No soup for you, white people

Today was a day of glorious sunshine. Tomorrow we return to clouds and rain. It is summer in Portland. We don't tan in Oregon, we rust. Perfect weather for the annual Naked Bike Ride (no, I did not participate, not wanting to blind people with my pasty white skin.

Speaking of white, we're at it again! We just don't seem to get it. I can hardly stand to watch the news. Photos of kids in cages and sound tracks of weeping parents and toddlers is shocking to some of us. But for a few moments at a time, I can imagine how others might see those images as just another liberal frothy emotional manipulation. Sobbing children, how trite, can't those liberals come up with something more original?

♫ This land is your land, this land is my land, as long as we are white men, we own it all. From the murder of Natives to the enslavement of Africans, we took this land, and now it's ours. If you are white, this land was made for you and me. ♫ Tra-la-la...

We bumped the Native Americans off their land and did our best to exterminate them. We kidnapped people from Africa and enslaved them, raped their women, and sold their children. We put Japanese Americans in internment camps, after taking their property. Even in our modern era, we repeatedly mow down young black men (and sometimes women) whose main crime is being black. And now we're valiantly attempting to teach those brown-skinned parents not to come here by taking away their children when they come seeking asylum and the American dream.

It's utterly mind-boggling, until I realize that this is what happens to any group with virtually unlimited power and resources. The powerful always win over the powerless. Human greed and fear of the “other,” combined with military and physical superiority, means entire groups of people are exploited, subjugated, imprisoned, or killed—or all of the above. 

I've been feeling a bit of rage.

Violence is a tragic expression of an unmet need. I keep reminding myself that some (not all) white men are afraid of losing what they have (power, safety, security, wealth) or not getting what they want (power over other people's land, wealth, labor, and lives). It feels terrible to not get what we want—ask any two-year-old. But when grown men with power (and guns) act like cranky nap-deprived two-year-olds, I start thinking of heading for the hills. 

Where would I be safe? How long can I hide behind my white skin? Sooner or later, we'll have to make amends. I'd give up soup for a year if I thought that would do it, but I suspect it won't. The best I can offer is the fact that I did not propagate. 

The Chronic Malcontent stumbles down memory lane

 As I grind my teeth and wait for a chat rep from the phone company to magically fix my billing issue, I thought I could use the time to catch up on my blog. Most evenings, when my brain is mush and I can't think, I work on my scanning projects. I'm scanning old documents, photos, letters, and artwork in a unique form of Swedish death cleaning. I'm not Swedish, nor am I dying, but preparing for the end of one life and (I hope) the beginning of another seems appealing to me as I get older.

I've been scanning letters. My letters. My mother (may she not live forever) saved every letter I wrote to her from the time I left home to the time I returned, twenty years later. When she embarked upon her own death cleaning (without the death part), she gave me back all those letters, two heavy shoe boxes stuffed with envelopes. Hundreds of pages. I couldn't throw them away without peeking at some of the things I wrote when I was twenty years old. Behold the slow-moving train wreck of my youth. Once you look, it's hard to look away.

I scanned one box over the past week, wrestling the dusty pages out of dirty envelopes, many addressed to "Mommy," from "Kidlet." I guess I was a very immature twenty-year-old. I don't remember much, to be honest. My memory works in Polaroid snapshots, not Sony Betamax. I recall moments, images, a dress, a song. How they connect I have no idea. Reading snippets of the letters from my earlier self helped me remember events I'd long forgotten.

Back then, everything was art. The letters, the envelopes, the scrawling calligraphic marks on the page. I drew pictures of clothes I designed and made at fashion school. It was 1978. Disco, leggings, spike heels, permed hair. Los Angeles was the place to be for a wannabe fashion designer. The voice coming through the letters was that of a child, a naive, foolish, optimistic child who was willing to live life on the edge—because what a creative life it was.

Like a child, I complained about everything. I was in a constant snit about something someone had done or failed to do. Until I read my own words, I didn't remember any of these snits . . . or most of the people. As I read, the places I lived, the people I knew started to resurface in my memory. The apartment on Romaine, where I lived in 1978 when I got hired at the department store. The apartment on Orange, where I lived in 1979 when I got fired from the department store. My month as a Dupar's waitress. Enrolling in fashion school. Working late hours doing paste-up for California Apparel News. Sleeping on the bus. Leaving fashion school after one year.

In 1980, I sent home photos of me with my friends, prancing around in tight-legged vinyl jumpsuits with shoulders the size of small turkeys, hennaed hair spiked half a foot above our heads. We showed our designs in fashion shows. We thought any moment, we would become famous. We thought people would be banging on our door in droves, demanding amazing costumes they couldn't sit down in.

The second box contains letters from the mid-1980s. I haven't started scanning those letters yet. I believe I was somewhat calmer then, perhaps more realistic. I was no longer making bizarre artfashion costumes that left the wearer drenched in sweat and unable to pee without wardrobe assistance. I'd lost my enthusiasm for fashion. By then I'd sold my soul to the custom sewing business and enslaved myself to making other people's designs and altering their stinky clothes. I myself was the worst-dressed person in L.A. To this day, I hate to sew.

Something corrosive happened to my soul when I became mired in a money-losing business doing something I despised. My good friend said, "It's never too soon to stop doing what you hate and start doing what you love." Even though I haven't quite managed to live up to that creed, I still think it is the best advice I've ever received.

I'm not the manic wackjob I used to be. I said I don't want to burden the world with more paintings, and that is true for now. One thing I can do, though, is write, and those letters are a vast hoard of rich and energetic descriptions from a life I barely remember, a life that might be fun to write about and read about. Maybe she, me, the young naive maniac with a passion for fashion will find her way onto the pages of some story, a book, a memoir, who knows.

It's almost enough to know that once, I had passion for something. Misguided, maybe, but I was a believer. I believed in my art, as only the young and innocent can do, before they find out it's hard to earn money making art. Life is real, rent is due, and we can't live on apples and cheese quesadillas. Money and art don't mix in my world, they never have, but that doesn't mean I won't figure it out someday.