let’s fool the meat to hassle the room

Even though I know there are important things going on elsewhere in the world and that nobody really needs to read my thoughts about the upcoming presidential election – I am a predictable leftist, I’ve known who I was voting for from the beginning, etc. – I’m about to go cast my (early) vote and I know I’ll be holding my breath until all the ballots are in on Tuesday. It’s chilly, dead leaves are chasing one another and we’re all rushing somewhere.

This is the first time in my (relatively short) lifetime that this process feels like a movement to me (so said R. yesterday, and she was right). She voted yesterday, and she said that families were hanging around in front of the polling place taking pictures of themselves with their ‘I Voted!’ stickers. I can’t remember such a feeling of community engagement with politics ever before – it was something I nostalgically always yearned for. Before my time, never coming back, gone with popular anarchist stump-speeches and union organizing from within and politics as everyday life, not as marginal act.

I’m glad to say I was wrong.

I wonder often if there might be a slight trending toward ideals of conservation, community, idealism, progressivism – but maybe that’s my wishful thinking turning its face toward the sun. I feel like such things are a natural response to the kind of socioeconomic and environmental crises that we’re facing.

Of course, I’m also older and cranky and fed up with the idea of lifestyle as an organizing concept.

apples to oranges

It’s difficult to resume something (even something as scattershot as a personal blog) after two years, but there is actually some continuity at work here (false blotch or not).

One of the last entries I wrote was about my Bubbe, who I think about several times daily but who is particularly present in my life in the fall. Yesterday, I threw away a coat that had some significant holes in the lining and was thus of no further utility, but before I threw it out I found her pin that I’d pinned to it ages ago. I held it in my fist like an amulet and looked up at my reflection in the glass – I have my young mother’s face and my young grandmother’s body. I’d spent so many years telling myself I wasn’t beautiful even though I always thought both of them were. That fundamental disconnect of self-perception that hangs between logic and emotional resonance has always been a stumbling block.

My drive for self-perfection has always led me to try to find comparative benchmarks, most of which are false hooks that pull me off stage left when I need to be centered.

I pulled a few pages out of one of my old journals the other day so that I could have a blank book in which to (rip it up and) start again. I do this periodically. It’s not the newness that I need to fold into my fist, it’s the consistent practice.