The Ultimate Joy

The wind threatens to blow the cherry blossoms off the trees before they bloom. It is a warm wind. The wind blows full of everyone’s gratitude. Empty laundry lines billow in the wind, clothespins twirling. Everyone is grateful for the ominous skies and the rain falling at last. The earth opens up, the worms sing. In the evening, we feel the pleasure of the portentous clouds, the dark mood that befits Portland.

This is all that we need: to be in one another’s company, to have a spiritual practice, to eat nourishing food, to be so clean that frozen blueberries are the ultimate sweetness, to play music and write lyrics while lounging on Erik’s bed in the candlelight. A tree of orange silk candle shades, the dark velvet duvet. This family is the perfect joy. We stand in a triangular hug, our three hearts beating, sending an electromagnetic pulse through each other’s bodies. Love is not in the mind or the gut or the spirit. It is in all of these combined. They are inextricable. I defy you to feel this through a computer, or over a cellular connection or through the vast network we’ve spiderwebbed around the globe. Compare that to being there in person. You’ll never want to go home to an empty house.

I go home to an empty house. But I realize tonight that this love is everything that I need. My family tends the unfathomably deep well of my love. They deepen it; they help me appreciate the flavour of the water; they celebrate my triumphs and share theirs, bringing up bucketfuls of life from the center of the earth. In this way I am loved. It is because of them that I know love, I know surely that the love I feel constantly rising in me is possible.

The way we smile, you’d think we’d run out of face to hold our lips.

Bush vs. Dick in the age of Bush and Dick

My mother recently suggested that instead of being 'bi,' wouldn't it just be easier if I decided to be straight or gay? The fact that she included gay (or as she put it, lesbian) among my choices denotes definite progress in the slide of her morals. I attribute the majority of the slide to the wiles of my younger siblings, who have spent copious hours in her house raiding her pantry, talking politics, confessing their drug habits and engaging in loud sexual acts with their significant others on the other side of her bedroom wall. My parents, despite their decidedly neo-con leanings can actually handle almost anything when confronted with it in reality.

Except oral sex. To my amazement, in a recent phone conversation, the woman who raised me suggested that perhaps the mere existence in the world of blow jobs was what caused me to rush into the lesbian camp. On the one hand, I do try to show my mother respect, on the other hand, I nearly fell off my bed laughing.

The other thing they haven't ever quite gotten used to (besides the fact that none of their children go to church or vote for Bush--too bad they made so many of us!), is their dykey daughter. Or I should say, their semi-dyke. It would be easier on them if I were one or the other. I think they secretly fear I'm in a big bed somewhere engaged in orgies. They think that bi means polyamorous, or that a bi person could never just be happy with one person, because they'd always crave the other sex. My mother told me whenever she sees people of the same sex holding hands, it makes her feel like civilization is coming to an end. If I were an NVC coach, I'd point out that "civilization coming to an end" is not a feeling, and that no one else can make you feel anything. But I am not.

Despite the fact that I live in a state that recently both allowed legal marriages between partners of the same sex, and then shortly thereafter attempted to change the constitution to disallow it, I still think now is a great time to be queer. In what other age could we brag that some of us had managed to get married? In what other age could we come out so freely to our neighbors? In what other age could we have such a high sense of self-worth? I live in a racially mixed neighborhood that is undergoing a process of gentrification. One of my old school neighbors, Faye, a skinny woman in her fifties, accosted me one day about some men's clothes that were left behind by the woman caretaking my house when I bought it,

"We think she is a cross dresser, but that's okay. Lesbians are
okay. Jill's a lesbian (my next-door neighbor) and she's okay.
I'm a lesbian, and I'm okay."

So you see, we're all okay.

Except for the bi's. Bi people give neo-cons fodder to fight against the concept that "it's genetic" (despite the obvious argument that a continuum can be genetic too, but neo-cons aren't known for their delicate analysis--that's what makes them so special), and we spread icky boy germs in the rarified air of the girl-on-girl pool. We're harder to fit into the fairy/stone butch/andro/boi/femme categories, messing up the whole inside-club system. In short, we're a pain in the ass (sometimes literally), and depending on your leanings that can actually be good. Some of us are even proud of how we subvert even the sub-dominant paradigms and sometimes also the dominant subs. So yes, mom, you're right, it would be easier if I were one or the other. Especially for you. It would be way less confusing, but it would also be way less real.

There's never been a better time to be bi. Because, like it or not, right now the whole world gets both Bush & Dick.