Why I write about sex.

I write about sex because everyone wants to read about it. I write about sex because everyone has it. I write about sex because I am always wondering who is laying that stylist with the pencilled-in lips. I write about sex because I get paid to. I write about sex because it is always changing. I write about sex because it scares people. I write about sex because it’s hilarious. I write about sex because it is an issue of social justice. I write about sex because it connects me to being animal. I write about sex because the words are a pleasure. I write about sex because I feared it in high school. I write about sex because my politics demand it. I write about sex because I was raped.  I write about sex because so were both my sisters. I write about sex because it is a part of loving well. I write about sex because I miss it when I am not having it. I write about sex because bodies have a dance. I write about sex because if you know a character’s sex life, everything else follows. I write about sex because I want to be Rumi. I write about sex because things like elevators become much more interesting. I write about sex to say it’s okay. I write about sex to bully my peers into using condoms. I write about sex as an act of love. I write about sex because I’m stubborn and self-effacing. I write about sex because I’m proud of the story I inhabit. I write about sex because there are a lot of terrible books to make up for. I write about sex because it’s good with wine and chocolate. I write about sex to keep my rights. I write about sex to open conversation. I write about sex because pubic lice are funny. I write about sex because I’ve had great lovers. I write about sex to cultivate compassion. I write about sex because no one is saying what it feels like to have your genital warts burned off. I write about sex because it is a way of holding my own hand. I write about sex as an apology to anyone I’ve judged. I write about sex in honor of every kid who’s asking if they’re normal. I write about sex because there’s no such thing as normal. I write about sex because it reminds me of the power of intuition. I write about sex because I retain the correct proportion of awe. I write about sex because I can say penis without blushing. I write about sex as a deep breath in my loneliness. I write about sex to cry. I write about sex because I ache to put my words behind something that matters. I write about sex because it’s difficult. I write about sex because I am never, ever tired of it.  I write about sex because so much happens in that place beyond words.

On Facebook and Love.

On the first date, we met at the West End Tavern and drank black beer and bourbon.  It was drafty upstairs and the band was too loud. We sat in the poorly-lit corner by the shuffleboard.  I pulled my shirt down to let him feel my scar; he slid his off to show me the tattoo—a  monkey wrench, red and blue, on his shoulder. We laughed endlessly. His leg, hard with muscle, pressed against mine.

We went back to my place and fucked, in honor of Ed Abbey.  He held my short hair in his hands as he kissed me.

“You better call, mister,” I said.

“You better pick up,” he said.

On the second date he brought his dog over to my tiny second-floor apartment and I made him yellow curry. The place was the kind of clean that only happens on second dates. He was less funny. I liked him anyway.  I turned petting the dog into petting him. Afterward, he lay in bed, squinting happily at my bookshelf.

That night, we became friends on Facebook.

I’ve got a walk-in closet of reasons I love Facebook. They’re hedgy, of course. They exist only in defense. Activism, community poetry, networking—and to know what my friends from seventh grade church camp are doing on a daily basis. There’s a delicious vengeance in watching the cutest cheerleaders from high school get fat on beer and drop out of community college. But the real, true joy of Facebook, if you strip it all down, is exactly what it looks like: legal stalking, in the comfort of your own home.

What I’m making clear, here, is that by the third date I had absolutely for-sure established the existence of the ex. Not just any ex, but a pictures-were-tagged-just-a-month-ago ex. A traveled-together-by-plane ex. A visted-family ex. A blonde, Naropa-poetry-slam-reading, tight-assed-doing-yoga-atop-Fourtneers ex.

I bristled.

On the third date we met at my favorite coffeeshop. It was late afternoon and the sun twisted through the glass windows onto the table. Outside snow softened on the curbs. He wore a maroon Carhartt jacket that made me want to eat him and I was nervous. Something was different. Maybe he thought poorly of my 1,000 Facebook Friends. Or the 1,500 pictures tagged of me at all stages of fat, hippie, dying, and making out with my ex.

We drank chai. He wanted to talk about her. I wasn’t surprised but my heart yammered against my underwire. It was only a month ago. (I know.)  She was the only person he knew in this town. (Oh shit.) She was his next-door neighbor (his fucking next-door neighbor?!). 

“I wondered,” I said, the paragon of calm. “I saw her in your Great Sand Dunes album. Those pictures were beautiful.”

He assessed me, smiling a little, brown eyes, brown freckles, slightly gapped smile. (MBA from Cornell!, I kept thinking, Sustainability Consultant! Camps naked!) 

“Are you, like, one of those creepy Facebook stalkers?” he asked.

Pause.

“No way,” I said, “I just look when I friend someone for the first time. You know, out of curiosity. But… not much after.”

I went home and looked her up. She was a writer too. She even spelled her name with a fucking i at the end like mine. We had a friend in common, someone pretentious and image-based (read: smart and beautiful and terribly nice) whom I’d gone to college with. Oh fuck you, I thought, flipping through as many of her pictures as Facebook would let me see and wishing I had an ass like that.

On the fourth date, I packed my MSR stove and a box of mac ’n’ cheese and a few beers into the cooler and drove to the San Luis Valley. I was nervous as hell. He’d gone camping alone and I was coming to meet him. I’d pictured sleeping in the back of his truck on that old mattress, the way she had; winter sex, the tangle of sleeping bags, his brown lab smooshed in there somewhere too.  I’d pictured a fire, the two of us sipping Jameson and reading nature writers. Or kissing in the hot springs. Disappearing into the steam. Maybe falling in love.

