Harm Reduction & Some Firsts

I just spent the weekend with a good friend of mine from college. Her most recent job/opportunity is to educate young people about health and related issues and subjects. Like many prevention educators, her approach is not one of absolutism. She does not say that one should live a certain way, and instead provides them with alternate (healthier) ways to live and thrive. She calls such an approach harm reduction.

So, I’ve been hanging with this Spark. And this hang, this togetherness has an easy-with-Sunday-morning feel, you know—time to read the whole paper, no rush to the next event, to the next moment, the next movement, the falling of streams of sunlight; warmth wrapped up in sandalwood style.

In past ‘hangs, relationships and the like’ comfort was desired but rarely achieved. Safety was solicited but rarely purchased. The harm that such prior interaction/relations caused me was immense. Just mix a bunch of betrayal, indifference, fundamentalist crap, lack of vision, and perpetual judgment – and you’ll get me.. a lost soul. Or a soul who is lost. Or sadly, a ride on the Soultrain---passed its prime, and only available in syndication. I think I am back, ot maybe I have finally arrived. But, still like De La Soul, I'm Treading Water.. a little unsure.. on edge. My drive to define has taken a back seat. I’m enjoying the ride. Did I mention my neck is stiff? A little achy? Inertia, perhaps.

So Spark, perhaps unknowingly has reduced some fears, and thus reduced harm by simply practicing the following:

Phone calls—confirming, affirming or postponing a rendezvous, a night out etc. This may seem obvious.. but this act is very challenging to many. Perhaps it’s a day-time minute issue, but more than likely it’s lack of care.. consideration. I think it’s just part the American Ethnocentric Disease. Focus on me and it will trickle down to everyone else. Spark is simply kind. This ‘desire’ may be the result of some nature/nurture circumstance. My mother just wants ‘the call’.
“ I don’t care what you are doing (right..) Just call.” she would cry. Following some police possies appearing at my house or apt, late night rides to see if I was of the living and not dead on the side of the road – I now call.

Honest/Forthrightness-always. Obvious, but for many difficult to produce. Even if Spark doesn’t know how he feels he owns that he doesn’t know.

Acceptance- the body.. the brain .. the cats..? maybe. My vegetarianism – to the point he wants to share dishes and orders the vegetarian entrée so we can share…it’s taking me a little time to get this and I’m a little overwhelmed. The sharing of food, of sustenance. love it. He gives little judgment or criticism and even if there is .I most likely listen as any such verbiage would be have been given great thought—being checked when the checker is sincere, steadfast—cool.

PDA/Hand Holding – I’m touchy. I don’t even know I’m touching or touchy most of the time.. except when pointed out or I sense a ‘stalk on the horizon.. Spark is not into the PDA and hand-holding, and I respect it-though I have not been able to quell the public touch with much ease. Mostly, I just end up touching myself, which is perhaps his intent anyway. However, in the silence, in the night, in the spaces in between –there is much touch/affection - and thus any public display becomes a lot less necessary. Yet, I do think it’s important to be true, to be - in all spaces, in all walks and worlds.

Okay—my firsts

So, when Spark spends the night.. I close my bedroom thus closing out the cats. This is beyond a first. As many of you know .. I have moved residences several times (so the cats could have a better quality of life), didn’t vacation for very long as I don’t want to think that I have abandoned them, and pawned all my gold jewelry years ago to help their friends .. etc etc. Here’s the DL – want to be w/ him. Simple. the sacrifice.

Didn’t think I liked Bjork. This is due in great part to the Stella McCartney Swan Scarf and perhaps my lack of feel for Icelandic sound. Spark is a big fan. On a CD he made me for by my birthday day-he put a song of hers on from her days with the Sugarcubes. A lyric in the song goes like this, ‘This wasn’t suppose to happen, I’ve been hit with your charm, how could you do this to me, I’m in love again.’ She cool.

