But it’s not mine, not whisking by the platform, tho’ it’s headed, like me, deeper into Brooklyn. I puzzle over this as I swipe my card and push through the bars to stand and wait.
Hoyt: the train I missed I didn’t, a 4 moseying through on the express track, just not express.
The next 2 train will arrive in. . . 19 minutes. I look up, and the sign says, 2 12 minutes.
Huh? Oh yeah, just cycling through. No 3 train this weekend. Not that I care: the 2 is mine.
I pull out my The Beautiful Struggle and consider leaning against the ceramic pillar while I read, but decide my naked arm is too clean, and I adjust my gym bag and widen my feet instead, hips pushed forward.
Sound down the line, and I peer into the tunnel. The light’s not right: another 4 taking its time rumbling through. I go back to my book, then look up, and see a small girl with her hands cupped around her eyes, spying on Hoyt, spying on me. Her grin is shy, and then, just before she disappears, an even shyer wave.
I watch the people in the rest of the cars. A small boy bouncing in the window, laughing. Two middle-aged men, sitting tight. A woman reading. Another woman reading. A man leaning against the rails, snoozing. The middle conductor glancing at me, his face, blank.
Two more 4 trains amble by while I wait, and I let my book go slack for both of them, staring through the dim of the middle tracks and into the lighted cars. The woman fixing her hair. The young man turned sideways, toward his girl. More books read by more women. A man signing to two people whose backs I can only see. A man in a kipa half-turned, gazing ahead. A young woman in Heidi braids, dozing. The last car, always someone leaning his or her head against whatever will hold it up, dozing. The last car, the conductor’s berth always empty, until the return.
Most of these faces are black, some brown, a few Chinese (do I know they’re Chinese? I do not.). Even fewer are almost as white as me.
I’m still damp from my workout, still damp from my shower, and damp in the long quiet of the station.
The 2 rolls in, the door opens right where I stand. I step through, and head for home.
That was my response to a TNC post on his unwillingness to keep fighting battles he considers settled: I don’t want to die debating the humanity of the blacks, the gays, the browns and the poor.
Amen (or whatever the secular version of that would be), I said in response. I, too, am done defending my status as a human being, done even defending the notion that all of us are humans, and that that’s what, and all, that matters. That I am is settled, done.
But, alas, I am not done. After I said my pie/eace, I realized that there are some issues which are not settled and for which I cannot lay my hammer down.
There are the continued flare-ups, as with the issue of Islam in the US, and whether Muslims get to be as American, much less as human, as the rest of us.
And, of course, there’s abortion. A week or so ago I got sucked into another debate on abortion (also on TNC’s blog); against all better judgment, I couldn’t let the argument that abortion is an immoral and fundamentally selfish act.
Now, those making this argument stipulated that they believe abortion should remain legal, so I should have been able to let it be, right? After all, I do believe abortion is morally fraught, which means I ought to allow for those who agree with me on the legality of abortion to think whatever they want about women who do terminate their pregnancies.
But I couldn’t, because it seemed to me that even in their agreement on the law they diminished the status of those who would make use of the law. How dare a woman choose her life over that of the fetus? they argued. How dare she be so selfish?
How dare she choose herself.
So, yes, I am glad that these critics offer support, however tepid, for the legal right of a woman to make decisions about continuing or ending her pregnancy.
Too bad that support is not so much for the woman herself.
I am tired of this fight, too, am tired of defending a woman’s being, as a human being, and were it just pundits and blog commenters sneering about the decisions a woman may make, I might be able to walk away.
But as long as those with the power to threaten a woman’s ability to live as free human being continue to do so, I’ll keep my hammer handy.
She slept on the floor, on rugs, in chairs, on tables, on my desk, in my closet, and, of course, in bed:
Whaddya mean, move?
As Chelsea and Bean got older, I set a low chest near the bed to make it easier for them to get up and down. In one apartment, however, I didn’t have room for the chest, so set this stool next to the bed, instead:
Chelsea would step lightly up, but Bean never quite mastered that. Instead, she’d climb partly on to the lower step, then stick her paw into the notch on top and haul herself up and over; made me smile every time. Shoulda gotten a shot of that.