Instead he took me on a walk up to the old mine and shot a roll of film in the dying light. Beautiful photos, not an ounce of me in any of them. He told me every word of mine was out of her blonde mouth, that we were just exactly alike, that it was a little too much.  “Stop it,” he said, when I told him I loved trains, “this is getting really weird.” 

I held myself tight against the cold. Was I? Was I exactly someone else?

We cooked two separate dinners at two separate picnic tables.  After, when I leaned toward him at the fire, he paled, jolted.  “Am I allowed to kiss you?” I said.

“I’m not ready,” he said weakly, “I’m not ready, I’m sorry, you’re wonderful, you’re so beautiful, I’m sorry.”

I drove home in the middle of the night rather than pitch my own tent. It was blizzarding on the pass.

At home, delirious, I stared at their pictures on Facebook and cried.  The man had been miserable, sitting there by the fire, lonely and lost. He was already in love. He probably let the dog out into a shared yard each morning, searching the windows for a glimpse of her hair. He’d gone home with a stranger because she fit so precisely into the shadow of his heart.

Sometime after dawn he unfriended me, and it all disappeared.

On being a westerner.

It’s midnight, and I’m writing in the back of the car—hatchback open, moon blazing full across the big mountains. The silence is a hum that builds inside your ribcage.  This is Steven’s Gulch: a long Forest Service Road that starts where Grand Avenue hits the highway, taking you from pavement to spitting gravel, past mining equipment and private drives. Eventually it reaches a reservoir; I stop at the pullout. 

Up here you can see low clouds winding through the trees, how the mountains tilt a million different angles.  Up here, I’m alone.

When I first moved west eight years ago, I was hungry for everything. I loved mountains. I’d backpacked the spines of long, overgrown ranges and driven into the desert to rock climb. But I didn’t know how to build a life.  I landed in Kelly, Wyoming, three days after my high school graduation. My hair was long, my skin soft with humidity. In a platform tent with a white canvas cover, I waited out the early June blizzards.

What I needed to learn, I found out quickly, was practical:  how to drive a truck over rutted road. How fast to take turns on a pass.  How to anticipate weather.  My practice runs were all Trails Wilderness School vehicles, boasting over 200,000 miles, with spidery windshields. Then I borrowed Johnny, my co-leader’s old white GMC, and took him on jaunts to Idaho for a vanilla milkshake. I sat on Johnny’s hood on the bison flats to watch birds, writing postcards home.  I was learning.

The next summer I took a car west with me, and in many ways this is when I began to be the person I am now:  I didn’t just run alone or drink tea alone anymore; I went on trips alone. I slept beside Abraxas in aspen groves and in desert washes. I slept inside his hatchback on the street in San Juan Bautista, with sea air flooding in the cracked windows. I spent a night on the Nevada salt flats watching lights glint half a mile away, convinced a murderer was going to axe through the ceiling of my car. And over time I developed my rules: the vehicle is most easily organized in plastic bins. Always carry extra water. Check the oil at each gas station. Watch for deer eyes at the edges. Don’t plan to be anywhere on time. Do not apply cream cheese to stale bagels while driving.

On the way, I also learned about public lands. I bought big red Gazetteers—Colorado, Wyoming, Utah—to identify free BLM and Forest Service terrain. (“You should never have to pay for camping in the west,” I liked to say.)  I learned about ranching, then oil and gas.  I left coordinates in the windshield when backpacking. I learned you can wash your hair in public bathrooms or in rivers; I learned how to hold my whiskey, how to talk to roughnecks, and how to sniff out the best cup of coffee in town.  Driving led to hiking, hiking to wandering.  And over the years, as the dry air got in my skin, my daily way of living quieted. I learned to chop wood. I built fires in the dark of winter morning. I watched the river steam beside snowdrifts.

At a recent staff training, I was asked to write down seven of my identities.  I could hear murmurings, all around me, of what others chose for their lists: Wife. Daughter. Athlete. Nurse.  Then we were asked to discard our identities, one by one—to choose the most important.

I am a writer first. I also an advocate for social justice, a teacher, a body.  And, fiercely, I am a westerner. 

My roots are in the swamps and strip malls of middle America, but by now, the west is home. Frost-heaved roads. Glacial tarns. Forest fires. Fiddles. Squatting in the gravel to piss without a single light on the horizon. Most of the time I take it for granted. But once in a while I load up the car, heading off somewhere new, and feel that wiggle of joy deep in my belly. I roll down the window, take a deep breath. I holler into the big open space of the west.

I began with a love of a place I did not know. It is such a privilege to slowly speak the language.

Sierra Leone: An Overview.

On the ferry from Lungi:

The sun goes down between islands, a sober orange. Tin shacks. Fishermen in long boats. The group clusters at the rail to talk. As the dark settles in, I grab Les’ arm. Lights! The coming hillside is dotted with white and yellow.  (Remember the dam? Les says, Up-country? They finally got it running.) Freetown is no longer the city that approaches silently.

On the roosters:

In the morning, Rachel rolls over. Do you think we can have chicken for dinner? she says. I only want male.

On meeting random men:

Sahid leads me down the white beach. He is trying not to get his nice shoes wet. I am barefoot, stepping over lines of trash the tide washed up.  You wanted to hear about the war? he says suddenly. Because I was a Lost Boy. (Behind us, the rest of the team chases a soccer ball. I let out my breath.) Yes please, I say.

On traveling:

We sit with backpacks beneath our feet and pineapples rolling around. The van is like a clown car: it takes ten minutes to load and unload at each stop. Mismatched shoulders, dribbling sweat, held bladders. If we drive fast enough, a stiff wind makes things bearable. We put hats on to keep our hair from dreading. There is the promise of the ride home: it will be better, we know, once we have given away all our stuff.

