Little Miss Pants on Fire

Midway through, I thought I'd have it figured out. Not the ending, but what the beginning meant. This is why we are all obsessed with memory and invoke meaning where we think it should go. Although we also all know history has a voice of its own. Capital T, Truth is irrelevant. The moral is in the outcome, not the story itself. Most of my real memories I have put under lock and key deep in the dark corridors of my experiential mind. Safe keeping. My own and others safety.

So some do inevitably morph into secrets and some are tempted to sneak out. Needless to say, I don't like digging around for the right one. It's messy in there.

When asked to conjure up my first memory ever, I responded as anyone would to the request as though being asked to clean someone else's latrine. 

But I found it. For now, it's the first ever.

My first visceral memory is of being called a liar. Not just labeled a ‘liar’, but awarded for being the best one. A ribbon fashioned from construction paper made with two notched out blue bookmarks that formed a vee, a circle glued over their intersection point notating the number one was bestowed upon me in front of my elementary peers one day in Mrs. A’s class.

When I brought it home from school my grandparents giggled at my grand achievement, a little too much. Telling and showing whomever they could, including the mailman, who, like me, didn't seem to think it was as funny as they did.

I was 5 and in first grade at Loyola Elementary, a richy-rich school, although I had an inter-district transfer. I knew there was much about adult humor I had to learn. I did not ever end up learning it in school, however. I was not proud of my ribbon, but they were and proudly put it on the left side of the Frigidaire affixed with an old AAA fridge magnet. 

I thought I should be punished, I half expected it. As far as I had learned in my handful of years so far, lying was a sign of weakness, either used to protect me or make someone seem stronger than they were.

Even now I do not disagree with that definition, especially after having been divorced for some time from a compulsive liar, I have the accumulated a physical BS ton by volume amount of experience with lies, white and tall. 

I remember that handmade ribbon vividly with its bold royal blue bands and happy orange circle. It defined me, made me, made me look more alertly for lies, question what is good and what is bad, and helped me to discover ribbons of my own truth somewhere in the middle. Now I understand why I needed to remember this misremembered memory, hindsight provides clearer vision. I am learning to embrace my little Liar after receiving an award for #1 Storyteller in the first grade. I’ve figured out that the ending will write itself. 

Image of painting by Ludwig Koch (painter) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, c. 1918.

Night-lights Navigating the Web

It felt like the biggest thing since the Enlightenment, a reliable sturdy creation with infinite possibilities much larger than the house Emily Dickinson imagined.   

It was critical or lethal and a bit of both.

Look what we made!

Oh well, it’s out of the makers hands now. 

The hints were there all along, it was just picking up the remote signals.

We are all weavers of webs, despite the gossamer display of arachnids who have been at their art much longer and have endless spools.

Along the world wide lines, signals are sent and retrieved, divisible in byte sized bits, digestible only be permeability, though we work at it every day.

Self-absorption. Absorbing all around. Come on-we’re not that porous, we usually bob on the surface letting the timely tide take us integrated, aggregated, curated, cultivated, pseudo-created avatar ambling along, shrimps on a Joeless shoe-string.

Hang on the line, was once a real line to hang yourself with.

Tailored threads hand me down, TV has nothing on receiving, channeling, funneling people or bots to works we make for man’s sake, it all started out as useful.

Like blinking, we trust everything is there in between-

Searches and updates are endless, archives immense, impressive towers that loom, spin castles into clouds, no wonder its knot raining this winter.

The clutter we defragment into micro-chips, the bottom of the bag, petabytes of particles add up.

Fine as silk, the web that covers the world wide connected by sub oceanic cabling balloons from no birthdays, beacons blinking vibrations, its working, we are entangled.

A fiber optic photograph on a 11-D graph, an amazing maze we made, the complex vortex wrapping fellow weavers and believers in their own image and calling it a cocoon.  

Resurrecting Dark Ages. 

Image By Christian A Diez (Christian A Diez), The Web (2008) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Acting out

“I get it,” she informed me. “I understand it now Mom,” she says nonchalantly while rifling through the pantry for afterschool snacks, past the crackers, straight to the chocolate covered cashews.  She seemed further away today, or maybe got taller.

“Oh yeah?” I think I challenged back, likely defiantly.

“You just have to be crazy,” decidedly closing the cabinet.

“Hmm…” I cast a lure for another line.

“In theatre…if I stop trying to be normal and not stress about being all in control, it’s better that way-the performance.”

“I think you’re right. Actors-the good ones anyway-lose themselves, you forget they are acting.”

“Mom,” correcting my conclusion she explained, “I can’t lose myself when I haven’t even found myself.”

Little did she know, what you don’t know can’t hurt you.

Cutting the rug of sanity, dance like nobody is watching, unraveling is revealing.  



Image by Everett Shinn [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, Girl on Stage, 1906.  

Never trust a cook with a clean apron

The days we try to do what we do but it is hard, chunky, clunky even when balancing on muscle memory movements jerk and it still doesn't work-right-when writing is what you do but all those right words ellude, what to do with all that art that wont quit and just comes out like shit-
The forcible pushing through comes out labored and premature needing ICU(s), but tagged as terminal, I've flatlined-you knew it. You saw the trap and said nothing.
I got caught in all those corners where I am cowering from looking around for the little door, the way in, regretting all of the digging and the hole I burrowed myself in, eating dirt, thinking of Alice, and knowing a white apron and patience is all I will need in Wonderland.


Image by Conrad Poirier [Public domain or Public domain], Cooking Class at YWCA c. 1939, via Wikimedia Commons.