“I fly my flag of self-esteem for all those who have been told they were ugly and fat and hurt and shamed and violated and abused for the way they look and told time and time again that they were ‘different’ and therefore unlovable. Come to me and I will tell you and show you how beautiful and loved you are and you will see it and feel it and know it and then look in the mirror and truly believe it. If you are offended by my anger and my might at defending my borders and my people you do not deserve entry into my beloved and magnificent country.”

“We deserve beauty, love, respect, admiration, kindness and compassion. If we don’t get it, there will be hell to pay.”

An underrepresented cultural conversation, I think, is how important comedians are to sustaining and improving society. Obviously not all of them; Dane Cook… I mean, watch him perform, I guess, but bring a friggin book! Jim Carrey, I actually find that you’ve blossomed into an amazing serious actor, and I admit that Ace Ventura Pet Detective was my favorite movie when I was 13, and I personally get an abundance of satisfaction out of poop and body-part jokes (which might be a part of me staying sane) but that’s not exactly the kind of critical cultural role I’m talking about.

I digress. There is a reason why the court jester, back in the day, was a) the only one allowed to mock the king and b) sometimes killed. Because comedians and jesters work from a level that is beyond what is acceptable for everyone else. It’s their definition and their allowance. And that they are sometimes silenced should tell us something about their potential power. They are subversive in the unique-est of ways, using humor to soften hearts and minds thus opening folks to issues they might not otherwise be open to, like how much of a dick the king is. Now, what are we going to do with the consciousness they potentially give us? That’s the question and the charge.

While I’m at it, watch this, if you haven’t already:

Another thing I think about a lot is how subversive it is for women, in general, to be funny. To be funny necessarily means to be assertive and loud and smart. Not always physically loud, but loud with one’s existence– a determination to take up some part of one’s own space with one’s mind. That being said, I have a soft spot in my heart for women’s physical comedy/humor ala Amy Sedaris, Kristen Wiig, Gilda Radner, Amy Poehler and my best friend Courtney Bartlett… come to think of it, all of my best woman/female-identified friends are bastions of hilarity. Ask anyone.

For a culturally conditioned woman to make oneself ugly for the sake of a laugh, or to use her body in a huge and obvious and contorted and ridiculous way, is subversive, even if the content isn’t. Precisely because we are supposed to be so small, contained, clean, sexy (and virginy too, you big oppressive false dichotomy dicks), and quiet (all metaphorically and literally.) Bottom line: women aren’t supposed to take up their own space. If you’re funny, you have to take up, to reclaim, at least some of it, whether mind/intelligence, body, or both and more.

So do you hate yourself? Your body? Do you degrade yourself unwittingly, degrade your body and mind? I love you and I’m here for you. It’s okay. It’s a struggle, one worth fighting, which I know from an unfortunate amount of personal experience. Keep fighting. Let’s take care of each other. “We deserve beauty, love, respect, admiration, kindness and compassion. If we don’t get it, there will be hell to pay.”

Why don’t we all do ourselves a favor and watch all of three seasons of Strangers With Candy (Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert) for free on Netflix and, I think, Hulu. And also let’s all get copies of all of Margaret Cho’s revolutionary stand-up comedy compilations.

I’ve come across a lot of people/commentary that says women can’t be funny. Hey, guess what? That’s nothing but bullshit penis-farting. Men, be allies, call it out. Women, continue onward in your awesomeness. Folks who fall on other parts of the gender spectrum, explode the conversation gloriously and to your liking.

"Pee on me"

I love my male comedians too, don’t get me wrong. John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and George Carlin are all personal heroes of mine. Gender-fucker Eddie Izzard just blows everyone’s balls to the wall. But that’s another post, if I get to it. Are you bored right now? Do yourself another favor and watch vintage George Carlin on youtube. Talk about subverting the shit out of things! He was the master (at least, in the men’s realm. Margaret Cho definitely stands right there next to him.)

I, for one, fancy myself a hilarious lady. Do you know how funny I am? Maybe I will tell you about it some day. All in all, I’m really awesome across pretty much every realm that a person can be awesome. There’s no way around it. How about you? Why don’t you leave a comment telling me how amazing and hilarious and smart you are.

I leave you with this little note from my temporary Thailand home, which I consider completely related to musings on comedy: I have to believe that the point of life is love, even if I’m wrong. If I don’t throw my entire self into believing this, I will go insane. Join me.

But unlike that little creature, I am not melancholy about the sun, not usually. In fact, here in Thailand, it is December, and still 80 degrees. How does that work? My New England inner child is flustered.

And as it turns out my first novel is going to be published by the lovely Aqueous Books. It’s called A Child Is Being Killed and you can read more about it here, and below is the cover, the cover which has beautiful photography from the one and only Catie Rae Zappala on it. I’m quite excited, folks! I’m jumping into the air right now. No, I’m not really, cuz then how would I be typing? Also, is it possible to develop dyslexia as an adult, because I just wrote “zuc” and then “cyz” before I finally got “cuz” out. Anyways, here’s the cover!