When I had a proper kitchen set-up—i.e., a table and chairs—Bean liked to jump into the chair. She then expected me to tip it back and rub her belly. She’d squeak and squeak until I’d stop, then look at me like ‘You’re stopping? Is there a problem?’
Even without the tip-and-rub, however, she liked to reign from the chair.
This became a point of contention between her and Jasper, as he, too, liked to loll on the chair. Bean would chase him off if he dared slip on to her perch, but at some point this past winter, she ceded the spot to him. It was a concession both sad and inevitable.
Still, she never gave in fully to Jasper, never let him get too familiar. Tolerance, however, she could do.
Early detente
I did see them sleeping together—actually touching—once or twice, but Jasper could never get the hang of how to hang without chomping on Bean. And then he wondered why she wanted nothing to do with him.
Chelsea was the same way, initially, with Bean, although because they were much closer in age, they had more time together to learn how to live together.
Unfathomable in the early years, constant later on
Chelsea, as I may have mentioned, was a marvelous jumper, able to leap from the floor to the top of five-foot bookshelves with little more preparation than a look and a butt-wriggle. This was how she most often escaped the Bean-kitten, as the young Bean had neither the strength nor, frankly, the chops, to follow her.
But oh, how Bean tried. One night, when my roommate P. and I were sitting on the couch, Bean chased Chelsea down the hall and into the living room. Chelsea skipped on to the nearby desk, then hopped on to the bookshelves.
Bean, determined to follow, didn’t bother first scrawling up the couch to get to the desk (a board slung across two file cabinets), and instead tried to conquer the desk in one leap.
She managed to get half her tiny body up, but her back didn’t quite make it. She bicycled her back legs, to no avail, and her front half slowly slid back off, until all that remained on top were her paws, the claws dug into the plywood.
She hung there for a moment, her little body swinging, before she finally let go.
Bean never attained the grace so natural to Chelsea, but she had her own dignity.
And she was sweet and lovable, who pipped and squeaked and purred and purred and purred.
Bean was a good cat. I don’t know if there’s anything after life in this world, but if there is, I hope she and Chelsea are together.
Her name was inspired by a Jane Siberry song, ‘Everything Reminds Me of My Dog’: She has a line about Old folks remind me of my dog/My dog reminds old folks of their dogs (Barfy, Ruffo, Beanhead). . . . Bean! That’s it.
Chelsea had been driving my roommate and me crazy with her constant talk, so I thought another cat might help chill her out. I was in Minneapolis at the time, a couple of houses down from friends, and they went with me to the Humane Society to get a kitten.
We saw one group of kittens, then went into another room (the sick cat room, it turns out) for more. I had the name; I needed the cat to fit.
J., the driver, held up a long-haired black-and-white kitten and said ‘Get her! Get her!’ I didn’t want a long-hair, however, and demurred. (I did coerce convince J. to get that kitty herself; ‘Entropy’, she was named. Aptly.)
And then I found my Bean—full name, Beanalea—and took her home. She lived with Chelsea and me in three apartments in Minneapolis, one in Montreal, one in Somerville, and five in Brooklyn. She didn’t particularly like travelling, but she always settled in once we had, in fact, settled in.
Bean, Beanalea, Bean-goddammit (for a brief period when she was around 6 months), Binkins, Polar Bean, Lima Bean, Navy Bean, Gah-bahnzo Bean. . . she was my Bean.
Perhaps it has something to do with starting the workday early to try to fix a problem which was uncovered late on Friday and then not knowing if that fix is really enough of a fix and trying to find another way to deal with the problem and having a supervisor (who is genuinely a good guy) not understanding that the combination of the fix and the another-way was probably the best we could do given the time constraints and having to take the time to explain why this was so and then having him suggest that maybe in addition to making sure the patch (to offer up a metaphor) works we could also make the patch pretty until another supervisor (the head honcha and a good one too) said perhaps we can save the pretty for later and the first supervisor saying Uh, yeah, okay that makes sense and by the end of the day running out of time actually to implement the fix/another deal/patch and instead of leaving early because I started early leaving late because I had to explain why the patch should work to the supervisors who did in the end agree that this should work and we really don’t have much choice anyway.
The only—and I mean only—good thing about one-and-a-quarter inch cockroaches is that when you encounter a roach which is less than half an inch, your response is:
That stutter of chords, fanning out across the guitar strings, repeated, then a side-step into another flutter of chords. And now, that high reed of a voice. . . no.
