benz’s he liked and built some model kits of them by hand. He kept them on his clothes dresser, a few on his secretary desk, and on the window sill near his waterbed. With the enthusiasm of a child he spent a decade rebuilding a 1963 SLC roadster, Cherry red, in his shop. And this was one of the small models he built and kept on his dresser.  He took her to shows and hung ribbons she had won on the wall. He also had a Gold fleck 1987 300 C, and a Jet black 500 AMG SEC same year, a 1987 Silver 190 E,  a Matte Black 1978 280D, and a row of nearly a dozen other Mercedes parts cars of various letters, numbers, and colors. All of which sat permanently in front of the alfalfa field where Denver had left the buffalo carcass. In the summer time we’d mow around the harem with a big burly tractor. 

I wonder about this phenomenon I see in rural america. People leaving their old tractors and farming equipment to rust in prominent places. Is this industrial nostalgia or patriarchal conquest? Or did people realize that there would be no way to remove them after they stopped working and so an aesthetic, centered around decay, was made possible because of the sovereignty of space,  lack of foresight and economic resources for recycling. We certainly don’t see them as Junk vehicles.

Junk vehicle definition from the Jefferson County Code Chapter 8.10 Solid Waste.

8.10.100 Definitions

Terms used in this regulation shall have the meanings provided in Washington Administrative Code (WAC) 173-350-100, 173-351-100 and 173-304-100, hereby adopted in their entirety by reference herein except as revised or altered by the definitions provided below.

Turquoise green junk car

One summer I came in the back seat

Amongst the shattered glass and mildew

And the morning dew on the dashboard

Glistened

backed into the brush and the hood covered with leaves

From the nearby poplar trees

It smelled sweetly of iron and silage

And crackly vinyl

And I,

Hidden

I felt so good I cried

Junk Vehicle: A junk vehicle includes campers, boats, boat trailers or any other type of vehicle used for human transportation which may exhibit any of the following:

Build-up of debris, moss or weeds on, in, under, or around the vehicle that obstructs use

Damage to the frame

More than 1 missing or shattered window or windshield

More than 1 inoperable or missing headlight or taillight

More than 1 flat tire

A missing or inoperable engine or transmission

A missing wheel, license plate, driver-side mirror, tire, body panel, door, hood or other obvious body part, not including a bumper

A license plate that has been invalid for more than 60 days

Evidence that the vehicle has not been moved in at least 60 days

State of Washington Laws

A vehicle certified under the Revised Code of Washington (RCW) 46.55.230 as meeting at least 3 of following requirements shall be considered a junk vehicle:

3 years old or older

Apparently inoperable

Extensively damaged, such damage including but not limited to the following: a broken window or windshield, or missing wheels, tires, motor, or transmission

Has approximate fair market value equal only to the approximate value of the scrap in it

For enforcement purposes, possessing 3 or more junk vehicles on a single property of any size is not allowed under this regulation.

In 2010 Linda had 15 junk cars, 92 trailers, mobile homes, and storage like Containers, 95 if you count the boats. I know, because I counted them for the producers of the Show Hoarders, who eventually came to make a show of her in Season 9 episode 4

Or sometimes he’d send me out to one, to find a part to use in a repair job. He’d show me the part and where to find it in the car and then I would have to figure out how to remove it. It wasn’t like trying to find something in the house. He loved it when I came to hand him tools, look for parts, and watch him. You see, this was Kirk’s collection. This was the collection that he felt justified in, that he deserved. Because he put up with so much else. This is how Linda deflected criticism and judgement from Kirk. His collection was just as illegal as hers. But this was also his escape from her; the fighting, the tantrums, and the noise.

So the brakes would scream and clutches would whine and throw fits and stall out everywhere. Inevitably gaskets would blow, oil spitting out, another impossible crack in the engine block, radiators in a hissy, batteries dead. Kirk couldn’t keep up with the problems so he gave up on them mostly. 

Maybe he thought, “what’s the point in taking care of something you love when you know somebody else won’t.” He said stuff like that on occasion but I can’t remember what exactly it was attached to. 

We spent so much time pushing stalled-out cars through intersections, and asking people for jumper cables and jumps and rides to the nearest gas station. 

For a period of time we were taking the bainbridge island ferry to downtown Seattle 3 or 4 times a week for classes and auditions. The cars were usually full of stuff because of constant pick-ups, and we didn't always have the time to unload it in the barn, or the warehouse or wherever it was going to end up. We’d have to hide ourselves in the trunk or under bags in the backseat to save money. If we were in the trunk we’d just stay in there for the hour long crossing, but if we were hidden in the backseat we’d jump out and make our way to the top deck to breath the fresh salty Puget Sound air. On one of many occasions, the battery died while we were on the ferry, and she didn’t know until it was time to offload, of course we were near the front and Linda had to let me out of the trunk in front of everyone so that I could help ask for jumper cables. Embarrassment was a part of my training. The Washington State Ferry started carrying a battery and jumper cables for moments like ours along with a miniature tow truck.

According to Harris-Hewther, anywhere from two to five cars a day are escorted against their will from the car deck on the Bainbridge and Bremerton runs. The vehicle that pushes dead cars off the deck is called a "bull."

She didn’t make time for repair or plan ahead. The gauges didn’t always work and it was cheaper to do the math on an odometer reading and a full tank of gas then to get the gauges fixed. Or maybe she didn’t like gauges or they were irrelevant to use or too expensive, I don't know.  She got a lot of speeding tickets because of those gauges and she was always late and in a hurry. Always racing around and never on time. She got one when we drove down to Los Angeles California in a brown Chevy Citation hatchback. It was in the middle of the night going 85 with a taillight out.  The citation had a tan interior and a broken glove box that was full and held together by a thick blue rubber band. I had to sort through it for registration and insurance while she came up with a “sob” story. I couldn’t find it fast enough and she smashed into me.

There was a  dent on the front left panel and the back right side door that kept it from being locked. I remember a  thin metal stripe that went down the flanks to the rear. It was rusted in parts and became cursive towards the dent, but flashy still, like the broken taillight with an exposed bulb. 

The interior smelled like Linda's body and her purse. Every Junker did.

Inside my mothers purse are papers, most of them not addressed to her. Some envelopes, usually business reply envelopes from businesses she never replied to. There’s a whole bakery of crumbs, maybe something wrapped in a napkin-just a bite and never more than 3, something from the food bank, or a brown apple . Anonymous Black mascara. Melted chapstick, waxy rouge lipstick that doubles as blush. Small bits of wire, dead batteries. A tool like wire strippers or a leatherman. Pens, mostly dry, or cracked in the tube, shiny blue spots in the throat of the bag, always open, pencils, a sharpie that doesn’t squeek, something to cross out addresses from mail that was sent to her. Stamps of all numen. Maybe some pennies, never quarters, she was always out of quarters. She believed in change for the parking meter, if there was no change, she’d park god-awful distances away. Paper clips, rubberbands, nails, tacks, staples, the last diamond hard drops of super glue- something to hold everything together. An empty change purse, a glasses purse, an empty silk purse with a double clasp, a checkbook with faded receipts and hand torn coupons, a small scribed address book, rolled wads of small bills, a drum tobacco pouch, with used cigarettes she’d unwrap and add to the pack, a small lighter, a large lighter in a silver case I think she got in arizona, old matchbooks. A collection of keys, some on key rings, some not, pins and sometimes patches, needles already threaded pierced the outside. If the shoulder strap was broken she’d tie it together or carry it under her armpit. It smelled fermented, smokey, and caustic. 

