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Welcome letter to the Witness Protection Program

May 25, 2018

Hey there, Maggie! I mean, Kimberly.

This is just an informal letter to welcome you to the Witness Protection Program. Isn’t this so exciting? You will receive a more comprehensive packet of information later this week, including a handy page of FAQs.

Please note that U.S. Marshals will arrive at your house tomorrow to ransack your belongings, burn your records, and destroy your files. Do not be alarmed by this — ctrl-alt-deleting your life is a routine part of the process.

We’re also going to have to toss that nameplate necklace you bought from the mall because it made you feel like Carrie in Sex and the City. (Frankly, you should have ditched that in 2001.) We’re also going to need your Delta Zeta sweatshirts, your engraved jewelry box, and the personalized license plate from your bike when you were 6.

Now for the most important part of this process — your physical transformation. We like to call this “middle-aging.”

Middle-aging involves adding a few pounds to the most awkward places on your body. Maybe you’ve always had great arms or sleek thighs. No more. Pulling on pants will soon become a chore that requires at least one shot of espresso and a pep talk from your life coach. If you’ve always enjoyed a flat stomach, congratulations! That was then. Now it looks like a bagel.

Your hair is going to change texture, likely to fine, thin, and dull, while your skin will best be described as “crepe-y.” Definitely save your pennies, because you’re going to buy a lot of expensive skincare products that are about as effective as magic beans, even if you’ve always insisted you’ll grow old gracefully like Helen Mirren.

The middle-aged you will also enjoy some fun, new hobbies, such as binging The Good Wife, reading 1.5 pages of a lackluster Jojo Moyes novel before falling asleep, and responding to infrequent party invitations with “Ten o’clock … at NIGHT?!”

If I could pass along one piece of advice about this process, it’s that you should invest in clothing with a lycra blend. Also look at yourself in the mirror the same way you might look at an eclipse: With care and probably with sunglasses.

Wait, that’s two pieces of advice. Whatever.

Most of all, relax. Once you have middle-aged, rest assured that you can move through the world without attracting attention. Yes, it will be difficult for you to procure a drink from the bar or receive help from a sales associate while shopping. But that’s a small price to pay for your continued safety and comfort.

As a bonus, you will now breeze through life with an ease you never thought possible. Tell a great joke or give a dissertation on supply-side economics, it doesn’t matter. People aren’t listening. Say whatever the hell you want.

You could actually rob a bank and nobody would even notice. Seriously. You could have a sack of cash money in each hand and tango naked past the teller window before branch manager Chad even glances in your direction. Heck, take out a security guard while you’re at it. Chad won’t even blink. You could literally get away with murder.

No. Don’t do that.

Best,

Your friends at the Witness Protection Program

Reclaiming My Anger

January 11, 2018

I spent the bulk of 2017 trying to turn my anger into something else. I wrote letters to politicians. I signed petitions. I made phone calls. I meditated and yogaed. I made playlists littered with Rage Against the Machine. Conversely, I crafted “calm” playlists, songs that were supposed to turn down the burbling anger and bring it to a simmer.

I lost friends because I was mad.

“You used to be funny, but now you’re angry,” one man said in a message before he unfriended me on Facebook.

“Couldn’t you be less political?” said another friend who didn’t agree with my political beliefs.

“Everything is art. Everything is politics.” —Ai Weiwei

There was a lot to be furious about in 2017.

“I am fucking furious,” read an email that a friend forwarded to me, an email that had been forwarded by another friend, and so on. I’m not sure who the original writer was, but the message detailed several fury-inducing points about the 2016 election.

I agreed with every word. And then I wondered why we were whispering.

I also spent 2017 teaching my 3-year-old son about emotions.

One of my worst fears is that my boy will grow into someone who can’t communicate his feelings and lets it all fester inside. So we talk about respect for our feelings and how they are valid. Passion is good. Conviction is important. Anger is meaningful. Every emotion helps us grow and understand our relationship with the world and the people around us. Nothing positive comes from suppressing them.

It’s advice I haven’t been taking myself. For all my effort to cope with my fury, to channel my emotions onto a different path, what I didn’t do was allow my anger to be anger.

Toward the end of 2017, I read “Priestdaddy” by Patricia Lockwood, a memoir about growing up with a Catholic priest for a father.

“As long as I lived under his roof, I told myself that I had no temper, that I would never speak that knot of heat I felt so often in my throat, forced down into my ribcage, sent flowing into my fingertips. But I belong to myself now, and I can admit it,” she writes. “When I sit down at the desk, the anger radiates out of me in great bronze spikes, like holiness in the old paintings, and a sermon rises up in me as if it had been waiting for breath, and puts itself together bone to bone.”

