Notes From 30

“The enjoyment was just from the too intense consciousness of one’s own degradation; it was from feeling oneself that one has reached the last barrier, that it was horrible, but that it could not be otherwise; that there was no escape for you; that you could never become a difference person; that even if time and faith were still left for you to change into something different you would most likely not wish to change; or if you did wish to, even then you would do nothing; because perhaps in reality there was nothing for you to change into.”* 

 There’s a thing on the internet right now where it takes pictures of you and tells you how you’ve changed over the past ten years...yeah. I don’t want to fuck with that. Every year around my birthday I spend enough time going through pictures and trying to figure out how I’ve changed. I’ve looked the same for so long...but there’s been subtle differences, it can’t just be a hair cut, right? The tattoos add up. My breasts got bigger (how). My shorts and dresses, shorter, as I got comfortable in my body. Usually the same boots, the same half grin, two dimples before I broke my jaw, then just one after. 

 The constant in most of my pictures, as I look at them now, almost 30, is the people in them. The same friend in front of a band, or playing in a band, or in a van. It’s usually Austin, Scott, or Adrien. Two friends I met at a funeral for another friend (I still remember your name Doug, even though I can’t remember most) who I ended up playing in a band with, after high school (we made it though). I had a drink with Austin the other day. Scott texted me. I called Adrien. We are still connected, by our memories and our lives, for better or worse. We grew up together. I am not sure, a hundred years ago, if we ever would have known each other. We certainly wouldn’t have had the experience of playing in a punk band together, and we wouldn’t be talking now, after I moved across the country (up the country?) to go to graduate school. I am grateful for these things. 

 I understand that turning 30 as a woman is kind of a “big deal.” Like we’ve reached some age where society usually at some point dictated something for us...but I’m pretty lucky to live in an age where that isn’t true. At 30 my mom was sailing a 36ft sail boat around the south pacific, about to finish a trip around the world, and was two years from having me (I was born in South Africa, toward the end of the trip). She raised me, with the privileged of the age we live in now, to focus on books and school and “doing my own thing” so that, over the past several years, I haven’t felt pressure about getting married or having kids. I understand that I’m lucky in that regard. I got an IUD a few years ago, which has worked great for me, and has helped me, during my various relationships to prevent becoming pregnant. I could never have been the kind of mother I wanted to be, and despite wanting to be a mother now, I doubt I’ll ever be financially stable enough (student debt, the horror!) to have a child before it’s “too late.” I’ll be 32 when my IUD expires, the same age my mom was when she had me. And I’ll probably get another one. A mix of privilege and luck. 

 So these are the things I’m grateful for. My friends and my mom and I recognize that a lot of my agency is a product of privileges most people aren’t afforded. But I’m also grateful for a sense of understanding and sympathy that I have now at thirty that I didn’t have when I was starting my twenties. I know what I like, and who I am, but I don’t find the opposites threatening to me. I don’t view things I don’t know as “the other” and I have come to understand that everyone, mostly, has something to offer. As a young punk kid I thought the teller of the bank was my enemy, now I realize she just made different choices than me. I’m happy with the choices I’ve made, and I don’t resent regular everyday people for theirs (cue Pulp’s “Common People” please). 

 “Sure, we’re poor in some surface, dirty clothes way. But I stake faith in our instincts and intuition, our abilities and the strength of our friendships. If this isn’t progress or wisdom, at least it’s survival.”**

 There’s friends who aren’t around. People who committed suicide...or just got married or had kids and took different directions in life. I haven’t really grown up yet. I understand both choices. I don’t look on other people with disdain like I did at nineteen. I try to be understanding. I try to have sympathy even when I don’t understand. I’m incredibly proud of turning thirty this year, for feeling like a smarter person. And also, happy that I’m still connected to my friends. When Travis killed himself a few months ago I ended up at a punk show, crying and getting drunk, and then spent all night in bed with my friends, crying and laughing. The simple pleasure of a band, and a shoulder to cry on. I still find comfort in these things. 

 *Dostoevsky “Notes From Underground”
**`Travis Fristoe America #12

At the Start of Summer

"A day like the days I remember, a day like other days."*
I have to start writing my goodbye to Gainesville, so I'll start with the very end, at yet another start of summer. 