One week in the summer on the old farm, before Linda moved in with Kirk, my cousin Ebony came to visit. Ebony was the same age as my oldest sister Soma.  

We had gotten an upright pool from our grandparents large enough to need a step ladder to get into. At the beginning of the summer it was a light shade of blue and by the end it was dark green. We were heading to Gibbs Lake in the afternoon, that’s the lake our neighbor at the old farm would take us to. but we were too excited to keep ourselves from the water. Unattended, We had all raced naked into the pool that morning and somehow Ebony had gotten into a hot and swollen canister of chlorine tabs. She had swallowed some and inhaled a bunch. Linda did not consider this a medical emergency. We pumped up two black tires and piled four kids into a bright orange 1976 Volkswagon Scirroco, spray-painted black. Ebony moaned through the headaches, and the projectile vomit spewed over the plaid interior, melted like hot butter over those big black inflatable bagels. We stayed drenched in vomit until we got to the lake. Ebony rinsed off and slept on the shore. We ragged off the chunks, never used soap for the rest of it, and kept the two windows rolled down for the entire summer.

16 hours Straight away through the night. I had a bunch of dance clothes, some ballet slippers and jazz shoes, and a few pants, my school books. Not a lot. Linda packed a suitcase full of dry unsliced bread,  peanut butter, jars of jelly, leftovers from the fridge. This made an angry odor eventually,  because of the bellicose California sun. I had gotten a scholarship from the Tremaine Dance Center at a convention in Seattle. We were heading to North of North Hollywood for 6 weeks. While we were there we lived in the back of that car. The first few nights we slept in the parking lot. But the management asked us to find another site because It was touted as the “Dance Instruction to the Stars” and I don’t think it was good for their high-profile image. 

I took classes with a young actress, a shooting star, named Elizabeth Berkley, who at the time was about 5 or 6 years older and in a show I watched on occasion, and that many of my friends liked, called “Save By the Bell”. The following year she got cast as the lead in the movie Showgirls, which nobody liked. That is,  until the high camp flop turned into a cult classic. Elizabeth was nice enough but television seemed dangerous to me.

My sister Jeroma and I had auditioned for a show on Nickelodeon called Super Sloppy Double Dare just two years prior. We flew from the farm down to Florida for a week and spent a day shooting the episode at Universal Studios. The shift from the rural stage to the urban was interplanetary. 

“The contestants were chosen by a contestant coordinator — such a great name — who worked in Philadelphia. And the thing that made us distinctive, over anything that was on the Disney Channel, was we used real kids. We didn't have the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, a perfect child. Our kids had acne, and their hair was messed up. And I think the kids at home related more to the people that we had on our show than anything that was currently running on Disney at that time. "Answer that question or take the physical challenge."The big keyword was "physical challenge." You wanted to take a physical challenge, and the kids at home wanted you to take the physical challenge. And then after that, it was going to the obstacle course. You win 8 obstacles in 60 seconds or less, you go to Space Camp.”

“Marc Summers became a household name in the late ‘80s on Nickelodeon’s ooey, gooey game show for kids, Double Dare. But the charismatic host who beamed on camera as the network’s signature “slime” slid down his suit would rush to remove his clothes as soon as the broadcast ended. Summers, now 66, was suffering from crippling Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, a condition he hadn’t even heard of until he was diagnosed live on his own Lifetime talk show in 1995.”

I was acutely aware of the choreographed audience, the hour long breaks between takes, the constant jabbing of my sister’s elbow to keep me smiling, the costume changes, the make-up, Linda’s audacities in conversations, her heightened sense of possession around us. In short, the intersections of my performances. I began to think about the intersection of Linda’s performances as well. Her use of Madness as a political and artistic statement. Is it possible that I am mis-aligning myself with mental disorder, because society favors adversity and oddity in the artist; and that I imply that mental order and disorder are at the crux of my work because there may be more emotional interest in the work and hence economic advantage. Is this something I learned from Linda.

“…art evaluations are partly rooted in perceptions of artist’ eccentricity and evidence the perceived authenticity and skills for these attributions”

It was dizzying duplicity yet familiar.

“Recently, since the 1960’s at least, aesthetic performances have developed that cannot be located precisely as theater or dance or music or visual arts. Usually called either “performance art,” “mixed-media,” “Happenings,” or “intermedia”, these events blur or breach boundaries separating art from life and genres from each other. As performance art grew in range and popularity, theorists began to examine “performative behavior”-how people play gender, heightening their constructed identity, performing slightly or radically different selves in different situations. This is the performative Austin introduced and Butler and queer theorists discuss.”

“...Brecht, Yvonne Rainer, Beckett, Keith Hennessy all spring to mind for the ways that they’ve attempted to deconstruct the differences between theater and ‘real life,’ in ways that art folks like Ono, Kaprow, Gilbert and George, Fluxus, etc, were also devising tactics like the Happening to put pressure on the distinctions that have been made historically between performance and what gets treats [sic] as outside of performance. In your work, I see you drawing from the conventions and training of dance and staged dance performances on the one hand, and also from what I might provisionally dub ‘life practices’ that extend beyond those traditions into the expanded field of performance art.”

We would arrive at 8 am before the back of the car started to really cook and wait for them to open at 9. I would rinse off with a wet rag in the bathrooms, change and then dance until 6pm. I would rag off again right before we left. Sometimes we would go to public pools after and I could cool off. Linda would ask me to swim in my dance clothes, because she thought the chlorine would sanitize them. They would dry on top of the car and bake in the back. Eventually a thin waft of chlorine was sandwiched between the molding food and our yeasty bodies. It reminded me, vaguely, of my cousin Ebony. We parked on Burbank ave for a week near the I170 overpass, until the police woke us up one night and said we needed to find a “safer” spot. Eventually, We needed a jump for the car and, fortunately, we met a rusty colored mechanic who had a shop on Burbank Ave. He allowed us to park the car behind a fence on rollers, topped with barbed wire, and locked at night with two padlocks. He let her sleep with him in his bed in his camper while I was in the back of the unlockable citation. They slept together for less than a week, but he fixed the tailight. This meant the car wasn’t a junker anymore. Four weeks into the scholarship my knees started hurting really bad. I was in so much pain I started sitting things out, limping around and trying not to complain to the teachers-which I was scared to do. They convinced Linda to take me to a doctor and get it checked out- they would pay for it. I was diagnosed with osgood-schlatter disease, which means I was growing and dancing too much. The doctor recommended I take a break, but Linda wouldn’t let me. Towards the end of the scholarship I had to audition for a woman named Julie Mcdonald at a talent company called Joseph, Heldfond and Rix. They wanted me to sign on with their agency, get a minors’ work permit, and move to LA.  I could be working and making money immediately, they said. Linda said that’s what we came to do. Julie asked me if that’s what I wanted. I was used to just doing what I was told, though, so I wasn’t sure I wanted. I told Julie I had to think about it. And so I did, and I was afraid, I was terrified. I didn;t know how to make a decision that satisfied my own desire, I only knew sacrifice. I had some other convention scholarships and another one for a summer dance intensive training at Pacific Northwest Ballet Company and “they” expected my back there.  Seattle was a big city with nice cars; very few ford f150’s beaten up with wooden flatbeds and hitches, and no tractors. It was as big a city as I had known. Already terrified by the high idle and asphalt, and lack of space. I knew I wouldn’t survive in LA.   I asked Linda if I could call my dad, which I didn’t do very much because long distance calls were expensive and Linda made us pay for them, and I hated my dad at the time because of how strict and physically abusive he was. He was a bull.  The truth was, two years prior was the first time that I thought about killing myself instead of praying for accidents.

