a brief response to your failing american dream

Dear K-

I sympathize with your despair at the nation's current state. I haven't felt truly American for a long time, mostly because I never really felt quite right here, never really totally at ease, at least in the same way I seemed to instantly click with Czech culture. Since then I've always pushed a bit against the "American way", and by that I mean the stereotypical American that you see on desperate television series like The Bachelor or MTV reality shows: ignorant, unhealthy, and usually a bit culturally insensitive. That being said, I still have to admit to my birth place and write on paper documents of importance my place of origin. I am American. That is a fact. Now, it brings me more shame than ever. I am embarrassed to discuss politics, in private and in public. It makes me feel sick. It makes me feel hopeless. It makes me shake my head slowly back and forth while staring at something infinitely far away, out of focus, and struggling to find any words at all.

Just trying to get through it the only way I know how,
-k

click, click, click, click

Dear K-

I apologize for the radio silence. I’ve been in a weird place lately. I haven’t been myself, and that’s been eating me away for the last few weeks.

When I say “I haven’t been myself”, I don’t mean it in the usual sense in that I just haven’t been feeling well. I mean I have been prevented through various means and commitments from doing the normal bits of my life and routines that make me feel like myself. Over the last four weeks, the nights that I have had off and to myself I can count on one hand. I haven’t been able to go on my normal runs. Even my weekly grocery store trip has been disrupted.

I shouldn’t complain; it is no one’s fault but my own. I’ve stretched myself too thin. Too many social engagements. The tedious burden of the working day. A new boyfriend who gets nervous if I don’t devote a certain amount of time to him. I like him, and I like spending time with him, but when I haven’t had a night alone to myself in several weeks I start to feel like everything is a burden, even him. And I know that isn’t a good place to be. I tried to explain it once but it didn’t go over well. I don’t think I had the right words. I don’t know if I’ve ever really had to right words.

Tonight, I cancelled plans with my friends. I saw them last night. I have plans to see them tomorrow night. I love my friends and I love the time I spend with them, but I really just can’t do it right now. I needed a night off. I need a night to go home, strip down to nothing but my underwear and an old club basketball sweatshirt from college and lay on my couch, petting my dog and playing video games. I need a night where it is okay for me to sit in silence and not have to actively engage my mind in listening and responding.

I really knew I needed a night to myself when I believe I offended a friend earlier this week. She was actively talking to me, vomiting up story after story about work, and I felt my mind drifting to and fro, weaving in and out of her stream of verbal onslaught. I nodded occasionally and tried to appear engaged, but I’m sure my eyes gave me away. I felt dead. I felt numb. Although I wanted to listen out of politeness and respect, I couldn’t force my brain to give a damn. I think she caught on and I could feel the shift in her mood from that point on. She still kept talking, but when I started to fade out and then return to focus, I’d meet her expression of exasperation and disappointment that I wasn’t providing the reception she demanded. It made me feel like I wasn’t a good friend. Similar to how I feel when I have to explain to my boyfriend how I love him but I don’t want to spend time with him. It’s like I’m on the high wire and trying to manage a difficult balancing act, and the wind has just picked up and started to gust.

I’m going to try to handle it the best I can. I’m being more active about identifying sources for my discomfort and trying to manage the cause rather than just the symptoms.

I’m sorry I haven’t been there for you lately. But, to be honest, I really don’t seem to have been there for anyone, even myself. But I’m working on that.

Still faithfully yours in friendship,

-k

Meditation On America In Late Winter

Dear K,

I've been on a journey backwards through America, and I want to set down some ideas that have been jangling in my head. Our current President disgusts me. I cannot say that in my short lifetime I have seen a man that I despise more take the presidency. I hated George W. Bush with a righteous fervor, with a fever that could only be stoked by the fiery passion of youth. I hated that man for the inglorious wars he started. I still hate him, and now I dearly miss him. More than him I miss our recently departed Barack Obama. I miss feeling like the office of president was held by a man with a cool head and steady hands. Now I feel as if it is held by a screaming infant, shitting in its drawers.

I know any number of people might take issue with this thought. But I do think America is exceptional. You can quote your Zinn at me and recount all the long list of sins committed under the guise of Americanism, and the list will be long and dark and bloody. I think it is a folly to look at American history and see anything but a long and bloody struggle out of darkness, but I think that's the history of mankind as a whole.