On digger ants:

Like a vein punctured in a rutted path: Careful, they say, Digger ants have pinchers and can eat a chicken. I have seen nothing like it. Thick ropes of ants spill from the ground. Once I saw an oil slick in the road, says Marissa, only it was ants.

On Kabala:

Many things are being built. The burnt houses are crowded with vines and people hang their laundry there. Others grow corn, seven feet high, up the middle of the bedrooms. War recedes.

On the heat:

My brain is cooking. I have a short attention span. As we walk, my pants go damp with the sweat. It is hard to want to write. I keep it short.

On sensitive mimosa:

Tap the plant with your foot and it shrivels in, like a butterfly disappearing itself. Then slowly, under the glow of the sun, it makes itself new.

On the food:

Groundnut stew. Rounds of pineapple. Raw coconut chunks. Too-early mango, perfect avocadoes, long soft baguettes with Laughing Cow spread. Hot pepper. A substance generically referred to as “meat.” Rice, rice, rice. (Rice is so important here, Hope says, that if you serve a man spaghetti he will say he has not eaten.)

On eating:

We eat in secret at regular hours. God does not forgive those who eat in front of the starving.

Thanks, Jesse.

It took me two days to report my rape and three more to get to Victim Services. In the office, Michelle bustled around, looking up business cards. “It’s your legal right,” she said, “to get reimbursed from this fund for any bills. Counseling, to a certain point. Work missed because of effects of the assault.”  While she was away at the filing cabinet, I leaned over her desk to peer at my file. Jesse Young, it said. So they had been to his house. It was the first time he had a last name for me.

Next to his name, the box had already been checked: prosecution denied.

I reported on a Saturday night. I was supposed to go straight from work to a wedding. Instead, I waited in the empty police station until a young officer escorted me across the street into the court building. There, we stared at each other in a too-big room.  He didn’t know what to make of me. I had every detail down.

“I have never taken testimony from someone with such a specific memory,” he said.

I nearly laughed out loud.

In the tub, pressed against the edge until my neck bled, I’d ascended above myself for a split second. Watched myself, the girl in the pool. Then some part of me hissed, “Get the fuck back in there.”

You will remember everything, I told myself. You must remember everything. It will be all you have.

And did. I told the cop evenly, carefully, without hope. Watched him blink at points at the language I had to use telling it.

At the end, he put his notebook down quietly. “Why did you report this?” he said. “Two days after. You’ve showered. There’s going to be little we can do.”

“So you will go to his house,” I said. “I know nothing will happen. I knew that before. But I want him to open his door to the police. I want him to be fucking scared.”  The cop nodded.  “He deserves a policeman at his door.”

“Okay,” the officer said. He looked at me evenly, with something like respect. “That’s all.”

He gave me the brochure for Victim Services. The next week, I found Michelle, in the office with yellow walls, sarcastic and sad as she recommended therapists specializing in “this sort of thing.” She was the first person to tell me what I needed to do.  The Community Safety Network. Western Wyoming Family Planning.  A plan: relief. Then she gave me more than that.

“It’s a shit, isn’t it?” she said, all of a sudden. “Wyoming law. It’s archaic.”

“I’d have been better off on my college campus,” I admitted.

“Yes, you would have,” she said. She slipped a rubber band around the brochures. “And when you take your six-month HIV test, you know what you can say? Thanks, Jesse. When you can’t sleep at night. When you’re trying to explain this to your next lover. Thanks, Jesse.” She was grinning. There was an edge to her that was almost hysterical.

“When I have to see his friend at work,” I said.

“Thanks, Jesse!” she shouted, grinning giant and fake. “You should make a fucking shirt,” she said, and then we were laughing, holding the desks.

“Coca-cola lettering, that’s what I’m picturing,” I said, through tears, grinning, crying. “Thanks, Jesse.”

“Yeah. Big fucking thanks for this,” Michelle said. Then, “C’mere, hon,” and her hug was giant and warm, and the last one I’d feel for a long time.

I meant to go back there. She was such a comfort to me. But I never did. At Western Wyoming Family Planning, I tried to tell them what I needed and burst into tears. The receptionist, unsure of herself, guided me into the back room. I peed in a cup, took deep breaths. When I came out, she told me the tests would be free, and gave me a big box of Trojans. They sat in the car that whole year; as though if I were raped again, I could at least get them to use a condom.

“Thanks, Jesse,” I said quietly, in my car.

Alice Sebold wrote something like, “Rape is that which ruins everything.” Since I heard it, I’ve never been able to find the quote. There are days when I am less lenient with myself. When I tell myself, you could have fought harder. You could have climbed that fence. You could have kicked him in the goddamn junk. Then, out of nowhere, I taste what is ruined. Last week, the man I sleep with leaned over me without a condom. I asserted myself once, then twice. On the third time, I burst into tears, and he lay back aghast, apologizing profusely.

It’s not you, I tried to say.

I thought it was hot when you asserted yourself, he said.

Even aware of my history, there’s no way he could have known. There’s no way I could have known.

The body carries stories sewn into its skin, pulped into the organs, traced onto the lines of its limbs.  Rape is that which ruins everything, secretly, in sudden ways. Out of nowhere, the feeling rushes in: you asshole. How could you doubt. You were raped.

It’s Sexual Assault Awareness Month. I’ve been silent, thinking of what to say. The month slowly ticked by. 1 in 4 of us—if not goddamn more—do not want to think about it. But it lives in our bodies. We give thanks, from time to time. We lift up our hands. We live the giant Fuck You.

Chiricahua.

Before me, long red and green cliffs stagger out of the dusty mountains.  Beside me, emerald hummingbirds zag under greening trees. In my hand, a cold Hefeweizen homebrew.

