The Return of The Clarion Blog-A-Thon!

So as you’ll recall, I took a two-week break in the middle of the Clarion Blog-A-Thon to deal with my mother’s medical issues – but now I’m back, and I want your dollars!  But no worries, I give value for coin.  There are fabulous prizes for donation, and today is no different.
If you’ll recall, the previous prizes for donating $5 are:

• The challenge coin from Myke Cole’s Shadow Point series (plus a copy of the book, if you haven’t read it!)
• An ARC of Catherynne Valente’s “The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led The Revels There.”
• The book detailing the making of my Clarion classmates’ fencing-and-dance fusion “A Thousand Natural Shocks.”

Today’s prize involves another Clarion classmate of mine – the frock star Monica Byrne, who’s become an up-and-coming playwright.  Her most recent play, “What Every Girl Must Know,” is a fascinating feminist play about four girls in the 1914 reform school, living out fantasy lives of freedom as they read smuggled pamphlets of sexual education.  (It’s worth noting that at the time, people were locked up for passing out information on birth control – because simply the idea that birth could be controlled was crazy dangerous.)  The play was well-reviewed – but here!  Look at the trailer video for it!

If this all sounds very interesting – and it should – Monica has graciously agreed to provide a signed copy of her play, as well as a one-off poster she’ll have printed especially for you!  Donate $5 and get into our raffle of many, many prizes to come.
The reason she’s willing to donate prizes is because, like me, Monica’s writing was helped tremendously by going to the Clarion Writers’ Workshop.  We critiqued each other, we savaged each other’s stories, we agonized over what this week’s tale would be, we analyzed how to make things better… and by the time we were done, we were stronger writers.  Monica’s already planning her next play, and she’s asking for information about how athletes have sex inside the village at the Olympic games.  Personally, I can’t wait.
Plus, if you donate $10, you’ll gain entry into the super-secret Clarion Echo community, where I am plotting my next novel.  Later today, I’ll be rewriting my first chapter, with an eye towards actually generating character conflict and getting past the first act.  I hope to have the whole thing plotted in the next three weeks, and the feedback in the community has been phenomenal, so please – donate if you can.  Every bit helps.

The Tintinnabulation Of Those Little Doggy Bells

This is my mother’s dog, Koshi:

I’d say Koshi is five pounds soaking wet, but as it turns out she’s six pounds.  In any case, Koshi is the least harmful dog in the history of canines.  I’m pretty sure that if I laid limp on the floor completely naked, Koshi still could not seriously injure me.
But at night she becomes a terror.
See, at night my mother’s house is very dark.  We sleep on the far side, in a bedroom around a corner, where there is a bathroom outside.  And when you rise to pee in the middle of the night, Koshi – ever-excitable – hears the noise and comes to investigate.
There is something fucking terrifying about hearing her little doggy-tags, in the stygian stillness of the night, approaching you, growing closer.  It’s the blind knowledge that something is stalking you, growing louder, coming around a corner.  I thought I was a fool for being scared and ducking into the bathroom before she arrived… but as it turned out, Gini was afraid, too.
We know, in daylight, that Koshi is a little fuzzer-pup, harmless as a fruit fly.  But when darkness settles, and those caveman instincts set in, and we’re dressed in flimsy pajamas half-naked, we know that something is coming towards us and yet we’re not entirely sure what it is.  The logical brain tells us it’s a dog; the animal brain tells us to run.  So we duck into the bathroom and slam the door.
The night changes things.  All those years of civilization get stripped away and suddenly you’re running in the night. From a dog no bigger than a football.