Linda would always pass people on two lane highways in her junk cars. Oh my god, the shaking, like a shuttle re-entry as we careened by semi’s. Where we lived, on Beaver Valley road, the deer would saunter across the black tar road in the lampless pitch of night. Sometimes, between a semi and the deer, I didn’t think we’d make it, and like I said, sometimes I wish we didn't. 

But I wasn’t ready to leave the comfort of the violence I knew for the violence I didn’t know. I had no reason to believe life wouldn’t carry on the same way, parked under the orange halogen, in the back of the citation off Burbank avenue. My dad accepted the long distance charges. I needed to be perfect for my father, if I wasn’t, then it came with consequences. He was often seeking the company of women, so the time I had with him, I didn't want it to be wasted picking out a switch to be hit with if I hadn’t completed a task. 

People say I have a strong work ethic.

So I told him how wonderful the classes were, and how much the teachers liked me and how they said how talented I was. I told him about how sunny it was and how fun Universal Studios was, And how perfect LA was. I told him about the audition and how they wanted me to move to LA. But, “they” really needed me up there in Chimacum and “they” were expecting me at the ballet company. And then I started crying. I couldn’t act okay at that moment. I couldn’t maintain the veneer of perfection. I broke down on the side of the road. I’ll never forget that. If I didn’t tell the truth then, my iron would turn to rust. It was the first time I felt like a junk car.

“By the middle of the piece, you seem to be shifting between different roles, where something more ominous hovers above the floor in your extended arms and downturned face, or when you’ve drawn your hands close to your head like something from Guillermo del Toro. Then there is a kind of maintenance evoked as you pass back through similar gestures as where you began. Occasionally your face tilts up and, eyes closed, there is a kind of dancerly reverie, fully immersed in fantasy and/or memory made inhabitable..”

It would be another blazing hot July in the backseat of a car. I’d miss making hay on Glendale Farm. Before the round bales and before the red Massey-Ferguson and the new red barn were engulfed in fire, we stacked square bales up to the rickety-stick rafters in the back of the old barn. It was all brittle bones with an inside out wig of cobwebs. The old barn, all matronly, hunched over to the south and supported by a wooden walker of six planks of douglas fir, each hewn four feet by sixteen. 

The old barn was over 150 years old and so was the guest house. These two remnants were all that were left of Glendale Farm- of the nearly 10,000 acres that originally sprawled the length of Beaver Valley. The Jefferson County Historical Preservation Society had registered the guest house as an historic landmark and had given Kirk a grant to restore what was once the accountants quarters, not long after I nearly burnt it down. Kirk also got a 99 year easement.

 “Jefferson County, in partnership with the Jefferson Land Trust, will use this grant to acquire a conservation easement on the 180-acre Glendale Farm, just south of Chimacum. Glendale Farm is one of the largest parcels in the county still in active agricultural use. It is at the confluence of Beaver and Center Valleys, the two largest agriculturally zoned areas in the county. The land has been a farm since 1857, with a history of dairy and cheese production, and is currently an organic beef operation”

 6 months later Kirk died and the care of the farm was with Linda. The old barn still stands beyond repair, slowly filling.

In the front was the milking parlour, with a line of cataract windows, the greyest-green, that neither let light in nor out. It had two rows of rusted iron neck clips for the holsteins with a shallow slop trough for grains and feed. They looked like giant rusted diaper pins, like the kind I’d seen labeled under the bathroom sink in grandma Jeroma’s house.  We kept a lineage of holsteins with either the name Julia or Duchess in the corral just out front; always with a few yearling steers or with the horses when they’d colic on the spring grass. I emptied out the shit and mud that accumulated every few months; pitchforking it onto the flatbed trailer. 

There is a difference between knowing something would happen again and waiting for it to happen. I was never waiting for the cows to get milked or fed in the early morning or the barn to get mucked or filled with hay or emptied. 

When I was really young, when Silas Brainard was still alive and Kirk was just the farm-hand and no longer my dad’s best friend, we’d put Juila III in one of those neck clips and milk her swollen bag in the parlour. We’d keep a couple gallons and spill the rest under the cedar trees right outside the doors. It would curdle with a smell of sweet grasses and hope chests, or something between fresh cut silage and a vintage jewelry box. It touched that profound place in me, like certain parts of Grandma’s house that smelled like rose soap and mothballs or day-old glazed doughnuts on the counter next to apples writhing with flies in linda’s kitchen.

The first time I smelled another boy's cock was on top of the hay, above the rafters, amongst the angled pillars of light articulated by the dust and the panting wind inhaled through the open mouth of the barn doors. The frightened smell of a Garter snake on my hands, after we both slithered away.

The old barn had a loud rhythmic click-clack that haunted day and night. You could hear the throbbing staccato from 10 yards away. It beckoned under a new moon, or in a morning fog, before the sun would rise, and you could find it like a bat in the night. All of the electric fences were charged from a control box with flip-switches just inside the milking parlour door. And it’s from there that the sound would clap “Action!” and send a silent restrictive bolt around the 180 acre set. 

I began to feel like I was moving from stage to stage. A different performance for each parent, sibling, teacher, and director. I became acutely aware of  the organization of classism and elitism around culture and cultural output. The Good Shepard center, in Seattle, is where they had the ballet company. 

“The Good Shepard Center is on the National Register of Historic Places as the Home of the Good Shepherd order of Nuns and is a city of Seattle designated landmark.The center was built in 1906 as a Catholic School for wayward girls and operated until 1973. "

Historic Seattle uses the center as a cash cow,"  Rick Graves, president of the Wallingford Community Council, said . "That's something you milk for all it's worth." 

The Pacific Northwest Ballet School was founded at the Good Shepard Center 1974. Formerly directed by Francia Russell, and now directed by Peter Boal, it has been considered to be "one of the leading, if not the definitive, professional training schools in the country." The teaching is structured on that of the School of American Ballet. Pacific Northwest Ballet holds an annual summer course in the month of July and is considered one of the leading summer dance education facilities in the country.