I am in heaven: Portal, Arizona.

The last time I was in Arizona, I was nineteen, studying the border with a class. We went down in a big white van to the migrant centers in Agua Prieta and Nogales. We interviewed the Border Patrol, slept in the slums.  I drank a lot of cheap, sugary coffee out of styrofoam cups and fumbled through in Spanish.

On the last day, we drove the stretch of desert where so many die, thinking of the men we’d met.  As we stepped into showers in Tucson, they were creeping north of Sasabe. They were hiding from Border Patrol in the brush. They were sipping Coke bottles filled with water, trying to make them last. And they were hoping they could keep their children from starving.  NAFTA had razed the economies of southern Mexico; in many villages, they told us, the only option was to leave.

The men I met were lawyers, psychologists. They would take work picking stawberries or digging trenches. Maybe they would be deported. Or maybe they would die before they got there.

This time—six years later—I am walking around the loveliest garden, waiting for a wedding. There will be local Arizona wine and a sandwich bar. There will be women in floral dresses laughing and fixing each other’s hair. Around me, trees bend with fresh spring leaves. In ways, it seems impossible that I’m so close to that border.

But I am.

I got into Tucson late last night, past ten-thirty, and drove the rental car blindly east.   I played games with myself to see how far I could make it before pulling over to sleep. “After I’m off the interstate,” I said aloud.  I dreamed of a pullout with a flat patch of ground, where I could throw down a tarp and sleeping pad and crawl into my bag.  But once I turned south onto 80, a slow uneasiness grew in me: I knew what this landscape held. Once, twice, then a third time, I passed the parked cars of Border Patrol. The place was crawling with them. Saw a flashlight in a field. Watched a van idling on a side road—loading or unloading?

All this time, the fear in me grew. I thought of coyotes, those brutal human smugglers. I thought of the drug cartels sending runners through this passage. It was two in the morning, and for the first time in my life I didn’t want to sleep in the desert.

So I went all the way. I took the hooking righthand road toward Portal and watched the cliffs of the Chiricahua rising out of the darkness. The moonlight was strong. Hares darted across the road: conejos, I remembered. I scanned the radio and found some bad country. Turned it way up.

When I got to the Forest Service entrance—Cave Creek—the sign, brown and in all caps, read: “TRAVEL CAUTION: SMUGGLING AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MAY BE ENCOUNTERED HERE.”

And I laughed maniacally. “Okay. Fine.” There was no way around it.

It was Easter weekend. There wasn’t a camping spot left. At three a.m. I circled every campground twice, then finally parked my car beside an occupied site and bedded down in the back seat. All night I jerked awake, worrying about tickets from the Forest Service, or (!?!) a coyote putting a gun to the window and demanding the car keys.

Needless to say, I was fine.

Here on the porch, it’s hard to feel anything but peace. Cave Creek Ranch is tucked down into the grasses, a circle of stone cottages protected by juniper and cottonwood. Skinny, ruffled-looking deer totter across the lawn.  The front yard is set with linened tables and wedding flowers. I cannot imagine people walking through at night while we sleep.

But when I ask my Arizona friends, they shrug. “It’s a real possibility around here,” they say.  They know that, regardless of what we see, we are in the borderlands. 

I take a walk down the road. Dust kicks up behind me, and the light is golden on the long cliffs. I find myself hating my wild fear. What moves through this desert is not only shadow but people too. They are people who love, who make love, who wipe their childrens’ brows in fever. They have passions, talents. They work hard. They are people fighting to live. I have spoken to them before.

I stop in the sun. Hands out. Heat collects in my palms. I hold the contradiction as it twists and moves through me: Coyote. Smuggler. Immigrant. And This gentle land. Nourishment. Oasis.  I am cradled by desert heat. By secret streams. I become quieter and quieter.

Then I know that the fear I feel is only my inability to understand all things at once.

Why I Buy Expensive Food.

The man at the credit card swipe laughs when he sees me back. “Already?” he says.

“Another forty.” I sheepishly hand him my card.

It’s the third Farmer’s Market of the season, and I’m hungry for the rows of white tents, the bags of baby kale, the sweet boys with the new hummus stand. “I always thought I hated shopping,” I tell the man. “Turns out what I hated was malls.”

The machine hums, spits out paper. “You want a receipt?” he asks, tearing off the end.

“No,” I said, “no record of this, please.” We grin at one another as he hands me $40 in Market Bucks.

“Don’t spend it all in one place, now.”  I heft my heavy bag onto my shoulder and head back into the crowd.

If I were spending this money anywhere else, I might feel sick.  Buying a full tank of gas gives me palpitations. I’ve put off replacing gear until it’s a detriment to my health. But cheap as I can be, I’ve learned that handing over bills can be a pure sort of joy when it directly nourishes my community.

In a capitalist society, money is power.  I don’t love this, but I recognize its relevance.  The money we spend as individuals creates markets.  Markets facilitate the allocation of resources. To me this means: Where will our water go? What options for work will our neighbors have? How will we use our land?  What industries will governments support as essential?  “Allocation of resources,” despite sounding vague and sterile, means everything.

I am not a person who makes much money, but I am very aware of the small power it holds. I know that if I buy a cheap plastic product from Target, I am ensuring that certain vile environmental and labor practices continue. With my dollar, I’m voting for globalization.  I’m throwing my weight behind large tracts of agricultural and wild land turning into parking lots.  And, by default, I am not voting for certain things: Artisans. Local commerce. The creativity of my own community.