She follows that up with this, a passage that leaves me breathless. I keep a photo of it on my phone now.

“I’m not interested in heaven unless my anger gets to go there too. I’m not interested in a happy eternity unless I get to spend an eternity on anger first. Let me speak for the meek and say that we don’t want the earth, if that’s where all the bodies are buried. If we are resurrected at the end of the world, I want us to assemble with a military click, I want us to come together as an army against what happened to us here. I want us to bring down the enemy of our suffering once and for all, and I want us to loot the pockets, and I want us to take baths in the blood.”

Yes. Oh god yes.

When I was an avid skydiver, I had a lot of conversations about fear with many of the other jumpers. A common thing I heard was, “When I stop being scared, I know it’s time to stop jumping.”

I feel that way now about those great bronze spikes of anger radiating out from me.

When I stop getting angry at injustice, when I stop feeling passionate about my beliefs, when I stop raging, that’s when I’ve stopped being human.

So I’m reclaiming this. Now. Today.

What do I want? I don’t want my anger to be negative anymore. I want it to be the driving force, the arrow that slices through all the noise and pierces my target, the thing that inspires me to get shit done.

2017 in summary

December 31, 2017

The world's cutest toddler, running along a beach

My focus word for 2017 was “abundance,” and I spent all year trying my darnedest to cultivate that.

And failing. I failed so hard, you guys. My failures were abundant.

Financially, it was one of my driest years since I started freelancing. There were long and seemingly endless spans of time where nothing was accepted or published, even though I wrote, pitched, queried, and followed up obsessively. At one point I read an article that advised writers to aim for 100 rejections per year, and I cackled like a mad woman in a Brontë novel — I was hitting about 100 rejections (or non-responses) per month.

It was depressing. It felt like I was trying to climb a mountain, and even though I was doing my part, I couldn’t quite get there. I researched the trail, I showed up in hiking boots, I carried all the right gear, I had the motivation and desire to put in the work. Then mere steps from the top, I toppled for whatever reason, forcing me to start all over again.

Just when I considered calling it quits, I attended the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop in magical Granada, Spain. It helped recharge my batteries on just about every level, from inspiring me to write new things and look at my work in a different way to satisfying my itchy feet and proving I can still travel solo.

Soon after, I placed some of my favorite pieces, like this essay for LitHub about Silent Book Club, a piece about wildflowers and making my own roots in the desert for Palm Springs Life (the online version is a little wonky with some repeated paragraphs, but you can see it here anyway), and a funny/sad essay about a rat for Mutha Magazine.

I also started hosting a radio show about books with Tod Goldberg. I received an acceptance from an outlet that has been on my byline bucket list for decades. I registered for the Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop, because I want to find my way toward humor writing again. I read 51 books.

Other good things happened: A road trip to Vegas, a quick jaunt to Portland, a terrific visit with my sister. I reconnected with old friends and made some new ones. As a family, Jason, Everest, and I slept in a tipi under the stars in Pioneertown, hiked through a couple of Canada’s spectacular national parks, and explored Vancouver, now one of our favorite cities.

Also Everest turned 3, and he has grown into someone I genuinely love to hang out with. He’s funny and weird and makes me laugh until I wheeze. We have dance parties, take silly selfies, and haven’t found a trail yet that we don’t want to explore.

In November Everest and I hiked 30 miles together, and most of those were quiet morning jaunts, clambering over rocks, scraping up knees, and listening to birdsong. I cherish every one of those miles.

Now we’re ending on a high note. We just finished a family road trip that was just about as perfect as those things get. We started by seeing the Yayoi Kusama exhibit at The Broad in Los Angeles, and stayed the night in Solvang, a quirky Danish-themed town. Then we spent a few easy days at Morro Bay, listening to seals bark, running on the beach, and sipping hot cocoa as the sun sank.

Our last morning in Morro Bay is a memory that I hope lasts, as it seems to sum up the whole year for me. It’s Everest, barreling down the pastel beach, gathering sand dollars by the handful. He carries them to me, holds these urchins to his chest, makes careful piles of them. He tosses some into the ocean; the rest he tucks into the pockets of my old college sweatshirt.

This is abundance. My pockets hang heavy with sand and salt and shells, and my heart is so full it’s buoyant. I am sand dollar rich, and I have all the things that matter.

My hope for 2017

January 1, 2017

It’s New Year’s Eve 2016. I’m freshly showered, about to get ready to go out.

