Dogpoet

In the end it was a clean sweep. Five schools, five rejections. A bitter pill for a guy who’d always figured out how to earn an A.

They never give you their reason, though, so I was left with a bunch of presumptions. The only one that made any sense is that the schools didn’t like the ten-year gap between master’s degree and the phd application, a gap in which I was dealing with batshit family trauma and actively trying to stay alive.

I’m tired of counting the costs of depression. It’s taken nearly everything from me. But I’m still here – words I had tattooed on my left arm as a reminder to myself of that mysterious accomplishment.

So good bye to that little daydream of academia. I have no interest in hanging around knocking on a closed door. I’m left with plan B; find a job that doesn’t suck in a city that I like. I miss California, and though I’ll never be able to afford another modest home on the gleaming hills of San Francisco, there are still cities in the southern half of the state where a writer could eke out a living.

But moving from Boston takes cash, of which I had none. I quit working with dogs because dogs just don’t pay. While scraping the bottom of the money barrel I got recruited on a six-month contract to work for the world’s largest online retailer, on a project I can’t even disclose.

Mostly a remote job, which the Little Girl loves because she gets to sleep in the gap between my calves as I type away on the bed. Two days a week I go into the office and work alongside a bunch of other nerdy English and Linguistics majors. I enjoy their company, and find I need my bunker less these days, even though I spend 90% of my free time there. I guess that’s progress.

I’ve had insomnia since leaving Portland, and am possessed by nightmares in which I’m rejected by family or my ex-husband, over and over, most nights. Some of the nightmares are so real I find them tough to shake. I carry them through the following days.

While waiting to hear back from the grad schools I submitted excerpts from my book to a slew of literary magazines, something I hadn’t tried in years, and then collected a slew of rejections.

Out of forty submissions I got one acceptance, a couple of finalist awards for contests, and five or six near-misses, where they tell you they like your writing, would like to see more, but not this particular story, please.  A pretty standard writer’s haul. The trick is not to fight the misery of rejection. The trick is to revel in it. The trick is to endure.

 

I’ve been slowly working on restoring my archives. At one of the nadirs of the brutal fog my site got hacked and gutted and I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to figure out backups or restoration.

I underestimated the challenge ahead of me. Never mind the tedious cutting and pasting from the Wayback Machine, the downloading and uploading of photos, the fixing of links.

That was cake compared to the posts themselves: I’m halfway-through my romance with the Fireplug. I restored the posts about our wedding, the photos, our vows.

I wrote our vows and the one that I always remember, the one I keep coming back to, is I will never give up on you.

I thought long and hard about those vows, and I thought long and hard about the one in particular. It’s not something I have a lot of practice with, in either direction. I had to ask myself if I really meant it, if I would never give up on him.

I did mean it, though in the coming years depression and PTSD proved too tenacious, and my marriage fell apart. But still I meant it.  I probably still do.

The loss of it has staggered me. I miss my home so much that I turn my thoughts in any other direction. I am lucky, though, that I have one thing left I will never give up on.

 

It’s hard to give up on life and the possibility of human connection when people keep trying to help you. I’m humbled by you guys, especially – I have to say it – those of you who contributed money to me through PayPal. I tried to be all self-sufficient and turn down the offers, but in the end I really I needed help.

Portland hasn’t exactly opened its watery, mossy arms to me. I can’t find enough work here to pay the rent. I can’t even get a job interview. I don’t know if there are too many people moving here or what, but it seems like jobs and wages aren’t keeping up with the rents.

All this time on my hands, flat-broke and a stranger to this city. A new shrink re-diagnosed me with recurrent major depression – my old pal the brutal fog hasn’t really lifted in three years. She said that suicidal ideations are an indication that it’s been going on for a long time, and is nearing its logical conclusion.

So I’ve got a toolbox full of psych meds.

I needed something to pin my meager hopes on, something besides the prospect of another shitty, low-paying job that would merely get me by.

So I’ve spent the past couple of months pulling myself up through the fog by applying to Ph.D. programs in writing for next fall. I had a lot of time to think about the times when I felt most awake, most alive, and they’ve always been in academia. I like the life of the mind, and I think I could make a good professor.

In the meantime, though, I’m almost out of money. I’ve decided to leave Portland and accept my sister’s offer to live with her family in Boston, at least until I know if I’ve been accepted by any school.

Melanie is officially a step-sister, my mother’s partner’s daughter, but we’ve always been close and have grown closer over the past couple of years. I got to spend time with my niece during a recent visit. Agnes flew with me. It’s sweet having a tiny dog sometimes.

I think I’ll be a little happier with some family around me. I leave in a couple of weeks, and I think I have enough money to get me across the country in time for the New Year. Me and Agnes – road trip!