A cover.
Strangely, I was disappointed. I didn’t particularly want to hear the song, but if Planet Fitness radio is going to play it, then play the real goddamned thing.
Faux Supertramp is unacceptable.
Not that I can listen to the real Supertramp, but at least with Roger and the boys, I know what I’m getting.
(I have no idea about the images, but this is the only actual Supertramp version I could find in my, uh, 3 minutes of searching YouTube.)
I sometimes listen to vids after I post them—I watched the Lena Horne interview a couple of times—but I won’t listen to this.
Takes me back. . . to where I don’t particularly care to go.
My older sister brought home Even in the Quietest Moments some time before I was in junior high, and by eighth grade I almost certainly listened to that album more than she did. ‘Give a Little Bit’ opened up side 1, and side 2 ended with the long mashup that is ‘Fool’s Overture’.
I loved it, beginning to end, unreservedly and unashamedly. When Breakfast in America and the double-live Paris came out I scooped those up, then went back and sussed out Crisis? What Crisis?, Crime of the Century, Indelibly Stamped, and their eponymous debut. (The latter two didn’t get much time on my turntable, and Stamped, which featured a naked woman’s tattooed torso embarrassed my teenaged self.) I stayed with them through Famous Last Words—Roger Hodgson’s last gig with the band, but didn’t let up until I was in college, and knew that Brother Where You Bound was the last Supertramp album I would ever buy.
Six years of intense devotion; it wasn’t a bad run.
I almost certainly still listened to them in college, but I don’t really remember that. And when I sold or gave away my albums prior to my 1993 desert sojourn, I knew that I would never own Supertramp in cd form.
I’m no longer embarrassed by women’s breasts (which, given my ownership of a pair, is probably a good thing), and even all these years later, when I don’t want to listen to one Supertramp song and two is out of the question, I can’t quite be embarrassed by my former ardor, either.
I was just about to write something snarky about the band, but, honestly, I can’t. You can, if you like—there is much eye-rolling to be done when it comes to Supertramp—but given how much I loved them, how they carried me out of my childhood and angsted right along with me in my teenaged years, it seems like bad faith for me to slag on them now.
I don’t love them now, but I did, once, and even if—or, perhaps, because—I no longer love any band (or any thing) the way I loved Supertramp, it seems a kind of betrayal both to my young self and to that love to repudiate them.
They weren’t the only band I listened to, of course, and when MTV hit SmallTown in the early 80s, a whole genre of music which the album-oriented rock of the Milwaukee stations never played suddenly chipped its way into my consciousness: the Police, the B-52’s (back when they still had the apostrophe), the Eurythmics, the Call, the Fall, the Clash, the Jam and on and on. I didn’t like them all, but to have the world open beyond Kansas or Boston—well, MTV in the early days performed a public service to us SmallTown kids who didn’t live close enough to catch the college radio stations.
By the summer after my sophomore year I was slam-dancing to the Violent Femmes at the Peaches stage at Summerfest, and when the LP played their 3 song ‘alternative’ rotation of the B-52’s (Rock Lobster), the Femmes (Gone Daddy Gone) and Surf Punks (Shark Attack), I was out whipping my skinny little body around that almost-empty dance floor.
A slightly-older co-worker at the local health club introduced me to Pat Metheny, and my theatre buddies to Manhattan Transfer, Frank Sinatra, and anything else that wasn’t, well, album-oriented rock played out of the Milwaukee stations.
So while I took Supertramp with me to college, I was already heading away from the songs which cocooned me and toward those that smacked me in the face, upside the head, and out into the headwinds.
I haven’t missed them in the fifteen or twenty years since I stopped listening, and I don’t think I ever will.
But they were a part of me, and they’re at the heart of one of the best things anyone has ever done for me:
Supertramp’s final tour with Roger Hodgson stopped at Alpine Valley, a mass-seating concert venue somewhere west of Milwaukee. I couldn’t afford one of the few hundred reserved spots, but I damned sure made sure that we got as close in as general seating allowed.