I’m sitting in my bathrobe when my son, Everest, notices a cut on my leg. First, he crouches down to examine it. Then he kisses it, because that’s how health and wellness works for 2-year-olds. Find the hurt, press lips to it, make it better.

A minute later he carries a pillow over, carefully places it on my leg and says, “Right here. Hold it right here.”

“Why?”

“So you won’t get hurt again,” he says.

It is a fragile thing, this love. Sometimes I don’t want to move for fear of crushing it.

I hold the pillow to my leg for a long time, afraid to let the moment go. When I finally do, I tell my son that I’m all better, and it’s true. The cut is minimal, unremarkable. It will not leave a scar. But I want my child to know that what he did matters. I want him to know that tenderness has the capacity to heal. That his love is momentous even in its smallness.

Too often it feels like the world is whooshing past, like I’ve been plunged into a loud and rushing river, and this — this tangle of love — is the knotted rope that gives me something to hold on to. It’s pure and precious and good.

We are just a few hours into the new year now, and the future is too far away for any of us to see. It will certainly bring battles and wounds. Some of us will carry scars. Some will never heal.

My hope for 2017 is that as we move forward, we find ways to protect rather than inflict. That in the face of fear, confusion, blind panic, and downright evil, we move from arguments into action. That we find a pillow and apply it liberally.

An ode to the purple one

April 21, 2016

I’ve said before that when Prince dies, it’ll be the celebrity death that destroys me. But as I sit here tonight, listening to the livestream of Prince music from a Minneapolis public radio station, I don’t feel wrecked. Not yet.

I think a part of me refuses to believe that I exist in a world without Prince. Or that a world can exist without Prince. Because as long as I can remember, my world has been infused with a tiny pixie funk sex god yelping about raspberry berets and “Trojans, some of them used,” and it was extraordinary. Prince is as seamlessly woven into my childhood as grape popsicles and roller skates. He just always was.

Over the coming weeks, a lot of people will write a lot of remembrances about Prince, and they will have more authority than I do. They will be involved in the music industry, or they will have attended more Prince concerts, or they will have something really unique to contribute. I don’t have that.

What I can say is that I grew up in a squat brick home in a tiny Ohio neighborhood, and Prince was an essential part of my life. Even there. His purple reign extended that far and deep.

• First grade, my mother’s vanity. I see Prince on TV, and before school one day, I use my mom’s eyebrow pencil to draw a thin mustache over my lip. “Because it’s pretty, that’s why,” I argue as she wipes it away with a cotton ball.

• Third grade, bathroom floor. It’s the quietest room in the house, so that’s where I go to record songs from the radio onto a blank Sanyo cassette. After I record “When Doves Cry,” I will play it so fiercely, so ceaselessly, that the tape itself will run thin and become knotted inside the player. I will untangle it and rewind the tape back into the case with a pencil, and that will happen over and over, until it’s finally rendered unlistenable.

• Fifth grade, Desiree’s house. It’s my first time seeing the video for “Kiss.” While the song is pure sugary pop, the video is the most confusing, frisky, lusty thing I’ve ever seen. Prince is pure, uncorked sex, gleefully wiggling around in leather pants and a half shirt, while Wendy, clad in twice as much fabric, plays guitar. Meanwhile, a veiled woman in lingerie and aviator glasses slinks and writhes. I don’t understand their relationship, the three of them, only that it’s visually exciting. And though I know something sexy is happening, it’s also the first time I’ve encountered something simultaneously hot and playful.

• Sixth grade, the community swimming pool. My friends invent this pointless game called “Song Cannon,” which involves doing cannonballs off the high dive into the pool. The kicker? In that space between jumping and plunging into the water, you have to shout a line from your favorite song. The first time I yell, “U got the look!” The next time, “Your body’s heck a sl— … (glub-glub)”

• Eighth grade, the dank, wood-paneled downstairs of my parents’ house. Spontaneous dance party with “Batdance” at full volume.

• High school, Kim’s house. My friend Kim is secretly dating a guy in our class who already has a girlfriend. He gives Kim a mixtape that opens with the Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” and ends with “Purple Rain.” It doesn’t even matter what songs are sandwiched in between. Kim plays the whole tape in her bedroom twice, and as the music careens through hunger and longing and sorrow, the air is charged, electric.

I could go on and on. The time a man on a Greyhound bus mistook me for Apollonia. Sneaking out of work early from the Cincinnati Enquirer to see Prince play a 26-song set. Standing front and center for Prince’s Coachella set, when he trotted out Morris Day and The Time. All the years I made a Prince lyric my mantra: “I don’t wanna die, I’d rather dance my life away.”

And of course, all the nights made seriously funky with purple and ruffles, sparkles and a wink.

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