We left the springs around 6pm, and sped down country roads back toward Gainesville, with the windows down, and we had all tactfully agreed without speaking on country music- up loud. Everyone ate at Bev's Better Burgers, and everyone had the day off work except for me so I was sober-ish and drove while everyone slept in the car after, windows still down. Everyone's heads were tilted back toward their head rests, limbs pushed out away- already sunburned, breathing the deep heavy breaths of a day spent swimming. Swimming in water so clear it still almost makes me cry. Swimming and not just swimming but tumbling, jumping from shaky docks into the mouths of that water below, and not just swimming and jumping but mixing rum and cokes into Styrofoam cups, and sitting in the sun and watching everyone else enjoying their afternoon off. I drove everyone home and fought the urge to pull over and run wild in the moats of flowers that have suddenly taken over all the roads around Gainesville. The sun was still out, and my friends were still sleeping in the car, and I felt like how parents must feel watching their kids sleep. The whole world and everything in it suddenly seemed like enough. 
*Donald Justice, Variations on a Text by Vallejo

Two Gold Rings

"I wonder sometimes if I'm the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that's simply human. Or do we all tend toward a single besetting sin?"*

1. I used to want to be the kind of girl that had silver rings on her fingers. There were all these women that I became friends with, once I moved to Gainesville, that seemed so adorned, even when they first woke up, hung over, bleary eyed, happy and excited and complete, and yet also they all shared these features- dark eyes like me, but dark haired, and so small and petite, like white sand from a gulf beach poured into a very small container and dampened with something better than water- only slighter darker than white, with their big eyes so that you couldn't help but think of soft, grey mammals watching you in the night. Then at Christmas one year in North Carolina in a dark room- not dark in an impersonal way but dark in the way that only a room that has been lived in for so long can be dark- with deeply used oriental rugs and pictures covering the walls and records lining the shelves- very little room for white space or space between people in the room. My mom, grandmother and I sat, all of us in the dark room with pictures on the walls from South Africa where we all were in 1985, and all of us reading, and because it was Christmas between us and for us that meant just that, us sitting together in a room reading, I was very surprised when my mother handed me a very small box and said merry Christmas.

I remember in high school sneaking into my mothers room. She was gone a lot, not out of town but she left for work before I went to school and she came back a good three hours after. I had the house to myself, most of the day if I decided to skip school. We spent our evenings always in the kitchen, always cooking together. She cooked and I did the talking. Then we ate and she went to sleep downstairs and I went into the loft and stayed up at night looking things up on the internet and then in the morning it happened again. But mostly during high school I skipped class. I was a straight A student and everyone trusted me and honestly it didn't matter or even come up. Sometimes when I stayed in I'd go in her bathroom, which always seemed the most private area of the house, and look through her things. There was one basket of earthy, woven material, something that she must have got on the sailing trip, and I'd look through it. There were a few necklaces (silver) and a few pendants that seemed to be from unknown islands. Tahiti? I didn't know. I won't know. I'll never know the intimate details of those places my mother went to. I know that she was there, I know she tied up the sailboat to unknown docks, swam to unknown beaches, I know she was in love. I have the pictures, to prove that they sailed around the world together. In the pictures, they are in love and they are young and they are in places I'll never go to. Especially not now. When I was that age, at that time, I had already thought about their comings and goings, and I had plenty of time to think about their divorce. I had already lived through it. We had the shells around the house, the tapestries and the photographs. But in that basket that my mom kept in her bathroom I found all the unknown details, the things and totems I didn't know or understand. The only thing I could recognize in the basket was the ring. I knew the gold ring was when my dad asked her to marry him, when they were really in love. I always picked it up, I always tried it on- skipping school before my mom got home, before I snuck out to punk shows (through the bedroom window, over the garage, she already knew). 

That Christmas when my mom handed me the small box, I expected something small, but not the small gold ring inside. She said, "you're twenty five, and I don't know what else to give you." It was the engagement ring, very simple, and yet the ring I'd always put on secretly, thinking about her and my dad, thinking about their trip, when the 36ft sailboat crossed the whole world with at first just them, and then finally me, inside its hull. I shouldn't have to explain how much I cried and cried, and have never taken the ring off since. 

2. One evening in my early twenties, I was sitting in the bathtub with my nose just below the water, eyes above, knees peaking out over, and just sort of floating with myself which has been something I've always liked to do. I've always liked to be in water. But I was sitting inside the tub and looking at the white porcelain container I was in and suddenly this wild memory came back to me, of being completely inside a very dark blue ceramic container. I remember the bathtub completely. It was very high, and tiled, which is unusual at least in Florida, and I remember when I got to the house that belonged to the tub always immediately wanting to be inside it, probably for the way the dark blue tiles turned the water in the tub a mysterious, middle of the ocean hue, and then floating inside that space for hours. The memory of the dark blue tiles came back to me, slowly (tidal) probably because it took me so long to realize that the tub belonged to the house that belonged to the woman that my dad was cheating on my mom with. 

