Today I was talking to some friends whom I haven’t seen much of over the summer. I shared with them a bit of the details of the roller coaster of our last few weeks.

You know, just your average roller coaster of life.

When I finished rolling out the 4-11, the friend circle was just quiet and looking at me. Nobody said anything, so I just kinda chuckled and shrugged it off with a laugh and a “well, five years ago when I was sitting at the pub drinking beers and having the easy life, I’d never had believed someone if they told me this is where I’d be five years, heh heh.”

And the crickets continued to chirp their response.

Relationships are a trick of the mind. Everyday we get up alone and spend the entire course of the day, alone, inside our singular minds. It takes a cold-mirror moment like the one I had today to remind me that what we need and get from other people is valuable and limited. And yet that which we mine from ourselves is skewed and often without perspective.

I am pretty sure that in the last 18 months or so, in the process of building one part of my life, I haven’t been as capable or as good at making my friends happy, answering calls for help, or greasing the wheels of relationships in life that make spontaneous conversation meaning-full.

The ground I walk on is unfamiliar and I feel cast away on an island of ill-terrain, where the natives aren’t unfriendly– they just aren’t that interested. So, in the midst of carrying the weight of life, I have mostly put aside trying to integrate.

I go the well myself. It’s a well I dug myself. I sit at the well alone and sing about tin roofs, Roman ghosts and the battlement of my fears.

I sleep heavy in sweat and dream of a well gone dry.

In my “Fantasy Island,” de plane carries me away to the mainland… whatever that may be.

Being politically motivated and standing up for my beliefs had an interesting side effect of making it difficult to choose a straw for my iced tea this morning.

At my favorite locally owned coffeehouse, I purchased organic tea in a recyclable cup. Being the artful sort, I paused as I reached toward the cup of colorful straws, deciding which color would best go with the shade of my peach-tea.

I froze.

The aesthetics of my heart wanted the pink straw. But in my mind, visions of Sleeping Beauty Aurora, helpless in eternal slumber, popped up. My brain stopped me.

The pink straw was the correct straw, aesthetically. But apparently my disdain for the prevailing social meaning of PINK was trying to override what the heart wanted.

For a moment, I became on of those crazy mumblers (fully acceptable at locally owned coffeehouses, natch) and heard myself say:

“Well, I just going to take the pink because none of the girls are here to force me to choose it.”

The little girls will do that. They have been force-fed the Disney pink — and all that it implies — since they were big enough to prop up in front of a DVD/TV combo.

The Princess Bride Price

The cost of princess-ifying our girls is heavy. As writer Kristy Quist notes, “It’s an identity based on image alone…Pint-sized princesses are adorable, and at best, this is fun, imaginative play. At its worst, it distorts a natural appetite for beauty and becomes an exercise in narcissism and materialism.”

Millions upon millions of girls worship the beauty, the gowns, the singing voices of the Disney Princesses. The machine that is Disney have created a factory of Dasmels in Distress – some who read, some who perhaps even carry a sword, but all who are, in the end, just pretty, anorexic and waiting to be rescued.

The psychology of that is real. We might as well be saying: what you say doesn’t matter, but the sheen of your hair and the size of your waist does.

Encouraging them to be “princesses” tells them you believe it too, that GIRLS ARE INVISIBLE TO THE WORLD. Girls don’t matter. Girls are objects. Girls expire at 40.

What I want to say is this: If you even look a little bit, you can’t help but be sick, sad, and terrified for the future of girls.

Sigh. All this, for want of a  pink straw to match my peach tea.

“Maybe if I act like that (do like this), that guy will call me back
Porno Paparazzi girl, I don’t wanna be a stupid girl
Baby if I act like that (Oh, Oh-Oh, Do you think?), flipping my blond hair back (Do you think?)
Push up my bra like that, I don’t wanna be a stupid girl (Yeah, yeah)”

– ‘Stupid Girl’ by PINK

A Guest Post by ‘Shiny Bits’ blogger, Paul Merrill

I love quirky products. It’s fun to cruise our local Whole Foods Market on a Saturday and taste samples from a variety of sometimes local small companies.

Occasionally I take the plunge and buy one of their toothpastes or boxes of cereal. But for the most part, I say no – mostly due to the product costing two or four times what a national brand would. Our budget cannot stretch to cover changing wholesale to local and natural stuff.