Lack of Idiosyncrasy. I’m not very judgmental, critical maybe of certain theatre or teaching, things that I myself am a player in, but of most things.. people, their ways ..I’m just not. So, not finding something to judge about someone is not unusual –what is unusual is that with Spark— I notice no flaws, no Seinfeld-like idiosyncratics (i..e. close talker, walker-a-header..). Of course there are flaws and imperfections – socially influenced –but I don’t recognize them as such. They just are him.. nail biting ‘n all.

There is much to like.. love about this spark.. his fitted shirts of a green, gray or lavender hue, his strong hands, (I don’t even think I’ve noticed someone’s hands before), the way he sits or slumps slightly, his shyness in new places or new people, the way he puts his glasses on when he walks but not when he sits, his sense of openness, his naiveté and his security with it, his desire for anything new and novel, the way he talks about his family both blood and beyond, his color-coded musical library, his pop-cultural (mostly Simpson) references, the primal-side, his vast network of friends-their stories, their histories,, his swoon-over smile, his serenity..

Sigh..I’m sunk. Swimming in sap. And I didn’t even see it coming. I haven’t even turned the TV on in weeks. Am shaving everyday. And inside.. there is a little tug; reminding me of all the past pain, and the possibility that this spark may just be a fire. Breathe.

Off-White or Why I'm not White

Prior to me moving away from my Jewish enclave (well.. there were Italians and Mexicans, too) I thought I was white. I also thought most people were short and that 5’9” was tall.

Now that I have lived some 18 or so (oy) years away from that world (though I can’t seem to shake some of its holds on me*), I know spiritually, socially, politically even I’m not white. My mother.. my brother .. white, perhaps.. my dad.. not-white. When I speak of being white or not-white, I’m referring to many characteristics including that of: skin tone, ‘tude, temperament, and degrees of consciousness (self, social, political).

When someone says someone is white, I immediately associate being white with being privileged. Privilege of opportunity (schools & jobs). And in this case.. I’m pasty white. I am drippin in it—this privilege. And though many of my hometown peeps associate such privilege with economic wealth, I associate privilege simply with economic opportunity. (I must thank my Marxist Sociology professors for such enlightenment in the first semester of my college career— though I continued shop at Marshall Fields, but only when I was sad or didn’t do well on a paper)

I attempt to recognize, and own this privilege, capital P, in most everything I do and say.. and feel. Of course, recognition of such a power (and I must thank the Emma Goldmans, the Gloria Steinems, the Bella Abzugs and my Ellis-Island ancestors for handing me such a power) does not quell it or lessen its strength. But being aware of it does not allow me to abuse it. I don’t think.

Perhaps, one may think or have experienced that being a woman has afforded them less opportunity, and thus one feels less privileged. I don’t feel that way. I have noticed throughout my little life that women and girls were often less assertive than their male/guy counterpart. And I am not of those. I didn’t feel some great inequity when only guys got to play football. “Go, run, tackle fuck your face up, who cares!” I’m certainly not fearless (particularly when it comes to things like love and well, math), and it isn’t like I’m Annie Assertive, but I have yet to experience inequity due to the fact I’m a woman. I have experienced it due to the fact that I look and act perhaps younger than my peers, and perhaps because I’m Jewish or short/petite or both. Moving on..

• When I think of white I think of something stale like bread, bread that should’ve been thrown in the fridge in order to maintain its freshness longer.

• When I think of white, I think of something or someone who is tone –deaf, unable to hear the many sounds and rhythms that resonate the world. If you can’t hear the world how can you understand your role within it?

• When I think of white, I think of large facial pores.. pores that too open, too obvious and resistant to any type of toner or astringent. It’s not that being white is open it’s that being white is obvious and resistant to being subtle, under the radar, to being just part of the face, part of a whole.

• And I have to say when I think of white, I think Christian and not the Jimmy Carter or Quaker-kind-of Christian. I think of the kind of Christian who fears liberty, the ‘other’..who fears feeling. The kind of Christian who defines being ‘open’ by eating Thai food. Consumptive, Clueless and Cruel.