It’s a sunny day at the Farmer’s Market, and everyone is beginning to shrug off their fleeces. I walk the long rows of booths pricing spinach, coveting the local wine, trying bits of gluten-free brownie on toothpicks.  I find myself buying from as many different booths as possible; feeling like an ally to all these farmers and artisans, I have trouble choosing one over the others. 

When I hand over my Market Bucks at last, I always vote for something specific. This booth, it’s Farmer John’s pleased, humble face as I buy another bag of his locally-grown, self-ground flour.  I know I am helping him live a life he has built. I am supporting open space:  this Niwot farm, at least, won’t sell out to a subdivision.  I am purchasing flour that required almost no gas to get to its end location. And most importantly, when I buy his flour, it makes it more likely that local flour will continue to be an option for everyone—even those who don’t yet know that local flour exists.

It’s impossible to bring up local, organic, and fair trade products without someone mentioning price. And price is, indeed, the point.  It would be easy to walk around the Farmer’s Market and sneer, “Eight bucks for a glass jar of tomatoes?  That’s ridiculous!”  And of course, if you’re used to standing in the aisles of King Soopers digging up seventy-cent cans, it would seem so.  To me, what’s relevant is how few costs are externalized. In other words, most (if not all) costs of that Farmer’s Market jar of tomatoes are paid for up front. There’s no river that needs to be rehabilitated because of pesticide runoff. There are no poorly-paid workers on Medicaid or utilizing the local soup kitchen. The tomatoes—by requiring less gas for cultivation and transportation—do not fuel international, oil-based conflicts.  There’s no energy spent to recycle an aluminum can—the glass jar just gets washed out and used again.  Industrial tomatoes are not actually cheaper; we just pay the costs in a different way.

It’s time to be more creative in how we think about price. As a society, we currently spend a smaller percentage of our income on food than any past culture.  To some, this looks like freedom. To me, it feels like chains. In search of a cheap “price” up front, we’re leaving wreckage on all sides—costs we do have to pay sooner or later.

The idea is relevant to more than food: clothes, furniture, cleaning products. Here in Boulder, it’s easy. I buy my candles from the hands that make them. Boulder is a place where these markets are strong because there are lots of us willing to use our dollars in exactly the way I describe.  But even in communities less robust than Boulder, there are ways to use a dollar to create the world you want to see.

For starters, choose used over new, local over industrial. This simple move minimizes the resources necessary to create and transport the product. Next, ask for organic and Fair Trade if your local vendors don’t carry them yet. You could be the one who creates the market your neighbors will support. Last, buy from locally-owned businesses. Attend art fairs.  Your neighbors—no doubt following their own dreams at financial risk—will appreciate it. And if you really can’t afford to buy everything organic or local, do what you can. A vote for ethical industries with some of your dollars is certainly better than none.

When I leave the last booth, saddlebags sagging with groceries, a vendor calls out behind me, “Thanks for being such a supporter!” I have to smile. Maybe I’m a little over-excited when it comes to the Farmer’s Market, but I also can’t think of a better way to use my own limited, precious resources.

Curious how externalized costs work? Check out this easy-to-grasp video through the Story of Stuff Project. It’s not food-specific, but it’s a great introduction to thinking about the often-unseen costs of modern life.

Compost.

It’s mid-afternoon, and everything is broken. Beneath the sink, the maintenance guy grunts. Then the sound of water. “Oh shit,” he says, “do you have another bucket?”  I grab the trash can, jimmy it under the counter. He lets out a long breath.

For months the drain has barely been working, and this time even Drano didn’t help.  I’ve had stacks of dishes and a sink full of smelly, stagnant water for a good week. It makes it hard to live well, in my opinion. Rot is conducive only to rot.

The maintenance guy gets up, takes the can of water to my bathroom sink. He dumps it. “Your sink in here is slow too, you know that?” he says.

“No.”

“Well, you’re not usually pouring giant buckets of water in it, I imagine.” He tips the rest into the toilet. Flushes.

When he heads out, I am relieved. It's a start. The dishes are not washed yet but they will be. The trash is sitting in a tiny bag in the middle of the floor but I will take it out.  I’ll beat you yet, rot, I think.

In the spirit, I grab the compost and swing out of the house. The composter is in back, a a simple black plastic bin against the fence, far enough from the patio that no one will have to smell it.  It’s something I bought myself last winter. I was lonely for the soil.  I didn’t like to think of my scraps being hauled away to some city warehouse, where I’d lose track of how they were doing. Still, too often I stall in bringing them down.

It’s grey out, with the threat of rain.  I pull the lid off, then smile. Green shoots peek out of the slag. When I prod them with my rake, I can tell: half an onion, sprouting.  A couple of rotting potatoes, new arms thick and purple, sending leaves into the air.  I thank them. They are small miracles.

Then I dig the rake into the compost, begin to turn. In places it’s black, close to soil. In places it’s slime and leaves.  I start at the edges and work my way into the packed middle. I comb up a corncob. Spill over, finally, the bag of barley from Erik’s first homebrew. Something in me shifts. I stop. I know what I am touching.

In this bin, the weight of a year. What is thick, heavy, wet. Bitter fighting. A salad half-eaten, the day my blood poisoned. What went to mold while I slumped in a hospital bed. The meal on the table the night he said No, I’m not attracted to you anymore. Tomatoes gone bad as we avoided the house. And cabbages let rot while I sat outside in late summer, cupping white wine, mourning him.

A tentative wind kicks up. I dig in again.

Become something, I ask the compost quietly. Please become something.

Upstairs, rot is conducive to rot. I push the sour edges of my life into a jar and sweep them out. But down here, the hurts sit, given their time.  For a long while they look only like what they are.  Then slowly, the smell fades. They break themselves over into something else.