This Is Not Going to Be One Of My More Popular Essays

Two blocks away from the ruins of 9/11 was a Burlington Coat Factory that some muslims wanted to turn into a mosque. Conservatives went berserk, claiming that the mosque was an insult to all who had died in the Twin Towers attack, that it was too soon, and (not all, but enough) claimed that they didn’t want this statement of a religion they disagreed with in their city.
At which point liberals argued back that America is about free speech. If the space is available, and the Muslims are willing to pay, then they should have the right to open up a temple. Yes, Muslims may be an unpopular religion in certain circles, and no, you may not like some of the causes that this temple may be funding, but your like of their goals is irrelevant. Freedom of speech applies to people you disagree with – and the true test of America’s values is not, “How do we tolerate people we like?” but rather, “How do we handle people with opinions at odds with everything we believe?”
As long as they’re not doing anything illegal, liberals argued, the Muslims should have the right to be there. And they were Very Sure about this.
Then the mayor of Boston slammed Chick Fil-A, urging them in an angry letter to “back out of their plans to locate in Boston.” And liberals shared this letter with a great whoop and WHOO GO TOM MENINO and great acclaim.  Seriously. It was spooged all over my Twitter and Facebook accounts.
Yet I think: What if the mayor of New York had expressed similar sentiments about the mosque?
Before we continue, I’d just like to express my credentials: I’m a big fan of gay marriage. Despite the fact that there is a Chick Fil-A literally across the street from me, and they are my favorite fast food chain, I have not eaten there in two years because of their anti-gay fundings. When the Muppets pulled out of Chick fil-A’s business, I immediately posted a link to Twitter that said, “Muppets do the right thing,” and I think that people have the absolute right to vote with their feet. This isn’t about me not being intensely pro gay marriage, or intensely anti Chick Fil-A, so if you’re starting a response along those lines, stop, delete your comment, and start over.
This is about freedom of speech for people you fucking hate.
But Ferrett, you’ll argue, this is a snack stand, not a temple!, to which I say, “So you’d have been okay with people telling Muslims that opening up a Muslim-run dry cleaning business close to the mosque was an insult?” Or Chick Fil A firing someone because they’re Jewish, because hey, work is different than worship and we only wanna hire nice happy Christians? No, guys, “freedom of speech” doesn’t mean “You get to be religious in firmly-marked areas with big symbols warning you so you know what’s going on,” but rather “People of all religions, even the icky ones, have an equal right to worship AND work, and express those beliefs through both.”
(And, you know, it’s not like all Muslims – particularly the fundamentalist ones – are a great bunch of well-adjusted people. All religions are nut magnets, and there were some very real concerns about where the funds the mosque raised were going. A lot of the mosques were funded by more virulent sects of Islam, even if the one in New York seemed to be largely run by a more peaceful branch.  If your worries about funding anti-gay causes are justified, then at least some percentage of the anti-mosque sentiments carried a similarly valid concern.)
Either way, you have a person in power telling someone, “I don’t like your religious beliefs, I don’t like how you spend your money, and I want you out of my fucking town.”  And your attempts to draw distinctions between that and the mosque are splitting some mighty fine hairs.
I hate Chick Fil-A, and I think they should have every right to build in Boston without having to worry about having permits pulled or being hassled because of their repugnant, stupid, backwater, bigoted, terrified, swamp-ass beliefs. That’s freedom of speech. They should have every right to go to Boston, build a franchise, have a constant stream of gays and gay-friendly straights picketing it and handing out fliers, spend months dealing with bad PR as the funds slowly run out and they realize that their anti-gay stance is costing them so much business they can’t afford to stay, and then maybe they’ll make a better choice. Or pay the cost of their opinions, because every opinion has a cost and if you’re willing to pay that price then you should be able to carry on with it.
The government, however, should not get involved.
This is not a popular stance, because so many liberals I know treat religion as though it were a disease. But that’s the point. Even if you dislike Chick Fil A, they have the right to their say – and part of their say involves selling chicken sandwiches to make a living. And a mayor telling fundamentalist Christians, “You are not welcome here” spreads the message to Christians that yes, they are persecuted, here’s the proof! And those dang liberals don’t practice what they preach.
Let’s practice. Let’s allow religious-run businesses to stand or fall on their own merits. And if it turns out that the fine people of Boston aren’t so pro-gay as to abandon Chick Fil-A, then I say that’s a problem we need to face in a different way than harassing them until they leave, and issuing bold threats from official pulpits. But as a government, let us make room for people of all stripes, even the foul and corrupt stripes of anti-gay bigots.
(And if you’re a conservative who is cheering now, yet was against the mosque? Shut the fuck up. The point I’m making is that we shouldn’t be as bigoted and closed-minded as you. If we should be ashamed, you should be ashamed doubly so.)