My mother thinks I have always wanted to be Black. I don’t know if it’s that I have wanted to be Black or as much as I simply find some comfort (not all) in many things, Black. Yes, as a child my loves among several were Good Times, Flip Wilson, Richard Pryor and Donna Summer. I recall watching Donna Summer on American Bandstand and my mother informing me? us? that she had slept her way to the top. How else would someone of her skill .. get there? I guess? I recall thinking, ‘Is that why she sang she worked hard for the money.’?

In high school I wrote this Haiku. It was published in its literary magazine.

They all bake
prunes shriveled into raisins
yet bigots they are

When I lived in Cleveland, I was told of an incident by a young girl named Aja regarding my color/skin/race. Aja attended a predominately Black school I was doing drama work in. She got into some argument with another girl and the exchange went something like this:

Girl-Ms. Decky is white!
Aja-She is not!
Girl-Oh yes she is.
Aja-is not!
Girl –Ms. Decky is white!
Aja-Ms. Decky.. is Ms. Decky

I don’t feel white.. I don’t feel so hateful, so full of moxie and hubris. I don’t feel or maybe I just don’t want to be whatever the girl in the story about associates with being white.

On the most recent census I couldn’t even mark my color/race down. You had Hawaiian, African-American, Pan-Asian, Eskimo, Native American and White. YUCK. Of all the choices, why would one even want to check that one?! I couldn’t do it. (Couldn’t they have what Dorothy Parker writes, ‘Just a Jewish Girl Trying to be Cute’, category?)

Now.. it’s not just a drive to be different, to be on the margin, to be the underdog, on the periphery -- all the things I do admit I thrive on being. It is not that, nor is it identification with such sentiments, (though given I’m one of very few Jews, one of very few maybe more urban individuals at my place of employment, the feeling of difference is very, very genuine). This being not simply feeling off-white is a combination of many things: it’s where I live.. work and play, it’s those I connect, create and collaborate with, it’s the poetry that moves me and the minds that mold me, and it’s who I love.

Color.. culture.. it’s a state of mind/being, if you’re privileged enough to claim it. I know this. Yet, just today someone came up to me and told me that I looked Brown; I smiled, glowed even and of course was quite comforted.

Coming soon.. Bjork and Other Discoveries, Other Firsts…

The Game Who Has No Game or Mourning Doves and Their Search for Love

Following several years of ‘kills’ (primarily of an aviary quality) by my cat Uno, a former huntress, I became a birder. In an ability to look beyond the heap of guts lying on my living room floor as simply guts or prey, I bought a bird book and began listening, looking and studying the beings who sang/sing outside my window.

So far I have heard and observed the following birds:
Sparrows (Chipping, Field and the American House Sparrow, to be exact)
Robins
Starlings
Crows
Blackbirds
Cardinals –male & female (I also saw a female cardinal suicide-but that’s another story)
Mallards
Blue Jays
Finches (house and gold)
Hummingbird-ruby-throated
Downy Woodpecker
Red-billed Woodpecker
Warblers/Common Yellow-Throat
Common Snipe- a sandpiper
Hummingbird (in North Carolina)
Egret
Great Blue Heron (on their way warm)
Hawk
Chickadee
Pigeons
And ..
Mourning Doves (a smaller more delicate relative of the Pigeon)

These mourning doves, which are incidentally on the Michigan hunter hit list-probably due to the fact that they are birds of love and commitment- ‘hang’ in a tree adjacent to my house. There are three (2 males and a female) who hang around the same time every morning. The first time I watched I thought I was seeing a little bird nookie. but it was less nookie, and more posturing and posing. The mourning doves are obviously adolescent, awkward, persistent, clueless and fuzzy. Here is a typical scenario:

Boy Bird #1 and Girl Bird are on branch; Boy Bird#1 makes the move beak-on (beak might be first base in bird world), Girl bird flies to another branch, Bird boy #1 follows, tries again, Girl bird flies to another branch where Bird Boy #2 attempts a little play. Girl bird just trying to take it slow flies away in disgust (her chirp sounded disgusted). Bird Boy#1 and Bird Boy#2 sit side by side on a branch obviously contemplating their recent dis' and defeat.