When I had finally returned from LA and started my scholarship at PNB I was drained; I felt extracted. I understood my commodification differently.  I spent the first two weeks of the month commuting back and forth from Chimacum. Linda had a black 280D Mercedes Benz that she preferred at the time, with a hole in the radiator we had to fill every couple hours, so we carried plastic milk jugs of water in the trunk. It had red leather seats, had a lot of rusty chrome still inside and out, except for the hood ornament, that vanished one night in the late 80’s and probably ended up around the reddish neck of some young pock faced hick in Pt. Hadlock. Kirk replaced it for her twice and then stopped. He said “it was like throwing pearls to swine”.  It had holes in the floor too, on the front and back passenger side near where the seat was bolted to the frame, when I was hidden under the heap of trash bags, in the backseat on the ferry, I’d watch the world go by from underneath me. Imagine my head was underwater and I could peer right through to the ocean floor. 

I used to wish my super-power was breathing underwater. I understand why now. 

She’d drop me off in the morning at the Good Shepard and I’d click castanets with the famous flamenco dancer Sarah Deloiuse and in the afternoon the head mistress Victoria Pulkiknen would tell me how bad my feet were with their collapsed arches and she’d make me shape my point with stretchy bands in the afternoons. 

I was pre-pubescent. Puberty didn’t come until my sophomore year in high school. I didn’t understand how food worked. Betsy, my first protector and longest dance instructor, may have talked about diet in classes, but whatever she had said was not relevant to me. I didn’t eat very much at home. When there was food that wasn’t moldy I would gorge; milk, and cheese and ice cream, and peanut butter, and regular butter, and days old bread,  hamburger, and an endless supply of sweets. Unless, I went to a friend’s house. Dance instructors from across the country said repeatedly that they had not seen a shape like mine with such talent. Linda and my sister’s called me “butterball” or more affectionately “jellybelly” or “chunky monkey” or “turkeybutt” and “pudgey”

After PNB I had stopped dancing, and the following year, well before puberty arrived, my father said to me that “If I didn’t lose weight no one would want to be my friend. The world is a tough place and looks are very important. I’m saying this because I love you. I don’t want you to make it harder than it needs to be. You should run laps around the school track”. My response was, and I’ll never forget this “Dad, people will love me because I’m a good person”.  I cried in front of him, before he left without a word. I ran laps by myself  that summer at the Waldport highschool on the Oregon coast and went for long walks along the beach. At the end of the summer, he joined me on one of the walks. He asked me why I seemed so withdrawn and why I didn’t talk to him very much, he wanted me to be honest. So I thought back to the time in 6th grade when he hit me for getting B’s on my report card. 

Penelope Gonzalez, my sixth grade teacher, had asked for a parent meeting with my father. I had been a straight A student, gifted in math and science. I had taken the PSAT’s at the end of that year for early entrance into University of Washington’s Robinson Center for Young Scholars. Linda had taken me to Seattle to pass some sort of emotional and cognitive screening test in Seattle.  I needed a score of 1100 and received a 1050. I didn't want to go.

Linda, really felt like I was an extension of her. That my success, my talents, my intelligence, were all because of her. Her genetics and her “doting” attentions. The more I succeeded, the more she succeeded; the more she could claim she was a good mother.

my grades had been slipping. Mrs. Gonzalez knew it wasn’t about the grades. She suspected abuse; like others had in the past. 

It was also prompted, I’m sure, by me bringing penthouse and hustler magazines to school in my backpack, getting caught and being sent to the principal's office. Jason and I had started fooling around in the old barn the summer before school started...

 My Dad didn’t like to talk about Linda, he wanted to distance himself completely from her and her reputation. He said she was “disgusting”, “crazy”, “sick-in-the-head”, “Your mother’s really fucked up”. He’d remind us about her reputation in the community. Reputation was important to him. So he never asked about her, or how we lived with her, or what she did. Distancing her meant he distanced himself from knowing me. He thought my bad grades were a reflection of him. He thought all of my failures were a reflection of him. He hadn’t been paying attention to me, because of work, and girlfriends, and the “other” kids we never talked about and so he thought he hadn’t been tough enough. He had thought he wasn’t making sure I was getting my chores and homework done. And that’s true he hadn’t been paying attention at all. He yelled at me in the truck on the way back, and then made me find a stick in the woods to punish me with.  I moved back to Linda’s house a month later and waited for 6th grade to be over. 

I told him I hated him. The beach turned instantly into quicksand. He chased me down and shook me, grabbed me so hard it left bruises, yelling into my face, spit flying from his mouth into mine, “NEVER, DISRESPECT ME LIKE THAT AGAIN!”. I had been in a similar and familiar place before, under Linda years earlier. I left a week later on a greyhound back to Linda’s house on the Glendale Farm.

This confused me. I felt so ugly all the time. And I wasn’t sure it was my fault. My parents and my dance teachers made me feel like I could always work harder. Nothing was good enough, that everything I did, and was, and looked like could be better. And I felt it in my body. And so I wanted to leave my body. And I did in some way. But then some classmates, and teachers, and my friend’s parents said “I was incredibly talented”, “So special”, “gifted”, and “intelligent”, “I had “beautiful blond  curly locks” and  “such a wonderful smile”, and “twinkling blue eyes”, and  “You’re an old soul” they’d say.  Now, It’s hard for me to accept compliments because I have a hard time trusting people’s intentions. I also have a large ego so it’s hard for me to trust myself.

So many sit-ups and petite allegro, grand battement, tendu, tombe pas-de-beurre glissade assemblée, day after day. 

“I am entranced by the gorgeous, trained precision of your repetition. I can see the many years of dance and yoga, especially in this phase. Your body movement is actually very controlled, almost detached, from the kind of emotional expression carried in your vocalizations. It’s repetitious, only gradually slowing to a stop. Stripped of a lot of the theatricality in the staging, you’ve got a kernel of something very special in this choreography that literalizes processing, letting me observe a way a body might work through something that is usually internal and hidden”

We were usually done by 3pm. I knew Linda to always be late. I knew it well. It was not uncommon to be waiting at school or at the dance studio or a friends house or anywhere really for an extra hour or two. On this occasion I had become familiar with the Interior of the building, not the expanse of the city outside. The facilities had closed at 5 pm and I had already been waiting those two hours. The very last person to leave at 7pm asked me if I needed to try and call (from a land line). I knew she wasn’t at home. I declined politely. “I’m fine, really”.  “She was definitely coming”. I told them with the assuring self-possessed smile of the talented young actor I was becoming. 9pm and the sun went down, and the orange street lights flickered on, and then kept flickering. They cast deep purple shadows. There were cars milling about, some figures too. But the city silence was terrifying.

In the summer time the starlings and swallows would make their clay nests under the awnings of the old barn. They were dashing erratically around the corrals and out into the timothy grass sewing their way through swarms of flying termites and caddisflies that coalesced under the dusk. The electric din of crickets clicking off into the sky added their charge to the barbed wire and the heartbeat of the barn. Oh, and those bellowing toads, in the culverts and drainage ditches. The world doesn’t sound like that anymore. Not there at least.  