My first book cover... isn't she great?

Additionally, December 13th would have been Kenneth Patchen’s 100th birthday, and it also happens to be YOUR TRULY’S birthday, so I wrote this piece for him and it’s up at The Rumpus today. Check it out friends!

All At Once Is What Eternity Is: Musings on Kenneth Patchen

If you mess with The Patch, he will destroy and then rebuild you with love

]]> http://liferoar.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/my-novel-kenneth-patchen-and-how-is-it-80-degrees-in-december/feed/ 3 liferoar My first book cover... isn't she great? http://liferoar.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/with-no-future-we-have-nothing-to-fight-about-2/ http://liferoar.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/with-no-future-we-have-nothing-to-fight-about-2/#comments Fri, 11 Nov 2011 03:48:48 +0000 carolyn zaikowski http://liferoar.wordpress.com/?p=648 Continue reading →]]>
World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns

I’ve been thinking lately about this poem.

Any moment, preparing this meal,
we could be gas thirty thousand
feet in the air soon
to fall out poisonous on leaf,
frond and fur. Everything
in sight would cease.

-by Ed Espe Brown, from The Tassajara Recipe Book

Love you.

Maybe now you’re finally free.

All that being said, I’m still a writer, and I have some writing updates to pass along, my favorite update being that a poem I wrote about our dear passed Akilah Oliver appeared in this summer’s print issue of Eleven Eleven– a beautiful publication. And then it was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, which I found out just as I got to Thailand. So, huge love to Eleven Eleven for their support of my work and, moreover, their support of Akilah’s legacy.

I also have an essay about a car accident I witnessed up over at the new issue of Bluestem. Thanks, Bluestem!

I’m pretty sure I had a dream of this impossibly beautiful space, which, it turns out, is real:

Wat Phro, Bangkok; The Temple of the Reclining Buddha

I promise to write more soon. Life sure is a wild something or other! A son-of-a-gun, if you will! Love you.

Yet I’ve never met any of my favorite musicians. That undoubtedly powerful relationship to a stranger who offers their music, their voice, their art, their literature to us–what is that relationship? Why do we feel so effected when these people we’ve never met die? Whatever this relationship to our beloved musicians is– or maybe, more accurately, our relationship to their creative offerings– it is an intense and real one. We will never know them personally, yet we hear their words, their laments, their voices, their deeply important musings and offerings, and we experience calm and healing, and epiphanies, and spirit, and despair, and wanting, and unsaid things. The most important parts of our lives are often imbued, saturated with music. These musicians are with us when we are alone, in our darkest or most private places. In our dark rooms at night– there is Amy’s voice, she’s there in an intimate way despite her total removal from anything related to my every day material life and space, her creations helping  and holding and inspiring and witnessing me with her sounds. She will continue to do so. That means something. She meant something to me.

I felt this confusing brand of sadness– and strangeness– too, when Elliott Smith, Kurt Cobain, and Jeff Buckley died. Their music had a profound effect on me in times of both distress and joy, and helped me heal and get grounded and remember what’s important in life and what’s not. I’d go to them. Not in the way I go to the people in my personal life, of course, but it is a definite going-to. In times of joy and exuberance, I sang and danced with their compositions, and they helped foster more of that joy and hope. The deaths of these types of folks, our reactions to these deaths, are not the same as our reactions to the deaths of loved ones, but they’re real in their own right. These are feelings to be attended to and to grapple with. They are valid.  Unfortunately, we are discouraged from thinking so.

Further swirling stories in my heart is the suffering of Amy and these other folks, how sometimes I could relate to those brands of suffering, and that even though I’d never met them I was filled with deep compassion for them, they inspired my own compassion for myself– and that’s, often, quite a feat. They’re a public voice for all who suffer in the shadows; that’s all of us, of course, just being human– but especially those who suffer from these addictions, eating disorders, and traumatic, chaotic emotional states.

We have nothing to lose by touching and knowing that wellspring of healing and compassion that’s in all of us; that wellspring’s our birthright. Don’t dismiss this as cursory new-age musings or fluffy self-help rhetoric. This is real. Compassion is real and is in endless supply. This is the objective truth about compassion. There’s enough to go around for all of us, for all of the humans and all of the creatures. But we all have a choice to make. We can choose to let our human suffering, that suffering we all ultimately share, make us smaller, make us inaccessible, disconnected. We can make choices from a paradigm of poverty and fear. Or we can use our suffering to be bigger, to connect, to hold each other and find solace in each other. We can recognize the paradigm of abundance, in which compassion is not in limited supply, and in fact, grows like a muscle the more we engage it. We can reject the false scarcity paradigm in which suffering begets suffering.