I don't know what it's like for other people when they realize they're becoming someone they never wanted to be. I know how it felt for me, but how it happened isn't even something I'm capable of figuring out yet. But I remember an evening where I was literally begging someone I was in love with not to leave me. I don't know if that means anything to you. Let me start over. I was on my hands and knees, in an apartment I paid for surrounded by all my shitty possessions. I remember thinking I needed to sweep the next day, because there was cat hair all over the room, and I remember even thinking that whatever was coming next, it involved sweeping. So a part of me was being rational. The other part of me, you could argue, was drunk, or deliriously in love, or horrifically in love, whatever way you could choose to describe it- I can only say that I felt like if this person walked out that door and left me that I would absolutely without a doubt die (I didn't, and that was the worst part). The next day, when I woke up alone on the floor (getting a white cat was stupid but then I guess you could also argue I've never really been alone) I had this terrible memory come back to me of me, maybe around eight or nine, peering out of my bedroom door and seeing my mom on her hands and knees begging my dad not to leave her. I remember even the memory itself bothering me for so long, because my mom has always been such a strong person (she raised me after that for eight years) but we had never talked about it. I felt like, much like all my biggest fears, that everything had come full circle and I was the person she would never want me to be (that actually might still be true but let's come to that later). I pulled myself up by my boot straps (literally) and charged my phone and called her about it. About that night when I saw her begging my dad not to leave. Much like any memory, I had gotten it all wrong. My dad, as it turns out, had already gotten four DUIs that year, and was drunk and trying to leave to go the blue bath tub woman's house. My mom was just trying to get him not to drive drunk, and was trying to protect him.

After my mom got laid off from her job in Melbourne she moved to North Carolina to be closer to her family. In Asheville she briefly joined a dating website but canceled, because she thought she didn't have the time. Somehow, the only person that emailed her the whole time kept emailing her and bugging her for dates. They ended up bonding over cast iron skillets and kayaking. When he asked her to marry him last year (she was 60) she said yes. When I went to the wedding, on the outer banks of North Carolina, she gave me a small gold ring. It belonged to his ex wife, who died of cancer, but it's an opal, and apparently good luck when you give it to other people, and he wanted to welcome me to the family too, so we both got gold rings that day. I shouldn't have to explain how much I cried and cried, and have never taken the ring off since. 

*Karen Joy Fowler "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves." 

The Future is a Slow Panic

"things are still the same, they're still not ok
we're clocked on and strung out on the day to day.
there's more to life than love and comfort,
there's more to life than books you know. 
don't give up on the big fear-
the one that brought you here.
the future is a slow panic, 
a necromantic, pedantic, reaganomic legacy
that still pits the organic vs. the machines.
so don't give up on nihilism.
there's more to life than love and comfort
college won't get you off the hook.
there's more to life than self-satisfaction,
there's more to life than books (yes, much more).
you were right when you were angry and scared,
don't second guess your fears-
it's still you and me against the coming years."

             I spent a few days alone in my apartment. Thinking I'd be out of town, it felt a little like a treat to stay inside and look through books, listen to records I'd forgotten about, and drink wine in the bathtub. I found the Scenery zine (#14) Fire as a Metaphor and read it this evening, with no plans and a that creeping feeling of nostalgia (dangerous, I know). The last time I read it was probably a year or two ago, but I remember reading it at 19, before I ever lived in Gainesville, and it striking a powerful chord with me because of it's topics of gentrification and where the punk community intersects with classism and economics (the zine is an illustration of an academic paper about those things). Reading it later, after I'd moved to Gainesville, it meant something different, since I'd heard most of the bands it referenced and met some of the people. Recently I went to a wedding with some friends and we ended up hanging out with Mike Taylor (the artist, look him up!) and trying to sneak into pools long after they were closed. The lyrics above, from the back of the zine, are from a True Feedback Story song, a band I'd listened to long before I moved to Gainesville, before I even met Travis Fristoe, long before he'd end up writing me my letter of recommendation to an MFA program I didn't get accepted to (no fault to him). The zine reads so differently to me now, so many years later. Reading about the intersections of NW 3rd ave & 8th St (hey I went to a party there the other night) and Pleasant St. (oh I lived at that one shitty house over there for years). Just like the stories and the people intersecting in the zine, my stories have intersected with those people, those places, and this town. 
            Living in Gainesville I spend a lot of time thinking about it. Thinking hard about it. Why do I live here? The original pull that brought me here- punk music and a good job, still seems pretty worth it. It also has a funny way of bringing people together- like that the person I traded mix tapes with in college works with me at the bar. My bandmates from the early 2000s still play in bands I can sing along to. I can walk into a crowded room, bar, show, anywhere, and know someone and feel mostly at ease. I like my stories; separated into our two seasons: summer and winter.