No crickets, no frogs, no howling coyotes, no Linda. At 10 I was cold. At 11 she came. I couldn't talk to her. She was high. She laughed and said “it’s a good thing you didn’t go anywhere”. I cried, leaned against the red leather door, and went to sleep. She woke me up to get in the trunk before we boarded the ferry. The milk jugs had spilled.

An orange light, probably carmine when it was new, would pulse everso asynchronous alongside the sound. Shhhhhhh, hear that, Chillbumps. Beside the dilapidated old barn and between the red cedars was a concrete calving shed with an opaque corrugated cream-colored plastic roof. When the screaming was too much, when I wanted to avoid unloading a truck of garbage, and we weren't bottle-nursing orphaned calves, sometimes in a heavy rain, I’d head to that shed and put down a few sheaves of hay, masturbate to thoughts of Jason or Jack, look up into the glowing light and wait.  I waited so long for a good shepard, a good mother, to return.

I can’t remember if she had fallen off the unfinished deck, or slipped from the roof while nailing cedar shingles through the black tar paper, or if she had been riding the grey appaloosa on the old farm. But she snapped her spine like a twig on the way down from one of them. She said “It was an out-of-body experience”. When she recovered her wind she had felt a firey sword behind her shoulders. 

It must have been in the field, riding Smokey, because now I remember her saying she was paralyzed in the grass, and had to pull her way back to the house, hand over fist, and it had taken her several hours through the pain and tears. She’d pull and then stop, and then pull and stop again, until she got to the land line in the house.

The ambulance came and took her to the Hospital in town. She had crushed some vertebrae and her spinal cord. They put a steel rod and some pins through the rest of them, put her in a full body cast, and eventually she got feeling back in her legs. They said it was a miracle that she would walk again. I used to lovingly touch the scars and marvel at the gentle arching swoop of her upper back. 

I wonder what life would have been like if she had been confined to a wheelchair. Would she have been less beautiful? Would it be less stressful to be called a cripple, rather than crazy? Did “others” make her crazy in the naming of it, is that the essential stress of it? What part does being called a faggot, before understanding the complexities of the term, before a cogent choice, shapes the becoming?

“Yet, as we have begun to explore, it may be harder and potentially undesirable to remain neutral' about the causes of some forms of impairment, for example, injuries due to war or unsafe working conditions, or distress developed in response to living under occupation.

My queer landscape is living under the occupation of White heteronormativity.

 Furthermore, a number of researchers (Angermeyer and Matschinger, 2005; Read et al, 2006a) have found that the stigma around distress increases if causes are attributed to brain disease, in comparison to explanations that emphasise psychological or social causes.”

She was olive skinned and had wiry unkempt auburn hair that she often died black.  She would occasionally let me brush it and put it up with hair combs. I’d scan for leaves and straw and sawdust when she came back, in the late evenings, from doing firewood. She loved the attention, me darting around her nest like a little swallow. I tried to imagine how beautiful she could be. By the end of the summers, under the grime and peeling skin of sunburns, she was the color of gnarled madrona, except for cream colored fungal patches and suture scars. There were not many pictures during that time when she broke her back. 

One of the first pictures taken of me, I was swaddled in a baby seat, asleep. It was labeled; “June 12th,  Seth 10 days old, sunburned”. 

But of the ones I saw of her before then (and she always said this too), she looked like Sophia Loren before the fall. That’s one of the reasons she wanted to become an actress. Because my grandfather was Italian and he loved Sophia Loren and he thought his daughter looked like her, and he told her how beautiful she was as soon as she started becoming a woman. And then she started messing around with her cousin Jimmy Tonda. And everytime we saw him drunk at the halfway house he would say how beautiful she was. And then she went on a few dates with Al Starcovich, who reminded me one afternoon while I was pouring concrete for some National Park outhouses, that she was a “looker” in highschool “your mother was smokin’ hot”. And then she met my dad. And she was beautiful like a wood nymph

Us kids didn’t go to the hospital back then, or I have no memory of going to the hospital. I never asked what it was like there. I knew Bree Murphy had gone for a broken arm and got a cast and everyone in class wrote on it. She got a lot of attention and was popular for those few weeks.  It sounded like a magical place. A clean place, full of care; where they make food and deliver it to you on clean trays, some place in the future, like in the Jetsons cartoons. I was born 1978, 11:47 pm. Linda had delivered me at home with a neighbor and her Mother who hadn’t known what to do. They thought she should go to the hospital, that it was practically illegal, to do it at home. 

...the natural childbirth movement may have seemed a step backward in terms of comfort in labor and birth, but several advances had been made in non-medicinal methods of pain relief. Early proponents of natural childbirth (Dick-Read, 1943; Karmal, 1959; Lamaze, 1970; Leboyer, 1975; and Bradley, 1978) developed programs to prepare women for childbirth that included relaxation, patterned breathing, hypnosis, and water immersion. Encouraged by the work of these early experts, women began to reclaim their autonomy in the birth process.

Linda said they mostly just watched. I don’t know where my father was. 

My dad remembers that he was still in Craig, Alaska, finishing a 320 day contract as a School Superintendent. He came down to meet me about three weeks after I was born. 

Maybe my grandmother had taken the picture of me sunburned.

It took five hours, she said from start to finish. “You were so easy, you just slipped right out, didn’t cry for more than a minute, and put yourself right to sleep”. I wonder now why she would always boast about me being such an easy child, never fussy. Why was crying myself to sleep an important part of the story?

It's April 4th 2021, Easter Sunday. This morning I woke from a dream that I was in a white farmhouse that was very old, from the late 1900’s, with lovely architecture. I was walking through it because it was being remodeled. It was empty, and sunlight stretched across the worn wooden floors. A brilliant illumination through drapeless clear glass windows. The project manager said everything upstairs was going well but he needed to show me the basement and the foundation. It was like a root cellar, very dark and damp. Water was seeping in through the earthen walls and the wood beams were moist and mildewed. Slowly deteriorating. I could see the floors above were dry and fine, though. And then he said he found something peculiar. A small closet that we opened and was empty.  

I realize now it was the closet in my bedroom that was always overflowing with  the clothes Linda had wanted me to try on.

The floor had a wet wood panel and it appeared to cover an even deeper cellar, below the basement and into the earth.  He flashed a lamplight onto it and I could see a jute cord. My heart was racing and I started shivering. I lifted it by the handle and raised it no more than a few feet. Out flew a black formless wraith. Terrifying, It startled me awake. 

I slept a lot. I enjoyed the dark womb of night. I longed for it.  I worked hard physically, so that made sense. But now I realize my mind did too. I was a very sensitive child and I cried a lot. Everyone in my family said I was oversensitive. My dad would say “stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about”.