There are a lot of reasons to buy local, which I won’t bore you with. However, one reason is talking with that smiling face who was actually involved in producing the product. There’s the good feeling of knowing that when I buy that consumable item, I am helping that real person.

But what about the real people who work for giant multi-national corporations? They have jobs too and depend on us buying their products. The connection between our non-purchase and the loss of their job is not as direct as with the little guy. But it’s still there.

And  it’s all too easy to make the giant corporation the bad guy. True, there is nothing good about a CEO getting paid enough to fund several orphanages. But often some of the big guys do have a sense of environmental responsibility and and ethical compass.

The solution? Play around. Buy some local and some multi-national. Research that giant corporation to see if they care about what’s important to you. Shake the hand of your local baker and buy their bread. Think about it sometimes and don’t just do what you’ve always done.

I have a terrible time writing in first person.

It’s a long, dark walk into the night to find the place where you can spill yourself. It’s high and hard to climb. It’s where you exist as:

“Me”

but where you no longer belong to yourself.

First person exposes you. The wind blows harder here.

But see? I did it again and drew back. Hid myself behind some theoretical “you.”

It puts a distance between the real me and the real you, you know.

‘Second person’ is the third person in the room, in experiential writing. Second person stands between you and me.

But I digress. And heaven forbid.

Tonight my fingers are shivering over the keys. I quake in my shoes at the idea of exposing myself again.

I ebb and flow with ecstasy over creating, and certainty of failure.

My toehold slips again.

Why didn’t King Kong hesitate? He just rocketed up the shiny metal mountain.

Leaving so many fears unanswered.

The truth about life lies in this pat of butter.

We can ask for what we want.

We can even PAY for what we want.

We can desire and expect it. But we won’t always get it.

Here’s the bagel I had for breakfast at my favorite Milford cafe.

I order it in this way.

Me: I’ll have a medium coffee and a sesame bagel toasted with butter for here. And I like my bagels burnt. Well, practically.

He: ummm are you SURE you don’t want to try the Vanilla Macadamia coffee? If you don’t like it, you can HATE me.”

Me: “No thanks. Just regular coffee and the bagel.”

He: “Are you SURE? The coffee is, like, to die for.”

[deep pause]

Me: Just the regular coffee. And the bagel.  I really don’t want to hate you.

The Vanilla (yuck!) and the Macadamia (AWFUL) managed to distract both of us enough — him then and me now. From the real point. The. Bagel.

Or more to the point:

Butter Pats and The Meaning of Life.

The bagel came and it was nearly toasted, served with four butter pats.

I spread the butter and ate the bagel and it was just fine. But it wasn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t what I expected or desired.  It was a slice of life, served on a pretty yellow plate, with a medium regular coffee.

People do have a way of wanting what the want, the way they want it, especially when it comes to breakfast bread. And ordering food out is a constant battle for satisfaction.We say “bagel with butter” but what we really mean is: “Hello. I have so many unfulfilled needs in my overstuffed life. My jeans don’t fit very well anymore and I don’t like my hair. Could you please butter my bagel for me????”

We look into the eyes of a stranger, the underpaid, also-dissatisfied person across the counter and unknowingly entrust them with our everyday luxuries. We ask for our heart’s desire, hope for the best and we are often disappointed.

A Bovine Revolt?

My friend Jessica, who is a vegan, is very funny and very ranty lately on Facebook. Lately she reminded us all (via Status Update) that a really good way to offend her– and the entire population of Vegan-onia– is to plan a subversive cheese attack. This is done but mixing “just a little bit”  of cheese into food served to her (or her vegan comrades) after they’ve asked for it without.

I thought of that as I was internally whining about my butter this morning. We can ask for what we want, we can even expect it, but life inevitably hands us obstacles.

Often, apparently, in dairy form.

… Is Beauty Disguised.

This week, I launched here the inclusion of more and different writers in my blog.

I desire to propel myself into a different place with my writing, and to create a wider community of conversation around experiential writing online. “Beautiful writing” — on blogs, in books, and in print media– seems to be pushed into hidden margins as a genre mafia takes over.

You know what I mean: it’s a shuffle and two-step of compartmentalization created by an intense need to label writing and file it away onto shelves. This same kind of thing happens with blogs, only more so. In order to succeed, a blog must be as niche as possible — a shaving of a topic, narrowed in order to satisfy preconceived desires of outcomes fractured into page views and “unique visitors” (such as they are).