Update

In case you don’t use Twitter for your trending news, I got the news on my mother: she’s all right for now.
Essentially, the way this particular disease works is that if her blood level of toxoplasms hits 20%, she’s hit what we call the “organ-damaging” phase of the disease, and things start to go downhill really quick.  She’s at 10-15%, which is high…. But she was at 10% fourteen years ago, so it just may be that she’s at chronic risk for this sort of thing.  This wouldn’t be unusual, in our family.  My Uncle Tommy was HIV+ back in the day when HIV was a death sentence, and he lived for twenty years after that.
Now, chances are that she will get a fatal disease in her lifetime.  That sucks.  And the doctor indicated the presence of a gene that indicates that if and when this turns active, it will be virulent.
But in dealing with cancer, “Not today” is your triumph.  She’s okay.  And going to be okay for the next six months, at which point they’ll check her blood and see how things are going. I’m pretty sure it’ll be okay.
Now I’m going to collapse.

What's In The Box? What's In The Box?

I envision my mother’s cancer diagnosis as resting inside a blue envelope, even though it’s probably a printout on a desk. Or an email. Regardless, someone knows whether she’s going to die of bone cancer, and we do not. At least not for another ninety minutes.
This isn’t Schrodinger’s cat. There is no theory, here; somewhere, there is a clear answer as to my mother’s future, locked and ready. Nothing we do can affect the outcome. I spent all of last night looking at her skin, watching her as we drank and talked, wondering if underneath that muscle were bones that were festering with tumors or just a healthy set of calcium and marrow.
The answer is somewhere. We’ll know soon.
The uncertainty is grinding us down.
I was always fascinated by the Oscar process, and always looked forward to the annual behind-the-scenes showcase where a small, private company tallies the votes. Two men bring a locked suitcase to the Oscars and stand off-stage, handing out envelopes; only they know the contents. Out in the audience, the nominees try to stay calm for the cameras, soaking expensive gowns in sweat… but their fate is known. Two men have seen the future, a future that will be revealed shortly by a handsome man in a tuxedo, ripping open a blue envelope that was sealed three days ago.
There is no uncertainty here. There is merely a secret that will change someone’s lives, words kept in darkness until the time is right.
In eighty minutes, my mother and I will be seated in a doctor’s office, and at some point after that they will bring us news. I suspect they’ve read the results by now; if I were a doctor, I know I’d want to be emotionally prepared in case I had to drop some bad news in someone’s lap. The doctor may be a little nervous, too, or a little happy; already, the shockwaves from this news or lack-of-news are starting to rumble across our lives, affecting loved ones and strangers alike.
But the news is there. Waiting. Lurking. Freedom or death.
Seventy-five minutes to go.