Winter: climbing on the roof of Wayward Council (RIP), looking down through the skylight at my friends going wild for a show. Innumerable punk bands, fireworks, too much beer, fingerless gloves and  biking home to houses I could see the ground through the floorboards. Biking sometimes not home but just to a friends bed, crawling in just for any sort of animal warmth, knowing who's doors were always unlocked. The first time I did XTC and waking my friend up to talk about punk music until I felt better. The block, rows of punk houses, at least Josh Rey still lives there. 

Summer: sneaking into apartment complex pools. Swimming at night, alone, the cops showing up and not even caring, but usually swimming at night, with too many people, and the cops still not caring. Biking down SW 2nd ave to the Junkyard at 3am when the show is still going on, at least for a few hours, somehow everyone is there, not surprised to find each other at a punk show on a Tuesday night. The whole town being at the junkyard on some nights. The whole town being at Wayward Council some nights. The brick falling on my head during Crazy Spirit and watching the rest of their set anyway, blood pouring through my hair. Sitting on a porch, quietly, watching people pass by on bikes. Finding random parties and walking in and making friends with everyone there. Summer storms coming through at the worst times, every day. The rain and the thunder and the heavy oak trees, weighing everyone down until the weather breaks along with the tension. 

            I could write so many stories about living in Gainesville. I know a lot of people have. I try not to romanticize it too much, I know that way lies only danger. Still...I can appreciate how other people's stories about Gainesville have intersected with mine, and how the Ark, Wayward Council, and the Junkyard (we still have the 911 house at least) will eventually get replaced with other stories, other characters, and other nostalgia.     
            Summer in Gainesville isn't just oppressively hot. It's also when the students from the university are gone (most of them, thankfully) and the town sometimes becomes unbearably small. There's swimming, at least. Biking across town at night can be beautiful without traffic, and the late evenings are cool, bright, and quiet. The town sort of feels like ours, just for a little bit. There's also an anxiousness that comes from your friends leaving in August, moving to New York or Portland, Austin or San Diego. Everyone eventually leaves, the stories disconnect. And another year I stay behind, biking down the same streets, singing familiar songs. 

A Truer New Year

"Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, and perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next. Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn't miss an appointment, it never has. When it arrives we receive it without too much surprise, for no one who lives long enough can be surprised to find their biography has been molded by distant events, by other people's wills, with little or no participation from our own decisions. Those long processes that end up running into our life- sometimes to give it the shove it needed, sometimes to blow to smithereens our most splendid plans- tend to be hidden like subterranean currents, like tiny shifts of tectonic plates, and when the earthquake finally comes we invoke the words we've learned to calm ourselves, accident, fluke, and sometimes fate. Right now now there is a chain of circumstances of guilty mistakes or lucky decisions, whose consequences await me around the corner; and even though I know it, although I have the uncomfortable certainty that those things are happening and will affect me, there is no way I can anticipate them. Struggling against their effects is all I can do: repair the damages  take best advantage of the benefits  We know it, we know it very well; nevertheless, it's always somewhat dreadful when someone reveals to us the chain that has turned us into what we are, it's always disconcerting to discover, when it's another person who brings us the revelation, the slight or complete lack of control we have our own experience."

               Growing up, I realized not too long ago, involves doing a lot of the things you'd swore you'd never do when you were younger. I'm far more like likely to say, "I'll never do that again," than swear off something initially. Some of these things are fun, wild, irresponsible parts of being alive, like traveling to another country where you don't speak the language, swimming at night in the ocean, going on a blind date, etc...but more often than not they're more harrowing experiences, the kind where you actually learn the depth and dimension of consequences that stick with you for a long time. Like the decision you make early on in the evening when you realize you're about to have sex with someone other than the person you're dating, and it just sort of washes over and you and you think, this is going to be fine, this might still work out, and then later in every subsequent relationship knowing it's not other people you have to be watchful of, but yourself. Or losing touch with a best friend, and knowing there's been too much time to ever repair the distance between you, in years of miles, and remembering in all your other friendships after the importance of a letter, a late night phone call, a simple text touching base. 