The writing in these places, to me, often feels so empty. It never-ended bullet-pointing solutions to our problems, and to me it just feels deeply unsatisfying. Like eating ice cream to solve the emotional eating craving, because you were all out of the Doritos.  Numbers drive the content, and what is lost is the way writing makes us more.

More human. More awake. More prepared to be a part of our moment.

My friend, Tricia, writes to me that her own production has become spotty, with energetic bursts paired with long bouts of silence. Her writing, when it happens, she says comes out as “drivel” — a word that means both “twaddle” and “saliva flowing from the mouth.” Either way, it is a beautiful and melancholy image, accidental language in the middle of an everyday email that shows her ability to sculpt metaphor into human experience. Even as she drives through a puddle of her own sadness.

We take a walk (uphill, both ways, without shoes, in the snow) into the forest of words, and we ask us ourselves to examine our choices and our beliefs: it is emotionally packed, filled with heartbreak and humor.

My writer friends, who will be visiting here from time to time, are all writers who have shown me that they are capable of this beauty. I hope we can all encourage them to write into that space of fear, frustration and mania– where the human experience and the art of writing combine to make us more .

A guest post by New Haven writer Chris Dawson

I bought new underwear this morning. Socks, too—both white and dark. And for good measure I threw in a ribbed blue tee shirt. Altogether it came to $45, give or take.

And now here it is five hours later and I still feel guilty.

I believe I have a problem.  It is not a problem I have seen mentioned anywhere—and trust me, I spend a lot of time just dinking around on the Internet.  If such a problem had already been identified, named, support-grouped, stretchy-braceleted, and bumper-stickered I would have come across its existence somewhere.

I am not sure what to call the problem, though I do have some sense of the root causes and a too-strong awareness of the symptoms.  I’ll start with the symptoms:

1)  When confronted with a need around the house, I will always think about what we already own that can be improvised to get the task done;

2)  I wear clothes even if the clasp has broken, a stain has appeared, or they are worn all the way through.  (ALL of my socks have holes.)

3)  When I have gotten to the point where the need to buy something new is simply undeniable, I will delay the actual purchase far beyond the point that it is OK to do so.  I alternate between the three pairs of socks that I own, even though two of the pairs are not technically “pairs” but instead simply close-color cousins.

When I do finally make a purchase of clothes for myself, I feel guilty for weeks.  Really.  (Today’s utter binge will have me feeling bad for at least 10 days.)

As far as the root of this affliction, I have it pinned down to two things: Roman Catholicism and being one of six kids in a staunchly
middle-class family.  My Catholicism, though long abandoned, lingers in the stunning levels of guilt I feel over an vast array of thoughts, actions, intentions, omissions, desires, fears, hopes, temptations, and PURCHASES.  My upbringing as one of six kids in a family without a lot of money has left me with the notion that my needs are just not that important. I was raised to believe that making do is far better than buying new.

These two strains combine to form a powerful thread in my personality.

MacGyvering the Consumption System.

It may come across as simply “cheap” to the uninitiated, but to me it is something different.  It is a clinical reluctance to buy new things.  It might even be worthy of inclusion in the DSM-V.

My default response anytime Erica or Isabel suggests, (or worse, states outright), “we need to buy a new” anything is to list all the other things we could do in lieu of spending money.

“We don’t need a new colander, we can just use an old tee shirt.”

“Who needs an eyeglass repair kit?  A short bit of paperclip wire will hold those together.”

“New shoes?  Duct tape!”

There is sometimes an oceanic gulf between identifying a problem, and actually changing the resulting behaviors. I have by now identified my problem.  I have taken a cue from psychiatric tradition and named it from its Greek roots, vorophobia—fear of having stuff. But now that I’ve given it a name, I am left with a question of treatment. What do I do?

I am experimenting with strategies to consolidate the guilt by saving so-called necessary purchases until I have at least four items on my list. Once I have four, I go and buy the things as quickly as possible.

To be clear, the guilt is most severe when the things I am buying are for myself alone, with no possible larger purpose. That is why I threw in the t-shirt today.  I do “need” one, since all of my other casual shirts have race logos or stains (or both) on them. I figure instead of making four separate trips to the store and marinating in four separate infusions of guilt, I get it all over with at once.

Now, I have decided to take my experiment one step further today.  Erica and I are heading to New York for a play this weekend and on the train I will be wearing new socks, new underwear, and my new blue shirt.  You may not realize it, but I will be taking quite a risk.