This scenario reminded me slightly of a six grade love triangle in which Brian Lawrence, Steve Kriozere and perhaps Matt Cohn?, ( I don’t know .. but I do know they called him, “Puke”) were hoping to skate (as in roller skate) with me during the Couples Skate or Double Skate as it was innocuously known. The caller would call, ‘Backward Skate’ or Doubles or Trios”, and one would skate accordingly. I preferred the trio, which was two boys and a girl; the girl (c’est moi) being in the middle, holding hands with boys on either side. One could view this preference as a foreshadow toward certain sexual practices, or simply a brief foray as a ‘Skate Slut’.

As to the Mourning Doves, I sense she (Bird Girl) is less interested in a threesome, and more inclined to take it slow. Boy Bird#1, unlike my admirers, went in for the ‘kill’ (so to speak). He played the personal space rule, going beak-on rather than first sitting side-by-side (as he did so sweetly with his 'boy' friend). He flew too fast-taking one cue as the cue, and thus forcing flight. Her moving to another branch gave him a chance to regroup, to chill, but no.. he repeated the same beak-in-face-move, and she obviously disenchanted with his birdbrain, flew South (well, actually West), but you get the picture.

Why is the slow stuff, the sitting side by side, the hand-holding (the wing wiggling?) so much harder for some than the mashin’, the smashin’ and the going in for the kill’? What’s the game? Jumping branch to branch in hopes that one will follow in order to simply sit side by side? Love, whether you are being hunted or the hunter, is just hard to grasp. The rules are that there all no rules; all birds sing, but their songs are uniquely their own.

Love, even for those whom nature decides will have such, isn’t easy. Branches break. The elements, such as sun and wind and rain may threaten such synchronicity. Perhaps, somebody could be waiting in the wings. But more than likely, it just is time; waiting for the fuzz to develop into feathers, and flying without fear. On a wing and a prayer.

You Give Me Fever...

You give me fever -Peggy Lee

I’m always cold. My average daily temperature is 97.6. (an iron deficiency. perhaps. But, I’d rather blame my mother who many of you know smoked while pregnant with me. Every sneeze is a reminder that my life began full of tar and 90 cancer-causing chemicals.) If my temperature registers 99 degrees, I’m either not feeling too well.. or feeling real well.

Lately, I’ve been feeling hot, over-heated. For days, my temperature has registered an even 99 with no sniffle in sight. True, the temperature has been hovering around 90 degrees for weeks, but the cause of this heat has less to do with the weather and more to with nature or nurture or both.

Some place /some time between the suing, the Celiac, the colonoscopy, (a cleansing of more than just the colon, really) I found and find myself in heat.

I think with women the heat can stay latent for awhile, redirected or displaced into other actions.. dancing…neighborhood watch.. downward-facing dog (a yoga move), the merry go round..

But once it (the heat) is awakened, the heat takes over and all my living life’s moments are moments of what ifs, and what just was, and a waiting for what will be.

Such awakenings are few and far between and they are as much biology as psychology or less scientifically, body meets mind, meets body, meets soul mixed with a little surrender, and topped off with a little truth. Note: Truth is almost always the sexiest.. the most alluring.. the most desired of ingredients.. hard to get .. worth the wait.

My last heat wave may have been in the 70’s . when Andy Gibb, Shawn Cassidy, Epstein from Welcome Back Kotter reigned supreme. Okay, maybe not the 70’s . but not so far off, maybe ’82 when Shadow Dancing was released. Basically, it’s like a comet, its appearance in our solar system may be infrequent, but when it arrives.. it arrives. Hopefully, unlike a comet—it stays.

Attraction is complex and imperfect and messy. It’s not like the movies, most real life shots would be edited out. What happens when desire and drive collide? Or when the mind’s mastery of the body makes for moments of awkwardness and truth? How not to make too much out of such moments and instead celebrate all of them .. the sum of all the parts.. of all the moments:
the knots, the sugarest coffee, simplest needs (ice, food, sex) for a complex person, an addiction to realizations,
a soulflower, a Cheshire cat, a position, an imposition, rigidity, patience, spooning and heat. The heat.