The Annoyingness Of Me

In our personal mythology, I’m famous for almost having destroyed my marriage with unnecessary freakouts.  I used to panic all the time over silly things, needing reassurance and proof of love over the dippiest of interactions.  I look back at those days, and I’m actively embarrassed at myself.
I’m still pretty childish, sad to say.  Gini deals with it well because she’s known me long enough to handle me, but other partners have looked at the fully-unpacked neuroses of The Ferrett and said, “Nope.  I’ll be over here, with a better guy.”  Which I can only agree seems like a reasonable conclusion.
Except.
Except when there’s real shit going down, I’ll manage.
It’s noteworthy that our marriage was saved when Gini shattered her shoulder and was in serious medical trouble, needing roofing screws to hold her left arm together… and I shut the fuck up.  I became the caretaker, holding off all of my usual bullshit worries until the real trouble was over.  In that moment, Gini saw a different side of me, and fell in love with the competent man I can sometimes be.
I’m in a situation where I may have to be that strong again.  For a couple of years, maybe.  And I guess it’s good to know that when the shit hits the fan, I’ll do what needs to be done – it’s better than the alternative, certainly – but it’s a constant nag on my thoughts: “Why can’t you be that way all the time?  Why does your best side only emerge during crisis mode?”
We’ll know tomorrow what the diagnosis is, and I hope all is well. I really do.  And if that portion of me is needed, I’ll be as strong as I have to be to see a loved one through the end of their lives.  And I know I can do that.  I just wish that all of my silly freakouts weren’t indulged so extravagantly during the non-critical times, so that I could be a little less annoying to the ones I love in times of peace.
 

