Of all the people in the world, Martin and Ruby should know better. They share an office with me for more than half the day; they hear me muttering obscenities under my breath and holding long monologues against the treachery of inanimate objects. Martin is often the sole auditor of my more cockamamie political diatribes--if anything, he's more liberal even than I--and they've heard my side of conversations with LJ, cryptic and laced with non-standard dialects.
And yet, there was Martin, telling me "Every time I see that picture hanging over there I think to myself 'She would make such a good mother!'" (The picture in question was taken at the behest of Noreen, during one of our yearly award convocations for the kids. I'm sitting in between two little bitty third- or fourth-graders--teeny little things--with a big grin on my face. (Of course I blinked. I ALWAYS blink. There's barely a picture of me in the last ten years in which I'm not freakin' BLINKing.) And I look fatter than usual, truth to tell. But everyone thinks I look cute, apparently. If that's cute, then I can't imagine what I must look like to them the rest of the time!)
I wonder what, besides the picture, would make anyone--anyone!--think I'd be a good mother. I am in no way maternal. I have no patience, no nurturing ways (okay, maybe that's not ENTIRELY accurate, but it's close.) I can do the little domestic things--cook, crochet, quilt, decorate--all that stuff--but I absolutely do not want another human being to be completely dependent on me.
More than that, though, I know I wouldn't be a suitable mother because of what I'm carrying with me. Apparently I'm fooling at least some of the people some of the time--but I don't think anyone knows what I'm really like, how angry and how dangerous (to myself, if not to anyone else.)
How could I possibly bring a child into this world when, at least three times a week, I contemplate how best to leave it myself? How could I raise a kid to be functional in the world--to be polite but assertive, to keep his or her own best interests in mind while never forgetting the rights and feelings of others--when most days it takes an effort of will to keep from screaming at someone who deserves it? How can I raise a child to be a good citizen and to question authority when I've seen the futility of trying to do right? I know too much about the way the world can crush the hope out of you--how could I look a child in the face and tell them that this is a fundamentally good life? I've been happy only for brief moments--and I know I'm no different from the norm in THAT regard, though I don't think this chronic unhappiness is the human condition so much as a symptom of a sick society --so how in all good conscience could I condemn a child to live in that same sick society--the same one I have no idea of how to fix? This is a society that rewards wrongdoers and punishes virtue and effort. The sad fact of the matter is, LJ is far more likely to make a good living out on the block than as a gym teacher; hell, he's likely to make more money in a year, doing what he does, than I make fixing computers!
What I really want out of life--if I have to live it--is this: I want the right to live without a constant guilt trip. I am tired of the constant implication that I've somehow "redeemed" myself by "turning away" from my old ways--drugs, irresponsibility, big dreams of a wild and beautiful future. The fact of the matter is, I haven't turned away from SHIT. The big dreams are only no longer a part of me because the person who I had those dreams with is dead. I would rather spend my last days on this earth as a wild-eyed junkie with no job, living off anyone who'll be kind enough to help me, than what I'm doing now. The life I'm living now is fundamentally without a soul. I can get through entire days without thinking about anything REAL to me. Were it not for the fact that I would lose this house, I would go back to my old life in a heartbeat.
I don't believe in the things of this world. That sounds, in writing, like some spiritual confession, some God-thing waiting to happen--but I mean it like this: I am aghast at the way this world has changed even in the past 10 years. Suddenly mercy is weakness; tolerance is the mark of a coward or an idiot. The Coulters and the O'Reilly's have taken over the world, and they name-call anyone who dares to mention peace or compromise. The whole world has regressed, we have become a nation of schoolyard bullies. Q101--the station that benefitted most from Kurt Cobain's rejection of the hatefulness of the jocks and cheerleaders and lugnuts of the world--now has 8 hours a day where the reigning "personalities" are intolerant jerks. M*nc*w (I'll be goddamned if I'll put that name in my blog and have one of his dumbass listeners find me by using it as a search term--I'd prefer the "canine-human sex" people!)--anyway, after 9/11, I heard a show where M*nc*w said we (the "true Americans", I guess) should "take back Devon Avenue"--the main street in the North Side's Arab neighborhood. But from him, I expect idiocy. Now they've got these three new afternoon-drive idiots, who think they're so liberal because they hate George W, yet these same three routinely use "gay" as a pejorative. They sound like a bunch of fifth-graders. Kurt Cobain had the right idea--he got the hell out before he could see the re-ascendancy of Jackass Nation--but before he went he wrote this:
"At this point I have a request for our fans. If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us--leave us the fuck alone! Don't come to our shows and don't buy our records. Last year a girl was raped by two wastes of sperm and eggs while they sang the lyrics to our song 'Polly'. I have a hard time carrying on knowing that there are plankton like that in our audience." (Kurt Cobain, from the liner notes of Incesticide)
And yet Q-101 plays Nirvana all the time. "He's the one/Who likes all our pretty songs/And he likes to sing along/And he loves to shoot his gun/But he don't know what it means/Don't know what it means..." They play it as though they themselves are neither guilty nor even complicit. It's exactly THAT sort of hypocrisy, of co-opting things that are real and polluting them in the name of the overarching corporate conforming mentality--it's THAT which makes me want to leave this life.
