emlocke

Category: Lately

  • This is the last you’ll hear about it from me

    I wrote an e-mail today “to the many members of my urban tribe.”  I’ll write the same message here to visitors, feed readers, friends, foes, and to tribe members not in my Gmail address book:

    This is merely a reminder, a gentle prod to your ribs, and not a politically partisan overture.

    I get a paycheck and health benefits, recycle, pay taxes, and have been called for jury duty in New York State. I’m still registered to vote in Connecticut. For the rest of you who have relocated to a new state since you first registered to vote or since the election in 2004—it is not too late to register to vote in your new state or to request an absentee ballot from your home state for the Presidential General Election on November 4.

    I requested an absentee ballot from my home town clerk by mail last week. This website walked me through it: Long Distance Voter. It was easy. Seriously. If you’re looking for a challenge, get your voting rights squared away and then come by and help me try to fit all my clothes into my closet.

    I would consider either one a personal favor.

    To expand:

    In a way, Republican candidate Senator John McCain inspired this general petition to exercise your voting rights. Today, he opted to participate in the debate with his opponent, acceding in his actions if not with his words that, as Barack Obama said, “it’s more important than ever that we present ourselves to the American people and try to describe where we want to take the country.”

    But in fact, John McCain first inspired this message when I met him four years ago, less than one month before the 2004 Presidential election.  By chance, we were seated at the same table at a bicentennial celebration at the Naval Academy Prep School in Newport, Rhode Island.

    He introduced himself and then asked my two friends and me, all three of us Mount Holyoke students, if we knew who we’d vote for.  One declared herself undecided; the other said, “pass;” I said that I would vote for his party’s opponent, John Kerry, because I preferred his positions on education and the environment.

    McCain told us that it’s important for young adults to know which issues matter to them and to vote accordingly; that it’s important for us, as young women, to cast our votes.

    I did vote, Senator, and I am voting again.

  • Reasons why I’m glad my roommate is home

    • fresh, objective material to use for justifying the frivolous purchase I made over the weekend
    • she can take pictures of me in the frivolous purchase I made over the weekend so I can send them to my mother
    • I don’t have to face up to the fact that I’m the only one who’s been drinking gallons of Diet Coke when I see all the cans in the recycling bin
    • someone to call out, “it’s on!” when Jon and Kate Plus Eight comes back from commercial
    • she’s not too scared to go tell the super that all the lightbulbs in our hallway are burned out
    • she missed me while she was away, too!

    This is what I’ve been listening to this week (when I’ve turned off TLC)
    Te Busque (Spanish version) by Nelly Furtado
    Crushcrushcrush by Paramore
    Spring Street by Dar Williams
    Blue Skies by Blackpool Lights
    Te Busque (Spanish version) by Nelly Furtado (again)

  • I’m crying small, sticky tears as I write

    Introduction to Creative Writing met at one o’clock on Wednesdays.  I took a violet spiral-bound notebook to class.  On a lavender post-it that I stuck to the inside of the back cover, I wrote:

    “. . . Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.”—D. Foster Wallace

    The only work that I have ever read by David Foster Wallace is the commencement speech in which he said those words.  The line was preceded by the following:

    “As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head . . .”

    That’s what depression is like.  A constant, hypnotic monologue damning each pleasure, every hope, any purpose and all courage.  It corrodes human resolve.  It bleeds out energy.  It’s paralyzing.  It will confine you to the inside of your own head and the only way out is to take back control over how and what you think. 

    It scared me that the Creative Writing course was one of the things that triggered such despair.  The possibility that deliberate writing, and the introspection and vulnerability that accompanies it, might always be so damaging was depressing enough.  I didn’t want it to be that way.  I really wanted to believe that, armed with philosophies like Wallace’s, I could cope my way past all the classic hazards of sensitivity, perception, and creativity, and get better.

    To this day, I’ve never read a word by David Foster Wallace that wasn’t in his commencement speech.  At first, I abstained out of fear.  My depression was an imaginative and particularly superstitious monster.  I believed that reading Infinite Jest or Consider the Lobster would bring me closer to the author, but I also believed that if I got too close, I would break the spell.  I might threaten his control over his own thoughts.  And I might shatter any hopes I had for myself.

    I’ve still not become a reader of David Foster Wallace’s work, and now I only wish there were some validity to my irrational fear.

    The speech is archived at Marginalia.org.

    I still have the post-it.

  • Call me when “Love Story” starts

    There is a new high-definition TV in the apartment directly across the street from mine. I can see the hundreds of thousands of pixels from my bedroom. From my bed.

    I watched more Olympic events on that television than on my own. From across the street, it was easy to see aerial shots of the pool. When country names and flags were super-imposed over the top three lanes, I could even make out the one that said USA. The display on this TV set is bright. I wonder how big the screen is.