So, if you happen to be on the 4:12 Metro North to Grand Central and a guy in your car seems overly-agitated, pupils dilated, and seems to be emitting little hicks and squeaks driven by deepest despair, call 911 right away and report a case of rampant vorophobia – fear of buying new underwear.

(But please, tell the paramedics to be careful with my shirt if they need to use the paddles.)

Only once do we have the chance to ACTUALLY be brand new.

We arrive on the earth, sticky and discombobulated, completely unprepared for all this light and noise.

From then on, we are experienced. We’ve seen it all. So we have to do all manner of contortions to reinvent ourselves.

The book I am reading right now is sort of a self-help for writers. It’s called “Juicy Pens, Thirsty Paper,” by an author I really admire. She has many books out that are very successful yet totally unique. You’ll recognize them instantly by their bright colors and hand-written text. She goes by SARK.

In the book, she tells the story of one of her most famous published works. You’ve probably seen it. It’s a poster called “How To Be an Artist.” The story is set in her “magic cottage” where she started out, before she was ever published.

“It (the “How to Be an Artist” poster) was my colorfully written statement that we are all artists of Life. I took this crooked, color full page to a store in San Francisco. They also had a catalog, and agreed to publish a photo of the poster once to see if anybody liked it. The orders flooded in and I ended up making 11,000 by hand. There are now over one million Artist posters in print.” — SARK

Something about this story whispers in my ear, with reverb that travels into the deepest recesses. It’s where I hide my fears. The places I am certain I will fail, so I leave well enough alone. The place where I conjure up another witty or even snarky remark about Someone Else to distract myself and anyone from my calling which has not been satisfied.

Everyday, for any reason, it seems, we are offered the chance to reinvent ourselves. We can suddenly become parents, or pop idols, or in the case of SARK, an artist creating exactly the message she desires, whilst still being able to pay the rent. I am working on something like that, I guess, (though I only now managed to add this sentence, in a second edit).

You know that feeling you get, standing  in line for the tall fast roller coaster? Your legs melting from the core and your stomach rolling?

That’s exactly what I am feeling right now. Telling you.

So, new ideas are bubbling up around here.

I’m fanning my desire to have guest writers at Letters.

So today I am going to create a new page called “The Guest Book” which will include bios of my guest writers, as they appear.

It will also include my guest writer Wish List, with such names as Ted Kooser, Elizabeth Gilbert, Bill Bryson,  Maya Angelou, Ira Glass, Garrison Keillor, Jon Stewart,  and others, as I dream them up. I hope to slowly move these names from the wish list, to the bio list.

Also means I need to reach out to these people and, well, ask them.

Ask them nicely:

Dear Writer: Please, write a Letter — to me and to all of us — on a fine detail of life in America. Let us see, in one brief snapshot, what you see.

A sliver of American experience, unfolded in words.

Accompanying photographs warmly accepted.

Yeah. Totally scary.

So I’ll start with the people who will probably say Sure.

Like some of my friends-also-writers: Chris, Paul, Tara, Jen, Holli,  Sally, Robyn, Jenn, D-Rev, J-Rons, and others.

So be sure to check in again soon, and regularly, for new, different, more.

More beautiful letters. Coming your way.

Shopping at Target for school supplies takes us into the arms of  August, summer’s last great hump.

I smell the Ticonderoga pencil shavings already and summer’s great keening begins.

The season is nowhere over, yet it is aging. Surrounded by the lemon-yellow-forest-green-cornflower-burnt-sienna colors swirling around me in the all-new-all-same-mass Crayola aisle. Even as I buy what is required, I disappear into my own summer place.

In the waning days, we are gathering our harvest buckets, our pickling salts, and inner-tube patches. We are ready for something to die again.

The summers of yesterday– whether we are 20 or 80– wait in our memories like still life. Perfect hard confectionary, twisted inside a cellophane wrapper. A permanent lost anticipation.

They’ve lost the bright heat of concrete noontime. And the sangria reds of the lake sunsets. They are behind us, in the albums of already. They bleach and blanch entirely, monochrome, with twinkles of silver in the edges of our memory.

Now, where the morning light touches the water, the memory flashes in brightest white. Where the canoe glides into the shade of a tree’s arch, it disappears into the blackness.

Summer belongs to the juicy, hand-picked moments of immediacy, and then, to the permanent archive of memory.

Other Summers in Black and White… here.