So rest in peace, Amy Winehouse. May you start a band in that strange beyond with Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley, and Jimi Hendrix. May your immense talent live on and continue to inspire and hold folks. May we remember you for your immense talent and not for sensationalist portrayals of your suffering that the media thrived on. May your death spur an assessment of our paradigms, of how we hold or reject those addicted and emotional chaotic folks, those Others. May your death incite an evaluation of how we viciously treat famous people as non-people; of how we neglect and get bored with and are often contemptuous towards what are actually the incredible, complicated existences of non-famous people all around us! May your death spark a conversation about how, as a culture, we flippantly lock up our addicted and emotionally chaotic folks in the counter-intuitive cultural spaces of jail, locked wards, hyper-medication, pathologizing diagnoses, bureaucratic institutions, shame, silence, lack of resources. May we all emanate the energy of healing and compassion to all those who suffer from anorexia, bulimia, addiction, depression, trauma, bipolar disorder, and all other pathologized states of being. Famous and not famous, these sufferers are creatures, they need us, we need each other and have to hold each other; sometimes, we’re each others’ only hope. The world is crazy and to be an addict, to suffer, to hurt ourselves, to starve ourselves, to mourn, to sink into deep dissociations and depressions and manias– these are actually not crazy behaviors. On the contrary, these are quite normal and even adaptive responses to a crazy world. We are not weak; we’ve been given to much to carry. Such a tragic death of an immensely talented, culturally notable person like Amy Winehouse gives us an opportunity, as a society, to evaluate our personal orientation towards compassion and healing, our personal and cultural attitudes towards “crazy” behaviors, and how we choose to “deal” with folks who suffer under such heavy pain. We can make the choice to carry each other, to be our most expansive selves as a response to fear and suffering, instead of shrinking from fear and suffering.

Come on, let’s carry each other. Let’s be huge. Let’s be vulnerable to that kind of love. We’ve tried the alternatives and they don’t work. No, it’s not easy to heal, or to empower others to heal. It’s sometimes terrifying and we get prone to numbing out and walking away from ourselves and others. Hugeness requires a leap of faith, a trust that healing, that being our most unprecidented huge selves is possible.  But we’re all, whether or not we want it, creatures together, sharing a strange and sometimes incomprehensible planet, and that planet is sometimes filled with unspeakable suffering and, also, unspeakable joy. Let’s be creatures together in the most awesome and huge way we can.  Let’s be creative and create new stories, less lazy stories. Let’s hold each other in all the ways we know how. We need each other even if we think we don’t. Even if we’re absolutely sure we don’t.

I’m poor. There are a lot of people who are poorer than me. In terms of white people with college degrees who live in the United States, I’m poor.

I lived in Kolkata, India one summer and I met a lot of people who were all fucked by life. This sounds like a cliché white-lady-goes-to-India story and it can’t not be in some respects. But in other respects I want to vomit when I hear stories about white people going to India and romanticizing poverty and having some kind of spiritual experience when they meet those undoubtedly amazing street kids who everybody is apt to meet if they walk down a street in Kolkata. And other such folks. I don’t even really know how to write about this. I want to use metaphors and maybe I’m even being too simple, but poverty’s not romantic. The objective truth is that it’s fucked and awful and full of suffering, and if you’re a white person who goes to Kolkata, and you somehow come to some narrative about “those” poor  folky folks and how they made you see the light with their grace and simplicity, you suck. My desire not to be like that often keeps me from writing about my experience in India.

I do feel the need to say that it’s impossible to say things about being in Kolkata without being trite, because as a city on the earth–I mean, compared to many other cities–it a fantastic and unfathomable place. It is a wildly sensory and chaotic experience to be in Kolkata; this is its character, moreso, I’m willing to bet, than many other places. And this will  probably be betrayed by language no matter what social and cultural barrier your brain is encased in. I also feel the need to say that to speak about poverty in Kolkata is different from defining Kolkata. Kolkata is, like all other places, a billion different things. But right now, I’m talking about poverty.

I always remember this one thing when I start to talk about poverty and wealth and I can’t get it out of my head. There are lots of rickshaw and taxi drivers who live in slums in Kolkata. By slums I mean shanty towns made of three-walled apartments, with tires and tarp for roofs, and mud puddles that have diseases in them. If you have USA dollars there, you’re just rich, period, no matter who you are. The exchange rate is 50 rupees to 1 dollar. It was less than 10 rupees to take a motor rickshaw–about 20 cents– and generally less than 50 rupees–1 dollar– to get a taxi across town. You do the math. This kind of money is less than what even my poorest, poorest USA friends spend on one shitty beer. One shitty beer! In the abstract we all know about exchange rates, but as a material reality, the extent of their consequence is just unbelievable.