He explained to me as an adult that this was a phrase he learned from his abusive, alcoholic father 

I guess, compared to Linda, it showed restraint. But like his other mantra, “Spare the rod, spoil the child”,  It had psychological complexities that I grew to understand. 

My dad started with an open hand but by the time I was five I would grab wooden paint brushes and pretty pieces of driftwood we collected on trips to the beach-small things I enjoyed. But then I didn’t want to be hurt by the things I loved, so through the age of 9, the size of the stick shifted with me, instead of thinking about the stick in relation to me, I began thinking about its relationship to my dad. My dad convinced me that I was only hurting myself. It took time to wander around outside and decide whether I wanted to be hit by a cedar switch-a half inch to quarter inch in diameter and maybe a foot and a half to two feet- It might have flexibility so the sting would be greater but the blunt force would be less, Or a super dry piece of alder, a half inch to an inch in diameter, and over two feet, so that it was unwieldy and lacked momentum if you were placed over the lap. Or a chunky rotten piece of douglas fir that could potentially snap in half if it was swung too hard. I had to become clever, but I was by no definition a naughty child. 

To be clear, I never felt spoiled.  Linda, didn’t waste time with sticks and threats. Her judgment was swift, undeliberating, and generous. She became more physically intimidating than my father, because he would generally strike us from the distance of belts and sticks. It was a distance that made sense. Whereas she would kick, and slap, and pull hair. Physical touch is my love language.

Have you run as fast as you could through a forest or a thicket and fallen? 

When it’s skin to skin the pain feels different, it’s more nuanced. She had taken karate, reached a black belt level, and became involved in competitions. I think it was a way for her to feel like she was in control of her body again after the accident. That’s when she put us in ballet; an extension of her mastery. Eventually her athletic prowess and physical compulsions were turned into the firewood business. After several years her wooden torso undulated with a grainy definition, her neck and scapulas, down to her calves, had the same filamentary precision.  Her branches, unbreakable biceps, became swollen burls. She cast a looming shadow, a relentless shade, around the house.  She was very volatile during this time. Her gathering increased. She became more sure of herself and deeply rooted in her opinion, more sexually aggressive, and her pitch changed. Her breasts sapped and she got huge implants and permanent black tattoos around her eyes- not in place of the usual thick mascara, but in tandem. It made her eyes look evil. She would not be confronted or criticized. She was not the problem. We were the problem.

The APA recognized OCHD as a social phenomena in the mid 1980’s but it was first defined as a mental disorder in the 5th edition of the DSM in 2013. psychiatry was in the process of flexing its disciplinary muscles as never before. From its first release in 1952, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) was already well en route to becoming North America’s prime mental classification system—the go-to defner of mental pathology that it is today (Caplan, 1996; Kutchins & Kirk, 1997).

R. D. Laing’s “politics of experience,” the challenging premise that madness could only be understood and engaged existentially and through the eyes of those who lived it. For the European anti-psychiatrists, the objectification of so-called “mentally ill” people under the guise of science was a deeply dehumanizing pursuit that required challenging through a wholesale rethinking of human consciousness and being. Whether psychosis was, or is, an exploration of selfhood or a journey to self-actualization may remain a contested idea

Mad Studies is an exercise in critical pedagogy—in the radical co-production, circulation, and consumption of knowledge. Following Foucault, the practitioners of Mad Studies are concerned with deploying counter-knowledge and subjugated knowledge as a strategy for contesting regimes of truth (Foucault, 1980, 1991) and ruling (Smith, 1987) about “mental illness” and the psy “sciences,” and about those of us who contend with psychiatric diagnoses and interventions. Further, to quote “In examining how mental health/illness is made sense of, we may also learn who is entitled to participate in the production of mental health knowledge,  who  has  the  ability,  or  inability,  to  control  what  becomes  ‘common’  knowledge, and moreover, who is permitted, or not, to be seen and heard in the making of MHL [mental health literacy].”

Mad Movement could be potentially modeled after the disability movement although it has not been formally unified nor codified in this particular way; lived experience does not need to be 

established through the channels of research, although this is one way to explore alternative methods of Individual and social impacts. Potentially because certain knowledges have yet to be presented and represented. 

“Madness- as a label or reality-is not conceived of as divine, prophetic, or useful. It is perceived as (and often further shaped into) a shameful and menacing disease, from whose spiteful and exhausting eloquence society must be protected”

“Information ethicists caution that, by overwhelming your capacity for reflection and empathy, this superabundance (of information) poses a real threat to judgement, well being, and relations with others”

I had refused to deliberate on clothes. She had a ritual of collecting piles of clothes for us and she would, one-by-one,  ask us if we wanted them or make us try them on. I  think this proved that everything she was doing was for god and her children. I hated this weekly ritual, because of how I thought she was manipulating me to substantiate her. I would refuse to participate, I hated it, saying no, no, no, no, no, no, until it was over. 

But I hated saying yes to something, even more. And I did.

I made a stand of my own that afternoon. I refused. I swore. I swung like an axe  “I hate this shit, I hate all of it, Its a waste of fucking time, I hate you!”. I can’t describe the timbre of her voice when she said.  “YOU UNGRATEFUL LITTLE SHIT”. 

Something massive snapped again. The tree fell in the living room and I ran to the bedroom to get away. She ran after me. I got caught in her limbs. She threw me to the bed. I knew she wasn’t in her body any longer. I could feel it- where she grabbed my wrists. It was indescribable power. She started spitting on me. 

Spitting upon another person, especially onto the face, is a global sign of anger, hatred, disrespect or contempt. It can represent a "symbolical regurgitation" or an act of intentional contamination.

I was kindling under her body. My legs flailed, something snapped in my wrist. She pulled me to the floor, pinned my arms by my side with her knobby knees. I felt high pitched screams leave my lungs and rustle past her deliquescent hair and then thud against the ceiling. She kept spitting in my face.

Sentiments against spitting gradually transitioned from being included in adult conduct books to so obvious as to only appear in guides for children to not being included in conduct literature even for children "because most Western children have the spitting ban internalized well before learning how to read."

I turned left and right to avoid it. I closed my stinging eyes. She kept spitting. 

There are six major salivary glands and hundreds of minor ones. Saliva moves through tubes called salivary ducts. Normally, the body makes up to 2 to 4 pints of saliva a day. Usually, the body makes the most saliva in the late afternoon. It makes the least amount at night. That said, everyone is different. What doctors consider to be a normal amount of saliva varies quite a bit. That makes diagnosing saliva problems a bit of a challenge.

And I could feel the warmth of her on my face. She kept spitting. 

In rural parts of North India, it was customary in olden days for mothers to lightly spit at their children (usually to the side of the children rather than directly at them) to imply a sense of disparagement and imperfection that protects them from evil eye (or nazar).[7] Excessive admiration, even from well-meaning people, is believed to attract the evil eye, so this is believed to protect children from nazar that could be caused by their own mothers' "excessive" love of them.[7] However, because of hygiene, transmission of disease and social taboos, this practice has waned and instead a black mark of kohl or kajal is put on the forehead or cheek of the child to ward off the evil eye

It was different than when her tongue was in my mouth. She kept spitting and I could feel it past my earlobes and down the back of my neck, through my hair. 