    Last night, I watched Michelle Obama speak at the Democratic National Convention. I couldn’t hear a word, but visually, it was an interesting perspective. I could see her smile. I could see “One Nation” banners fluttering in the audience. I could see the crowd respond to Michelle at specific moments. I could see her daughters come out on the stage followed by their father, via satellite. When the woman who lives in the apartment got up and walked past the TV, I automatically dodged her moving silhouette as if she were blocking my view at a live event.

    Right now, the cameras are focused on Bill Clinton in the audience. Is it just me, or are his ears very red?

    I think of the HD-woman as Bea. All last summer, I saw her sit with her elbows up on the windowsill, looking down at the street. As it got warmer out this spring, I anticipated the day she would start to open her living room windows again, thinking that I would mark summer’s arrival that way.

    Now I’m marking bedtime by Bea’s television. If I glance across the street around 1AM and her apartment has gone dark, I know it’s definitely time for my lights out, too.

  • I really want to get a puppy. Yes, still.

    A few nights ago I had a dream that I lived in a house with four stories and the top floor was a lofted nursery where I was caring for a baby bunny.  I adored my dream-bunny.  I loved him so much that the love formed a slippery bubble of emotion in the back of my throat that made it a little difficult to speak clearly or swallow.

    So I’m in the dream-nursery and I’m taking care of the dream-bunny, feeding it sips of milk from a spoon with a long handle, dabbing dribbles from its chin.  Friends visit and I’m nervous to let anybody else hold my dream-bunny.  I let them but I say “Be gentle, he’s very delicate,” and I pretend not to hover over their shoulders, where I can look down at his dream-bunny face, until I can’t stand it anymore and say, “Oooookay, that’s enough” and gather his warm, wriggling dream-bunny body out of their arms. 

    Next thing I know, my dream-bunny is a dream-flea.  He lives in a petri dish in the nursery.  I can’t hold him and it’s not easy to feed him with a spoon, though that doesn’t stop me from trying.  My dream-flea is not warm or wriggling but I love him so much that I stay up all night with him because he’s sick.  He needs his dream-flea medicine every few hours.  I try to administer it with the long-handled spoon. 

    My dream-flea is so small that I have to drop dye into his shiny little dish so I know where to look when I want to look at him.  He swallows the dye and it turns his little body bright green, but when I point my dream-flea out to visitors, nobody is interested.  “What am I looking at?  Oh, that?  Okay, well, let’s go see a movie.”

    I don’t want to go see a movie because my dream-flea will need another dose of medicine soon, but I agree to sit in the kitchen downstairs and drink coffee with one friend while another volunteers to sit with my cherished pet.  The nursery loft looks down over the rest of the house, so when my volunteer nurse leans over the railing and says, “Emily, you’d better come up here,” I look up three stories and I know I won’t make it upstairs in time to say goodbye to my little dream-flea. 

    Even though I knew that the situation was almost hopeless, my ailing dream-flea hardly stood a chance, I was fighting an uphill battle and wanting so badly to save his life just wasn’t enough to save his life, my dream-heart was broken. 

    When I woke up, I could still feel the slippery bubble of love and devotion and adoration that had formed in my throat.  I could still feel the desperate hope that I’d be able to save my dream-flea’s life like pulled muscles in my arms.  It never goes easy on you, love. 

  • Have all those unsorted loads of laundry finally caught up with me?


    From ffffound.

    My mind feels tired and sort of droopy, like it’s fallen slack. Has my brain atrophied from disuse? I’m in a list-and-label mood; maybe I’d benefit from a thorough cataloging project, like a tough workout for my head. I suffer this withdrawal the way some people suffer iron deficiencies.

    I’ve been milling around on the look-out for things to stick Post-its on. I wish I had a tape measure handy because I have this funny itch to measure my office and draw up its floorplan. What I should do is clear off the top of my desk, but it is so cluttered that I’d require a clean surface for the de-cluttering process.

    For now, here’s what I’m listening to this week:
    Moses by Patty Griffin
    Bleed for Me by Saliva
    Her Eyes by Pat Monahan
    When I Said I Would by Whitney Duncan
    Prince of Spades by Dispatch

  • What is it they say about location? Something . . . something . . . something?

    Back to Brooklyn tomorrow, but the quarters already seem close. As much as I look forward to coffee shops with three varieties of artificial sweeteners and clothing retailers that don’t sell neoprene waders, I’ll miss having a decent excuse to eat a non-non-fat muffin every morning and wear the same $2.00 tee shirt every afternoon.

  • What we wanted was Spring Break and what we got was an educational field trip

    Wind and rain chased us from the beach before lunchtime this afternoon. My dad and I had to escape the house or we were both going to go haywire in different directions, or head-to-head. We drove down to the Cape Cod National Seashore Visitor Center in Eastham.

    We saw this exhibit the first summer we came to the Cape and it hadn’t changed a whole lot since then. They have the standard maritime exhibits in the one-room museum: an old boat (still smells like sailor), sand under a microscope (one of the lenses was broken off), stuffed birds under glass (gross aaand gross).

    I could practically see the little me pacing through the aisles, impatiently forcing myself to read every word of every plaque to stretch out my attention span as long as possible, but not retaining much besides the dim lighting and enormous, low-resolution photo murals on the walls.

    Being a kid at a museum is so hard, and not just because you have to crane your neck just to see or read anything. If someone had told me ten or twelve years ago that, one day, I would relish a leisurely walk through a museum, I would have rolled my eyes, but it’s true. Historical and art exhibits are both so much more engaging to the older, more patient, more thoughtful, more experienced, more fully formed me.

    Even in a dry, sort of dilapidated exhibit, I found a lot to look at and I notice my personal interests away from the seashore reflected clearly by the displays that attracted me at the Seashore Museum.

    There’s a section devoted to the U.S. Life Saving Service (the U.S. Coast Guard of today) which won the heart of my hero complex. Crewmen patrolled the beach all night, every night, watching for wrecks offshore. If the water was too rough to launch a rescue boat, the Life Savers would shoot a zipline from a miniature cannon out to the sinking vessel. Stranded passengers would secure the line to their boat and ride to shore one at a time in a breeches buoy. The line was shot over with a wooden tag with instructions written in three languages—a little like bottles of shampoo and mass transit advisories.

    They have a display of vintage Cape Cod Cranberries labels. I also pressed my nose against the Cape Cod architecture exhibit, which showed the floor plans of a Cape-style home as the residents expanded it. I just wanted to play house inside the scale model.

    Well, what I wanted to do was go to the beach. But this was nice, too.

  • Halfway between Ryder Beach and Fisher Beach

    My dad and my brother and I went off on an amateur art history scavenger hunt down the Cape Cod Bay beach this afternoon to find the house where Edward Hopper and his wife spent summers painting, journaling, and sailing from the 1930s until the artist’s death in 1967.

    We surmised that the big bay window that takes up the whole north side of the house had been added in the last fifty years, but here is a portrait of Edward Hopper, his wife Jo in the background, showing the window as is in 1960. A great perspective for Hopper’s naturally lit, moody dunescapes.

  • This is not the last word. This isn’t it either.

    I used to fear the unknowable, unimaginable depths of the ocean. Whale watching with my dad and my brother, I looked eagerly over the ship’s railing for the splashes and spouts that revealed a whale at the surface, but I didn’t dare imagine the rest of their bodies any deeper down than the bottom of the boat. If I pictured their rubbery forms, propelling through the sea and at one with it at the same time, almost invisible against the dark blue water, I could imagine the mass of the ocean swallowing me down and my vision would blur at the edges. I held very tightly on to my camera.

    At some point, I came to appreciate the ocean for its vastness. It became an acceptable fact, something trustworthy, instead of a knowledge to be conquered only by absolute comprehension. All I need to know is: “How big is the ocean?” “Big.” And, “What would I do if I got sucked out to sea and I had to survive through the night and a whale came and—” “That’s probably, almost definitely never going to happen.”

    The ocean just is. And there’s not much more to know. Its size, its tides, its smells, its creatures. It’s power is astounding, and yet, it is mostly predictable, reliable, knowable.

    Alan Dugan was born in Brooklyn and eventually migrated to the outer Cape among the other artists and writers who colonized here in Truro. He founded and taught at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

    Note: The Sea Grinds Things Up
    It’s going on now
    as these words appear
    to you or are heard by you.
    A wave slaps down, flat,
    Water runs up the beach,
    then wheels and slides back down, leaving a ridge
    of sea-foam, weed, and shells.
    One thinks: I must
    break out of this
    horrible cycle, but
    the ocean doesn’t; it
    continues through the thought.
    A wave breaks, some
    of its water runs up
    the beach and down
    again, leaving a ridge
    of scum and skeletal debris.
    One thinks: I must break out of this
    cycle of life and death,
    but the ocean doesn’t; it
    goes past the thought.
    A wave breaks on the sand,
    water planes up the beach
    and wheels back down,
    hissing and leaving a ridge
    of anything it can leave.
    One thinks: I must
    run out the life
    part of this cycle
    then the death part
    of this cycle
    after the last world,
    but this is not the last
    word unless you think
    of this cycle as some
    perpetual inventory
    of the sea. Remember:
    this is just one sea
    on one beach on one
    planet in one
    solar system in one
    galaxy. After that
    the scale increases,
    so this is not the last word,
    and nothing else is talking back.
    It’s a lonely situation.
    —Alan Dugan, 1983