The Call That Never Came

My friend Cislyn gave me a first-time challenge: “Ferrett, will you write a guest entry for me for LJ Idol?”  According to the rules, she’s allowed one “Champion” to come in and write an entry conforming to a theme she hasn’t done.  And since I like Cislyn, and I’ve never participated in LJ Idol, I looked at her list of prompts and chose “The call that never came.”
——————————–
You have to realize: she’s the only woman who knowingly broke my heart.
You could say it was only fair, because I broke her heart first.  I met Abigail when I was nineteen, and the world was so full of shallow and immature women, and Abigail was crazy-deep.  She read up on serial killers.  She wrote poetry by hand, which she kept in a velvet-bound book.  She rented art films from the Sono playhouse and played them late at night, having marathons of foreign film and obscure directors, and occasionally she even took the stage at her school plays.
I was so shallow, back then.  I’d read one book by Herman Hesse, but by God I could go on for hours about how it had transformed me.  I’d just started listening to Frank Zappa, but before I put the tape on, I’d tell people to hush – this was going to change their life.  And when they heard the music, I’d watch their faces intently in the hopes that it would go from mundane listening to goggle-eyed amazement, then a fawning gratitude as they realized the window I had just opened for them.
That never happened, but I kept acting like putting on the cassette tape was escorting someone into the Pope’s private chambers.
I stank of vinegar and water, immune to the stench of my own douchiness.  And I think I sensed a fellow bullshitter in Abigail, who I don’t think had watched nearly as many foreign films as she claimed, and she probably read up on serial killers only because she knew other people found it quirky and bizarre.
But together, we genuinely opened up each other’s worlds.  Maybe I’d only read one of Hesse’s books, but that was more than she’d read – and encouraged, she read both Siddartha and Steppenwolf.  So started an arms race, as I couldn’t admit to not having read Siddartha, so I crammed it in one night and then read the Glass Bead Game just to ensure I stayed ahead.  And together we played the “Oh, you haven’t seen that?” game, where we’d pretend astonishment that we hadn’t seen this obscure foreign film that nobody in their right minds would watch.
So, one experience at a time, we stepped away from being posers and became actually educated people.
But I was also dating another girl, her best friend, and after a while I felt I had to choose.  (I may not have had to; this was long before I heard of the idea of polyamory, and even though both were aware it felt like cheating.)  And I was too addicted to playing the white knight back then – because when I had to choose between the girl whose company I really enjoyed, and the girl who’d never dated before and needed me, I flung myself on Excalibur.  I didn’t ask “Which one would make me happier?” but rather “Which one needed me more?” – and I chose the neurotic one whose feelings would be most hurt by my abandonment.
Worse, I told Abigail that.  “It’s not you,” I said.  “It’s that it would break Alena’s heart for me to leave.  You’re stronger, you can get past that.”
Yeah, I was a fool.
So Abigail left, stung, and I dated Alena for another six months until it eventually fell apart in a tangle of mixed neuroses.  When it was done, the summer was nearly over, but I still missed Abigail.  And I missed our late-night cuddle sessions of watching Philip Glass films and cheap horror flicks, and I called…
…and she was available.
We dated for two weeks, in a flurry of intensity – seeing each other every night, knowing she’d go off to college soon, relishing every minute together because we loved each other and had re-found each other.  We drank coffee and discussed philosophers.  We exchanged poetry.  I fell stupidly in love.  I wondered why I’d ever dated Alena.  I told her I’d always be there for her.  I wondered how I could live without her when she went to college, but she promised she’d call every day and we’d be together for sure.
Then she left for college, and I didn’t hear from her for a week.
Oh, I called.  But she didn’t answer.  I called her parents to make sure I had the right number, and they answered with a strange exhaustion that yes, you had the right number.  So why wasn’t she getting back to me?
My friends told me this was common.  First week of college is hectic.  Some people get caught up.  She’ll probably get back to you.  But I curled into a ball, knowing something was wrong, a looming shadow I couldn’t quite make out.
Finally, I got a letter in the mail that I can’t tell you exactly what it said because I tore it up, but it was something like this:
“Ferrett:
“You should know that I’ve spent the last two weeks despising you.  You broke my heart when you chose Alena.  So I figured I would make you fall in love with me, and now you can know what it’s like to have your heart broken.  Nothing I’ve said to you is true, and I’ve already found another boyfriend here at Kent State.  So suffer.”
I got very drunk.  Very, very drunk.  And spent the next two weeks feeling like she’d kicked a hole in my heart.  And spent a month where none of my friends dared to say her name in my presences, because I’d go off on a long black rant about that decieving whore, and eventually it sorta healed.  But I was always furious at her for leading me on; it was hard enough for me to be happy.  Hard enough to trust.  She’d just hurt that considerably.
And, eventually, I recovered.
Three years passed.  Then the phone rang at two in the morning.
“Ferrett?”
“…Abigail?”
“I wasn’t sure if this was still your number,” she said, icy calm, still holding herself at a distance.  The distance she’d secretly had all along.
“So… Why are you calling?”
“Remember when you said you’d always be there for me?”
“…yes….”
“I think I’m about to kill myself.  And you’re the last person I know who might talk me out of it.”
Well, that was a conversation starter.
I don’t remember what had driven her to suicidal thoughts so desperate that she’d call me, of all people, but I do remember there’d been some traditionally college-silly set of fights that had alienated many of her friends, and her parents were being dicks, and probably, I don’t know, her grades were shit too, why not?  All I remember was in that moment, I had a choice.
I could return hurt with hurt.  I didn’t think she was all that serious.  I’m pretty sure if I’d hung up the phone, she would have had a very bad night and maybe gotten blind drunk, and perhaps done something stupid, but she’d almost certainly have lived.
But I didn’t want to leave her alone.
So we talked for three hours, me doing my best to counsel her, asking all sorts of questions and explaining how she could dig her way out of this, and telling my signature bad jokes, and doing everything I could to make her feel human.
“You feel better?” I eventually asked.
“Yeah,” she said.  She didn’t feel great, but it was enough that she could get up the next morning and feel like there was some hope.  “You know we’re not friends.”
“I know,” I said.  “Call if you need to.”
“I love you,” she said.
“Love you too,” I said.  And those were the last words we ever spoke.
I don’t know where she is these days.  I’ve forgotten her last name, so I couldn’t Facebook her, and even if that was the case I don’t think it would actually work.  Maybe we’d be friends nowadays, maybe we wouldn’t, but I’ve got no way of staying in touch.  And if she was in trouble, that old phone number is long disconnected, and I go by a different first name, and how the hell would she find me?
Sometimes, though, I hope she’s okay.  And I wonder if my phone will ever ring again at two in the morning, with her twenty years on, needing me.
If she does, I’ll be there.  I could say that for a lot of people who no longer talk to me; I’ve made some odd promises in my time.
But especially her.  Always her.
(This story is 85% true.)