Such a habit also existed in some Eastern European countries like Romania, and Moldova, although it is no longer widely practiced. People would gently spit in the face of younger people (often younger relatives such as grandchildren or nephews) they admire in order to avoid deochi,[9] an involuntary curse on the individual being admired or "strangely looked upon",[9] which is claimed to be the cause of bad fortune and sometimes malaise or various illnesses

She kept spitting and eventually I stopped moving.

In Greece, it is customary to "spit" three times after making a compliment to someone, the spitting is done to protect from the evil eye.[11] This applies to all people, it is not just between mothers and children.

It turned into periods of silence and stillness while she gathered more fluid.  And we just stayed like that. Until she dried out. And then she, the dryad, came back to her body, and I didn’t return back to mine for years. And she left. And I went to the bathroom and washed my face, and then I went back to the bedroom and I cried, and then I went to sleep. When I woke up it was nighttime. And she was high and tearing up bits of paper at her desk. I went past her, without looking at her, into the kitchen. And she called out “Do you want me to make you something?” as if nothing happened. And I really thought about it, I really did. I thought about what my father would say “You’re mother always blows hot and cold”. But this question; it felt like the coldest thing. A primal paradox.  It sounded like she wanted to care for me. That she wanted to nurse me back to her bosom, her fake tits and black black eyes. But I knew she couldn’t. Besides my throbbing wrist, she had cursed me, she had humiliated me, she had hated me back. 

Now, I realize that before my eyes were shut, she had looked deeply into both of them, saw herself in me, knew that she created me, that she was shaping me beneath her. I was the object of unrelenting misogyny, the ungrateful, critical, defiant, disrespectful, persecuting male, and I was her, and she hated it all in that moment. She had hated herself. She had been made to hate herself. 

“Women who  reject  or  are  ambivalent  about  the  female  role  frighten  both  them­selves  and  society  so  much  so  that  their  ostracism  and  self-destructiveness probably  begin  very  early.  Such  women  are  also  assured  of  a  psychiatric label  and,  if  they  are  hospitalized,  it  is  for  less  “female”  behaviors,  such  as “schizophrenia,”  “lesbianism,”  or  “promiscuity.”

On the simplest level, when I was just a boy, and beginning to comprehend these lessons of self-loathing, I knew she wouldn’t make me something that was humane to eat. I returned to my room, without responding to her and went back to sleep, easily. This memory more than any other had been an unspeakable wraith. I was very broken at that point. I began to see that I had no physical control of my life, I was an object of possession with unreliable value. I had been complicit in the acts against me because I thought my Mother had loved me, if not just too much. I would sacrifice guilt and shame for undying devotion. But that illusion washed away in the bathroom. I knew Linda was not well, that she didn’t have boundaries with me, and that the relationship was different with me than with my sisters. I was becoming her Oedipus.

“Oedipus accidentally fulfilled a prophecy that he would end up killing his father and marrying his mother, thereby bringing disaster to his city and family”.

 I could endure it because it was my fault for becoming self-aware, and for living in the shadow, nonetheless. 

“Man in order to be born, in order to progress, has to sever the umbilical cord; he has to overcome the deep craving to remain tied to mother. The incestuous desire has its strength not from the sexual attraction to mother, but from the deep-seated craving to remain in, or to return to the all-enveloping womb, or to the all-nourishing breasts. The incest tabu is nothing else but the two cherubim with fiery swords, guarding the entrance to paradise and preventing man from returning to the pre-individual existence of oneness with nature.”

When I got my wind back, My suicidal thoughts became a firey sword behind my shoulders and I spent the next 10 years pulling myself, hand over fist, across a field of sorrow. 

Anne and Larry were the closest neighbors. Their land came up to the edge of the fifty acres on the old farm and was accessed by the same long winding road across beaver valley, called Peat Plank road.  Their eldest was Bree, she was my best friend. She sent me a note about a dream she had recently and said “my love and concern for you is felt deep in my cells and psyche…” Her Mom Anne worked at the Marine Science Center for years and became it’s Executive Director until she retired several years ago. She had an old blue Volvo with a cassette of Paul Simon's Graceland lodged forever in the tape deck. She’d sometimes pick us kids up somewhere along the quarter mile drive on our way back from school and tell us stories about sea cucumbers shooting out their intestines through their anus to save themselves. Or about the limpets who licked their home rocks clean with rasplike radula and would return to the exact spot they started from. In the summer time she’d take us to Gibb’s lake and everybody would get real somber on the way home and we’d sing Under African Skies:

“This is the story of How we begin to remember

This is the powerful pulsing of love in the vein

After the dream of falling and calling your name out

These are the roots of rhythm 

And the roots of rhythm remain..”

At Kirk's funeral, I thanked Anne for all the trips to the lake, and the fresh baked breads with home-made jams and almond butters from the food co-op,  the apple compote on pancakes, sesame seeds, alfalfa sprouts and even the gross hippy carob chocolates. All the hugs and safety. Anne taught me things and asked me questions and gave me compliments. She said this of her earliest recollections of me; 

“You were a magical creature, Seth. So confident and brave in the wild. Sometimes I’d drive home and I’d see you with frogs in your hands or a snake wrapped around your neck, or see this sweet toe-headed little boy with a dirty face and dirty hands, just a toddler, maybe two or three, asleep in the grass in the ditch on the side of the road. It scared me sometimes, but I knew you’d be okay

“When the creative power of humans and the contingency of reality are consummated in a great work, the later has a presence more commanding or expressive than that of a text, score, or plan.

Its May 5th, Today is my last critique, I’ll submit Blueprint for Lamentations. I woke up early from a dream about linda's house, the one that used to belong to Silas. I returned as a visitor. The ceilings and roof had caved in parts. It felt like ruins. All inside-out and outside-in. I was walking over debris, the walls and the old spanish style ceiling tiles mixed in with the rot of old clothes. I saw a skittish dog briefly out of the corner of my eye in the old sewing room now stitched with weeds and blackberry bushes. Linda was still living in the ruins, although I never saw her. Blue tarps and plastic sheeting were strung up as makeshift doors and buckets were everywhere for rainwater. It was irreparable and I was calm.

II

          Crawling Back Home

On the train from Merida to Mexico City I got sick-deathly ill. Going through the desert I lost track of my fever. The boxcar we were in was the end of the train-The caboose.  

A caboose would often shelter the crew, who had, in a different era, been required in switching, shunting and to keep watch over perilous loads shifting over the river of rails. What is one crew? 