This is not the life I envisioned for myself. My checking account has a -$324.78 balance. My gas tank light is on and I can’t fill it until I get paid, which means I can’t sign up for shifts at the courier company I work for until I get paid on Tuesday, but that first paycheck may not even get me out of the hole, and rent is due on Friday.

I’ve had to ask for money from the man who asked me for a divorce. The rest of the money coming to me is tied up with lawyers. I’ve subsisted now for months on Ten-forTen-Dollars groceries. I’ve eaten canned raviolis for the first time since childhood. I make canned chili with rice several nights a week. I salt it heavily.

I made the humbling choice of looking into food stamps, though I’m told I’m paid too well to qualify.

PTSD has pushed me into a dark panicked corner. How can I be this broke working seven days a week? The math has defeated me. I’ve worked a long tangled string of entry level jobs so that I could write. But the 95%-completed-memoir I wrote was untrue, or missed an enormous truth, all to protect a man who never had my interest at heart. Or I worked a long string of entry-level jobs because I felt most comfortable aiming low. Or both.

I hate writing this. I hate how this could be used against me, but my only guiding star these days is the ugly truth, because that star shines on other men, trapped in their self-made bunkers, unable to trust in the love offered to them, nursing ancient wounds around which their entire lives have formed, like a tree absorbing a piece of broken fence.

They’re out there, dim stars in a black sky, solitary, gleaming, protecting their soft, faltering light.

Tomorrow I’ll shower the stink of this brutal fog off me, dress in clean clothes, and drive with my gas light on to the building downtown where I’ll begin to learn foreign languages that drive our devices and therefore our lives. In a few months I’ll take an internship, and this time next year I hope to have landed a job that will pull me out of this swamp.

I could fail. My fuzzy, addled brain, cluttered with the 24/7 fear intimately known by all men in bunkers, may fumble with these foreign languages. But it’s worth a shot. I don’t know how much lower I could go – I’d rather not find out.

This is you smiling.

You’ve hiked into the forest behind the house in Portland where you’ve crashed your deep space bunker, and now you’re exerting all of your facial muscles to perform the most common exercise known to modern man. This is your selfie. This is your smile.

You used to be sweet. Now you’re scary. That’s what they keep telling you. You frighten me, they say. You’ve left three jobs and three homes in the past year because you can’t keep it bottled. 44 years of rage uncorked, the vintage 1971 was a bad crop. Straight outta Oklahoma, you sad, scary hayseed.

The fucking bunker is failing. You watch astronomical amounts of television while playing match-three games on your phone just to keep the hate in check. You watch so much TV that you’ve run out of TV. You’ve watched it all. Congratulations.

You are a 44 year old dog walker courier who’s about to lose his job. You’re scorched earth. You have nothing left but a 4Runner and a chihuahua named Agnes. You are such a fucking loser that you’re sucking up all the loserdom in the vicinity. You’re the kicked dog who keeps getting kicked simply because the last guy kicked you.

You’re in a strange city where the streets make no sense and the faces come out of the rain. Nobody here knows your name and you drive the strange streets thinking you could at any moment just disappear and would anyone hear that tree when it falls in the woods behind the bunker, over and over, a woods full of trees falling one at a time?

You think you’ve found a new Ground Control, you sit on his couch every Wednesday morning for 50 minutes trying to figure out if you could trust this one, if you could hear his voice as you drift through deep space, the only voice you hear now because you have successively shut everyone else out, even though you know that the one thing you need is the one thing you can’t accept – human connection. The only thing the kicked dog trusts is the kick itself.

You shield the world from your rage and at the end of the day you’re spent, a skinless man with bundled, singing nerves in the dark of the back bunker, the most farthest deepest room back there at the back. You hold the chihuahua to your chest, both of you fetal, and you keep checking to make sure she’s still breathing. 

You know the only thing that will save you, if you can’t accept human connection, is this. Putting words together even if your head is fully occupied by OCDish snatches of pop songs you’ve heard on the radio. Put the words together somehow. But don’t fucking put them here. Put them here and you’ll never get hired again. Put them here and the only humans who will connect will be the other freaks. Don’t do it. Don’t hit [publish].

Every morning I put myself together with duct tape and fear. I double and triple-wrap to hide the black hole in the center of my chest. Some days it holds. Most days it won’t.  Under the tape I’m empty and formless, a squirming hogpile of failures.

Everything hurts. The thought of forming a sentence hurts. Talking to a stranger hurts. Emailing a friend. Walking the dog.

I crawl back to the bunker to dress my wounds. I flip on the television to drown out the voices in my head. I pet the chihuahua to prove to myself that I’m still capable of love. I rearrange the stacks of duct tape I’ll need in the morning.

I’ve been masticated by life.

Chewed up by the gods of marriage and money and spit out from the stupid, beautiful city that I called home for 18 years.

I’ve crash-landed a few worlds away, in a town called, ironically, Oakland. A stone’s  throw from Interstate 5, in an Oregon valley of ranches and moss-covered oaks. Population 927.