Today at work I was asked to do some work on a project for Nancy in marketing--to open a file for her and match the names with the names in our database. I opened the file and there were all these weird phrases in there instead, all with numbers after them. "Country Squires", "Bluebloods", "Pools and Patios", "Kids and Cul-De-Sacs"--stuff like that.
"Nancy? What is this?" I asked her.
"Oh--those are the marketing research company's designations for all the target subgroups people can be a part of." She seemed nonchalant.
In searching for the data for her project, she sent me another file. This one turned out to be a full list of their 62 subcategories. The categories were arranged in order of decreasing income--and the further down you got, the more condescending the names became: "Shotguns and Pickups"and "Hardscrabble" were two of the ones I remember--and I think I've consciously blocked out the "urban" permutations.
After spending five minutes with this file, I really, really wanted to take a shower. And these people make millions of dollars--billions, if you look at all the companies just like them. (Jake and I spent a moment idly wondering which categories we fell into....though I think I probably come under the "unmarketable" category, since I am swayed not at all by ads or marketing ploys. The things I like, I like either because they're cheap, useful to me, tasty, or other qualities based on some individual preference not shared by many others. I'm an iconoclast, and there aren't any categories for us...I don't think.) (Update, 7/16/04: I just looked at this file again and it skeeved me even WORSE, if that's a possibility. I mean, read this:
(Hey! There I am!!!) The descriptions of the lower-income demographics have the details that just kill me. "Hooked on Christian and country music"...."bears all the scars of poverty"....."loves camping, bowling, and attending tractor pulls." If I bought into the prevailing belief system, I would be SO PISSED to hear myself summed up in these little blurbs. Fortunately, I don't.)"The neighborhoods of social group U3's three clusters are highly concentrated. Over 60% of the total households are in the top 25 TV markets and over 99% in the top 50. With one cluster in the ninth affluence decile, and two in the tenth, and with the nation's lowest incomes and highest poverty ratios, U3 has the nation's lowest incomes and highest poverty ratios. Its clusters share multi-racial, multi-lingual communities densely populated with rented rowhouses and highrises. U3 shows high indices for singles, solo parents with pre-school children, and perennial unemployment.
45 Single City Blues Ethnically-Mixed Urban Singles
Cluster 45, found in most Eastern megacities and in the new West, contains the third highest concentration of singles in America. Often found near urban universities, Cluster 45 hosts a fair number of students and very few children. "Single City Blues" offers a mixture of races, transients, and night trades, and is best described as a "poor man's Bohemia."
Lower Middle (51) Age Groups:
Here's the thing: There are millions of unemployed steelworkers, craftsmen who can't feed their families, artists forced to abandon their art--and all of those people MAKE something, create something tangible and lasting. Marketing people make nothing lasting--they spend their life and their talents and their intelligence on acts of manipulation and the excavation of the human psyche for personal gain--and yet they are paid more than teachers, more than nurses, more than writers, more than social workers. In my own neighborhood I see thousands of people struggling just to get by, to feed their children, to make ends meet. Yet the people who have the talent to direct the workings of peoples' minds--are they pointing people in the direction of self-improvement, or leading the society in the direction of equality, justice, and opportunity for everyone? No--they're using their talent to convince everyone else that they need to buy more, get more, have more--that they need Air Force Ones or Prada bags or Lexus cars to validate them, to show that they're successful--no matter what they have to do to get them, or whose toes they have to step on. The less they have now, the more they're told how much they absolutely need these things. And the people who are being duped by this miserably-successful manipulation, for the most part, don't realize they're being duped. For the most part they believe that these material possessions actually -mean- something, that they actually say something important about the value of the owner as a human being.
I'm not immune, myself; for how many years did I convince myself that in order to consider myself successful, I had to have a house of my own? It was genetic, the influence of my grandmother operating within me, that made me believe that, though, I think--not the marketing juggernaut--and yet when I look around, there are so many material things I want. Not because of the way they're marketed, I assure myself; and yet, how can I be sure? I mean, I know I don't drink Pepsi because of its commercials--I drink Pepsi because I like the taste better than the taste of Coke or RC. When I buy a different brand of shampoo, it's because it's on sale, not because of the commercials full of shiny-haired women having orgasms in the shower. (Though occasionally I'm sucked in by a promise of smoother or less-frizzy hair--wait, that's NOT my point!) But I wonder sometimes how much I really am influenced, in ways I don't even know, by the constant media barrage. I don't even dare to trust my own motives and perceptions, in a world so full of manipulation and deceit.
This is the world I live in. These are the thoughts I encounter every day, and--when I combine them with my memories of what once was, and my half-recollections of what might have been--they leave me filled with a nearly-constant anger, strong enough to make me fear the moment it finally breaks through. Yet there are people in my life who find me competent to bring a child into this chaos--a child who will ask questions I can't even answer for myself. That, to me, would be an intolerable cruelty, and I won't ever purposefully do it--but it proves that I'm evidently doing a good job of hiding my private madness from the world.
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