I am getting close. I can taste the soil without touching it.  This will, again, become life. After the rotting is complete. After the mold takes over.  What breaks us is our beginning. I have to believe that.

Springtime.

I have a computer in my body.

It folds out of my breast like a pack of cigarettes in a back pocket. Eventually I’ll be worn in. Its wired edges press up beneath my skin. Its intelligence clicks inside me.  I am metal warmed by blood. I am blood woken by metal.

It roots down, with a long arm, into the center of my hot-beating heart.

This week the seatbelt grates over it. The skin presses onto the wires. The wires eat up into the skin.  Some itching is normal, my doctor said. He also said Careful, they can saw their way through, and then we have trouble.  I cup my hand over the box. I try not to feel where it pushes.

Trouble. I’ve had enough.

It’s springtime. I drive past the hospital most mornings on my way to work. There are cheery flower planters. I stare at the third floor. It’s almost been a year. I do not feel safe. In my nose, the smell of saline. We’ll do a flush. Then the heparin. Then a flush. Keep your IV clean.  I clutch my arm protectively. Out the window, rotting soil struggles to life. There were five steps to the bathroom. I cried out as I dragged my IV stand. I shook and swayed with the pain. Saw shapes instead of men. You have to eat, they said, but I could feel only my own bones.

Then slowly, the passing of something I couldn’t name.

I sleep curled beside a window. The old tree, giant and wordless, leans over the bed.  Some mornings I wake full of sweetness. The stars are in me, the thick ancient blankets.  Then some mornings, darkness. The winds surge, wild and slippery, into my veins. I wake wide-eyed knowing Death.  He sniffs at my clotted organs. He knots his tongue around the wires and threatens to pull. I do not plead but lie silent. Long ago he claimed me for his own.

It’s springtime. I run my fingers across the scar again.  I think about thick wire slipping through skin. Red pulp. The insides of me aching to join the outsides.

Put your lips here, upon the wire.  Understand.  To love me, you must also love death.

Why Guinness Makes My Heart Hurt.

Downtown, in a pub alone, fingering the scratched wood table. At the front of the room, a longhaired man sets up a wobbly microphone, drags cords to the amp.  I’m having a Guinness and waiting to play.  And, like the nerdiest blogger on the planet, I’m drafting this by hand.

The Guinness tastes thin and sour. All winter I’ve been holed up at little breweries drinking thick, creamy stouts fresh from the barrel, and this just isn’t cutting it. What’s funny is I never liked Guinness to begin with. It’s something I’ve trained myself to get through; something that does, I admit, taste good on its own from time to time now. But that’s not how it started.

My first Guinness was in Golden, about a year ago, at a pizza place on the main drag with a big wood rail out front. Erik and I’d stopped there on our way home from Colorado Springs, hoping to redeem a trip that had been (frankly) not fun at all.  Settled into our table, we were discussing drinks when he figured it out. “Never?” he said. “You’ve never tried one?” His eyes were huge. “That’s it. I’m buying you your first Guinness. You’ll love it.”

At that point we’d been together just over a year and a half, and things were rocky. He was traveling too much. I’d been unemployed too long. That weekend, we’d gone down to take care of a workaholic friend in the Springs, but en route discovered Erik was in arguably worse shape: a pink eye full of crust, explosive sinuses, and some resulting heart palpitations. (What an underappreciated joy it is to not feel your own heartbeats!  He was fine, but it never stopped being scary.) We stayed the weekend anyway, thinking I could take care of two patients at once, but the weekend wound up soggy with whining and Kleenex; the gas was hardly worth its cost. Erik barely left bed and Makendra wrote endless press releases, and at one point I took the cat outside and put my head against the house and wept.

So do I even have to tell you the Guinness tasted sour and thin to me then, too?  Without thinking, I made a face—and watched Erik’s fall.

For whatever ways he drove me crazy, Erik loved nothing better than to share with me. Picture the two of us propped in bed like twin bookends, reading.  Picture us running errands, hand in hand; picture us chopping endless vegetables for curry. Whether or not I wanted to share something (you should probably laugh here), I usually ended up trying. He was the king of cajoling, impatient and excited, insistent upon my presence. We’d go to fancy dinners and eat half our plate, then pass it across the table to the other. We even shared a towel.

One was always enough: one schedule, one meal, one heart.

Except when it wasn’t. The problem was, we were terrifically different people.  Sharing an organic chicken was one thing. Sharing everything else—evening hours, tight quarters, vacation time, friends—was quite another.  Over time, our needs backed up. So few were being met.  But we held each other and pretended it wasn’t true.

All that spring the pressure built and hissed out the jagged edges. There was never enough time. There was never enough energy to do everything we wanted.  The night of the Guinness, we fought in the restaurant. He hadn’t even wanted to go, he told me. I hadn’t made him, I said. We loved each other too much to just say it:  we were desperate to do things together, but we didn’t want to do the same things. 

What he was ecstatic to share with me, I snubbed. And when I pulled at him--well, he got anxiety.

A long time ago I told myself, Nobody else is going to live in your body with you.  That didn’t stop me from trying.  Only when he left did my body know its own limits again. It cried out. The bed was cold. The kitchen was blank where his pans had hung.  I missed my third and fourth hands.

And yet, I was obligated to nothing. I never had to pretend to be excited. I spent my evenings wandering the neighborhood as dusk fell, ate meals without production, saw only the friends I cared most about. To be desperately lonely was actually to be free.

           

In the dim pub, I drink my Guinness. I watch skinny men lean against posts, staring at the baseball game. I watch the hodge-podge musicians show up with their long cases. It is somewhat incredible to me that I can drink a Guinness at all. That I can ignore, even for a moment, the worst sadness I’ve known: to love and fail. 