A small portly Charon collected money at the limen that separated the outside from the inside. People entered the train through the doorless rear portal, strapped with babies to their backs, with baskets of chickens, with miniature cords of wood. Some didn’t enter at all. Like the vibrant little  boys with machetes in one hand or boxes of chiclets for sale. They hung on by an arm or a foot to the railing under the rusty awning of the porchlette. At times forming a precarious choir of 10-15 in the back, singing the name of the offering twice and then the prices. “Aguita, Aguita, cincuenta!” or “Pina, Pina, dos cincuenta!” It was a windowless train. That is not true,  I mean to say there was no glass.  When we stopped in the jungle the hot rain felt like it was rising up from my body into the sky. Green and brown naugahyde pulled limply over the carcass of metal springs and a horny frame. Those bovinesque seats lapping at my salts and loosening my wells, were from butchered old school busses, and were even thirstier than l.  I would slip under them into the shade and listen to the choir through the day and the dusk, and through the overwhelming openness of the train.  I begged for Linda to buy me water, limonata, or orange fanta in plastic sandwich bags twisted in straws. Her care was a phantom. She left me under the seat with some money and disappeared to another car with an amorous stranger along the hot shaft of the train.  The coins were a relief on my eyelids.  I saw stars where there were none. I needed help, I was passing out. “Could we stop at a hospital?'' I asked when she rematerialized.  I was afraid of dying in the night.  I was eighteen. Everything got shorter.  I cried.  I wanted the tears to stay but they too escaped through all of the windows and holes in my body.  I vomited until my water was gone and then heaved green bile. The rest would come trickling as a rivulet from my ass hole, in the heat of the first day. Under the seats the floor of the train was tentative and unsure of itself.  But by the time it became the bathroom it knew exactly what it was. The emptiness of the closet, with no handrails, no toilet seat, no toilet paper, no mirrors, no sink, no window, no door, no nothing except piss and shit everywhere and the single fist sized hole in the center gave a final punch to my guts . The hole revealed the blur of the truth of the track below it. I had to close my eyes. I opened them again. Slumped my pants around my ankles,  my face pressed into the shit against the wall; I was seventeen and I was the train, I was the beggar in the church, I was open to everything. A starving cur on all fours, I crawled back underneath my seat. I called out to Linda.  If I had been taken by this fever, would she have another child at her age, as she had promised?  Alone on a train from Merida to Mexico City, my oldest mother, the moon, gathered my tears under the whirring exedra of the last boxcar.  I would be gaunt and fine 2 days late.I was sick before I got on the train.

In Panama City I saw the dead body of a boy wash up on the waterfront. I mean it had already been awash. It was at the edge of the ebbing tide, near one of the small rivers created by the sewage culverts exiting the city. I’m not sure which direction it came from. I mean, I didn’t know if it came from the Gulf, the cut of the Canal, or from the mouth of those gaping culverts. The waves were Sherwin-Williams Hunt Club SW 6468 green and the foam, that ghastly foam, was  Dun Edwards Smoke and Ash DET 514. The receding waters had left bilious lines across the black Sand. My heart was beating, all the sparkling plastic and jugomex aluminum cans strewn about, and birds pulling things apart, the white hotels behind me, and the palms of my hand on the concrete railing, the palms in the planters along the walkway, fronds splayed, the sway of wind, the sway of the women, the splatter of bougainvillea. I wasn’t sure what I would tell you when I got back or if you’d even ask what I had seen or done. My first hamburguesa con huevo frito y jamón perfectly swaddled in a napkin from the large lady in the  monochromatic crop-top right outside the hotel, or this.  that my heart was beating because I realized that others had seen the body and they did nothing. No one was screaming or surprised or gathered around him crying. I was too far away to see the shape of his eyebrows or the pocks on his cheeks-  The loss of details are the saddest part for me.  I can’t remember if the color of the sky was Benjamin Moore little boy blue 2061-6 or Turquoise Haze 2060-60.

These two memories were on the same trip before we saw Jeroma in Guatemala. She had been there for a year already, living in a small wood shed, surrounded by corn, with a tin roof that would drown out our voices in the afternoons when the rains would come. It had wood shutters with no glass windows, dim light bulbs hanging from cords with an added flicker coming from candles and the gas burners on a counter.  She had been taking care of the small cafetal, pot farm, and the house of the Canadian lady who had to leave for passport reasons I think. She found herself in the shed after she left Mexico and had to leave Carmen del Playa, because of that car accident with the German guy who had been a guest of the resort she was working at. She was Animacion, meaning she was hired to entertain guests; teach water aerobics, play beach volleyball, put on shows, and generally be exploited for her youth and beauty  They danced and drank and I don’t know. She had been eighteen and left him in the car after they crashed, unconscious. They found him alive, it wasn’t life threatening, the story was in the Prensa Libre. Nobody pressed charges, but the resort was concerned for their reputation, and didn’t want to talk about it. She was used to that too. She got on a bus and headed to Belize a month later and then found a long-haired Brazilian lover in PanaJachel who taught her how to make duendes. Jeroma always seemed to get away from stuff. I was jealous that she could just get away at all. And she did. The rainy season starts in May and we arrived in July.  I told her that when I saw her. I needed her to know how alone I had felt in all of it- felt abandoned there in Linda's house, that I couldn’t handle receiving all of the madness on my own. The constant gazing inward. Neither of my sister’s called that much. Linda made us pay for long-distance phone calls back then, it was hard to call for help.  They just left, got out as fast as they could and as far as they could. Donald Winicott, says that a mother should neither make love to nor devour their children. I understand that. Jeroma didn’t know that I feared death, I feared it because I longed for it.  But she knew how frustrated I was about keeping physical boundaries. I was exhausted, worn down mentally, by having to say ‘No” and the sinister shift of time in some of Linda’s embraces. She had experienced it too, so I thought.  I asked for help from Jeroma in confronting Linda and she tried. Linda started crying, wailing, got angry at the “accusations” and said “I had ruined the trip with all of these lies” and left. I hadn’t even shared the details.  Jeroma ran after her saying “Wait, momma”. Of course, she did. She hadn’t seen Linda in two years. She hadn’t been devoured by her everyday.  Jeroma and I didn’t speak of it again. I stayed in the bent wood chair outside of the shed until the rain came in that afternoon. 

to be continued...

Junk DNA

The first dream I remember was around two  years of age.  There was an old logging road owned by the Crown Zellerbach pulp and paper company that connected the house that I was born in to the house I would later be buried in and from which I now emerge. I was with my father on that road. My grandmother gave my sisters and I plush animals and they each represented a kind of bear. In the dream, my father and I were stopped by a meandering panda. He told me not to move, not to make a sound or else I would be attacked. I asked him if anything like this happened in real-life and maybe somehow I had gotten the panda part wrong. He said no, but he has a terrible memory.

He goes on to say;

The burrow at the entrance of which Thoreau would have us build our houses as well as our nations is a cellar that leads into, and arises out of, the underworld of the dead. It is no doubt in us as much as it is in the earth. To say that this burrow is in us means that it is the source of the unfolding interiorities, the vital heat of which our shirts, houses, books, and words maintain through more or less efficient methods. Those interiorities allow us to hold our place in time and to give time it’s human as opposed to merely natural character.

But the fear is braided through the coif of ancestry. As discreet as a single hair, It traces the imbrication of heartbeats and breaths every single day. This pattern is not your own-I believe that, but the waves do come from inside. So I wanna talk about sand and pearls