I think that what makes America special is not what we are, or who we've been, but who we tell ourselves we could be. The ideal America strives for is a land where each person lives by their talent and sweat. I suppose it's more than that, and has always been more than that. Pioneers didn't settle the land and prosper in vacuums. They joined in together to harvest. I don't know if there's a more powerful metaphor in my mind than farmers coming together to reap.

There's a book I read in college called Witness To The Combines. It is a series of essays and memories written by a man remembering his childhood on a farm in North Dakota. The title essay is about his father's death and the subsequent selling of the family farm. His father died a couple of months before harvest. The family was mostly grown and they all knew they would leave the farm and not take it up themselves, but still they thought they had a couple more seasons together. They needed that last harvest in order to get themselves out of the obligations they had to the land and set their mother up with a house in town. They couldn't do it by themselves. Their neighbors from all over the county came in with their combines and harvested that wheat for them together.

You know we're a republic, and one of the oldest symbols of republics in western civilization is the fasces. Now this symbol was corrupted and twisted by the fascists, which is a real shame. It was an ax surrounded by a bundle of rods. Individually the rods were weak, they would bend and snap and break if they weren't bound together. The symbol is evocative of a sheaf of wheat. The thing that makes us strong is our union, it is the bonds between us that give us strength. Whatever system of government we have, whatever symbols we use, whomever we choose to be, we must never forget that we are individual strands bound together, woven together. Together we are stronger than we are apart.

I hope you are doing well.

Yours,

K

How's Your Flame?

Just south of where I was born there is a town called Indianola that is famous for its balloon festival. When I was little I would see the balloons drift through the sky. If you've ever seen a mass of things drift in the air you know what sort of hope it inspires in a child's soul. I think that's why I write things. Not the balloons, but what they represent.

There are various lantern festivals all over the world and I think they get at what I'm trying to talk about. People put little candles in boats and float them down a stream. Or they put a candle in a lantern and let the heat from the flame take it into the air. Or they set a paper lantern on fire and it lifts off into the night sky. Thousands upon thousands of these things float into the dark. We do this out of hope, or to celebrate our lives.

This is why I write. Every time I sit down to write I am really setting a candle into a stream. I'm setting a bit of paper on fire with my soul's flame and watching it drift off into the night.

At some time or another everyone confuses the purpose of the festival. We think our lantern should be the grandest flame in the sky, the brightest, the most beautiful, and that our soul will only be magnified for its glory when everyone says it is the the brightest and most beautiful and the grandest one hanging there in the dark, floating down the stream. The flame will still go out. The candle will gutter and flicker and die. The lantern will still come crashing to the ground and nobody will know who set it in the sky or whose soul lit the flame. The point is to light the world, to let our lights shine, and not to be the brightest.

I think I'm getting at what I want to say. It's a hard point to make. The festival is our culture. The lanterns are all the things we make and do and say.  We look at others and think their lanterns are much better than ours. When really it is our task to just light as many lanterns as we can. To make them as well as we can. To light up the night sky. To reflect back to heaven the glory of heaven. To show God we love this world as much God loves this world.

That's why I write. It's the thing I've decided to make my lanterns out of.


I hope your soul is aflame and blazing,

K

Buck Up!

Dear K,

I started seeing somebody. I really like her. We just had our first date last night. But we've been hanging out all week. It's one of those head rushes that takes you out like a tackle from nowhere. You're trudging along in the snow and then someone wraps their arms around you and you find yourself on the ground in spring rubbing your head and wondering how you got there. It's a reminder that the world can be a fine place to live in, and maybe all we need is just a little kindness to get by with. Just somebody to look at you and say they like who you are and what you do and how you do it.  Thinking about all the time I spent crying into the wind, trying to get back something that I left, trying to march upstream in a river when the water's already in the ocean, and it strikes me that I'm a fool, and I'm glad I'm a fool. I'm an idiot in a good way. I'm really enjoying life. I've been going through a lot of ups and downs and this life is quite a wild ride and I'm so glad of it.