We would have done anything for one another. But the anything we picked would always be wrong.

Sex-Positivity 101.

     "We always have this idea that sex needs something to redeem it.” 

-Charlie Glickman, Good Vibrations

“I’m a Sex Positive Sex Educator"

SexTech Conference 2011, San Francisco, CA

I’ve been developing my understanding of what it means to be sex-positive for several years now. But today I heard the best description I’ve gotten yet.

In the Gold Room at the Stanford Court Renaissance Hotel, perched atop Nob Hill in downtown San Francisco, Charlie Glickman of the Good Vibrations Sex Shop gave us his run-down.  Here’s the quick version: We live in a sex-negative culture. We’re taught that sex is bad:  inherently dangerous, sinful, dirty, and—most importantly—shameful. The only way that sex can be redeemed is through procreation, marriage, or love.

Some sex acts are good, some sex acts are bad. In other words, when we’re being sex-negative, we judge the what and who rather than the how and why.  People who engage in certain activities are simply less worthy—regardless of the actual effects on that person.

Which acts was Charlie talking about? Anal sex, of course. Oral sex. Open relationships. Group sex. Same-sex sex. Sex without relationships. BDSM. Masturbation. Sex toys.

“As long as there have been people, there have been these types of sex,” Charlie said. “What changes is how many people engage in them, how we talk about it, and what the ramifications are.” In the U.S., some sex acts—acts which are often ignored in other countries—can lead to arrest, job loss, humiliation, or even a loss of child custody.  In a sex-negative culture, there’s an obsession with whether or not something is “normal”—and an endless interest in policing others’ sex lives.

So what about sex-positivity, then? Is this the view that all sex is good?

Not necessarily, said Charlie.

Sometimes people who’ve been constrained too tightly by social boundaries want to destroy the boundaries altogether.  “This isn’t healthy either,” Charlie said. “In fact, the healthiest people I’ve met are people who have very specific boundaries, know them, and can communicate them.”

In other words, a sex-positive view moves the emphasis back to the how and why.  Is someone having sex because they feel like they have to, or because they’re looking for attention? Are they having sex to keep a relationship from ending? Are both parties consenting? Are they comfortable with the activity? Are they preventing STIs and unintended pregnancy? Have they communicated about their preferences and boundaries?  Are they having fun?

Charlie says the cornerstones of sex positivity are pleasure, consent, and well-being.  It makes sense. Sex without consent is not pleasurable. Sex without pleasure does not contribute to a person’s well-being. And sex that does not contribute to your well-being (or your partner’s) is just like anything else in that category: a problem.  We all deserve to be well.

Of course it is important to ask questions about sex. Of course there are ways that sex can be unhealthy. But damaging sexual experiences do not come solely from stigmatized activities, and the behaviors we like to consider normal—like vaginal sex between a heterosexual married couple—have caused their fair share of pain.  To be sex positive is, at heart, to believe that what works for an individual is most important. 

Sex needs no redemption.

I say: Cheers to that.

DEN to SFO.

Flying over the Great Basin. It is the first time I have ever taken a plane west of Wyoming, across these giant arid spaces that bunch up and drop into the ocean.

The first time I came to the coast I was alone, packed into my old silver Honda and not sure what I was doing. I stopped to sleep in the dust in the middle of Utah, drank middle-of-nowhere coffee out of styrofoam, pissed on the side of the road in Nevada. I came down the Sierras in late afternoon, tasting the air thicken until, at a park outside Sacramento, I could swear I was in the cricket-humming Midwest of my childhood. Then I bought fruit from a stand in the hills and spent the night just short of the ocean, parked against a neighborhood curb.


When I woke, the dawn was pale. Roosters roamed the streets and a burro wandered the old Spanish plaza. San Juan Bautista. The only person awake was a baker girl, who sang loudly in her shop with the door open. I walked circles on the asphalt, watching the light rise.


It was raining as I got back into the car. I turned up the music and went to the ocean. For the first time, the Pacific stretched before me. I was nineteen years old, wearing ripped jeans, with long hair that curled at the ends.


I ran toward the break. It surged toward me. Suddenly soaked to the knee, laughing, sand whipping in the wind.  Fifteen hundred miles from my tiny dorm room, the ocean had taken care of the last three feet.



Grey surf. That whole trip it rained. I met Makendra at a horse farm outside Monterey and she pitched hay, patted mares. There was the smell of horse poop, rich and fresh. We slept on the floor of the house. Then we packed bags and went into Big Sur, down the jagged coast, where the rivers rose so high and brown that in the end we simply walked down the middle of them. We ate thai food in the dripping forest and read aloud to each other.

Flying over the Basin now, I can’t help but recall Ed Abbey’s journey to Australia. “Next time I’ll do it right,” he said:  a drive to the coast, a boat to the next continent. He hated the disorientation of stepping on a plane and somehow arriving, mere hours later, on a different part of the planet.  The transition mattered. I find myself aching the same way—for the elongated journey, where the air gets hot and sweet, or slowly fresh and cold; where the ground slowly gathers up into foothills, then peaks. Where you stumble into a Reno cafe to pee and discover belly-dancing night. Where the mind comes to take the same shape as the rutted-up land around it.

We fly over the Sierras now, tops thick with cream, the valleys sharp and glacial. In less than an hour we’ll hit the coast. Suddenly, California. And for an instant, I’ll taste a sharp longing for my old life: where a trip was a journey. Where the continent unfolded slowly, pulling me into it. Where it hardly mattered where I ended up at all.

Listen, jerks. It’s cold and quiet here too.

