Windfall
Found $5
splurged on a latte
thus is the state of my
IRA
Got $600,
just barely had to work,
spent it on flowers put the vet bill
on the card
Granted fifteen thousand bucks
bought myself some time to write
spent it on taking care
of anything else
Begged a billion dollars
to make a new pain drug
now my baby girl is in
a new kind of pain
Won a trillion dollars
spent it on world peace
won’t keep me from dying
poor and alone
My life as theoretical math or:
on the un-inevitability of linear time
There is a kind of grown-up
I will never be. I know I’m not
alone in this but still – my god,
I’m 51 and
what the fuck? I still
avoid bills I have the money
to pay I neither answer my
phone nor check my voice
mail – I don’t want to know who
needs what I haven’t
attention to give. Holy hell,
self-centered and self-righteous
barely mellowed as I aged and I
can make a mess and walk away,
near to believing it was not me.
Maybe age does not accumulate for
my subspecies maybe time can not-be
linear maybe 51 means I am 1
and 5 and 15 all at the same time, next
year 2 and 5 and 25, every ten years I
am zero every 11 years at least by god I am
2/3 consistent.
life-saving truths from Linda Ramsey of Brooklyn Women’s Martial Arts:
1. any choice you make to survive is the right choice
2. It’s better to know it and not need it than to need it and not know it
3. Fight with confidence and conviction and do whatever it takes to survive
4. It’s better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6
passed on to me from a friend who heard this at a National Women’s Martial Arts Federation special training
from a letter published in Lesbian Connection sometime in the late 1980’s:
I become more and more convinced that those who perceive themselves as powerless are the most treacherous people of all because they do not believe they can inflict harm on others.
from lesbian-feminist philosopher Joyce Trebilcot’schapbook 1983 chapbook “Taking Responsibility for Sexuality”
Notice first that to take responsibility for a state of affairs is not to claim responsibility for having caused it. So, for example, if I take responsibility for cleaning up the kitchen I am not thereby admitting to any role in creating the mess; the state of the kitchen may be the consequence of actions quite independent of me.
Similarly, in taking responsibility for her sexuality, a woman is not thereby claiming responsibility for what her sexuality has been, but only for what it is now and in the future.
Joyce Trebilcot
The world is magnificent, because we will make it that way with our brilliance.
Carol Burbank
from my beloved friend, who, when she receives despairing phone calls, listens and then responds with quotes like this utterly unselfconsciously. And when you hear her voice say it, you know it must be true. Or at least one possible truth.
The most difficult of all things, the only difficult thing perhaps, is to enfranchise oneself and – even harder – to live in freedom.
Anyone who is in the least free is the enemy of the mob, to be systematically persecuted, tracked down wherever she takes refuge.
I am becoming more and more irritated against this life and the people who refuse to allow any exception to exist and who accept their own slavery and try to impose it on others.
Isabelle Eberhardt, 1902
Isabelle Eberhardt (17 February 1877 – 21 October 1904) was an explorer and writer who lived and travelled extensively in North Africa. For her time she was a liberated individual who rejected conventional European morality in favour of her own path and that of Islam. She died in a flash flood in the desert at the age of 27.
To All of the Middle-class White Christian Women
Who Occasionally Consider Your Privilege:
Now you’re talkin about
owning your racism
and owning your classism
and owning your anti-Semitism
and owning your lesbophobia
and I’m supposed to be impressed
and the question I’ve got for you
is just how you plan
to pay for all this stuff you’re owning?
will you use your checking plus account
or cash in a CD
or get the money from daddy
or put it on your VISA?
and what happens
when all of this stuff you’re owning
gets a little old
and out of fashion?
what happens when you go to find something
new and improved
something that works easier
for you?
What then?
You just gonna pitch this stuff?
or you gonna try to sell it
back to us
packaged as our own desire
and try to make a profit for yourselves
in the process?
found in file, undated, probably from 1989 or 1990
The most difficult of all things -the only difficult thing perhaps is to enfranchise oneself and – even harder – to live in freedom.
Anyone who is in the least free is the enemy of the mob, to be systematically persecuted, tracked down wherever she takes refuge.
I am becoming more and more irritated against this life and the people who refuse to allow any exception to exist and who accept their own slavery and try to impose it on others.
Isabelle Eberhardt, 1902
Isabelle Eberhardt as Si Mahmoud Essadi
from the blog Julie Unplugged:
Isabelle Eberhardt’s short life was anything but everyday.
What else could describe a French female journalist who masqueraded as a man, was the first European to be admitted as a member of a Sufi brotherhood who died during a flash flood because her clay home basically fell to the ground upon her?
She was born in Geneva, a child conceived outside of marriage. This not only lead to a life of emotional instability, but also financial instability because she could not gain access to her inheritance. She was a very smart woman, multilingual, and enjoyed spiritual study with her father. They poured over the Koran together and had lively discussion about what they read.
Her choosing to dress as a man started as a young age, primarily because she knew men had more freedom than women. She could move about freely as a man. She could travel alone. When her brother joined the French Foreign legion and moved to his post in Algeria, Isabelle and her mother joined him. What no one could have known is not only would Isabelle convert to Islam and become a part of a Sufi Brotherhood, she became known as Si Mahmoud Essadi and fought against the foreign legion. She is reported to have used hashish and before her marriage she enjoyed a lusty and fulfilling sex life with a variety of men.
She wrote of herself,
As a nomad who has no country besides Islam and neither family nor close friends, I shall wend my way through life until it is time for everlasting sleep inside the grave.
from Ursula Le Guin’s 1983 commencement address at Mills College:
Success is somebody else’s failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. No, I do not wish you success. I don’t even want to talk about it. I want to talk about failure.
Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you’re weak where you thought yourself strong. You’ll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself — as I know you already have — in dark places, alone, and afraid.
What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.
This Frenzy 