(General seating: the stage at Alpine Valley was situated near the bottom of a hill; the reserved seats were covered, and rising behind them, a vast slope of green. You’d get to Alpine Valley early in the day, set out your blanket and cooler in line if wanted to be first-ish in, or just in the gravel parking lot if you wanted to, I don’t know, hang out near your car. At some point they’d announce they would shortly open the gates, at which point you grabbed your shit and scrambled up into the crowd—which would, inevitably, start mooing—and pressed and pressed until they opened the spigot and you popped through the turnstiles and ran as fast as you dared down the hill to claim a spot.)
We did pretty good getting far down the hill at the Supertramp show, but as I was as short then as I am now, when the crowd stood up for the first song, I couldn’t see a damned thing.
That’s when the best-thing happened: JK, who didn’t come with us and wasn’t a part of my regular crowd, came over to me. Get on my shoulders, she said.
What?
I know you love Supertramp. Get on my shoulders.
JK was not a big girl, but she was strong, and she hoisted me up and bounced with me through that whole opening song.
What a magnificent thing to offer someone who’s not, really, even your friend.
I don’t remember what the opener was, and I haven’t seen JK since high school graduation, but as long as I can remember her I will.
So, you see, to turn my back on Supertramp is to turn my back on that passion and is to turn my back on this great, good deed that JK did for me.
She’s been fading, fading, for months; I wasn’t sure she’d make it this long. But we are nearing the end.
I see her hunched-up walk and my breath catches in my throat. I scoop her up and hold her against my chest and tuck my chin into her fur and whisper No, not yet! I’m not ready.
And I set her back down and she walks fine and it’s clear that she’s not ready yet, either.
But it’s coming, and when she’s ready I’ll have to be, too.
Yeah, a bit of tightness across the shoulders, down my triceps, and I can now feel muscles just above my ass that I forgot I had, but, overall, I’m unexpectedly able to move.
The first day at the gym was a success.
It’s silly, that I need a gym, but I do. Having Prospect Park a less-than-10-minute run/from my house was not enough. Clear weather, open-enough sidewalks, not enough. Unhappiness with my body, not enough.
Remember when I said that I’d start walking 4 or 5 days a week as a way to ease myself into a running schedule? Yeah, didn’t work.
I do walk a fair amount, but not enough to counteract the tremendous amount of sitting I do. And while my diet is pretty good, I like cheese—I really like cheese—and I’d rather think about what I eat in terms of taste and balance rather than calories—what I want instead of what I avoid.
I’m not fat, probably not, by most accounts, terribly out of shape. We Americans are apparently packin’ on the pounds in record numbers, and all to the detriment of our hearts and knees and insulin levels, so perhaps I should feel comparatively good.
But that’s not how it works. While I do agree that health and fitness matter, I hate the moralizing that accompanies so many conversations on diet and well-being, as if to be fat is to be bad. I think to be fat is to be fat, and that’s all. There are unhappy consequences to carrying around extra weight, but those consequences accrue to the person carrying such weight, not me, so it’s not for me to pile moral pounds on top of the rest.
After all, I have plenty of my own excess baggage to lug around; it’s just not as obvious as fat.
I’m not without judgment, of course, but I have learned to ask what the point of it is before I let my criticisms loose. And there is no point to thinking that body size is in any way related to moral worth.
That’s how I try to view others, at least; for myself, well, I can come up with plenty of reasons for judgment.
I don’t want to be skinny, I don’t want to look like a 14-year-old boy, but I also don’t want to look—or more accurately, to feel—how I do now. I have a sense of myself as someone who is fit and able to take care of herself, and right now, I don’t feel fit and can’t count on my body to do what I want it to do. I like to be active, and to think of myself as active, and since I’m not the former I’m can’t do the latter.
And that makes me unhappy.
Perhaps I should ease up, be more accepting of this fortimpth body and the limits those fortimpth years impose. There is wisdom in the notion of letting things be.
But there is also wisdom in recognizing unconditional self-acceptance is not one of my strong points. I should perhaps be less harsh in how I view my body, and worry less about what others, especially possible intimate-others, might think about my body.
Yet telling myself to ease up on myself rarely works. No, I’m the kind of person who has to do, first, and only then can I say, This is enough.
And so, the gym. I won’t have to haunt the place 7 days a week, or freak out if I miss a day or two; three or 4 days a week should suffice, allow me to get my bod into a shape which makes sense to me, allow me to say, This is enough.
AbsurdBeats 