When I was leaving, I got a taxi to the airport at three in the morning. It’s a long ride, and for any taxi driver it would be a pain in the ass at three in the morning, but still it only (for me) cost about 150 rupees. A friend who spoke Hindi told me that a taxi driver had told her that, despite, they hoped to get these ride requests from white and/or foreign people cause often it meant a huge (to them) tip. So when we got to the airport, I gave the taxi driver the rest of the rupees I had, about 400– less than ten dollars (that’s a sort of nice six-pack of India Pale Ale in the USA, a twelve pack of shitty beer maybe.) I didn’t know how to do it because I didn’t want it to be condescending, like a pittance, like I didn’t realize the discrepancy and just threw money around. But this is what I can’t get out of my head: the taxi driver almost started crying. He made the sign that’s somewhat a Hindu equivalent to the Catholic sign of the cross, closed his eyes, and touched the picture of a god that he had on his dashboard.

This is far from the most complicated thing about Kolkata or my experience there. It’s pretty simple, really: even if you think you’re amongst the poorest people in the USA, if you have dollars and you go to India, you are rich. Now, this doesn’t speak to what it means to be a poor person in the USA. It doesn’t speak to that suffering and all of the oppression, exploitation, labor, and sickness that accompany it. Again, that’s another blog post. But it changed the way I thought about money and its material consequences across the globe. I can’t help it: now when I think about people spending a lot of money on things they don’t need in the USA, I get offended. I think about that taxi driver. Of course, I get that, within the confines of the US economy, we live relative to our money; we buy things we need, and, for the sake of our psychological and spiritual well-being, we treat ourselves sometimes if we can. I spend money on things I don’t need, sometimes; most often books. We help ourselves out with gifts here and there. I think it’s fair to argue that sometimes these kinds of psychological nourishment–art, literature, music, self-care, therapy, special meals here and there, a meditation class, a humble vacation, whathaveyou–are necessities. Especially for folks who do want to do good work in the world, whose burn-out needs to be addressed with self-care if they are to continue being a positive force. But when I see people pathologically, mindlessly spending hundreds and thousands of dollars on things like clothes and TVs and third and fourth TVs and insane cars or insane cruises or things they could get for cheap or free, I get offended. I get offended for all kinds of reasons that aren’t original– mainly, because people in the USA believe they are entitled to anything they want. They believe they’ve earned it when they haven’t; there’s no such thing as “earning” the right to exist free of suffering (and if anyone’s “earned” it, it’s not rich USA people, it’s poor rickshaw drivers who workd 20 hours a day and make 20 cents per ride just to hang on to life in the slums); they’re products of and participants in an insane, international, unjust economic system; they’re just humans like all the rest of the humans. Their shit stinks, they are born and they will die naked and without the false comfort of all their stuff.  They believe that they have right to tell everyone else, either directly with their words or symbolically with their four-hundred dollar shoes– to go fuck off. Of course, who am I to say that people don’t have the right to only look out for themselves? But I just think it’s boring, crappy, and morally questionable to see the world that way, as something you take no accountability for, even while you’re having a huge impact on it. I know it’s moralistic and sometimes hypocritical to think this way. I don’t feel it’s a good use of my energy to get offended, per say, or to moralize. But since this all started with me thinking about my own money and a donation button, I’m just trying to own this part of myself, work with it, figure out my relationship to it.

Here I am, then. I’m a poor USA person and I want to let you know that I’m accepting donations so that I can try to do some of the writing and other work I do. I just lost one of my jobs and I’m trying to write and do some good work in the community. As many of you know, that’s not always something that equals having a lot of money. People don’t get paid for trying to do good stuff or to be creative.

Because I can’t not think about that taxi driver, I can’t ask for these kinds of donations without qualifying them with the following: Donate to other things first, especially community services like rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, and rural health clinics that are continually almost shut down due to lack of funds and lack of people giving a shit. Donate to things that our taxes should be paying for. Donate to animal rescue and farm sanctuaries. Donate to international organizations if you feel secure that they are doing good (by which I mean, generally, not colonialist) work. At the end of the day, these efforts, objectively, need it more than me. If you have extra money after donating to those places, then consider donating to me so I can maybe do some more writing and such without being so stressed all the time.

If you can’t donate money to anything–of course, that makes a billion pounds of sense, too– please donate to the world by always remembering to creatively revolt with your huge, amazing self. Love you.

I also want to say thanks to PANK magazine for interviewing me here about writing, smallness, waterfalls, and falling. And Matthew Dube at the Valley Advocate in Northampton for interviewing me here about my music. It’s not often that I get to publicly talk about Broadway musicals.

What have you been reading lately? I realize I’ve read a ton on non-fiction this year but hardly any fiction! How can this be? Tell me what your favorite books are: Go.

This is a scuttle fish. They change color and shape and sometimes the males dress in drag to impress the females into accepting their gingerly offered sperm packets: