Traveling in pairs

I’ve long battled knowing the difference between productive and destructive anger. My frustration often finds new channels: when I’m happy in love, I refocus my dissatisfaction towards the larger world. When I’m content at home, I’m annoyed in public space. Angst is my twin. We go everywhere together, even though we don’t get along or have that special secret twin language (which I can also safely say is not universal; I live with a twin, and the only private language that these brothers had was known only to one of them).

To cope with my ongoing feelings of displacement, anger, and sorrow, I picked up a stack of books in the U.S. Usually my lengthy list is more than I can handle in a bookstore, but wandering into a DC shop, I was drawn fortuitously to several titles, including bell hooks’ All About Love and Thich Nhat Hanh’s Anger. I later found this link between the two and more importantly, found it well worth the read.

I’m not the only one thinking about the radical potential for love. And, I don’t disagree that we’re all scarcity-minded or that my dislike of poetry is rooted in my resistance to feel so deeply. I’d argue most people won’t engage in conversations about radical love in the first place for the same reason: resistance and fear. Fear is perhaps the strongest motivator, making us all grasp for control of things that don’t mean much at all. Even when contemplating why we maintain a scarcity mentality, doesn’t that have to do with fear of the unknown? Have you ever known a complete life? How do you begin to live in the ways you wanted when you achieve what you never thought you could? There is comfort in known trauma.

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Due to flight delays between Copenhagen and Boston, we were awake for nearly twenty-four hours. We sat next a Rosetta Stone kiosk in Newark. Over and over, it told us: Naranjas. “Naranjas,” we diligently repeated aloud. Everyone looked at us like we were crazy. We were.

I met up with an old friend in DC. I drove away from our shared life nearly four years ago without looking back. Thankfully, I got over myself and emailed him. Even better, some things never change, even when everything else does.

We also had the outstanding opportunity to hang with Deb and the animals of Poplar Spring. Words do it little justice, though Deb’s are quite remarkable if you’re looking for stories about survival and healing. You can also look no further than three-legged Lola for clarity about moving forward.

The hours I’ve spent sitting in the immigration office finally paid off. My papers arrived today. On top of increasing amounts of freelance writing gigs, I can start legally working for some friends and acquaintances in a variety of functions that supplement my income and vault of story material, if not my resume. No, I will not be working a nine-to-five for a pharmaceutical company, even if English is their corporate language. Two words in that sentence are particularly problematic. See if you can decide which I mean.

Not that it was a goal, but I figured out how to love The Beatles: understand their skiffle roots. I’m working on my jug skillz, and a friend of ours has a saw to play, so if you know anyone who plays a washboard or spoons, you let me know. I’ll be damned if I forget my mountain roots just because my class status is wonky now I live in a rich ass socially democratic state.

At 2am, Chris Isaak and a topless Helena Christensen come on TV to tell me to me about a wicked game. He apparently just wants to fall in love with the Danish girl (who, for the record, sells her clothes in her mother’s secondhand store roughly ten kilometers from our house). Of course.