             Sometimes there's also the reversal of things I've sworn off of, you know when you say you'll never talk to so-and-so again but then you slowly forget why you were so mad and you become close again and the cycle repeats itself weeks or months or years later. I'm bad at holding grudges. Which I think is mostly a good thing. It feels good to forgive someone. It's easier to forget slights and perceived insults than to let them simmer in the back of your head somewhere. And yet...

              Around this time about two years ago my dad wrote me a letter, outlining not only the ways I've fucked up as an individual but also with the weighty end note saying that he would rather not have a daughter than have me as his. We were very close when I was younger, but after my parents divorce and then my very hard-headed adolescence we went through years of spotty communication, to put it lightly. Every time we got in an argument I'd say, ok, that's it, I'm done, and then a year later I'd end up talking to him until we would have another, eventual blow out. The letter he sent me sent me on sort of an emotional tailspin, as you might imagine, and all our communication ceased. I was on tour maybe 8 or 9 months later with my band Rose Cross, and my step-mom called to tell me my dad was in the hospital, and had just had a heart attack. I didn't tell any of my band mates, until we were in Pensacola. 

              We were partying after the show, in a steep two story apartment that two really nice kids invited us home to. I can't remember their names for the life of me, but I remember being so cold that I kept waking up in the middle of the night to try and get their dogs to lie on the bed with me, and ended up sleeping under orphaned jackets and backpacks. Lying awake, so troubled by the cold (I remember it was a very cold winter because our Atlanta show was canceled because of an ice storm and all the roads in and out were shut down), I turned to my drummer and just said, "there's something I sort of need to do in the morning." We had been up doing drugs or drinking, or both, it does't matter, but Jon and I woke up and drove our dodge conversion van to the hospital there. I have no idea what he did while I was in the hospital, but it meant a lot to me that he woke up early and took me there, and then didn't tell anyone else in the band later when they asked where we went ("oh, just out for coffee"). No one in the hospital said anything to me, I remember thinking how wild it was that no one stopped me, and I wandered through blindingly white corridors until I found where he was suppose to be, connected to tubes and bandaged and gowned (he had ended up having some sort of open heart surgery, but it was only vaguely explained to me, in passing, months later). And my dad, Parker, who I really did like so much for so many years of my life, just laughed and said, "fancy seeing you here!" So that was that. We never talked about the letter. We exchanged some weird hugs, and then we resumed our normal, strained communication. 

              Recently we got into another fight, and we aren't speaking again. He insisted that I was a loser, and wasting my life, or ruining it, something to that effect. Coincided so perfectly with fall, when I'm already filled with a sort of shadowy, intangible nostalgia, like the creeping deep shadows that get colder and fuller, when there's something about the chill in the air and the smell of fires that makes me sad. I start thinking of all the ways I have fucked up. All those letters unsent. Rejection letters from the few graduate schools I actually wanted to go to. People younger than me moving on with their lives and having different adventures and experiences when sometimes I feel like I'm stuck on the same page, living the same story as four years ago. I think I know enough now not to say I'll never talk to him again, but I think I at least know better than to mail him the letter I wrote in response. I'll just tuck it away for now. I wrote him a letter explaining all the ways I'm not, in fact, taking anything for granted in my life and how even though I might not be any sort of a professional anything, there's at least a lot of things I enjoy doing and am lucky enough to have a good group of people around me who care about me...but why bother explaining anything to him? My biggest fear as a kid, and the one thing I can safely say I have sworn to never do, is that I'll never be like him. Still, the dialogue in my head, where I'm telling him everything I've done so far in my life and everything I still have a chance to do, and how lucky I am and who-the-fuck-wants-to-be-a-lawyer-anyway, all that? It's pretty good motivation. 

"They're all useless questions. There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken."*

             

             Maybe this is just a season for regret. My mom sent me an envelope full of essays I wrote as a kid about what I wanted to be when I grew up. Always an artist. Always a published writer, from a very young age. Reading those sloppily written essays, on faded, grey elementary school paper, touched a nerve in me for sure. I imagined schools I never went to, places I never moved to, opportunities put off or missed completely. Then, the weather gets beautiful all of a sudden. I read a few good books, went out walking, took a bubble bath, cooked dinner with my boyfriend, and everything once again seems alright. Fall once again presents itself, like a truer new year, full of possibilities and things to be learned. 

*The Sound of Things Falling, Juan Gabriel Vasquez