Cheers,

K

Now The Gates Of Jericho Were Securely Barred

Dear K,


Last week I went to the Des Moines Art Center, which is our humble little art museum here. It's got a couple of treasures and they do their damndest in a town that has little time for anything other than cubicle sitting and couch sitting. The new exhibit the art center has on display is photographs by Vivian Meier. There are exhibits of her photographs all over the country now, she's been in vogue for the last couple of years. They made a Netflix documentary about why.

You see these two yahoos in New Jersey went and bid on a storage unit in an auction and they won. In the storage unit were thousands and thousands of negatives. Some of them were dated and had the location on them. A lot didn't. Vivian Meier had died some time ago and never intended for this work to be exhibited or used or thought about. I believe that she took these pictures for herself. Took them and made them and kept them secret like you keep your writing secret. Now the secret is out though.

It's a strange exhibit to see, because there's no authorship in the work, by that I mean you don't know how or why she took these pictures. A lot of the ones up at the Des Moines Art Center are in the genre of Street Photography, which is where you take pictures of strangers on the street. Vivian Meier took pictures of strangers without them knowing, she didn't do street portraits. She didn't ask people about their lives. She just took little snippets of their lives, parts of their exteriority and hid them away. It's kind of the inverse of what happened to her work isn't it?


Here's the thing though. I guarantee that your work will resonate with somebody. I guarantee that what you write will save somebody's life in a small way. I say this because I think that we live and die in small events. Every minute is made up of sixty seconds and those sixty seconds are made up of smaller bits and smaller than these is where we live. They're not all good, and not all bad, and it's the whole that matters, it's in aggregate. I want you to share your work for the same reason that if we were all put into a choir we should all sing. It's the duty of everybody who can move a pen and put together a sentence to write to the best of their ability, and to share it. To sing with the choir.

I'm not going to stop trying to convince you to that your work should be made public. And I won't have any part of destroying it after you die. You know what I'll do? I'll edit it all into books and publish them myself. That's what I'm going to do. You better hope you outlive me because if you don't I'm gonna find all your writing and share your voice with the world.

Yours In Annoying Friendship,

K

i took the lights and radio towers out of my dreams

Dear K-

I am sorry to hear about your friend. It’s always hard to lose someone, especially unexpectedly, and especially when it was anticipated on their end but they didn’t relay that message until it was already over. Suicide always makes me feel guilty and selfish. I think to myself “what could I have done” or “why didn’t they tell me” and even sometimes “was I not enough to keep them wanting to live”? I may have only talked to the person once, at some crowded college party and we exchanged some joke about Jamaica, but still their choice to later consciously leave this world always hangs heavy and I feel like an opportunity was missed. I am not foolish enough to think these sentiments are original or unique; I am sure death tends to rock all our cradles in a similar fashion whenever it passes near. We always miss the things most that we can never have back.

In regards to your previous rants of the new year, I did not mean to make you feel targeted by my lamentations, although I always welcome your perspective. It is one thing to read a past love’s work and admire it for its sentimentality and heart, but it’s another thing to react in such a way as to make the author feel cornered, trapped. You know that I have a long history of writing without an intent to share, so I still startle easily when I realize that I am exposed, vulnerable. I don’t like my words being twisted to suit another’s purpose, especially someone who has left such a bitter taste in my mouth. But I guess that is inevitably the plight of every writer; once you give yourself up and let other’s in on your world, it’s no longer yours. Someone will always find themselves in your writing, whether the interpretation is accurate or not. Someone will always feel when they read your work (or maybe they won’t, maybe it won’t resonate at all), and that is something you and I and everyone else just has to accept. I am sure some of my favorite authors would probably be disappointed in the sentiments they evoke in me, because perhaps it wasn’t their intent. But there’s nothing to be done of it. You are right. I shouldn’t let it stop me. What should I care what some little, lonely man thinks?

I have been drinking a lot more coffee lately. I know it isn’t good for me, but I have been trying to be better about other aspects of my life in exchange for this simple pleasure. It’s hard to give it up. There just isn’t anything that can compare to staring out a cloudy winter window while sitting in my knickers, sipping a steaming cup of black coffee in the gentle morning silence and musing at the birds around my backyard feeder. I like to watch them flit and flutter and their undulating flight paths. I don't get to do it as often as I'd like.

Yours cordially,
-k