As I type there are frogs singing and a sheep crying from across the road.

On the table in the center of the mother-in-law’s apartment I currently call home there is a stack of papers; a new bank account, old bills from my previous life, and a Petition for Divorce sent to me by my husband’s lawyer.

I came here with nothing more than a few boxes of books and a chihuahua named Agnes. I live on the generosity of a cousin I’ve only just begun to know.

I lost touch from you, stuck in ice, spinning slowly out here in space, in a bunker that protected me from people and suicidal ideations. After two years of weekly appointments with my Ground Control I realized the bunker was to protect others from my rage.

I’m lost and broken and broken-hearted and the chihuahua has wandered away from me, drawn inexorably to the neighbor’s chicken coop. In a minute I’ll carry her back to this bunker and settle in for the night. Hello, good-night.

You ever get that whiny voice in the back of your head that says, “Boy, it sure would be nice if life only gave me one, maybe two things tops to deal with at a time?” Apparently life doesn’t work that way!

I know. I’m still processing this, too.

Also: IF YOU ARE A WRITER CONSIDER THE BENEFITS OF RENTING!

Three jobs and an arson are nothing compared to the mortgage approval process. If you recently took time off to go to grad school, work on a book, or engage in nontraditional forms of employment, prepare yourself for weeks and maybe months of financial proctology.

Dig out your bank, credit card, IRA, and 401k statements (yes, Dad, I really have a 401k). Scan and email your tax returns. Check your credit score and try not to give in to despair. Write three-page emails trying to explain the six or seven w-2 and 1099 forms from 2010.  Keep your cool when they say, “Um, that was really confusing.”

Stay near the phone and field each day’s new request. For example, “Can you give us the contact info for the two years of employment before you had this really weird urge for an Ivy League education? Actually,  make that three.”

Also: “Can you get us a copy of your degree from Columbia?”

“How humiliating,” Joe said when I told him.

“Someday,” I said, “I will look back on all of this and not throw up.”

“Even better,” he said. “You finally got to put that MFA to use.”

In the usual media-churned-ocean of post-Golden Globes buzz, I stumbled across a tweet by Mia Farrow’s son, Ronan: Missed the Woody Allen tribute – did they put the part where a woman publicly confirmed he molested her at age 7 before or after Annie Hall?

That, in turn, led me to the recent Vanity Fair article about Mia and her children. The sordid Woody/Soon-Yi spectacle hit while I was in college and largely oblivious to pop culture. Until this morning I had no idea that Woody had been investigated for molesting another of his adopted daughters, Dylan, who would later suffer from crippling depression:

The depression lasted all through college, exacerbated to high decibels twice when Allen succeeded in contacting her, Dylan said. The first time, she was bringing the mail in when she found a typewritten envelope addressed to her with a postmark from London. It was shortly before her 19th birthday, in 2004. Mia also saw the letter. According to Dylan, it said now that she was 18 he wanted to have a conversation. He was willing to meet anytime, anywhere, and would send a helicopter for her. He allegedly said he “wanted to set the record straight about what your mother has told you. Love, your father.”

Three years later, during her senior year of college, she said, a large stuffed manila envelope arrived at the school. “I should have recognized the handwriting—I didn’t. It had a fake return name: Lehman.” Inside she found “a four-inch-thick explosion of pictures of me and him—pictures, pictures, pictures everywhere. Some had tack holes in them. There was never anybody else in the pictures—there was definitely a theme going on.” None of them was inappropriate, but “it was scary.” According to her, the accompanying letter read, “I thought you’d want some pictures of us, and I want you to know that I still think of you as my daughter, and my daughters think of you as their sister. Soon-Yi misses you.” It was signed “Your father.”

“How do your daughters think of me as their sister?,” Dylan wondered. “How does that work?” She told me, “I held it together enough to get back to my room, and for three days I didn’t move. I wouldn’t answer my phone or answer my door.” She asked her mother to call her lawyers, and they were told that this did not constitute harassment. (When asked about the letters, Sheila Riesel, Allen’s attorney, called it a “private matter,” adding, “This is a man who loves all of his children and should be respected for that.”)

So this really fucking creeped me out. Not the helicopter part. The part about the package with the photos and the letter that reiterated his claim on her as a father. Creepy because my own father, Hank the Blank, sent me a similar package this past September. Despite my best efforts, the occasion sent me into a suicidal tailspin.

Before today I was a mild Woody Allen fan. Willfully oblivious, I think, to his private life scandals. I loved, and maybe still love, some of his movies. But after today, well, my entire body shivers in sympathy-pain for Dylan. There’s no question whose version I believe. I’ll be spending my entertainment dollars on other stories, with no regret.

Like me, Dylan later found a savior in a patient and compassionate husband. I hope one day to be a little less broken, so that I can give and receive the love that we humans need in order to deal with life on planet Earth.