Hellooooo everyone, one and all, everyone who is reading, or no one at all.

It’s been a while!

After the insane push through final exams, I’ve just been enjoying some time to myself lately. It’s very strange to have a weekend with no deadline hanging over my head, but extremely, very, most definitely, nice. The weather is cheering up with a yellow happy-face sun and warmth, and I’m getting that seasonal urge to clean stuff up. Don’t worry; I won’t disappoint anyone by actually doing anything with that urge. But it’s still a nice urge.

I’ve been keeping abreast of all things fat, but find myself with very little to say, which I think is a common phenomenon all along the fatosphere. It’s hard to keep saying and saying when there are so many others saying so many similar things and saying them so very well! And there is the persistent high-wire effect that Lawrence Ferlinghetti once described, in a poem I was forced to read in community college, as “constantly risking absurdity.” Larry Spaghetti, even though your name sounds like a tasty pasta dish and I don’t much like your poetry, I think you hit the old nail on the head.

It is difficult to risk absurdity, even if you’re as silly as I am and actually sometimes seek out absurdity for the sake of it. But unintentional absurdity, especially if it’s perceived as offensive, is scary territory. And to push that “save” button knowing that everything you write is going to be scanned and picked apart by intelligent, critical minds — well, it’s thrilling, it’s everything one could ask for, and it’s also scary as shit.

I found out a funny thing; apparently my parents read, or at least have read, this blog! So, to risk a moment of intentional absurdity, I’d like to say “hello, Mom and Dad, I’m sorry for posting an icky poem about sexual harassment, and for the swear-words. You can skip those.”

Am I babbling? Right. This is a blog. The advent of the fatosphere feed has left me with this feeling that I must remain strictly on-topic at all times, railing against the inequities and injustices of our world, culture, and media. But it’s a blog. And you’re reading it. You’re reading a blog — how does that make you feel?

In my down-time, I read two books I’ve read multiple times before, On the Road (except this time, I read the “original scroll” version, which I liked a lot more than the usual published version, which I’d read twice but always had that “edited-for-TV” sensation about) and The House of Mirth (an old, old favourite in paperback with torn cover and yellowing leaves), and that was pretty nice.

I wrote a poem or two, not terribly good, but existing, and possibly paving the road that will eventually lead to good poetry, which is something I mess with in my idle time between quitting perfectly good jobs and failing classes in which we discuss the technical aspects of poop.

So, in that vein, here is a poem about someone who would have been 82 next month.

“Grandma”

You called me slower than molasses in January, and
I was mad at you for not understanding centrifugal force
when I innocently swung your purse by the strap like
a perilous carnival wheel on the gangway of the marina,
where tiny electric jellyfish and freckled seals lived,
and ham-fisted starfish clung to the sides of stones like
old people to their walkers and outmoded swearwords.

You taught me to kill things, polished me of my sensitivities
with the force of your 200-grit personality. One incident
of getting caught setting black snapper free from the stern
of the Laura B. cured me, and it wasn’t long before I could
wield the net and the club without a tear, once coming down
on the head of a ling cod with such force, we had to turn the boat
around and retrieve the club, happily designed for just such instances
to float on the oily swells.

We slept with the window open, in the same huge bed, under
a dusty painting of a wrangler roping a calf in some yellow
prairiescape. Bedtime was Rod Serling and rootbeer floats
and then NyQuil for my restless legs and night terrors. I woke
you on more than one occasion with my screaming. I was eleven
and for some reason you loved me. I didn’t do anything to deserve it,
certainly not more than your own children.

Each morning of summer vacation was 5am and five layers of clothes,
shoving off from Citizens Dock, and cutting up squid in the stern
until dinner was caught. I practiced imitating the tone of the foghorn,
a single melancholy boop that turned your careful navigation on its head
until you told me to knock it the hell off. Sometimes I sang sad little
mermaid songs to myself very quietly, since I’d been told my voice was ugly,
and I didn’t know until later that you heard me and listened.

I didn’t know that people might think it strange, an old woman and
her bookish granddaughter heading out to sea each day in a mere cork
of a vessel, and the neighbors treated me rough, making fun of my city clothes
and my city ways, me not knowing that compared to where I was, where I came
from was big, and I had the nerve to show up on the back of a motorcycle, missing
my hair ribbon to boot. The kids on the street wanted to play too often, while I was
falling in love with my first computer and wanting to avoid their swearwords and
precocious sex talk and sketchy stepfathers.

I was glad for the salmon trolling and our illicit barbed hooks, evading the game
warden and checking the dredge for chowder-clams, and the tiny bookshop near the
dock that sold my favorite paperback pap. You gave me a dollar for washing dishes,
but forbade my intimacies with stray cats, whose food I bought with the dollar.
I think you were confused by my devotion to old people, my reluctance to play
Hungry Hippos with the girl down the street, but eventually accepted me as a friend
among other gray-haired friends.

I was afraid to start seventh grade and thought I must learn how to wear make-up
and big hair or I would be eaten alive by my robot-monster contemporaries, who
didn’t know from ling cods or redwoods or motorcycles or computers or poems but
could make my life a misery all the same. You left a note, unsigned, on my C: drive
to let me know it would be ok. I wish I had it with me now.

You were cranky and sour, Head of the Joint Committee to Make Me Clean My Plate,
and one day in July you wrote me that you would kill yourself and then you did.
I’m not sure anyone will ever forgive you for that, but I can’t see you being
any less contentious in death than you were in the seventy-six years before.
It suited you, and I can say to you now, without anger, you were absolutely
what you had to be, and I’m happy to claim you if no one else is.