             Some people say Jackson isn’t part of Wyoming. I think that’s shit.

            It’s noon, and I’m driving back to town from the valley floor. The sage are buried so deep they’re barely visible, just tiny specks of black where an arm reaches up. Snow pours off the banks and sweeps across the road. The mountains are invisible. My wipers cake with ice.

For three hours I’ve been lying in front of a group of people, naked. They are artists. Here is how it goes:  beside a wood-pellet stove I bend and they draw me. I twist. I breathe. They dip brushes into ink wells, furrow their brows, and make magic.

Always, I fix my eyes on a point to hold the pose. The walls are covered in paintings, and I eat them as I wait: dark valleys.  An elk, half turned. Snow-encrusted spires in the desert. 

Once in a long while, I allow myself the luxury of peeking out the window. Today, a blizzard hissed outside. A cluster of aspens was quietly buried. The valley seemed more raw than ever.

Sometimes it’s people in Jackson who say it. These people are usually not from here. They don’t associate themselves with the metal lines of trailers, the endless high plains; they don’t venture into the dark bars, floors slick with snow. They don’t talk cows or gas rigs.  Jackson, they think, cannot truly be part of Wyoming.

            More often it’s the rest of the state disowning us:  our eco-friendly lodges, our sushi and wine bars, our boutique shops.  We have national parks. We make the covers of calendars. There’s not a Wal-Mart in sight.

            Still, when the snow closes in like this, the differences dull down. There is snow. There is wind, endless cold. There is the giant silence, leaning over us.

           

            Landscape painter Greg McHuron—who hosts the drawing group in his personal valley-floor studio—had a new canvas on his easel today. In the painting, the Tetons tilted over the floodplains at a startling angle. Cottonwoods flared orange. Rocky spines seemed to jar out of the canvas.

            At noon, as the other artists filed out the door with big pads of paper tucked into their armpits, I asked him about it.

            “This one new? Or are you still working on it?”

            “This fall,” Greg said. “I did that plein air.”  I nodded. “This part,” he pointed to where a sage berm twisted away into the distance, “this part I worked on inside a bit. But the rest of it was all outside.

            “I get an emotional response to what’s going on around me when I’m out there. Painting from a photograph, you worry about getting it down exactly as it looks.  Outside, you paint what you feel.”

            We talked about about the shadows in the painting. How he hollowed out the canyons with color. Greg shook his bald head. “People paint snow too sweet. It’s not actually white. It’s blue, or a hard purple.  Or then the sky opens up and it’s softer—yellow, maybe light orange, but almost never white.”

He looked hard at me. “If you’re going to be painting snow, you better be standing in it.”

This struck me as brilliant.

            I went out into the snow, holding the sketches I’d nabbed to my chest, so they wouldn’t get wet.  Fresh snow filled my tracks. When slush kicked up into my boot, I laughed.

            If you’re going to be writing about snow, you better be bathing in it. 

Gretel Ehrlich comes to mind:

…You should hear the way snow

sizzles and shrinks, hisses and rots away.

Overnight someone new steps into

those white thighs and drags herself downhill towards

the next season. A thunderstorm

unties the sky. It composes and decomposes darkness,

and forgives what it has gathered there

by letting it rain…

Ehrlich wrote the poem, “Other Seasons,” out of the center of Wyoming. But it was just as relevant here, during my first high mountain spring, when I was living in a one-room cabin five miles past the Hoback Junction. I read the poem daily as winter’s deep drifts shifted and cracked and slid into mud. The hills across the highway browned, then paled again. Then crept green in the late May rains.  Weather was the language that ordered my life. Erhlich understood it, and I drank her in.

            Driving back from Greg’s, I let my car slide a little as it goes around a bend. I know better than to fight the ice.

In Wyoming, weather is god.  The wind with razor teeth, the steaming river, the mud season. Snow year-round, and a sun that makes us brown.  Not a soul avoids it. It seeps into every corner of our lives: we live seasonally, we fight to remain, we sip on the tenuousness of an economy far from the city.  We dig out our cars and split wood for the stove. We make love watching icicles crawl down the windows.  We can’t help but know snow intimately: in Cheyenne and Ucross and Worland and LaBarge—and Jackson.

In the Hole, too, the god roars.

I've never really been cool anyway

The Blog Age is over, I hear. So passe. No one reads them. Twitter and Facebook have dulled our attention spans to a sentence or two.

So why start one now, long after the height?

It’s personal, of course. I created Girl Makes Fire with the intention of easing my own perfectionism. Anyone who knows me will agree that I’m hard on myself when it comes to writing. I don’t let a word out of its locked room until everything is in place. When I invite friends to be editors—and it happens with only a few—it’s deeply private and very vulnerable.

But to be perfectionistic about writing is to cut it off at the source. All too often, I let ideas slip away undeveloped because I don’t have the time or concentration to “do it right.” Opinions that—who knows?—could create change if distributed instead become rants in bars. At some point, it’s important to simply sit down and finish something—and to let someone read it.

Consider Girl Makes Fire my personal writing bootcamp.

This blog is personal. It’s also political. It’s an opportunity to publicly engage with my reactions to books, articles, and news stories. Oh yeah, and life.  The name of the blog, Girl Makes Fire, comes from my sense of myself as one who brings things together. By sharing, I aim to create engagement. By responding, I aim to synthesize experiences.  And whether or not blogs are uncool, anything that can be posted on facebook can drag people into a dialogue.

Flint. Tinder. I am the catalyst, the grated-against steel. Don’t all artists aim to hold these cold objects in their hands, and somehow make a magic flame?

Here I go, bending into the digital ghetto with a megaphone.